My actual blog lives here; startingvillage.blogspot.com
Updated when it needs to be, go drop in.

• 10Jun 09

  Got me some Emblems!

  Woo, my emblems came through! Now my profile looks totally E3 2009! Loves it! =)

  Wow, this is my first blog post in almost a year... Blimey.

  Say something cool, say something cool...

  uhh.

  Oh, read my new blog here!

  Jazz hands! =)

  • Posted Jun 10, 2009 2:10 am GMT
  • Category: Games
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 20Jul 08

  My Personal Past E3

  E3 was fun wasn't it? It was my first visit, and it was good. I look like a Sony fan, cause my computer buggered up and missed the start of the Nintendo one, but I don't mind. They read out my question about Megaman 9, which was cool, and I watched the live show every day. The Nintendo conference wasn't the greatest but hey, GTA DS looks good!

  Anyway, on with the title. Yesterday, I got bored of doing nothing, so I paid a visit to my good friend, who has an X-Box 360. Whilst there, I found that GTA can only keep you going for a certain amount of time if you just drive around doing nothing. And also I found it strange that everyone in Liberty City walks very slowly. Do they have no-where to go to? Anyway, I suggested we go onto X-Box Live and abuse the demo system to pass the time. So we did. And now a list of games we played;

  DOOM: Doom. Doomy, doomy doom-doom. How do I feel about Doom? Well the demo was ridiculously short. Shorter than me, and I'm about 5' 4". If you wanna advertise a game, give me at least a minutes worth of gamplay, not a level that you can beat it 12 seconds flat. But Doom itself. I appreciate that Doom revolutionised FPSs (by being the first proper one) but it hasn't really aged well. Compare it to Half Life for a second. Both changed FPSs for the better, but Half Life aged very well. So there. But at the end of the day, Doom is still a glorious celebration of boyish fantasy violence (Stolen Yahtzee quote FTW! )

  Ecco the Dolphin: Ahh Ecco. I remember playing this on Windows 95, on a Packard Bell PC. Do they even exist anymore? I do not know. So Ecco. What a weird game. You start of swimming around happily with all your dolphin brothers, then the screen darkens and all the wildlife gets sucked away! No! Ahh! We didn't actually get to the end of this demo, but it reminded me of what a trippy game it was. The colours are so bright it looks the vomit of a rainbow. You talk to a killer whale and can kill jelly-fish my ramming them. By the time I was talking to a crystal and it was telling me to get a key-glyph, I got bored and moved to the next game.

  Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution: Out of all of the games we played, this was the game I knew the least about. I'd generally avoided it, because I always saw myself as more of Age of Empires person, plus I thought it was egotistically to stick your name on the front your game. But we had a go on it and frankly, it was awesome. It was seriously amazing. With only a choice of three characters, we chose Caesar but only because he's the most famous... I enjoyed it. I never saw myself as a turn based strategy person but I liked it. Especially when you took over cities, or built roads between them. Out of all of the games I saw, this is the one I want the most. I will get it, but on the DS. Unless it's on the Wii. If so, I'll get it on both consoles. Yeah.

  Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars: This one came immediatly after Civilization Revolution, and I was on a bit of a strategy game high, so this one was quite good. It was a modern day Age of Empires, but it had live-action cut scenes, which was a bit cringy. Although I saw that girl from House, so there we go. There were two "scenarios" to play, so, being a sensible person, my friend chose the hardest one first. Moron. But that was cool. The mammoth tanks were funny, especially when you blow up a building. So that's all I have to say for that. I'm sure a C&C fan would care more.

  EXIT: I thought this was a PSP game. Turns out it's on XBLA as well. Anyway EXIT is a two-dee collect-em-up timed platformer, with a funky art style and music that drilled holes in my skull. I was quite looking forward to it, cause I read about it in EDGE. And it was a total disappointment. It was slow and boring, with not enough jumping and too much clicking. It would have worked better on the DS. Yeah. Making a point. Yeah.

  Hitman: Blood Money: I think I played the first game of this. I can't remember. First thing I noticed, the guy's got a barcode on his head, and then immediatly thought; Do people ask him why he has a barcode on his head? Anyway, on with the game. It started off with a clip of a ferris wheel falling over, and some old guy getting mopy about his dead son and calling the Hitman Shop, for a hitman. Or whatever. So Agent (random number) goes onto this pier and knocks out a sterotyped black "gangsta", and goes through to a shop, and distracts guards with a coin (not very good guards then). Through the course of them game, Hitman kills more stereotyped black people, and then a chemist. It was a bit boring, but I guess it was good for gameplay. We replay the level again to do it all stealth-ly. And I thought the level round-up as a newspaper was genius. Onward!

  Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas: I didn't play this. I didn't particularly care. But my mate played for 10 minutes and must have died about seven times. Loser. Bad music, good intro sequence, good graphics. There we go.

  DMMM: E: Okay try and guess which game this is before I actually tell you. Go on. First person swordplay. Fantasy violence. Okay its Dark Messiah Might and Magic: Elements. Hooray for long names. This wasn't that bad actually. I had an idea, for no reason, that this game would be rubbish. This thought was re-enforced when I saw it was first-person, after having a bad experience with Morrowind. But if I'm honest, it was good. After the intial struggle of "getting across the bridge with no bridge" I cut off a guys head, and the game immediatly rocketed in my ratings. There wasn't a lot of strategy in the game (random button mashing FTW!) but I got a cool sword that drained people's SOUL! Okay I'm rambling now. Overall; Good graphics, good physics, I would buy it if I had an X-Box, or a computer that could run anything above Half Life. Half Life 1.

  Katamari Damaci or Beautiful Katamari: This game is freakin INSANE! It's MAD! It's bloody MENTAL! To conclude; fun but weird. I tried to explain why we downloaded it to my friend and he threw an iPod at me. That's life I guess.

  LEGO Indiana Jones: This was fun. I have decided. Me and the same mate had previously beaten the entire of LEGO Star Wars (The ENTIRITY. We got everything. EVERYTHING!) and this was pretty much more of the same. The environments looked really good, which was funny considering I was fighting GIANT PLASTIC SPIDERS. Discovering I could spear them with spears, it was genius. The platforming bits deserve a little label that says "Will get tedious very quickly (refigirate)". And also, boulders. =) But yeah, it was essentially the same as LEGO Indiana Jones.

  And there we go. So then, I had a fun evening playing lots of demos. BUT THEN! I got home and the next day, I went onto the Nintendo Channel and watched a few videos, and then downloaded a few demos for the DS! So onward!

  Tetris DS: I've wanted this for bloody ages. Seriously, for AGES. So seeing this, I was all "AWESOME!!!!". So I waited the 5 minutes for it to download (Five whole minutes!) and then started playing. The first game I played, I lost hard, but I hadn't played for years, so I expected that. The second game I played, I lost. The seventh game I played, I lost. By far this was the hardest demo I have ever played. I didn't win a single game, even when I got like two rows in a row! Nintendo, take a note; Demos should be easy, so it makes the player look good. That way the player thinks "I'll buy the real game and be awesome!" The way I think now is "I suck at Tetris, I'm not buying that piece of pure IMPOSSIBLE."

  Ninja Gai- Oh sorry.. NINJA GAIDEN - Dragon Sword: Fun this, cause this game looked rather good, but I wasn't that excited. Ninteno Magazine had given it a good review and I filed it as a "Get it a few months" game file. After playing it, I played it once again. And then again. And then again. And now I am getting ready to buy it off the internet. Because it is that awesome. I mean, it's got ninjas, which means it's bound to be cool, but seriously, it's the best demo I played. I want it. Good graphics, awesome controls, the ability to hang in the air whilst throwing shruiken. The coolest move, the izuaka drop, which made me smile every time I did it. BUY THIS GAME. BUY IT.

  And I'm done. This is possibly the longest blog I've ever done. My fingers hurt, I'm tired, and I wanna go play Rayman, which I found under my sofa. Stay awesome!

  Oh yeah and it's my birthday tomorrow. Yay.

  • Posted Jul 20, 2008 8:30 am GMT
  • Category: Games
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg
• 12Jul 08

  Videogame Graveyard - WTF happened to Rayman?

  So Rayman. A armless, legless, neckless hero of sorts. Remember playing "Rayman" on the Playstation? Remember how brilliant it was? Remember how great the feeling was when you reached that ! signpost at the end of a really tough level? Remember how freakin' awesome the Moskito level was? I do. It was a great game which I played over many a morning back when I was 10 years old, in the hour before school, and then continued to play when it was re-released on the GBA.

  

  Look at it. Don't you just want to play right this very minute?

  So, Ubisoft had made a game that had sold 10 million copies on the PlayStation (making it the best selling PS1 game ever). This provided Ubisoft "with the financial foundations it needed to become a major games publisher." according to Wikipedia. So it seemed logical that Rayman would have a sequel. And it did.

  Inventively called Rayman 2: The Great Escape (although, I don't remember doing much escaping, it was more of a rebellion, but I guess Rayman 2: The Great Rebellion sounds a bit weird), it took Rayman into the third dimension and for no apparent reason, replaced his ability to punch with this bizzaro orb firing power. I never really got that. Anyway, Rayman 2 wasn't bad. The story line was okay(ish), the gameplay was fairly consistent, and it mixed platforming with combat well. By today's standards, the graphics are poor, but in the context, it was pretty good.

  

  As it goes, this is what a regular Friday night looks like in Essex

  Personally, I didn't enjoy Rayman 2 that much. I was expecting more of the original, but in 3D. But I could live with it, becuase it had pirates, and ninjas. Fair game really. But then Ubisoft buggered it up. They made a third game.

  Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc. I could just sit here for an hour pointing out how this game doesn't deserve to be considered a Rayman game, but I feel sorry for it, truly I do. I'm looking at the box right now, and I feel geniune sorrow for it. Okay, so I previously mentioned how in Rayman 2, he couldn't throw his fists anymore, so they gave him the orb-shooting ability. Well, in Rayman 3, they brought back the fists (with some stupid curving ability, which made the tutorial three times as long as it should have been, thank you very much). But what confused me is that they gave Rayman a grappling hook ability. Right. So a guy with no limbs, who can evidentally throw his fists to grapple on to things needs a grappling hook. Oh sorry not hook, claw. It's a claw. This along with weird costumes, and a story which makes Rayman 2 look like Shakespeare, made Rayman 3 a craptastic journey. All that said, I did play it on PC, which could explain it.

  

  "Ubisoft, no! You're destroying my franchise!"

  So, three games, on a sliding scale, from awesome to fair to sad. Then nothing happened for a while and things just got remade and re-released. Then someone at Ubisoft decided they should bring back Rayman. So they did. And several things happened.

  When the Wii launch line up was first announced, the game "Rayman Raving Rabbids" was announced as a new platformer game, in which Rayman's world would be invaded by, unsurprisingly, rabbits, and it would down to him to fight back, save the world, etcetera. The intial screenshots showed Rayman fighting the rabbits, with the player using the Remote and Nunchuck to control his fists. There were also images of Rayman riding huge creates to help destroy the Rabbits. My first impression of this was "meh". After Rayman 3, I was disheartened, and what with this games story seemeing to have little to do with the other games, I filed it as a "get a few months after release as a "2 for £10" deal". So when the announcement came that the game would be minigame based instead, I wasn't really that bothered. However, several months after the Wii had launched, and I was bored of my current collection of games, I borrowed RRR off of a mate, and played it through to the end.

  

  Remember this part of the game? No I didn't think so...

  It wasn't bad. It wasn't good but it wasn't bad. The plunger sections... they were weird. Some minigames just didn't work at all. Others were a good laugh. But this is avoiding the point. Rayman had been shattered as a platformer game. It had become a WarioWare type of game, without the frantic-ness. There was no story line, and the end bit was anti-climatic. It annoyed me. A lot. I still have a lot of respect for the original Rayman game, but RRR seemed like a kick to the face of Michael Ancel.

  And now it is now. Today. There was a sequel to RRR, which I haven't played but apparently involves even less Rayman. And now a new Rabbids game is coming out, where they have taken over a TV station and the minigames are based on TV shows... I've got the preview here in my hand, and the magazine actually describes it as "the Rabbids third outing". Apart from the title, it doesn't actually mention Rayman once. It's essentially a hostile takeover. It wouldn't surprise me if the next game didn't even feature Rayman in the title.

  In my opinion, Ubisoft need to make a decision. Say that Rabbids games are their own franchise, and then bring back Rayman, in a separate game. I envisaged a side-scrolling game, with a visual ****similar to that of LostWinds, with the game play being the same as that of the original. Sure, it wouldn't be realistic, but neither are rabbits that have plungers.

  But until then, Rayman shall remain locked away, in a rather ironic metaphor. Maybe Ubisoft will listen, and bring him back. Maybe not.

  You know, those rabbits are weird though. It's probably because they're French. They always stick their hands up in the air, i.e. SURRENDERING! And "BWAAAA!" is probably French for "I want some garlic and onions!"

  There we go. I had to save the French-bashing for the end.

  Thank you all. Stay awesome.

  • Posted Jul 12, 2008 8:58 am GMT
  • Category: Editorial
  • Tag
  • Print
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Digg

See Previous Blog Posts »