Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of this blog. It is also the day it closes down. I set out to chronicle my misadventures with a game system with which I was reunited after more than a decade, what I ended up doing was realizing that such a commitment requires way more time, money and effort than I'd like to expend.

So it is with little fanfare that we close shop today. Simply stated the passion wasn't there. I realized that I'm not that big a fan of video games to begin with and trying to find two or three things to write about per week is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. Some months were easier than others, shit just came to me, but other months (especially the most recent ones) the days without a post simply piled on and I had nothing to end the droughts with.

See the real money, fame and so forth is in niche blogs. All of these chicks with douchebags, stop making that duckface and other blogs are what its all about. This thing was simply too broad, too ambitious and most often than not too neglected.

It was fun at times. I'm proud of some of these posts, I'm embarrassed at some others and I'm indifferent to most of them. I won't delete the blog because theres no reason to, this is here and its an insight into my mind circa 2009-2010. Just as the former blog (that I deleted) was an insight into my head circa 2003 to 2008. It was a darker time to be sure.

Anyways this is it, it was fun.

Giana Sisters

Giana Sisters was originally a game for the Commodore or TurboGrafx or some other old gaming system which tried very hard to be Mario Brothers. To this end you control a blond girl who walks around hitting blocks, jumping on pipes and eliminating baddies by (you guessed it) jumping on them. Some of the blocks gave you the ability to transform into a red haired version of the girl with the ability to shoot fireballs. In other words its exactly like Mario.

In 2010 the game makes a comeback on another platform: the iPhone. The graphics have been updated, made much prettier actually. While the original game appears to feature grungy women from New Jersey the new sisters are younger, hipper and cuter. They look like little vinyl figurines. And even though its still largely a Mario clone this isn't such a negative thing seeing as how the platform will never see a legitimate Mario game. It's a healthy alternative, I'm not sure how ethical it is but its better than nothing.

Gameplay feels like Mario with the fireballs, jumping, tubes and whatnot. Graphics are pretty, its colourful, you collect jewels instead of coins, you jump through obstacles and face bosses who live in castles. There's lots to like and its varied enough (80+ levels) that you don't get either easily bored or beat it too quickly.

But it also has some problems. The main one is the buttons, because you're not physically touching buttons but rather a flat screen it is often difficult to determine how far a jump will take you, when you're supposed to jump and, worst of all, where the location of the buttons is so you often end up pressing a part of the screen with the wrong command or nothing in it. You lose all instinctive commands and you end up looking at the screen in order to not miss an input, have you ever looked at your hands to make sure youre pressing the fire trigger on an xbox controller when playing MW2? 'course not.

To be fair, however, this problem is not exclusive to this game, most of my bitching about iPhone games is largely because of their non physical buttons. One could safely assume, then, that the whole not having buttons thing does adversely affect iPhone games but apple was not about to sacrifice style for playability so the decision was made to go buttonless. Yes the iPhone is slick as fuck but the question has to be asked again whether its a true gaming platform or not.

Getting back to the actual game: what can I say? its fun. Sure it gets excruciatingly frustrating at times but thats how these things are. A little difficulty never hurt anybody. A solid two basilisks out of three.

Gone for Spring Break

Yes I'm gone for a week. I'll be back next Sunday. In the mean time here's an old ad for Battletoads.

KOF 13: Here We Go Again

King of Fighters XIII was announced a few weeks ago and today SNK released the first of what promise to be tons and tons of screens. They made a point of featuring Mai and her jugs first and foremost too as if to say "look fanboys we know we screwed up but please accept our apologies, in the form of Mai's jugs".

Will the inclusion of Mai make everybody forget that KOF 12 was essentially a very good looking piece of mediocrity? umm probably not but the inclusion of King and Yuri will probably do the trick. Actually no, we'll have to wait until we see actual gameplay and some improvements in both the main arcade/story mode and online gameplay.

Lets face it, SNK, Capcom has all but eaten your lunch when it comes to retro goodness both in terms of profiting from nostalgia and delivering a great gaming experience. You still have your great looking revamped 2D sprites to fall back on but with BlazBlue and Guilty Gear cornering that market its hard to figure out where exactly it is that you belong.

I, of course, want to believe that this will be a return to form for SNK and I'm a sucker for great artwork so I'll give this a try. That is, of course, if the reviews dont bury it before it arrives.

By the way you know what else I appreciate SNK? stuff. How about including some tangible extras in a special edition? hell how about including some extras in the regular edition just as a way of asking for forgiveness. Give us stuff, SNK, and I assure you we will forgive you. Give us a good game and I assure you you'll become relevant once again.

Pricing Schemes

Since I posted that entry about Infinity Ward's upcoming "Stimulus Package" map pack I've had a chance to not only think about the whole thing but actually learn the price that this stimulus will cost us. Turns out the price will be 1200 Microsoft Points which translates into $15 American and about 15,000 Schrute Bucks.

That's a whole lot of Schrute bucks.

Yes this price sucks, yes its double that of the map packages that were available for the first Modern Warfare and yes out of the five included maps two are actually old maps from that first MW title.

In effect what Infinity Ward, or more accurately Activision, is doing is stealing from its rabid base. Fifteen dollars is too much money for any add-on, regardless of how many hours us players and them creators have invested in the game. Fifteen dollars is 25% of the cost of the friggin game despite the fact that you're not getting 25% more game.

The problem is that Activision does in fact hold a monopoly on the add-ons and expansions for this game. As such they, like the East India Company and AT&T before them, have the ability to charge whatever the fuck they want for their product. I'm not saying this is fair, quite the opposite actually, but I'm saying this is a fact. It's an unfortunate side effect of the online stores and the add-ons market as a whole.

I don't have a problem with paying for extra content but I do have a problem with being gouged for extra content and this is exactly what's occurring here. Actually I'm surprised this sort of thing didn't occur earlier. It seems like at some point we all agreed how much a bonus costume, a bonus stage, an actual game should cost and have been living with these costs ever since. Now Activision realizes that we'll pay just about anything and goes ahead and doubles their prices.

This might be the final stand for the Modern Warfare franchise too. Not because its fans will suddenly feel robbed and stop playing the game but because of the entire fiasco that was the firing of Infinity Ward's head developers. The Modern Warfare franchise will live on but will it really if the games are being created by someone else? I know that Call of Duty games have been developed by all sorts of different companies but this is no longer Call of Duty, this is a whole new beast, one that has far surpassed the original and one who's fanbase will only take so many slaps to the face. This pricing scheme was the second one, we'll see how many more they dish out.

Minimum Carnage

I have to admit I thought of that title before even thinking of this entry. Minimum Carnage. Har har.

Maximum Carnage is a game for the SNES that came out in the mid 90's. As such, and like the JLA game we reviewed not too long ago, it offers a foray into the world of superheroes as envisioned in that horrifying decade. Namely big muscles, big explosions, misogyny and Rob Liefeld.

The game is based off the eponymous comic book event Marvel published in 1993 which saw Spider Man teaming up with the quintessential 90's anti-hero: Venom to destroy a much meaner version of Venom, if you will, the red gooey whatsit known as Carnage. I've never actually read this thing but I imagined that what ensued was full of testosterone and machismo.

To say that this game sucks would be unfair. It is, after all, a product of its time and even though its primary objective was to cash in on the successful comic book it does offer yet another version of the 3/4 beat-em-up. And as a member of such a fraternity it is fairly indistinguishable from the Double Dragon's and Turtles in Time's of its day. The graphics are good enough, as one would expect this is a colorful world with characters that take up a good chunk of the screen, and fighting moves that are on par with the fighters and beat em ups of the time.

But the drawbacks are too many to make this game worthwhile. The baddies are as repetitive as you would expect, you basically fight through New York beating up what appear to be old homeless men, punk teenagers and women. Yep Spider Man beats up on women in this one. When you reach the end of a level you fight a boss who is usually someone from Spider Man's rogue gallery. In the end, I assume, you take on Carnage himself.

The game is also unbelievably cheap. The lesser thugs will gang up on you and kick your ass solely because they have a numbers advantage. Yes you can eliminate these guys easily enough but not when you're punching one and another one decides to drop kick you from behind. The odd thing is this is labeled as a Spider Man-Venom game but its not two player, instead you have the ability (in some stages) to use Venom but for the most part its just you and Spidey. Had they made this a two player game the action would be much less frustrating. As it stands there are limited heals, you only get three lives and just one continue.

In later stages you can get some help from other superheroes but their help is limited and you actually have to get to these stages with your three lives and one continue. It's frustrating, its not worth the time and effort and it looks like they tried to sell this thing solely on the basis of its cartridge being red. Yes the cartridge is kickass but the gaming is the equivalent of being stabbed in the eye with a pencil.

Some Randoms

This last week's been pretty bad: sick, work, no access to the SNES. So this has led to a slowing of the updates. There are some news to report:

-Hakan has been officially unveiled for Super Street Fighter IV.
-This weekend was free play for Xbox silver members on Modern Warfare.
-And well actually that's it.

Fortunately I do keep a stash of shit to post for when situations like this come around, namely links to stupid articles that I star on my Google reader. Here are two such articles dealing with video games in real life.

On Buzzfeed.
On Cracked.

Loser of the Week - Photobucket, I like you, I do, you're an integral part of this blog, fuck you're the the fifth Beatle of this blog! but honestly you're not Flickr, you're not Tumblr so please stop trying to be like them. I don't want to catalog and tag my images, at least not with you. So please when I upload something limit yourself to just fucking giving me a link that I can quickly copy and paste. Ok? thanks! bye.