Friday, November 30, 2012

Worst game awards part 3

Iron Man
I played the Wii version, and it was slow in the first stage and most of the missions are confusing and the enemies are over-powered. Also, most of the plotlines don't follow the movie. The good thing was that you could go fairly fast if you wanted to. The cut-scenes were cool (Better than Spider-Man 3), and the voice-actors are actually the cast of the Iron Man movie. At least it's better than Iron man 2 (Grrrr....) 2.4*

Ferrari Challenge: Trofeo Pirelli
I played the PS2 version of this game and I have to say, this game SUCKS. You try to steer and you fishtail, you try to turn and you lose control, you try to get it OUT of a fishtail or try to regain control and you fail epicly. This game might not be so bad on the DS, Wii, or PS3 but the PS2 version gets a 3.2* rating. This was one of the first PS2 games I played and I have to say, it's DEFINITELY one of the worst PS2 games you can find.

Sonic The Hedgehog: SEGA Game Gear series.
I have to say, this series is bad, bad graphics, bad sound, bad controls, and bad boxart.
The sprites hurt my eyes even more than sprites usually do, the music was annoying, the levels are tedious and the controls are unresponsive, and that's just the first game! Get into the others and you encounter confusing levels (Sonic 2) tedious gameplay (Sonic Labyrinth) stupid as all hell controls (Sonic Triple Trouble) an INSANE amount of oversteer (Sonic Drift), and a Dr. Mario ripoff! (Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine). This series is bad, the only good thing I have to say about it is it's free if you get a copy of Sonic Adventure DX on the GameCube like I did.

Cya soon with more stuff! And sorry about the delay on the new feature, I'm having some technical difficulties.

(Image credits Wikipedia and Google Image Search)

Saturday, November 24, 2012

Wii U

Well, I tried the Wii U at Wal-Mart and I have to say, I like it! The uPad is nice and light, the sticks are PERFECTLY positioned for FPSs and the shoulder-buttons are the only ones I have used that don't give me finger cramps \/.\/
 

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Most bone-headed moves in the videogame industry, part 1

Here is where I chronicle the worst business moves made by companies that produce and or publish videogames.

Atari refusing to give their employees credit for the games they made.

What happened here was Atari, one of the first videogame publishers and console manufacturers wanted their developers to remain anonymous (which wouldn't be stood for anytime after that) and thus Activision spawned from it, and caused the second generation North American videogame crash with the loads of unlicensed shovelware games. If Atari had inserted a credits sequence in their games then there wouldn't have been a crash in '83, they wouldn't have lost a ton of money, and they PROBABLY wouldn't have dropped out in the fifth generation and there might have been a sixth, seventh or even EIGHTH Generation Atari! (think on that for a bit).


Releasing the PSPgo.
This was probably the first (and hopefully only) console that doesn't use any kind of removable media and has no backwards compatibility with previously released PSP games. So you had a system that couldn't play the games you already had, you couldn't re-sell your games, nor could you easily hack it. Anyways, the PSPgo is infamous for many reasons, first being its download only game system, the second being its Wireless B internet, another one being the control layout, and finally the fact that the hardware has been boycotted and discontinued for the most part.

Region coding on the PSVita, 3DS, Wii, and whatever other consoles use it.

Seriously, in this day and age, with imports being the thing with hardcore gamers and some games being exclusive to certain regions (Especially with Chrono Trigger being JAP and NTSC only with no PAL entry until the DS remake) they might as well just stop. Honestly if they want to make more money and avoid unlicensed addons and piracy they should remove region-coding and work on the international scripts at the same time, if they did that there would be less fan demand and more revenue for the companies, and we wouldn't spend endless hours googling for fan translations of the Death Note DS trilogy.

This is the end of part 1, let me know if you have any suggestions or topics for this let me know.

Friday, November 9, 2012

Skyfall

Yeah, it's late. Shut up and read the review.

Skyfall starts off with a macguffin hard-drive being stolen and Bond falling off a train.

Okay, it's more than that, but that's the gist of the beginning. There was quite a lot of blur to it and sometimes you couldn't tell who was Bond in which scene (Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace suffered from the same thing). The hero is, of course, the famous Commander 007 James Bond, the villain is an old MI6 agent who feels M betrayed him and wants her dead. Bond of course won't allow that and is trying to stop him.



Daniel Craig is amazing as Bond, and is a lot better than I thought he would be before seeing Casino Royale, and topped the first two in the new series by far.


Javier Bardem is the villain, a disgraced and psychopathic MI6 agent who goes by the name of Raoul Silva, he was driven insane by months of torture and an attempt at suicide, he blamed M for not getting him out of wherever he was and wants her and whoever gets in his way dead.


Judi Dench is M, she reprised her role as M from the original series in Casino Royale and permanently leaves the role in this movie due to macular degeneration in both eyes. She did a good job and despite her eye-problems she looked and acted natural, only missing looking where she was supposed to be once early on.


Ralph Fiennes stars as Gareth Mallory, a former Lt. Colonel in the British Army and as of most of the movie chairman of the ISC, he did a good job and he'll be pretty good in the next movie.


Naomie Harris stars as Eve Moneypenny, a field agent who takes a desk job at the end after accidentally shooting Bond in the shoulder. She did a good job, and I hope she's better in the next one. Her role as Moneypenny was suspected throughout the entire production of the film and was only confirmed in the British showing of Skyfall.


Bérénice Lim Marlohe as stars Sévérine, the second Bond girl onscreen who gets shot about halfway through the movie by Silva. She's okay, like most of the soon-to-die Bond girls she serves for a sex-scene, fleeting eye-candy, and a bit of dialogue, only to be killed by the villain or the villains men. At least they broke the "First Bond girl to appear dies" trope.

                                        (Crappy photo, I know. It was the only one I could find)
Albert Finney plays Kincade, the gamekeeper at Bond's childhood home. Sean Connery was considered for the role (And he could have played it) but for some reason they chose Finney, and he did a good job. He had funny moments and it'd be cool if he was in the next one.


Rory Kinnear as Bill Tanner, M's Chief of Staff, who plays a very small role in the movie, he saved M's life and I don't know if he survived the courtroom scene.


Ben Whishaw as Q, head of Q branch. He's the youngest to play Q and the first in Q ten years. He does a good job and plays the part of a geek very well.

Anyways, the movie was very good, the only thing not explained was how Bond survived being shot twice and falling off a bridge into a river and then falling off a water-fall.

Then again, Bond IS Made of iron.......

Anyways he comes back (Shaken and a bit weaker), runs around the world, gets a few million euros because he got a poker-chip off an assassin (Who kills someone who is of no other relevance to the plot and then falls off a building), and gets voluntarily captured and tied to a chair by Silva.

Then weird stuff happens.


For the next three minutes the scene plays like any other hero-captured-by-villain scene, Silva gloats, tells Bond how M faked his records to get him back on active duty, and then it gets kind of homoerotic.


The theme is sung by Adele and I heard it on the radio a while before I knew it was the theme to Skyfall. It's good and fits the movie perfectly.
Anyways aside from that scene the movie has no flaws, I give it a 9.90*, there are several crowning moments of funny and it's a very good Bond movie, MUCH better than the late Roger Moore-era movie I saw on iON one night....

Images from Google Image Search.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

PlayStation 2 discontinued.

According to http://www.the-magicbox.com/gaming.htm Sony announced VIA Twitter that they were discontinuing the PlayStation 2.

"Sony posted a note in Twitter, stating that the production of PlayStation 2 console has come to an end and they no longer produce new units. The PS2 was released on March 4, 2000 in Japan, and over 154 million units were sold worldwide."


Wonderful, Sony kept the PS1 going for over a decade even DURING the PS2's lifetime (I think Square Enix still sells Chrono Cross discs) then they released the PS3, I have a feeling there's a trend here, Sony's about to release a new console and drag the PS3 out for over a decade. Seeing as Sony ground SEGA into the dirt with the PS2 I can't say I'm entirely disappointed, although I'd be lying if I said I'd never touch the hardware since I play on my PS2 quite regularly. Anyways, I have to wonder how many cross-platform releases will still be published on the PS2 since the console has been discontinued. The PS2 had a good run, twelve years and still getting some decent games on it. The PlayStation 1 lasted I think fifteen years and who knows how long the PS3 will last.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Well, some Battlefield 4 info has been leaked:

Well, some Battlefield 4 info has been leaked:



Battlefield 4 is powered by Frostbite 2 Engine. The game will stress the engine at 80%.
Battlefield 4 has tentative release date of October 23. It will arrive on current as well as next generation console i.e PC, PS3, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4 and Xbox 720.
Battlefield 4 on current generation console will run at 30FPS, whereas next-generation will run at 60FPS
Battlefield 4 on Xbox 720, PS4 and PC will support 64 players on MP. No such feature for current generation console.
Battlefield 4 will support tessellation and dynamic lighting
A FPS Cap on Battelfield 4 PC version. A cap will be at 100FPS.
Battlefield 4 will have Voice Commands as well as Commander role in MP along with lots of new tools and abilities
Battelfield 4 will take place in modern-day scenarios and it will support video sharing, meaning that gamers will be able to watch videos directly via Battlelog.
Battlefield 4 will support female characters. A total of three factions will be available USA, Russia and China.

Sounds cool. Not gonna buy it if it's not on Wii U, PS3 or Xbox 360 though. Nothing's been confirmed about it yet so these may change.

Source(s):http://www.gamepur.com/news/9648-tons-battlefield-4-detail-leaked-female-character-platforms-and-more.html#pollfield-9493-0

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Artix Entertainment games.

There are a lot of you who've probably never heard of these guys, there are some who probably play their games.



Anyways, Artix Entertainment originally came out with a Free-to-play flash game called AdventureQuest in 2002, it was given an optional one-time upgrade fee in 2003 and a free-user server cap around the general time of release, back then it wasn't as popular but later on the free user count was restricted to those who stayed up for weeks on end continually attempting to log in. This was a major problem and caused a lot of negative criticism of the game and AE for the low capacity (between 2K and 4.5K) of the F2P server. Although it was removed around July 14, 2010 or July 14, 2011 (The wikipedia pages for AE and AQ have conflicting dates) it still made enough of an impression on the players that it caused more than a bit of bitterness towards the friendly folks over at AE. The gameplay is decent, although there's enough restrictions on free users (For instance, a good deal of the quests are tough, even for a level 40 fighter), the guardians (Paid users) are the only ones that can survive most of the storyline quests and the fact that most of the gear is expensive.... Micropayments are required for upgrades and most of the stuff is INSANELY stupid, some stuff is practically USELESS and yet they won't let you sell it to free up a space..................


With the popularity of AQ, AE released a prequel game on 9 June 2006, known as DragonFable.
DragonFable is everything AQ SHOULD have been, but wasn't. It took place from a third-person perspective most of the time, it used a 2.5D isometric view that I've NEVER seen used better, it had a better potion system, little to no micropayments needed for the best gear, more gear slots, more attacks, you didn't need to buy spells as new abilities were unlocked as you leveled up, and you could play through a LOT of the storyline without an upgrade.

And then it all fell apart.... They started requiring Dragon Amulets (The upgrades) for final bosses of quest-lines, making more and more "Fetch this" or "kill this many" quests required to proceed with wars, and on top of that I don't think the game's had a relevant update in a LONG time, it still uses Flash 8! In six years a good game went from awesome to pitiful. The early quests are still fun but most of the cool one-time events have passed, the rest are just filler to keep the players occupied whilst the Dragonlords (Paid users) get the real meat of the game. I do still recommend playing at least the first few quests, they're good.

Later, they came out with another game, yet again ANOTHER prequel to AQ, set 5,000 years before it and 4,995 before Dragonfable (And runs on the same engine, but tweaked a bit). The game has absolutely NOTHING wrong with it other than the fact that it's only got two or three people maintaining it, it's pretty much abandoned and doesn't have any decent limited-time sidequests to it any more. The Mecha-combat is cool and the storyline (If it has one) is nice for a Flash game, at least in the beginning. After a bit it becomes convoluted and contrived rather than coming to a decisive end (Sort of like comic-books VS manga) the gear is neat, you get to blow things up with giant robots and right aliens with light-saber clones (although the hand-to-hand combat is repetitive after a bit) The game just needs some competent people making sure they clean it up from the mess it's become and is given some interesting side-quests, the game has a LOT of potential to be cool (Just like DF does) if they put a bit more work into it.


AE's first game with a real-time system, simplified (More super-deformed than the typical anime style of the other games) graphics, and multiplayer. AdventureQuest Worlds started out terrible, got decent, got good, got REALLY good, went back to decent, and then dropped into the "meh" territory AEs first three ORPGs fell into, except this game's still got regular updates! The 13 Lords of Chaos saga was cool, the first few fights were neat and the storyline was fairly compelling.
Then it tried to be The Legend of Zelda, and EVERYTHING went down hill........
There's only one Legend of Zelda, it's made by Nintendo, anyone else who tries to make a game in the same genre has, so far, in the games I've played, failed. They started requiring puzzles to be solved to get to the area bosses, they scrapped the PvP format that everyone loved, they started showing ads when you died, and most recently they made the main town impossible to navigate! The game is okay, the first few quests are nice and SOME of the puzzles are fun to solve but most of them you can just warp to someone who's in the boss chamber. The episodic format is good, it's sort of like free DLC expansions, I stopped playing the game at about the Seventh Chaos Lord Saga (Around this time last year), so that's about the sixth episode of the main storyline (seeing as we have yet to see a Second Lord of Chaos fight). The game is okay as far as about the fourth or fifth Chaos Lord (Some of the best hard-to-get gear are from those two), but the side-quests are getting more and more tedious and some of the yearly events are repetitive, some of them aren't interesting and most of them would be considered filler if this were a console game.


Released on July 17, 2009, Warpforce is a split part of the Devourer saga (What passes for the main quest line of AQ) and is a VERY interesting concept, I don't think it's gone as far down-hill as the other AE games. In fact, it might not even be in decline (That'd be something). It's pretty cool, the gear is awesome and you can do all kinds of stuff that AQ limited, I think it's still a good game (although I'll have to check)



Later the same year, AE acquired Epic Inventions LLC and their one PVPMMO, EpicDuel. EpicDuel doesn't have a subscription base, rather it relies on microtransactions (In the form of a paid-for currency called Varium) I've been playing ED for a while now, and I still get on it occasionally, but around level 25 random matches become impossible. All kinds of people buying Varium and getting bonus weapons and armor and robots and buying all kinds of stuff and in the end it gets to the point of sheer insanity and you can't win. If they had more of a storyline and balanced the Varium-users out to at least give a GHOST of a chance to beat them, and made the bosses a little weaker so that free-users can beat them (Like in WoW where they give you the option to fight them nerfed or full power or higher than original) it could be a better game, it started out okay but after a while (When you get into the high levels) you can't go anywhere, and it takes a TON of XP to go past level 30.


Hero SMASH! is AEs second in-house developed MMO (Which uses the same basic engine as AQW), originally called Super-Hero Quest, AE was issued a joint letter of cease and desist from Marvel and DC (Essentially Walt-Disney and Time Warner) and had to rename the game HERO SMASH!. With a cool concept behind it and stylized graphics, you'd think it would have been a cool game, and it was for a bit, but like AQW it became repetitive (And this happened REAL early, I was an Alpha tester!) The game is worth playing if you've got a few minutes to waste.

The first game by the company's main artist, Milton Pool/Miltonius/Nulgath headed up the OverSoul project, making it in the theme of other AE games, but with a much darker undertone, and apparently is an MMO with PVP and PVE and Cardbattle elements to it, I'll be playing it soon.




AdventureQuest 3D: Legend of Lore


Little is known about the game aside from that pre-registration started a while ago and that the team behind it has changed the format several times. I personally think they should make it a client game and have the players download at least PART of it. I don't know why, but seeing as they like to keep things browser-based I have a feeling that keeping the games in the browser detracts from the quality somehow.

Well, that's all the games they've got, the people are helpful and quick to answer questions or respond to bug reports, the only thing that's wrong is they don't have decent phone support.

All in all certain limitations to their games seem like they're either necessity driven, or greed driven. If it's necessity I get it, but if it's greed driven then it's completely unacceptable and it makes them seem like EA.


The link to the company site: http://artixentertainment.com/








All images from Google Image search.

Best Game Awards Part 1:

This is part of my ongoing series of best/worst game awards.

No, i'm not getting any more specific than that, I like all of them. To this day there has not been a truly BAD Zelda game (unless you count unofficial Flash ones and possibly CD-i ones), only frustrating ones. I'm giving the entire SERIES one of my Best Game Awards. A 10.1* for entertaining generations and challenging us with new puzzles for over 25 years!



Okay, anyone who's played this game (no matter what version) knows it's awesome. Could have done with a bit more scripting in certain Egg-Carrier stages though. 8.98*, the only thing wrong is the camera defaults to auto instead of free, and the talking animations are a bit odd.

Ahh, Goldeneye. Activision remade the classic FPS and it received almost universal praise. I myself have beaten it twice and I'm planning on an LP soon. It's the first FPS I played and I'm not sorry about that! It's the best and there's no denying it. It had four releases and three are the same game. I haven't played the DS version but hey, it's Goldeneye, it pretty much has to be good. Goldeneye 007 Reloaded gets 10.1*, it's probably the best FPS of all time, and I'm taking Perfect Dark into account!

Why you ask? I ask why you ask! This game may be over 21 years old, but it spawned one of the most successful multimedia franchises of all time, the longest running comic-book series based on a videogame, (I own the 200th issue!) the TV series that introduce me to anime (Gotta go fast!). and some awesome 3D as well as 2D games. Still going fast (Mario's just too slow!) after all these years and a transition from being a SEGA exclusive series to being on every console from the obscure to the prominent I can still say that I have never played a truly bad Sonic game, a few might be substandard (GameGear ones) but they're not "omigodiwannathrowthisaway" bad. 10.1*, Green Hill Zone theme brings me to tears!

To put it simply, F-Zero X is the only racing game I can stand to play, in all others I fishtail like mad or else something else is wrong with the game. I REALLY don't like other racing games, they're not as smooth. 8.77*, the music is so cool!

Well, that's it for the first edition of the Best Game Awards!

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