To be this good takes Ages

Following on from an earlier post, today I downloaded Radiant Silvergun and had a bash at it. I didn’t last long, which is unsurprising for an arcade shooter, but I was impressed with the number of shooting abilities on offer. Needless to say, this warrants further investigation.

What is of particular note is that with the purchase of Radiant Silvergun, the number of Sega games (as in either made by Sega or originated on a Sega console) on my XBLA account now reaches eight. It joins the likes of Sonic Adventure, Sonic CD, Ikagura, Soul Calibur, Daytona USA, Nights into Dreams and Guardian Heroes. Now whilst it may not sound like much it still represents a third of the games I have downloaded from XBLA.

I suppose having a particular empathy for the Sega games is a holdover from my days as a Sega fanboy. I guess once you’re a fanboy you’re one for life and you can never truly escape such a fate. However other reasons behind such an empathy exist in the form of:

• Perhaps playing Sega games on the Xbox it is a firm indication of Microsoft's replacing of Sega in the Console race
• Or maybe it is more of a case of finally playing games that I have previously only been able to admire from afar.

But most likely there is still the faint glimmer of hope that if Sega games are being brought maybe a miracle may happen and we’ll finally see a re-release of Panzer Dragoon Saga and Shining Force 3.

But what are the odds of the happening, amIrite?

Shot Through

When I was a kid I really enjoyed arcade shooters – for some reason there was something appealing about controlling a jet/helicopter and gunning down a seemingly endless parade of military hardware. Indeed, I recall seeing these type of games in arcade parlors, watching the demo/attract mode and feel I could do better. Of particular note, I recall being more excited about Raiden 2 than Mortal Kombat 2 or Super Street Fighter.

I can’t stress this enough: I haven’t a clue as to why arcade shooters had such a sway over me. Was it the first kind of arcade game I saw and became familiar with? Was it seeing something that was capable of producing something beyond the limitations of my trusty Commodore 64? Or was it the offer of blowing shit up? I don’t know and somehow, such questioning doesn’t warrant further pondering.

However, when I entered my teens and adult years I grew off arcade shooters. Again why this is so is unclear to me:  Most likely it was me becoming aware of other gaming genres. Or maybe I realized just what a coin thief arcade games truly are. Nevertheless, I’ve gone off shooters and the interest has never been rekindled – true I’ve the Raiden Project for the PlayStation but, as always, the power of nostalgia can have a sway that is difficult to resist.

Still, what is of particular interest is that through being away from the genre, many innovations have occurred to it. Innovations that to me, come as a complete surprise. Two particular titles have stood out in particular: Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. Both games from those wunderkinds known as Treasure and have such a reputation in amongst the arcade shooter crowd.

A reputation that warrants investigation – I already have Ikaruga and have had a go at it. So let’s see if Radiant Silvergun has something to offer….

Doomed from the start

These past few weeks I've been playing a lot of Doom, 1 and 2, largely through the enhancement lens provided by the Brutal Doom mod.
However, whilst I've gushed about the dramatic changes Brutal Doom offers, it doesn't however change one pet peeve I've had with Doom. It's a problem I had twenty years ago and it still bothers me now - and that;s the stupid level design. There are places that are inaccessible and stuff that's near impossible to find.
And I feel this problem was ramped up in Doom 2 - Whilst I was able to get 100% kills and secrets on every level in Doom 1, in Doom 2 I missed more than a few. Yes it may provide a challenge but there were times when I'd been over the same level several times to a point where I felt I was being trolled by the game designers.

Still, in a world clogged with ultra-serious shooters, there's something to be said for a twenty-year old shooter that has enough 'goin' desperado' clout to hold appeal even now

A Tail and a half

When I was kid, I'd play Super Mario bros with my older brother. He didn't have to but he did.
And, as befit the older brother, he'd choose Mario and leave me with Luigi. It's the same story that may sound familiar to many other people and it's a tradition that continues to this day.

Strangely, whenever we played Sonic 2, my bother would always opt to play as Tails - which i found kinda odd as out of Sonic and Tails, Tails was clearly the younger of the two XD

Raiders of the Lost Character Arc

Among the trailers shown at this year's E3, were new iterations the franchises of Tomb Raider and Uncharted.
Of course this is a prime example of brand recognition being put to good use but I can see some potential. The question is whether or not that potential will be realised and not dropped on the floor. You see, my main beef with these two series is that they are being handled by writers who have a character but no idea as to what to do with them.

Much has been written about Nathan Drake being something of a response to Miss Croft - only with him being completely honest about being thief and being as snarky as humanly possible. And that's all there is to him - and for some reason that is enough for some people but you can only fool them for so long.
However, it has been observed that the torture/imprisonment scene in Uncharted 3 provided some depth that Nathan Drake sorely needed but it never went any further. Hopefully the writers of Uncharted realize this and build upon it for the new game. After all, it would be senseless to present a revelation and not see it through. Indeed,  if Nathan Drake isn't who he claims to be then why would he build such a facade?

And as for Lara, the previous Tomb Raider game certainly put a lot of effort in establishing some background and making her a warrior/survivalist type. So is there anything that can be done? Well, from the looks of it, the new Tomb Raider game seems to heading further down that path. Such a knowledge doesn't sit well as the Tomb Raider games have had a nasty reputation of being formulaic - and just because there's one game setting off in a new direction doesn't mean the franchise won't fall back into bad habits.

Of course, this is all speculative - it is too early to say seeing this is based on trailers. But if a trailer is not making me interested in the game it's plugging, then something isn't working.
Whilst there is potential for the new Uncharted and Tomb Raider games, it remains to be seen if this potential is realized or mishandled completely.
Knowing how things go however, my money is on the latter....

Myth Busted

Not much to say for today except that I've got a third blog going.
It too is a gaming-related blog and it is aimed at analysing, and debunking, many of the urban myths within gaming

It can be found here

Runway to Rapture

Once again E3 has come & gone and once again it has succeeded in not making me care.
However I thought this was of interest:

 Original video located here. Accessed 16th June 2014

What could this be? It's hard to say as the people behind, The Chinese Room, said little beyond it's about the end of the world. But from the looks of it, it could be one of many things:

 - It could be a post-apocalypse game that eschews shooting zombies for exploring an abandoned world
 - It could be a religious themed game could, for once, be actually GOOD
 - Or it could be the next step in atmospherics.

However even if this game shows some potential at this early stage, there is no escaping that this is by The Chinese Room. And for the uninitiated, these are the same people who made Dear Esther, a game infamous for being all about wandering around an environment (however well-rendered) with minimal gameplay and a weak narrative. A game infamous for wandering abound doing nothing that some people actually hesitate to call it an actual game.
Therefore my interest is tempered with caution - and rightly so. I will not fooled by a trailer that shows footage rather than gameplay or what the game wants to accomplish.
Still, it may be tempting to think The Chinese Room may have learned from their mistakes and may have delivered an actual game, but what are the chances of that happening?

Need some Singstar lovin'

This is a video of Ever Lovin' Man. It is a song by an Australian band from the 60s known as The Loved Ones.

Original video located here. Accessed 13th June 2014

I'm posting this here because this would've been a lot of fun to do in Singstar and it fact that it never showed up on Singstar is a crying shame...

A cheat worth remembering

Everyone who grew up in the eighties and nineties era of gaming may know the Konami Code from Contra or the 'iddqd' cheat in Doom, but how many of you remember the cheats from Alien Breed?

Alien Breed was a series of games that originated on the Amiga but eventually found it's way to the PC - it also inspired a series of remakes that are currently available on XBLA.
But what I remeber about it were the cheat codes - not so much what they did but what had to typed out. And through GameFAQS I found them again.
So credit to Team17 - they may be cheat codes but they certainly have a sense of humor about them (that is sadly lacking in games since):

Seemed like a good idea at the time

Following on from an earlier post about Steam achievements, I've been doing some comparisons between the achievements scored in the games I've played against everyone else.
It was then that I saw a pattern emerging: It seems the most unlocked achievements are those that detonate certain progress through the game itself. But in the terms of progress achievements, it's the first in a series.
What this means that it seems that people got part way through a game before giving up and not bothering to go back and complete it.

To back up this claim, let's take a look at the following:

Eversion:

Gemini Rue:

Secret of Monkey Island 2:

The Stanley Parable:

True my claim may be BS as I've been relying on games I've scored perfects on to base this theory. And again this theory is BS as I too have been guilty of playing a game so far before giving up on it completely. And finally, I've included The Stanley Parable here even though the achievements in that game aren't really designed to be unlocked without some near -insane level of commitment.

However there is some weight to the theory that there are so many games available on Steam and many of which are designed to be played quickly without the need for a massive time investment. Thus, one can expect, in amongst the Steam users, that there are the kind of users that download a game, give it a go before deciding the game wasn't for them and give up on it and then move onto the next game.
Indeed, one can imagine this to be a side-effect of having so many games readily available: With so much variety, the time committed to a game is subsequently on the wane. After all, why spend hour on a game when something potentially better is within easy reach?

Still I would like to think that the people who played Eversion only to gave up were traumatized victims of being broken by the game itself.

Perfect Blue

According to my Steam profile I have, at time of writing, notched up seven perfect games. This means, for the uninitiated, that I have scored all the achievements that came attached to the game.

Not a bad feat I have to say.

This in turn makes an interesting contrast to the XBLA achievements: I have plenty of XBLA achievements to my name but no perfect games to speak of. What does this mean? Are the XBLA achievements too demanding? Or are the Steam achievements easier to get?

I think the Steam achievements are indeed easier to get – why, To the Moon has a grand total of one achievement and that is for beating it, thus setting up a perfect game in the bag. That is not to say that the Steam has its own share of demanding achievements – there’s plenty of Age of Empires 2 achievements that require fighting a thousand battles – but I have found that many Steam achievements require less effort than many XBLA achievements. Why is this so? One would think that the Steam achievements would offer some kind of fighting chance instead of being near impossible. And when a game offers an achievement that actually seems feasible of scoring, one would gravitate to the game and the platform it is offered upon. After all, if a game is worth the trouble of getting a perfect rating then it must be a pretty awesome game, right?

Still, there’s no way I’ll be fighting a thousand battles in Age of Empires 2. I do have a life you know…

War is Over

So as a new Star Wars movie increasingly draws nearer and the nerds have their wallets out (as always), I recently found myself trying to get my copy of TIE Fighter working purely to enjoy one of the many games that escaped my notice the first time around.

I didn't succeed which is indeed a shame because I heard a lot of good things about this game - in the form of fighting for the Empire in the name of Lawful Evil and the presence of the legendary Grand Admiral Thrawn. I guess the mystique surrounding TIE Fighter will persist.

What is even more bothersome is that the Star Wars Expanded Universe has now had it's throat slit in the name of new movies on the way. And so TIE Fighter will most likely join the rest of the EU to die. Therefore it seems doubtful that TIE Fighter will ever get an appropriate re-release. I suppose it would be too much to ask that this game gets dusted off for Steam (like Knights of the Old Republic did) or something, which is indeed a waste as I bet lot's of people would like to play TIE Fighter - whether it be for the first time or the five hundredth time.

To be brutality honest...

Much of the past week has been devoted to revisiting a classic in the form of Doom. So what's the occasion? Well, thanks to a certain game reviewer, I have been made aware of a mod called Brutal Doom. I've had a crack at it and have been significantly blown away by how dramatically Doom has been changed by this mod. Even more impressive is that it was the work of one guy.

But really I cannot emphasize how different Doom has become with this mod: Mouse aiming; Better weapons; the necessity of reloading; A jump function (A JUMP FUNCTION!!!); Marine NPCs; Finishing moves and so much more that talking about it seems awfully redundant.
Indeed it is fascinating on how this mod gives this a game twenty one years old a new lease of life.

Now whilst I have, over the past few months, been indulging in the miracles that the modding community can provide, this is however not the first time I've tried a FPS mod. That honor would go to Navy Seals Quake. Has anyone heard of this? I played this in high school - within a year of Quake's original release no less - and was impressed by the changes made. This involved the demons replaced with human enemies, a reload function and more emphasis on tactical action rather than brainless shooter action.

And much like Brutal Doom, I found Navy Seals Quake so much an improvement over the original game that it wasn't funny. You see, I was unimpressed with the original Quake - I saw it as Doom but with a new coat of paint what with the Demonic enemies, Hell motifs and puzzling level design. Thus I couldn't understand why many people at the time were turning cartwheels over it. Thus, coming across Navy Seals Quake I, and many of my friends at the time, found it far more appealing. Indeed, it should be noted that Navy Seals Quake eschewed the then mindless action trends of FPS and adopted a more realistic approach to the genre - well before Half Life took that concept and ran with it.

My general approach to mods is that they offer new content (but even that is a challenge trying to find some quality in amongst the mud) and they offer to correct 'mistakes' (if you can call it that) that hinder the original game. Indeed, having played Brutal Doom I'm now wondering how the hell I managed to get by on the original - which goes to show that sometimes a new coat of paint isn't enough and sometimes repairs made also be required to renew interest in an old game.
If anything I would rather play Brutal Doom than the latest incarnation of the Call of Duty series any day.