MonkeyWrench

I was browsing around for some old PC DOS games last night and noticed how many of the sites were named Retro-something, and this reminded me of something Steven Poole mentioned in his book Trigger Happy - why do we call old games retro? Whilst the use of the term is correct, he comments that we don't use retro to describe any other media. We don't call Dante's Inferno retro, or Citizen Killzone Kane, or the Beatle's White album. To be fair these are all classics within their medium, but examples that aren't widely regarded as classics are still not referred to as retro. More often than not we refer to them by the decade they were released, especially film and music, so maybe the gaming industry is just too young....I dunno. Anyway, whilst I was looking around for Poole's site I found that he did a documentary for the BBC which is available here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8221616346838822371&hl=en Not watched it yet, but I noticed Molyneux making an appearence in the 5 seconds so it must be good!

Well spotted! Making fun of typos is right up there with sarcasm

They're for Rock Band 2. Anyway, having already played Rock Band quite a bit with friends I fired up Guitar Hero World Tour for the first time since buying it. What surprised me was how simple it felt compared to Rock Band when playing both on hard, it almost felt like a kids version of the game. You just have to do a like-for-like song comparison to see how much more effort Harmonix put into the note patterns. Not only that the mixing is terrible too. It definitely shows that Neversoft aren't a company made of musicians. So this got me thinking about the various band-branded versions of Guitar Hero that Activision are banging out this year, and how they compare to the upcoming Beatles game. Where as the Acti games are blatant cash-ins which could have easily been released as simple DLC, I believe the love that Harmonix shows in the crafting of each song will really make this Beatles game something special. It'll be a magical mystery tour! I went on a mad spending spree in the Rock Band store the other day in preparation for a weekend away with friends. Last time I bought something from the store was before Christmas last year, so I was surprised at the amount of stuff released since. Ended up spending over £30 on tracks! I was giddy with excitement at the likes of James Brown, Stone Roses, Von Bondies, Kasabian...the list goes on. Like Chris mentioned the spread of tracks is crazy, who would have imagined you could play along with a selection of tracks from Sponge Bob Squarepants? Fucking brilliant stuff!

Or even worse "Golden Oldies". I can just imagine cheap-o complilations boxsets that can only be bought from infomercials.

I admit I prefer the more structured event of the Crash mode, but I wouldn't say Showtime was nothing like it. The basic premise is the same - crash a car and rack up damage costs. Beyond the scoring elements the only real differences is there's no run up and the traffic is completely random.

Have a look into Showtime mode, that's the closest thing BP has to a crash mode.

I've watched a few top tier matches with players using Vega and he's absolutely lethal in the right hands. The characters are definitely a lot more equal than they have been in previous games. Anyway, on search around to get tips on getting past some of the brickwall challenges I read something quite interesting that will help me no end - you can queue moves up out of order. One of Ken's challenges involves pulling off HK into Hadonken, but instead of doing HK QCF+P as you would expect, you can perform the QCF then press HK followed immediately P.

Everytime I see this I am reminded of Geoff Crammond's Sentinel.

Nice work! I've hit a wall on most of the characters trials. It annoys me you can't skip levels, there's a whole host of combos and moves I'll never get to learn because of the timing of some bastard combo I can't master.

I don't know, it just all seems a bit pie in the sky to me and my first thought was that this will end up being another Phantom. The concept is great, and it probably works well in their tests, but I just don't think it'll handle well out in the real world.

Yeah it definitely lacking some basic user direction, the whole inventory section stands out in my mind. Some areas indicate that the B buttons take you back, other don't. Not to go on about the controls too much, but why the hell do I need to hold a button down and press another to perform a knife attack? Anyway, it's amazing how much easier it is when your partner isn't trying to perforate your head. I made it past that first section without any problems. Currently up to chapter 1-3, I'm kind of enjoying it, but it's definitely not the massive achievement it could have been if they had reworked the series.

Ahh, for some reason I thought that setting was about her going in for melee attacks on the tougher zombies when you're not close enough. I'll restart it tonight and see how I get on. Cheers! Still, a fucking stupid solution for such stupid AI.

Fired this up for the first time last night and having struggled with the controls in the demo I decided to start off on the lowest difficulty and just go along for the ride. Everything was dandy up until the executioner encounter from the demo. I thought I was going to breeze through it as I was primed from my experiences with the demo, but oh no...got badly zombie bummed 5 times before I turned it off in disgust...I feel so ashamed! What is with the friendly AI? I had made sure we had an even spread of ammo, but that stupid bitch decided to unload all her ammo in the back of my skull whilst I was trying to slash some zombies, and then had the cheek to moan about being out of ammo. Surely the coders could have put something in like "if player is in line of sight, find better position", it seems such an amatuer error. But hey, it looks frickin' nice (despite the worst screen tearing I've seen this gen). I'll give it another crack tonight.

Wonder if they're going mix the pre-stereo stuff. It'll be weird to have a game where bass and drums through one speaker and vocals and guitar through the other, and even weirder if they mixed it with them being such well known songs.

I found the stealth to be fine. When shooting from the shadow of a tree I'd find they would just run around panicked with no idea where the shot came from. You can only really get away with shooting in the daylight if you have the camo outfit and a silenced weapon.

I still have flashbacks of psychokinetic lab monkeys! I also remember that being the first game to make use of my A3D sound card.

Dammit....beat me to it! mm-mh.

I'm sure I heard the word "breasts" a few times?

Bugs in a Ubisoft game? Now there's a first... Although you don't need anyone at the gun shop to buy guns, you just sit down at the PC. The only time the gun shop will be manned is when there's a mission to do.

With the recent talk of sci-fi shooters/space-sims on the last podcast I was left lamenting the decline of a much loved genre. However, yesterday I logged on to PSN and was presented with a banner for a game called No Gravity. My first thought it was just going to be another twin-stick shooter, but I was curious, so I asked the internets and to my surprise it was a space shooter. If I didn't have such a void in my life for that type of game I probably wouldn't have picked it up, but I slapped down some virtual sterling and downloaded it. I played through the first few missions last night and it's not bad. Reminds me a lot of Blast Radius by Psygnosis, a pure no-frills arcade shooter. I would have preferred something with a little more depth, maybe a bit of space trading, but as it stands it's an enjoyable little shooter. The description of it from the developers site is unintentially funny: A space shooter in which you fly a spaceship?! There's a trailer for it here: http://www.gametrailers.com/player/37713.html

I also found that surprising, plus the fact GTAIV didn't pick up anything.

Funny you should say it comes across as shareware as it was originally a freeware PC/Mac game. Good points. Another thing that is a bit of a pain is when you boost the colours over saturate and it completely obscures your targetting reticule.

In this Kotaku podcast with Seth Killian he mentions some of these things: http://kotaku.com/5165282/kotaku-podcast-street-fighter-iv-with-seth-killian The reason there's no blind select is because it's not the Japanese way (yeah lets not consider this game might actually sell more copies in the west eh?), he also skirts around the lobby question.

Hard to say, adapters can cause a bit of lag, but it could be your kung-fu is weak. On the subject of SF4. I've been getting increasingly frustrated with it just recently. I went through a phase of holding my own and now my win ratio is below 50%. On top of all the usual Ken and Ryu's I'm finding that more and more people are using Akuma as they're unlocking him and just completely spam you with fireballs. Also what's with the lack of a lobby that allows multiple users? The whole "winner stays on" thing is fundamental to the coin-op experience, so it's strange they didn't include it, especially as it features in the HD remix. I'm not sure how big of a hit on network traffic it would cause having a room of 6 people watching match.

I heard about this guy on the Gamers With Jobs podcast, but totally forgot to check it out. I really like the Zelda and Castle of Illusion ones.