Mega Derived

I haven’t really posted much for a while. I don’t have a fancy-schmancy new piece of hardware to enjoy, nor do I have the innate eloquence and journalistic thirst for a story. I’m also lacking video-capturing skills and enough intellect to deconstruct my time-wasting hobby of choice in entertaining ways. The internet has been quiet with sources for my forte: shitting on press releases and mocking PR tosswanks. This whole paragraph is a rather long winded excuse to say that I haven’t really been playing anything.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I’ve been playing Gungrave, which is so perfect in terms of style but so woefully lacking in challenge and entertainment that I feel that I don’t have the patience or motivation to put the disc back in my PS2 and wade through the final level. I’ve dabbled in Another World and kept myself busy with the texty and wordy delight that is Phoenix Wright. But the game that’s got me most excited in recent weeks is Klonoa: Door to Phantomille on the archaic PS1.  I clearly missed out on this title because it’s a bloody joy to play. It’s a sort of cross between Yoshi’s Island and Kirby and I feel like a kid in a candy store when I’m bouncing any of the game’s bright, colourful levels. It’s tricky without being too challenging, which has been nicely juxtaposed alongside the complex whilst basic controls. It’s a finely tuned little title that’s been balanced perfectly by Namco, and I absolutely love it. It is much better than any of the shite on the 360, and it’s better than most of the shite on the PS2. You don’t need to twat around with achievement points with Klonoa because your entire body just glows with a sense of wellbeing and personal accomplishment just by loading the game up in an emulator. Of course, you have to use an emulator because then you can run a nice graphics plugin and get a few fancy filters on those graphics. Make the game a bit easier on the eyes.  

Summer rocks for games. Instead of having to play lousy crapfests like Prey you can dig into the backcatalog and unleash mighty titans of gaming such as Klonoa.

High Resolution Edition of Another World? Sign me up! Finally, a way to play classic games without having to drop valuable money on a 360! Oh, no, wait, this stupid bullshit game has gone and fusking lost my save when I’m two thirds through the game! Gee, that’s not infuriating at all!

Bullshit rating: 1000/10

Official verdict: Everybody steal this off the internet instead of working out just the hell how much seven euros are in real money. That’ll teach the bastards.

Update: Managed to find the level codes on the trusty internet and complete the game. Take that, you publisher cocks!

So, with all the attention I’ve been giving Valve lately, I went back and played a few bits of Half-Life 2 again this afternoon. This, normally, wouldn’t be a worthy subject for my gold-laden posts that are undoubtedly a source of joy and inspiration for millions, but as I was running through some of the areas, I found myself genuinely intrigued and absorbed into the game, something that really didn’t happen the first time I played the thing.

I’m thinking about starting a new game up on hard and trying to work out if all my anti-HL2 sentiments – nothing revolutionary; dull combat; craptacular ending; whole game was basically a pack of lies and deceit, a crude masquerade that never lived up to the legendary E3 demo that we were all promised; vehicle sections were tedious and there was too many of them – were actually justified, or whether I just played through the game when I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for it.

Steam is still the biggest aberration in the history of time, though.

Question: How do you reveal to the world that all the promises, dreams and ideas you said you promised you could and, indeed, would implement in the sequel to the game that made you a reputable studio in the first place will likely amount to little more than a port of Team Fortress Classic to the Source engine, which we be bundled into Episode Two?

Answer: Give it a hilarious new art style!

Seriously though Valve, great job on the artwork for those Team Fortress 2 characters. They all look fantastic. The medic and the spy are both hilarious looking great. The spy especially. James Bond with a balaclava is brilliant.

My predictions:

1. TF2 will absolutely not be bundled with Episode Two, like originally claimed, unless the release date for Episode Two gets pushed back until 2009. There is absolutely no way Valve, with their tardy reputation, will be able to work on Team Fortress 2, Episode Two and porting all of the current HL2 content to the 360 and the PS3 and get all of that done by 2007.
2. Gameplay for TF2 will remain largely unchanged from TFC. This is both a good thing, because it means classic Team Fortress style gameplay, and a bad thing, because TF2 was supposed to be so much more.
3. I will never play TF2 online anyway, as online games are for dorks and/or people with way too much free time on their hands.

Eurogamer couldn’t be more right with their review of Prey, written by Kristen Reed. Actually, thinking about it, I would have given it a lower score if I was reviewing it. I don’t need to keep good relations with the publishers, though, so a score of 7 is entirely justified in that respect. Apart from the editor trying to look modern and cool by filing it as an Xbox 360 review when Prey is quite clearly a PC game and the rather tiresome attempt to look like a normal metropolitan city fellow that does normal, trendy things in the first paragraph, almost every bit of it is an eloquent little diatribe against a rather dull and tedious game that’s only saving grace is that it was released in July. My favourite little bit is this:

Its tendency to lapse into generic blandness might be acceptable on boring days in July with no other games to focus on, but it’d have to a fairly rainy one at that. Even with our feel-good glasses on it feels like we’re damning Prey with faint praise to write a sentence that ends with “reasonably entertaining few hours of gunplay that never really stretches you”

Now, let’s have a little peeksie at the IGN review:

With some truly imaginative level design, a compelling story with dramatic highlights, good voice acting and dialog, and more interesting weapons, Prey earns a spot on this shooter fan’s hard drive. If you’re not sold, I recommend checking out the demo.

Imaginative level design? Compelling story? Good voice acting? It’s like they’re playing a different game. I want the game that they’re playing, because my copy of Prey sucks ass.

Half as good as Episode One, three times the price and one third longer. I moan that Episode One is the most expensive expansion pack ever created, but at least it’s not as stingy on the play hours as Prey. Which is like Quake 4 but you can walk on the ceiling and do out-of-body puzzles. Oooo! How revolutionary. Ten years of development time and this is the best they can come up with? Jesus, ten years of development time and you should have the words first sixty hour FPS game.

Oh, and you can’t die. It’s impossible to die. Which champ thought that one up? “Removing the element of death will make this game even more fun!” he must have said, joking to his boss, who assumed he was being serious. I suppose the argument is that it keeps the stream of ‘narrative’ flowing. Pffst. Yeah, narrative. If society has resorted to having to get bloody narrative from an FPS then I think it’s safe to say that the human race will have made itself extinct by 2020. Read a bloody book you pissing jerks, when I’m playing an FPS game I fully expect to at least be able to bloody die. The atmosphere isn’t a patch on what Valve have got going, either. And the digital distribution system is actually not as good as Steam. Who’d a thunked it?

Now look what you’ve made me do! I’ve resorted to defending Valve, one of my least favourite developers on the planet. Those guys can’t even get out of bed in the morning without turning it into a four week job, packaging it up and selling it on Steam for $19.95 with Directors Commentary: “We totally took this getting out of bed idea back to the drawing board at least fifty times before finally letting the four second scene be completed, even though nobody will notice and it doesn’t matter whatsoever and it would have been much nicer if we actually did some proper work and got Episode Two out before 2007”

As a closing note, anybody who buys the 360 version is paying almost ten pounds per hour of gameplay. Chumps. You know, moreso than they already are, as they pay valuable money on shit like Penny Arcade and Frag Dolls themes whilst they post on forums about how excited they are at the prospect of paying more valuable money on yet another port of Street Fighter II.

Overall Rating: 9.0 out of 10. Editors Choice Award!  

Yes, that’s right: this post is full of anti-Sony messages! But they’re all at the bottom of the post, so you’ll have to read everything else first. Think of it as your reward!

Knocked down Maximo vs Army of Zin (#16), Transformers (#17) and Half-Life 2: Episode One (#1 over the last few days, and they were all worthy of my time. Perhaps the most glaring critique is that, whilst they were all pretty short, each one was an enjoyable little gaming morsel and I could quite easily envision myself playing any one of them a second time. Oh, look, I just did in-between typing sentences there. I’ll give a few short rundowns, because I know nobody is interested in reading what I think anyway:

Maximo vs Army of Zin

Sensational stuff. Capcom really took criticisms of the original Maximo on board and produced a highly deserving sequel. This isn’t just a few little tweaks and refinements, with perhaps a slight graphical update – as so many sequels are these days – no, this is basically a reconstruction of the game from the ground up. Like a big fat person after extensive plastic surgery, there spirit is still there but the package is much easier to be around. Gamestation have had copies of this for £4.99 for ages, and anybody complaining of a summer lull could do a lot worse than sourcing a copy of this for an action packed, high quality weekend of delectable platform/adventuring.

Transformers

What is perhaps a rather generic and uninteresting mech shooter is invigorated by the addition of the Transformers license and a fairly interesting system of collecting and utilising various power-ups given to you as the game progresses. The jumping sections can be fiddly and annoying, and taking down some enemies can be more frustrating than fun in the first few levels, but most of its faults are redeemed when you knock a group of robots down like bowling pins in your vehicle mode.

Half-Life 2: Episode One

Is like a choice cut of beef, perhaps a rib-eye steak, soaked in a delicious, tenderising marinade which mostly consists of atmosphere. Better than Half-Life 2. I don’t think it’s as good as people say, and is certainly a victim of the hype machine. The actual gameplay elements in Half-Life 2, in my opinion, are rather drab. The combat isn’t particularly inspiring, you just shoot stuff whilst running forward. It’s a game about presentation, and lateral thinking, and you probably won’t find a better title for it than this. It’s pretty much the antithesis of stuff like F.E.A.R, which was some incredible gameplay marred by bland, shitty maps. Valve and Monolith should join forces. The resulting offspring would be an unstoppable goliath of the first person shooter universe.

I still hate Steam, however. People who have pirated this game are the lucky ones, as they get to circumvent that shitty software. They also don’t have to decrypt the .gcf files on-the-fly every time they load the game, which probably increases performance and, at worst, decreases load times. So, in reality, stealing a copy of Episode One off the internet is probably the best thing you can do, from an end-user perspective. It’s not like Valve can complain, they’re all about digital distribution.

ANTI-SONY REMARKS: I’m a fruity little games journalist who preaches about being impartial and detached, like I’m pretending to be a real journalist, like the ones that go to journalism school and get real news from dirty little places like Iraq and stuff. They probably don’t even have broadband in Iraq, so how do they put their impartial thoughts and analysis on the internet? Madness! But, yeah, I have an Xbox 360 and I loathe Sony. The Playstation 3 is stupid. More like Gaystation 3, am I right? You bet your ass I’m right! The Playstation 3 is pretty much the worst thing since Hitler. Fuck Sony! Fight the Power! Sony are nothing more than corporate scumfuckers and I want them all to fry in a massive, corporate-sized frying pan. Fuck Sony! Fuck Sony! More like Piece Of SHIT 3, am I right?

AND you get to fight Unicron!

AND the ending credits are a sort of Transformers theme Jazz remix with a really, really cheesy robotic rap thing overlaid on top. It’s like watching the end credits to a movie from the eighties. It’s bloody fantastic.

Overall, I give the game IGN’s sixteenth highest award, 1000000 out of 10

In my case, I was locked in a colossal battle against Megatron in an active volcano. It was really intense. Seriously.

Has anyone seen the new DS Lite advertising campaign? It’s so racist I cannot believe it. It’s disgusting. It’s amazing how such a racist campaign even got made in the first place.

Look at how the white DS Lite has clearly been positioned on top of the black DS Lite. Look at it! Bloody Hell! It makes me sick to my stomach. And look how the black DS doesn’t even get a stylus. It’s clearly making fun of white oppression and should probably be banned. I’d suggest we all boycott the Nintendo DS, but then I wouldn’t be able to play Ouendan.

Still. Damn. Look at it! Repulsive.