Tag Archives: games

Happy Birthday Elite!

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Hard to believe, but Elite came out 25 years ago this month. Twenty-five years!

This makes me feel very, very old. Still, Elite has held up really well over the years. That must mean I have too, right? Er…

The first time I played Elite was on my cousin’s Commodore 64. I was barely out of nappies and for the life of me, I couldn’t wrap my head around the whole space-trading thing. Having to keep track any number of variables is kind of difficult when you’ve got the attention span of a sparrow. I had no idea what was going on and understood maybe every second word in a sentence. “What is ‘narcotics’?” “Drugs.” “What is ‘drugs’?” But I loved the game’s 3D engine and the feeling that you could go anywhere, do anything. All this in a game that took up less than 22K of memory – that’s less than an average email. And I still count my first successful docking with a space station as one of my videogaming high points.

If you fancy playing a bit of Elite right now, grab a copy of Oolite, which runs on almost anything.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

For a license with so much meat on its bones, it’s a little disappointing to see all the Batman games that have been made, all laid out. The majority are lazy movie tie-ins, knocked out by South Asian sweat shops for a bowl of rice per game. And it shows, you know? Check out the SNES version of Batman Forever and tell me if you think the developers had even heard of Batman when they started working on that game. “What-man? Forget that noise, Jack. Kids today love their Mortal Kombat. Give them some Mortal KomBatman.”

Thank goodness, then, for Rocksteady Studios. Here are a bunch of hardcore, unrepentant Batman geeks who get it. Working very much from an “If it ain’t broke…” mentality, these guys called in the pros. Rather than trying to write their own story and ending up with some fanboy claptrap, they instead hired Paul Dini to write the story. He may not have written the book on Batman, but he certainly wrote the cartoon, as well as the truly amazing Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. They also hired a lot of the main voice actors from the cartoon too, like Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin. Even ignoring the rest of the game, the story and voice-acting are pure Batman.

But, thankfully, they didn’t ignore the rest of the game. Having a great, authentic Batman story would be nothing if they didn’t completely understand what makes Batman such an interesting superhero. Apart from a few gadgets (which are all present and correct), the best thing about the character is that he’s a brick shithouse who moves with fluidity and grace. He can hide in the shadows, picking off his enemies one by one, making each remaining enemy progressively more terrified. It also means that he can handle himself when he drops into the middle of a group of thugs and decides to take them on all at once. The developers are proud of their combat engine here, even going so far as to offer a bunch of separate “challenge” modes where you fight groups of increasing numbers of enemies. Kind of like Gears of War 2‘s ‘horde’ mode, but with fisticuffs. And they’re right to be proud – this game has the best combat of any game I can think of. It’s simple, it feels natural and it produces devastating, cinematic results. If there’s any film that can offer a more spectacular, perfectly choreographed fight sequence, I’d love to see it.

Okay, maybe that one sequence from Tony Jaa’s The Protector comes close.

It’s not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination. It cogs so heavily from Bioshock that it falls foul of the same criticisms that could be thrown at that game — lazy fetch-quests to artificially pad out the game’s length, inconsequential upgrades that make very little difference in the gameplay — but for all it gets wrong, it gets other things very, very right. The world is almost perfect. It’s an open world that you actually want to spend some time in. You’re encouraged to explore, and rewarded for doing so. Through the 240 ‘riddles’ hidden throughout the island, you’ll learn more about the mythology of the place, or characters that don’t actually make an appearance in this game, like Catwoman and the Penguin. British Gaming Blog nails it: “After hunting 200 god-damn pigeons in Grand Theft Auto IV last year, I decided to make a pact – make them enjoyable to hunt, or I just won’t bother. Guess what? My Xbox 360 gamercard holds an achievement for solving 240 riddles in Arkham Asylum.”

I’m slightly disappointed that the game didn’t lift a little heavier from Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. It’s a genuinely brilliant comic that explores Batman’s own psychological state in relation to the so-called lunatics locked up in the asylum. Having read the book, I was hoping this was a theme that would pop up in the game, but it only really appears in passing. Though I suppose beggars can’t be choosers. I guess I’ll have to be satisfied with it only being the best Batman game ever made.

Oh well.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box

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The first game, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, was an interesting addition to the DS library. Rather than a straightforward Japanese puzzle game like Planet Puzzle League or Picross, Professor Layton was more like a French cartoon – think Belville Rendez-Vous with the occasional sudoku puzzle thrown in. It was a cute conceit to begin with, where everything and everyone you saw lead to a puzzle. But as the game progressed, this got really, really annoying, as Penny Arcade managed to sum up perfectly. On top of this, the puzzles got painfully repetitive, and once you figured out that the game was actually a smug asshole who tried to catch you out all of the time and 90% of the puzzles were actually trick questions, it became less a matter of working them out and more just a question of donkey-work. Still, I battled through and finished the first game, just don’t ask me what happened in the story, since I had long since given up and would just tap rapidly on the screen whenever an exposition sequence suddenly came up.

With Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, I had hoped that the creators would fix some of these problems. Maybe they integrated the story a bit better? Maybe they came up with new, interesting puzzles?

Did they fuck.

The game is essentially the same as the first, in slightly different clothes. In another way, it’s actually more frustrating than the first game, since the entire thing has a lot more hand-holding to help newcomers to the series. The puzzles are almost exactly the same, and the characters are still the same bunch of puzzle-wielding cunts. I mean, what kind of Maitre d’ would ask you to solve a puzzle for him while you’re waiting for your table? “Welcome to El Bulli. I’m terribly sorry sir, your table is not ready yet, but in the meantime, here’s a book of crossword puzzles.”

Maybe I’ve just gotten incredibly curmudgeonly in the year or so since the first game (I hear that happens after you cross the big three-oh), but I’ve been trying to decide what I find particularly wrong about this game. If they took out the random puzzles, I wouldn’t care for the story, or the way it’s told, with you as a completely passive detective who just clicks through screens as the story unfolds for you. If they took out the story and just presented it as a list of puzzles, I’d be annoyed at the frequency of repetition.

If you’re new to the series, or if you really liked the first one, give this game a go, you’ll probably like it. For me, however, this is one of the few games that has made me think that life is too short for this kind of bullshit.

Fuck it, I’m going back to Picross.

Hitlers Must Die

Cryptic Sea’s No Quarter is a series of indie games described by the developer as “an album of original games inspired by arcade and console classics. Think of it like an album of music except with games instead of songs.”

Quite.

Part of this ‘album’ is Hitlers Must Die!, a “run and gun where you play a Soviet special forces guy assigned to kill Hitler clones.” Basically, a 2D shooter, with some neat John Woo-style stunts in there, like sliding backwards while shooting. But there’s the question: why not just have some cookie-cutter space aliens or monsters? Why Hitler?

But the answer is obvious. Why the fuck not?

Proof that, like Philip Glass, Moonlight Sonata makes any video infinitely cooler.

Ghostbusters: The Videogame

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A while ago, I talked about the way that, when dealing with popular franchises, creators are often unsure of how to introduce something new so they fall back on fan service as a way of masking their insecurity. By wrapping something new in familiar clothing, they hope it makes it easier for people (especially those all-too-fickle fanboys) to accept. Or, worse still, in trying to recreate the success of the originals, they use the originals as a actual recipe. Take a dash of this situation, a pinch of that character, two heaped tablespoons of this trusted joke and – bingo! – something similar-yet-different.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is another perfect example of this. The first few levels are like playable deja vu. You start at the Sedgewick Hotel, you meet slimer and Venkman get slimed. You wreck the ballroom. Then you jet across to the Library where you meet the Librarian ghost and the whole thing ends with a fight against the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man. It’s all so very obvious and unremarkable. It kind of makes me think of my idea for creating a sequel to a movie by just taking the original movie and cheaply dubbing in the word “again” after every line (e.g. “Zed’s dead again, baby. Zed’s dead again.”). Otherwise known as the Rocky II school of sequel-making. In Ghostbusters: The Videogame, the first hour is filled with lines that basically follow this setup. “He slimed me again!” “She shushed us again!” And there are far too many “Hey, remember that time…” for my liking. To quote Joni Mitchell, nobody ever said to Van Gogh, ‘Paint a Starry Night again, man!’.

But then, halfway through the library level, something special happens. You leave the confines of the movies behind. No longer tethered to ticking all the boxes for the fans, they are free to play about a more experimental storytelling palette, and the game improves dramatically. You visit the ‘extradimensional’ version of the library which had the potential to be generic and unremarkable, like Xen from Half-Life. Except with Egon and Ray nerdgasming over the walkie-talkies, it feels like something that genuinely belongs within the Ghostbusters universe. It’s completely believable and enjoyable.

After all, what are the main reasons why someone would play Ghostbusters: The Videogame, the things that separate it from other videogames? The universe and the characters. People didn’t respond to the films just because of the kick-ass theme tune. They responded because the world was interesting and the characters were entertaining in the way they behaved within this world.

With the exception of Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis, the entire cast is back, lending their voices to their characters. And the whole thing has been written by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, the writers of the Ghostbusters movies, so the writing even feels consistent with the movies. And there’s plenty of meat on these bones, if you want it. You’re encouraged to “scan” the environment, Metroid-style. This then pops an entry into “Tobin’s Spirit Guide”, which you can read later. Again, that’s if you want it. If you want to just shoot things and cause an assload of damage, that’s okay too.

I only have one, minor problem with the game, and that’s the fact that you play as a no-name rookie, a new addition to the Ghostbusters squad. This would be fine – I mean, I’m not demanding that I have to play as one of the original Ghostbusters (although you can in multiplayer) – except that sometimes, it feels as if you’re the only one who actually does any work. Very often, it’s up to you to fight and capture ghosts while the rest of the characters stand around spouting (admittedly funny, if slightly repetitive) one-liners. It’s a very minor quibble, and one that can almost be forgiven as a standard videogame trope.

First few levels aside, Ghostbusters: The Videogame is fan service done right.

B+

Enough is Enough

Checking my multiplayer stats in Call of Duty 4 has become a terrifying reflection on my addiction. Two hundred and twenty-eight hours. On a single game. This isn’t even close to the top of the CoD4 leaderboard though. That guy has something like eighty-three days logged. That’s one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-two hours. And that’s not even the highest! The person ranked number 14 in the world has three thousand, one hundred and ninety-two hours. If you played this game for eight hours every day, it would still take you over a year to get that kind of play-time. Can you imagine?

The worst part is that I’m not even enjoying it any more. I’ve gotten to the stage now where most people who would be at my ‘comfort’ level of skill have all moved onto something else. Gears of War 2 or Call of Duty: World at War, maybe? And so what I’m left with is people that are beyond my skill-level, and just don’t make the game any fun. (I often accuse them of playing unfairly, but I think this is just my way of not having to admit that I’m not good enough to play with them.)

My achievement score has suffered too. I used to love my gamer score, and took great care to nurture it. Now it’s getting neglected. While I could be finishing other games that I started playing (like Dead Space, or Rainbow Six Vegas 2), I’m more likely to ignore them and fire up CoD4. To make matters worse, my Call of Duty achievement score is rather pathetic too, not at all reflecting the hours I’ve sunk into it.

And so, from tonight, I’m giving up. No more Call of Duty 4. Instead, I’m going to focus on other games. I’ve got a stack of games as long as my arm that I’ve been itching to play. Including (but not limited to)

  • Beautiful Katamari – barely touched
  • Stranglehold – played for an hour and stopped
  • Persona 4 – ironically, haven’t started because I’ve heard about the amount of time people sink into this game
  • Punch Out! – I play this now and then, but haven’t given it a decent run-through
  • No More Heroes – played about an hour
  • Deadly Creatures – really want to play it, but haven’t touched at all
  • Condemned 1 & 2 – played them both for about an hour, really enjoyed, and stopped
    • And, of course,
  • Battlefield 1943 – isn’t actually out yet, but I can feel my fingers twitching at the thought of playing it

So if you see me on Xbox Live (gamertag: swishypants) and you catch me playing Call of Duty 4, please, send me a digital kick in the pants. I’ll thank you for it.

EA Sports Active

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on trying to get myself into shape. Or rather, some shape that wasn’t just ’round’. Cutting out chocolate (except when thoughtless fucks come over to stay and bring us presents of giant bars of Dairy Milk). Cutting out fizzy drinks (except when we throw a party and the thoughtless fucks don’t drink the mixers). And generally just watching what I eat. And, as a bit of an experiment, I’ve been trying out EA Sports Active.

I’ve tried Wii Fit and found it to be a total misnomer. Wii Balance might have been a better name, since that seems to be all it’s concerned with. I still use it for its daily “Body Tests”, which measure your weight and BMI (and also still finds a way to work “balance” into the equation), but apart from that, Wii Fit was a non-starter in my house.

EA Sports Active, on the other hand, has been a huge hit. It actually gets your heart pumping and I’m loving the way it feels like a genuine training session. Or at least, like a more intense training DVD. I’m halfway through my first “30 Day Challenge”, and there hasn’t been one time where I’ve thought “I can’t be bothered with this”, so it can definitely be called a success.

That’s not to say it’s perfect.

  • Enough with the fucking lunges Christ on a bike. Every session has a minimum of three or four batches of lunges. Even last night, where the trainer says “Today we’re going to focus on your upper body!” had five sets of lunges. I’m sure they’re great for my fitness, but let’s mix it up a bit, please.
  • Why can’t it weigh me? I’ve got a Balance Board. It knows I have a Balance Board. Why the hell can’t it weigh me using the Balance Board? Right now, I do my body test using Wii Fit, get my weight from that and manually input it into EA Sports Active. This strikes me as just a silly oversight. Although it also seems like none of the Wii fitness games offer this, apart from Wii Fit. Maybe this is a Nintendo-mandated omission?
  • No abdominal exercises Weirdly for something that presents itself as a rounded fitness program, the game doesn’t even try to give any abdominal exercises. Apparently, these will be coming later in an add-on pack.
  • Crappy resistance band The resistance band they supply with the game is not only light as to be almost completely ineffectual, it also is made of a crappy material that will snap if you look at it wrong. My advice would be to buy yourself your own resistance band and use that instead.

Apart from these fairly minor complaints, I’m really happy with EA Sports Active. It’s not a complete workout package, but it’s not really meant to be. It’s intended to gently ease people into regular exercise and to compliment a broader, more comprehensive weight-loss and exercise regime.

Now I just need to stop people bringing me chocolate and I’ll be laughing.

Edge’s 100 Greatest Videogames

Edge Magazine (still the best videogame magazine out there) recently published its top 100 videogames of all time. It’s pretty interesting reading and, being Edge, there are a few questionable decisions. But this is what I love about Edge – they occasionally do some wild stuff, but always back it up with good, solid explanations.

Here’s the list along with my statistics.

Continue reading →

We’ve come a long, long way together

My idea of heaven – 1991

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My idea of heaven – July 7th, 2007

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Slowly making my way through all of these in roughly chronological order. Monkey Island 2 next. I don’t think there’s a bad game in here.

BONUS CONTENT Press Play on Tape perform the Monkey Island theme live. If the first 30 seconds don’t make you smile, I guarantee the last minute definitely will.

Manhunt 2 and Censorship

I’ve been pretty busy for the past few days and I’m still catching up with the stuff that happened last week. Like the Manhunt 2 furore.

For those of you that don’t know/care, last week, the Irish Film Censor’s Office decided to make a prohibition order against the upcoming game, Manhunt 2, making it the first videogame ever banned in Ireland. A moot point, since over in the US, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board gave Manhunt 2 an Adults Only (AO) rating and the three console manufacturers have said that they will not allow AO-rated games to be released for their systems.

”Civil Liberties”

Anyway, you can can imagine the the reactions the the IFCO’s decision. An anonymous commenter on IT Law Ireland:

So lets ban any story, film, news report which contains violence and go about life in ignorance, as they want us to. God help us all, next thing banned will be the great sculpture of David done by Michelangelo because it contains nudity.

. And naturally, boards.ie went into hysterics. My favourite quote from the 7-page long Manhunt 2 thread being:

Personally, I think the idea of completely banning any game from a country is an outrage, and a blatant infringement of civil liberty.

That still makes me giggle.

Strangely, I find myself agreeing with the censor. In their statement regarding the prohibition order, they said

IFCO recognizes that in certain films, DVDs and video games, strong graphic violence may be a justifiable element within the overall context of the work. However, in the case of Manhunt 2, IFCO believes that there is no such context, and the level of gross, unrelenting and gratuitous violence is unacceptable.

And you know what? This all sounds perfectly reasonable to me. John Kelleher has proven himself to be an extremely liberal censor, and prohibition orders are typically reserved for the most hardcore porno. Think about it like this – this is the film censor that let Hostel through. This means that Hostel, one of the most brutal exercises in Gorenography I have ever seen, has more of a context for its violence than Manhunt 2. (For reference, here is their ruling – ‘strong’ across the board.)

I also agree with the censor because I am not convinced that, on its own, classification of movies or games is an effective way of preventing children from being exposed to indecent material – I just don’t think it actually works. As someone who was exposed to a ridiculous amount of horror films as a child (thanks, Gar, for letting me watch the Exorcist at age 5), I believe that if you don’t want children being exposed to something, you should make it as difficult as possible for them to get their hands on it. In most cases, by banning it.

This goes double for videogames, where lazy parents often dismiss the graphic content of games simply because they are ‘games’ and will happily buy Grand Theft Auto for their 10-year old just to keep him quiet for a few hours.

Hardware Solution

The big “however” at the end of all this is that all this could be easily avoided if the rating system was used in conjunction with parental controls. These days, most media-playing devices (including modern games consoles) have parental controls built in. If you want to watch a movie or play a game above a certain age-rating, you have to enter a password. But the problem here is that hardly anyone uses these parental controls because hardly anyone knows about them.

Maybe it’s time they were turned on by default, and bugger the inconvenience?

Spatial Dissonance

On my first trip here, I experienced what I guess I’d call a sort of temporal dissonance. I was in a taxi, heading up the Gianicolo towards my hotel. The Gianicolo is a hill that sits in the south-west part of the city, meaning that from the top, you have a perfect view of historical Rome on the one side, and a fantastic view of the Vatican from the other. Now, maybe it was just the jetlag, but sitting back in that taxi, I had an of out-of-body experience: I realised that I would soon be living in Rome, a place I always thought of as almost fictional, a mythic place where all the history happened. The rational part of my brain decided this was my only chance to feel overwhelmed by the city before I would have to get on with day-to-day life, and so I sat back, reeling at the weight of it all.

Strangely, this is the only time I have felt this way. Now, I’m cutting across St. Peter’s Square – a magnificently opulent, overwhelming place – on a daily basis and only when I’m halfway across do I gain any sort of awareness; holy fuck! I’m cutting across St. Peter’s Square!

I’m blaming this on everyone’s favourite scapegoat: videogames. When we first visited the Pantheon, I wondered what was up on the second level of the building. In my imagination, I saw a dark place, filled with wooden crates, lever-puzzles and bad guys with Uzis. But hang on a second… Wooden crates don’t actually exist in the real world, not really. They only exist in videogames as containers for ammo and/or health. And bad guys with Uzis? Jesus. Then I realised, I had seen the inside of the upper levels of the Pantheon. Or, at least, a Pantheon. In a videogame. (Tomb Raider perhaps?) And in the end, a tiny part of me was disappointed by the actual Pantheon because I didn’t get to go exploring all its dark corners.

Gears of War has affected my experience of Rome more than any other videogame. The look of the game, the so-called “Destroyed Beauty“, was heavily influenced by Romanesque architecture. For the most part, the game takes place in wide streets flanked by marvelous, oppressive buildings and everything in a massive state of disrepair. Well, this being Rome, there’s no shortage of Romanesque architecture. Or wide streets. Or marvelous, oppressive buildings. But there’s more to this than simple generalities. On Via Nazionale, there’s a building whose long, winding entrance I would swear is the direct inspiration for the Fenix Mansion part of Gears of War.

I’m still blown away by Rome on a daily basis, especially when I stumble across some particularly beautiful place. But still, a tiny part of me is waiting for the moment that the Locust Horde comes pouring out of the ground. Where’s my Lancer?

Sonic and Mario… together?

If we weren’t but a few days off from April Fool’s day, I probably wouldn’t have such a hard time believing this. This is the video equivalent of the Beatles teaming up with the Rolling Stones to form the world’s greatest band. Why, there’s no way this could not be awesome!

Uh…

TOKYO (March 28, 2007) – SEGA® Corporation and Nintendo Co. Ltd. today made a historical announcement that two of the biggest icons in the entertainment industry, Mario™ and Sonic™, are joining forces to star in Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Developed for the Wii™ video game system and the Nintendo DS™ system, this momentous agreement marks the first time these two renowned stars have appeared together in a game.

Published by SEGA across Europe and North America, and published by Nintendo in the Japanese market, Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games will be available for Christmas 2007 and is licensed through a worldwide partnership with International Sports Multimedia (ISM), the exclusive interactive entertainment software licensee of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

In Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games, players will compete in events that take place in environments based on the official venues of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Using a supporting cast of characters from the amazing worlds of both Mario and Sonic, gamers will be able to compete as or against a range of lovable personalities including Mario, Sonic, Luigi™, Knuckles™, Yoshi®, Tails™ and more. Innovative usage of the Wii and DS control systems to maneuver a favourite character will allow players to race the likes of Mario and Sonic down the 100m track, engage in exhilarating rallies in table tennis and churn water in a swimming heat, all while competing for the much sought after gold medal.

“We are thrilled to partner with Nintendo and ISM on this groundbreaking title,” said Hisao Oguchi, President and Chief Operating Officer, SEGA Corporation. “For the first time, two of the world’s greatest games’ characters come together to compete in the world’s greatest sporting event and we couldn’t be more excited.”

“Mario and Sonic have been respectful rivals since the early days of video games,” says Shigeru Miyamoto, Senior Managing Director and General Manager, Entertainment Analysis and Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd.. “In fact, for a long time they have been discussing the possibility of one day competing against each other. Now that they have been given the perfect opportunity to meet at the Olympic Games, we may finally learn who is actually faster, Mario or Sonic?”

“The Olympic Games represent the true spirit of competition and passion,” said Raymond Goldsmith, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ISM. “Bringing together intensely competitive and fun characters like Mario and Sonic in an Olympic setting helps showcase the sports of the Olympic Games in a new and compelling way for all generations.”

Home (or: I think Sony just killed Second Life)

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Today at the Game Developer’s Conference, Sony officially announced “Home“. Home is so many things, it’s a little complicated to describe.

Pitched as somewhere between Second Life and MySpace, it’s a social space where PlayStation 3 owners can meet PlayStation 3 owners. They do this by navigating an avatar (similar to Nintendo’s Mii, but more realistic and with more customization options) around a 3D world. Each user also gets a private space – a virtual apartment – which they can customize as they see fit. They can invite people into this private space and launch multiplayer games, or stream music and videos from their PlayStation 3 to the other people in this room. Sony’s Home includes a virtual ‘trophy room’ where people can display their ‘entitlements’ (Sony’s answer to Xbox 360′s achievements) as moving, 3D trophies.

Oh, and it’s all free.

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This was Sony’s ace in the hole. A completely unexpected, beautifully executed masterstroke that almost makes you forget about all of Sony’s fuck-ups with PlayStation 3.

Almost.

Right now, Sony is still talking about the possibilities of Home, and although a lot of these are still pretty blue-sky suggestions, they do give you some idea of what an online virtual world is capable of when you’ve got the weight and muscle of the entire Sony Corporation behind it. For example, using its ability to stream high-def movies, there could be movie premieres (in a virtual cinema) of Sony Pictures movies within Home. And for the MySpazz crowd, there’s the possibility of in-game appearances by their favourite Sony BMG bands.

I bet the makers of Second Life won’t get much sleep tonight.

Havok Physics in the new Star Wars game

Video footage of a Lucasarts presentation of the technology they’re going to be using in the next Indiana Jones and Star Wars games. This includes the latest version of the Havok physics engine.

Besides the killer technology on show, this video is also interesting for the part where they blow up Jar Jar Binks encased in Carbonite.

10 Favourite C64 Games

The Great Escape

I think I got this with my Commodore 64. I seem to remember a Christmas Day where the rest of my family was off watching the Great Escape on TV and thinking to myself “Fuck you, last-generation losers. With this super-powerful computer, I AM Steve McQueen. I AM the Great Escape.” The game itself didn’t really follow the movie very strictly, but I still like the way it forces you to follow a pattern and ‘keep up appearances’ while you’re digging your way out. Never finished this game though. I got into my tunnel, was heading under the fence — I could taste the freedom — when, with no warning, my C64 crashed, taking a tiny bit of my heart with it.

Ghostbusters

Most movie tie-ins on the C64 are of the side-scrolling shooter variety (‘sup, Robocop?). And this probably could have worked with the Ghostbusters license. But instead, they went down an altogether more interesting route: part-resource management, part action. You have to build up a Ghostbusters franchise into a profitable venture while dealing with the escalating amount of paranormal activity. Whenever I get bored and want a C64 fix, this is the first game I reach for. Oh, and the synthesized speech is still amazing.

Last Ninja 2

In this game, you play the worst ninja in the world. Running around a park in broad daylight beating up jugglers and mimes doesn’t seem very ninja-like to me. And what kind of ninja staunchly obeys the “keep off the grass” rule? A fucking pussy, that’s who. Okay, so it’s not exactly Ninja Gaiden, but it’s still pretty awesome.

Bruce Lee

I never, never understood the point of this game. You run around a weird temple, trying to collect… what? Lamps? While being constantly chased by a ninja and a fat guy? Still though, you’re motherfuckin’ Bruce Lee!

Zorro

Zorro is still the most punitive game I’ve ever played. It’s stupid and dumb and I hate it. But I can’t stop going back to it. Maybe one day I’ll actually, y’know… finish it. I imagine that would be like the end of WarGames and my C64 will turn to me and say in a Stephen Hawking voice, “A strange game. The only way to win is not to play.”

Barbarian 2

Wolf from Gladiators, Maria Whittaker’s tits and graphic decapitation. How could a pre-pubescent boy not love this game?

Beach Head

I remember being so engrossed in this game, I missed a bunch of swimming lessons and as a result, only got a silver medal in the end-of-year contest. Every time I see that silver medal I think about how, if I’d just played a little less Beach Head, it could have been a gold medal. And then I think “Fuck it, it was totally worth it.”

Park Patrol

I can’t really explain this. I’m a messy bastard, but I really enjoy this game about tidying up a park. Cleaning vicariously, that’s what it is.

Goonies

Much better than the barmy Nintendo version, this was a platform game where you took control of two of the kids and had to use both to solve puzzles. Kind of like a proto-Lost Vikings. For example, to get past the first screen you have to navigate one kid to the roof to print fake money and distract the Fratellis while the other kid ran into the basement. Further on, the screens get ridiculously hard and you’ll find yourself blowing through each of your eight (EIGHT!) lives just trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do. Download Goonies from c64.com

Master of the Lamps

. I originally played this game on the Amstrad CPC-464. You try playing a game with colour-based puzzles on a crappy monochrome green-screen monitor. Only when I played it again on the C64, on a colour telly, did I finally get to appreciate just how incredible this game is. Sound puzzles, colour puzzles, geometry puzzles and a kick-ass magic carpet ride tying them all together. Years ahead of its time.

A Sober look at the Nintendo Wii

Now that I’ve had my Wii for almost two months and the shock of the new has worn off, I think it’s time to step back and take a good, hard look at the system and see what needs to change before it can become… ahem… “the most successful console of all time.”

“Hey, what’s your friend code?”

True story: I was listening to someone I know on the radio today talking about the Vista launch – the presenter mentioned that he was crazy about the Xbox 360 and said that they should swap gamer tags. “Sure,” my friend said, “I’m $foo.” Now, I can guarantee he’ll have a few extra friends on Xbox 360 tonight. People he could play games with in the space of a few minutes. Leaving aside all other parts of their latest console offering, Microsoft nailed the online aspect. They made it ridiculously simple for people to find each other and play online.

Nintendo’s online strategy has been built around the idea of protecting children from sexual predators. The idea being that if you make the system ridiculously cumbersome, the sexual predator will lose interest and go back to stalking teenage girls on myspace. So we’re left with the following: If I want to add you as a friend, I have to give you my 16-digit code, you put this into your Wii, and then you have to give me your 16-digit code and I have to put this into my Wii. Except we can’t actually exchange codes over the Wii, so we have to find some other way of getting our friends codes to each other. But once we have independently added each other, that’s when the fun begins! We will be able to… well, we can’t play any games together yet, because there aren’t any games to play online yet. We can send each other messages, I guess. And send each other Miis (those cute characters that are popping up everywhere). Apart from that, uh…

The exchange (and entry) of these 16-digit codes is so awkward that I have actually traded Wii friends codes using Xbox Live. If that doesn’t set alarm bells ringing in Nintendo HQ, there’s something very wrong here.

And to top this all off, Pokemon Battle Revolution — the first online-enabled Wii game — will require an entirely new, completely separate code for friends to play with each other. I mean, good grief! Iwata-san, protecting children from online predators is commendable and all, but surely the rest of us shouldn’t be punished as well?

And now even big developers are telling Nintendo that the Wii “Friend code” system is broken and dumb. So there’s hope yet.

Post-launch Game Drought

Zelda aside, there hasn’t been a single truly compelling purchase for the Wii since it launched. Wario Ware: Smooth Moves is a fun diversion, but the system already has a bunch of games based around mini-games, so it’s hard to get excited about a bunch more. The upcoming release pipeline is pretty bleak, with no real excitement until Mario Galaxy in June. Until then, we get a bunch of lackluster third-party titles and ports from other systems (Price of Persia being a port of the PSP version(!) of the game).

Come on Nintendo, people knew there was going to be a bit of a drought while you found your feet. People still went and bought the system on the promise of something remarkable. How’s about you live up to that with more than just mini-games?

Features Removed From Virtual Console Games

When I first spoke about the Wii’s Virtual Console in December, I said

But the games that you play on the Virtual Console will be pixel-perfect versions of the games you played on your NES, SNES, N64, Megadrive or PC Engine. As the man says: Nothing added, nothing taken away.

Turns out this isn’t quite true – Nintendo removed expansion port functionality from Nintendo 64 games on the Virtual Console, which means that you can’t save data on some games (such as ghost data on Mario Kart 64), but more importantly means that there will be no rumble in VC games, despite the presence of a rumble motor in the Gamecube controller. These may be relatively minor issues, but all the same, as someone who is being asked to pay unreasonable prices to play these games, the least I can expect is the same experience. I mean, it’s only right. Right?

Misc issues

  1. Wireless out of the box! Always-on technology! Why can’t these two things come together and give me an experience where my Wii doesn’t have to do a 15-second connection test each time I connect to the Wii shop?
  2. We’re no longer dealing with bricks-and-mortar distributors and export laws, so why can’t I buy games from the US Virtual Console shop? Why are Nintendo only going to allow me to buy games that were originally released in Europe? Playing games that were never released here is half the reason I love emulators so much.
  3. I was going to make a joke about straps here, but then I figured, nah…

Game On, London

My girlfriend is amazing. Despite the fact that she can barely tolerate videogames, she still whisked me away to London last weekend, just to bring me to the Game On exhibition in the Science Museum, where I could play virtually every game ever made, on every system ever made. Just think about this for a second: this is like someone who is lactose intolerant having a milkshake with you, just because it’s your birthday.

Amazing.

I got to play SpaceWar*! And Space Invaders! And Steel Battalion (with the huge controller)! And the old Star Wars Arcade game! And a Playstation 3!

Actually, this last one wasn’t that amazing.

They were running a demo of the racing game, Motorstorm. When I took the controller, I noticed that the controller wasn’t set up to use the motion control. So I went to quit the current race and turn it on. Except, on this pre-release hardware, running this pre-release demo, clicking “quit” causes the machine to freeze. Hard. The PlayStation 3 itself was enclosed in a plastic box, so they started by trying to squeeze a bent metal coathanger through one of the ventilation holes to hit the ‘reset’ button. When this didn’t work, they had to get a drill to remove the plastic box.

Fortunately, my amazing girlfriend was on-hand to document the faces I made as people scrambled about with power tools trying to fix the obscenely expensive piece of consumer electronics I just broke.

PS3 at Science Museum

Yeah, she’s amazing.

More photos from my trip up on Flickr

* – running beside a PDP-1, but not on a PDP-1