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.
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)”
It has been a few weeks since the WiiU launched, and I am loving it. Miiverse is amazing, ZombiU is amazing and New Super Mario Bros U is pretty close to topping Super Mario Bros. 3 is terms of being my favourite side-scrolling Mario game. While the game journalism side has already been torn apart by Grubdog, its time for me to tear apart the other BS part: the third parties. Continue reading ““I like my new WiiU, but I won’t make games for it!””
The Wii Remote & Nunchuk was last generation’s innovation in violence – still strong today, still better than the competition. This was the method of controlling the last true console Resident Evil experience the world would know: The Umbrella Chronicles.
For the previous console cycle, there’s a seldom-stated lesson Capcom briefly learned (see RE4:Wii) then immediately forgot (see their “HD” games): if you’re pretending to KILL in a video game, do it properly. It’s just a shame we don’t have to pretend anymore: modern games, such as Capcom’s premiere action series, have gotten so smart that they play themselves (step aside Super Guide). The games don’t hesitate to handle much of the excitement on their own, and work hard to convince us that quick-button-context-flashback-retrospection-cutscene was an artistic achievement (“Best QTE of 2012,” is there such a thing?). Opponents of violent gaming love to point out how video games “teach kids how to kill”, but I know that’s rubbish cuz most games suck at that, especially as more games suck at being games. It’s supposed to be like watching a movie, right? Why not an effing GAME? Thru these last couple generations of analog masturbation, popular shooters have more or less surpassed “REALISTIC EVERYTHING” – nevermind the gameplay. And in a (not really) fun twist, “more realism” cheerfully graduated to “more Hollywood”; new gameplay became movies that look like gameplay. “Wow, it’s like playing a game,” – thanks, my confidence in the new generation is at an all-time high.
Before proceeding, I want to be clear that the major ideas in the blocks of text below don’t necessarily apply to every genre or gameplay mechanic. Many of our favorites are derived from things like tennis, team sports, board games, gambling, mazes, vehicles, boxing puppets, and Donkey Kong – there’s no reason to mess with certain core elements. However, TANGIBLE VIRTUAL VIOLENCE has a raw, engrossing quality that the majority of the Industry has not been interested in embracing for some time; fluid human movements seek the spillage of human fluid, yet they insist gamers don’t like movement and just seek Mountain Dew. Trapped in the game industry’s electronic erection contest, the prestigious computing “arms race”, we continue enduring their fake war: fake gameplay and fake value. Cash and companies continue to perish in the high-priced struggle to show violence; rarely do we see genuine imagination towards playing violence. It doesn’t have to be this way; we can still search for decency. Aim off-screen and raise your real arms to rediscover what’s in front of you: the gameplay in your hands.
/wii joke
The SimCity brand has been through a lot. The last good SimCity was SimCity 4, released back in the start of 2003, but even that wasn’t a true step up from SimCity 3000 until the Rush Hour expansion. Future expansions were theorised but never eventuated, leaving the game’s enthusiastic modding community to push the game engine to it’s theoretical limits and polish SimCity 4 into a kind of modern society simulator come digital train set. Since then, EA have kept original developer Maxis distracted with Spore while conspiring with Tilted Mill Entertainment to ruin the franchise with SimCity Societies and forcing their Japanese affiliates to badly port remixes of SimCity 3000 to DS and iOS. Apparently they also got the work experience kids to make a unique SimCity for Wii but no one actually played it because, you know, it was a third party game on the Wii. EA’s latest betrayal of Will Wright’s legacy is assigning Playfish to develop SimCity Social for Facebook.
Polyphony, Codemasters, System 3, Turn 10, SimBin, Brain In A Jar, this is directed towards ALL of you. I’ve been enjoying Supercar Challenge lately with my new wheel, playing a good few hours every few days. It’s the most satisfyingly realistic driving simulator I’ve ever felt. However, I’ve still only unlocked 3 cars in the game, out of 44. There are 41 cars I can’t drive. Despite the fact that this is a videogame, my options are artificially limited by in-game money earned by competing in hundreds of races with dull, easy, brain-dead AI opponents. That’s no knock on Supercar Challenge’s AI racers, all racing games have AI I don’t care about.
Should I really have to spend 50 hours in career mode just to enjoy Time Trial properly? Would it be considered a crime to let me drive the cars I want from the start? This is mindblowingly terrible design that has somehow become the standard in console racing games. Time Trial is what I love – I want to drive to my own limits and challenge myself, to properly appreciate the physics of these fantastic simulators. Why can’t I take ADVANTAGE of the fact that this is a videogame, and drive the car I want?
Continue reading “Racing Developers – Let Me PLAY YOUR GAMES”
I’m sure you’ve all seen the tired arguments, Nintendo “needs” to get more third party support, they “need” to put more core gigaflops in Wii U, they “need” to offer ten different controllers. Well sure that’d all be great, why not throw in ten free games with the console too.
… Using their old stuff.
Also comes in white
3rd Parties bitched and demanded Nintendo provide traditional input crap so they can focus on difficult PS3 ports, and thus Nintendo delivered. Now’s the time you’re supposed to whine about Nintendo copying Nintendo, and how they’re not trying anything new.
It’s just been announced via Twitter that Dynasty Warriors VS will not be coming to 3DS outside Japan. There’s no reason given, however we do know that Dynasty Warriors VS didn’t do very well in Japan, selling a mere 10,000 copies in its first week despite the heralded appearance of Samus and Link as bonus characters. Who cares, right? The game bombed, why do we care? Doesn’t that justify no western release? Absolutely not, and here’s why I think Tecmo-Koei are blowing a good opportunity.
It’s time for another 3DS Wall update. As usual, games have their score from GameRankings, and all the games are scored together to give a general idea of the quality of the out put from these various publishers and developers. Scores are rounded up and they must have at least 5 reviews to curtail outliers. Games with no review score mean that the game has not been released yet or have not attained 5 reviews.
Without further ado, let’s have a look.
I dragged out some of the more preoccupied Pietriots for comments. Got them to share their thoughts on why MONADO WAS SUDDENLY, MALICIOUSLY CANCELLED and how well they think this new Xenoblade thing is being handled in North Amerika – why did things turn out the way they did?
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.
Before they cancelled Mega Man Legends 3, before they ignored Wii Pointer controls in Monster Hunter Tri, before they rewarded Resident Evil fans with rail shooters, before Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop could handle 6 zombies at once, before they announce Resident Evil: Revelations including the free Mercenaries HD for PS Vita launching simultaneously with the 3DS version (hi-ho 2012 release date) – Capcom presented… THE FIVE.
Never one to forget 3rd Party achievements, I put this little post together to help last generation’s players and this gen’s newcomers remember the pain for years to come. Actually, before rambling about the quintet’s history that everyone’s heard before, I want to bring attention to the titles as they were announced: by sharing nice-quality versions of their debut trailers (well, 4 out of 5 of them). If we’ll remember ANY of it, let’s at least see clean copies of them; one last face-to-face before closing the casket. I know you can search for the moldy Flash videos originating from Matt C.’s IGN, but try to have some respect for the departed. Those videos came from a time when magazine, internet, and even Nintendo’s own coverage made “good” GameCube games look crappy.
Tracking down known copies of these trailers a couple years ago took some time and $rupees$. My search was narrowed to a couple auctions for rare promo DVDs from Japan, eventually making some sellers very happy. In addition, I managed to gather almost all the promo videos for these games since their announcement. One last step (took forever), each video was processed piece by piece – deinterlacing, cropping out blank borders, scaling the frames for consistency – whenever reasonable, trying to help them look their best. It’s only these past couple months that I seriously sat down to finish converting this junk. When hobbies start to feel like work… I tend to avoid them. Recently feeling an urgent sense of justice, I could delay no more.
So here’s what I got: a few custom screencaps, my personal thoughts/description of each game at inconsistent degrees of relevance, and links to the DivX-formatted media on my homepage. But seriously, I went overboard, so don’t read all of it.
This first one up was the first one to go down…
Hey, how have you guys been?
What?
Where have I been?
Mostly looking for work which is pretty hard to find where I am. I know I promised bimonthly updates to the Wall, but truth be told not a lot of movement in 3DS games happened initially after the first publication.
But enough about that, let’s get down to brass tacks. As usual, the only criteria is that a company has to have released a game or have finalized (or near such) boxart with a release date. Boxarts are followed by GameRankings Averages of each title and the company’s library as a whole.
In a shock opinion that’s shocked a few people somewhere, some guy who used to work on stuff has declared this the future of gaming,
Not only is this the future, but it’s good enough to kick Nintendo out of the videogame market. How does that work, you say? Free flash games, a threat to Nintendo’s business? Well Trip Hawkins, the man behind Digital Chocolate, makes some very good points. He’s come out and criticised Nintendo for not using the world wide web and creating companies with open platform game.. something.. or some shit. I don’t know what he’s f**king saying but it’s not good. This guy made the 3DO so he knows what he’s talking about. It all results in Nintendo going bankrupt and being forced into the dark age to build things out of scrap metal.
F**k it, no-one cares. I just wanted to use the headline.
Pietriots 