Mega Derived

Today I officially quit reading the Argent Dawn forums.

Their sad, pathetic excuse for social interaction used to be funny but now I am becoming addicted to watching them all throw their lives away.

It was bound to happen sometime, but somebody I know traded in his PS2 and all his games for a 360 and two games. Namely, Condemned and Perfect Dark: Zero. Now, without wanting to offend the guy’s purchasing decisions, I think that must be one of the worst things you can possibly do. In your entire life. Seriously.

It’s bad for games, you see. You – the consumer – are handing over a veritable smorgasbord of gaming avenues in return for an underused box that promises, but does not deliver, a glimpse of the future. Where’s the future in Perfect Dark: Zero? Unless the ‘future’ is that Rare are going to become an even worse development studio, there’s nothing to be seen there. You’re stuck. While the 360 will probably churn out a few AAA titles in its lifetime, none of them are here right now and they probably won’t arrive for ages.

The internet is always good for ramping up consumer frenzy and I don’t think it fails with this. By clogging up Xbox Live with shit like skins and music videos and touting ‘media player functionality’ that’s worse than the cheap softmod job I did to my regular Xbox for less than a tenner they’re pretending that your 360 will somehow be unique. Fuck that. When you go to winamp.com, are the best skins available for Winamp the ones that come up in that ‘sponsored’ box and are conveniently placed near the advert of the coinciding movie’s release? No. They’re shit. The last thing I want to decorate my Xbox with is such vacuous merchandising. By taking the focus away from the games themselves Microsoft are essentially arguing that it becomes somehow more than a games console but the gritty realisation is that you’re just lumbered with a bigger, more useless piece of junk than it was when it couldn’t play any games. If you’re going to pay to download music videos, then you should at least do it in iTunes. My theory goes like this: if you’re going to side with one ridiculous DRM-powered lousy file format, at least go with the stylish one. I’ll just keep getting them off file-sharing networks. The other thing; media player functionality? If it’s not streaming some XviD’s over my network, it’s not the media player for me. WMV files take the piss.

There are good things. As much as I am loathe to online gaming, Live is a good service. There is also potential for great games. Here’s the kicker: potential is not a good enough reason to forsake five years of gaming investment. Or even the future of the PS2. What happens when you want to play FF12, or Kingdom Hearts 2, or DMC3: Special Edition, or Ibara, or Guitar Hero? Those five titles will have more gameplay in them than the 360’s entire 2006 output. That’s my prediction and I’m willing to bet exhaustive amounts of money on it. Even more importantly, what happens when you want to replay an old favourite, like Gradius V? You can’t because you’ve gone and fucked yourself by swapping it for nothing more than potential and that’s just not something I could ever do. The trade just seems so unfair.

She’s sitting down because there’s nothing to do in the game. Obviously.

But there is something sinister to do! Look… at those bunny ears. Look at how much leg is on display. Look at that little bit of cleavage.

I don’t need to tell you what to do next, right guys?

<Woman in a long coat walks into the house>

VOICEOVER: Hard day at work?

<Woman looks at camera with eyes that scream “Yes! So hard!”>

VOICEOVER: Well, do you either:

1. Break open a bar of scrumptious, dark, Belgian chocolate and relax with a book?
2. Or how about relaxing with some yummy videogames? They’re great to unwind with, and won’t add any more inches to your waistline!

<Woman smiles and bites her lip seductively whilst walking over to table. She pulls the scrunchie out of her hair and lets it all hang down. She also takes off her jacket, throwing it over a nearby lampshade. There are three pads on the table; Gamecube, Xbox and PS2. She picks up the Gamecube one, obviously.>

VOICEOVER: They’re so addictive they’ll even take your mind off your boyfriend!  And with three great varieties to choose from, you’ll never be stuck with a decision more complicated than “Oh, which console shall I snuggle up on the sofa with tonight!”

<Camera moves to behind the sofa. The woman is curled up and is enjoying a copy of Animal Crossing. Camera pulls backwards and blurs out.>

What’s the best music for when you’re feeling a bit excited? 80s music. Obviously. That cool, energetic synthesised sound will inject you with a perfect euphoria for hours on end. It’s why all modern ‘dance’ music is just old music remixed with more bass. The same thing applies to games. Take old games, add bass. But, in the games world, the ‘bass’ is replaced by exciting technology.

If you’re feeling like you want to get some action, are you going to really go for a fourteen hour, ten man instance crawl through WoW? Yes? Sure thing, Grandpa! Young, peppy types like me look to Japan for the answer.

A quick dredge through Google videos turns up this old chestnut. Sure, it’s a Gamespot video review. Never mind the fact that the person playing it dies within about four seconds of it being on screen, that’s just Gamespot being shitty at games. Look past that; look at the game, buzzing away in the background. Take a peek at the crisp blues of the bullet fire. Notice how fucking hard it looks. Being able to complete a game like this is testament to your superiority over just about everyone else on the planet. Don’t mind that Greg Kasavin says you’ll be able to do it in ten hours. You won’t. Well, if you’re one of those complete tossers who will just freeplay your way to the end of Metal Slug 3 then you might. But fuck you guys, you don’t count.

Gradius is all about perfection. You have to do it without dying because otherwise you look like a stupid ponce. You need to build up your army of multiples – little tiny blobs that follow you around and give you extra destructive power – and use them to obliterate anything that pops up on the screen. The beauty of the game is that it’s fast and there are bullets everywhere.

Okay lads, lets pretend that we give a shit about getting women into gaming. But we guys don’t care, do we? Not really. Even if women did like games it probably wouldn’t change the fact that they get pissed off with you when you don’t phone them because you were busy killing Nevan on DMC3 or that you spent the money you were supposed to be buying her presents with on Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence.

What we guys really like is segregating ourselves from chicks that little bit further. We especially love reading the odd article here and there about how women don’t like games and then laughing at them because they don’t understand. These articles are made even better when they include little diversionary bars down the side listing things that women like instead of games. Flowers! Chocolates! Puppies! Haha, women aren’t like blokes at all! Blokes like beer! And videogames!

The obvious suggestion, as put forward in the Walker’s article, is that girls like pretty things. That are, obviously, pink. This is a fact mirrored by that new “Hot Pink” Motorola phone and whenever Nintendo decide to make a pink Gameboy. Is this true? Who knows! I’d like to think that girls were slightly more intelligent than to fall for such a cheap marketing ploy. They must be because the three most popular games, that I know of, for girls are The Sims, DDR and World of Warcraft. Two of those are on the PC, the ugliest gaming platform of all time. WoW is good, though, because if we all play our cards right then we’ll be able to set up some naughty rendezvous with a girl gamer and fuck their brains out. That’s what they’d like us to think, anyway. In reality they’re emotionally stunted freaks who live off the attention of sad, lonely guys and will probably open a pay-for cam site within the next eight months. Remember that the next time you’re having a quick wank whilst thinking of one of them, WoW fans! But that’s what the whole debate is about, really. If more girls play games then, hopefully, we guys will have less work to do when we want to coerce the pants off one of them. If girls are into DMC3 then they’ll obviously be more inclined to give me a blowjob if they know that I am up to level four of DMD. If I manage to clear the whole game on DMD, well, I’ll obviously be getting the full works.

Why else would we care? I have never been interested in persuading women out of their hobbies and into mine; if they want to stand about in New Look all day staring wistfully at pairs of shoes then let them be. I have never once tried to convince girls that Indian food and eighties action movies are the pinnacle of entertainment so why should I care if they’re playing games or not? If they want to play the bloody things then they will, there’s no need to attempt to tailor the industry to try and introduce them to the field. Fuck, the games companies are making more than enough money as it is and we really don’t need them stunting games with stupid 21st century marketing terms like ‘accessibility’ and ‘market appeal’ any more than they already do. Games are dumb enough as it is.

I think female gamers, also, would appreciate it if we don’t run stupid and slightly condescending articles over the press and the internet about how our games are too complex for them. Nobody is going to attract any new female gamers with it and we’re far more likely to just piss off the ones that already exist. And they do exist; a quick Google for “girl gamers” and you’re left staring at a metric shitload of results. And if these girls, real ones who actually play games, are all pissed off they’ll just get stroppy and moody and will be far less likely to want to worship me for being able to complete Ninja Gaiden.

If anyone thinks I’m being too harsh about him then you can piss off. He’s a grown man and he’s more than able to put up with my caustic bullshit.

Besides, he knows the secret that my devotion to gaming makes me socially awkward, emotionally stunted and destroys my relationships with people just as much as his does.

But he’s still a twat for not playing DMC3.

Richard Churchill was a native born Londoner who, like most of us, grew up with a steady stream of videogames. He had a fiery, sarcastic personality and was not afraid to lambaste individuals who ‘had it coming’. He was much respected by his peers and feared by his enemies. A personal favourite of his was to mock emotionally unstable anime fans. Great times were had by all and, unfortunately, I am not nearly a competent enough scribe to annotate these good times. They were good times, though.

A rocky break-up caused a period of loneliness and insecurity for Richard at the end of 2004. This was a particularly damaging time for him. It lead him down various avenues, one of those was to hide himself away in videogames. Alas, his health took a turn for the worst in 2005 when he became a subscriber to World of Warcraft. At first the game was merely a hobby, but it wasn’t long before it became an addiction. Countless days would be spent traversing the lands of Azeroth, where its reassuring warmth would keep him feeling entertained and busy. When he started to become a serious roleplayer, the escapism proved to be too much for Richard’s life. The gifts – the equipment, the success of being a high-level character, the power in the community that was not obtainable in his everyday life - handed to him by Blizzard was far too much for Richard. Soon his entire day-to-day focus was purely about logging on to the game. Any segment of free time would be spent inside the game or on his server’s forums.

Things became even shadier in late 2005 when he announced that he had fabricated a tale of love between himself and another denizen of the game. There was an announced marriage, which was milked for its worth by him and his ‘bride’ on the forums. It would not be long before the self-congratulatory posting between the couple would lead to further degradation for Richard’s already weakened mental state. To this day he protests that he has no real feelings of love – it’s all just a cleverly constructed storyline based around a very good friendship - or commitment to his bride, but logic and sense declares otherwise. His friends tried to support him for his choice, but becoming emotionally attached to someone through an online RPG pushed their dedication to the limits. The true extent of this fake relationship will forever be unknown.

The start of 2006 yielded some hope. He vowed to leave the game. Things were looking up. Unfortunately, he only lasted twelve days away from the game before finally succumbing to his illness on the 22nd January 2006. His friends and family were with him when he passed.

Rest in Peace, Richard. The candle twice as bright only burns half as long.

Follow-up from last night:

Radiant Silvergun.

There’s a downside, though. Playing all these wonderful Saturn games makes me ashamed to realise that when I was a childish, immature shit in Year 6 when I turned my back on Sega to get a Playstation. When my friends used to stand around in the playground kicking the crap out of Sega, I even joined in!

I’m sorry Sega. Really, I am. You didn’t deserve that. I wish there was some way I could make it up to you. I could buy Sonic Heroes as my way of an apology? Would you like that? Not Shadow the Hedgehog though. I didn’t fuck up that bad.

For a game that’s incredibly short, you really have to ensure that each and every segment of the game is exceedingly juicy and satisfying. This is why it’s so confusing to me when I discover that that ZoE 2 has a midsection saggier than a woman who’s just birthed octuplets.

It’s a brilliant trilogy of tedium:

1. Fighting a boss that you have to grab and hold, instead of just outright destroying. Harder than it looks because you’re in a motherfucking giant robot with the raw destructive power of a thousand nuclear missiles. A quick tap of the guns and they’ll lose half their health and you’re fucked then.
2. Then you have to escort a whiny woman someplace, instead of just using said killing machine to sow destruction. Said woman will shout out “auauauauahghgh!” every two seconds in a pitch that hurts to hear.
3. Finally, you have to navigate very slowly through a minefield. Because being a giant robot is all about going slowly and not blowing the shit out of stuff.

Yawn. So boring! Here’s how to code a giant robot game:

1. Create giant robot.
2. Give it lots of weapons.
3. Make it fight lots of other stuff.

It really isn’t hard. I know you can do better, Konami. And you fucking better for the rest of the game or I will write a stern letter of protest to your PR department.