Simon Wistow’s blog

You get what you need

nobody@vox.com(Simon Wistow) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 11:02:12 -0700

For a year I didn't buy any games. Over a year actually. Partly this was because I had a stack of things to get through and finish but also because I was going to be moving sometime and would need to sell off my modern consoles.

So I gamed vicariously. Passive aggressive playing.

One of the things that was funny, from the outside looking in, was that Portal seemed to be such a huge success. Ok, so the people I know tend to be geeks but there was something about Portal that seemed to transcend normal trends. People who wouldn't normally talk about games were cooing over Weighted Companion Cube cakes. "The cake is a lie" was everywhere. From my self imposed exile it was kind of baffling. Why this game? Why now? Even Yahtzee couldn't think of anything bad to say.

So, as part of my rehabilitation I bought the Orange Box last weekend.

Everything everyone said is true.

...

Gosh that felt good to say.

We Wuv Weighted Comanion Cube

So this is my review, a little late to the party but bear with me for I have brain items to lob at you.

First off, it's short. I thought I'd finished the training missions but that was the whole game (short of doing the XBL Achievements and the Advanced versions of the levels). But that's ok because because I got, like, 30 other games in the pack so I'm not fussed. I mean, I kind of wish that it had been maybe 5 or so levels longer but only because I was enjoying it so really it's no bad thing - always leave them begging for more as an old dominatrix friend of mine used to say. Of course then she tried to attack my balls with a cheese grater but it was meant in an affectionate way.

Secondly the difficulty level is pitched just right. I was never stuck thinking WTF do I do now or grinding my teeth in frustration whilst composing harshly worded missives to the internet at large. Part of that is the respawn points - at one point I got hit by a glowing ball or fell into some acid or something and though "Bollocks, now I'm going to have to do that last bit again. Bugger this, I'm going to watch some TV instead." but NO! I didn't have to do it again. I was placed back at the start of the sub puzzle I'd just fallen a cropper of. And so from being just about to switch off I ended playing right through to the end. Genius!

Remember that bit, I'm going to come back to it later.

Now let's talk aesthetics. Now to be frank I don't like the way that Source, the Half Life engine, looks. It's a personal thing and it's certainly not going to stop me playing a game. It's not that I don't think it's not good, I just don't like the style. But that's not the aesthetic I'm talking about.

Aesthetic is the whole package. What would Rez be without the styling? Probably not half as fun. And this doesn't mean that graphics should trump game play but that it should enhance it instead. Look at Doom 3 for example (which I suppose could actually be an argument either way).

With Portal it's the graphics but more it's also the humour - the cold, pitch black humour which has spawned all the in jokes. I'm contemplating purchasing a WCC tshirt and a series of Aperture motivational posters. From a game that was shorter than an average length film and had about 60 lines of dialogue. WTF? I mean seriously. I felt bad for the gun turrets FFS. I am not an overly emotional man, prone to tears, hootings, ululations, renting of hair or tearing of clothes yet I felt guilty for flipping over something that was SHOOTING BULLETS AT ME. What sort of witchcraft is this?

So we have a novel game mechanic, slick presentation, jet black jokes and a pitch perfect difficulty curve. And we can see how these things combine to become more than the whole by going back and downloading Narbacular Drop which, since it's by the same people who did Portal before Valve cannily hired them all, exactly the same game. Just
not nearly as good.

Narbacular Drop

It's like one of those dream experiments where they have identical twins and lock one in a all white room and raise one normally and then take them paintballing on their 13th birthday or something. Not my dream you understand, just a theoretical gedanken experiment. I just mean that we can quantitatively measure the positive effects of a unified aesthetic when combined with a game play mechanism.

Aaaaaaaaanyway.

Something bothered me though. And I couldn't quite put my finger on it. And so I mulled. Which is actually pretty hard to do actively. Mulling is a essentially a passive activity but, with practice one can mull actively without straying into "thinking" territory.

And at some point, it dawned on me, round about the 8th or 9th mug of tea of the day.

Sure Portal is good. But actually, in a way, only the game play mechanic and the humour are exceptional. Prey had a similar game play mechanic and it's not considered a modern classic. There have been other funny games but it doesn't guarantee them legend status.

It's that whole package again and the fact that Portal stands out as a shining beacon in a sea of mediocre turds.

Not to dismiss Valve's remarkable achievement but Portal is made to look extra special because 99% of other games released are self indulgent crap. Look back at that point that I said I'd come back to. I was praising the fact that Portal didn't actively piss me off. How fucked up is that? I know that balancing game play is an art rather than a science but if you're no good at you're job then you should be fired. We don't go watch a film, realise that it's boring and then say "Well, editing the film to smooth out the pacing and heighten emotions is a difficult skill to master so I'll just put up with it". We don't look idly out the window as our plane plummets groundwards thinking "You know what, I'm going to give the pilot a break because, gosh darn it, this flying stuff is pretty tricky all round".

Fuck that shit.

We've put up with lame ass games for too long. With poorly designed pieces of crap that are derivative and generic and padded with repetitious, derivative, clichéd levels in order to justify the ever more ludicrous price tag. We've become so brain washed that we confuse lens flare and bloom for aesthetic.

Sod that, as they say in my country, for a game of toy soldiers.

If there's one thing my year in exile has taught me is that I can go with games for a year like some sort of Camelus dromedarius ludens and so now I'm going to do something radical - I'm only going to play games that are fun and if nothing comes out that tickles my fancy then there's always Rock Band and Mr Driller to tide me over.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Second Toughest Confusion Waitress

nobody@vox.com(Simon Wistow) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:16:45 -0800

I want to make Rez Invaders.

It's possible I'm saying this because the mad melatonin monkey is currently playing how's yer father with my frontal lobes and I've got the kind of tiredness where, even when you do sleep, you dream of being asleep. And it's bright here - like scour the world clean, brave new world, minty fresh, pastel blue, sear your retinas, you're not in ~~Kansas~~ London any more Toto bright.

In this kind of state I can get some pretty funny ideas. Like pub crawling up Kensington Church Street one January and waking up up 6 months later on a beach in Thailand clutching a Mai Tai kind of funny ideas.

So, not all bad then.

That aside I want to write Rez Invaders.

Many years ago I started writing a fairly straightforward shoot-em-up in which you flew down a valley destroying various aliens - the twist in the otherwise vanilla tail being that the shape of the valley and attack waves of the aliens were controlled by music.

It sucked. And it sucked for a whole bunch of reasons. And most of those were my fault but I always thought that the underlying concept was basically sound. And I think I was right because recently I've spent waaaaaay too much time playing Audio Surf.

Audio Surf - Gorillaz - Dare

Audio Surf plays like Wipeout and Tetris bumped into each other at an industry party and had an instantaneous and electric attraction leading them to embark on tempestuous and frenetic love affair which resulted in a startlingly attractive love child whom, in a C&C Music Factory/"Things that make you go hmm" kind of way, looks suspiciously like the last level of Rez.

In essence you feed it some music and it creates a track for you - the gradient of the track (and hence your speed) is based on the tempo of the track. Along the way you dodge the grey blocks and try and pick up coloured blocks to make stacks which convert into points when they get over a certain size. The layout of the blocks being based on the beat and various other elements of the music affect other parts of the track.

It's kind of hard to show with videos what the game's like to play and how well it integrates with the music - you very quickly zone out into that game trance where you're not even concentrating on what you're doing you're just reacting. In fact, in the case of songs that you know well you can find that you can sort of predict what the game's going to do which only heightens the sensation.

Actually there have been a fair few games I've played in the last year which induce this mind meld - pretty much any of the Binary Zoo games will do it, particularly Echoes which builds gradually until you're frantically whipping the mouse around to avoid the marauding chain of red asteroids or the screen wide wave off greens. Grid Wars, obviously inspired by Geometry Wars, is another example.

Space Giraffe practically had the zone as a game play mechanic - at the points when the screen is so saturated with colour that you can't see where the enemy are you're supposed to channel Jean Claude Van Damme in Bloodsport and hear where you should be shooting. It's was a brave choice as a gameplay mechanic - not readily accessible or dumbed down and not to everyone's taste but I still think it should be applauded.

In fact all of these are crying out to be on XBLA (well, Grid/Geometry Wars already is) - especially Audio Surf which is so much better when played with a 360 controller and which would neatly integrate with your music collection which the 360 already has access to. XBLA and Steam together represent one of the most important thing to happen in games in the last decade - they represent a relatively low cost delivery channel for indie developers which in turn means that, instead of multi million dollar bloated triple-A titles retailing for 100 dollars a pop which feel they must artificially pad the length so that you get a good entertainment minutes to bucks ratio, you can blow $5-$10 dollars on a chance or something a little bit different and not feel hard done by if it doesn't work out. Of course if it turns out to be triumphantly awesome you feel like you got an incredible bargain. And in return, by lowering the barrier to entry, we get developers willing to take a risk (such as in Bizarre's case with GW) and a way for indie developers to start getting seriously involved.

Hmm, I appear to have drifted off the road to Pointsville and have began floundering around the musky swamps of What's He Rambling About Now Forest scaring all the flora and fauna by foaming at the mouth and gesticulating wildly.

So what's this Rez Invaders then? Well - Echoes updated the Asteroids concept (it wasn't the first, granted, but it's the most fun variant I've played), Space Giraffe updated the Tempest concept (which was in turn an update of Galaxians which was in turn an update of Space Invaders).

So I'm wondering what I could do if I took some of the ideas from my original music based game and gave it a training montage sequence with Audio Surf to learn from its previous mistakes. Then liberate some gameplay ideas and aesthetics from Rez and take styling cues from things like Echoes and Space Giraffe.

A Space Invaders like top down shooter with Galaxians swooping waves but hook them up so that they're controlled by music. Throw in Rez's multiple lock on system and audio feedback system. Bolt on the insane power ups of Echoes and Grid Wars. Maybe try something a little different - could Space Giraffe's bulling system be co-opted somehow? Finally give it a lick of delicious sexy paint - I personally have a penchant for clean minimalist nouvea vector lines couple with a whole mess of pixel shaders for particle showers, motion blurring and compound eye style gratuitous mind candy.

Cos, you know, I've got so much spare time on my hands to code this up.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Bad to the Bone

nobody@vox.com(Simon Wistow) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 05:34:17 -0800

As you'll well remember, the Zero Punctuation review of Super Paper Mario has a very salient point to make re game design. Wait, you do watch Zero Punctuation don't you? There's a simple way to tell - either your local hospital A&E department has given you a frequent flyer card because you've herniated yourself whilst laughing so many times that for the first time in your life you've nearly filled up all the little squares on one of those endless little cards that infest the dark recesses of your wallet only to arrive back at the hospital, gleefully anticipating your free lumbar puncture (whilst simultaneously attempting to ignore the cold hard maths that whispers that you've indirectly paid approximately seven and half squintillion pounds for something that you'd normally just buy for 2 quid 50) only to find that they shut the program down for no discernibly good reason only the day before.

If these events, or a moral equivalent, are not familiar to you then you haven't watched Zero Punctuation. And you deserve to be beaten. Watch it now, don't worry, the rest of the class will wait for you to catch up.

Zero Punctuation - Super Paper Mario

Right, the bit I'm talking about is approximately 2 minutes and 52 seconds in. It concerns "working" in games.

I remember once when a house mate of mine took a day off his actual real work in order to spend the day driving a fork lift truck as a job in Shenmue. At the time it seemed like a perfectly logical thing for him to do until later, much later, down the pub it dawned on him what he had just done and he screamed the scream of a man who has just woken up after a pleasant dream of creating an intricate ice sculptor as an wedding present for his fantastic new wife only to find that he has inadvertently butchered her to death during the night and, inexplicably, her Chief Superintendent father is knocking on their conjugal door demanding entrance.

I digress.

My friend, for what its worth, was so deeply ashamed by what he had done (viz. Shenmue not nupticide) that he spurned all material possessions and became an Alpaca farmer in the Midlands.

I undigress.

The odd thing is that some video game designers seemed to have played the "Desert Bus" minigame of Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors and decided that it represents the pinnacle of game design play and that what you really want when you slap down your 50 notes is a mind numbingly repetitive game mechanic in order to numb yourself into some sort of zen state in which a higher plane of conciousness can be reached. The grinding of MMORPGs spring to mind here. The next time one of my friends blows off a fun evening of imbibing fermented vegetable bi-products because they "have to" go skin two thousand mutant vampire bunnies in the Forests of Terrifying Cliché in order to advance their lvl 32 hippy gnome mage's leather working skill I'm just going to push them to the floor and give them a comprehensive shoeing right there and then.

But in some ways I can sort of understand it. Well, not really because, despite the crippling genetically handicap I received with regards to my being a anti-social nerd-autist, I still have a scrap of self-dignity. But at least it appears to be a deliberate game play choice - albeit one designed for the kind of sad obsessives who feel that no game is complete until every stat is maxed out, every secret uncovered and every mini game unlocked, finished and gold starred.

Then there are the games whose designers appear to have eschewed their copies of Chris Crawford's seminal "on Game Design" in order to lazily flick through "Pissing off your customers for Fun and Profit".

There's a whole pantheon of sins to choose from, of which some have apparent motives if not actual excuses and some of which are just the result of over inhaling from the nitrous cylinder one too many times. What they all have in common is the fact that the artistes appear to have forgotten that the sole reason to buy a game is to have fun and that anything that gets in the way of that is not just a simple mistake but a case of, at best, gross incompetence by you and your team and, at worst, false advertising and evidence of high crimes against humanity.

Let's pick some random examples shall we? Plucked randomly from my gin sodden cerebellum and in no particular order.

For a start there's the unskippable cut scene. Usually placed just before a difficult bit it guarantees that, no matter how good it looks (and they rarely do) you'll listen to the same unbearable voice acting by your (inevitably) gravel voiced protagonist again and again and again because you keep dying right afterwards and you can't restart quick enough to keep your momentum up. XIII I'm looking at you. Mass Effect sort of has skippable cut scenes but only allows you to skip through the individual shots which is even more annoying somehow - like Bioware thought that the default use case was people who just need to see individual snippets of the dialogue even though they hold no clues or tips as to how to beat the next encounter.

My only guess is that the developers are so in love with their CGI, or more likely that it just cost so much to make, that they just must force you to watch repeatedly until you vomit copiously.

Kin to that is the long boring, easy bit between a respawn point and a hard bit or just generally otherwise pointless repetitive bit. You know the kind - Gears of War had a couple of these, particularly the bit in your ancestral home after you've held off the marauders and need to make your way out back, past the two Bezerkers, to the waiting transport. Zelda games also seem to suffer from this - the latest on the DS makes you schlep back through the same temple after every dungeon for no particularly good reason that I can see.

These transgressions are somewhat more inexplicable than the cut scenes, Occam's Razor suggests that the only logical answer is that whoever perpetrated these crimes is either a petty and malevolent being or had been sipping deeply and regularly on a ready supply of Tard Juice™.

Then you get the devices which are just lazy ways to extend the game play time - as if a game that takes 160 hours to complete is actually a good thing - like fun should be paid for by the minute. There are multiple transgressors here - doubling back and/or otherwise reusing levels (Halo), annoyingly frequent side quests which complicate an otherwise simple task so that the designer doesn't need to actually come up with a believable and engaging plot reason for your journey (BioShock) or inexplicably tricky and fiddly bits, your completion of which seems largely down to luck rather than skill which means that after several hours of howling with rage every 30 seconds you suddenly and mysteriously get through yet, since you appeared to have no direct result over the outcome, strangely leaves you feeling absolutely no sense of accomplishment or achievement whatsoever rendering all your efforts doubly enraging.

The inner bile that drove that last sentence comes largely from God of War - a game which I found otherwise fun despite it's churlish and adolescent inclusion of a completely pointless 'titillating' mini-game right near the start. Fun, that was, except the bits when you're balancing on narrow beams jumping spinny blades in a manner so frustrating that I destroyed three controllers, two vases, a cherished picture of my late, great Aunt Maud dressed up as the Silver Surfer and, distressingly, my beloved Rottweiler/Shitzu mix puppy Mr Huggles. Then it compounded it with that abortion of a level in which you have to climb up not one but two cliffs also inexplicably festooned with circular saws. Ooooooooooh, how I seethed. So much so that, on balance, I ended up hating the game and have refused to play any of the sequels (which, I note, were so pleased with the below-softporn mini game in the first outing that they felt they warranted inclusion in all subsequent releases in order to secure that key "sniggering 13 year old boy" demographic that so drives the market).

Part of my white hot fury, I'll have to admit, comes from the fact that I find David Jaffe a smug, self important twat whose infuriating blog posts on why second hand games are the greatest evil ever spawned (as if the games industry - which as is so painfully pointed out, makes more money than Hollywood, Enron and God combined - needs some sort of special protection that items such as, well, EVERYTHING ELSE EVER SOLD TO YOU EVER, don't deserve) made be literally incoherent with rage.

Then he had a frothing rant at walk throughs, strategy guides and cheat codes bemoaning how they besmirch the designers original vision, thus ignoring the obvious and salient points that

If you don't want cheat codes then DON'T PUT THEM IN you festering thumb sore of a man.
If people feel the need to use cheat codes or strategy guides then YOU'VE CLEARLY FAILED AT YOUR JOB you syphilitic pus filled buboe.
Even if they weren't necessary but people choose to use them anyway then WHAT DO YOU CARE? You already have the punter's money - it's not up to you to dictate how they should enjoy your masterpiece. If I, err, I mean, my friend, want to 'enjoy' the game clad only in a PVC Donald Duck custom smeared liberally in Jelly then that's my, err, I mean my friend's right. You dangling tag nut on the pimply arse of humanity.

Christ, this has gone on quite a bit, hasn't it. I'll leave by saying that perhaps the most frustrating game over was Rogue Leader - Rogue Squadron II on the Gamecube, an otherwise pleasant game that ended with a level that required you to fly behind the Millennium Falcon into the heart of the second Death Star, destroy the reactor and then fly out again, chased by a fireball. Even taking into account my crippling cack handedness, no single level of a game should be unfinishable even after 3 straight days of almost continuous play whilst unemployed, despite having activated various cheat codes. My failure haunts me to this day.

Seriously though, go watch every single episode of Zero Punctuation so that you too may liken Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw unto a tiny god. Actually, the rest of The Escapist is pretty good too, even if they have stopped doing the full on Edge mag style layout but on the web schtick.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

And I've made up my mind

nobody@vox.com(Simon Wistow) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:51:24 -0800

I have a confession to make. It's practically a heresy in these ultra connected days. I don't like playing multiplayer games online. There, I said it. I don't play well with others, I prefer playing with myself.

No, wait, that came out wrong.

Considering I'm part of the wired generation, that I've replace of my spinal column with 100BaseT, that I've blown a sizeable proportion of my post pubertal disposable income on a bewildering array of games, games consoles and game oriented paraphernalia this might be an odd thing to say. But it's true.

I'm not an antisocial person. I have loads of imaginary friends. I love 'party' style games. Give me a Wario Ware or a Buzz or a Singstar or Super Smash Bros then I'm in like Flynn. Hell, the old winner-stays-on Street Fighter II rules practically made me fail my A-levels not to mention epic lives-and-levels sessions on whatever game we were playing at the time (Castle of Illusions springs to mind).

Yet I don't play WoW, have never played any MMORPG to be honest. I don't have an XBL account any more and I never really indulged in Quake Death Matches, LAN or Internet.

Sure, part of the reason is that I actually suck pretty bad at most games which may seem odd but is sadly true. One of life's little ironies I suppose. Part of the reason is that I also don't enjoy having 13 year old Ritalin poster children from tract housing in the flyover states 'pwn' me repeatedly whilst shouting 'hacks!', 'gay', 'english fag' and 'joo' (sic) at me all the time - since when did anti-semitism become hip amongst the youth crowd again anyway?

I tried shouting "I love Dragonball Z" to try and fit in but they politely informed me that it's pronouced 'Zee' not 'Zed' and that I was a 'faggot' again. I politely pointed out that if it hadn't been for us saving their arses in doubleya-doubleya-two then they'd all be speaking German or French or limey or some shit but they didn't get the irony. Probably because they all have fetal alcohol syndrome or something.

"Ah!" you point out, and quite reasonably I might add, "Ah! But you can just play with your friends". And, yes, you're right. I've enjoyed getting my ass handed me to in a hat by my friends a few times. Project Gotham, Rainbow Six, Halo 2, PSO. A bunch of my XBL friends worked at some of the major UK games houses (all 6 of them) so I had a ready made excuse for when I lost horribly and dismally. They'd still call me 'gay' and 'fag' of course but would refrain from the more obvious racial slurs in favour of the more florid "cack handed northern monkey malco". Which was sweet of them.

Basically what I think it boils down to is ADHD.

Like many people who rolled that 1D12 for the great Character Class of life and came up Nerd, first class, chaotic aligned neutral my attention span can veer wildly from laser like precision in which time and social niceties, even food, ablutions and personal hygiene, become secondary to the task in hand and then swing back, like an elderly driver who's just noticed they need to take the next exit, to a state of hyperactive meerkatting in which any activity longer than about 12 seconds is almost guaranteed to bore me . It's a wonder I ever ... oh, look. A doggy!

Where was I?

Playing with other people means you have commitments - you have to all be online at a specified time and you have to stick around until the mission's or race is done. To my detriment that's not how I game. I'm a snacker, an opportunist. I game when the whim takes me and, like Happy Harry Hardon sometimes I'm on for 5 minutes and sometimes I'm on for 5 hours. Part of the problem is that I have a low tolerance for frustration and if things aren't going my way or I'm sucking particularly hard at that moment or I think that parts of the game design are particularly retarded then I want to stomp my feet, throw my controller across the room and hit the off button. Fine when you're playing on your own but in multiplayer at best you're inconveniencing your team mates and at worst you're cheating.

Many moons ago, in a different life, whilst working for a games company, I wrote a report on mobile gaming for the DTI. One of the points I tried to make in that was that mobile games ought to have the facility to be turned off at any point - if I'm midway through a level of Super Mario Bros or R-Type and I reach my stop on the tube, or I want some chocolate milk, I don't want to lose all the work I've done. It requires a certain amount of finesse in the game design for sure but I think it's something we should be aiming for - or at least sensibly designed save points (and don't get me started on games in which it's possible to save yourself at a place in which the game becomes impossible to complete).

For what it's worth I think the best game I ever saw for the GBA was a port of Broken Sword. I kept a copy of a developer's diary for it I found lying around. In short they adapted to the limitations of trying to do a point and click adventure on a platform with no pointing or clicking by making the protagonist, George, moveable directly with the D-Pad. And, instead of having to click on items on screen, you cycled through them using the shoulder buttons. These two measure instantly eliminated the two main annoyances of P&C games which forced you wander aimless around and scrub your pointer over every square pixel or every screen in case the reason why you were stuck is because you hadn't picked up some obscure but vital item 'cleverly' hidden by a designer fresh from reading his well thumbed, hard back copy of "Lazy clichés you should employ to artificially make your game longer".

I actually tried to port the mechanic to ScummVM but lacked both the tuits and talent and instead became distracted by ... oooh, another doggy!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

You and me, we're history

nobody@vox.com(Simon Wistow) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 06:47:12 -0800

So, Rez HD is out. And I have no 360. And lots of people are starting to talk and blog and Twitter about it and IT'S ABSOLUTELY KILLING ME.

Partly that's because I want to see what it's like and blow an entire night of sleep unlocking the last level but partly it's because I'm wondering - WHERE THE FUCK WERE ALL OF YOU 6 YEARS AGO?

I get a feeling that Rez is like the infamous Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976 - if everyone who claims now to have loved Rez the first time round had actually bought it then it would have been one of the best selling games of all time.

Eurogamer have given it a 10/10 but gave the original 8/10. Likewise C&VG gave it 9.0 and gave the original 7.0 (actually they gave the PS2 version 7.0 - they didn't even bother reviewing the Dreamcast version).

Part of me wonders why I like Rez so much - when you strip it down it's Space Harrier (or Panza Dragoon Orta) with wireframe graphics and an Ken Ishi/Adam Freeland trance soundtrack. Then another part says that ignoring the totality of aesthetics is stupid - like saying that Metamorphosis of Narcissus is just a painting of some rocks and some ants or an iPod is just an MP3 player with a wheel. Hell, if we're heading down that route then isn't Halo just a game with story elements from Ender's Game and Ringworld and level design that boils down to "Take this map you just done and do it backwards"? Of course there's a third part of me that says "Mmm, bacon" but that part of me is just kind of omnipresent.

But saying Rez is Space Harrier is like saying Space Giraffe is like Tempest. Sure, superficially it is. But you either get it or you don't and if you don't then, cool, ok. I won't mock you. Openly.

So I remain conflicted and console-less and inconsolable and if this teaches some people some video game taste or persuades Mizuguchi to do more games on non handheld consoles then I'm all for it.

But next time I tell you a game is good then listen to me and save yourself 6 years.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Today's escape will consist of a mask

nobody@vox.com(Simon Wistow) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:22:10 -0800

That narrow *cough* overlap between beat-em-up fans and Star Wars fans are going to be squeeing into their bowls of marshmallow flecked cheeriholes this morning because Saul Calibur is going to contain Yoda (360) and Darth Mouthbreather (PS3) as playable characters.

Yoda in Soul Calibur

I liked Soul Calibur. Not least because it was a awesome, well balanced fighter that looked great and didn't penalise those of us who aren't able to pull off nine Hadoukens and half a dozen Shoryukens before the other player has even realised the bout has started. Also it was a Dreamcast game described as (on Wikipedia anyway) "the greatest fighting game of all time, and even one of the greatest games across all genres" - a quote I've printed out in 22pt Comic Sans, laminated and placed carefully in my wallet and which I read to myself occasionally before crying myself to sleep at night wrapped in my Sonic jim-jams.

Also, I appeared to have a slightly suspicious affinity with the unnervingly insectoid Voldo - a man dressed in what can only be described as heavy-BDSM combat chic. An affinity that allowed me to regularly beat a friend who otherwise kicked my arse all over the shop at any other game, electronic or otherwise from straight Unreal, Project Gotham and X-Wing vs Tie-Fighter to his own versions of Drinking-Sudoku, Blindfolded-Quake, Strip-Diplomacy and sessions of Starcraft that somehow managed to involve acupuncture needles.

But I digress.

It's not like this doesn't have precedent - the previous 2 versions of SC contain Heihachi, Link, and Spawn after all. Super Smash Brothers had Samus Aran in. Even DoA 4 had a fricking Spartan (Halo not 300) in it .

That said something about this bothers me and I can't quite put my finger on it - maybe it's because I'm one of the few people who didn't feel compelled to repeatedly mouth "Best. Film. Scene. EVAR!" whilst staring bright eyed at the part of Attack of the Clones where Yoda gets his spinny death whirl on. Maybe it's because I'm slightly tired of The Industro-Entertainment complex doing mashups with the popular culture icons of my childhood (how long before Virtua Fighter gets Snoopy, Neo and one of the Ninja Turtles as unlockable characters? ... Actually that might be pretty cool.) in a transparent effort to extract every last bit of disposable income from my sobbing wallet. Maybe it's the fact that - even in a world where some people wield 6ft long sword and other people actually survive being hit by them - this is pushing credibility a bit too far. Lightsabres are beams of pure energy - capable of dismembering bar dwelling xenoassholes with effects friendly ease. Surely, no matter how strong Ivy's combat-lingerie is, it's going to be a one-hit one-kill kind of deal.

Maybe I'm just a grumpy misanthrope.

If you're going to go the mashup route then why bother topping Monty Oum's surprisingly well realised ultimate fan boy fantasy:

spartan vs samus

Halo! Metroid! A hint of girl-on-girl action! Predator references! Lightsabre noises! A Zatoichi-style ending dance number! Ooooh, I'm in Otaku heaven!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Sweet memories will last a long long time

nobody@vox.com(Simon Wistow) — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 17:05:34 -0800

The last year has been an oddly game free zone. Under the perpetual threat of trans-pondian deployment I resisted buying anything new - all my old consoles would be packed up to come with me but I'd sell off my 360 and the modest stack of "Review copy - not for resale" white labels so there was no point buying anything new let alone tracking down a Wii (let us not go into the sordid subject of Sony consoles).

All told not exactly a bad year to miss out though. I'm not that bothered by missing Bioshock to be honest. Portal I do want to play but I've made do with the Flash version. Rock Band we get to play in the office which is far more fun to do than playing it alone (even if my 'singing' does tend to set the SixADogs off). I do want to finish Halo 3 however, even if 2 pissed me off no end.

Next year however - aww man. I've already squeed over Patapon (although it's at odds with my "have never bought a Sony console, will never" philosophy of life) and there's a new CES trailer

Patapon CES Trailer

and, best of all, Rez HD

Rez HD - Area 5

Awww yeah.

It's kind of hard to explain just how good Rez is. In fact some people hate it which is fair enough except that those people are wrong and killed my beloved Dreamcast and probably only ever buy endless yearly updates of FIFA and Pro Evo and Madden and Tony Hawks. They should, to paraphrase Warren Ellis "suck bear cocks in hell".

Suffice to say that it's beautiful and enthralling and mesmerising and chilled and frantic and fun. I gave a talk on it when it first came out, standing in a freezing east end warehouse projecting it through a VGA adaptor onto a wall. A friend, squatting on the ground, played through the first level as I talked. I turned round to point something out and paused momentarily to watch it. And then realised that I hadn't said anything for 5 minutes but that the audience hadn't noticed either. Later I was interviewed by Violet Berlin for the TV program Gamepad. I used the word salivated not once but twice during the course of the interview. That pretty much sums up up my state of mind at the time.

ObJanePinckardReference: I have no idea if it will come with the Trance Vibrator attachment. I have now fulfilled the seemingly mandatory requirement to link to that post whenever Rez is mentioned anywhere on the Internets.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend