“Durpthroughs” – Dead Island Co-op: BATCH 5 FINAL

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

I really wanted to do a special Halloween Durpthrough of a random horror game in my collection, giving you all an uncensored, uncut look into how much I freak out when I’m playing a REAL horror game.  Unfortunately, I currently sound like a frog being cranked through a meat grinder thanks to the horrible timing of a heinous mix of bronchitis and laryngitis.  So instead of something that might have been good, you get the final batch of Dead Island clips.

I completely skipped recording the prison section of the game right before the final boss because, well, I was sick of recording at the time, and didn’t realize we were so close to the end.  It’s not like you missed anything anyway.

So enjoy our last leg through the jungle, our bout with the ultimate worst final boss this generation, and finally the ridiculous closure (or lack thereof) of this miserable pile of pumpkin snot.  The horror…THE HORROR!

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Trick or Treat?

Definitely a “treat”.

THE ERECTION, IT DOES NOT CEASE. I want to dress her up like Rebecca Chambers / Lilith / Samantha Smith and exchange FRIEND CODES with her day and night throughout this Season of Mario.

We both like Super Mario Bros. – this is what brings us together.

Battlefield 3

battlehead
Battlefield 3 is a fucking disgrace and a monument to everything fucked up about gaming in 2011.

So let’s start this by talking about the user experience. You load up Origin, EA’s malvolent store slash game launcher client thing that is not Steam and it has some validation thing that takes way too long. Then you click on Battlefield 3 and it runs another validation thing to make sure you don’t live in the future; once it confirms that you don’t, you can load the game. Except that Battlefield then doesn’t load the game – instead it opts to fire up your web browser and takes you to a website EA calls the Battlelog, some people have called it Facebook For Murderers, others ‘one of the worst ideas in video game history’. Your web browser will be as unprepared as you for Battlelog, forcing you to install two plugins for your web browser to continue. Now so far in this review I’ve talked about what you do when you first play Battlefield 3; I’m going to talk about what I did for a moment: At this point in the process I turned to my one, solitary friend on Origin, who was playing Battlefield 3 at the time, and complained about the validation shit. I said, “all I want to do is shoot cunts!” He laughed and responded with “I hope you like dying.” Now at the time I thought this was just him shit-talking my gaming skills, but in reality it was an ominous warning of what was to come. Battlefield 3 is a game about dying. Continue reading “Battlefield 3” →

Spyborgs

If there’s one thing every video game could be improved with, it’s mayor Mike Haggar from Capcom’s very own Final Fight. Even the crappiest of games would become instant stunner deals (Streetwise never happened) with his inclusion. Just… pile-driving everything non-stop. For example, imagine Data Design re-releasing Billy the Wizard as Mike Haggar the Wizard. He’d spin that entire castle right into the Earth’s core, before beating up on some garbage bins to restore his stamina with filthy, discarded roast chicken.Sadly, Spyborgs has a distinct lack of Haggar, but it is at least in the same genre as Final Fight. Side-scrolling beat ’em ups are a rarity in this day and age; especially ones that actually make it to retail. This final product is actually nothing like Bionic Games’ original vision for the title. It was initially unveiled as a ‘comedy’ adventure inspired by early 90s cartoons and what looked to be rather large bags of steaming horse urine. Thanks to a huge amount of internet backlash, Spyborgs’development went into chaos and somehow mutated into this no-nonsense, bog-standard brawler.

There’s a story, but it’s not very important and rarely ever gets in the way (this is a good thing). Essentially, someone’s being a dickhead and it’s up to the remaining members of the ‘Spyborg Initiative’ to save the day. See, just how much cooler would that have been as the ‘Haggar Initiative’? You better believe there’d be chest hair everywhere. Alas, there are three characters here, each with their own strengths and weaknesses (urr hurr no way) – a quick but fairly weak ninja, a slow but insanely powerful robot, and some guy with a gun fused to his arm to impress the ladies. While Spyborgs is best played with a friend in co-op, each stage will always have two of the three playable characters in action during single player. The CPU does its best to help out as the second player, and you can freely switch between the two at any time.

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Mario’s Cement Factory

Before he became a plumber to partake in typical plumber-like duties such as punching bricks, crushing turtles, crotch-polishing flagpoles and breaking into castles to let off fireworks, Mario owned a cement factory. True story. He made sure to let people know it was his, calling it Mario’s Cement Factory. This wasn’t a joint business venture with his brother – no, this was all Mario. Presumably Luigi just owned a gun, which he’d point towards the back of his trembling mouth each and every night.

Mario’s Cement Factory is one of those few Game & Watch games re-released through the DSiWare service. I like the idea of having these available for 200 Points ($3 something in Kangaroo money) a pop, but also lay awake in bed at night with the thought of never getting another awesome Game & Watch Gallery cartridge compilation ever again. This is a faithful replica of the original 1983 LCD handheld, and as far as Game & Watch games go, it’s probably one of the more hectic.

For whatever reason, Mario’s decided to do this all by himself. Conveyor belts dump bags of cement into chutes on both sides of the screen non-stop. As the company was put together with a budget of fifty seven cents, these have to be manually emptied and can only hold three bags at a time before the entire factory comes to a grinding halt. Naturally, arriving at this dreadful situation kills Mario and perhaps the universe itself.

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Smart Phones With Dumb Games

Lately (well, the past few years) there’s been talk (viral propaganda, speculation) about handheld gaming systems becoming a thing of the past as iPhones and Androids threaten to take over the multibillion dollar industry inside your pocket. The logic behind it is that people want one machine that does everything. I understand this logic and I completely agree with it. It would make life a lot easier, more comfortable, and thus more enjoyable to only carry around one “device” and still be able to do everything. I’m perfectly happy carrying my 3DS and my phone in the rare instance I might need them together, but there are certainly benefits to this “idea” for different types of people. So how is this going to happen? Is the best approach really adding games to phones? I don’t believe so.

Currently we have two different mainstream devices competing for our pocket with their bulky presence: smartphones and gaming systems. I miss the days when we could just call everything a Game Boy, but we have Sony involved now, and Nintendo has 3D graphics and multiple screens. Anyway, smartphones are apparently “threatening” the purpose of owning a gaming handheld, as they start to accumulate game libraries of their own. Meanwhile, game machines are expanding too, but they aren’t becoming phones. We’re getting new 3D graphics and new gameplay concepts, and game experiences are expanding as we get incredible new stories like 999, and wonderful massive adventures like Dragon Quest IX. Gaming handhelds have also started to add features like internet browsing and direct downloads. It would seem that both smartphones and gaming machines are starting to become like each other in their own ways, but where is this heading?

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The Hype War

Hours ago, war broke out across the North American continent – no platform was spared as Electronic Arts invaded, attempting to seize all Activision strongholds on the continent. As we speak, more EA forces are mobilising off the east coast of Australia and there are reports of the EA navy circling Europe from the North Sea to the Black Sea, preparing for an invasion before the week is out. This is of course the Great Gaming War of 2011 and just as the poster above depicts, your kids will ask you about what role you played in this pivotal moment in history.

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“Durpthroughs” – Dead Island Co-op: Super Late Batch 4

These have been uploaded for quite a while, but I forgot to post them here on the site before I went on vacation.  Those of you who actually care probably already noticed them on PieTube, but here they are anyway.  The last batch should be up sometime in the next few days (the ending sucks, by the way, SURPRISE!), so until then enjoy the game-breaking glitches!

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Steel Diver

Steel Diver – what a history this game has. It started out as a tech demo at E3 2004 for the original DS, and quickly became a game everyone wanted to be real. In a time when Nintendo was criticised for their apparent lack of new franchises, this game was labeled unique, old-school, complex, and refreshing all at the same time, and had hardcore gamers foaming at the mouth. “Submarine Tech Demo” was used in message board arguments around the world to illustrate what Nintendo “should” be doing.

Fast forward to 2011, and the game has finally been released as Steel Diver on 3DS, with fully fleshed out levels and modes, on a brand new console with updated graphics, and a third dimension added. Nintendo fans and the press were set to go absolutely BALLISTIC over this game, everything they wanted was finally here, and to top it off, it was a launch title for a brand new system. However, something was wrong. The game received no hype, no coverage, and nobody bought it. Was the game bad? It was covered so poorly, you probably don’t know anything about it. That’s why I’m here. I’m going to tell you ALL about Steel Diver, so sit back and enjoy another Pietriots review with your favourite beverage.

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A True Watershed Moment in Digital Entertainment

Hold onto your arseholes everyone because the latest sales figures are out and there’s one headline that will dominate global news, pushing Wall Street protests and Bangkok floods off the front pages. Are you ready?

Forza Motorsport 4 had the biggest opening sales week of ALL TIME!
… in the UK
… for an Xbox 360 exclusive
… that’s about racing…
It really is an incredible achievement to almost sell as many copies as Just Dance 3 and I imagine this day for forever forth be known as F4 day.

This startling statistical analysis comes from GfK’s UK website ChartTrack. I’ll be refreshing their page everyday from now until November to see if Skyward Sword can be the best selling Wii game released in Q4, or if Skyrim claims the title of most purchased Elder Scrolls game.

escapeVektor – Chapter 1

escapeVektor is a new game on WiiWare from Australian developers Nnooo. It’s hard to compare to anything because this is a brand new gameplay concept. It’s like Pac-Man, with cannons, switches, boosting, scoring depth, and a personality. The concept has you controlling Vektor, a human who somehow got converted to computer code and is now stuck inside a CPU with no memories left, except his ability to code, of course. Now you have to capture cells in each level to escape the CPU and figure out what’s going on. escapeVektor is an intense, engaging gameplay experience that nobody should miss out on.

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Be careful what you wish for

There certainly has been a lot of talk lately about whether or not Nintendo should quit hardware and become a third party.  This sort of discussion baffles me because I’m not aware of any year Nintendo ever lost money to such an extent that “going third party” was a necessity.  In fact, even in the recent “trouble years,” according to several game news websites, Nintendo still pulled down billions in profit.  The comparisons to Sega are thrown around as if they meant anything, despite Sega’s situation having been the result of a decade of financial missteps.  Sega was losing money for years before they were forced to become a third party in order to stay alive in the industry.  Nintendo is sitting fat on billions upon billions of dollars, and has never posted a yearly loss, ever.

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Nintendo Connection Tour 2011 – Impressions

Nintendo Australia are currently touring the country with a new Connection Tour, giving fans the chance to show up and play some highly anticipated unreleased games. I was lucky enough to find time to attend one of them in Parramatta Westfield, and I spent a good few hours playing Mario Kart 7, Super Mario 3D Land, Skyward Sword, Kid Icarus: Uprising and Kirby’s Return to Dream Land. Most of my time was spent mingling with fellow Nintendo fans, and basking in the glory that is Mario Kart 7. Here’s a recap of the whole event!

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