Crackerwax

Video games have a bad reputation. We’re told they’re responsible for a nation of fat, indolent children, that they condone – nay encourage – violent behaviour.

Whilst I certainly wouldn’t want any child of mine playing Resident Evil 5, Dead Space or – God forbid – any of the relentlessly tiresome Grand Theft Auto series, I wouldn’t object to them playing video games per se, much in the same way that I wouldn’t object to them watching films. In both cases I’d just want to ensure that what they watched or played was suitable.

You see all of the games I’ve mentioned above have 18 certificates in the UK and just like movies with the same rating shouldn’t be sold to anyone under the age of eighteen. It’s all fairly straightforward, these games are just not suitable, the fact that they are just games changes nothing. (more…)

This is very simple but I thought you needed to know. Here they are in no particular order the ten best games ever made.

• Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation)
• Ico (PlayStation 2)
• Shadow Of The Colossus (PlayStation 2)
• Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube)
• Wizball (Commodore 64)
• Pac-Man Championship Edition (Xbox 360)
• Burnout Paradise (PlayStation 3)
• The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time (Nintendo 64)
• Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords (Nintendo DS)
• Super Mario World (Super Nintendo)

Actually there is an order but only very slight Resident Evil 4 is at the top and Ico comes just after it, the rest are all joint third.

For information Bubble Bobble just missed out on being included and if I’m honest I’d be tempted to swap out Wizball for it but I just had to have a Commodore 64 title in there somewhere.

In the next couple of weeks I’m going to start writing little essays about all those games, so don’t make any plans will you?

There’s a cutscene I came across in Gears Of War 2 the other day that’s rather moving.

Dom’s wife has been missing for sometime, when he hears news that she may have been taken by the Locust he sets about, with Marcus’ help, trying to find her.

And he does find her.

I thought it was all rather sad and full of pathos.

I’ve always liked reading Edge, it’s got a more mature outlook on gaming and treats it with the same level of respect that film critics treat their field.

This does of course lead to outrageously pretentious bollocks making its way from mind to paper. Witness this belter from a review of Motorstorm: Pacific Rift where, what they are trying to say is that the ground textures are a little indistinct and are made worse by the use of motion blur.

…which blend into amorphousness mere metres ahead. The problem is only exacerbated by excessive motion blur, further serving to muddy the aesthetic…

Oh, do fuck off.

The writer here clearly felt they had to embellish their writing to the point that it was practically unintelligible.

I like reading Edge but it does have a habit of pulling shit like this from time to time. At least it’s better than Gmaes™ which seems to desperately avoid proof reading and basic grammar in favour release deadlines.

On numerous occasions I’ve considered posting videos on YouTube. After seeing and hearing this I’ve decided that severe quality control is required before such an endeavour is undertaken.

Charismatic, huh?

From the best PlayStation 2 game ever made, Ico, comes this beautiful track Castle In The Mist.

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Whether you’re a gamer or not you should own this game. It’s actually worth buying a PlayStation 2 just to play it.

Its mixture of puzzling, platforming and action is perfect, the setting is beautiful and the gameplay is evenly balanced. Oh, yeah and the music is perfect.

I remember my first play through with Kate, it was a great joint experience, me at the controls and Kate helping me solve the puzzles. Ah, the good old days!

Those three things are a heady combo when you’re twelve. The kid in this video obviously has them all in abundance.

It’s really quite cute the fact that the info for the video says:

everything in this video is made out of card board

Bless. What a helpful lad he is for pointing that out! It almost makes up for his attrocious and oh so twelve-year-old’s-mind username of fartbuttface.

I’m really glad YouTube didn’t exist when I was eleven, otherwise the whole world would right now be pissing themselves at the sight of my low rent Thunderbirds clone, Rescue 11. I had a headquarters and everything.

Well I say that, my bed had a headboard on which I stuck a label I’d written Rescue 11 on but to me that was a headquarters.

Get yourself over to the brilliant You Have To Burn The Rope, it’s a proper treat.

It’s all about the music. All about the music…

I know that my great mate Bridz completed Portal in my presence (I may have been pissed) and no doubt he saw the amazing end song and video to ‘Still Alive’. However I did not.

As I am yet to complete Portal on my own, I had to resort to a bit of crafty Googling to find the awesome end song that is ‘Still Alive’.

Thankfully YouTube is here to save the shit gamers amongst us that have yet to complete Portal but still want to hear the amazing end song. For those of us that applies to, watch this.

Awesome isn’t it? Those gun emplacements really seem to have the song writing knack don’t they?

Bloody hell, this is good news!

A new Puzzle Quest game will always be welcome in my home. I lost about three months last year playing Puzzle Quest: Challenge Of The Warlords on the DS, but by golly it was worth it. I still go back now for a quick blast, it’s like that passage from The Time Machine.

‘The laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb confusedness descended on my mind.’

Just like that in fact.

I’m glad to see that this one is coming to the DS too, I downloaded the demo on XBLA but, like Lumines, it just didn’t feel right when it wasn’t on a portable.

The new game mechanic looks a little worrying but I’m sure it’s going to play like a dream regardless.

I’ve just watched a trailer for Soul Calibur IV. The sound of cash registers ringing has just stopped, so I’ll tell you what I saw.

Darth Vader. Darth Vader and Yoda. In Soul Calibur. Fighting with lightsabers. The world has just made a popping sound and turned inside out.

How greedy is George Lucas? Obviously having lost all credibility as a filmmaker he’s decided to just become very, very rich instead. The really sad thing is that he’s done so much for the special effects industry and film making in general, to see him whore his properties like this (again) makes me want to cry.

Word Up, or Word Soup as it now insists on calling itself, is quite possibly the most fun you can have in a pub. I’m serious, don’t push me on this one it’s fucking awesome.

What’s more, in news that will send shockwaves through the Dean household, I’ve discovered that it is available on the PC! Your dream has come true my friend you can now play Word Up in the luxury of your own home!

Click this link to go to the site!

I’m not certain that this game is going to be as big as Nintendo might hope. Don’t get me wrong it’s great fun and it’s has the potential to be one of the best games ever but I’m not sure the average Wii owner will be able to get into it.

You see the problem is that the Wii is popular with everyone not just gamers and Super Mario Galaxy is very much a gamers game. Your average Wii owner has one game, Wii Sports and they’re not all that interested in mastering anything that involves much more than waggling the Wiimote.

The first few levels do little to bring in the Wiimote-wagglers, it’s so different from anything that has gone before as to actually be confusing. It’s a step beyond Super Mario 64 in that it’s not just a 3D representation of the landscapes that were in the original Mario games it’s a fully realised up, down, in, out, sideways, right way up, upside down, round about, twisty turny, mind fuck of a landscape.

We’ll see how it fares, Gamestation’s second hand section should prove a useful indicator.

Bridz popped round this evening for a spot of gaming and a pizza, and what an evening it was! Just look at this!

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How fucking awesome is that? 300! A perfect score at Wii Sports bowling.

It was touch and go for a while when on the seventh frame it dawned on me that he’d had seven consecutive strikes and I made mention of it. Oops. The last pin on the eighth frame wobbled for a while before finally falling, jinx over! Phew.

If only he’d done it using his own Mii!

Still at least he can gloat that in a handful of frames he managed to match the score I’ve been working on for about a year. Smart arse!

Although I suspect I probably haven’t actually finished the fight, I did complete Halo 3 last night. On Heroic I hasten to add. It was good fun, seemed very short and if I squinted I could almost imagine I was playing Halo. Don’t think the campaign was worth the asking price but I strongly suspect I’ll get more than my money’s worth out of the multiplayer game.

As I say, I don’t think I really have finished the fight and I’ll tell you for why. After the credits roll there’s a cut scene and in this cut scene we see Master Chief being put into stasis by Cortana. As she tucks him up in bed he says ‘Wake me when you need me.’. Hmmm, not if you need me but when you need me.

My suspicion is that Microsoft are planning on offering level downloads, perhaps even making it episodic. Although the only thing possibly acting as a bar to that is that the limited disc space on the majority of Xbox 360s might mean that owning the entire series of these (at the minute, hypothetical) levels/episodes would be limited to Elite owners.

Having thought about it a bit more I suppose Bungie’s recent split from Microsoft might cause a few minor issues too, but with an IP as strong as Halo I don’t think Microsoft will be too keen to let it go unexploited. Instead I suspect they’ll either develop it in-house (unlikely) or farm it out to a trusted third party (likely).

Whoever they decide to let develop it, I’d bet on the end result being downloadable as there’s an infrastructure already in place with Xbox Live. Every purchase then from a retail point of view becomes pure profit as there are no physical retailers, packaging people or distributors to pay. The killer reason though is that the second hand market completely evaporates when we start to talk of things in terms of downloads which are locked to the machine they’re downloaded onto.

Halo 3 feels much more like the original Halo did, the sense of freedom you get from being able to rip up gun emplacements and carry them or deploy shields where you want is immense. Add to that the number of different ways to progress through each level and you end up with a thoroughly convincing world.

The sheer amount of stuff you can do in this game is astonishing and rather unusually it doesn’t feel tacked on, it just adds to the atmosphere.

I know I said yesterday that the graphics weren’t really that much of a step up, well I was wrong. The further you get into the game the better they get. Not only that but the number of enemies on screen at once and the number of effects going on is fantastic, you really do get the sense that you’re in the middle of an invasion.

The Arbiter from Halo 2 is still present and thankfully from what I hear you never have to play as him. That was one of Halo 2′s major failings and Metal Gear Solid 2′s while I’m at it, I’ll never forgive Hideo Kojima for making me play as Raiden.

Fucking about with the players sense of identity is a big no-no in my book and so far I’ve felt very much that the fate of the world really is in my hands and that I am Master Chief. Little details abound to convince you of your status as the world’s saviour.

The character of Master Chief really is made to feel larger than life in every situation, marines talk about you in hushed reverential tones and the grunts shit themselves when they see you. It all adds up to a solid sense of immersion.

The Cortana part of the plot is interesting too, I’m looking forward to finding out where her part in the story is. At the minute I can only guess that 343 Guilty Spark will be involved somewhere down the line but for once I’m actually interested in a game’s plot!

I get the feeling too that once I’ve completed the campaign I’m going to get more than my money’s worth out of the online multi-player stuff. It’s a really good game, there’s no mistaking that, but only time will tell if its truly a classic.

A temporary fix has been made on my ’360, looks like that Elite won’t be winging its way to me anytime soon.

As a consequence of my great fixing ability I’ve finally had a chance to play a bit of Halo 3 and from what I can see it looks good. The graphics aren’t that much of a step up from Halo 2, texture wise at least, but the increase in resolution is pretty noticeable.

There have been a few design changes too, for example the Brutes no longer have fur and the Grunts look way more vicious up close. Nice touches.

What’s really freaky though is the voice acting, I’m certain I’ve heard Jonathan Ross and Nathan Fillion as marines, I can’t be sure and they’re not listed on IMDB but I’ve got a sneaky feeling it’s them…

I’m off to pick up a copy of Halo 3 at a midnight opening this evening, I can’t actually believe it’s the first time that I’ll have gone to one of these openings for anything.

I was offered the chance to pick up my Xbox 360 at midnight, which I was tempted by, but in the end it got canceled after the local GameStation took police advice. I strongly suspect that advice might have gone something along the lines of ‘Open if you want but it’s not going to look too good when someone gets stabbed for a console.’.

From what I hear it sounds like Halo 3′s packed with content, has a deeply satisfying single player campaign and some cracking multi-player maps. Probably a first for an Xbox 360 game!

I know that Leprekorn really rates BioShock but I’m not sure that it’s as rounded an experience as Halo 3 promises to be. Besides which I reckon BioShock is going to be the trade in of choice for those picking up Halo 3, which means I’ll be able to pick up a copy dirt cheap (insert evil laugh here)!

So, back to the point, after twenty five years gaming tonight’s the night I’m there on the dot to pick up a game. I’ll let you know my thoughts on it soon.

It would appear that Sony have made a massive fucking u-turn and decided to add rumble to the Sixaxis and imaginatively re-brand it as the DualShock 3. Gosh!

I’d completely forgotten about rumble, after all it’s such a last generation feature. As Sony’s Phil Harrison himself said, when he was asked if adding rumble to the PlayStation 3′s controller might be a good idea:

We have no plans to do so in the standard controller that ships with PlayStation 3. I believe that the Sixaxis controller offers game designers and developers far more opportunity for future innovation than rumble ever did. Now, rumble I think was the last generation feature; it’s not the next-generation feature. I think motion sensitivity is. And we don’t see the need to do that.

Fucking hypocrites. This is what I hate about Sony, their blatant disregard for the people who pay their wages.

We all know, well the gaming cognoscenti at least, that the whole reason they dropped rumble in the first place was that they’d refused to pay Immersion Technologies for the use of haptic feedback technology that they had patents for. In fact they didn’t just refuse to pay up (unlike the commercially savvy boys at Microsoft who paid up almost instantly) but they fought and fought and fought. They still lost.

They seem to assume we’re all slack jawed chavs, playing 50 Cent: Bulletproof while we wait for FIFA Soccer 2009. Admittedly this is probably part of the core audience for the PlayStation 2 and if I’m honest it unlikely the sort of audience Sony generally attract would ever be interested in Ico or Okami preferring to label them proper gay like but even so show us a bit of respect.

What’s more even though they’ve finally capitulated and given us rumble, they’re still fucking the UK over by not releasing it until Spring 2008 (nice and vague that) whilst Japan gets it in November. Bastards.

Of course we all know that as soon as they come out I’ll be buying one, I’m such a sucker.

I fucking love Bubble Bobble.

I first played it twenty years ago when it was ported to the Commodore 64 and recently I’ve picked up the Nintendo DS version of Bubble Bobble Evolution. The Evolution part is shit but the port of the original arcade version is pretty neat.

I say port, surely these days it’s just the arcade code running under emulation right? Wrong. Taito managed to lose the source code in 1986 as part of a company reorganisation, so every version since then has been derived from disassembly or good old fashioned playing of the original.

How mental is that? The original code of one of the best games ever written has been lost! Unbelievably the Commodore 64 version was coded by one guy, Ste Ruddy, and to him I am forever grateful.

The story of two ruddy cheeked brothers Bub and Bob (see what they did there?) who are turned into dinosaurs and then have their girlfriends kidnapped, or is it the other way round? Pah, it’s not important. The gist of it is that you (and a mate, full of two player goodness this one) have to roam through 100 levels of bubble blowing, monster popping fruit collecting madness in order to finally face ‘Super Drunk’, kick his arse and get your bitches back. Ace!

Simply put the entire game is a series of single screen levels, each of which contains platforms and a number of enemies that must be defeated. Things are made a little more difficult with the addition of an unseen timer on each level that counts down to the appearance of Baron von Blubba! Baron von Blubba is an invincible enemy that slowly homes in on you one axis at a time. Evil shit.

The game has some very complex mechanics, bonuses look like they appear at random but secretly they depend on a whole world of data that’s collated behind the scenes as you play. Counters run for the number of jumps, bubbles burst, bubble blown, enemies blown up and a whole host of other events.

If you own a DS and see it pick it up, it’s a true classic.

If you’re interested Stephen Tjasink and Paul Rahme have written a really detailed page
all about them here, all I can say is that those guys must have had some time on their hands but hey, I am grateful.

It would appear that the original post on Black Looks has caused a great deal of controversy, with several people posting nasty racist and hateful comments on the site. For what it’s worth the Blog author’s automatic assumption that these people are in any way indicative of gamers at large is misguided and at worse inflammatory.

These people do not speak for me, nor do they speak for anyone I know. However it would be worth pointing out that many of the comments posted against the follow up article are coherent and well written. Some of course are not, welcome to the world of free speech.
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It would appear that the new Resident Evil 5 trailer (I’d watch that first if i were you) has prompted a few people to pass comment on its content.

Seemingly shooting white zombies is fine, shoot as many of those fuckers as you want! Start shooting black zombies though and you’re a racist. Forget that the whole zombie thing started in Haiti and that 95% of Haitians are of predominately north and western African descent, that means nothing, clearly this must be Capcom’s latest bid to subjugate the black (wo)man, surely?
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Don’t you love E3? Ok, it’s a little less grand this year but all the cool shit still goes down there!

Not only do we get the new Halo 3 trailer (jeans creaming optional, thank you Leprekorn) and the Killzone 2 trailer but Sony have only just gone and released details of the new and improved PSP, the PSP Slim. Get in!

They’ve reduced the size making it smaller, thinner and lighter, increased its battery life and also appear to have rounded its edges a bit more. All this and it’s still got the same size screen!

The other great thing is that now it’s slot loading! Great stuff, much better than the MiniDisc style pop up loader it has currently, it always felt flimsy to me, like it was just about to snap off.

The rumour mill has of course gone in to hyperdrive, current speculation is that it’s going to have Bluetooth and maybe even 4Gb of internal flash memory! 4Gb built in would be very nice, though I’m not certain that it’s a guarantee yet.

This redesign is of course is very good news, the original PSP is shit to play for prolonged periods of time, it did have something of the brick about it . Hopefully this redesign may have cured some of those problems. I doubt it though, my main gripe was always that fucking analogue nubbin, which was as much use as a chocolate fire guard and it doesn’t appear to have moved.

Still one can always hope. You know I’m going to get one anyway…

The Church Of England’s recent attack on the PlayStation 3 game Resistance: Fall Of Man is without doubt a piece of band wagon jumping of the highest order.

In a time when the media is in a frenzy, desperate to pin every evil of society on video games, the Church Of England thinks it would be a good idea to complain about the use of Manchester Cathedral as a setting in the game. In fact they went as far as to say that it was virtual desecration and that it promoted gun crime in Manchester, how they quite worked that one out is beyond me. Regardless they then proceeded to insist Sony make a ‘substantial donation’. Greedy fuckers.
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As anybody that knows me will attest, I’m massively into my games.

It all started when my dad bought me a second hand ZX Spectrum+ (proper keys and a reset button!) in the mid-eighties and snowballed from there, I’ve had practically every console ever made and love the whole scene to bits.

Currently under my telly sit a PlayStation 3, Xbox360, Wii, Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 and I don’t travel anywhere without my Nintendo DS Lite. I’m considering getting a PSP again, as they can link up with the PlayStation 3 and do all sorts of fancy stuff, but that’s a thought for another post it’s the DS aspect that’s cool.

I’ve had my interest piqued recently by DSpec, a ZX Spectrum emulator for the DS, it doesn’t work with my flash cart yet but when it does it’ll be pretty cool. Being able to play the classic games that started my love of gaming when I’m on the train, in bed or when I’m sitting have a coffee in Starbucks is going to be superb. Fantastic stuff this modern technology.

I sat on the phone for 48 minutes last night all in the vague hope someone at Microsoft might answer the phone. As before, fat fucking chance.

So I made a decision, if Microsoft don’t want to fix it I’ll get it fixed myself and send them the bill. Right on!

Let’s see if I get anywhere with this. So far I’m £38.50 in the hole and it sounds like the company I’m using actually take the unit apart, get rid of the shit and dust out of it and fit a decent cooling that doesn’t let the motherboard warp like a suspension bridge in a gale. We’ll see how they do but to be honest they can’t be much worse than Microsoft.

I’ll keep you informed in my quest for Microsoft to pay my bill.

Looks like my Xbox 360 has finally decided to pack in at the grand old age of 18 months.

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This isn’t the first time I’ve had this kind of problem, oh no, I’ve been having freezes for a few weeks now and I even rang Microsoft last week to report them. I was helpfully told then that a simple restore would cure the problem.

My arse.

I’ve worked in the IT support game long enough to know that the first thing on tech support’s mind, when handling a call, is to get rid of that call. This isn’t my idea of customer service by the way, I’m much more thorough, however my English speaking chum possibly wasn’t.

This time though it looks serious, I even had three red lights earlier tonight. I guess that means I’m fucked really.

The upshot of all this is, that tomorrow, I’m going to have to call Microsoft to try and get them to help me get my ’360 fixed. God alone knows how much that is going to cost me.

Be warned though Microsoft I’ve got a PlayStation 3 now, and I’m not quite as impressed by your machine as I used to be.

Hah! Listen to me, as if Microsoft gives a flying fuck about me!

The PlayStation 3 is the most amazing piece of hardware I have ever owned. It is worth every penny of the £425 asking price.

I’ve just tested its upscaling of DVDs. Star Wars upscaled to 1080p on my Samsung panel looks amazing. Absolutely fucking amazing. Like nothing I have seen before. The picture is crisp, vivid and alive, motion is smooth and shadows detailed. It’s like it was on Blu-ray, it really is.

The XMB (the interface you get on switching on the box) is beautiful and surprisingly functional. Even the built in web browser is usable (this site looks awesome running full screen at 1920 x 1080).

So in summation, I’m sorry Sony. I really doubted you on this one, at least now you’ve gotten rid of king of the egos Ken Kutaragi the platform has a fighting chance.