Mean Machines

(Found in a rubbish bag in the rain. Lucky me!)

More Interesting Than Saucepans

I often see stuff left out on the pavement, sometimes with a "Free! Please take!" sign attached, its ink running as a result of being left out in the rain for days. Most of the time it tends to be a couple of saucepans, a grubby dish drying rack, and a bundle of baby clothes, but the other day I spotted something a bit more interesting poking out of a damp Sainsbury's bag.

The SNES itself had an ominous rattle but this turned out to be a non essential component and once everything had been dried out the console and the games proved to be in perfect working condition. It is clear that whoever left such treasure in the street is some kind of dangerous lunatic but I am grateful to them nonetheless.

Changing My Mind

Back during the original console wars, I was a Sega boy. This meant that I got to play Streets of Rage and Sonic the Hedgehog but it did also mean that I missed out on the classic role-playing games of the era. We got the Phantasy Star series and Shining Force but we didn't get Dragon Quest, or Breath of Fire, or the big one, the Final Fantasy series. It didn't help that even Nintendo owners only saw half of these games, if that, released in Europe.

With the release of the PlayStation and Final Fantasy VII Nintendo's dominance of the genre faded away, so it's somewhat ironic that the best rpg of recent years -- since Final Fantasy XII on the PS2, I'd say -- appeared on the Wii, which, as everyone knows isn't a proper console for proper gaming, no siree.

Monolith Soft and Nintendo delivered Xenoblade, a game that looked much better than Wii games are supposed to look and played much better than any rpg in years, despite some wonky menu navigation. It combined the best aspects of both online and offline rpgs and if it had come out on the other consoles too, it would be regarded as one of the best games -- rpg or not -- of the current console generation.

Yes, I do mean to suggest that it's better than Skyrim, and it looks like there's a follow-up on the way:



I wasn't going to get a WiiU, but Nintendo may have just changed my mind.

Xenobonus

I ordered the new Wii rpg Xenoblade Chronicles, but I decided I wouldn't start playing it until I'd cleared at least one game from my current backlog. I've been near the end of Final Fantasy XII for a while, but I've been reluctant to go for the final push until I'd mopped up some of the subquests and side missions. As of today, I've done that, so I cracked open the Xenoblade box.

Hang on, what's that little flash of blue there under the clip that holds the manual?

Well, that's unexpected:

It's not much, but giving away a little freebie like that is a nice touch. Well done, Nintendo.

Bloody

Games Workshop's Warhammer is a juggernaut of a franchise. Its runaway success has changed the company from a single hobby shop in Hammersmith to an international corporation, and the game has expanded beyond the tabletop into board games, role-playing games, video games, MMORPGs, novels, comics, and even, in the latter stages of 2010, a straight-to-dvd film, although reviews haven't been too good on that last one.

Warhammer is the company's core product, but there's also a horde of lesser games, lost to the mists of time and commanding high prices on eBay, stuff like Chainsaw Warrior and Lost Patrol. Somewhere in between is a middle tier of games that have never been huge money-spinners, but have remained popular enough to remain in production, on and off, throughout the company's life. Blood Bowl is one of these, a Warhammer-ised version of American football, with orcs and goblins beating seven shades out of dwarves and elves, and with maybe a touchdown or two thrown in. In the game, players take it in turns to advance their teams up the pitch, seize the ball, and through applied brutality, agile footwork, or dead-eye accuracy, attempt to get the ball into the end zone to score. Their chances of doing so are modified by their teams' skills and statistics as well as a significant amount of luck, as generated by the rolling of dice.

In 2009, Blood Bowl was released to a number of video game platforms, including this DS version. It lacks the 3D environment of the PC and console releases, opting for a isometric viewpoint; while some may view this as a negative, and it does at first glance seem like a retrograde move back to the 16-bit era and a waste of the DS' capabilities, the viewpoint works in the game's favour, allowing for a wider field -- pun intended -- of vision, as befits what is, after all, a game of strategy.

Similarly, the lack of a real-time mode turns out to be a missing feature which is not missed, as the end result is something which is more or less a straight translation of the board game into electronic form. The original board game is strong enough that 3D graphics and arcade-style gameplay are not improvements but unnecessary distractions, and for whatever reason they were removed from the DS edition, it has resulted in a better game. The fidelity to the source material also means that those players who want a quick game of Blood Bowl, but can't find an opponent or don't have the space to set up the board, can instead whip out the DS and indulge. There is also a rudimentary local multiplayer option, as well as a "hot seat" mode, which may be a misnomer on a portable system.

All that said, some features are indeed missed, such as the wilder players and options some of the teams bring along with them, and while eight types of team are included it is disappointing that evocative races such as the dark elves and undead have been overlooked. It is possible however that only those familiar with the original game will miss these bells and whistles, as the core gameplay offers plenty of complexity to keep strategic thinkers happy. On the other hand, those same strategic thinkers may not be quite as happy with the difficulty of the game; while the single-player mode will prove a challenge due to an aggressive CPU, the AI does on occasion seem to engage in some wild and hare-brained schemes, such as sending players to the far corners of the pitch to await passes which are never likely to come, or withdrawing strong blockers from the front lines, and so on.

The game benefits from good graphics, with good designs and smooth animation, although it would have been nice to have some variation in how the players moved. There are some neat cut scenes during the game, with the referee stepping in to conduct the opening coin toss and adjudicate fouls, and so on, and there are is a brief appearance from the game's commentators, familiar to those who have played the board game. Perhaps the most important cut scene of all is that which plays when a touchdown is scored, and alas this is the most disappointing, with dodgy-looking cheerleaders and no variation in the animation at all; it would have been a neat touch to have included burly orc cheerleaders, ethereal elven cheerleaders, bearded dwarven cheerleaders, and so on. The game also lacks much in the way of music, with only one or two tunes in evidence, although perhaps a wise move to shun in-game music, which could have become annoying with individual matches taking up to an hour to play.

This lack of polish can sometimes be an annoyance, but the game survives. There are some glitches in the code that may prove to be a more fatal issue. Outside a match, the game can sometimes take a long time to move between screens, which could be put down to loading times were it not for the simple fact that Blood Bowl is a cartridge-based title. At times, the game can lock up during these pauses, necessitating a restart and the subsequent loss of data, most annoying during a league game where a team has built up money and experience over a season. Other editions have been fixed by updates, and a new version of the game was released in 2010, but neither have made it to the DS alas.

All in all, Blood Bowl on the DS is a very basic game, and the lack of features and polish can be a bit disappointing at times. That said, the core gameplay is strong, a faithful adaptation of a great board game and at the end of the day, it's the gameplay that matters most.

More Mario!

We've been playing a lot of Mario Kart Wii of late at Brainsplurge Towers; we've had it about a year now, and it's still great fun. In fact, it's pretty much the only video game Meg actively enjoys playing, and she rattled through a bunch of the time trials the other night, unlocking stuff I couldn't even get near in all the time we've had it. I'm astounded at how much play this thing has still got in it, but it could still have a lot more. I've been playing a bit of Guitar Hero World Tour on and off, and it got me thinking about downloadable content. Such content is pretty common on computers and other consoles, but it's still a bit rare on the Wii, although GHWT does its best to mimic the service available on the "grown up" consoles, with most of the same songs available for download.

It occurs to me that, with at least five games' worth of tracks in the franchise history, Nintendo could quite easily offer Mario Kart circuits for download. The Wii edition already has a number of older tracks, so we know they can be updated. It seems like an obvious move to me, and something which would extend the life of the game even further. I doubt anything of this sort would happen, and it's not like Nintendo executives are reading my ramblings, but I had to get this frustration off my chest, and that's what blogs are for after all.

If you ever do want a race, our Wii Code is 7714 7295 2393 7107, and our Mario Kart Wii friend code is 3093 9646 0225.

Mister Blobby

A few years ago, I'd almost given up on video games. The whole industry seemed to have devolved into an absurd graphics arms race, and gameplay didn't so much take a back seat, but got forced to the back of the bus to that manky seat with all the dried chewing gum and bogeys stuck to it. Every game seemed to be a World War II first person shooter, a Japanese-style role-playing game, or a sports title. A tiny number of genres dominated, as the big publishing companies saw what was popular and pumped out more of the same. This has always been a problem in the industry, as all the beat-em-ups and scrolling shooters in the 16-bit era prove, but as games got more elaborate, we saw the disappearance of those bedroom programmers who just had an idea for a fun gameplay mechanic and built an entire title around it, whether or not it would sell.

And then came Katamari Damacy. Presentation aside, it could easily have been a £2.99 Commodore 64 release. It's got a unique central mechanic, and the rest of the game is there to serve and embellish that. It's a game for gaming's sake, and I loved it to bits. I bought the sequel, and loved that too. Then came the Wii, and Nintendo's new approach of "sod the graphics, let's make games fun again" and after almost putting video games away forever, I'm back in. I was waiting for Katamari Wii; the philosophies match up, and anyone who's played the rolling ball levels on Super Mario Galaxy knows that the game could work well on Wii, but it was not to be. Instead the Firebomb360 got a half-hearted sequel and Wii owners got nothing.

Until de Blob. It's definitely a post-Katamari game, and probably wouldn't exist without that title; they look very similar, and have the same sort of almost-therapeutic feel to the play. The purity of the game's philosophy is also similar; while there's a token plot*, it's all about the fun of the mechanics, of just playing the game for its own sake. It's not a clone of the earlier title, however; the central mechanic is quite different, based on colour rather than mass, and with the ideas of colour mixing, patterns, and combinations thrown in, it's even a bit more complex than Katamari, although just as intuitive in its own way. The control scheme is by necessity different to the earlier game, and doesn't borrow from Super Mario Galaxy either, presenting a new take which works well and makes good use of the Wii's unique controls.



The graphics aren't groundbreaking, but that's not the point, and the central conceit of painting colours back into a grey world works very well. The music isn't as manic and varied as the wonderful Katamari tunes, but it is a good fit for the game, and quite cleverly associates different sounds with different colours, making the soundtrack somewhat interactive, as (for example) the doo-wops accompanying de Blob as he (literally) paints the town red give way to some freestyle scratching if he turns brown and starts daubing things in that colour.

(As an aside, I'm not sure if there's not something slightly racist about associating the colour brown with "urban" sounds, but perhaps I'm reading too much into it.)

It's not as refreshing as Katamari, but de Blob is nonetheless a very welcome reminder of games-as-games, which is surely why we play these things in the first place, and is a good fun game in its own right. There's lots of replay value in the various unlockable levels and secondary play modes, and it looks to have a decent multiplayer mode, something the Katamari series lacked. All in all, it's a very solid title, and a worthwhile purchase for any Wii owner.

*There is a political edge to the plot, with much talk of revolutionaries and an oppressive police state, and the central conceit of graffiti as a form of protest. There's no real depth to it, but unlike Katamari, the plot is at least about something.

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In other news, I started my new job this past Monday. It's not that different to my old job, and it's in the same office, and technically it's a promotion, but I had to apply and interview for it, so it's all a bit strange and unusual.

In No Particular Order

I'm a bit behind here, but Pro Evolution Soccer on Wii is the best footie game since Sensi. Since the death of that venerable franchise, I'd basically been making do with the playable but dull FIFA and had been avoiding the Pro Evo series for no good reason; particularly foolish given the consistently good reviews bestowed upon the franchise. The clever new control system of the Wii version got a lot of attention, but still I resisted, until it was forced under the tree at Chrimble. It turns out to be quite brilliant. It plays completely differently to any footie game I've ever seen (but doesn't have to; it can be played in a bog-standard Fifa way if you want, but you're missing out) in the sense that you really do control an entire team rather than just one player. In the majority of these games, you have to rely on the AI to back you up when you go for a run, or try to put a cross into the box, but in Pro Wiivo, you can move any team member into any position on the field, make them move where you want, and so on, and it's nothing short of revolutionary. What Konami have done, essentially, is take the environment of a real time strategy game like Command & Conquer and slap it onto football, and it works wonderfully. And at £13 from Amazon (likely cheaper elsewhere too), it's also a bargain. I'm not very good at it as yet, but I'd be up for an online match; my Wii number is 7714 7295 2393 7107.

ITV are trumpeting their snagging of the FA Cup broadcast rights with plenty of billboard advertising. It's all macho nonsense based around an "in the FA Cup, all men are equal" tagline, and one of the posters shows a fireman competing with a Manchester United player for a header; it's a clear reference to the previous round where a postman knocked the once-mighty Leeds United out of the contest, but the unfortunate implication of the advert is that a man who every day risks his life to save the lives of others is somehow not as worthy as a bloke who's paid millions to run around a field for an hour and a half once a week. Nice work, ITV. Classy.

I have a beard. I had an ill-advised facial growth back in Sixth Form, but it looked like a tuft of ginger pubes and was quite the embarrassment, and I swore never to repeat that mistake, and yet... Back around Chrimble '07, a colleague grew a superb beard, a full-on North Sea fisherman thing, but his missus not-so-subtly suggested that he get rid of it by buying him a shaver as a gift. I detected the beginnings of new winter plumage sometime in November and urged him to keep it this year, pledging that I too would grow a Christmas Beard in support. Meg hated the idea at first, but now has become quite taken with my hirsuteness, and won't let me shave it off. Combine that with the fact that I haven't had a haircut in two months, and I'm starting to look like a feral Geography teacher.

Vimanarama is great fun, and probably the last decent thing Grant Morrison did. It's also the only known instance where a Wikipedia page quotes me. Meanwhile, Brandon Graham ad Corey Lewis are geniuses, even if the former is borrowing liberally from Mitz. Graham's King City is particularly inspirational, and I can't wait to see the second volume; I may give his werewolf porn comic a miss though.

And I was rooting for Paterson Joseph, but this fellow has a definite sense of the eccentric about him, so I think he could work. After all, I thought David Tennant was too young when they announced him, and he turned out okay. Incoming showrunner Steven Moffat's favourite Doctor was Peter Davison, again a youngster at the time, and he seems to have a good idea of how to make the young-but-impossibly-old thing work. All that said, I am a tiny bit worried that the producers will try to twist the show to make it more youth-friendly, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Crime and Punishment

Super Smash Brothers Brawl is brilliant. I knew it would be.

For those who might be interested, my Friend Code for the game is 0388 0323 8824, and my Wii Code is 7714 7295 2393 7107.

I've yet to unlock Sonic the Hedgehog, so I can make that mid-90's Sega versus Nintendo rivalry come to life, but I'll get there. I've waited long enough, after all; the game came out in Japan and the US circa 1758, and when it was finally released here last week, my copy was delivered to Meg's workplace and was then promptly stolen. The building CCTV caught the thief, who turned out to be someone from one of the other firms in the complex; the police have closed the case, however, deciding that there isn't enough evidence. That's despite the following in the footage:

Two people walk by the mailbox. Both can confirm the game was there.
Someone walks up to the mailbox, puts something in her bag, and leaves.
The earlier two people return and can confirm that the game was gone.

However, since the camera is at slightly the wrong angle, you can't see what exactly that third person puts in her bag, so the police have decided that they can't press the case. On the plus side, the building owners refunded the cost of the game, since it was stolen on company property.

This week's post also brought a copy of Rol Hirst's PJANG!, and this was thankfully not stolen. I haven't looked back on the art I provided since I finished it, and seeing it now makes me cringe a bit, but that's pretty common for me. I've heard that such a reaction is healthy, because it means you're aware of the faults in your work, and that's a first step to improvement. I hope so. The other two stories are illustrated by Tony McGee and Andrew Cheverton; I'm a huge fan of Tony's work (I thoroughly recommend Angel Nebula, in particular), but I have to say that Chev's strip is my favourite here. Part of that is down to the writing; it's the best of the three stories by far, a sort of revenge thriller with a creepy, almost Clive Barkerish, twist. Chev's art is what really grabbed me, though; I've not seen his artwork in print before, so I don't know if he usually goes for the Mike McMahon-esque style he uses here, but it's a striking approach and fits the unsettling tone of the story quite well.

Tony's work is good too, of course, and the writing in all three stories is as strong as I expect from Rol, but that one story is really good stuff, and easily worth the (very reasonable) £1.75 cover price. Sir Nigel of Lowrey disappoints by only providing a cover, but it's a great one, so I can't complain too much. And thanks for the Death's Head cameo, Nige!

Healthy Sales

I've never been much of a fan of the Grand Theft Auto games. I've enjoyed the freeform elements, but the plots are rubbish, so I've often spent more time trying to jump from one skyscraper to another on a moped than I have in beating up Generic Thug 1 because Generic Thug 2 said so, and there are only so many hours one can waste doing that. However, like Halo, the mediocrity of the GTA series hasn't stopped a huge fanbase developing around the game. People are very excited about GTA IV, so I was quite surprised to see that all the shops still have massive stacks of copies, but can I find a single copy of Wii Fit in all of Brighton?

The Wii, you'll remember, is Nintendo's vanity project, which will never be successful because teh grafx r suxxor5!

I'd be interested to know what the ratio of order to sales have been on the two titles, because despite my ambivalence towards the series, GTA IV should be selling shedloads. I can only assume that the shops all massively over-ordered GTA, and perhaps under-ordered Wii Fit, thinking it wouldn't catch on.

Too Hot ta Trot

I'm geeking it up again at the Virtual Console Archive, this time with a feature article on the mighty Commodore 64.

So that's comics and video games; to complete the set, I suppose I'd best start writing about the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons or something...

Heavy Metal Thunder

A lot of my fondest video gaming memories involve not the games themselves, but their soundtracks. The Amiga in particular had some great music ; Chaos Engine and Stardust are classics, and I remember playing through Lemmings mainly for the tunes.

I never had a PC Engine, as they were about as abundant as unicorn tears in Britain; in fact I never even saw one until very recently when one turned up in the window of GameStation. So I missed out on a whole system's worth of games, which I'm slowly catching up with on the Wii's Virtual Console.

I just downloaded Lords of Thunder, which like many PCE titles, is a shoot 'em up. Not one of my favourite game genres, to be honest, as I lack the inhumanly quick reactions needed to be any good at them, but Lords of Thunder is still worth playing, if only because of the absurdly over the top power metal soundtrack. Really, I've heard nothing like it before; it's as if DragonForce have set up shop inside the Wii and are rocking out like the galaxy itself depends on it.

It's sheer silly big-haired guitar-wielding brilliance:



Genius. How the guys at ocremix haven't been all over this game yet, I don't know.

Too Hip to be Square

They let me in again. I've just had another article published at the Wii Virtual Console Archive; this one's about finding alternatives to the big role-playing game franchises like Final Fantasy.

Am I a video game journalist now?

Horizon Broadening

I've written an article! One about something other than about comics! But I haven't strayed too far from my usual path, as games we hope never get released on the Virtual Console is typically mean-spirited and grumpy, even if the subject matter is a bit different.

Overboard

I really like the Wii's Virtual Console feature, where you can download old games and play them on your new shiny bit of kit. There are a lot of features I'd like to see added, however, and one of those is board game support. I quite like the idea of firing up an online game of Scrabble, Settlers of Catan, or Risk, or, as has just been announced, Talisman. Stuff like this is available on X-Box and the Playstation Network, and the technology is already in place on the Wii, so let's have it, Nintendo!

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!

And just like that, all my spare time disappears.

Twilight Princess is fantastic. Have a look at this sequence, which almost made me wet myself with geeky delight:


Our Wii's Friend Code, should any of you want it, is: 7714 7295 2393 7107

Clumsy Westerners Need Not Apply

"Nintendo surprised many by unveiling a new version of its best- selling GameBoy, called the GameBoy Micro, due to go on sale in the autumn.
The tiny game player is just slightly bigger than an iPod Mini, but two-thirds the weight."

Good to see that Nintendo are going for the hitherto-ignored market of video games for really tiny people...

The new X-Brick is even uglier than its predecessor, and has the wrong name (wouldn't "Next-Box" have been much better than the surreal "X-Box360"?), and I'm undecided about the look of Sony's new machine, but it promises to be backwards compatible with both previous incarnations of the hardware, and that's enough to sell me on it.