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. (continue reading…)

The magic of beat/rhythm/music games is strong. Nothing makes you feel good like playing your favorite song, rocking out and getting the highest score you can. Well, not everyone knows what good music games there are out there, so here’s something that might point you in the right direction. Get ready to boogie!

Elite Beat Agents/Ouendan

If you haven’t heard of EBA, you probably need to come out of your cave. This game is totally amazing. The song selection is a bit… Odd, yes, but solid. Every second of this game is hilarious. The EBA go around the world and cheer on people who are in tough situations. How this would help someone steal back plans for their business or help a cat save a baby from a construction zone is beyond me, but I won’t complain. The game gives you numbered circles, and you have to tap them in sequence and rhythm with the playing song. Easy, right? For a while, sure, but you’ll be crying when you fail at the last stretch of “Without a Fight”. This game is on the DS only, has an American version(EBA) and two Japanese versions with different characters, scenarios, music, but that same awesome gameplay. There’s even a custom song game with gameplay very much like it on the PC called “Osu!”, but unless you have a touch screen PC you’re gonna be mousin’ it.
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Yes, even the Xbox has good games to play. Not many, though. Thankfully, I’m here to tell you a few for that hulking black monster. Let’s take a dive.

Stubbs the Zombie in:

Rebel Without a Pulse

FINALLY A USE FOR HALO. Hoho. With all seriousness,though… This game, made with the Halo engine, was what should have been big instead of Halo if you ask me. You play as Stubbs, a zombie with nothing better to do but zombify everyone he meets. You get a choice: Bite people to turn them into your zombie follower, posses them with your hand and have them kill other people or just kill them. Your followers automatically attempt to turn everyone they see, so keep that in mind. Stubbs has some cool things he can do. He can take his head off and go bowling, take over people’s minds with his severed hand, throw his organs as grenades or fart to unleash a deadly toxic gas. Cool job, Stubbs, you look pretty Wario!
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Halo. Just by hearing that name it provokes a reaction out of anyone. Some people love it, others hate it, and some don’t understand either. Selling millions on release day, odds are if you have a Xbox, you have one of the three games. But why is it so appealing? What about it draws in so many people? And why is it still one of the most played games over Xbox Live?

Before Halo, first-person shooters usually fit into one of three categories. First-person shooters were usually either frantic frag fests (Quake, Unreal Tournament), slow tactical team oriented combat (early Rainbow Six, Counter Strike), or the old classic run-n-gun style games (Half-Life, Duke Nukem.) Halo used a blend of all three, primarily adding a tactical element to the faster styled multiplayer games.

The main difference lies within the ability to only carry two guns at a time. No longer could you just pick up every weapon you encountered like in the old run-n-gun games. You had to think and make choices on the field based on what you think you’d come up against. You had to balance your loadout, because if you end up relying too much on long, medium, or short range combat a good player could take advantage of your weaknesses. Older style tactical games allowed a small selection of weapons, but for most missions you never changed weapons and stuck primarily with what you started with. Halo blended all three styles of play, to allow a fast paced tactical run-n-gun game.
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We’re not too sure on how to take this news seriously, but for the most part, it seems harmless: Gamerscore Blog, one of the bigger ways that Microsoft had used to reach out to the gaming community is now being retired. No, there wasn’t any bloodletting involved (or so they say), it’s just something companies call ‘re-appropriation of resources’. Meaning that the staff of Gamerscore Blog didn’t get canned, they just got placed somewhere else.

For instance, the stuff we usually went to Gamerscore Blog for will be viewable on the Xbox 360’s Inside Xbox Channel. The bloggers who had manned the retired blog can still be read on Xbox.com’s Voices page. And the infamous Major Nelson? He’s not going to stop blogging and podcasting any time soon, you can make sure of that.

Not quite good news, but any news is better than rampant sacking.

Have you ever played Mechwarrior? If the answer is no, don’t feel too bad, neither have most people. The cockpit has been empty for sometime now, specifically in first person mech simulation games. The last genuine mech game that allowed some 1st person viewing was Chromehounds for the Xbox 360, an early release that saw everything from perfect scores to abysmal ones. When one thinks about all of the asskickery that goes on in games today, such as ripping people in half with a chainsaw, punching someone so hard they explode or paying a stripper to take her clothes off, it would make sense that the “giant robots shooting other giant robots” genre would be flourishing, but of course, this is not the case.

Here are some possible reasons, but feel free to throw your own ideas in:
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I have a very strange love for the Fable series. I didn’t own an Xbox when Fable 1 was released, I had never read any of the hype, and I had never seen anything on the game besides a single tiny thumbnail in an Electronics gaming monthly. So, when I came home from school, and received a phone call from a friend, who told me that Fable was here, my only response was, so what?

I should probably explain that my friend is like one of those dogs that when you say it’s name too many times, it shits itself. So, when I showed a complete lack of interest in a game I had never heard of, I was then treated, in a shrieking pre-pubescent voice, why I was wrong.
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The Holidays are here, and all the worthwhile game companies have made sure that their biggest blockbusters are on the shelves just in time for Christmas, Hanukah, Ramadan (we are a few months late, but still), or for whatever reason people may want to buy games for. However, biggest doesn’t necessarily mean best, and it definitely doesn’t mean original. If you can’t get that special someone the game they want, here are a few great substitutes. Or maybe you can’t get enough of your favorite game? Or maybe you are just too full of yourself to play the mainstream games, even though you really want to. Or maybe you rather buy five games for the price of one. Whatever the reason, here they are.

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Badass.

Okay, some of you may remember hanging out with your friends playing a little game called ‘Army Men’. This mildly successful game led to a few more sequels, and eventually a subsidiary dev group came out with the Heroes Of Might And Magic series. This fledgling force was called 3D0; A company that initially got together to try to build a next-gen gaming system to compete with the then reigning champ, Playstation. At the time they’d released a few nothing games that were nothing really to call home about. This is a story of just before they filed for Chapter 11 and flushed what arguably could’ve been a game that brought them back up in the world. This game was titled ‘The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse’. From what I delved all the way back in 2003 they’d had a good part of the game done. There were even ingame animation videos that showed Abbadon (the main character who not only was the chosen Archangel but also a murderer and a chain smoker) fighting goat headed demons. Originally 4 Horsemen was planned to come out on the Xbox, PC, and PS2. But just about when the shiny light at the end of the tunnel was about to deliver us with what looked like a badass third person fighter/shooter 3D0 went under. Now personally, I couldn’t give two shits about the next Army Men game but I did trust that on the whole 3D0 knew how to make a decent game. Working with the N64 graphics must’ve been trying as hell. But the infinite power of the Xbox at the time promised many great deliveries of games that had a great amount of depth put into them.

The other thing that first sparked my brain the moment I’d started reading up on this game was the fact that Simon Bisley of LOBO and Heavy Metal fame was doing all the character and environment designs in the game. If any of you ever read the guns, broads, and gore themed Heavy Metal Magazine you’re probably very familiar with Simon Bisley. If there’s anyone that can take a simple concept of a typical dreg and turn it into a badass icon of punishment then it’s him. The pre-sketches were so true to what the in-game renders looked like as well as looking like the first game that really pushed the Xbox to it’s full potential in detailed environments.

The story went as follows; The seventh seal breaks and unleashes the dreaded Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse. Abbadon is just sitting in a bar one day when 30 percent of the world population disappears. He ends up being the chosen one to redeem the awfulness of man. But first he has to find the other two mortals that are supposed to do battle with the forces of hell. One of them is a Psychopathic Serial Killer/Preacher named Jimmy Ray Flint. This guy you have to break out of a maximum security prison to have him help with the horsemen, he spouts religious babble nonstop and is pretty decent with the business end of a shotgun. One of the other awesome things about this game to be was the four horsemen were actual believable forces of evil. Famine was a beautiful woman who when you got close enough you could see the skeleton inside her, to glimpse this femme fatal was to take in pestilence. War was an actual war machine resembling a possessed medieval knight. This was the stuff of awesome we’re talking here. On top of this, the other mortal that was supposedly a chosen one for the redemption of the human race was a drug addicted prostitute. With such a subversive storyline I wondered what was taking it so long, it had the setup to be rushed to completion because everyone wanted it so bad. Remember when hype never determined how well a game would sell? *cough*Halo*cough*

This was because the initial showings at E3 had been a little rough around the edges. I guess the textures weren’t meshed exactly the best and some of the animations weren’t complete. But by and large it still looked promising in a way that games today don’t really bring us a view so creative. When’s the last time you wanted to play a video game based off the story alone? Metal Gear maybe, but dealing with the biblical prediction of the endtimes and turning it on it’s head; I get a little giddy. Perhaps it’s was just the utter subversiveness that the game seemed to want to offer me, but it could also be that around 2003 games started slipping into the generic FPS based around a Sci-Fi war or a historical re-enactment. This is definitely one that got away. However after 3D0 filed bankruptcy just about everyone that was looking forward to this game tried to find out who the property was sold to. It doesn’t look like anyone who would do a good rendition of it either.

Here’s the trailer.

It still saddens me to this day that we never got to experience this game and likely never will. As I understand it the same might happen to a beloved Ghostbusters game that was slated for earlier this month. But like so many of those games we’ve all watched pass by like Starcraft Ghost, Duke Nukem Forever and a faithful Soldier Of Fortune sequel; I’ll always hold out a bit of hope that this intellectual property gets picked up by someone and hopefully has the shine on it that caught me as being truly a game reaching above the static of cranked out EA games for a multitude of 12 year old mouth breathers to jerk off to their pals.

Halo: Jumping Evolved

-K

It’s a-wafting….It’s called HYPE. Have you ever bought a game just because IGN said it was 9.8 “Best Game Ever?”

Ever notice those games usually run full price and almost never hit the “Greatest Hits” section of your retailer?

I’m sick of it. I’m looking to tell you, fair reader, that you don’t have to be a millionare to play good games.

I’m also saying that you don’t have to delve into ebay, craigslist, or shady yard sales with questionable goods (sorry, not all yard sales are bad.) to have a good multimedia experience.

My column, starting today, will be based on the fact that not everybody has the cash to keep up with the new and shiny games of last week. You still deserve to have fun, o ye of light wallet!

Also, I don’t give number ratings, thumbs, little happy faces, or anything else superficial like that. It degrades what a game really has to offer and makes people look at it rather than the game for what they should spend their hard earned money on. It also forces people to READ A REVIEW. THE HORROR, THE HORROR.

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Today, I start with a series that has been overlooked, surpassed, and left to the ages. It’s a series with top-notch CG animation, great action, customization, and thoughtful puzzles. Heath Ledger was also set to play a role in the live action movie, which has sadly stopped production because of his unfortunate death. The entire series of PS2 games (all 4) can be picked up at Gamestop for about 40 bucks.

This series is Capcom’s Onimusha.

Onimusha: Warlords was the first game in the series, released on the PS2 in 2001 and later ported to the XBOX in 2002. It features a samurai warrior named Samanosuke Akechi vs. an army of demons (oni / ogres depending on the region…) headed by Nobunaga Oda.

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