I think it’s almost cheeky of me to review this game. I haven’t played the original trilogy of games that some people seem to adore so much and I have a particular bias towards Ubisoft for filling my pants with the Anvil engine which gave us the Assassin’s Creed series. So I’m going to have to review this game on its own merit.
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands sees a Prince (unnamed, and if he is named I forgot) go to his brother’s kingdom which is under attack and then his brother unleashes a horrible curse upon his land which he must end. That’s it. There’s no other development really, there’s a lady who looks like Calypso from Shadowman who’s a Djinn and slowly gives you more powers (when she should really just give you ALL of them) , but apart from that the story is just a way of linking some platforming together.
Graphically, this game is actually rather pretty and although I try not to do the whole “graphics are nice” thing and these aren’t particularly stunning, it’s pretty enough.
Unfortunately, that will probably be the only wholly nice thing I’ll say about this game. Whilst the controls make sense and seem to work, the combat is functional but lacks style and flow and since a lot of the rooms require you to clear them of baddies before you move on it gets tiresome, boring and frustrating. The upgrade system though allows you to have full health from very early on in the game and means that the fights become even more of an annoyance as they present no real challenge. The boss fights are straight out of Batman: Arkham Asylum. IE: boring and unchallenging as they constitute the same dodge-attack-run away rota as Arkham.
Despite the lacklustre combat the platforming is some of the best I’ve seen in a good long while and the different elemental mechanics make for some challenging and interesting gameplay. However, each of these puzzles has a fixed camera and you have to do the correct thing to get the camera to change position, unfortunately what you have to get to is out of camera shot meaning that the beautifully crafted platforming is ruined by something which should be easy to get right by now. This became especially apparent during the FINAL chamber for me when I got stuck on the first puzzle due to me not being able to see how something worked, not any actual problems with the controls or my operation of them just a dodgy camera meaning I can’t see how to correct my mistakes. Sometimes the platforming would feel a little clunky and based on trial and error rather than any immediate skill or clever planning.
It’s said that the time reversal mechanic is what makes Prince of Persia so interesting and whilst it can deflate a tricky situation I found dying to be preferable because the game is so well checkpointed and the time reversal so limited. It got to the point for me where I was dying instead of using my time reversal because time reversal is so precious, which kind of defeats the object of the exercise.
Perhaps this is a stylistic point but despite the game being well checkpointed it lacks any definable chapters. This, for one, shows how shallow the story is in that the whole game is one chapter. It also has no manual save function meaning you have to complete the chamber you’re currently doing before you can safely turn your console off and these combining factors give them game a lack of any definition. Nothing definite happens, it’s all a minor variation on a theme. Your twatty brother becomes more of a twat. That’s about it and it sort of bugged me throughout the whole game how loose it feels.
I want to bring something up here, and it’s the traps. I appreciate how the circular saws moving around walls works, that’s fine. I like the moving pillars and spike traps and whizzy columns but the fucking swinging bars are a pain in the cunt. I took more damage from those fucking things than I ever did from combat and they just broke the flow of the game for me. In fact I found almost ALL the trap sections boring, especially when so much of the joy was to be found in the FLOWING platforming. Having to stop, walk around slowly and get unnecessarily worked up about a stupid feature is not a pelasant experience. I’m aware that this is something that was part of the original series or whatever but it’s just unnecessary and boring. It’s like chocobos in Final Fantasy games, unnecessary but there just because “it wouldn’t be a real part of the franchise if it wasn’t there”.
I was one of the very few people who enjoyed the 2008 reboot of Prince of Persia and even though the ending was fucking stupid and the smugness cranked right up, the platforming was superb and the advent of timed platforming was welcomed for the challenge. It lacked the traps and upgrade system which I see as unnecessary and even though the combat in that was stupid as fuck it was at least difficult in places and didn’t just feel like a grind.
I can recommend Prince of Persia: TFS, I suppose. I mean, I enjoyed the time I spent with the game but the combat was shoddy, the camera a real mess and the story’s development was so paper thin I almost shat out a kidney when something genuinely half-unexpected happened. In fact, looking back on it I would rather play the 2008 version again.
Red Dead Redemption is a sidestep for Rockstar in some ways. Despite the franchise having a precursor Rockstar’s usual method of making games is to design a playground (be it a city or a school) fill it with weirdoes (school kids or gangsters) and then allow you to run rampant causing terror and provide some story based missions for you to see the main character beat up someone who deserves it. So it should come as a massive surprise to you that Red Dead Redemption is set in a huge, but fictional, part of the Wild West and features your main character trying to kill his former partner whilst he’s not shooting deer for his mates… oh. You may be wondering where the sidestep is, well it comes in the level of maturity that’s brought to the game. Whilst the Grand Theft Auto franchise has a lot of knob gags and characters with odd sensibilities and Bully featured the same sort of characters but miniaturised, Red Dead has constricted these traits and allowed character humour to sometimes poke its head up and each characters different eccentricities are explained by their interaction with the plot. Basically, the characters aren’t just caricatures of gangsters, they’re more complex and each have motivations which feels a little more than the shallow “I wanted money” that seems to pervade the Grand Theft Auto series.
A lot of criticism has been levelled at this game for being Grand Theft Horsey and as much as I didn’t want to use this term and think I was clever the parallels have to be drawn. Like I said, it features a huge map, guns and various ways to break the law which hardly wins it in the originality stakes, it also features wild animals (different), cacti (different) and a horse riding mechanic (different) which I hate. The controls in this game aren’t BAD they’re just not EXCELLENT. To make horsey (I called mine Simon) go faster, you have to tap A. This is supposed to represent you jabbing it with your spurs I suppose but it doesn’t quite work. As any horse rider will tell you horses have 4 levels of running: walk, trot, canter, gallop and you can never quite get the speed right. I suppose this is because they guessed you’d probably run at full pelt everywhere but some of the side quests involve being slow and checking for plants and things so it would have been nice to canter as opposed to full to full on gallop. Despite this, the horses LOOK stunning and I found myself ending up very attached to Simon. The gun mechanic is functional and you have to hold A to run, so I’m hardly going to praise this game for its controls.
What I shall praise this game for is its feel, I stopped thinking of it as a game and started thinking of it as a “Wild West Simulator” and that’s when I started to enjoy it more, in some ways I ended up treating it like an MMO having more fun with the fetch-quests and side missions just to soak up the gorgeous scenery. The writing helps this feel, because Rockstar seem to have grown up and abandoned their knob gags and started going for deep characters, all of whom really open up the world because they contribute to the character of where they live. If a character is a world-weary sheriff you understand how fragile law and order is in the area and how the town feels about their sheriff, seriously, that is how strongly I feel about the writing (and voice acting) in this game.
I feel I’ve gushed a little too much because a lot of this game is broken as fuck. You have bullet-time (called Dead Eye) and it isn’t needed in the first quarter of the game and it might as well be unlimited considering it regenerates so bloody quick. You have regenerating health AND med kits which kind of ruins any pretence of this game being a challenge. Timed missions don’t have timers which therefore made me shout at the game for essentially not allowing me to complete the mission out of skill, but out of trial and error. It’s sometimes so glitchy you have to reset and occasionally plot points are so big and so obvious you have the tendency to think “HOW FUCKING THICK ARE YOU JOHN!” at the telly. Also, I did as much of the sidequests as I could from the first half of the map and found by the time I’d entered Mexico I had full fame and full honour. I shall briefly talk about these systems because they annoy me. Fable 2 managed to get this system basically right somehow. If you go about the game trying to be good by the end of the game you’ll have roughly reached full good on your first play through and this is how it SHOULD be, you should see your achievement in upgrading as an indicator that you’re coming to a close on the game, not that you’ve entered the second act.
I’d like to put a big disclaimer over this review. The game IS good, in fact it’s absorbing and gorgeous and extremely funny witty and clever in a lot of places. However, it has its problems and despite the recommendation from me to buy this game I warn you that it has its issues and you should only buy it if the things I’ve mentioned won’t destroy the experience too much for you.
When watching The Descent 2 you’ll probably fit into three camps. One will be the people who watched the first movie and want to know how it continues and HOW it could continue. Second will be people who have seen the first movie and hope for a movie just as good as the original and if it’s not? Well you’ll just hate it because it’s not the original. The third will be people who have never seen the first and just want a good horror movie. The question is going to be who out of the three groups will like this movie?
The movie starts straight from where the first left off. We learn that some women are trapped in the caves and people are now looking for them. Turns out they are looking for them in the wrong place because (as the people who saw the original know) the “flight plan” that was given is wrong. One of the women who went missing suddenly appears miles away and a team of rescuers are called in to go into the caves where they actually are and see what happened to them. Oh yeah, they decide to drag the survivor along for the ride. As they get deeper into the caves they find themselves attacked by the same creatures as the original party were, but this time (in a small space of time) they’ve evolved to be tougher and meaner. Not that that makes sense of course.
As with the first movie we have few characters to work with and the actors do the best with what they’ve got. Shame is, there is very little characterisation as this seems to have been sacrificed to get straight to the action. This of course is not a bad thing, but it would have been good to learn more about the characters as this is one of the strengths of the original. The two characters from the original (Sarah and Juno) are not surprisingly the stronger of the characters and it is nice to see the continuing story between them and how it concludes.
I started by saying this movie was aimed at three groups and arguably I think it will be liked by 2 of them (people who have seen the first and want to see the continuation of the story and people who have never seen the first). The third group may like it but when you compare the original with this the original is a better and a stronger movie.
The big difference between the two movies is that the second is made to be a much more fun one. This leads to it having a different tone and one some may not like. The gore is also upped to add to the fun which also adds to the difference between the two as in this it’s much more cartoonish and visceral gore where in the original it was harsher and more realistic to keep to the harsh tone.
I’ve talked to quite a few horror fans who don’t like this movie (probably because it can’t live up to the original) but I for one liked it. Sure it’s more cartoonish in portrayal of the violence on the screen but it’s entertaining and in a genre full of remakes it’s good to see a movie that doesn’t tread old ground but extends a story that many wanted to see.
Let’s start by saying New Moon is not a movie aimed at me, I’m not a teenage girl. Then of course I have to answer the question “then why review it?” the answer is simple really, because modern culture pushes it into the genre of horror and I review horror movies. Oh yeah, it’s got werewolves and vampires in it.
When the movie starts it’s pretty much made it’s mind up that you’ve seen the first movie. If you’ve not then you’ll be totally lost. Bella is happy with Edward and everything is sparkly cool, in a miserable kind of way, could Edward ever be happy? Nah, it’s impossible. Everything goes wrong when Bella gets a papercut and sends one of the vampires into a blood frenzy (a scene filled with over acting and cheesiness). With this BIG drama Edward and his family decide they have to run away from Bella and that she’ll never see them again.
So what does Bella do? Well other than screaming all the time and acting even more miserable than she ever could she falls into the arms of Jacob who just turns out to be a werewolf (big fluffy CGI werewolf…I’m sure you can see my love of them). Along with his “cocky” pack they defend their territory from the mean evil vampires (who Bella seems to think are not monsters at all but happy people who glitter in the sun and never kill people). Bella proceeds to tease Jacob to within an inch of the poor guys life while all the time pining for her pale faced glitter wearing vampire. As Bella fights to get glimpses of Edward she finds she must also contend with vampires from the past who for some reason seem to have a problem with Bella…oh the drama.
So, let’s start on the plus points of this movie. The first thing I’d say the direction is hugely improved. Gone is the motion sickness inducing sweeping shots of the first movie to be replaced by atmospheric scenes created by a director who finally seems to know what they are doing. The second plus point? Kristen Stewart’s performance is actually quite tolerable in this movie. She’s not a bad actress really, but she has to work with what she’s given and the problem is what she’s given is bad.
Now I’m past the good points let’s get to the bad. The storyline for this movie is quite honestly terrible. It’s so simplistic that you have to question why even bother using vampires and werewolves at all? Just call it One Tree Hill and add a few more storylines in there and you’d never know the difference, really. If the “monsters” are being used to try make a unique story then it fails big time. Also having a veiled attempt to turn this into some kind of Romeo and Juliet style story fails hugely as I’d argue the writer does not have the ability to handle the themes involved.
Other than Kristen Stewart and some of the older actors the rest of the cast are poor. They are so wooden that they are lucky the watcher can tell the difference between the trees and the actors. Again this could be down to what they have to work with, most of the script seems to ask for the character to be moody, or angry or a domineering asshole who thinks he has the right to control women.
So, did I like the movie? I’d say it’s watchable and probably little teen girls who watch it won’t give a shit about the storyline just which “hot” guy takes his shirt off next. Of course nobody seems to realise the whole homoerotic nature of a bunch of topless guys running through the trees together and letting their “inner beasts” out (how Freudian).
This movie is miserable. Don’t bother watching it if you actually want to be in a good mood, this will ruin your day. I don’t mean to be overly harsh on the movie but even in it’s happier moments it’s almost suicide inducing. But it DOES have amusing moments (that aren’t meant to be), especially Edwards Cheshire cat moments where his bodiless head appears to “warn” Bella not to do something, or to remind her what she said she’d not do. He’s the ultimate obsessive boyfriend but just in head form…oh and who has left her (it’s that stalker theme from the first movie again isn’t it?).
The whole male dominating women issue in this movie is something that probably bugged me the most. The women seem to have to live in servitude of the men and do what they are told. Bella WILL be Jacobs, Edward spends most of the movie appearing randomly to tell her what to do, way to show a strong woman in a book aimed at teens eh? I think it gives them a bad message, Bella should be a stronger person and not allow herself to be controlled…but no, she’s bossed around by the “angry” werewolf and the “miserable” vampire…not stereotypes at all are they?
So I’ll end before my rants go on for the rest of the day. So yes, watchable movie but don’t go if you want an actual good storyline.
I don’t know why I’m doing this to myself, I really don’t. I remember when the Wii was announced, when I was a slightly shorter (about 6’2″), slightly less disgruntled chap. I laughed at the name, I looked at the games that were coming out and thought “cool, it sounds okay”. Then I found out it had motion sensor controls. Then I swore.
I hate to shovel spoonfuls of my private life at you but I happen to be incredibly lazy and I also happen to be spatially retarded. I didn’t want a Wii when I found out, I wanted to bury my head in the sand and cry. What is wrong with a normal controller? Why can’t you do what Sony will inevitably do and change fuck all about the controller?
The GameCube controller is easily the most comfortable, best designed and most well-weighted controller of all time. I can say this with a degree of certainty because there are complaints about controllers which you must always take note of. 1) It’s too big- never heard this about a GC controller, 2) It’s too small- never heard or had that about a GC controller, 3) I can’t reach the <insert> button- never had that problem. Everything about it is designed to fit perfectly into your hand and never give you carpal tunnel or RSI. The wiimote on the other hand seems to have been designed by Ann Summers if Ann Summers was run by Nazis. The wiimote has a long smooth shaft with nodules designed to reach all a woman’s pleasure centres and the nunchuk is clearly a clit-stim with a 3d control for intensity.
… where was I? Yes, that’s right. It’s designed for anything other than fitting in your hand. It is designed to be “ergonomic”, in this case “ergo” meaning “errr, go away now please, I’m trying to look cool”. It doesn’t fit in your hand, the d-pad is twenty miles away from your thumb and the A and B buttons make very little sense in their positioning the +,- and home keys are too small for anyone but the fucking Borrowers and the 1 and 2 buttons have never been used by me, ever. The Nunchuk’s button placement is similarly annoying as I STILL don’t know which is the Z and which is the C button. This is a problem I never had with the GC controller as it was so brilliantly designed even a dyspraxic moron like myself can use the damn thing.
Enough of the controller, let’s look at the other hardware. I can buy a little cable which connects my GBA to my GC… why would I want to do that? Oh, I can put a game from the same franchise in my GBA and my GC and then use the GBA as a controller to open different content. Wow, that sounds pretty good. The Wii has similar features? Oh… I can only send Pokemon to “My Pokemon Ranch” for no clear fucking reason. This is the problem with the Wii, it does stuff for the sake of it and gives no clear reason why we need it. Why would I want the weather on my Wii? I clearly have a television and the internet so I see little reason to switch another device on when teletext will do just fine.
Let’s move on to the games before I kill someone. It seems to me that the GameCube was able to do something extraordinary with games that shouldn’t have been good. Super Mario Sunshine sounds like a flawed premise in a way, take a character who has been jumping from platform to platform for almost 40 years and make him fight paint. Yeah it sounds stupid, but how many times have you played a game where you have to jump and immediately press any of the 4 main buttons to switch to your hover nozzle before realizing the game you’re playing ISN’T Mario Sunshine? That’s right, none, because you’re not thick like me but it’s this level of immersion which brings about these thoughts and why Mario Sunshine is so good.
Super Smash Bros Melee is another case in point because it took a fairly fun beat ‘em up on the N64 and turned it into a fantastically funny and creative beat ‘em up in which nothing ever seems broken. This is something the Wii managed to break because as long as you’re Falco you will ALWAYS get the Smash Ball in SSBB and it will ALWAYS annoy people. What Melee managed to do is make losing fun. It didn’t matter if you were shit because watching Link fly off the screen because he’d just had a bob-omb thrown at him is, and always will be, hilarious. Allowing any muppet to break the game if he gets the right item detracts from the fun because there’s no sense of “Yes, my friend deserves that kill”, all you feel is “fucking smash ball!”.
Another game brilliantly brought to life by the GameCube is Mario Kart Double Dash, a game I have already wrapped my lips around and pleasured fondly but it deserves the praise I give it. It took a game which already existed (Mario Kart) added a new dimension to it (2 characters) which managed to freshen the whole approach to both single and 2-player co-op. In single player you would think which 2 characters would give you the best karts, items and weight and this in turn allowed you very different styles of gameplay with each different team construct. In 2-player you thought “which of us is shit at driving? You? Well you can be him because he has the best item and I’ll be whichever will allow me this Kart” which is slightly different. Mario Kart Wii sought to do something different from Double Dash and made Mario Kart 64 but without any soul. Just Mario Kart by numbers with shit items that no one gives a fuck about.
There are plenty of other games for the GameCube that now have Wii partners and I can guarantee you that everyones complaint will be “I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT MOTION SENSORS”. No one cares, if the controls were used effectively then maybe people would like it. Unfortunately, because it’s there almost every single action has to be replaced with a flail to mimic an epileptic receiving electro-shock therapy and so you get very physically tired very quickly and turn the game off to do something else… like get a GameCube game.
I know it’s unoriginal to rag on the Wii but I have some advice for you. Go out and buy as many GameCube games as you can find, yes even some not very good ones, play them on the Wii with a Wavebird or GC controller. You will not be dissatisfied, in fact you’ll probably enjoy yourself and have a good time. You also won’t get carpal tunnel syndrome, won’t look like a tit in your window and will never, ever, ever play “Wii Fit”. Which is about as effective for weight loss as squirty cream on tap.
Assassin’s Creed II is an odd choice of game for me to play because I never played Assassins’ Creed I. I had seen it being played, I tried to do the tutorial at the beginning but it ended up making me feel ill (it’s just so bright). I have heard that the first one is riddled with faults- it’s too repetitive, it seems to think that the eastern world is the size of Kent and that the side missions are a little… meh, so approaching Assassin’s Creed II was a strange step for me. It’s a little embarrassing then that when your main gig is ripping on games that you find one you actually rather like.
You play as Desmond Miles reliving the genetic memories of his Italian ancestor Ezio Auditore Da Firenze, who is trying to uncover a conspiracy in the past to unfold a conspiracy in the future. You start off seeing Ezio’s birth where you are taught how the controls work, you follow his development from spoiled teenager to grim and determined assassin. The development of the story is unimaginably immersive… I still don’t care about Desmond that much, although he seems like quite a nice guy. Accompanying Desmond are Lucy (who looks like an attractive woman with a rhombus for a mouth), Rebecca (who is super excited about everything and has that “cute”, nerdy-girl voice that makes you want to stab things) and some other bloke played by Danny Wallace. I want to bring this up because it’s something that made me want to die. Danny Wallace is a funny bloke, not denying that, he isn’t a voice actor however. Every single line he has is annoying, not because that is what the character is supposed to be (the character is SUPPOSED to be disdainful and stoic, concerned with the mission and exasperated at the time he sees as being wasted) but because Danny Wallace isn’t a voice actor. You can TELL it is him because the voice acting is so bad. The only people allowed to voice act are as follows: Tim Curry and Patrick Stewart. NO ONE ELSE.
I’m going to get the nice stuff out of the way quickly because a lot needs to be said. Firstly, this game is fun. Do you remember that? Fun? I enjoyed running around the rooftops of 15th century Itlay, I enjoyed finding all the feathers, I enjoyed stabbing people with knives, slicing them up with swords, piercing their faces with hidden blades, poisoning them and stealing their pikes to perforate their gizzards. This game simply allows you to have a lot of fun running around tricking guards and eviscerating them with your arsenal of mildly similar weapons. I found that a good proportion of the time I would use the hidden blades, as there’s nothing quite like walking up behind a guard and despatching him with a muffled “hmph!” and then running away to a little hidey hole and giggling as their rag doll falls to the streets below. I sometimes spend an hour just running around the rooftops taking out guards and finding more and more creative ways of killing them (which I should probably see my psychiatrist about). Secondly, it’s immersive and on occasion quite nerve wracking. Thirdly, it is visually a treat. I know I say I don’t care about graphics but when a game gives each area you visit a different style and a different area with different kinds of people it adds to the sense of scale, it makes me feel as though I’m travelling between different cities. Florence is dusty with terracotta roofs, Tuscany is green and pleasant, Forlí is darker and slightly seedy, an air of oppression creeping in and Venice is expansive and holds an austere atmosphere. And what is and isn’t a ledge are clearly definable, which is so welcome when you’re playing a game which consists ENTIRELY of jumping between ledges and hoping you don’t fall to your doom.
It does have faults, however. It is exceptionally easy, I’m on my second playthrough of the game and I managed to clear a good deal of that in 6 hours. Secondly, there is a micro-economic town building side quest that doesn’t seem to make sense. I can only assume it was put in as a visual indicator of how your questing is influencing and changing the world, but because it’s so far removed from any of the other cities you lose that sense. Perhaps a safe houses system like GTA, with one in each city would have made sense but it would just feel like a rip off so I can see why they didn’t bother. The armour system baffles me, I know they tried to remove regenerating health from the game and in some ways this makes it harder, but the regeneration had a good explanation in the first game. It becomes even more baffling when I had the best armour in the game before I had managed to buy the armour set before. The mandatory vehicle sections are given a nice twist in this game though; driving a runaway cart through mountains, punting yourself to victory and flying on a glider are all hilarious in the way that they seem to be taking the piss out of everyone else’s vehicle sections whilst actually contributing to the narrative.
The middle of the game gets confusing, you seem to get ordered to one place or another with no clear reason and I had to play it again to realise who these people were but at least you can take them out whenever you want and they don’t all reveal long cutscenes WHILST THEY’RE DYING. This is the most annoying feature and I wish it would fuck off. I have stabbed them, why would they suddenly reveal vital information with a blade through their throat? Also annoying is the fact that the last half of the game takes place in Venice. The first half of the game takes a while to manoeuvre through different areas, broadening your sense of scale immersing you deeper and deeper into 15th century Italy and the wide range of places which it consists of. So why do they take the breadth away from you and insist you play the last half in the same fucking place? I could have revisited earlier places, see how they changed over time, especially if they had broadened the villa concept. It just makes me think they got bored towards the end.
The combat is also a little… spongey. I can’t quite vocalise what I mean, but it essentially comes down to waiting for them to attack you and then countering. This changes if you play a second time and fully explore all the combat options, whereby you end up being a cross between an Assassin from Italy and a ninja. One neat little feature is the way that Ezio can steal weapons from guards by selecting fists and then gut them with their own weapons. If you spend your time training (but why would you when the story is so compelling) then you can end up dispatching enemies quickly through dodges, strafes, counters and full assaults but it just shouldn’t be that much effort to get it right.
One thing I have to mention before I wrap up is a genius gag which nods towards one of out favourite portly video game characters. I literally howled with laughter as it was completely unexpected, little things like this can sometimes make a game and it is worth playing the first hour for that alone.
So overall I recommend Assassin’s Creed II. The graphics are pleasant, the gameplay is good and the story is cracking, and if you don’t like the ending and credits you have something SERIOUSLY wrong with you. However, by no means is this game perfect and I’m never going to let my personal enjoyment of a game override the fact that I’m a reviewer. It’s worth renting and I have felt like playing it again and again so take from that what you will.
Where have the days of the good old gothic horror movies gone? Whether it was Christopher Lee majestically stalking his prey as Dracula or Vincent Price being depressingly obsessed with death in a good old Edgar Allen Poe story such as the Fall of the House of Usher? Why do we have to modernise movies now and soften them so they can be sold to teens?
As a child growing up (and ironically part of this growing up was as a teenager) I remember being able to go to bed and turn on the TV and more often than not you could find a horror movie on. This was the days of the VHS were you could record more than one of these movies on one tape and have a whole collection rather than just one DVD per movie. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen all Lee’s vampire movies and even the ones without him (my personal one without Lee of course being The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires). We seem to lack the ability to make movies like that anymore.
I know it’s arguable that The Wolfman was a return to the gothic horror, but I’d counter argue that’s just a modern horror with an almost Photoshop style gothic world coloured over it. You can take that movie and almost say “that’s out of American Werewolf in London” or “that almost feels like The Howling”, even though I did LIKE it, it felt like a facsimile of a true werewolf movie. If you want a good gothic style werewolf movie hunt down The Curse of the Werewolf, another movie the Wolfman stole off. Oliver Reed plays the tragic Lycanthropicly cursed character perfectly, but then again I doubt you could show me a bad Reed performance.
My point is we lack good old fashioned horror nowadays. They don’t even show Hammer Horror movies on TV anymore which is a crime itself. We have hundreds of channels on TV now, we even have horror channels so why can’t they show them? Look at Sci Fi (SyFy) now in the UK. Almost every night they seem to reshow American Werewolf in London, it’s an awesome movie BUT why not replace repeats of movies with some classic horror? I bet it would be easy to really if they wanted to.
As much as I applaud the fact the Hammer Company is back making movies I find it a shame that they aren’t helping the cause of the old Hammer movies. Clean them up, get them on Blu Ray! (if the new Hammer company have rights to the movies of course). I know I for one would buy a Blu Ray collection of all the old movies, even if it did cost a lot.
The same goes for Roger Corman’s Poe movies with Vincent Price of course. I would love Blu Ray releases of these movies so I could add them to my collection. Even if it was just Fall of the House of Usher, Pit and the Pendulum and Masque of the Red Death they would take pride of place in my collection. They were always my favourites and I miss that they’ve not been shown for years.
My guess is that the lowly horror geek who wants to see these movies shown again is a little spec of dust on the wave of the “WE WANT TWILIGHT” voices that seem to control horror now. I’m just an old school fan who has to sit back and watch horror become all glittery and fluffy so that teens can be easily manipulated into buying into crap. So yes, BRING BACK REAL HORROR! That’s what I say.
I actually bought a new game this week to review; I shan’t be doing that a lot of the time though, I envisage myself trawling through my current games collection and thinking up new and more interesting ways of accusing them of not being good enough for the while. So I bought Sonic and Sega All-Stars racing, what of it? I bought it as a curiosity and because I have a certain soft spot for “battle-racers”, one of my first ever games was Wipeout 2097 which was a joy to play and fun even to the end of my Playstation’s life and my love of Mario Kart Double Dash has also been well expressed here, so it was interesting to play Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing.
It should be mentioned that, as a battle-racer, The controls for All-Stars are simple, intuitive and perfectly functional… and better than Mario Kart Wii. Everything seems to work and it never feels as though the controls are letting you down, only your use of them. It should also be noted that when you take damage from a weapon your recovery time is a lot less than that of Mario Kart, which is good, it means you only fall back 2-3 places instead of the 4-5 of Mario Kart, which removes the frustration of making a mistake on the last lap. The levels are very well designed and visually sumptuous, the characters all have enchanting voiceovers and the commentary is amusing enough not to get too boring after repeated play throughs. Right, nice stuff out the way, on to the problems.
The racing is actually pretty boring, beginner difficulty seems to be for chimps but then again this game is aimed at children. The game does offer you a tutorial when you put the disc in and I’m glad it did, I wish Double-Dash had a similar feature because I remember being TERRIBLE at that when I first started. The grand-prix side of it is enjoyable enough, it’s just no Mario beater. The levels are pretty enough and it certainly takes a degree of skill but it lacks the “charm” of Mario Kart by trying to ram other franchises down your throat. It’s not the grand-prix segments you should be concentrating on though, the game comes alive in the missions. They’re a little repetitive but they let you play as every character before unlocking (like some of the Super Smash Bros Melee challenges) and are a good way to spice up the normal “race until your thumbs fall off” mantra of most battle-racers. If anything, it seems to be taking its cue from NFS Pro-Street with the campaign what with the drifting, boosting and timed challenges. There are also 2 battle challenges (the last mission being one of them) which don’t serve the game too well, they’re too vague and the graphical quality of the opponents is sadly lacking making for a less than enjoyable experience although the idea is good it becomes frustrating rather than fun.
I would compare this game, in a way, to Smash Bros rather than Mario Kart. I can’t really say why but it just makes me think of melee more, perhaps it’s the campaign mode and the unlockable features, but it just has that feel to it. The unlocking mechanic has nothing in common with either Mario Kart or SSBM. I don’t know whether to hate or love it actually. You accumulate “Sega Miles” by how well you do in terms of speed etc and these can be spent on characters, tracks and music. This sounds okay but since I completed the beginners grand prix all in one go (just so I didn’t look like a cocky prick jumping in at advanced) I could buy a good proportion of the characters straight off and then completed almost all of the missions and bought the other small percentage and a good deal of the tracks along with some of the music, rendering it a little useless. I understand that this is a children’s game, but surely unlocking through beating tracks or cups at certain difficulties would be better? Or perhaps after a certain number of Sega miles you could buy the chance to beat them in a race? I just found it all too easy and thus unlocked most of the achievements by accident meaning I could trade it in almost the next day (along with fucking Risen).
One of the stylistic complaints I want to make about this game concerns the weapons as (along with most of the game) they are mostly quite bland. Everyone’s special move is the Star from Mario Kart with a different animation which is both better and worse than the aforementioned game. When you released a signature move in Mario Kart it was usually something similar to a normal weapon but larger or more of them or stronger which was good fun and meant that although stars were still better and rarer, you had a slight advantage. The weapons don’t seem to tie into any of the games either, there’s a shield which is green and as far as I’m aware shields in Sonic are blue (I know there were fire and other shields in later Sonic games, but the blue one is most iconic), so even that feels as though it wasn’t from that game. The weapons are perfectly functional, and in some cases great fun but don’t “fit”, there’s no link between them and any of the games. There are no weapons from Billy Hatcher or any of the Sonic games specifically so I’m going to assume that this is the case for all the weapons (not having played Super Monkey Ball or Jet Set Radio Gaga or whatever it’s called) and this detracts from the integration, I’m glad that Sega didn’t go for a celebratory circle jerk with the weapons but that’s kind of why people are here and it leads to a very bland but functional playing experience.
The main problem with All-Stars is that there is no real variety to the actual levels. Everything is very pretty and there are obstacles but they’ve made a bizarre decision in having 3 levels per game series (selected games series I should say) and having them all around the same theme. Nothing sets this up more than the sonic levels of which there are 3 within 3. There are 3 levels set in seahill zone, 3 in final fortress and 3 in casino zone, all with pretty much the same features, all with pretty much the same layout and preferred kart types. Also, every level has 3 laps. No differentiation, just 3 laps. Some of the missions have 2 but every single level in grand prix is 3 laps. Double dash had some levels with 8 laps, some with 2 and this made for a slightly more interesting experience whereas All-Stars feels like a slog. The only time it does get interesting is on the FUCKING MONKEY BALL LEVELS! Designing the levels around kart-types is fair enough, but making it virtually impossible to get around the circuit without being that specific kart? Fuck off. It’s this sort of badly designed feature which makes All-Stars racing so fucking annoying on occasion, especially as one of the mission levels actually ASKS you to play through all 3 monkey ball levels… in a race… only one of which I can competently do and I’m no slouch at this game.
Actually, I want to bring this up. I understand that this is a children’s game first and foremost and that the beginner level is for them and that expert level is for people who don’t have brains but small super-computers with central processors equivalent to bugatti veyrons, but it quickly becomes very easy to do (apart from the Monkey Ball levels) and I’d hate to presume that it is any actual talent at the game considering I played the demo with friends and I sucked more arse than a german fetishist. When I say “I’m no slouch at this game”, I actually mean “I have thumbs, therefore I am no slouch at this game”.
Lastly, why the fuck does Sonic need a car? I know everyone has raised this point and I can kind of see why they did it because Sonic racing on his own would be unfair, but it doesn’t combat the fact it’s fucking moronic. Why aren’t there more Billy Hatcher characters? Billy Hatcher was great and even just a little more expansion would have been nice! I’ve tried to keep away from Mario Kart comparisons in this review and I’ve tried to keep away from slagging it off for being a copy and with good reason, this is better than Mario Kart Wii by a long shot but ultimately a little bland. It’s like a ham and cheese sandwich from a sandwich shop, it’s tasty enough and it’ll fill you up for a while but you’ll never say to yourself “this is one of the best sandwiches I’ve had in a long time”. If I was going to describe this game in one word that word would be “functional”, if I was going to describe it in more than one word it would be this review. I can only recommend this game if you WANT to buy it, that sounds like a pretty tautological statement but unless you are actually interested in it then this isn’t for you, and that’s the way it is.
I was chatting with some friends earlier today (Yeah, I do have some) and I said how bored I was with my games collection. I told my friends clearly what I wanted, “I want a game called “Generic Beat ‘Em Up”” or perhaps “Generic Shooter”. I almost went for Battlefield: Bad Company but had to abandon it lest the game try and smother me with its story that’s as weak, limp and lifeless as Ashley Cole was before him and Cheryl split up. It was during this conversation that I said “We should just have a series of games which are generic; no story, no cutscenes, just 4 cliché levels and cliché weapons.” Later on I had a little jaunt through some Yahtzee columns and saw that he said something pretty similar so being the enterprising chap that I am I thought that I would outline you my plans for Generic Shooter, Generic Beat ‘Em Up, Generic Fighter, Generic RTS and Generic Platformer. I shall go through their Setting, Gameplay and Design in order.
Generic Shooter:
Gameplay- Simple really; first-person perspective, health bar, radar and ammo on the HUD, lots of guns and some baddies with some boss-fights. I’d have the weapons embarrassingly cool too, pistols which shoot green lasers, automatic weapons which shoot blue lasers, lightning guns, flamethrowers, rocket launchers and the obligatory MASSIVE gun which would simply be called “Anne” and fantastically over-designed. I’d also have all the baddies with completely distinguishable characteristics; clawed melee specialists, weedy snipers, big brutes which categorically carry big guns and drop armour and Bosses which can be identified by looking like big versions of whatever specialist enemy is in that area. Doesn’t this sound great?
Setting- This, is easy. Temple, City, Snow, Desert, Tropical Island, Volcano and Sewer. It would be great fun.
Design- the more exploratory you make it the better, big open levels with plenty of places to climb and kill shit, lots of big spaces to throw grenades into and end to the level which is a lady and the better you do the more clothes she removes.
Generic Beat ‘Em Up:
Gameplay- You know the wireframes from Super Smash Bros Melee? Them, just 4 of them, and simply controlled mechanics. A for jump, X for punch, B for kick and Y for special, Right Trigger for grab. Simple, brutal, effective, fun.
Setting- This is easy too, shaolin temple, city, forest clearing, warehouse and somewhere stupid… um… top of a lorry. Yep, sorted.
Design- I’d probably have 2 male and 2 female characters. They would be Skinny Powerful Kid, Massive Tank Dude, Agile Teen in Mini-Skirt and Character Inevitably Called Agatha.
Generic Fighter:
Gameplay- You have a sword and plenty of combos, bonuses for racking up hits, floods of enemies, third person perspective lots of corridors and bosses with increasingly large weapons. Also, whenever you score a critical hit it goes to a mini-cutscene like in Assassin’s Creed.
Setting- large open environment filled with enemies.
Design- You know how this works, it’s Fable 2 without the pretention of a story but proper combos. Might include tits for good measure.
Generic RTS:
Gameplay- You have men, big men, scout vehicles, light tanks, heavy tanks, jets, scout boats, attack boats and floating gun platforms also plenty of stationary weapons.
Setting- Different planets. Moon, Ice planet, dust planet, weird planet, strange alien planet and industrial planet.
Design- Y’know Starship Troopers? That.
Generic Platformer:
This is actually a little trick one, testing to see if you’ve read this far (and if not, why not, you should have been laughing and agreeing with everything I’ve said). Buy the Mega Drive ultimate collection, go to Flicky. There. Play that. See if you DON’T get hooked. It’s got everything, simplicity, intriguing level design, collectibles, enemies and a clear goal. Also fun bonus rounds. Go on, off you go.
