Anyway, Sonic games. Yeah yeah, I know. sonic has been REALLY bad lately. And it hurts me deep… but there are good ones. Lemme show yah what ones.

Starting with a newer game:

Sonic and the Black Knight

No, really. I’m not kidding. The concept for this game was HORRIBLE, but the execution is pretty damn good. Sonic is summoned to the land of King Arthur by a cute loli version of Merlin named (surprise!) Merlina and after some delicious chili dog eating, Sonic gets a magic talking sword named “Caliburn”. The action is fast, and the sword allows you to obliterate most enemies without a care in the world. Now, like Secret Rings, there are a few slowdowns. There are points where you have to give villagers rings and there are large enemies that don’t go down in one hit, but everything else in the game is a pretty damn good time. I don’t really recommend it for someone who doesn’t like Sonic, but it’s worth a try even if  you don’t.

Sonic Rush

This is the game where Blaze the Cat was introduced. The story for this game is something like Blaze comes from the negaverse and there are funky Chaos Emerald style gems there as well and Blaze is looking for them… It doesn’t matter much, it’s really not important. This game also introduced something I think all Sonic games need: A boost meter. You can use it to get to speed with a small burst or use it to destroy everything in your path for a short time. It’s filled by rings, doing mid-air tricks or defeating enemies. It’s awesome and EVERY SINGLE SONIC GAME SHOULD HAVE IT FOREVER.

YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE BEST

Sonic CD

Oh god, this is one of the best Sonic games in my opinion. It brings together some of the best parts of the first three Sonic games, but it adds in cool shit like time travel and some of the most fucking amazing music ever. The level design is amazing, the bosses are challenging and the time travel mechanic gives each level a wonderfully fresh feel. The game has good replayability and looks totally amazing. It’s for the Sega CD, PC and is an unlockable in the Sonic Mega Collection.

And, finally…

Sonic 3 & Knuckles

What happens if you take one of the most critically acclaimed Sonic games, then add the functionality to play as FUCKING KNUCKLES? You get one of the coolest things ever. Ever. This is seriously one of the best things that 16 bits has to offer. Climb shit, swim in the water, get around… You can do it all. You can do it with Sonic 2 as well.

That wraps up this stuff. Sorry about being gone so long, personal shit…

Anyway, I hope that soon I will be able to contribute regularly again!

Till next time!

Jumpluff~

Nintendo broke away from competition with Sony and, new arrival, Microsoft with what some call the “Blue Ocean” business strategy. The Blue Ocean strategy is the metaphor of leaving a “red ocean” (one dyed by the blood of competition) for unclaimed waters filled with the potential for creating new demand. From a business stand point this brave (or stupid) move has paid off and now Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are competing for second place.

Nintendo managed to succeed because they did something more than incrementally improve and repurpose old features. Yes, Gentle Reader, I’m talking about the “I” word, innovation. It’s debatable if the Wii controller is a true innovation as some gamers will still belittle it and mock it, but from a business standpoint it’s a successful change that’s brought in tremendous profit. Nintendo is as guilty as everyone else of giving us sequels by the truck load, most games in each series offer something new every one or two games. In truth, sequels are not really a bad thing as long as they are different enough that it stands on its own or adds to the previous experience.

This is the potential folly faced by Microsoft and Sony. If both companies continue to try and outdo the other, this means they have to rely on the other to show them where it is they are going. As mentioned before, it’s a tradition in the game industry to play copy cat with your opponents and then sell what they made for a lower price or with something more appealing attached. The game Sony and Microsoft are playing is the equivalent of trying to race someone you’re following to an unknown finish line.

If the two titans do not exercise some real creative muscle and insight, they run the risk of choking their audiences’ current interest. History has shown that strokes of genius like Katamari Damacy are not that common and while they may be risky or appear too weird, it’s that their quirkiness that aid to its success. The first GTA games offered sandbox gameplay, but GTA 3 took the top down world and made it more accessible by giving the player more dimensions to see everything. This reinvention (or innovation) has made the name Grand Theft Auto globally known.

Rehashed games, or those that don’t provide much of a new gaming experience, can poison a series or genre. If the games they make for the “core” gamer are not more than uninventive sequels the interest will dissolve and the audience will vanish or develop new preferences. The market has become swamped with First Person Shooters and while some may feel that’s not bad, it clearly demonstrates that developers are vying for the attention of a certain niche while alienating possibilities. As mentioned before, even if Nintendo did not stir up this casual boom, the publishers seemed to become more focused on producing games they KNOW will sell then those that can expand the market.

When we consider that the Xbox 360 has introduced its Mii-like “Avatars” and has begun promoting its “family friendly games” and that the Playstation 3 has its “six axis” controller and demonstrated a recent swelling of fresh but casual Playstation Store games their actions foreshadow that the duo are once again trying to outdo the other as they look for the path Nintendo made. Sony and Microsoft could just stick with the audience that has carried them to their current success, but like I proposed in part 1, only a fool (or altruistic gamer) would turn down the easy money casual games bring in.

I’d expect the next Microsoft console to utilize some sort of Wii remote like peripheral and the Playstation 3 to get it’s own version of the Wii remote. If Microsoft wishes to make the most money possible, their Wii remote copy will be a peripheral rather than a brand new system.

You might think “The End is Nigh” if you’re a core gamer that detests those happy, care free casual gamers. In the event that Sony and Microsoft act like a business and chase the money, a core gamer’s won’t be lost in a changing industry if the new audience leans how to discern between crap games and software worth its price tag. If all else fails there’s always indie games.

So as of now, these are the ominous black clouds that loom over the game industry. Nintendo is getting flogged with junk casual games and Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 run the risk of tiring their comparatively small (compared to the number of casuals) core audience with incremental improvements of current software.

During the Great Depression, American movie theaters saw steady business as the consumer hungered for an escape from the troubled economy. In today’s global economic recession, it seems that people still want that escape and video games are the medium that provide it even better than a mere 2 hour movie for 20 some dollars (if you get popcorn and a drink.) The road that lies before the game industry is not likely to disappear, no matter how cluttered it becomes with obstacles. That way ahead may be uncertain, but it is not lost when there are companies that will forge new paths and people that pine for the experience.

Now I don’t mean bad endings as in “You didn’t complete a mission objective – bad end” sorta bad endings, but ones that are just highly disappointing and brief or offer little closure.

This may become a weekly thing, I’m not too sure, but today we cover four from the days of my childhood.

#4 – Bad Dudes :

Internet memes aside, really what the hell, a solid beat’em up on the NES where President Ronnie takes the Bad Dudes out for Hamburger after they beat up a legion of ninjas who kidnapped him. I mean really think about that. That’s it? I’d feel kinda pissed off if I was them. Also, what the hell did the ninjas kidnap the president for? Was this part of a larger global plot? What were their demands? Also – why the hell weren’t these guys part of the President’s elite personal security to begin with if they’re such Bad Dudes?

Screw you man, saving your ass is only worth a Burger?

#3 – Kid niki: Radical Ninja :

Marginally ahead of Bad Dudes is Kid Niki, another game published by Data east (who apparently have a fetish for using terms like BAD and RADICAL and AWESOME in their game titles.) In kid Niki it’s a little platformer a la Mystical Ninja. If you haven’t played it, don’t It’s relatively bad, the controls are clunky and the ending is down right horrible. After smacking around a boss who is not hard as much as he is time consuming (wait for him to finish attacks that make him untouchable, hit him, get your sword back, repeat) he falls off the castle roof and you jump down to pose on top of his fallen body. You are then praised by a quick narrative about your AWESOME NINJA SKILLS and told that you are one RAD DUDE then a giant flying THE END wooshes onto the screen.

Dear god it’s an attack of the Michael Jacksons!

WOAH hold the hell on there a second, I’m the RADDEST NINJA WITH AWESOME SKILLS of all time, and I’m still KID?? Seriously? How degrading! Why not “Mystical Ninja Niki” or “Supreme Master Niki” Sorry that this kid just whooped the hell out of a million ninjas attacking our castle while nobody else could and defeated a supreme mystical martial arts master – maybe I should go back to playing with my toys.                               Ingrates

#2 – Adventure of Lolo :

BEFORE YOU SEND ME HATE MAIL – I am by no means saying this is a bad game. In fact it’s probably in my top 100 favorite games of all time. Man those puzzles were freakin hard and the game was charming in all it’s various features. The little monsters creeped me out, the puzzles were challenging but made sense, and once you got a feel for it all it was really freakin fun. But seriously – he just kicks in the door and blasts his lady’s keeper with a bubble and that’s all it took? I mean seriously. I expected some sort of epic confrontation, instead – PEW PEW yay the day is saved. I mean for Pete’s sake the random baddies were harder than that.

I mean really, the look of despair in his eyes does not belay how lame that bad guy is.

And # 1 – Legacy of the Wizard :

Like seriously, what an epic game. Tons of items to get that change your stats, different characters/classes to chose from, a HUGE sprawling game world that you can get literally lost in for hours without remember how the hell to get back to your house to save. One of the earliest password/save systems that I can think of so you didn’t have to waste hours of work. What a sweet game.

Then you kill the dragon, teleport back to the surface, meet up with the family and wave goodbye.

Thats it.

I am glad to see they are grateful for us controlling their pathetic lives. God knows what they’d do without us.

I’m sorry, why did we just slay a dragon? What now? Apparently that dragon’s been hanging out there for ages, are all the monsters gonna disappear now? Will the entire under-city that was the maze crumble and the world fall apart? Seriously, what now?

Also, what’s with that huge ass castle off to the left of the entrance to the maze? Who lives there? why are there not knights helping you kick monster ass and take names? SERIOUSLY LETS GO EXPLORE THAT CASTLE OR SOMETHING. No, lets just wave goodbye. Solid.

Well that’s about it for this edition of Highly Disappointing Endings – I suppose next time I’ll move to a different system, maybe that can be the theme. Each week I’ll review the bad endings of a particular console.

What about you guys, do you feel the same way I do about these? Got a particular NES game that you thought had a horrible ending that I should have talked about instead? Lemmie know.

Follow me now on twitter – http://twitter.com/TheReverendLei

Keep up to date with games I’m checking out, import or otherwise and learn about whats new.

Co-ordination and or timing – and mini-games.

Now I don’t know about you, but back in my day, we were lazy. Our ‘party’ games so to speak were the likes of Madden, Tecmo Bowl, NBA JAM, Blitz, You Don’t Know Jack, Pong and such. (Shh I’m leaving Track N Field out of this one.)

What I mean by this, is they were relatively sedentary games, learn a few button clicks, maybe a little bit of choice quick finger movements, but that was really it. We had buttons dedicated to juke around an opponent, or to dribble between their legs. Long gone are these games and their lazy ire for the lazy video game playing nerd. Now we have the six-axis to flick our controller in various directions to help angle his shot, a guitar with a gyro in it to detect when we are swishing our instrument into the air to ‘rock out’ harder, or a wii-mote to swish around in a graceful ark to do make a hook at a guy’s jaw.

Interactivity makes the game better I’m told. I thought it was pretty interactive when I pushed left and Little mac dodged to the left to enable me to dodge Mike Tyson’s (or Mr. Dream for those more politically correct or for our younger crowd) deathly uppercut and come back in with a few quick jabs of my own.

So then there are the Wii’s waggle games. Little co-ordination of timing, but lots of flipping your nun-chucks around in a pattern to achieve the goal of various mini events. Great concept, problem is the motions rarely seem to actually give a shit about what you’re doing, more that you’re just moving. I’ve played Mario Party 8 and when it told me to swish the wii-mote around in a circle to paddle a boat, simply just swinging it around in whatever direction I wanted worked just as well. I found that all kind of disappointing, as a system and series of games that tried to be the front man for the whole life-like motion concept – it felt rather half-assed.

I hear there’s an attachment coming out eventually that will actually make the wii-mote’s motion more life-like and less sporadic. I’m on the edge of my seat. (/sarcasm)

But then came Dokapon – It’s Mario Party without the mini-games with the addition of an adorably charming RPG in the mix. Yes! Finally! A game I can play with friends and don’t have to worry about scratching up my touch-screen when we’re spazzing out to flick soccer balls in a goal, or something equally as obnoxious.

What I mean is – You have a Kingdom (coincidentally Dokapon Kingdom on the Wii,) ruled by a silly little king who has a daughter. He wants to marry his daughter off to the bravest adventurer in the land – so here come you and some friends (or AI, up to 4 players/AI max.) There are 8 classes to chose from that all have their own stat-gains and abilities and carrying loads or spells available. At it’s core it actually has a pretty acceptable RPG. There are shops to upgrade your gear, monsters to kill to gain experience and get gold. Minimalistic PVP, quests and boss monsters.

Charmingly cartoony graphics give this game a unique feel compared to the seriousness of most current RPG’s

All the players move around on a giant game board map similar to Mario Party’s, with a ‘rolling’ system to move your spaces each turn. Items that enable you to move a specific amount of spaces, or get additional rolls. Spells can be cast against one another to screw with each other’s progress or hamper your health before a big fight.

Generally whoever is richest at the end of the allotted amount of time (Or all the quests have been finished) is the winner.  There are a few quests along the way to help you earn more money (One quest has you retrieving an elixir to cure a town’s poisoned well, another has you rescuing the King’s daughter who wandered off on her own to go on a shopping spree) and rescuing towns from evil monsters adds to your net worth and earns you tax-revenue.

All in all it plays like a Mario Party, but it’s adorable and doesn’t have aggravating mini-games that newcomers would have no idea how to play – thus making it easy for anyone to jump in and play.

Oh, right I knew I forgot something – 4player Wireless one-card support. One of my favorite features about this game is that nobody else needs to have it to play. You can stream it out to 3 of your friends and then can join you for a dumbed-down version of the game (8 weeks long, starting zone and about 12 towns only.) But its nice to see multi-player games that still support this feature on the DS (and just solid multi player games in general) – one of the main reasons I got one in the first place.

Follow me now on twitter – http://twitter.com/TheReverendLei

Keep up to date with games I’m checking out, import or otherwise and learn about whats new.

When I was a kid, there was a game series  that EVERYONE played, or else they were stupid.  Even the local Sega fans begrudgingly picked up a SNES, or borrowed one from a friend, for just one game.  If you’re in the know, and read the title of this article, you’ve probably guessed that the series in question is The Legend of Zelda.  If you didn’t guess that, you probably owned (Or still own) an XBox.

Now, I bring this up because I’ve been playing The Wind Waker again, because I just got my GameCube back, and unfortunately, my favourite games, Metroid Prime 1&2, were destroyed.  So I pulled out my next favourite, and it’s definitely worthwhile to play through.

I won’t recap the story or something, this isn’t a review of the game.  This is me stating the reasons why I love Toon Link, and why you’re a jerk if you don’t.

1. Toon Link is much more similar in style to the Links of olde than the Heroes of Time and Twilight.  Think about it:  Zelda has been very cartoony ever since I can remember.  It was a game for kids!  There were even childrens’ books based on the series.  Admittedly, it’s a step past the oldschool level of cartoony-ness, but it feels like a much more natural progression than the GRIMDARK of Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Zelda fangirl through and through, and I love those games as well.  Hell, I’d even call Majora’s Mask one of my favourite games ever.  But compare the imagery for a moment.  The middle, A Link to the Past, has a brightly coloured, cartoony character, comically disproportionate characters, and PINK HAIR.  I chose that screenshot because that’s as GRIMDARK as the game gets:  A dark tunnel with an old man asking for directions.  There wasn’t a ‘new style’ in The Windwaker, only a progression of the old style.
2. Link’s face (And to a lesser extent, the other characters) have incredibly expressive faces and body language.  The big heads allowed for a very clear view of what the characters were thinking and feeling.  When Link yelped in terror, his eyes went wide and he gritted his teeth.  When he was sad, his mouth curled down into a frown and his entire body slumped over.  When he was happy, his mouth dropped open into the goofiest grin imaginable and he jumped for effing joy.  Exaggerated, yes, silly, yes, but the series is about a young boy saving a sad princess from an evil middle-eastern dude who turns into a gigantic anthropomorphic pig when he gets angry.
3. ZELDA ISN’T A PUSSY.  Usually, anyway.  She’s a badass smacktalking pirate who calls Link on his shit whenever he does something retarded.  The only time she wimps out is when she’s in shock from finding out that she’s the princess of a dead nation, and then she comes back and SHOOTS GANON IN THE FACE, because he’s such a skilled swordsman that he’s invincible in a duel.  Let me say that again, SHE SHOOTS AN INVINCIBLE PSYCHOPATH IN THE FACE TO MAKE SURE LINK CAN BEAT HIM.
4. With the introduction of counterattacks, and improvement to swordplay in general, it allows for a final boss who is not only fun to fight (Something that most Zelda games don’t have) but for a death scene which will forever live on in memory as one of the most painful, awesome things to watch in the history of Nintendo, right up there with the blood-soaked, spinning, disembodied eyeball at the end of Kirby’s Deam Land 3.
5. Yes, it’s a kiddy, cartoony, even childish looking style of animation.  Half of you watch anime, with its idealized 2 dimensional love stories and people yelling out the names of their ’special attacks’ anyways, so why does that bother you?  If you’re willing to pass up because it looks childish, even though it’s part of a series you had up-to-then enjoyed, I got some bad news for you, it’s not the game that’s being childish.

Yes, there are low-points to the game.  It’s very clearly not finished, and I hope for a Director’s Cut version one day.  It is artificially extended by necessary fetch-quests.  I’m glad I didn’t pay full price for it at release for those reasons (I got it as a gift, in fact, and my mother got it for free).  But  now I see it up at used game stores for $10-$15.  Hell, there’s a copy on ebay right at this time for $6.00.  If you passed it up, and you love Zelda, you’ll be doing yourself a favour.  The comic imagery at times is priceless, and the story, standard Zelda fare, leaves nothing to be desired for a fan of the series.

Peace.

Presenting…

…The Top Five Signs That a DLC Should Have Just Been Free

Brought to you by Fedora Man

Well it finally April and you have to love how easy it is to open an article with the lines “so it’s finally whatever month we’re in right now”. It’s time for the next step in my great journey to earn money through a video game blog. Now I know you might be wondering “I thought you had billions! Were you lying to me?” The answer is of course, no. Stupid. Why would I make something like that up? But the difference between that money and the money I’ll earn on this site is I actually had to do work to earn it, unlike my corporation where I really don’t do any work at all. I can show all my friend “yeah this is the ten dollars I earned THROUGH WORK!” and if they say that they also have a job and have made more money, I’ll pull out my emergency one million dollars that I always keep stashed in my pants and laugh at them, probably while rubbing the money all over myself.

Now I’m sure that everyone reading this right now loves to hear all the stories that end with me rubbing money all over myself (and there are a lot of them) but now is neither the time, nor the place for me to describe my achievements to the world. Mainly because I think that might blow my secret identity and also I don’t think anyone would let me post an article called “The Top Five Ways to Rub Money All Over Yourself Like a Pro”. Instead I’m going to write about some game related phenomena, but only because I have to.

That brings me to my greatest problem: what the hell am I going to write about? There aren’t any games coming out these days (according to me) and writing about one specific past game has been done by everyone and their grandma. At first I was thinking “Heroes of Might and Magic 2, everyone will love to hear about that!” before moving to and idea about specific overrated games. Then one night I was staying up late to try to perfect the insertion of a giant blade into my fedora. Some might call that an oddjob rip off, but those same people might find it hard to speak when, say, a razor-bladed hat cuts their entire mouth off. Anyway it was around 6 am that I decided “screw it I’m too tired to think up a new idea” and settled for this one.

Now if you’re like me (and you’re not at all like me) then you too have expressed frustration at some of the worst excuses for DLC (downloadable content if you somehow made it to this point in the article without knowing what that is) ever made. That’s not to say that all DLC is bad and that it should all be free because there are small amounts of DLC that actually seem to have been worked hard on and deserve some sort of monetary reimbursement (the shivering isles for Oblivion is the first thing that comes to mind). Of course for every shivering isles there are hundreds of “screw you, give me all your money” DLCs or as I like to affectionately call them “dog shit”. I’m sure that this isn’t just at 360 problem, it’s probably also a problem with the PS3 but I wouldn’t know now would I? So here are the signs to identify if the dog shit you just bought should have been free.

Number 5: When the DLC is Free Anyway

Example: Call of Duty 4: Variety Map Pack

This is probably the one that isn’t about dog shit (I’m very much hoping the editor doesn’t take offense to that word being used over and over again). This is one of the cases where the DLC might actually be good but in any case it isn’t free even when say, THEY OFFER IT FOR FREE ANYWAY!

Take the above example for instance. The Call of Duty 4 map pack was offered for free via a code in the Game of the Year Edition. The cost of the Game of the Year Edition is exactly the same as the original game so you’d think they’d start offering the map pack for free, right? Wrong (as always)! I’m not exactly sure why they’d do this (other than the obvious “I want more money” approach) yet it seems like around the time they started offering free map packs they’d just go ahead and put it out for free on the marketplace anyway. There’s only one possible explanation: to piss off hat-based crime fighters.

Hell, that reminds me; before I go on I’d like to tell a little story about my experience with these “free” maps. It started like any other day, random death hurricanes mixed with volcanoes and a zombie apocalypse, you know, nothing special. So I decided that I’d go and get Call of Duty 4 because I was in a crime fighting slump (only because I imprisoned all my enemies) and so I decided to blow off some steam by mercilessly killing people on the internet. I picked out my game and brought it to the Gamestop counter where the cashier was like “I’ll give you the game of the year edition, it doesn’t cost anymore and it gives you free maps.” So I was like “sweet free maps, thanks you pimply faced bastard, I’ll be sure not to violently attack you in the future over game prices.” So as I got back home I opened the box… nothing. There was a game and an instruction booklet but that pimply faced sonofabitch lied to me! There wasn’t any map code at all! Now my first reaction was to don my fedora and jacket/trench coat (have to protect my secret identity) and go back to that store to kick all kinds of ass. But I’m a detective too and my detective-like instincts told me that it probably wasn’t that pimply faced bastard’s fault. Using my fedora-shaped super computer I quickly got confirmation that this had happened to many other people as well. In the end, after a brief bout with tech support that should have just began and ended with the word “bastard” I never got my maps. I’m just waiting for the time that they become free, WHICH THEY NEVER WILL!

Number 4: When the Game in Question has a Sequel

Example: Call of Duty 4: Variety Map Pack

Call of Duty again? Really? Well that’s just an example; there are many games like this. Again this isn’t necessarily dog shit but I promise that the next one will be about dog shit, you dog shit enthusiast you. Anyway the reason I claim that the DLC (which may or may not be dog shit to appease all you crazy people) should be free once a sequel comes out because sales probably drop rapidly over time once the sequel hits stores. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works, but don’t take my word on it, it’s not like I know a lot about business (although I do run a multi-billion dollar business in my free time). I don’t think anyone is rushing out to go buy Halo 2, or Mario Party 3 (despite how awesome Mario Party 3 was) so I’ve taken this rule and applied it to damn near any other game. Maybe I can understand not immediately making it free but in the above example Call of Duty 5 (or Call of Duty: whatever the hell they’re calling it these days) has been out for nearly half a year and I doubt that the Call of Duty 4 will have those free maps in another four or five months time. Granted the two were made by different developers but that’s beside the point. Give me the free maps! I demand it!

Number 3: When the DLC Doesn’t Add Anything Special to the Game

Example: Bomberman Live: Bomb-Up Packs

So NOW we’re talking about dog shit. Again I’m hoping the editor doesn’t come to my house and challenge me to a fist fight for using that so often. In any case I could talk about this in depth but the name says it all. The dog shit doesn’t add a whole lot to the game so it should be free on the grounds that I don’t want to pay you to add pretty much nothing to the overall gameplay.

Take my above example… for example (does that even work?) Bomberman’s bomb-up packs should definitely have been free or just included it in the original game. With the pack comes a bunch of gametypes and maps no one online plays anyway (we’re all too busy playing on the good starting maps with the non-stupid game variants to care). It’s like opening a gift on Christmas to get a playstation 2, a gamecube, or an xbox when you already have the better console. But gosh there’s really not more to say about it, maybe I’m complaining too much or maybe… just maybe… you’re not complaining enough.

Number 2: When the DLC is Just a Little Polish to an Otherwise Bland Turd Sandwich

Example: Crackdown (whatever that weapon pack is called)

I wanted to research what the dog shit was called here to retain my journalistic and genius vigilante integrity but I honestly didn’t care. Now let me set one thing straight, whereas Number 3 on the list (the one you just read if you read like a normal human being or super being) was about something that should be free based on the fact that it added little to a good game, this one is about DLC which could be good or bad that adds little to a horrible game. That’s right; I beat the system by having ALMOST identical but still slightly different types of DLC on display. Wooh!

Anyway I’m sure you (yes you, the guy in the red baseball cap) can think of a ton of DLC and games like this, but let’s go with my example because I already took the time to write it down. Now Crackdown wasn’t THAT bad of a game… okay yeah it was. The whole game was GTA or Saints Row with a ton of collection and not a lot of anything else. Shooting civilians was a power-up losing crime too, so there goes all the random slaughtering fun. The goal of the game is to collect orbs and kill a bunch of bad guys. You’re basically like Super Man except with a gun (or a slightly more athletic Fedora Man, with super powers, a gun, and no awesome hat). So after the fun of jumping around rooftops and shooting people wears off about six hours into the game what’s left to do? Well Realtime Worlds (the developers) has the answer in the form of a content pack sure to add a couple more hours of fun to the game. You get a weapon like the harpoon gun which is cool in that you can fire harpoons at people and stick them to cars and buildings and trees and other people. Where was the downside again? Oh right the fact that there’s a fuggin’ price tag associated with it. What the hell?! I paid sixty dollars for your game! There is no way in hell I’m going to spend six to ten dollars more to make your game NOT suck as much. You may think I’m being a little frustrated this time, because if there’s anything Fedora Man is known for its definitely not violent outbursts of vigilante justice. But that’s what happens when you stay up too late and you keep slicing off your fingers with your stupid razor-blade lined hat that STILL DOESN’T WORK!

But hey let’s look on the bright side. I’d like to take this time to get away from all the anger and pessimism and quickly point out Left 4 Dead. It’s a decent game, not too bad, not too good. But it appears that they’re coming out with DLC soon to make the game better. You know what I like the most about it without even having to look up gameplay videos on youtube? The fact that valve decided to not be a bunch of assholes and release the DLC free. So there, at least I tried to make this article slightly happier with a contrast between dog shit and decent DLC, as well as decent business practices in general.

Number 1: When the DLC in Question Sucks

Example: Too many to count

Damn even the example is a little depressing. There’s like a sea of dog shit out there (not literally you creep) and you know a DLC should be free when the DLC itself sucks. Really, this one ties into every other group category. By now you must be wondering “is there some kind of evil video game-themed villain out there causing all the DLC in the world to suck?” Well no, there was once, but he died in 1983 when the video game crash happened. It was weird and sad because the one thing he was trying to destroy was the only thing keeping him alive. Once the games became bad enough the crash happened and he died. It’s tragic, which is why I’m writing a play about it. I’m thinking of starring the lead role to Adam West and maybe get Jackie Chan in there somehow; we’ll have to see how it turns out.

Anyway there’s really not much more to say but hell I have time to kill in between creating my razor-bladed fedora and fighting demons from beyond time and space. So I’ll start with a little known game called Halo 2 (does anyone remember this game?). Halo 2 had four or five map packs, with the last one having two levels “Desolation” and “turd sandwich” or… something like that, I can’t remember (and I refuse to look it up). Anyway both were remakes and both were TERRIBLE. Although I’m not ashamed to own the Halo series, I am deeply ashamed to have put any money down toward this map pack. Turd sandwich was a terrible level and desolation was… also terrible (cut me some slack I’m tired AND I saved the world yesterday, shut up). Look I’ll give you another example: Halo 3. Halo 3 (and I use the halo series because of its general accessibility so people know what I’m talking about) had the “Heroic map pack” which was so bloody awful that I had to think twice before ever purchasing any kind of map pack EVER AGAIN! It was like they had a staff meeting but only three people showed up and they left after five minutes after someone said “but think about the customers” and someone else responded with “screw the customers!”

I’ll give you one more you might not have thought about: gamer pictures. Yeah those things, you actually have to pay for them. I think I’ll leave it at that instead of pointing out the crippling stupidity in paying for tiny pictures rather than picking up a fedora to hide your identity and going out to vigilante the shit out of the gaming industry.

If you’re unfamiliar, I’ll give you a quick rundown.  There are a bunch of cute little animals you could adopt in a variety of colours and designs, with whom you can play games (Which are more often than not cutely redecorated clones of Apple IIe 5 1/4in floppy titles reprogrammed in Flash), train at various schools to raise their stats, and of course, have the viciously beat the hell out of each other.

The site was initially started by two Welsh people in California, named Adam Powell and Donna Williams.  It was essentially a website full of games for college students to pass the time.  Of course, the cutesy look attracted more and more players, mostly young kids like myself, and the whole thing began to take off.  The site grew, the staff grew, and eventually they realized that they were losing ridiculous amounts of money.  They tried to make it up without advertising on the site:  Merchandise was the way to go.  Limited Too, Hot Topic, Claire’s Boutique and others began carrying stuffed animals, t-shirts, jewelry and action figures, and admittedly, it was pretty cool.

Obviously, it didn’t work for long.  And along with adding small ads to the site, service started to slip: Reports of accounts being banned by mistake, rude responses by customer service personnel, and just an overall feeling of ‘what happened’ plagued the site.  I would later find out that it had been owned by a group of investors, as a publicly traded company, for quite some time.

And it was still losing money.

I quit, for a long time.  It happens, I guess:  It was an addiction I just outgrew, unlike heroin (There are no 12-step programs for Neopets to my knowledge).  I went on to other things, better games, communities with an average age higher than 12.  That was a long time ago.

Recently though, I saw my foster-sister playing something vaguely familiar.  I cocked an eyebrow and asked ‘Is that Neopets?’  She responded that it was, and was surprised I knew about it, after all I’m almost 7 years older than her.  I started to wonder if my old account was still there.  It was.  But it was buried in a mountain of obnoxious flash ads, a cash store for additional content, and many, many ‘updated’ games.

Much of the site now centered around ‘Neocash,’ the game’s RMT currency, with spotlights for the pets who have had the most of mom’s hard-earned cash spent to make the look tacky.  Many years-old promises have not been fulfilled, like finishing old plot arcs, and making the collectible clothes already in existence wearable by your pets.

Worst of all, the flash games are either drawn at such a high resolution, or just so poorly coded, that it takes a modern computer to run them.  Read that again:  IT TAKES A MODERN COMPUTER TO RUN A FLASH GAME THAT TAKES A MAXIMUM OF 3 MINUTES TO PLAY.

I really don’t know what else to say.  Humanity is doomed?  Everything has to evolve and change, but this feels more than a little sick.  I guess there’s not much else to it though:  It’s a publicly traded company, so it exists to make a profit.  Even so, fighting as a Cybunny soldier in the great Sloth wars is one of the few fuzzy memories of my early-mid teens.

I remember Eliv Thade, the great Lord of Anagrams.  I remember the Lab Ray which could perform unwanted Sexual Reassignment Surgery in seconds flat.  I remember my pets who fought valiantly against the evil Dr. Sloth, lord of all things slow and lazy.

I miss Neopets.  As casual-market video games go, it was tops.  Seriously.

Now it seems that game developers are more focused on creating overly subversive stories instead on giving the player a little more poignant realism in the form of optional total bodily dismemberment. Yeah sure there are still gibs in UT3 and God Of War has bloody decapitations but all in all after being a gore hound for these earlier games they just strike me as a little weak. Which brings me to my next point:

The all powerful, game stomping, fail-safe line of the A-O rating. Publishers shy away from this because there’s a good chance that their product will be outlawed in several countries as well as shunned by retailers. But if you’ve gotten around to playing Madworld you’ll see the same argument that hack directors make when they want to show their cocks in their terribly pretentious arthouse film. And that is; ‘It’s pornography unless it’s artistic.’ This is why Madhouse ever came about the way it did and on that system. Considering that the Wii is barely above the PS2 in graphics power I have a feeling that this game could have been done far more violently years ago for the aforementioned system.

But what is risque now? I mean in GTAIV we delivered drugs, we shot cops, we gangbanged and we did driveby’s but honestly did you really ever see anything in GTA that you wouldn’t see in either a superhero movie or on the dumbed down CNN ticker? What I’m really lobbying for is a publisher to be taken seriously when it wants to depict the horrors of war and violence. Not for the sake of a shock factor but for a: realism and b: immersion. Well perhaps a bit of entertainment at that rate. But I’m not going to quote all those innocuous various studies that have time and time again placated our parents into buying us the new shootemup under the guise that video games don’t kill people, stupid children who aren’t smacked around by their parents enough kill people.

In any case I believe this blanket statement to be true. Seeing as they completely butchered my favorite series, SOF:Payback has become something of a joke to gamers. No longer is that leap of faith such a thing but now we go into our mature rated games like ‘Yes, we’ve got a rocket launcher and it will send you flying into the air.’ However an addendum to that statement as games strive for realism and immersion should have an extra ‘and you can see the mangled tendons trailing (using physics of course) under you as your torso separates from your pelvis‘ tacked onto it.

So yes, I want violence. I want lots of bloody brutal violence that I can choose to inflict on my various legions of frowny-faced foes at my whim. My stipulations are that it be well done and not half assed, that it isn’t the one tagline feature on the game box, and it isn’t the only reason I want to play the game. Too often are nextgen games jerked off by their marketing department for only good things about that particular game. If Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault had dismemberment during the Omaha Beach scene even for it’s day and graphics I think it would still be one of the most revered games out there. If we’re killing people in our games let’s take the fucking condom off and really feel what it is to take a life, and I want the option to be as sadistic as I can when doing so.

For once I’d like a game that I can barely stomach, and not for it’s repetitive environments with big burly dudes spraying down the decks with their machismo. Furthermore I don’t think many games have really captured what it feels like to shoot a gun, the gunshots aren’t deafening enough, the recoil of your screen shooting upwards is a joke and what we pass as action based gore feels so damned arcadey and tacked on. Hit zones is where it started but c’mon now guys; I want to take off limbs wherever my sword hits, not just at the joint. Also, you remember when you could blow off a guy’s leg in games and he’d crawl around and scream and make a lot of noise? You could choose to let him sit there and howl and alert guards or you could put a few into his breadbox. I miss this. There’s something about the penis extending chainsaw gun in GOW that simply doesn’t translate to the days of abandon.

-Veraliis

This is another game in the series of the Yu-Gi-Oh: World Championship series. I own both 2006 and 2008, having gotten all cards on 2008 and having played a lot of 2006. And again, this game is fun, because I love the Yugioh card game. There’s so much variety, and because every release includes a whole bunch of new cards, it’s worth playing them every year.

This time, it’s not about the Yugioh GX like 08 was, but about Yugioh 5D’s, the new series. The game has a whole lot of new cards, including synchros (which were recently added to the game, it’s an entirely new game mechanic) and they even included something else.

Dueling on a motorbike. That’s right. In Yugioh 5D’s, they duel on motorbikes. It takes a while before you can finally do them (almost the end of the game), but they’re great. They solve one of the big problems in the Yugioh game: Powerful spells that can turn around the entire game. In Turbo duels, both players gain Speed counters every turn, and all spells either require a cost speed counters or simply have a requirement of having a number of them. This means that you can have very powerful spells that are not even overpowered. Remember Raigeki? In Turbo duels, it costs 12 speed counters to use them. That means you have to wait for at least 6 turns without using any other spells.

But actually, this is not what I wanted to make this blog about. Sure, the game is great, but they made some really, really terrible design decisions.

One of the problems is that your starter deck sucks, as usual. The problem this time is that it actually contains some really good cards, but it’s just a mess. There’s no strategy to be found anywhere. So while it’s possible to win with it, it will be hard.

Especially considering your opponents. Random opponents you can find on the streets in the story mode have really, really good decks compared to your starter deck. I don’t mind the challenge as a veteran, but any newcomer will hate it.

Another problem is that they introduced racing. That’s right, racing in a card game. There are times when you have to complete a lap in a certain amount of time, or escape from the cops. The racing is easy, but it’s so easy  to screw up. And if you want to improve your bike? You’ll have to pass up on getting new cards and pay for new parts.

But the worst of all? They included a stealth segment. A stealth segment where the guards have a huge line of sight and a huge radius around them that you can’t enter or you’re caught. And the worst part? It’s timed.

This part alone is so extremely frustrating that it’s unbelievable. You have to avoid guards that you cannot even see. Because their line of sight is as big as your entire screen.

Yu-Gi-Oh 5D's match commentator

The game has some really bad design decisions, but also some good ones. Ever wanted to have a yugioh match where this guy was providing comments? Hell yeah! It’s great!

…the top five games not worth full price

Brought to you by Fedora Man

Well it’s finally March; or rather it has been March for half a month now, whatever. It’s hard keeping track of time when you’re on another planet fighting the living embodiment of anger with nothing but hat based weaponry and your wit; not to mention making love to all the alien women who all suspiciously speak English (call me). In fact it’s nearly impossible to keep track of the time when you’re fighting robots and defending humanity twenty-four hours a day seven days a week (or sometimes eight days a week depending on where I am) so cut me some slack on the issue. But in between throwing my Fedora-rangs (not a rip-off of Batman) and solving super crime in my Fedora Cave I did manage to get down to Gamestop to browse the selection. I was thinking “Damn, I need some new games to play in between sleeping and fighting five dimensional creatures that my mind can’t fully comprehend.” Because honestly, what the hell else am I going to do in my spare time but play games on my super computer?

A horrible thing happened as I browsed the new games list: most of them weren’t worth the displayed price and I’ll be damned if I spend a cent of my billions of dollars if it’s on something overpriced and uninteresting. At first I believed some crime was afoot. Perhaps my non-arch-nemesis (but a nemesis nonetheless) The Emo-inator replaced all the great new games with some games that were released last year and already had at least thirty dollars shaved off the price tag in reality. But I quickly found out he was still in jail after his last big scheme (replacing all the pen ink in my mansion with black eyeliner). So I returned to Gamestop and demanded answers! “Why are these games priced at sixty dollars!” I demanded to know. “There is no way in hell they’re worth that much money!” I grabbed that pimply faced bastard by his collar and pulled him close to my face to show him I was serious. The rest after that was a blur, but I’m pretty sure the police came and I think I was trying to explain my innocence to them while being beaten with their night sticks. I couldn’t do anything since I wasn’t in costume (my fedora) so I just had to take the ass kicking. There is some good news though: I did manage to write down a list of games to bring to the public’s attention before I got sent to jail. Now the list was hastily scrawled on a dollar bill and there’s also a lot of blood on it but I’m pretty sure I can read it so I hope you can appreciate what I’ve done for you in the following list.

Number 5: Halo Wars

If ever there was an argument for Starcraft 2 to come out in the year 2009 this game would be it. With what looks like completely unbalanced gameplay and some craptastic AI; Halo Wars makes me yearn for the glory days of the RTS when Starcraft was out and kicking some ass. Or at the very least it makes me yearn for a computer RTS instead of this watered-down console game. Sure the controls worked but everything else was terrible compared to almost every other RTS on the market. Want to build a defense line at a chokepoint? Well you can’t build outside the designated bases. Do you like managing resources and armies to win strategically? Well I hope you do since it’s a Real Time STRATEGY. The only trouble with that is they only put one resource in the game and you can’t really hotkey or select units you aren’t looking at directly so micromanaging is nearly impossible. So do you want to kill the Prophet of Regret’s vastly inferior forces with your army of super death? Well have fun getting killed by his stupid laser. What about the AI? You might as well take out the “I” in that because there’s nothing intelligent about the computer. Even on the hardest difficulty and with the handicap of being a human (the entire human race tends to suck horribly in this game) I still managed to destroy the computer with minimal effort.

Admittedly the above was all part of the demo but a demo is designed to make you want a game and this demo did nothing but make me look at Blizzard’s website to see how far along Starcraft 2 was in production (and now I’m going to stop talking about SC2, I promise). “But there was a harder difficulty in the real game”, or so I’ve been told. But the thing about that is I don’t want to buy a game only to find out it’s not the least bit challenging. If someone else wanted to buy the game for me then sure I’d play it, the point is I just don’t want to pay $60 for it.

Number 4: House of the Dead: Overkill

Call me crazy (and I’ll punch you) but I’ve never been much for rail shooters. There was something about the lack of freedom to choose where I wanted to go (or move) that always got me. I guess they were alright in an arcade where I never had anything better to do and I had a friend handy. Other than that it never appealed to me to want to play a rail shooter at home because I could always do something different. “Let’s see do I want to play a game where zombies attack me and I’m not smart enough to take a few steps back? Or do I want to play Mario Kart?” Mario Kart won every single time. So although I haven’t played House of the Dead: Overkill, I have played rail shooters and previous HotD installments and can say that with one hundred percent certainty that this wouldn’t be worth fifty dollars.

Number 3: Tom Clancey’s HAWX

I don’t think demos are really making me want games anymore. First Legends of Wrestlemania (yeah your favorite superhero Fedora Man likes wrestling, sue me) with its “I don’t want to download because I’m an asshole” attitude. Then Halo Wars was like “I don’t feel like trying”. Then there’s this game, and I honestly can’t decide what this game’s message is. On one hand it could be “I’m not fun!” On the other hand it could be “what the hell is going on?” Both of those would actually work for this title. Maybe I was just stressed out from lack of sleep and from all the clowns I was punching in the face and the game simply appeared to not be enjoyable. Or maybe everyone telling me how great the game would be made me build up false expectations that it would be the next Starfox (minus that stupid Starfox Assault failure). Whatever the case may be it was not really all that great as a game. This could have been because I had no idea how to fly my plane in a way that didn’t cause me to experience vertigo. It could also be attributed to the fact that it felt like I wasn’t really accomplishing anything during the course of the battle. On one hand I could cut it some slack because it’s just a demo. But on the other hand I’m sworn to uphold the law in whatever way I see fit and if that doesn’t give me jurisdiction to be a douche for no reason then I don’t know what will.

Number 2: Halo Wars: Limited/Collectors Edition

Now I know what you’re thinking, and no I don’t have the ability to read minds I’m just that good. You’re thinking “but you already did Halo Wars! You’re so lame!” You’re probably considering destroying your Fedora Man action figures and burning all the T-Shirts with my face on it. You might even go pick up monopoly, dig the hat out, and eat it just to prove a point. Although firstly I’d like to point out that’s not a fedora, it’s a top hat. Secondly don’t lose faith! There is a very good reason I’m putting the special edition on this list.

For a while I debated just putting this down as an honorable mention and putting MLB 2K9 on this list instead. But then I realized that not only was it a sports game but it was one about baseball and no one would even read what I had to say about it because no one cares. I probably just pissed off some baseball fans that are no doubt injecting steroids and getting angry at me at this moment (zing). However I really can’t care because none of them parade around in my merchandise and play Dungeons and Fedora Man in their free time. In truth I shouldn’t make fun of baseball fans just because of our differences in what we like to watch. After all professional wrestling also has steroid use so I can let that slide (note: Fedora Man does not use steroids he is naturally a buff ass kicking machine). I do apologize for those last remarks, but only if you wear a fedora tomorrow to recognize my heroism.

Hey it looks like I’m getting off topic. Let’s get down to Halo Wars: Special Edition. Now I’m not sure when every major release had to have a special edition but I think it was around the time Halo 3 came out. In any case the special edition is priced at a nice eighty dollars. With it you get a disc on how they made the game, you know, in case you ever want to make a Halo Wars game yourself, in your basement. Actually it’s probably because they love Halo SO MUCH they just HAD to get it! Since figuring out how the game was made makes the experience so much better. Aside from that you also get a Spirit of Fire patch so that you can become the coolest kid on the block! (Note to self: get Spirit of Fire patch for costume). You also get some useless crap like trading cards and a book that details the history of the characters in the game. Now I’m no rocket scientist (okay yes I am) but I’m thinking that should have been included as an encyclopedia in the game or in the instruction book. Look I don’t mean to talk about Starcraft again but this just came up and it’s very important. See when you bought Starcraft it came with a huge manual that, aside from telling you how to play, detailed the history of each individual race as well as several heroes. Maybe it’s just me but I’m pretty sure that part could have easily been included in the game.

However the biggest reason this is on the list is attributed to the Halo 3 map code. I’m just wondering if somewhere along the line openly treating the customer like an idiot became the norm. The maps are going to be ten dollars on the xbl marketplace but now you can buy them for the low, low price of twenty dollars! Seriously? Maybe people really want all that other crap (anyone want to give me an ultra hip Spirit of Fire patch?) but I’m quite certain the majority of people bought the special/collectors/limited edition for those maps. So if you want to pay ten dollars more for the maps then go for it, just be sure to give me the Spirit of Fire patch.

Number 1: Resident Evil 5

So I get to play Resident Evil 4 again? Well that’s cool, it was a fun game and I’m sure they’ll change it so it doesn’t get boring while still delivering the great gameplay I expect from the fourth game. Oh but what’s this? You took out the merchant (the best character in the game) and the attaché case? So I can only carry around nine measly items? Well I guess they’re going back to their roots with survival horror in a way right? They’re limiting the items, it’ll totally work! Except they’re giving you mounted mini-guns with unlimited ammo so they can’t be trying to make it survival horror-esque again. But hey now they’re giving you cooperative mode, that’s awesome right? Except it ruins the gameplay for single player entirely which you might think is odd because it’s supposedly a single player game. One could argue Resident Evil 4 had an annoying partner you had to take care of. The difference here being Ashley could hide inside of dumpsters and not die like a jackass. She also decided that trying to run up and hug a man wielding a chainsaw was a bad idea, unlike Sheva whose battle strategy involves running right up to the chainsaw man and trying to shoot him. Oh and that’s another thing, Ashley never wasted my ammo. Hell when I think about it all the complaints I have about the game boil down to “my teammate is a moron”, that and they pretty much downgraded everything from the fourth game. I’m not going to spend a cent of my billion dollar fortune on Resident Evil 5 when I could invest that money in something much cooler… like a space ship shaped like a Fedora.