IGN Black Beta Select Awards – Pietriots Style

The what awards? Black Betty select who? I asked the same questions the day before the event. On Friday IGN AU held an event at the Maritime Museum in Sydney to announce the best games of 2012 sponsored by Mountain Dew. It sounded like the last place you’d ever expect to see a Pietriot, but also an opportunity. Out of the blue someone offered me a ticket and I jumped on it. Free food, beer, games to play? Why not. It was all worth it when I saw this!

monsterhunter6

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The Wind Waker – Sailing The Forgotten Seas

We’ve all heard the announcement by now, Wind Waker is being completely remade for Wii U. The seas aren’t exactly forgotten, but I had a different motive for this article. The Zelda Symphony hits Sydney this weekend and I’ve been playing Zelda games in frothing anticipation, namely The Wind Waker which I just finished an entire playthrough of. I’m so glad I did because it’s every bit as amazing as I remember, it was the great gaming cleanse I needed. When Nintendo made the announcement of the remake I almost shat my pants because I was playing Wind Waker a few hours before the conference and hadn’t even thought about the idea of a remake. The game is pretty much perfect already in my eyes. My last playthrough was in 2005 according to my save file, and playing it now allowed me to enjoy it with a different perspective.

grandmaperspective

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Videogame Warfare – Nobody Wins

Wii U strikes back! Wii U behind the next-gen curve! Sony waiting for Microsoft to make the first move! 3DS dominating Japan! Will the Vita make a comeback?

How does that read to you? To me it sounds like sports commentary. The winner goes to the next round and the loser is knocked out as everyone fights for center stage. Is this how we treat artists? Unless you’re THQ, this isn’t how the gaming industry operates. It isn’t how ANY entertainment industry operates. People make cool things, other people buy and share the cool things and more cool things are made. Movies are shown in different cinemas, musicians play at different venues. Why are we being so passive-aggressive about videogames, have our lives gotten so easy that we need to simulate chaos where it doesn’t belong? Gaming journalists apathy for videogames has gotten to the point where Nintendo has actively moved away from the whole scene with Nintendo Direct becoming the sole outlet for their game announcements.

timidwanker

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Dead Space 3 – Demo Impressions (it sucks)

After a ridiculous “Xbox 360 time-exclusive” period where you had to sign up to Origin, Xbox Live and the Dead Space official website to get the demo, it’s finally available for free on PSN. I downloaded it and decided to write some impressions because I really liked the first Dead Space (and Extraction). The first thing the game asked me to do is read two large documents and agree to the “terms and conditions”. I just scrolled down and agreed to whatever it was like a good consumer. The next screen told me to sign into my Origin account, this was so I could get access to the online mode and a possible patch for it. No thanks EA; while it’s nice that the demo has access to online play, I don’t have an Origin account and I will never get one. It’s one more step between starting the game and playing it that nobody needs. Playstation, Xbox, Wii U all have accounts we’ve already signed into. By the way, a patch for a demo is called a “game”. After declining to sign into Origin, another popup appears asking “are you sure?” as if I’m doing something wrong. I already hate this game.

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Pietriots Best Of Nintendo Wii!

Whelp, it’s already here. On November 18th, the Wii U ushered in a new generation of Nintendo hardware, and I’m very excited. Once again, we have a new controller that will deliver different experiences – but as we all know only niche developers and Nintendo will do something about it. Third parties? Haha don’t make me laugh, seriously.

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Tokyo Crash Mobs – Outta My Way, Hipsters!

Ever been standing in a line and somebody pushes in? Of course you have. Someone up near the front is calling out to their friends, it’s a group of three. Sure guys, nobody will mind! Anger enters your bloodstream and you yell out, but the people are too far up the line to hear it. Or they ignore it. The frustration starts to boil, but you risk losing your spot in the line if you approach them. They are approaching the line quickly, you have to do something! In a swift act of bravery, you pick up the person in front of you and throw them forward, knocking the line-cutters over like bowling pins and restoring peace and fairness to the line. Tokyo Crash Mobs brings this fantasy to life and it’s as fun as it sounds.

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Test Drive: Ferrari Racing Legends – Another Cruel Joke

Slightly Mad Studios should be renamed Completely Batshit Studios, because based on this game they are a bunch of sadistic wankers. After Shift Unleashed I thought they’d be able to make a better game without EA. While the menus are much cleaner, this game’s structure has completely gone down the shitter.

testdrivenothing

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Wii U screen cropping fix

This isn’t a common problem for modern TVs, but a lot of people have reported their Wii U not filling out the screen properly on their TVs and I’ve been dealing with the same thing since launch. Some games have no problems; Black Ops 2 and Sonic Transformed automatically adjust the screen size or have their own options, however Nintendo’s own OS doesn’t (only Miiverse and the eShop have scaling options for some bizarre reason) and ZombiU, New Super Mario Bros. U and Nintendo Land were all oversized on my TV with elements of the screen missing and no option to change it. My Sanyo 32″ LCD isn’t exactly ancient but it’s a few years old and has a funny way of configuring itself, with no direct overscan or scaling option. Yesterday I accidentally discovered a fix and I thought I’d share it.

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Metal Gear Solid 4 – Do you require Nanomachines™ in your diet? (WARNING: STORY SPOILERS)

MGS4

In the world of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, if you have convoluted plot-devices from previous games in that series that had no answers to the questions raised, then you can fix that problem with Nanomachines™! With Nanomachines™, you can keep killer diseases like cancer at bay, make your military units competent and/or zombies who can shoot things somehow, and explain ridiculous plot devices that destroyed any writing creditability you had circa pre-2001! And thanks to this being the final Metal Gear Solid title (ahahaha nope not really), Solid Snake gets the send off he deserves. Wait, no, he didn’t. That’s what most of Kojima’s blind-fanbase truly believes (like thinking Cyborg Raiden is a good character); in actuality, this is one of the most hateful games I’ve ever played. Unlike Metroid: Other M, which had an equally stupid storyline with gameplay-intrupting cutscenes that also had questionable character development, MGS4 did whatever it could to piss me off… and no, the 2012 patch doesn’t help matters either. Continue reading “Metal Gear Solid 4 – Do you require Nanomachines™ in your diet? (WARNING: STORY SPOILERS)” →

New Super Mario Bros U – Ugly, Uninspired, Unfun

Mario used to be fun, about 50 years ago. Since then the franchise has slowly milked it’s way into creative bankruptcy, and here we have New Super Mario Bros U – possibly the least effort Nintendo has ever put into a game. We should all just buy it because it’s a Mario game right? It’s not even that. It’s boring and has no identity.

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