Mega Derived

Everybody! What are you doing right now? Playing a copy of Time Pilot on MAME? Of course you are! That’s all you ever do! So close that down right now, you pirate whore. Stop destroying our precious industry. Don’t cry, buddy, it’ll be okay. We’ll save the industry together. Thankfully Microsoft has given us a lifeline, as now we can all spend £3.40 to download a copy onto our Xbox 360!

Who would have thought we’d all be so lucky to have this opportunity? Not me, that’s for sure. I, like a naïve fool, figured that £280 console would mean I would be able to buy new games instead of all these bloody XBLA bits of crap.

Alas, I have not been posting my blogopinions to the blogosphere lately, nor have I been embracing the social networking revolution of Web 2.0 to spread and enjoy the opinions of other when it comes to our most beloved hobby. “Why?”, asks you, the humble viewer, somewhat rhetorically. Because I’ve had stuff to do!

Only joking! Of course, my whole life is a rather pathetic cycle of awakening, playing some shit old Playstation 1 game and then going back to bed. If I’m lucky I’ll get enough time to catch a sly wank whilst thinking of Kate from Lost.

Right now I’m chugging through Valkyrie Profile. It’s a pleasant little title that I’m almost ashamed to say I’ve never experienced past its rather standard Japanesey-RPG’ey title screen. But thanks to the wonder of next-gen – all its games are shit and not worth playing at all! – I’ve found enough time to creep back into our collective gaming yesteryears and make a little time for a certain little light-haired battle-hardened goddess of Death

Sure, it’s a Japanese RPG, but the battle formula has been combined with an actioney-adventurey title and the mix is a bit eclectic. However, overall, the fusion works. The atmosphere is great, too; there’s a sickly tragic tone running in the background. This is somewhat unavoidable, seeing as how you can only recruit people into your party when they’re dead. But people don’t just die of cancer or obesity, you know, real world deaths, they die spectacular, exquisite deaths that are usually somewhat cruel or ironic. You see, your job is to reap the souls of the slain and train them up – by trudging through the odd dungeon filled with an assortment of nasties – and then dispatch them off to lord Odin, who then enlists them in a heavenly war in an attempt to try and offset Ragnarok. Or something. I’m not far in, but I’m fairly sure there’s a twist brewing offstage and that will shortly reveal itself.

Basically, it’s a good game. Its PS2 sequel comes out later in the year, and what self-respecting internet gaming freak would be able to survive that without being able to namedrop the relatively obscure and hard-to-obtain first game in the series? Think about it, internet nerds, you’d look like a casual gamer! Not the hardcore ultradude that you are! Or one of those annoying twats that just talks about Pro Evo and plays on Xbox Live. For the purposes of this analogy, pick whatever one you like the least.

Next week I’ll be playing another old game and will also slag off crappy new games in the process.  

Golly, it’s the Leipzig Games Conference! That’s, totally, like, my fifth favourite games conference! All of my innards feel like they’ve been scooped out and replaced with organs made out of excitement rather than flesh and blood and stuff.

Actually, the whole thing is tedious. All games conferences are tedious. Leipzig is actually foreign for tedious. And that’s a fact.

To prove it, I’ve had more fun jingling my keys around to the tune of the new Scissor Sisters song than I have reading about any of it. I know this one guy who basically plans his life around his fondness for speculating about games that are coming out in the future. Jesus man, you could be dead in the future. Why don’t all the internet wannabe journalists try and fulfil their dreams of games journalism by learning proper syntax and spelling instead of copy ‘n’ pasting news from forum to forum? Because they’re much, much too stupid to actually do anything productive, that’s why.

My exciting Leipzig Games Conference predictions:

• People will say Sony are stupid
• People will say the 360 is really great and, wow, Microsoft have quite a lot of money. I hear they’re quite a big company!
• None of the games will be surprising in any way.

Tomb Raider: Legend was my contender for game of the year right up until the last level. Where you fight the final boss. Hey, everyone, did you know Tomb Raider: Legend on the Xbox has no “Restart Level” feature? Did you know that? Imagine this, you get to the final boss, you’ve run out of medipacks from the little “kill a ton of enemies” thing they’ve just made you do, and you’ve got to fight a completely bullshit boss with no medipacks. It’s not like the boss has attack patterns which you can learn and then exploit – gosh no! - this boss just randomly attacks and hits you a lot. If you want to know the secret strategy to beating this boss, it’s having medipacks. Now the only way the game will let me start that level again is by replaying the level before it in its entirety. Cheers for not putting in a simple “Restart Level” function, developers. I imagine that such a complicated feat of programming would have taken you months, nay, years to include.

I’m so frustrated that, when I’ve completed it, I’m going to take the DVD-R out of my Xbox drive and snap it in half. How do you like that, Eidos? I bet that burns pretty bad.

UPDATE:

Oh, you can’t even replay a previous level to get to the next level! Fantastic. There is absolutely no way to restart a level in this game unless you’ve already bloody completed it. Having a game that autosaves every time you hit a ‘checkpoint’ without having a way to rollback to the start of the level is pure ass.

UPDATE UPDATE:

Downloaded a save game off the internet and replayed the level. Modded Xbox wins again. Fuck you Eidos!

Gosh, Eurogamer got a hold of a review copy of Disgaea 2 pretty fast. Those chaps over at Amazon say it’s not coming out until the very end of October! I wonder if they’ve struck some kind of a deal with the publishers? I wonder if the whole thing is basically a complete and utter fucking disgrace on the part of Eurogamer, as they chew down and swallow their integrity so they’ve got enough room left in their slutty man mouths to fit Koei’s massive cock. I wonder if a few choice quotes from this review are going to end up on promotional material spread around by Koei. I wonder if a big fat “this game makes me orgasm so hard I can’t make love to my wife anymore – 9/10 Eurogamer” will magically appear at the bottom of the front cover. I wonder if this whole thing is conveniently timed so that Koei have enough time to add this to their cover design before they send it off to the printers?

Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting (or whatever the crap it is) costs eight quid to download onto your Xbox 360. Fucking priceless. What is it about XBLA that brings out the idiot in people? You can buy Street Fighter III: Third Strike – a much, much better game - in the Street Fighter Anniversary Collection for the original Xbox for much less than £8. That even comes with the anime movie and shit thrown in! For heaven’s sake, you could just buy Guilty Gear XX #Reload for about £1.04 and enjoy that infinitely superior game. Is it Xbox Live? Are people really coughing up eight quid to play a decade old game that’s been both emulated perfectly for ages and bettered a hundred times now because they can play it online? Lonely bastards. Could be worse, I suppose. They could be playing WoW.

As I’m a cut above the average gamer, today I’ve been dabbling in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I will concede that Symphony of the Night is a renowned game that should be respected and played by all, at least once. I mean, it showed the world that making one big, giant rip-off of Metroid was a pretty okay thing to do. I was speaking to a guy once that had the audacity to claim that Metroid was a copy of Castlevania. Bravo, Konami, you at least managed to convince that one guy. The rest of us are well aware that you haven’t had a single good idea since whatever fat, overpaid corporate shitfuck sat down at a desk and went “Hey, how about a rhythm game with moving arrows?”

So, anyway, I’m playing Symphony of the Night, or SOTN as it’s known in the world of acronym, and it suddenly dawns on me, about two hours in, that I’m ball-achingly lost. I have absolutely no idea where the bugger it is I’m supposed to be going. And, suddenly, the clouds part and I, at least in retrospect, revel in this life-changing epiphany. Why the cock am I playing this game if all I’m going to do is wander around and be lost? I’ve completed it once before, so it’s not like I have anything to prove, I’m think to myself, why on Earth should I play it a second time just so I can wander around this fugging castle until I feel the compulsive need to take the CD out of the drive, smash it against the monitor and then use the shards of the disc to slash my wrists open and giggle to myself as I embrace sweet release. These gothic games bring out the worst in me, I tell you.

Then I started thinking, why is such a tedious game mechanic so celebrated? When we say that games like Metroid and the Metroidvania’s are great, we should actually be saying “Oh, look, I’m wandering around all pissing lost whoopee doo this is effing fantastic!”  

Then I realised where I was supposed to be going and got back to playing the game.