Divi-dead
This appears to be some sort of interactive erotic horror novel thing. An interesting curiosity but I'm not entirely sure I'd read it in book form, never mind when I need to press a button and select locations to keep things going. Nice to have one of these translated if only so I have some clue what in the hell geeks are talking about at our monthly gatherings.
Draconus Cult of the Wyrm
So there I am, a big burly knight chock full of fairly anachronistic tough guy cliches strolling through the woods when WHAM! George Takei fairy lord and friend to all guides me to the location of some ancient treasure. Some hacking and slashing took place. Found it a bit awkward as I seem to in a polygon environment. Adjusted fairly quickly and was soon beating up pigs with aplomb. Not a badly made bit of medieval fantasy action-hack n slash type thing. Could do with some better lighting though. Often seems like every passageway in a remotely shadowed area is a secret.
Dragon Riders
Well, they worked with the author of the fantasy series. It shows. There's some good storytelling happening here. What isn't so grand, however, are the controls and camera. I almost put the controller through the screen during the tutorial because I would wander off screen, lose my character behind an object, or even wander along the rim of something then have a collision detection problem and warp a bit off course. It'd be great to get lost in this game and blow hours but I find my tolerance for the awkwardness is about 30 minutes at a time and even then that's solely because I really like the story.
Championship Pro-Surfer
I try really hard not to stereotype. Then a game about surfing tells me to catch some waves with Trevor and other smugly named blondes. Part of the reason I won't bill this as a videogame review blog is that would obligate me to learn enough about the genre to do a comparison. This one turned me off enough that I would prefer not to look into things enough to establish that this isn't a fluke and there actually is a genre it belongs to. Wiggle stick. Fall. Glide towards wave. Wiggle stick. Launch board at what appear to be mines. Fall asleep on sofa. Wake up to the name "Trevor." Curse the day the publisher's CEO was born. Brah.
ECW Hardcore Revolution and Anarchy Rulz
I'm all for not lumping games together, even if they're part of a franchise with inherent similarities. However, I can't help but think that would involve more effort than Acclaim games put into development on these games. Hardcore . . . came out and was basically a new set of polygonal blobs dropped into a WWF game. This pissed fans off so they made Anarchy Rulz more "true" by apparently adding a couple match types and marginally improving the character models. Part of me wonders if the WWF looked to these games and said "heeey these guys are right! ECW is us! Let's just use the name and release more of the same shit!"
E. G. G. (Elemental Gimmick Gear)
This game struck me as a bit out of place back in the day. It was a Link to the Past styled adventure that looked like it began development back in the Sega Saturn days. My brother wrote it off due to that but I spent a week or so doing nothing but playing it. Still have very fond memories which a recent playtest brought flooding back. Just a really well done title all around. Find myself thinking of it every time there's a "new, primitive society coping with ruins of an ancient, more advanced one" plotline.
Evil Dead: Hail to the King
I really enjoyed the interactive cheesy zombie movie aspect of Resident Evil. So when I heard that my favorite reaction/homage to cheese-tastic horror, Evil Dead, was being made into a similar style game, I did a happy little dance. OMG! SURVIVAL HORROR! OMG OMG OMG CONTINUATION OF THE STORY! OMG OMG OMG OMG NEW VOICEOVERS FROM BRUCE CAMPBELL! O. M. . . shit. In order to witness the last two, I need to actually play this turkey? I am absolutely fucked. Just spent five minutes hopping around spastic trying to attack the first deadite with a chainsaw. Why the hell do I keep jumping backwards? Is the stick really that oversensitive? Going to need a Codebreaker just to survive through to the second enemy. This blows. I hope that someday it's feasible to stream video over the Internet so I can catch all the relevant bits without having to schlep through this inept excuse for a game. Ah memories. Now of course I'm older, wiser, and a much better gamer. It was actually somehow a worse experience. Worth playing if only to make one appreciate well... pretty much any other game really.
Fighting Force 2
In demos showing how freaking awesome this game is to play, the computer gets beaten up because it takes too long to turn around and face an opponent. That honestly was a fairly accurate portrayal of the gameplay. Start swinging at an enemy. Have him sidestep. Get half your lifebar eaten before you manage to turn around. Repeat until death. That combined with the GRRR WE SO SERIOUS plotline/dialogue make this game an utter and complete chore to play. If you have a craving for the genre, dig up Dynamite Cop. It was an arcade port made by Sega and knew how to have some serious fun with adapting the beat-em-up genre to 3D.
Oddly enough, the 4th entry will include a game that features whales. There shall also be frogs, fighting, men in tight tights, and a sprite doing an impression of the dude who played Super Shredder in TMNT II: Secret of the Ooze.
Showing posts with label RPG. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RPG. Show all posts
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
Doing Things Other Than Watching Doctor Who Pt. 4: Old people, camp,
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
I love the cast of this film. Sadly, they put less effort into writing than they casting. It's the standard "there's life after 60!" pap with very few twists. Mind you, it's well acted pap done by a pretty awesome group of actors.
Female Trouble
I love this movie. Taffy! Divine! John Waters! Gah. So much fun! So disgusting! So great! Shit. I need to sleep so I can learn to use punctuation other than exclamation points.
Sir Apropos of Nothing Peter David
When I was 13 wizards, knights, and heroic figures were really cool. Then around 13, I got really burnt out on the black and white-ishness of so much fantasy. Sure heroes can help people learn to hope again but they honestly seem a bit stupid and vapid after the fourth or fifth bloated novel in which you know their virtue shall conquer the dark. Peter David deftly parodies all that by having a very flawed human being perform the standard great tasks for decidedly un-heroic reasons. End result is a more believable fantasy realm chock full of some great dark humor.
Melinda & Melinda
Woody Allen tells the same story twice from two different perspectives utilizing two fairly delightful casts. Don't find serious Will Ferrell as annoyingly over-earnest as Jim Carrey, but he's close. Of course, I also found Larry David similarly clunky in the only other Woody Allen film I ever saw so maybe that's a directorial decision? Assuming this is a Woody Allen film? Really only watched it because it was of interest to the wife. Not bad but far from something I'll go back to soon.
The Man Who Loved Children Christina Stead
Wow. Sam Politt may be the least likable character I've ever run across in fiction. The way he treated others, his views on everything, all were so repugnant I had to skip some of his dialogue to avoid punching the library's brittle copy of the book in the equivalent of its face. Calling it all a bleak portrayal of American family life at its worse is an understatement. When a character died, I felt jealousy at escaping Sam and not sorrow for their survivors. Well written, fascinating text.
Paper Mario N64 via 1964 ultrafast for Windows
The missus got herself the recent sequel for her 3DS. As the battery on that thing won't allow for both of us to play, I decided to go back in time a bit and try the first game to bear the Paper moniker. It turned out my N64 goodies were split between the retro-gaming cabinet and random box storage hell upstairs so it seemed a good time to bust out the ROM and see how far emulation had progressed in five or so years. I went with 1964 Ultrafast because the idea of fast forwarding in what was essentially a turn based RPG was freaking sexy. Truth be told, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of performance. With default plugins on a laptop pushing six years, I only had one persistent graphical glitch and application crashing rendering complication. Otherwise, I seem to recall cracked walls appearing a bit more visibly cracked but bear in mind that was on a 52" TV. Any other bugs were the result of my idiocy. If I didn't fire up the interface for my PS3 controller ahead of time, the mapping got weird. Trying to ALT+TAB out of Fullscreen caused 1964 to sit atop everything else until I managed to force a system restart. Both understandable issues that shouldn't have happened.
As for the game itself, I'm glad Nintendo decided to go with a hybrid platform/RPG presentation. The jumping around compensated for the repetition of turn based combat nicely. Well, for awhile. By Crystal Palace, I had to remind myself it was basically castle 7 of 8 and quitting now would mean watching the ending on Youtube. Bear in mind that I have the attention span of a kitten and am about as strategic. My not quitting to go piss someone off by senselessly smashing buttons in a network-capable fighter is a testament to the charm of the game. Which of course, it has in spades. I honestly would've preferred things be a bit closer to flat out ludicrous like Super Paper Mario on the Wii but there were still some decent gags present. All in all, I don't see myself playing this one again very soon but will probably encourage others more patient than I to do so.
Die Hard Arcade Sega Saturn via SSF for Windows
Seeing N64 emulation run fairly smoothly on my old P. O. S. made me wonder if any progress had been made with the Sega Saturn. I still remember when Yabuse got the system ID to pop up at an extremely jerky frame-rate and select segments of the Internet began jumping around like monkeys before a monolith. There are some major limitations on resolution and very few features beyond gamepad support and RAM cart emulation but video and audio reproduction were quite nice and there were no stability concerns. It's not as slick as 1964 with its cheat integration and capability to retain controller mappings or documentation explaining how to make it run but it's also far from obscure and there are some very friendly/helpful users kicking around emulation forums.
I'm really glad SSF didn't require much work to get running as Die Hard Arcade is far from something I'd kill to play again. The game is fun. It does a better job adapting the old Streets of Rage/Final Fight formula to 3D than Fighting Force. The excellent foley work on crotchshots alone makes it imminently playable. However, the thing has all of five levels which fly along at a breakneck pace. When my skills are anywhere near refined, the thing takes me half an hour to play through with kitten cuddling breaks. Mind you, if there's another player around there's a pretty good chance of multiple playthroughs. It's fun on my own but seriously begs for a buddy to beat the crap out of blocky baddies with. Sadly I don't see that happening as, while the franchise is blatantly tagged on, this is a Kevin Smith household and we pretty much banned Bruce Willis out of solidarity.
As a note for future blogs, the last Who Watch entry was most likely my final one. My library system simply can't provide the remaining serials. So rather than doing something sensible like starting in on the reboot via Netflix so I can watch the first half of series 7 on DVR and join in on live Who blogging, I'm going to integrate Who entries with everything else. I mean the other option might get me an actual audience so once I am off unemployment and my seven reviews per week reduce to 1 or 2 per month then there'd be someone to feel disappointed.
I love the cast of this film. Sadly, they put less effort into writing than they casting. It's the standard "there's life after 60!" pap with very few twists. Mind you, it's well acted pap done by a pretty awesome group of actors.
Female Trouble
I love this movie. Taffy! Divine! John Waters! Gah. So much fun! So disgusting! So great! Shit. I need to sleep so I can learn to use punctuation other than exclamation points.
Sir Apropos of Nothing Peter David
When I was 13 wizards, knights, and heroic figures were really cool. Then around 13, I got really burnt out on the black and white-ishness of so much fantasy. Sure heroes can help people learn to hope again but they honestly seem a bit stupid and vapid after the fourth or fifth bloated novel in which you know their virtue shall conquer the dark. Peter David deftly parodies all that by having a very flawed human being perform the standard great tasks for decidedly un-heroic reasons. End result is a more believable fantasy realm chock full of some great dark humor.
Melinda & Melinda
Woody Allen tells the same story twice from two different perspectives utilizing two fairly delightful casts. Don't find serious Will Ferrell as annoyingly over-earnest as Jim Carrey, but he's close. Of course, I also found Larry David similarly clunky in the only other Woody Allen film I ever saw so maybe that's a directorial decision? Assuming this is a Woody Allen film? Really only watched it because it was of interest to the wife. Not bad but far from something I'll go back to soon.
The Man Who Loved Children Christina Stead
Wow. Sam Politt may be the least likable character I've ever run across in fiction. The way he treated others, his views on everything, all were so repugnant I had to skip some of his dialogue to avoid punching the library's brittle copy of the book in the equivalent of its face. Calling it all a bleak portrayal of American family life at its worse is an understatement. When a character died, I felt jealousy at escaping Sam and not sorrow for their survivors. Well written, fascinating text.
Paper Mario N64 via 1964 ultrafast for Windows
The missus got herself the recent sequel for her 3DS. As the battery on that thing won't allow for both of us to play, I decided to go back in time a bit and try the first game to bear the Paper moniker. It turned out my N64 goodies were split between the retro-gaming cabinet and random box storage hell upstairs so it seemed a good time to bust out the ROM and see how far emulation had progressed in five or so years. I went with 1964 Ultrafast because the idea of fast forwarding in what was essentially a turn based RPG was freaking sexy. Truth be told, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of performance. With default plugins on a laptop pushing six years, I only had one persistent graphical glitch and application crashing rendering complication. Otherwise, I seem to recall cracked walls appearing a bit more visibly cracked but bear in mind that was on a 52" TV. Any other bugs were the result of my idiocy. If I didn't fire up the interface for my PS3 controller ahead of time, the mapping got weird. Trying to ALT+TAB out of Fullscreen caused 1964 to sit atop everything else until I managed to force a system restart. Both understandable issues that shouldn't have happened.
As for the game itself, I'm glad Nintendo decided to go with a hybrid platform/RPG presentation. The jumping around compensated for the repetition of turn based combat nicely. Well, for awhile. By Crystal Palace, I had to remind myself it was basically castle 7 of 8 and quitting now would mean watching the ending on Youtube. Bear in mind that I have the attention span of a kitten and am about as strategic. My not quitting to go piss someone off by senselessly smashing buttons in a network-capable fighter is a testament to the charm of the game. Which of course, it has in spades. I honestly would've preferred things be a bit closer to flat out ludicrous like Super Paper Mario on the Wii but there were still some decent gags present. All in all, I don't see myself playing this one again very soon but will probably encourage others more patient than I to do so.
Die Hard Arcade Sega Saturn via SSF for Windows
Seeing N64 emulation run fairly smoothly on my old P. O. S. made me wonder if any progress had been made with the Sega Saturn. I still remember when Yabuse got the system ID to pop up at an extremely jerky frame-rate and select segments of the Internet began jumping around like monkeys before a monolith. There are some major limitations on resolution and very few features beyond gamepad support and RAM cart emulation but video and audio reproduction were quite nice and there were no stability concerns. It's not as slick as 1964 with its cheat integration and capability to retain controller mappings or documentation explaining how to make it run but it's also far from obscure and there are some very friendly/helpful users kicking around emulation forums.
I'm really glad SSF didn't require much work to get running as Die Hard Arcade is far from something I'd kill to play again. The game is fun. It does a better job adapting the old Streets of Rage/Final Fight formula to 3D than Fighting Force. The excellent foley work on crotchshots alone makes it imminently playable. However, the thing has all of five levels which fly along at a breakneck pace. When my skills are anywhere near refined, the thing takes me half an hour to play through with kitten cuddling breaks. Mind you, if there's another player around there's a pretty good chance of multiple playthroughs. It's fun on my own but seriously begs for a buddy to beat the crap out of blocky baddies with. Sadly I don't see that happening as, while the franchise is blatantly tagged on, this is a Kevin Smith household and we pretty much banned Bruce Willis out of solidarity.
As a note for future blogs, the last Who Watch entry was most likely my final one. My library system simply can't provide the remaining serials. So rather than doing something sensible like starting in on the reboot via Netflix so I can watch the first half of series 7 on DVR and join in on live Who blogging, I'm going to integrate Who entries with everything else. I mean the other option might get me an actual audience so once I am off unemployment and my seven reviews per week reduce to 1 or 2 per month then there'd be someone to feel disappointed.
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