Ratings Guide

★★★★★ Impressive. I struggle to find major faults with the game and will probably buy it.
★★★★ Excellent. Not quite epic enough for a 5. I might buy later when I feel like a new game.
★★★ Good. Overall high quality but has a significant shortcoming in one area.
★★ Average. No real reasons to keep me playing beyond trying it out.
★ Poor. Overall bad design or just plain irritating. I would delete to save the space.

PowerUp Forever

★★★★★ Top-down dual-stick space shooter. Really impressive in all areas. Great darkly ambient music that ramps up to upbeat glitch as you advance through the game. Impressive use of stereo sound effects. Has quite a mysterious feel as the game world is a lot bigger than your screen’s viewport at first. You draw out elusive Guardian bosses by destroying their minions and filling their “rage gauge”. When each Guardian is destroyed you absorb its energy, your ship grows and the viewport zooms out so you can see more of the world. A larger ship also makes it harder to dodge enemies. There’s good AI too, for example I saw a Guardian on low health run away and hide behind some obstacles. This game feels quite deep and immersive, much more than any other shooter I’ve played. The graphics may contribute to this, they are colourful but also kind of gritty and not so “fake plastic shiny”. A few minor criticisms though: menus are way too slow and “fadey” (fuck off!); it needs a more epic-sounding name (e.g.”Guardian Rage”); and the first level feels a bit grindey. I’ll probably end up buying this if I can get past level 3. Here is a video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7WAebrhMzs

Mutant Storm Reloaded

★★★★★ Top-down dual-stick shooter. I loved this game on the PC so buying this was a no-brainer. Great shiny graphics, punchy sound effects, and nice ambient music. It’s another fast-paced action shooter to rival Geometry Wars in addictiveness. Checkpoints every 10 levels. Good difficulty curve. Only pain its the pointless 13 second post-death wait while you spam the A button trying to get back to the action.

Galaga Legions

★★★★☆ Space Invaders layout shooter. Highly polished graphics, sound and music. Has good fast-paced action with more strategic gameplay than your average shooter. A nice feature is the enemy paths are traced out onscreen before they arrive so you can strategically place your 2 satellite guns for optimal spammage. Shooting a captured Galaga gives you a swarm of minions which is essential as certain stages seem impossible without this extra help. Never played the original but now I want to. This could fill the void that was created when I bought Star Soldier R on WiiWare.

Mutant Storm Empire

★★★★ I was tempted to buy this game just for the awesome glitchy menu music, but I restrained myself. It seems like the logical adventure progression of Mutant Storm. You explore a maze instead of isolated abstract rooms, with each victory opening up a door to the next room. It will sound stupid but I don’t like the left-to-right progression at the start of the game. It means you’re always holding the right analog stick (shoot) to the right, which is not the most comfortable position to sustain when you’re right handed. I prefer to shoot to the left and in the more “arena” style top-down shooters I position myself to the right of enemies if I can. The game feels a bit more chunky than the original, with fewer larger enemies that take longer to kill, compared to the swarms of babies we’re used to in the original. Instead of bombs, you have a super weapon with limited ammo which you can power on and off. This is handy but I found myself wanting for bombs as I inevitably end up surrounded in these kinds of games.

The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom

★★★☆ This is not groundbreaking stuff as some reviews would have you believe. I consider this to be just a slight variant on Lemmings. Instead of having predefined roles, you record the path of each clone of yourself. It will inevitably be compared to Braid, because the concept is very similar to the game mechanic of Braid’s World 5, where you use your shadow to help solve the puzzles. Winterbottom’s demo puzzles are pretty clever but unlike Braid’s multiple worlds, there probably isn’t enough variety in the game to keep me playing, so I can’t justify a 4-star rating. The graphics are what they are but I found the old film greyscale styling to be quite depressing. Here it has no point, unlike its poignant use in World of Goo.

R-Type Dimensions

★★★ Side scrolling space shooter. This is one of those Monkey Island style remakes where you can switch between classic 2D and redone 3D graphics. I find this choice a bit distracting in any game of the sort. Here, the 3D graphics are really nice and polished, but the music and sound haven’t been redone so when playing the new shiny version, this seems out of place. I expect epic music with bassy dance beats and modern power synth and explosion sounds with depth, not blips and beeps. This reduces immersion and just makes the game feel like a child’s toy version of Gradius V (seriously, the level designs are noticeably similar).

Star Trek D.A.C.

★★★ This is a pretty decent attempt to apply new features to the top-down dual-stick shooter concept (e.g. different ship classes and multiplayer deathmatch etc.). The battles on the trial map were too sparse resulting in most of my time being spent looking for the other enemies (bots). I think you need to be a fan of the franchise or really into the online multiplayer to get into this game. Another gripe is that the maps have “invisible walls” at their edges. I HATE invisible walls with a passion. They point to lack of creative design detract from realism. Make me crash into them or fall off or just make the walls explicit. Anything is better than forcing me to scratch my head while I try to figure out why I’m not moving.

Tempest

★★★ Firstly, the music in this game is top-class. Sound effects and graphics are quite good. But it lost me at the micro gameplay. In Tempest you look down tunnels of varying shapes and move your ship around the perimeter which is quantised into a number of columns. Your ship must be on the exact column to destroy the enemy which is advancing up it. My main frustration is the controls suffer from the old precision/speed power struggle. With sensitivity set to normal, I don’t have the micro skills to select the right column with enough precision so I’m constantly over-correcting. When I turn down the sensitvity, I lose significant speed, meaning I can’t get to the columns when I need to. But perhaps mastering this level of micro is the main point of the game. If it is, that’s not my kind of game.

E4: Every Extend Extra Extreme

★★ Rythym-based top-down shooter. Slow loading/logo screens. Nice LSD graphics and the music is sightly above average but I don’t really get the point of this game. You’re meant to detonate your ship to the beat setting up chain reactions, which I tried… but nothing much happens. A few enemies explode then you wait ages until your ship respawns at a time that’s suboptimal for another on-beat detonation. So it’s just kinda frustrating. There’s another game mode that’s more like geometry wars but it seems equally pointless. The gameplay feels like someone’s half-arsed experiment.

Aces of the Galaxy

★ Third person space shooter. Controls let it down. Primary shoot is A button, meaning you can’t steer and position the aim reticle while shooting. This is why trigger buttons exist! The roaming aim reticle is also very confusing and non-intuitive in this view. Basically, the ship controls weren’t exactly like flying a Banshee in Halo, so I hated it.

Novadrome

★ Arena racing car shoot-out. Shiny graphics but controls are not intuitive and feel really quite sluggish -- this may also be due to the insanely low gravity. Requires excessive use of handbrake to achieve anything resembling a turning circle. Shooting is auto-aim with toggle between enemies. Could have made much better use of right stick for targeting. Basically, these cars didn’t drive like the Warthog in Halo so I hated it.

Space Invaders Extreme

★ This is basically just the original game with a shiny facelift and some Xbox Live features. The creators have made a failed attempt to use “musical” sound effects to make it play a bit more like a rhythm game but the result is they are so fucking annoying to the point where this game is unplayable. I was surprised that Good Game recently had good things to say about this game.

• Halo: When you die, time effectively snaps back to the last checkpoint, so everything in the game world including your ammo, health and enemies is exactly as it was when the game saved at that checkpoint.
• Bioshock: When you die time continues in the game without interruption. Your body respawns at the nearest Vita-Chamber with minimal health and plasmid energy but your ammo remains intact. Some enemies respawn.
• Prey: When you die time stands still while you’re transported to a place in the spirit world. Your aim is to shoot as many red and blue flying spirit piranhas with your spirit crossbow before a time limit expires. The more piranhas you shoot, the more health and spirit power you will have when you respawn. Respawn takes the form of your spirit returning to your body with all ammo and enemies as they were when you “died”.

On the surface, Bioshock’s death mechanic may seem similar to the traditional checkpoint mechanic but the continuous time aspect has consequences which aren’t obvious until you actually play the game. Below is a typical transcript of a Bioshock session which should illustrate.

1. Stockpile ammo and items that you find lying around.
2. Get to difficult part of level, such as a hard boss.
3. Try to defeat said boss, reducing your ammo and items.
4. Die and respawn.
5. Walk several hundred miles back to where the action is. Sometimes this takes over 30 seconds which is a long time in an action game.
6. Continue to stockpile ammo and items.
7. Fight boss again, using up your ammo and items.
8. Die and respawn.
9. Continue to stockp– Oh drat! There’s no ammo and items lying around anymore!
10. Try to fight boss with no ammo, no items, no health and no plasmid energy. Use your wrench to tickle boss with desperate futility.
11. Last about 5 seconds before you die.
12. Repeat from step 8 until you throw the controller across the room in epic frustration.

The problem with the continuous time mechanic is that the gameplay asymptotes to an unwinnable situation. It’s not “game over” but you’re trapped in an infinite loop like some kind of virtual Groudhog Day set in the sixties. What can you do? Enemies keep respawning but the ammo and items don’t. And God help you if your hard boss keeps running off to a healing station that’s beyond your reach. Your only hope is to pick off a couple of weak enemies whose corpse you can frisk for ammo.

The Halo and Prey gameplay mechanics are simply immune to the asymtotic death weakness by design. In Prey, ammo is plentiful, and Halo’s time reset means you’ll always have some resources at your disposal.

Prey has made an active effort to replace the tedium of trudging back to the action. So it may last 30 seconds but at least you’re given something to do. This avoids the dull action troughs that you experience in Bioshock while walking back to the fight.

In Halo and other checkpoint games, you may have to try over and over to beat a difficult part, but at least you’re given a chance. In fact your chance increases with every trial as you become more familiar with the layout and where enemies are going to respawn, etc. In Prey, your prowess at picking off piranhas is rewarded with an improved chance in the form of greater health and spirit energy.

Bioshock’s handling of death is not some kind of built-in puzzle. It’s not adding depth to the gameplay; it’s adding unbearably relentless tedium and frustration. To add insult to injury, Bioshock has one of the most spectacularly immersive, creative and suspenseful game environments I’ve ever seen. And the player is denied this unless they are some kind of masochist who enjoys wading through concrete. It’s like the player is being forced to earn their right to the Bioshock experience.

I want to love Bioshock. I want someone to tell me that I’m just impatient or I suck at the game. But I’ve never experienced this level of monotony in an FPS played on Medium or Normal difficulty. Half-Life 2: Episode 1 is close, but I’m playing that on Hard.

In Part 2 I’ll cover some of the more unique and groundbreaking death mechanics, starting of course with Braid.

But I digress. The game’s music by Joris de Man totally blew me away; an awesome mix of 8-bit chip tunes and modern beats, but with a dark, serious tone, which is something you don’t often get with this kind of “chippy” music. The best quality can be heard on the composer’s website under the Projects section (flash site so no direct link). Interestingly, his KillZone work appears strongly influenced by Harry Gregson-Williams of Metal Gear Solid 2 fame.

Now I would buy this music in an instant, but annoyingly, BOTH the iTunes and Amazon MP3 stores impose geographical purchase restrictions on the album. WTF? Encourage piracy, what? Annoyingly, I can’t even find it on the usual pirate channels.

While I’m on the topic, another awesome theme can be heard in Geometry Wars Retro Evolved on XBLA – a game which can only be described as “Asteroids on Acid”. Check out the music and the truly chaotic gameplay in this YouTube video. The sequal is also awesome but lacks the variety in weaponry.

And just for good measure, here’s a list of my all time favourite video game music, with links where I could find them (I take back every bad thing I said about audio-only YouTube videos).

• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty – Harry Gregson-Williams
• Metal Gear Solid 2: The Other Side – Norihiko Hibino
• Diablo 2 – Matt Uelmen
• Quake 2 – Sonic Mayhem
• Machines (more info) – Jim Croft
• Red Faction – Dan Wentz
• FX Fighter (another) – Martin Gwynn Jones, Justin Scharvona
• Grim Fandango (another) – Peter McConnell
• Halo – Martin O’Donnell & Michael Salvatori
• Tekken Tag Tournament (another) – Namco Sound Team
• Entomorph – Danny Pelfry

Inspirational!

Now it’s been a while since I played Jazz Jackrabbit but all the nostalgia came flooding back when Good Game recently interviewed the game’s creator Cliff Bleszinski for their History of Epic Games segment. I had always read the names in the opening credits with a sense of wonder, like “Hmm, I wonder who those Arjan Brussee and Cliff Bleszinski guys really are. They sure do make a swell game.” So I always had a great deal of respect for these faceless names. When I watched the interview I was gobsmacked to discover that Bleszinski was only 18 when Jazz was released! I can safely say that he now sits along side Peter Molyneux in my “Heroes of the Games Industry” category. Speaking of which, I should really play Fable 2 now that I have it.

Oh and here’s a video of Jazz Jackrabbit.

I won this Mario plushy ages ago from a skill tester at that arcade in Albury at the bottom of the cinema. I forget the name of the place, but Mario got stuck on the claw and was hanging there precariously until the attendant came over and eased my despair. Anyway I was bored the other day and took this photo. Getting his hands to stick to the controller required some trickery…

1. The space on the 256MB memory card is not enough to download Braid,
2. A hard drive would enable me to play old Xbox games. The only ones I would want to play are Halo, Halo 2 & Half-Life 2.

So now that my new Xbox can play old Xbox games, there’s not much point keeping an old Xbox around. That is, it has ceased to be useful as a games console. But I wonder, should I bother to give it a rebirth as something else? I could…

• Install XBMC on it… no wait, the new Xbox does everything I would use that for. Plus I can’t be arsed installing a mod chip.
• Install Xbox Linux on it… Meh I’m kinda over screwing around with Linux. Ditto re mod chip.
• Convert it into a NAS device… and utilise it’s whopping great 8 GB of storage. Yeah baby. Plus that would be the most oversized NAS on the planet.
• Gut it and use the case for something else…but what? And can I really be arsed?
• Pull it apart just for the fun of it (so far this is winning).
• Trade it in for like $2.
• Donate it to someone who wants it (let me know).

It’s a bit sad really to see it sitting there, useless and helpless as it is.

On a related note, I preordered Fable 2 the other day. You should too. Even if you don’t have a 360. The game is going to be that frickin good.

If anything, E3 made me realise how very very small Australia is compared to the rest of the world.  I guess this is why we have to pay a bit more than the  US .. and suffer some awful pings… but our industry is growing, and the types of people turning into gamers is changing… . more ages and genders of humans are becoming gamers… this can only be a good thing in helping our industry grow here.  If there was one thing that more developers at E3 said to us more than anything else, is that NOW is a good time to get into the games industry – it’s strong, it’s growing, it’s changing and finding it’s feet through chaos, commercial pressures and the artistic needs of some great minds who just want to make great games.

I don’t care how small we are, it still doesn’t justify the price fixing on Wii points.

Single player adventure mode is absolutely awesome. Clever cut scenes that make the characters look like they are ready to kick some serious butt. Strangely it feels like I’m playing Final Fantasy again. Great way to have some fun while getting to know the different characters.

Now online multiplayer… I tried the quick brawl feature to “play anyone, anywhere” and to say I was disappointed would be the understatement of the year. I don’t know how this game’s hosted (server or P2P) but the brawl was UNPLAYABLE. It would lag every second for about half a second. And the worst part: you can’t exit even using the Home button. So it was hard reset time. VERY POOR. Let’s hope this is fixed somehow or at least the friend battles are lag-free otherwise there will be A LOT of Aussie Brawlers who are gonna want Nintendo to suffer. And I mean suffer on the scale of Microsoft Antitrust suffering.

UPDATE: From a quick glance at some forums, it may be that Nintendo’s servers can’t keep up with the demand. Found some more info from Nintendo, limited in usefulness as it is.