This is an archive of my blogs from 1UP.com, which I'm told will delete old blogs once a certain limit is reached. I couldn't bear the thought of my ickle blog babies being destroyed, so here they are - for all eternity, MWAHAHA!
Expect to see the life and times of an Englishman's experiences in Japan and gaming. Plus anything else I like. Me hopey you likee! (^_^)
I can't be the first person who's wanted to race around in a craft like those from the awesome wipEout series. I wonder, though, can this video be for real?
It seems as though a company is looking to sell something that's getting closer to making that dream a reality. Although it's far from wipEout or even what the developer of this flying car is eventually aiming for, I think even at the much slower speeds this car flies at, it sure would be awesome to zoom around in.
Also, who cribbed from who? The guys at Koei Canada who made Fatal Inertia:
or the boffins behind the flying car mentioned above:
I've been pretty engrossed in other stuff like the recent Transformers movie hype and even more so in all things Harry Potter, so I'd collected quite a few unplayed demos from Xbox Live. 20GB being the gaming equivalent of having a shot glass to drink a pint of Ye Olde English Best, I decided last weekend it was time to play some of these damn demos and get them off my 360's hard drive!
First up on the chopping block was Project Sylpheed. It's been out in the shops here forever, but only recently released in the States. So now Japan gets the demo, too. Huh. Well that makes sense... And people wonder why 360 does so great in Japan (^_^).
I never bothered with Sylpheed when it came out here last winter because it looked like just another anime style cheap cash-in like all those simple 1 on 1 fighters or mecha games that BandaiNamco have been churning out the factory since the Dawn of Tiiiiiime. It's actually a fairly decent, sped up version of Colony Wars with an attractive coat of anime paint. The controls are complicated, but practice makes you less of a Monkian. I probably would buy it were not for Sylpheed handing me my ass back all the time. It takes a lot of practice and retries to figure out what weapon does what, and you can't carry all of them at once, so restarting the mission is required till you can try them all out. It's also hard to tell who the smeg is who in the melee. It's great that Squenix have created these massive space battles, but more needs to be done to make it easier to distinguish targets from friendlies. Maybe I'll pick it up if it's half price. Come to think of it, it probably already is considering how popular 360 is here in Japan!
Do you want to delete this content?
Yes <----
No.
Oh hell yeah!
Next up... Stranglehold, a.k.a. Hard Criscoed a.k.a Charlie Chan and the Creosote Factory. Screw Gears of War (actually, screw GoW anyway, it's not bad, but it is vastly overrated), this sets a new level for just sheer background detail. In this Hong Kong backstreets demo level, there is a megafuckton of shootable objects, market stalls, neon kanji shop signs and scaffolding. The hero, modelled on Chow Yun Fat, is a detailed 3D character but with textures that appear to have been roughly sewn on, similar to (but not quite as obvious as) a patchwork quilt. Probably it's just an odd side effect of the pits and grooves they put on him to make him look worn and dirty. And what's with the graphics engine making him appear to be covered in creosote?!
I thought this was going to be a stupid Max Payne clone, but it's actually pretty cool. I initially laughed at how Tequila bum slid over every fricking' object at waist height - I'd get confused by the sudden acceleration of ass sliding over tables when I didn't intend to, try to change direction and end up repeatedly sliding the opposite way and back again! Could have used that as "looped" footage for a music video with scratching in it!(^_^)
The ludicrously over the top gunplay was satisfying once the controls are gotten used to. Tequila Time was especially fun, as it recharges quicker than the shoot dodge meter in Max Payne. I soon had the hang of shooting and diving, and it made me feel like God in this game. It'd be great if they made a DLC level (or maybe it's already in the full game as an Easter egg?) of the final hospital duel from the original movie Hard Boiled, but at full speed (you go into slo-mo when you use Tequila Time).
That. Would. Blow. My. Mind.
With white doves flying in the foreground...(^_^)
A definite buy, but I'd rather wait for the limited edition PS3 version which I heard has Hard Boiled included. Unfortunately, that means missing out on Achievements! I also need to be able to actually afford a PS3 first! Babies are expensive...
Delete.
Hmm... Viva Pinata demo... well, I just bought the groovily-packaged Limited Edition Asian version on the cheap from Play Asia last month (haven't played it yet, but it was half price, so I had to get it whilst it was on sale!), so not much need for this demo. But I had a quick look to see what it was like in Japanese (I have a habit of hoarding dual versions of games sometimes so I can compare localisations!). Oh. It autodetected my 360 menu settings and set the demo to English... hmm, nice graphics! And a regional British accent... Don't see that everyday in video games... Delete.
4 more to go... let's try... Stuntman Ignition. When I hear the word "stunt", I often am reminded of something that scarred me for life when I was a child - the bearded cross dressing shenanigans of comedian Kenny Everett as his character Cupid Stunt.
Love that name(^_^). Anyway, Stuntman. I remembered the previous games got mediocre scores, so I ignored them, though the idea of trying to drive the prefect stunt sequence through a movie set sounded like a great idea. This was a fairly good demo, with 2 or 3 stages, one seemingly ripped off from based on the execrable movie Volcano. Or Dante's Peak, take your pick. The car drives like one from Ridge Racer in grip mode, so no 360 spins without trying really hard! It's easy to miss a spot or a skid you have to drive through, so I soon earned "fuck up points", too many of which force a restart. There are also some instant "death" restart points, too, such as landing the car in the lava floes. Whoops! (^_^; Overall, not bad, but not fun enough to make me want to buy it when there's Halo 3, Bioshock and Metroid Prime 3 around! You're outta there! Delete!
So, Blazing Angels 2. Didn't play the first, and I don't think I missed very much by not doing so. The demo was pretty fun, but like Sylpheed, finding targets in the murky countryside, amongst the trees or against the dark blue ocean was sometimes frustrating, especially in the final escort mission of the demo, where you essentially have a time limit (i.e. kill everyone before the flotilla you're escorting gets mullahed). Fun singleplayer for a "free" demo, but multiplayer was boring as hell. Few players over a wide open deathmatch area = falling asleep at the stick! Delete! Now!
And then there were 2... next was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Liked the movie a lot (even went to see it twice!), despite the disappointingly numerous cuts made from the book (GRRR...). Wow, 1.3GB demo. Must be a pretty long demo, right? Wroooooong. EA, if you're going to make such a humangously(sic) huge demo, please, please, please for the love of (insert religious preference here!) don't put a 5 bloody minute time limit on it. That's just plain asinine. I literally only had enough time to float a couple of school benches around with Wingardium Leviosa, play a quick game of gobstones (but not really get what what I was doing) and walk into the Great Hall before the demo timed out. That's barely enough time to get the controls down, let alone get hooked on the game. I doubt there are many people who haven't already decided if they're going to buy this or not before playing the demo, but 5 minutes for such a large download is ridiculous. I know I'd like to go into the shop having played enough to know I'm buying a game I like, even though I probably would buy this anyway, Harry Potter whore that I am. As it is, despite the good reviews, I think I'll wait to get it 2nd hand or at less than half price to lower the risk. In the meantime, I'd love to replay the demo but for that fucking crass time limit... DELETE!
Last one! Phew! And it is... Beautiful Katamari. I wonder if the Japanese title is pronounced the same or has it been changed to the more common in Japanese "beautifo-". I love the Katamari series' style. Crazy music and characters, quirky, Kubrick-esque graphics... but what's so great about the gameplay? It's kinda fun rolling sundry crap into a huge ball for 3 minutes... but over the course of an entire game? It'll take more than this demo to convince me. Sorry King of All Cosmos, you're a funny, spandex outfit wearing dude, but... delete.
Sweet. 13.6GB free. Nice!
Thanks for reading this far. I know it was a long journey!(^_^)
Don't go breaking my arm... I won't go breaking your arm...
So a French guy, a Korean guy and a Japanese guy walk up to an Arm Spirit arm wrestling machine from Atlus to prove their Muscle Bob Buffpantsness and promptly get their arms broken! No joke! According to a local TV report and this article I found afterwards, Atlus have had to recall their Arm Spirit machines since the accidents happened in three different locations, including my town, Fukuoka. Kinda trumps getting Wii Tennis elbow as a Hardcore Gaming Accident, huh?
I suck at rhythm action games. But I love 'em to bits! So, like the half-Chinese-half-no-rhythm-honky that I am, I go into a rhythm action game like a lamb to the slaughter! I think my penchant for music games started at uni, around 1997. My friend Shaolinsteele had picked up Parappa the Rapper and, despite its short length, its quirkiness and happy go lucky atmosphere charmed everyone watching, especially me. Soon after, through our Japanese contacts (namely a dorm full of Japanese girls come to learn English and this Earth thing called "kissing" - the Man from Del Monte, he say "YEEEEAAAAH!"), Shaolinsteele and I got our grubby English meathooks on Beatmania and a little gaming gold nugget called Bust A Move (you may know it as Bust A Groove because the Puzzle Bobble series had already inexplicably nicked the Bust A Move name for itself in the West, even though you don't bust moves in Puzzle Bobble. Hmmm...).
Bust A Move (BAM) had a gameplay system that I still don't fully get to this day. That's how much of an unco I am at the rhythm action genre! But I still had fun trying to outdance my rivals on each stage by tapping out the onscreen directions to the correct beat. The beat was flashed in the background of the box that displayed the directions or buttons you had to press.
Get the rhythm right, and you'd school your opponent with your own character's dance moves. Flub it and you'd get served!
The main reasons I have fond memories of this game are the game's sound, the character designs and the fun evenings I had with my friends while playing BAM. The concept of dance-offs, if not the actual execution, was easy to grasp and the characters were varied, running the gamut of cool, cute, anime sexy, funny, kitsch and downright "Huh? WTF?" bizarro.
As for the sound of the game, it was just as varied as the characters, as each song was made to fit the character and stage it went with. Every song was catchy and written to express the personality of each character. I have to admit liking a lot of the genres of music included in BAM, which obviously helped win me over. The attractive graphics, the music, the characters, the whole concept fitting together like bacon and eggs is why I still think about BAM now. I even listen to the soundtrack sometimes, even though it's dated as hell!
So, anyone else have any memories of this game, good or bad? What about it did you love or think sucked? I gots to know!
I'll leave you with some clips from the game, starting with one of my favourite characters, Hiro, because I'm a sucker for 70's disco (^_^):
Hey there fellow Nerfherders, how you coping with the summer heat? Is it as bad as it is here in sweaty ol' Japan? Every day I'm torn between wanting to go out because it's so bright, and staying home because I know I'll be drenched in sweat within 15 minutes because of the humidity! (>_<) Mrs. SoloNerfherder, I assume because she has my Danish in her oven (^_-), is feeling the heat even more. We've got the fans and air conditioner on at full blast and she still says it's hotter than a sauna on the Sun! Managed to finally finish Prey on the 360. It's not very long or difficult, but there were other things taking up my time, as usual (^_^; Luckily, an all nighter on Friday night got me to the end. I'll write something about it soon.
Here's some interesting clips I found trawling gamevideos.com this weekend:
It's always nice when one of your video game series is reduced to so many cardboard-looking sets tuck together:
I can't tell if this is for real and is just crap, or if this is a parody.
My bet is it's for real. Oh dear, big LOLs, etc.
Here's another hilarious vid. Double entendre-tastic!
I'll leave you guys with this one. This amazed me, someone has gotten a NES emulator working on an iPhone already! Looks like it needs some tweaking before it'll play well, though.
Any G.I. Joe fans here? I watched G.I. Joe The Movie, or Action Force as I knew it when I was a kid, a few days ago. I was a bit of a fan as a kid, Transformer mania having died down a little in the UK in the wake of Transformers The Movie bombing and the 3rd season of the TV show losing its way a bit. Nobody liked Rodimus Prime over ol' Oppy, I guess!
I decided to look up the G.I. Joe movie because the hilarious G.I. Joe public service announcement parodies from a couple of years back rekindled my interest in the original series. There were a few connections between the production of Transformers the Movie (which I love and watched again recently), and G.I. Joe the Movie according to the interviews on the TF Movie DVD that I got for my birthday. Having never watched the movie before, I started it up in anticipation. Would the memories of collecting the action figures (Anyone who calls them "dolls" gets a chop from my kung-fu grip hand!), reading the ludicrously complicated Marvel comic or the thrills of watching the A-Team-esque no character deaths cartoon come flooding back?
Firing the movie up, I was welcomed by this bizarre sight - G.I. Joe the musical anyone?
And here's the the equally cheesetabulous UK version - I was surprised how different it is:
So, OK, good for a laugh, but it was a good indicator of the quality of the rest of the movie, i.e. dire. It was sort of fun seeing characters that I used to know when I was a kid, and now I know who the hell Sergeant Slaughter is from having watched WWE over the last few years (it wasn't that big a deal in the UK when I was a kid), it was fun seeing him in his prime, too.
Compared to Transformers the Movie, G.I.Joe the Movie felt like no one really cared about its production; the animation and art aren't nearly as detailed as TF the Movie, the music is just carried over from the original TV show, not to mention the musical cues ripped off from the TF TV series, and sound effects from Star Wars!(^_^)
The story veers away from the military cartoony fiction of the old series and comics. I remember how the comics would have footnotes in the panels telling the reader the names of the weapons the characters had and what they could do, for instance. The movie goes into weird science fiction/fantasy territory. In a major retcon for the series, it turns out the bad guys, Cobra, a terrorist army who've been trying to take over the world from episode one, are in fact borne from a secret race of weird looking creatures that had all but died out and still remained hidden somewhere in the Himalayas, as you do. Kinda strange how they had this guy:
voice this guy:
They also had Don Johnson play a crass, womanising officer called Lieutenant Falcon, but he's crap (^_^). One cool video game connection is Michael Bell, who played mainstay hero Duke in G.I. Joe. Video game fans will know his characters Raziel from the Legacy of Kain series, as well as The Fear from Metal Gear Solid 3.
Always-screaming Cobra Commander is often good for a laugh because he's so cowardly. But in the movie, he gets turned into a friggin' snake! OK... (^_^; Seeing this scene made me realise I actually had seen this movie once as a boy. For some reason seeing Cobra Commander getting turned into a snake scared the brown sauce out of me and I couldn't bear to watch it again! I guess playing Biohazard and Dead Rising has toughened me up since then (^_^;
G.I. Joe the Movie was a nice trip down Memory Boulevard, but ultimately, it's a pretty bad movie. They even brought Duke back from death in the movie with some hastily redubbed dialogue (something about that he'd come out of a coma) so that the producers didn't have to face the backlash they did when they killed off Optimus Prime in the TF movie! Crazy (>_<)!
I've never played any of the G.I. Joe video games that were made, mainly for the NES, but I would like to check out this one from the arcades which seems to play like the into-the-screen stages on Contra and S.P.Y.: Special Project Y:
Looks pretty cool, huh? Well, it's almost 4:30 in the a.m., so that's enough random G.I. Joe-ness for now! Anyone else got some 80s cartoon skeletons in their closets? (^_^)
Wednesday 8 August 2007
This blog looks familiar... hmm... (^_^).
Glad you're back blogging, even though I've read most of it already in your e-mails to me. Love the work you did on the Carmen Sandiego pic, by the way. I see you even managed to alter the shadow to match her/your new head!
That Mario vid was pretty funny. I want to see an XMugen mod that plays and looks like that!
Oh yeah, and I just noticed this next to your blog:
Just found these vids over at gamevideos! They're pretty funny, especially the 3rd one!
And if you're in London and would like to see some art, go see my friend's exhibition! It starts tomorrow and goes on to the weekend. Details here. It would be great if you could go support her. Tell your friends now!(^_^)
Aaaanyway, I pwned Lara Croft's big comeback game, Tomb Raider Legend last week. Thanks to therealpidge05, who got it for my birthday a little early! Me love you long time, baby!
I've always had a couple of reasons for being interested in the TR games, and I played a little of the 1st one and the 4th one way back, but this is the first one I've bothered to to play till the end. It came out spring last year, so I'm definitely LTTP, but who cares? I really enjoyed it. It's not very long, which made a refreshing change from Blue Dragon and Final Fantasy V Advance that I'd played just before.
It's also pretty easy, but enjoyably so. Very little hair-tearing, and I was able to play through the game a few times to get all the achievements. 360 Achievement Whores, this game is for you (^_-). So yeah, the achievements are kinda hollow, as probably everyone has spanked Lara's arse game by now (^_^).
The graphics aren't Gears of War quality, but I like them, there's good use of light and shadow, and the music sounds good enough to draw me into the action. In fact the whole game from the intro when you first load up strives successfully to create a Bond With Breasts action movie atmosphere. There's even a few nods to the movies, too, such as the layout of Lara's mansion resembling the one from the 1st movie (haven't seen the 2nd one) and a few of the movie's outfits appearing in the long list of unlockable costumes.
The highest recommendation I can give Tomb Raider Legend is simply that I didn't want to put the controller down, and now I'm really looking forward to a hopefully decent version of Tomb Raider Anniversary coming to 360, in whatever form it takes. Seeing as you can probably pick this game up for half price or less now, go check it out!
Since I finished TR Legend, I've started playing Prey, another denizen of the 360 bargain bucket from last year. So far, I don't like it nearly as much ol' Lara's game. But you never know, maybe it'll get better.
Oh yeah, I finally broke the 50K point barrier on 1UP! Yay me! So now my rank is... "Shadow Mage"? WTF? I was hoping I'd rank up from Genome Soldier to Revolver Ocelot! Or at least that guy peeing off the side of a building in MGS 2...
