Challenge me Angel!

Challenge me angel ?? :-S

Do you really want to mess with me punk? Well, do ya?

Despite how I describe myself as being a fiero-seeking nutjob sometimes the challenge just seems too much, or too far away from my core interest in a game, even for me. For example, as part of my practice for Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, I’ve watched youtube videos of the best players in the world fighting with DeeJay & read about them and even from them on forums like shoryuken. And I see and read about things that I just can’t seem to do reliably, no matter how much I try. The biggest stumbling block for me is the execution of combos & blockstrings, which whilst not always that important to SF2, can be in certain matches for DeeJay. It’s a bit like how I’d describe watching any match of Street Fighter 4 in some ways [link to the future here ^_^], in that the best DeeJay players always hit that huge combo in that one chance they get to land it in a match, or can repeat a blockstring over and over if it’s effective to do so. It’s pretty much the opposite to me, as I have to play around the fact I will more than likely miss a big combo if only given a single attempt and a small opening to get it – and I actually quite deliberately work around this weakness in my play style and strategy in some ways. However it definitely limits my ability to play at a really high level – and with blockstrings it’s much worse than just missing a combo. In matchups where I need them a lot – eg. vs Dictator, I struggle with the whole matchup and am generally a lot worse because of it. Despite hours and hours spent in training mode on combos & stringing moves together, whereas I can at least do every combo in SF2 with my chosen character (unlike many other fighting games!), it always seems forever out of my grasp to become consistent at them. Now having this never attainably execution plateau is sometimes inspiring, but equally sometimes I wonder; what’s the point? What’s the point of learning every setup and situation & mindgame (which I find amazing fun, because it’s interactive & opponent dependant, not rote-learning of facts; like a map or course layout), when I get into the perfect situation I want to be in – I miss the exact move or combo I’ve just spent the whole round setting up.

I sometimes wonder if I ought to attempt to find the character in a fighting game that requires “the least physical dexterity to use”. My ideal character would therefore be the one with the least combos, least difficult moves – anything that’s a motion special I find much harder than a charge move, and I am quite bad at direction-held normals where they have to be applied in very small reaction windows, least important to time a perfect safe-jump / cross up / or reversal? ie: A character that is most dependant on mind-games (yomi) & knowledge. I’m not sure who this character would be in SF2, perhaps Blanka? But it’s so matchup dependant in SF2. And I would bet that this theoretical character in any fighting game is very probably low tier. It sometimes makes me think I really ought to go and play a good competitive turn-based game instead, such as Kongai or Magic the Gathering; and of course, sometimes I do. This is especially a problem when I’m playing when mentally or physically tired, and I’ve even suffered from serious issues with RSI in the past (thankfully joysticks never really cause me this, although I do get ‘button basher’s forearm’ at times ).

The crazy thing for me is that when HDR was announced I set myself my own personal goal for how good I thought I could get at Street Fighter 2…

Now whilst I’ve not yet signed away my soul to the Spirit of a Fighter, I’ve already surpassed my personal goal to become the greatest jazz player in Yorkshire… Perhaps I set my sights too low, and sometimes I wonder should I even be trying to aim higher? Yet of course, much of the time, it’s great fun, and that good old fiero when I do manage to punch above my weight isn’t half addictive for someone like me

I do believe that the mastery of execution needed to play fighting games well is a big part of the ‘flow‘ that fans of this kind of game can achieve whilst playing. What I mean by this is that when the execution of moves is within their grasp, not too hard and not too easy, the player is put into the flow portion by just this aspect of the game; and they’ll probably have a lot of other enjoyment factors for them going on as well. The trouble is that the vast majority of gamers – at least when exposed to real competitive play on fighting games – are quickly placed into the Anxiety area on the graphic to the left – although I’d prefer to rename the feeling caused as frustration or despair. I believe one of the main reasons I enjoy it so much is that SF2 HDR hits my “flow zone” far more than any other fighting game, during competitive play, precisely because so many other fighting games are just too hard, too fast and too complex (in terms of the dexterity needed to use their mechanics) for me.

Unfortunately it seems that much of the fighting game community – and even the developers of these games – are oblivious to just how much of a challenge even so-called simpler or ‘easy’ games like HDR really are. As fighting games have developed over time, rather than a focus on balance and viable strategic options or tactical styles for players, games have generally just increased the complexity of the execution needed to master them. But then again, you could argue these developers really are feeding their own community, since even today you still hear cries from the ignorant about the so-called ‘dumbing down’ of SF2 in HDR purely due to the handful of motions & timings that were made easier. I take completely the opposite view and I think any nod towards greater accessibility is actually a really good idea for the genre. And the really daft thing is, when it comes to SF2 at least, that at the very top levels of play everyone can execute everything with very high %’s of success. So making moves ‘easier’ for lower level players, really doesn’t change the top-level game at all, it just allows more players access to it. If some players move into the “control/relaxation” zone when it comes to performing moves on a fighting game, I think that’s a really small concern, in fact the game arguable works best at that point. It amazes me that even fighting game fans at times seem not to realise there’s still so much more going on in these games than simply performing combos and special moves! How ‘flow’ can be found equally well, if not far more in the rest of the gameplay inherent in fighting games is something I’ll also go into in future.

So really, maybe HDR is still the ideal fighting game for me when it comes to the mastery of execution, since I’m getting put very close to a ‘flow’ zone every time I get a chance for a crossup combo with DeeJay. “Alright Rikky, bust out da’ jackknife!.. kick”

Hardcore you know the score

The keen-eyed reader may have noticed that we’ve been playing around with the summary tagline that attempts to describe this blog in a single sentence. It’s actually quite a difficult thing to pin down, as Agoners is really about an attitude to gaming and our thoughts that develop from that, coupled with a wider reach on just about any gaming-related topic that interests us. I guess the whole purpose of this blog is founded in my own constant quest to find games reviews & articles by writers who share my kind of perspective on gaming. Whilst I also value a wider or counter-perspective as well, when it comes to the matter of opinion I can trust for buying or more importantly, investing my time in a game, I really do want an author who I can tell actually thinks somewhat like me. So for example, when I’m reading reviews of Madden 10, and deciding not to buy the title for yet another year despite my historical love of football video-gaming, it really helps me to have some faith in a review when the writer compares the actual gameplay to NFL2k5 or to the real sport of football. Ideally I’d also like to see hardcore views on the online & offline competitive portion of the game – but sadly things like this only really come around a few weeks or months after the game’s release, and I’ll probably have to forum trawl, or quiz friends that actually play it, since I know of no-where in the gaming press actually does this kind of hardcore review. Other than painstaking internet research on each & every individual title, nowhere provides the information I’d really like to know. Most of the time I simply have to play it myself to find out, which is unfortunate given how little precious gaming time I sometimes have available.

I seem to keep using that word: hardcore.

“musings of hardcore competitive gamers”

I’d better point out that I completely disagree with the traditional ‘hardcore’ or ‘casual’ gamer distinction. That model is quite clearly an overly simplistic and flawed one… so what do I mean & why do I even use the term at all? Well Only a Game explained this perfectly, so I won’t rehash the same ground but simply direct you there.

When I use the term ‘hardcore’ I mean the confluence of both the dimensions described there: A highly gaming literate ‘gamer hobbyist’, who also particularly enjoys ‘hard fun’ (agon) and punishing games; in particular this is most often found in games with human competition, and so therefore social factors involved in playing that game also often become important.

I’m well aware this is actually a very niche interest & it’s becoming rarer as gaming becomes more mainstream. The peak of gaming fun for me is most often when I’m dying, or losing, over and over in a game and being really challenged and then finally beating it – or even better my opponent – by improving my actual skill – not just winning by getting more ‘levels’ on my character, a better gun, or by luck. Whilst I may get temporarily frustrated, I know this is actually what I enjoy the most. However I’m also extremely particular about the manner in which a game challenges me. Whilst I can enjoy all of the traditonal skill tests in games – strategic, tactical, logistic & diplomatic, I still have general strong dislike for tests of rote-learning (eg. learning the map in an FPS), trial & error (eg. point & click adventure games with illogical solutions), and overly complex dexterity tests and non-interactive parts of a competitive game (eg. long combo strings in a fighting game), and I also have a wider ‘general interest’ taste in games than just this, but it is definitely my core.

A hardcore gamer in these terms will probably identify with more than one of these gamer types but will definitely associate most strongly with ‘Conqueror’.

You’ll certainly come out as some kind of Conqueror type in the Brainhex survey too.

Add in a self-analytical slant & a love of thinking about why you play and what you get out of it, and you’ve got, well, Agoners.

HARDCORE MOTHERF**KERS

Incidently, if any of this sounds like you and you’d like to write for Agoners, feel free to get in touch via the comments! Or if you know of any websites you think I’d like to read that aren’t already featured on our links, again, please comment.

Journey of the Tourney-fag

After the fun I had at last year’s Battle of Destiny event from Neo Empire, I’m starting to really look forward to their event this year, Super Vs Battle!

I’d really encourage anyone to go if you’re into fighting games, whether you want to enter a tournament or not, I am sure you’ll have a great time. Of course this year I’m going to enter the Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix competition and see how I do. In the meantime I thought I’d try and get a bit of practice at the game at least, and I discovered an European-only tournament being run over XBox Live & via shoryuken.com that some of my XBL Friends List were involved with. I gave that a shot and duely lost in the first match, only then to discover it was only single elimination – and so I was out immediately. At least I discovered later the player I lost to ended up placing 2nd overall

… BADA DADA DA DA DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! …

Now, fight a DRAMATIC BATTLE!

When looking for news on SVB I discovered there was a preliminary “Dramatic battle” tournament running in Birmingham. Whilst it was quite a way to travel, it was the nearest HDR tournament to me by far. So after forum reassurances that I’d be able to borrow a TE stick to play on – because they were using the horrible PS3 hardware to run it on I wouldn’t have my own, I started to sort out my travel arrangements. In the end fellow Sheffielder & gaming blogger id0ru, aka Marc from Dead Pixel Skyline joined me for the trip, so with a navigator on board I decided to go by car as the most efficient option.

Marc's tiny Dic leads the way!

But as expected finding the place proved to be an immense challenge in itself. After numerous wrong turns, illegal manoeuvres, giving up and deciding to park in a shopping centre carpark, seeing the ridiculous prices at shopping centre carpark & giving up on that, throwing the as-usual ridiculously inaccurate googlemaps directions out of the window, and relying on the map printouts I had and despite the fact the road we kept missing turned out to not have the same name as on the map or the directions, we eventually arrived, ready for a fight!

Remy77077 & id0ru. Don't mess with us, sir, we've got some powerful moves. Oowww!

The Global Gaming venue where the event was held. Where's Ryan?

The event was run really smoothly by the guys at Electronic Dojo, one of whom turned out to be an old friend of mine I’d not seen in years, with an excellent set of tournament rules (better than some of Neo Empire’s rules in my opinion): double elimination format, characters selected once at the start of the tournament and no changes allowed, ie: Japanese style. However I wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence anyway, or worried about the rules – as long as it wasn’t one and done – I mostly just wanted to go for the sheer experience of it and to see just how much I had to learn. However I fully expected to go 0-2 and out immediately. When I recognised ‘Prodigal Son’ Ryan Hart outside the venue – probably the UK’s top fighting game player & also known for this money match against Justin Wong, I became even more certain this was going to be a lot of fun but any wins at all would be a very good result I thought. As I’d driven all the way there for over two & a half hours and there were spare slots available still, I decided to enter 3rd Strike as well just for a laugh – even though I haven’t played it properly in many years  - just so I’d get a few more games of something in. I started taking some quick notes in my phone after my matches as to how my matches played out so I could try and play them back in my mind later and learn from whatever mistakes I made, and also to remember which characters I needed more practice against. However I then discovered the organisers were actually video capturing all the games anyway. Brilliant!

My first game was on HDR and I beat a rather cagey T-Hawk 2 rounds to 1 with DeeJay. T Hawk is one of those odd ‘unstable’ matchups for DeeJay where I feel he really has the advantage and holds all the cards, yet one mistake can spell defeat. As long as I can keep my cool and there’s not horrible lag, online, I’m pretty confident against all but the very best Hawks though, so despite the fact my opponent was playing as pink T-Hawk (who as we all know does extra damage on all his moves),  I was pleased I didn’t blow it. I was finding the “but it’s not mine” effect on the joystick rather weird as well – it definitely felt looser than my TE stick. I was also really struggling with the button config and menus on the PS3 with its stupid shape symbols instead of simple button letters – everything felt so unfamiliar. I ended up always leaving it up to my opponents to navigate the menus.

Marc fighting for the future!

Next my name was called for 3rd Strike and I quickly & unsurprisingly lost 0-2 to a Chun Li, although it was amusing being asked which character I wanted to play, given my signup name. My next game of HDR I lost 1-2 to a Ryu player called Jinty who played some really good rounds and got me in a perfectly timed & spaced fireball corner trap in both his wins. This put me at 1-1 and quickly into the ‘losers bracket’. I managed to actually win a game of 3rd Strike against a Ken. It was only during this match that I remembered you could actually ’super jump’ on 3rd Strike, which made me laugh as to just how much of the game I’d forgotten. I also discovered I couldn’t reliably even do a flash kick motion on the PS2 joystick I was borrowing; already not taking my 3s games at all seriously, I didn’t really care. My bottom-tier Remy quickly lost to yet another Ken on 3rd Strike so I was done with that anyway. As expected almost all the players were playing Ken-Chun-Yun, although it was fun that there was actually another Remy player there. I never thought I’d see that.

But then after a wait for the winners brackets to be resolved, it was back to HDR. Losing in my 2nd game I was deep into the losers bracket hole & found myself up against another excellent Ryu – who is also DeeJay’s worst character matchup at least ‘on paper’, yet I just managed to scrape out a 2-1 win with a ‘Sobat Carnival’ (Super Dread Kick) as Ryu tried to land a j.LK on DeeJay on wakeup. My opponent lamented he was trying an SF4 tactic of a LK crossup when it was hardly the right thing to do in HDR! I completely understood as I’d found my own HDR game got worse back when I played SF4 any amount at all. The TE stick I’d borrowed for this match (from a fellow DeeJay player M. Turbo, who luckily played blue-pants DeeJay to my purple-pants so there was no squabbling) felt a lot nicer and actually felt identical to my own.

Next HDR match up was my friend Marc! I joked that I wouldn’t give him a lift back home to Sheffield if he didn’t ‘play possom’ and let me win.. but then I told Marc seriously it was actually the opposite – he’d better play his best against me or I wouldn’t drive him anywhere! But his Cammy went down 2-0 to my DeeJay; it’s another matchup I fortunately feel very confident in & once again, the TE stick I had felt perfectly familiar. The TO told me to stay in my seat because the way the brackets worked I was up next. And then again, and again. I somehow beat past a Honda, another Ryu & the fellow DeeJay player without losing a round. I think having a run of games in a row like that really helped me though, and I suspect a lot of the players were distracted by also playing other games too.

DeeJay Wins!

So somehow I’d made it out of losers bracket and through to the HDR final! I was absolutely overjoyed already that I’d managed to even win a couple of games – this was far surpassing my expectations already. I’d read all about “bedroom champions” and “internet warriors” falling flat on their face their first time in a real-life tournament. I fully expected I’d end up the same way the moment the pressure was on me to perform on the spot. But whilst I’d been playing pretty badly, missing combos and setups I do regularly at home, and forgetting basic things like to LIGHT Jackknife-Kick a Honda butt drop from underneath it,  I’d still managed to do ok and had managed to keep my cool despite my errors, and I’d even managed a few moments of clutch play that I’d had no idea were in me. However I found that something else I’d read was completely true; that in a tournament setting combos that you find easy normally you completely mess up when the pressure is on. But fortunately it wasn’t just me making these mistakes, it seemed to afflict my opponents just as much. Plus I’m not very good at combos anyway, so it probably hurts me less than most. Another major thing that was very strange was that the game seemed so slow to me. I don’t know if it was the fact I almost never get to play offline and so it felt much more responsive to me than online matches, or whether I’d somehow developed the Sirlin super power to slow down time (!!! ); but I actually suspect it is the much complained about speed differences on the inferior Ps3 version of HDR. However I can’t really complain because once I’d become accustomed to it, I feel it was actually helping me a lot. I frequently find HDR online on the 360 actually feels too fast for my reactions, yet I never felt that problem all day at this Dramatic Battle. It may equally well have just been that I was wide awake, I’d been sleeping, eating & drinking pretty well the whole weekend, and I wasn’t playing drunken at 4am as I somewhat prone to doing.

However despite this speed ‘advantage’, I was already thinking about how I was going to write up an agoners blog post about how I was so thrilled to come 2nd in my first ever real fighting game tournament. I now had to play against the only guy who’d beaten me all day, in technically DeeJay’s worst matchup, I didn’t really think I had much hope, but I knew it would definitely be great fun when I realised they were going to hold the finals so you each had your own screen and everyone else at the event would be watching – Fantastic! However I had to wait for quite a while before the HDR final would come along.. in the meantime I did everything I could to keep my focus. I sat down where I couldn’t even see any other games (in truth I’d not been very interested in watching anything other than HDR matches anyway – to me it’s so much more interesting than the other Street Fighters these days), and did mental ‘reps’ about the Ryu vs DeeJay matchup. How did I want to start the round? What did I want to try after the way Jinty had beaten me before? I kept going through various theory fighter games in my head again and again to keep me concentrated on nothing but HDR…

“Don’t psyche yourself out man! Just picture the fight in your head. How will the battle shape up? How will you win? Let’s get started!”

When I finally sat down for the finals with my friend Lom in the ‘judges seat’ between us, he announced that because I was in the losers I had to beat Jinty twice to win. I knew about this from watching how Evo was run this year, but I’d actually completely forgotten about it until I was reminded. I didn’t really think too much about it though, as I thought the finals would have been more sets anyway. I was still just thinking about Ryu vs DeeJay. We did our button configs, then went into a match and picked our characters. As my opponent pressed to pick “Ryu stage” I’d already started to hold down-back to charge at the start of the round, and so the stage selection cursor moved down to China as he hit the button. I said “sorry” across to him & I meant it – I actually much prefer Ryu stage graphically & musically . As the round started I walked back away from Ryu and then threw a Hard Max Out.. and my DeeJay Dread Kicked his merry way across the screen! “My buttons are wrong” I said matter-of-factly but loudly. The annoying PS3, like the pox on the video-gaming world it is, had chosen that moment to dish up it’s known bug of actually being unable to save the button configuration between the options menu and an actual game.

Is there no end to the bad comedy that is the PS3?

Luckily for me not even a single blow had been landed and the TO kindly immediately stopped the fight and allowed us to redo our button config, twice, so that we knew it had actually worked.

Then to my complete surprise I managed to go on to win twice in a row to win the final! I was so focused on playing the individual rounds that I can’t recall much other than setting up a bunch of start-of-the-round guessing games pretty well, but apart from that they were really rough & ready games with lots of mistakes on either side – as others commented afterwards, and I readily agreed, they weren’t very good performances. I felt we’d actually both played much better in our earlier game where Jinty had won. I recall I did win one round when I managed to cross up Ryu, not quite finish him off – I most likely fluffed a combo as usual – and I just decided to play clock and distance as there was no way Ryu was going to beat me with fireball chip damage at that point and couldn’t gain a super either. So I just blocked, Max Out & slid about and tried to bait a jump in that never came until the timer ran out. I remember this because I was glad I managed to keep my head enough to do this in this situation. I don’t even know what the round counts were in the finals though, I was so concentrating on just playing each round as it came and I was really glad I was able to focus in that way as it’s something I’ve actively worked on doing a lot when playing SF.

The winnings. Propped up, like me, by 'the lucky lucky Street Fighting drink'!

I also wasn’t sure what, if anything, I got for winning this.. it turns out I won a ‘Gold Pass’ to SVB which is free entry and a free game entry. Nice!  However I’ve already paid for SVB and my entry to HDR and I can’t really play any other games I might have tried since they haven’t been released on the 360 yet, so I need to find out how I can actually use this Gold Pass…  but it does manage take away my disgust and disgrace of playing a video game for the first time in my life on a PS2 or a PS3. At least no cooty-infested Sony control pad got near me though.

But it was the fun of the whole thing that was the best thing to “win” anyway. I’ve thanked the organisers already on their forums for this, but I have to re-iterate it was absolutely amazing to be able to play the game I love the most in this kind of atmosphere. I do really love playing with an audience – even if I was concentrating so much I was barely aware of their presence for the most part – it feels like old times in those all too rare occasions I’d get to play in an arcade and when I’d manage to draw a crowd. I do wish there was something like this closer to home, and I have to admit I’d really like to try and run an event like this someday locally, if I could ever find a suitable venue for it.

My other prize! Thank you Dee xxx om nom nom, it's lovely Sheffield's finest

When I got home it was gone midnight but I was still so mentally into Street Fighter there was no way I could sleep, so I went onto HDR, and promptly got my ass handed to me online. I’ve hopefully made it clear enough that although I’m really happy about this result (if you can’t enjoy winning at your favourite game then I don’t know what you can enjoy!) I’ve got no delusions of grandeur, nor would I want to brag about my performance in any way as I genuinely felt I was pretty bad for the most part – as you’ll be able to see on the videos most likely soon enough. I felt I got lucky a bunch of times in this tournament, and I’m absolutely certain that a fair few of the players were much better than me overall and will I am sure will beat me the next time we play. I actually found it a great shame that Jinty, who I most wanted to play against again (as he beat me!), was only on PSN so there’s really no way we will get any matches in.

In any case, this will all mean absolutely nothing once SVB starts, and I’m still expecting to scrub out 0-2 there if I don’t manage to up my game and play much better. I’ve got so much to learn and improve still, but that’s exactly what makes fighting games so much fun – the endless challenge!

Afterall, the answer lies.. in the heart of battle!

Max Out.

(Note: At this Dramatic Battle some people also played some games of SF4 apparently)

Four Play

I’ve lamented the death of arcade culture over here before, especially for someone outside of London, who must go on some crazy pilgrimage, or to a tournament to even play games in this style. However to my amazement, Capcom decided to run a mini Street Fighter 4 UK tour with some actual arcade cabinets in tow. Despite the fact I’d have my hands on the game itself in only a few weeks  - what made this truly special was that it was going on just a half-hour drive out from my home city. As an SF nut, I just had to show my support for this, no matter what. Sadly on the first day, the whole of the shopping mall in question, Meadowhall, was snowed out; my calls to the shops there going unanswered, the helpdesk did eventually answer me to to explain that the whole place was pretty much closed down and that the SF4 event wouldn’t be going on. I’d later find out that it had been on, but virtually no-0ne had showed up due to the weather & the fact most of the mall was closed. I would have been more upset at missing a chance at this, but I’d had a fantastic evening gaming on HD:R and GoW2 anyway so I couldn’t be too miffed.

The next day however, the snow had died down and melted somewhat, and I had a roving informant already at the mall who eventually tracked down the cabinets and confirmed it was on and would be going on until later that evening.

I was shattered after being at work all week (and too many late nights gaming, naturally), but nothing was going to stop me, as I dug my car out from under the snow and ice with gloves and an ice scraper, and then proceeded to try to drive it off the icesheet that called itself my road. No go, it was literally impassable without some snow tires or something. But instead I managed to slide my car back down the hill on the ice, and managed to get it around the corner and onto the, thankfully clear, main streets of Sheffield. Whew! When I got there I knew exactly where I was headed… yep, I walked straight past the SF4 cabinets with a grin, and wearing my ‘Sonic Boom’ t-shirt like a true SF geek, went on my way to Starbucks. I grabbed a vital double espresso to go, and made my way back to the SF4 stand.

There wasn’t too many people about so I almost immediately got a go, and supping on my espresso, went to select Guile and discovered I had to play as f**king Ryu as the previous person had actually won despite vacating the machine. But I hate Ryu I thought to myself (and perhaps sung out loud)… but proceeded to play anyway. I immediately noticed something was terribly wrong. What was this.. LAG??! On a cabinet? How on earth was this possible? It was actually really horrendous slowdown at times – and as I discussed with the Capcom booth staff on hand later, apparently these weren’t “full spec” cabs, and didn’t have the correct graphics cards or RAM or something. Of course their reassurances to me that the console version would be fine weren’t really necessary as I knew this was some really freaky problem, having played at least a little on SF4 cabs that were perfectly fine before; but talk about a terrible way to promote your game.

Still, it was free, and so my quarter-circle-punch’ing went on unbowed by this unfortunate turn of events. I discovered I couldn’t seem to get out a Super or Ultra move though, despite the fact I find Ryu’s double fireball motion easy most of the time. My opponents weren’t exactly taking advantage of the flaws in my game though, and three easy wins later my opponent was motioning wildly at my win counter for some reason. Bemused, I then discovered this had earned me an SF4 t-shirt for my troubles, and I also realised as his arm waving got more exasperated that he was in fact using sign language. Sadly I don’t know any sign language, but I still managed to communicate through the universal language of Street Fighter, smiles and points at the screen with both him and his friends during the course of the evening. There was only one competitor all night though who could give me anything like a good game (wushudude, who’d travelled from Manchester), but I was still having fun, and we were more interested in experimenting with focus attacks, dash cancels, different characters and the like. I even discovered that due to the slowdown on the machines that Ultras and other complex motions could be performed, you just had to input the motions incredibly slowly for the game to register it.

A day away later, I woke up after hardly any sleep after playing Drunken SF HD Remix all ‘night’ until 8am, and in a very short space of time somehow managed to get myself back to Meadowhall, for more coffee & SF4, this time with a couple of friends with me, including fellow blogger Navan Daughn. SF4 does seem to be associated with a lack of sleep for me now. This was quite a different experience to the other night, as the weather had cleared further, and the mall, and the machines were packed. The bad news was it took some time to get a go and you probably wouldn’t stay on the machines for the maximum 3 wins unless you got a run of weaker opponents. However it was great to chat with a lot more knowledgeable players and bigger fans, and to get some good competition – not to mention the tantalising “oooh” of the crowd when spectacular moves and near misses occured. Of course that competition was really dulled by the amount of experimentation with the new game systems going on, and not to mention our total exasberation with the slowdown, causing some stages of fights to become utterly random. 3rd Strike player SrWilson has put up some videos on youtube of the SF4 games at Meadowhall.

Yes that's really agoners own Navan Daughn on the nearest cab putting in his first real-life appearance on this blog!

So yes, all in all it wasn’t an incredible experience thanks to the dodgy cabs, but there were some real highlights for me. The chance, if only for a few brief hours, to play games in this kind of arcade environment was really fantastic for me. In fact it was arguably better than ever before for me, as now I’m a converted stick player, I don’t feel like I am playing with one arm tied behind my back just because I have to use a joystick. In fact the Viewlix cabs had absolutely gorgeous controls – and it was great to really start to get to hands-on with them, knowing that my Tournament Edition Madcatz SF4 joystick is only a few weeks away, and it itself is modelled off these same cabs; even using almost the same parts. But it was the comaraderie and audience of the crowd that makes this kind of gaming just so special. Not to mention the game itself. I’ve been pretty harsh on SF4 in general, as it’s taken a number of design turns that I really disagree with, completely counter to say, the great decisions made in HD Remix. However I have to say with actually a few hours of play under my belt now, the game is warming on me. The amount of mind games and techniques based around the focus attack is really impressive, and the mixture of some of the best elements of Street Fighter 3 is really a great idea. Not to mention giving anyone with a good grounding in SF3 a huge initial advantage at SF4 I would suggest. I’ll never agree with choice to maintain (and even worsen) the overly complex commands, and I’ll lament the atrocious character roster until hopefully one day something like SF5 makes amends for it. But until then, it was good to see some more good in SF4 than I expected – and I’m really looking forward to the home version much much more now, thanks to this UK Tour.

Yes, there really is a guy who's cut his hair like Zangief! What a dude!

Street Fighter Post Prelude. My Oscar Nomination

  

I have a post in the making regarding my recent recognition of my fiero in the playing of Street Fighter II HDR. Until it’s done (there’s too much to talk about and I don’t want to bore you, so it’s taking longer than I expected) I have this little gem for you. It is Remy’s find, so I give the credit to him for finding the most amazing piece of film footage I have ever seen
…in my life
…ever.

Please vote for this at the next Oscars, Academy Awards and Golden Globe Awards  for “Best Film Evar!”

One Year of Wasted Dreams

Without intending this to become a review site at all, I did waste over 120 hours of gaming playing Lost Odyssey during the last year, so I feel it would be remiss of me to let this experience pass by without some detailed Agoner musings on it. Note, there will be some spoilers in this post, so if that bothers you, please look away now – although of course I’d love it if you’d also come back and have a read later.

You may be questioning why someone with my general taste in games was even playing a Japanese RPG. Without getting into the topic of my history with JRPGs too heavily, in the past I have really enjoyed the very best of this genre (eg. Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy 6, Panzer Dragoon Saga). Yet I have been so utterly disgusted by the worst of this genre, that some of the games I consider the worst games ever made fall into this category – eg. Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy Tactics. In fact it was this phase of atrocious JRPG’s on the Sony Playstation that seemed to rip everything I loved out of the genre, cruelly destroying the gameplay I enjoyed with the combined assault of terrible 3d graphics, fixed story cut scenes, huge on-rails game sections, cutout characters and moronic game systems, that had led me to all but give up on JRPGs entirely. I’d certainly given up all hope with Squaresoft/Squenix.

However it had been a long time now, and I guess I didn’t really have high hopes for much anymore, but at least a game slightly apart from ‘mainstream’ JRPG crowd had a chance it could be better, so I took a look around. The other major reason I was looking for one was that I was specifically wanting a game on my 360 that I term a ‘mong’ game, by that I mean a game I can play when I am ‘monged out’ – ie: tired, distracted, eating etc. This meant I wanted it to have little-to-no arcade skills at all – as almost every other game I had on my 360 needed some. I tried out a few other titles like Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata, and even Western RPGs like Mass Effect, but all of them seemed to have too much of some kind of dexterity skill element in their games, whereas Lost Odyssey, short of it’s very easy and also non-essential ring attack system, had none at all. I also went into the game, and this critique, effectively blind on purpose, reading very little about it at all as I wanted to get away from any preconceptions I might have about this kind of game.

For a while, despite it suffering from many things I lament about the ‘modern’ JRPG, I was calling Lost Odyssey the first JRPG in years that didn’t annoy me. The game system didn’t seem to be moronic for a long time, but in the end, it did break down. Right from the start it contained the usual wealth of completely useless attacks and abilities, yet there did seem to also be an interesting set of viable options, at least for optimising and ‘power gaming’ that it kept things interesting, and I was very impressed to actually get killed by the first boss in the game. And oddly, that tiny bit of skill needed with the ring attacks did keep my interest, as it added an element to the combat that meant perfecting the logistics of any particular battle in the game was never an absolute certainty. However, by the mid to latter stages of the game I felt that I had completely broken the system. I was ending up coming out of every battle with a party of completely full health & magic with very little thought or clever tactics at all.

One of the problems was that even without purposefully trying to “level up” my main characters, the immortals, all reached the maximum experience level (99) long before the end of the game. Now I had deliberately tried to get all the available skills, showing the parts of my manager & hoarder nature when playing certain kinds of games, but it was only around level 94 or so I actually went for levelling, mainly just to see if 99 really was the maximum. One of the reasons for this was, appropriately perhaps given the title, I got so very lost many times. Whenever the areas became too maze-like I tended to get totally confused & ended up walking around in circles. I find that the fact that the random battles take you away from the main game screens (& maps) really disorientating, and the fact this was, as mentioned, a ‘mong game’ for me meant I was generally rather out of it and tired when playing it, really didn’t help. The excess of random battles I faced through getting lost repeatedly was very likely a contributing factor in making the game’s levelling curve seem bizarre to me.

In the end, almost without realising I was at the end of the game, I killed the “last boss” in only a handful of turns without any of my characters even ending up damaged at all. In fact, whilst I was annoyed that the game made me wait until it’s last disk to offer much in the way of any kind of open ended gameplay, it was precisely when this open ended portion kicked in that the gameplay started to break and playing started to drag & become really tedious. Perhaps it would have been better off being ‘on rails’ throughout, but the fact it was all contained in one final ‘free play’ section was almost as poor design really. The game became so very easy for so long, it felt kind of pointless to me. When I did complete it, as you might have guessed by my tone and the title of this post, I felt rather empty, like I’d wasted my time on this game, and not to mention slightly glad it was over. Yet I was also annoyed by the game for not delivering more. I didn’t feel interested to go and hunt for all the things I’d missed, which judging by the Achievements there are quite a few, and I certainly wasn’t enticed by the offer of yet more content, especially not soon after the NXE launched:

Worst use of MS Points ever?

Yet another game system issue was how homogeneous the characters became towards the end of the game. All of the  non-immortal characters ended up being little more than “skill feeders” for the immortals, so they offered nothing else once they had maxed their skills. And because any skill set can be mapped to any immortal, you ended up finding the perfect mix and then keeping them identical. And of course two of the characters’ natural weapons and stats meant they were obviously perfect for being front-line fighters and the other two meant they were perfect for being back-row casters, so why would you try anything else? All of the interesting options offered by the front / back row system, such as taunting from a back row, all soon became worthless to anyone wanting to optimise combat. As usual, so many abilities were pointless as they failed to take the hidden action cost of a characters turn into account. Some of them were so obviously pointless it beggared belief; notably some of the special attacks like a 3-hit combo attack that took two turns to do, when during the in the same time you could’ve done two 2-hit combos…

But back to the characters; literally the only interesting decision I found myself having to make in the game was which of my mortals to ‘take along for the ride’ – and even then, it ended up being an obvious choice, as Sed was the only character offering anything unique in the entire game in fact, with his ability to always ignore the enemies back-row guarding effect with his gun attacks. I also don’t doubt there would be a way to map even this ability onto the immortals too if I’d completed everything in the game. It really is exasperating to me to see every multi-character JRPG I’ve played since the SNES make this mistake. I can’t believe that the concept of having a mixed party of characters with each offering truly unique game abilities is the sole domain of Final Fantasy 6 still. It makes any game of this kind so much more interesting tactically.

It was also somewhat jarring for me to find this game actually forced me to take notes in places. Yes, actual literal pencil and paper notes. Now whilst this was something of a regular occurance in games in the distant past, it was pretty odd to have to do it these days, especially when most ‘RPG’ style games, not to mention MMORPGs have such detailed Quest systems and the like.

But, since this is an ‘RPG’ (even if it’s not at all really) what about the story? Well, for me, whilst the story can interest me a lot in a game, it’s really a very minor element, even for an ‘RPG’. It just isn’t the game. The reason I enjoy games and especially video games over all other forms of entertainment is for their interactive elements, and generally, that doesn’t include the story to any great degree. Again, this is a huge topic of discussion in itself, but suffice to say, like so many games I found the story in Lost Odyssey started out reasonably interesting & even touching at times, but ended up turning incredibly generic and boring, and then to worse.

What made this a really tragic shame for Odyssey, was that the immortal’s dream sequences, the “Thousand Years of Dreams” as the game calls them, were truly excellent. These were some of the best written pieces I’ve ever seen in any video game, and for a while, they seemed to really blend with and enhance the main story for the game. The dream sequences are just short stories of text, blended with music and generally static or slowly moving background graphics – the best examples of these became quite literally poetic in the way they blended the elements. Now whilst it does perhaps speak to my emotional state at times in the past year, and while it does nothing but prove a game has never made me cry, I did in fact get moved to tears a great deal of times by these narrative sections.

But once into the latter stages, instead of working with the main game story, they were actually pulling in opposite directions completely! It was as if they were written by completely different writers and teams; which in fact, they were. So as the game’s main plot descended to complete generic farce for the most part, with only touches of melodrama that appealed to me, the moving tragedies of the dream sequences became totally at odds with this. So in the ‘main game’ I’d be seeing some gobble-di-gook Star Trek “tech” explanation of how the immortal characters had come from some other dimension and had come into this other world to observe it’s effect on theirs or some other such mumbo-jumbo, and then a few minutes later I’d be seeing a morbidly emotional dream sequence where that same character would be questioning the reason for their immortal existence – which they, and more importantly you, the player, now had complete knowledge as to why.

I can’t really labour the starkness of this contrast enough, as it completely removed any vested interest I had in the the story or the characters. The main storyline ending was in fact simply atrocious in this regard, figuratively pissing over all of the earlier superb dream parts, seemingly laughing as it defecated on their every premise. You’ve witnessed harrowing thoughts on how soul-destroying immortality could actually be in terms of someone’s view on life, love, emotional state, war and philosophy. Then you are forced to bear witness to mortal and immortal characters chosing to get married and vowing to “love each other forever”… Now I’ve heard forever’s a long time, baby. Yeh, infinitely moreso for an immortal I’d imagine. The real final straw for me though was to hear the main character utter the immortal line “immortality’s not so bad…” without a care or consideration that he would outlive his fostered children that he was happily musing about bringing up.  It was almost as if it was mocking the player, assuming they would be too stupid to think of the flaws in what was being said, not to mention the writer of the Thousand Years of Dreams.

For my final thoughts though, I do wonder if I am simply too much of a challenge-seeking Agoner to ever really enjoy a game of this nature any more. But the fact remains that for large parts of the game I was enjoying it, even when it wasn’t especially challenging to actually ‘win’, it was challenging my ability to optimise and collect in a logistical play manner. I also even felt some fun of the Juggernaught player too. And dispatching the last boss with barely a scratch did unleash a small amount of fiero in me. Not that it proved to be actually challenging, but it was perhaps my own anticipation that it would be challenging that gave rise to this emotion perhaps. I have to completely agree that a good ‘c-RPG-style’ game is incredibly hard to make, and my big problem is, as much time as I do spend on video games, my time is still really limited. Why these games tend to annoy me the most, is that it often takes a very long time to figure out whether I even find them worth playing or not. It’s even given me doubts about playing other c-RPGs right now I had ‘on slate’, which included Oblivion, Mass Effect and perhaps one time in the very distant future, even Fallout 3.

For an excellent review and discussion on Lost Odyssey from a very different perspective to my own please also see: Lost Odyssey – “The (Real) Final Fantasy” on Metagame.

Orange.. Wednesday?

The Orange Box: Day 1.

Well at the insistent urging of my colleague, friend & co-blogger lordnaff I eventually found a copy cheap enough to get.

So to tie in with my ideas on time-based reviews and things that could be added to XBox Live, here’s how I got on with Orange Box after my first forays at it (3 Achievements!) for a few hours last night. Warning, this is going to be unavoidably negative in places, much moreso than I would normally ever blog. However I was planning a post regarding my problems with the FPS genre as a whole, but instead I’ve also included a lot of those points here. So if you’re a big close-minded fan of FPS’s.. please look away now!

As a multiplayer-competition loving goon, the first game on “the Box” I decided to try, naturally, was Team Fortress 2. I already knew it was a pure MP thing, but I hoping for some kind of practice mode. Bots or something maybe? Umm.. nope. Nothing. So instead I booted a LAN game solo and after waiting for a 15 second countdown, to check I was really sure I was ready with myself, it did actually allow me to run around the map on my own, read the character classes and get a few basic tips & figure out the controls before without having to go in totally cold to a multiplayer game. It’s cool that there was some way to do this, but why hide it? Then I ended the game and got a congratulatory message for the longest time alive with the Medic or something. 15 minutes. Oh great, so my attempts at practice have ruined that part of my ‘high score’ stats now too. What a poor interface: This isn’t starting out well for TF2.

Anyway, I have the raw basics of the game down at least, although reloading on the B-button is proving to be an absolute nightmare for those used to Gears and Halo like me. Why on earth would you change that? But it’s time to leap into a Player Match on the same map I’d just ran around. Oddly.. there doesn’t seem to be any lobby, I am dropped straight into a game in progress. It seems to be a 3 v 3 game.

“Hello” I call over mic, to silence. “Anyone there?… Can you hear me?”. I run around for a good few minutes without seeing a single person. I hear intercom messages about ‘the intelligence’ being taken and stuff, so I know others must be there somewhere, but that’s all I get. Eventually I find someone on my team and get near to them and again call out; again with silence as the response. I was wondering if they could only hear me in close character proximity in-game. But it seemed to make no difference. I decide to follow my ‘teammate’ and sure enough I eventually find someone to shoot. A very brief firefight ensued and the usual spazzing about ‘figure-of-8 dancing’ that is all so common in the generally laughably-unrealistic FPS genre occured. I am pretty sure I got killed by a smack to the back of my head or something, although it was hard to tell, as I wasn’t left with any nice view of how I died or anything. The characters seemed to move way too fast to me, really hurting any attempt at tactical combat, not to mention how few hits seem to kill. The movements & attacks felt really jerky and non-fluid. It all seemed to heighten the sheer spazziness of it. As I’ve often felt with FPS games, it did accurately portray a gunfight between two people who had stuck traffic cones over their heads.

Eventually the opposing team ‘won’ the match and I noticed people seemed to be joining and leaving during the game too. But instead of a win/loss screen – it just seemed to restart immediately on another match with the same teams. I was getting bored with no-one to ask advice or anything, and then suddenly it popped up with “The Host has left”.

Maybe it was just a bad group? So the next match I enter the same map but this time one already full with 15 players, as I noticed it had felt extremely empty on that map. “Hello” I said once again as I was dropped instantly into a mid-game. Thankfully this time, someone answers. So it turns out you can actually hear everyone else on the same team. I explain I’m totally new to this and wanting some advice, and the young fella seems happy to help out – also, I notice no-one else seems to be really working as a team much at all. There’s no other communication going on so it doesn’t really matter that we’re talking about what the character classes and weapons over the game’s team channel. I try out a bunch of different classes but I couldn’t seem to get anywhere really with anyone other than the rocket-launcher Soldier who I am getting quite a few kills with at least.

Neither team seems to be be able to make any headway at all at actually gaining the objective. 8 v 8 seemed that it was impossible for either side to crack their defenses. Wandering into the enemy ‘base’ alone I could find no safe way in at all, and even following others in didn’t seem to help. I eventually ended up in a one to one chat with my helpful teammate because the game actually blocks the chat while one or other of us are respawning – but with no indication of this fact, I wasn’t aware I was in fact talking to myself half the time. Another gawp-inducingly moronic hole in the interface then. With the score on 0-0 for ages, the game eventually initiates “Sudden Death” mode which my teammate explains. A couple of minutes into this, without seeing any enemy… “The Host has left”. Oh dear. Well… I’m not really having much fun at this, so despite the fact I am really grateful to my teammate for chatting with me, I decide to go and try something else.

Overall, I can’t see why anyone would play this over Halo 3 at this point. The class selection is a very nice idea and it’s much better than running about the map to learn weapon spawn points. If I want a rocket launcher, I can play with one. That is great.

However for absolutely everything else Halo dumps on it from a stratospheric height. I am also pretty sure there is no party-play & a lack of good matchmaking… However I understand that some features may be a lot better in ranked matches, so I’ll certainly give it another try later. But when you’re looking at a bad interface, worse graphics, worse controls, and seemingly to me at this point far worse gameplay than the most obvious competitor that springs to mind… I’m left wondering why? Even the potential for the vaunted class-based teamwork seems much lower than in Halo without party play & with the flaws with the in-game communication.

So, time to try something else. Let’s start at the beginning with Half-Life 2 then I thought.

 

First impression – well the graphics don’t exactly seem cutting edge but, well, this started out really interesting. I was really impressed by the voicing and I at least seem to quickly grasp some sense of what was going on with the controls etc. The storyline seemed to be really interesting. Who were these overseer-type class? Who was that white-haired man talking over the viewscreens all the time with the really Equillibrium/1984 style stuff… I felt the urge to want to agree with them and assume they really were beneficial just to see how it played out. I wonder how things would get revealed…  but then BAM. It was ruined. My heart sunk – you were already supposed to know that actually, the new ‘ruling class’ people are actually aliens now controlling the earth and they most definitely are the bad guys ™ and you should shoot them in the face immediately all without any qualms at all. No grey areas allowed sir! (but it goes so well with orange).

My interest in the story was almost immediately lessened to the mere curiosity that I get with 99% of videogame storylines.

Even worse, you were clearly supposed to know half the characters already. That’s to be expected I suppose for a sequal.. but it’s not much fun for anyone when you haven’t even brought the game out on the same console. At the very least I expected some kind of storyline prelude summary in the manual. Nope, nothing. Apart from a vague explanation that it was somehow my characters fault that unleashed a lot of this bad stuff ™.

Also.. as good as the speech was, because it was fading in & out as I approached people, and because of the loud voice over the top from the white-haired dude, I kept feeling I was missing things. I restarted a section with the subtitles on, and sure enough, there had been masses of speech I hadn’t heard, that made things a lot more playable and understandable.

Anyway, I got through the first few introductory sections still rather interested, if feeling really let down by the fact the big story ‘reveal’ had already prematurely spilt itself everywhere before the game had even begun. Then finally we get to the more ‘action’ section of the game proper, and finally a I get a pipe! Aaah. This is about the only thing fun I can remember from my brief plays on the PC Half-Life – playing MP matches purely to smack some sniper-rifling camping idiot in the face with a lead pipe.

But I notice the control still feels rather clunky though. Smacking down some crates with the pipe to get through a gap or picking up and dropping things and manouvring objects is a nice feature, but for me it just highlights how bad the first person viewpoint is for this kind of thing. Unlike in third person, sideways-on.. or even you, know, real life, it’s really hard to judge where objects are in relation to everything else around you when you are blessed with a Dalek-like “10 degree view” of the world. Perhaps it should be called 10% Life rather than Half-Life?

I can still see way more from behind a Dalek than in any FPS game

As I got a gun and firefights ensued, it just got even worse. It made me realise how important a feature the ’scanner’ in an FPS (like Halo has) is for adding any kind of realistic awareness of your surroundings. The “hit direction” indicators in Half Life 2 just didn’t seem to work properly at all either. I repeatedly got killed wondering “what the ****” was killing me. The worst case was when I was wandering along and suddenly couldn’t move, and my health dropped to zero. What on earth? On a later repetition I discover I’d been grabbed by some overhead egg-type alien thing. Fair enough, but why not pan the camera up automatically to, you know, let the player have some clue that his face is eaten off? Or better still.. here’s a crazy idea. How about making this game in something other than a first-person view in the first place?

I’m getting shot again and wondering where from.. so I try to backtrack into the cave-like area I’d just poked my head out from, but no.. I just stand still and die. Obviously this was because there was a tiny step on the ground that my character couldn’t backstep up over and, naturally, he had absolutely no awareness of it’s presence. Silly Gordan Freeman-Face! Another time it would seem my elbow got caught against a door corner in exactly the same fashion as I stood there getting shot. A problem I’m sure we’ve all faced in real life.. I’ve seen so many people stuck by their elbows in doorways when they don’t think to even move their arm, or maybe, you know, look out around the door frame rather than being forced to walk through it to get any view of what’s the other side. But of course.. you’d have to make something like Gears of War for that to work in a video game.

I also notice I’m repeatedly running through reasonably sized areas, but with really no clue as to where I’m supposed to be going. All the while being shot at. Again, it makes me realise how much better games have become these days to attempt to overcome these shortcomings of the FPS genre with objective and direction markers and map overlays for example. I got lost numerous times and died a few times before I found the ladder I hadn’t seen, or went in the right direction, or found the barrel I had to smash or explode.

All these things then seemed to combine on one particularly nasty section. I’d narrowly escaped some exploding barrels, and scraped through running down inside some pipes. I then walked out and got slaughtered by overhead gunmen. Ah, I forgot to mention until now that all enemies in this game seem psychically linked to your precise location at all times – the moment you step out of anywhere, or look through a hole in a wall, you will be shot. Even helicopters wheeling through city streets overhead are able to track you to almost sniper-like accuracy. I suppose it’s good practice for multiplayer. Anyway, I respawned and stepped out again, having learnt where the enemies where. I shot the first 2.. then more poured out and I died again. Respawn again.. and I notice each time I am starting this section with only 30% health. And I had no option to not save, no option to backtrack to find more health.

Not since I almost smashed the disk of Final Fantasy Tactics on the Playstation 1 have I seen such a game with such an atrocious save game interface that seems purely designed to screw over the player & perhaps artificially ramp up the challenge. It’s worse knowing that in all likelihood on the PC it had no checkpoints and the player could likely save anywhere and as often as they liked, and could manually backtrack to any previous saves they wanted. That kind of system also ruins games in it’s own way, but it wasn’t anything like this. Checkpoints are a great idea, but this was just so poorly designed as to be even worse than the save-anywhere method. I still eventually got through this section, but it left a really bitter taste in the mouth and resentment in my head.

Unfortunately the game seems all about repeatedly doing the same section over and over until you learn where the enemies are, where you are supposed to be going, where the ammo is. I don’t really feel much fun or progression from doing this. This is a definitive hallmark of all those bad PC games I’ve left behind. I’d heard Half-Life was meant to be immersive? Well it’s impossible to be immersed when you are dying over and over again and having to ‘learn’ sections of the game. Even good set pieces that should feel cinematic don’t really work when you see them over and over. I daren’t even compare it to something like Halo or Gears of War, as Half-Life 2 is so hopelessly outclassed on this front by games like these that it doesn’t even seem like a fair comparison.

I guess I was expecting too much. Worst of all, I was simply getting rather bored playing it. So bored in fact, I was periodically pausing the game and chatting & browsing on a PC while ‘getting through it’. This really isn’t a good sign when I’m only just starting a new game.

Oh and don’t even get me started on the torch! *mad glare*

The only point (past the very first level) where the game really entertained me was with the Achievements. The first one I got in the game was possibly the funniest and most accurate achievement for me personally I’ll ever receive, and when I was getting a bit frustrated with the game and it gave me “Malcontent” achievement, I did think this was a genius of programming to have read my mind like that.

Anyway, despite all this negativity, it’s still a game I feel I can still play more of. It’s reputation alone means it deserves more of my time. Who knows, in a few weeks or months I could completely change my opinion. But for now, I give this game my highest ever rating: One Turd

One team has STICK!

Team Shitty Shotty enlisted a new member last night, wildpaintings, and the team went on another foolery-filled rampage on Halolz. I suspect that wildpaintings maybe in danger of demotion from TSS however, as he led the Team to their dramatic first ever win. 50 to 49!

The game started off badly, with a member of the opposing team immediately making it onto both my ‘Mute’ and ‘Avoid Player – Communication’ lists before the game even began for his ridiculously annoying screeching in the lobby. But there were no drops, and a nice lag-free game that was incredibly close on score all the way… with myself dealing the, not-at-all-lucky-honest, final kill to the enemy team as Navan Daughn distracted the enemy from the flank:

Much whooping and cheering ensued as the glory of Team Shitty Shotty lit up the rankings leaderboard… umm, well not quite. It was only a Casual Team Slayer game. Still, some delicious fiero in the face of agon was certainly felt all-round.

We even won again just a couple of games later, but it wasn’t even close, as the opponents were all on split-screens and one seemed to have turned into a stationary target practice dummy for reasonable periods of time which made the win rather anti-climatic after the previous excitement. However TSS was also fairly close to pulling off an upset in a number of other matchups against far more experienced and skilled opponents thoughout the evening. Definitely improvement was being seen in fact. I will attempt to counter this alarming trend with alcohol next time.

The next challenge is for Team Shitty Shotty to steal a victory from the pansies in a Ranked Match game, and perhaps to take their honed skills into other game arenas.

It was a rather good night of other gaming on top of this as well for me. I once again had some great Street Fighter AE matches with The Uberwarlock, who is an awesome Street Fighter opponent for me always. As usual, I was losing to him, but at least my game was reasonable this time – I even managed to beat his ‘Gief once. A fantastic challenge.

And, much later, I got out of bed for an insonmia-fueled 5am completion of Braid. Both of the Agoners crew are big fans of Braid with lordnaff in particular declaring it one of the best games ever. Myself, I am hugely enamoured with its existence as a 2D game & it’s aesthetic and design ideals, and would have bought it almost no matter what I thought of the gameplay. But overall as an actual game for me, I just think it’s ‘rather good’. The dissappointments that lower it to that category for me are firstly that I became very irritated with the manner in which the obfuscated game mechanics became a part of the puzzle themselves on one too many occasion – a problem a decent tutorial or smarter level design could have easily allieviated; to at least let you understand what tools you had available. And secondly I am feeling really let down by the storyline switch-up in the ending, which was far more poorly delivered than expected, and has pretty much ruined the game’s narrative for me. Then again, I prefer some good emo angst to some hard-hitting plot twist; your tastes may vary. But, I am named after Remy for a reason!

Fight For Futility!

Visceral Thrills

I didn’t blink, I’m not sure I even thought.

It felt like pure instinct. I slammed the biting saw-blades downwards at my assailant. There was a sickening crunch as the whirling mass impacted with his skull, only just audible over the roaring sound of the weapon, and it was only an instant before the bone gave way to the speed of hard steel. A moment later, the blood. It sprayed out in all directions, covering both of us in dark red gore. Chunks of flesh broke apart and fell away from the blade as his body collapsed to the ground. I grinned with a lunatic leer as the blood splattered all over my.. screen.

So I hadn’t lost it entirely. I was just playing Gears of War again (on a borrowed 360!).

Gears isn’t likely to make my all-time top games list ever, as it’s just not really my kind of thing, however I do enjoy it a lot, certainly a lot more than most FPS games too, even though it shares a lot of mechanics with them. One of the major things about it that appeals to me, which was also a real surprise to me, was just how much I liked the ‘feel’ of certain things in this game. Especially, as described above, the close-quarters gore-filled kills when using the chainsaw bayonet; although the shotgun at point-blank range proves to be a lot of fun also! I must admit I was also a tad concerned by my attraction to this, but on the other hand it’s not especially realistic, and it’s really hammed up. Perhaps the best thing about it is the way the blood splatters ‘onto’ your monitor screen as if you are watching it through a camera lense. It’s just so… tastey! (Itchy Tastey?)

Rrrrrrrrrrrr

This is an almost indefinible quality in games for me, and I find it exceedingly rarely. I don’t really think I’m caught up in the Mimicry of it, as I certainly haven’t ever harboured any secret desires to chainsaw anyone’s face off, you maybe dissappointed to know. I don’t even like guns! But it’s something about the sheer experience of it that stands out to me. I also have to note it’s something in a game where the graphics & sound really do matter too, so I suspect getting this kind of feeling may increase as graphics improve even further. I’ve also noticed I tend to enjoy this kind of thing even more when other people are playing with me – ie: an audience. Which I think is related.

I think the trouble with it is that it tends to wear off pretty quickly with time and repeated play, especially for me. This could be because I am far from an adrenalin junkie; many things that seem to excite other people adrenalin-wise don’t tend to do the same for me, especially when repeated often. It maybe why this occurs so rarely for me in video games also. I think I also ’suffer’ from the fact that I am so familiar with so many video games having played them all my life, that I just don’t get the ‘initial thrill’ in the same way a new player might.

I think in Gears’ case there is definitely an element of agon to the proceedings too. As on some occasions it is an added challenge to go for the spectacular close range kill – something I have noted definitely attracts me.

I tried to think of some other games that have had a similar type of effect on me, and there really aren’t many, but here’s what I came up with for now:

Ninja Gaiden (Xbox versions). These games really do pile on the gore in a similar fashion and at first you do get this real experience of slicing people up with a sword. I do think it wears off pretty quickly for me as the tactical elements of the combat start to become more important. Which is what has really killed NG2 for me for now, as I discovered the fighting mechanics are actually less interesting, mainly due to the

NiGHTS into Dreams – something completely different. It’s more of a ‘rushgame‘ but I still certainly played this game repeated just for the ‘feeling’ it gave me of flying & floating about, as much as it was trying to race through the levels.

Gun Valkyrie – another XBox third-person action game. This does certainly seem to be the easiest current game environment to provide this ‘experience’ feeling in for me. Again in this game is about the feeling of flight and total control over your jetpack.. once you really master it! I tried to re-play this game again recently, and whilst I can remember a few things, I found my control skills had dimished to the level where I have to re-learn to be good at it again. Unfortunately it’s unlikely I’ll ever really enjoy it in the same way again.

Space Channel 5 – a possible candidate. Again.. once mastered, many of the parts of the game become so easy, you’re just ‘enjoying the ride’ – the music and tapping along to the beat. This is the only ‘dancing’ game that’s ever made me actually want to dance along with it. Light years ahead of all other “rhythm action” games in my opinion.

Numerous fighting games – Of course I certainly get a bit of the “beat” in my beat-em-ups from time to time. I think the earlier Street Fighter 2’s did the best job of this really, as they had the nicest sound effects and ‘feel’ to the contact. But generally Capcom games do ok in this department as they feel noticably better than the others. But this feeling does wear off especially quickly with me with beat-em-ups so I can’t think of anything else notable, especially in 3d fighting games I can’t think of any example that did it to me.

RROD’ed

All sorts of problems, considering I got a USA Elite especially to try and avoid this. *sigh*