Legendary

I have no idea why I'm so disappointed with this game but after seeing it back in 2008, thinking it was a cool idea and then finally playing it 10 years later I just can't help but feel somewhat let down.

The game is about a guy called Deckard who gets hired to go and steal Pandoras Box.  As he tries to grab it the box brands him, he gets double crossed by his employer and he unleashes all manner of mythical beasts on the world.  You then have to team up with some British woman and a bunch of army type people to stop the big bad and put all the beasts back in the box.

This game came out at a time when shooters were dime a dozen and there was plenty of sort of, not really bad, but dull, bland shooters on the market.  Basically if you owned an Xbox 360 at any point you've probably played a game that's sort of similar in quality to Legendary.  Legendary though on paper seems like a really good idea because it was a modern shooter but the enemies weren't just dudes but mythical beasts.

When you actually play the game though it does have a decent number of mythical beasts to shoot in the face but there is also an abundance of dudes with guns.  That's only the start of the games problems though.  The controls for moving and shooting are fine but if you ever have to jump its the absolute worst thing I've ever seen.  Deckard for some reason can only jump about half a millimeter off the ground and while places where you actually HAVE to jump are few, when it does come up it's akin to trying to pull your own teeth out with your bare hands.  The absolute worst thing of all, especially for a game in this genre, is that the guns feel weak.  There's one part, for example, where you have to fight a Griffon and it's hard to tell if you're doing any damage because everything feels like a water pistol and the enemy doesn't give any indication that it's taking damage.  Even if your shooter is a bland, boring, by the books piece of shit it can be saved at least somewhat if it FEELS good to play.  F.E.A.R is a great example of a game that is quite shit but I still like playing it because mowing down guys in bullet time with that nail gun thing feels awesome.

It would be unfair to call Legendary a shit game, but it's definitely a forgettable one.  The kind of game that's only worth playing if you're absolutely MAD into FPS games and you've played literally EVERYTHING else.

Alien Breed Trilogy

Alien Breed Trilogy is one of those games that I looked at, rolled my eyes and expected something truly terrible upon firing it up.  What I got wasn't so bad but all things considered it still wasn't very good and playing all 3 games back to back was at some points, truly painful.

First let me explain why I had such low hopes going in.

Alien Breed got its start a long while ago on a home computer system called the Amiga.  Now I never owned an Amiga myself during my younger years but I had a friend who did.  Most of his games were demos but one of the only full games he had was Alien Breed (and Body Blows but we won't talk about that).  It was a top down shooting game where you had to collect keys and ammo in order to gun down aliens and get to the end of each level.  I've not played the original Alien Breed games in a long long time but from what I remember it was pretty fun.

Whenever old, obscure series like this get a reboot for the modern day they usually suck huge amounts of anus, just look at Syndicate if you want to know what I'm on about there.  Then again though, it's kind of hard to fuck up the concept of Alien Breed so maybe there was a small ray of hope.

The game follows Conrad, a gravel voiced balled space engineer with a "bad ass" attitude as he battles his way through a space ship being over run by aliens.  The story comes in 3 different games with it culminating in a battle against some guy who has assimilated with the space ships AI or some such nonsense and he's the one controlling the aliens so you have to stop him.  Despite the fact that I only beat the third game like 2 days ago the story is no inconsequential and shitty that I've already forgotten it.

Game play for Alien Breed Trilogy isn't so bad, it's kind of similar to the old games but all fancy 3D unreal engine shit.  You get a selection of about 6 guns and a big space ship full of aliens to use them on, it's fairly self explanatory.  The bullshit kicks in with the repetitive nature of the levels where you go one direction, find something broken, go the other way to fix it and then backtrack to the first point in order to progress.  Rinse and repeat this shit for 3. Games. There are also some boss fights but they all subscribe to the Doom style of design of "shoot it until it dies" and because ammo and health drops are so easy to find these encounters never hold the tension that I think the designers were shooting for.

That's all there is to say about the series really.  Everything else is so "meh" that it's barely worth commenting on.  Visuals and audio aren't awful but are nothing special worth talking about and the controls work just fine despite being a little wonky when the game starts changing camera angles on you in the third game.  In terms of revived old franchises this one has come out largely un-ruined.  The trilogy is a bit shitty but pretty bearable and if you're into this kind of top-down action type thing then it has its fun moments sometimes.  Get it on sale or something.  

Who Cares About VGX?

Here we go again folks!  It's getting to the end of the year, so it's now time once again for everyone to start putting their game of the year lists together!

If anyone doesn't know what VGX is it's some video game award thing hosted by Spike TV and it involves talking about games for a bit, and then announcing a load of awards given to whoever made the best of whatever category they are pushing.  The show is produced by Geoff Keighley, the man known to the masses as "Dorito Pope", so you know it's probably a load of bollocks.

Now when I woke up this morning it was already underway but having a quick look at my twitter turned me right off the whole thing.  The first thing I saw was that Nintendo announced a new Donkey Kong game, which I thought was cool but apparently the rest of the internet was just complaining about it.  The day has come when people are cursing a new DKC game....and that's a sad day.

So aside from the Dorito Pope the whole thing was hosted by Joel Mchale, who I'm not familiar with but he's not much of a game fan by the looks of things.  From what I saw and heard about the goings on, he spent most of his time looking like he didn't want to be there but he did manage to ask a couple of really awkward questions to certain people, which gave me a little chuckle.

Now I have a bit of a problem with these kinds of award shows because the winners are always really really predictable.  The game of the year winner at VGX was, surprise surprise, Grand Theft Auto 5.  Not that I'm saying that there's anything wrong with GTA5, I've not played it yet, it's probably a good game at the very least however the game of the year really can only go to like 1 of maybe 3 games off the top of my head.  Most of the big review sites will probably give their game of the year award to either The Last of Us, Bioshock Infinite or Grand Theft Auto 5. 

In fact, I'll make a bet with people right now, for every major gaming site that gives it's GOTY to something different, I'll give £5 to charity, so make sure you email me and make me aware because I'm not going to go hunting for it.

Not that those 3 are bad games, they are all passable titles, well put together with lots of polish and all that jazz but the fact that every gaming site will give their awards to one of these three is a little boring and sort of smells a bit of that whole "paid review" thing that gets talked about sometimes.  I just wish that they would be more open about what their game of the year could be, so that when I watch I don't just fast forward through nominees because I know exactly what they are going to pick.

I heard though that fucking Gone Home of all goddamn things won indie game of the year.  THIS I don't fucking agree with, because it's barely even qualifies as a game.  If you want to tell me that Gone Home was better that Rouge Legacy, Don't Starve, Gunpoint, Antichamber and many others (that's just going off my sidebar) then take your shitty opinion and fuck off out of my face, I reject your awful taste in video games.  I'm not sure if it actually did though, so if I'm wrong I'll be happy to discover that.

I didn't ignore the VGX completely but what I did see seemed low budget, badly made bullshit.  The reveal about DKC was cool and I didn't see the others but the awards were so predictable I ended up closing the tab and playing fucking Gynoug on the Mega Drive.  Do people actually give a flying fuck about these award shows? They know which handful of games is probably going to win so why bother?

Although if the VGX did one thing right it bored me enough to make me get up from my computer and work through my PS3 backlog for a few hours.

Boring is Worse than Bad

I'm really struggeling with Final Fantasy 4, the game is just dull.  This made me realise something and that is that a boring game is way WAY worse than a bad one.

Let's take a truly shitty example of a game

It's pretty much accepted by anyone with any kind of taste in anything ever that Silent Hill: Homecoming is an absolutely shitty game.  This game truly has nothing good going for it to the point where it becomes offensively bad but when a game reaches this level of shittyness there is still some entertainment to be had.

Get a friend round and play a shitty game together and you can both sit there just raging at it and that can be sort of fun in a strange kind of way.  Then when you're done you can hop onto your computer and have a giant bitching session with thousands of people about how much Tomm Hulett is a piece of shit.  Then when you're done with that, you can go to YouTube and be entertained by other people that you don't know raging about how shitty the game is, all with this smug sense of satisfaction because there are literally thousands of people who agree with you about how shitty this game is.

But then you have something like Final Fantasy 4.  Final Fantasy 4 is fine, it's not mechanically broken in any way and nothing about it really sticks out and just sucks.  The graphics are fine, the story is fine and the gameplay is fine, but at the same time it's not really all that fun either and that's the problem.  Final Fantasy 4 is BORING and this is way worse than being shitty.  At least with Silent Hill I can go on a tirade but I can't rage about FF4 because it's fine, it's just dull.

A bad game can almost be fun to play because sometimes you really want to see just how shitty it really gets (E.g. Heavy Rain) but a boring game really is just an absolute chore to play.  If I wasn't streaming it for charity I would have put it down by now.

Come enjoy the FF stream tonight!
www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

A couple of updates

Well I got back from Disneyland last night but the friend I recorded the Die Hard showcase with is visiting again so chances to blog so far have basically been none, so I'll just give a mention of whats coming so you all know I'm not dead.

I've got about an hour of Panzer Dragoon recorded and ready to upload so keep an eye on the YT channel for that. 

Accounts of Tokyo Disney Sea will also be written here with lots of pretty pictures.

Finally, I'm planning to do a new series for the YT channel involving me and my friend, it should be pretty good to stay alert for that one.

In the meantime, I'm going to hit Nagoya castle and go drop coins into arcades today, so there will probably be stuff on that soon too, watch this space!

Blog Updates!

Well I don't really have time to make a full on big post today, so instead I'm going to grace you with some ideas I have for the near future.

First, I'm planning to do more Isaac videos, mainly of the challenge mode and probably with commentary.  I'll upload them even if I lose, but I probably won't upload every attempt because that will get pretty dull pretty fast, probably the first attempt and then the 5th, 10th etc.

The other big video project I have in mind is doing some mahjong commentary, playing online and explaining why it's bullshit when I don't win.  It'll also be semi educational so it might be of interest to anyone wanting to learn the game

There is also an idea to do a kind of non-gaming related video series but I'm still thinking about that one.

Finally, I have a big month long event that's going to go down starting from around September 1st, but you'll find out more about that tomorrow!

Look forward to the stuff, hopefully you'll enjoy it!

UPDATES! Sexy new banner and my game collection

So this is going to be a pretty short post since I was going to be raging about Dracula X on SNES, but then stuff happened.

So first of all, the reason you're not getting a picture with this one is because I've just been provided a sexy new banner by my buddy HKM, so big thanks to him for actually giving this blog some originality outside of the standard blogger template.

Now, the reason I'm not doing a proper post today is because I'm in the process of trying to figure out WHAT THE FUCK is going on with my game collection back home.  The post company have managed to lose track of the boxes so they may or may not be stuck in Denmark or something, god knows what's happening, I can't ever get any proper info about anything in this situation.

Tomorrow will be back to normal, for now, enjoy the new banner

R-Type Tactics Update!

So you remember a few days ago I made a post on what I thought so far about R-Type Tactics and how I thought I liked it but when I thought about it the game is actually a pile of shit?  Well even if you don't I've been playing it a bit more and I've come across something that has annoyed me even more.

You see, the amount I've actually been playing this game is quite low, partly due to being distracted by playing League of Legends recently, and partly due to the game being huge amounts of horseshit.

Anyway, lets play a little game of spot the difference, look at these 3 pictures I just took.

Can you spot the difference? NO YOU CAN'T IT'S THE SAME FUCKING LEVEL and yes, these are from 3 different missions.  Sure, the purple crap that makes you move slower changes shape over the course of the stages, but that does NOT make it a different goddamn mission.  Oh, and on top of that, the music is the same in each of these stages. 

This is just lazy on the part of the developer.  Sure, I'm warping a huge distance into the Bydo homeworld, but you do not need to convey the distance by repeating the same stage 3 times.  I've not even bothered to play the third one yet so there may even be a 4th.

I want to beat it, I don't like to leave things unfinished, but I'm THIS close to sodding the whole thing and just starting on Dracula X Chronicles instead.

Castlevania Series Run: Castlevania 2

What a horrible night to have a SHITTY FUCKING GAME! HOLY CRAP THIS SUCKS SO BAD!

OK, cruise control out of the way, yeah, the second game as part of my Castlevania series was obviously, Castlevania 2: Simons Quest.  This game is so bad it makes me want to cut off my own hands for having played it, it's a disaster of a game and was barely worth my time, but still, I couldn't say I did a proper go through of the series if I didn't play it.

Anyway, before I start talking about how awful this game is, lets go over some good things about this game, and surprisingly there are a few.  First of all we have the day and night thing, which is surprisingly an awful thing and a good thing at the same time.  See, it's a cool idea and it does a lot for building tension when your low HP and quite far from the nearest town to heal in, but it's so badly implemented it kind of just falls flat, but more on that later.

The other good thing is the soundtrack, most notably Bloody Tears.  When ANYONE thinks of Castlevania, they think of that damn song and this is where it all began, as an overworld theme in the daytime segments of this shitty game

But unfortunately, that's about it for the good points behind this game, so time to dive headfirst into the shit.  So yeah, back to that day and night shit.  Sure, I said it's a cool concept, but the problem is that every time the game transitions between phases, EVERYTHING stops and you can't do shit for like a good 15 seconds.  It's a pain in the ass and it really adds a lot of unneeded length to an already arse game.

Leading me onto my second point, GRINDING!  Now I'm a bit of a glutton for the grind.  I used to play the shit of World of Warcraft back in vanilla and Burning Crusade days and hell, I've even had my fair share of hours on those free Korean grindfests, but THIS is a pisstake.  Basically you need hearts to buy important shit that you need to move on.  However these hearts take fucking ages to get and the only thing you ever really want to do is walk back and forth between 2 sets of enemies hoping one of them drops a big heart so you don't have to grind as long.  What's super double bullshit turbo is that if you die, you lose all your goddamn hearts, so you have to grind out those 4,000,000 skeletons AGAIN! fuck this game...

So when you do eventually get your shit together, you get to go questing in what is quite possibly the worst designed levels fucking ever.  There are 4 mansions in this game, each housing a bit of dracula that you have to pick up.  The first 2 don't even have a boss and you just have to fight your way through some easy mode skeletons and slimes or whatever.  Then when you finally do hit a boss, it's so easy it may as well have not existed in the first place.  But your worst enemy in this shitheap game, is the floor!  Some of the blocks you just fall through and you either day or have to backtrack like 5 minutes to get to where you were, and by that point you're so angry you forget AGAIN and fall down AGAIN.

Writing about this game is actually giving me pretty much ever disease ever, so I'll wrap up with this last point, and that's the puzzles.  Holy shit the puzzles.  This is the most cryptic as shit game that you'll ever play, more cryptic than Z grade point and clickers from the 90's.  Unless you have gamefaqs (which lol, you wouldn't have done if you played it new) or a copy of Nintendo Power (lol, enjoy spending more money, dickface) you were just fucked up the ass with a broomstick.  There is NO WAY you would ever figure out from the hint "hit your head off the cliff" to go buy a red gem, and duck in front of it for 5 seconds, and that's just the most famous example.  There is so cryptic shit in this game that it could take up a good 10+ entries on the "Thats some BULLSHIT" bit I'm doing.

So yeah, that's Castlevania 2, and if you're still interested after all that, here's one last thing to maybe put you off the game entirely.  The final dungeon has no enemies or traps, and you can stunlock Dracula with fire until he dies.

Fuck this game, and fuck everyone associated with its development

Holy crap! No time! Gotta make a post! plans for the blog!!!

OK! No pictures or any of the fancy shit I usually give you today, I'm in a rush to head out and fulfil social obligations (I know, I know, I'm a disgrace) so I thought I'd very quickly give you guys a run down for plans I'll hopefully be able to bring forward in the future.

First of all I want to set up a stream, I just really need enough time to find something A) Worth streaming, and B) figure out how to work some free streaming software that I found

Of course going hand in hand with the streaming would be lets plays, but I'm going to be very careful about doing this because there is an over saturation of people doing this shit already.

Once I start getting some time of work I'm hoping I'll be able to do some events where I'll be streaming or doing something  gaming related in order to raise more money for the Alzheimer's charity.

Finally, stuff that I plan to fulfil a bit more short time is getting some footage of all the really cool coin-op games I'm playing in Japan and do some bits on there, so stay tuned, things should be good!

R-Type Tactics

The next game that's been taking a pretty significant portion of my time is R-Type Tactics, which is a weird way to take the series I think.  For anyone who may not know, R-Type is a dirty big long series of side scrolling shooter games for various formats, most notably in the arcades so to see it appear as a turn based strategy game more than raised an eyebrow the first time I saw it.

Anyway, the story for this thing is that there is this huge alien army called the Bydo that's being ruining Earth's shit for a long long time and its up to you to get all your ships together and go wreck face.  It's a pretty minimalistic plot that tries to flesh itself by talking about the state of the Earth army and crap like that, but if you've ever played a shooter, you don't give a shit about the plot then and you won't give a shit about it now.

 I'm actually finding this game kind of hard to write about as now that I think about it, it's actually pretty boring.  Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy playing R-Type Tactics, but I can't ever do more than one or two missions in one sitting and by the time its over I'm pretty burnt out.

I think the problem is that there is very little variation in the missions and all the objectives boil down to "kill the enemy flagship" and on top of that all the maps are just expanses of space or boring orange looking interior levels.  Granted I've not beaten the game yet, there may be some cool looking levels coming up, but I'm pretty far and it's been dull as shit so far.

The second problem I have with this game, is the "tactics" part of the title.  I've used the same strategy every time and I've never even come close to losing a level yet.  Oh, and before anyone calls me out on my progress, I'm INVADING THE BYDO HOME WORLD, so that must be getting on to the last section of the game at least.  Every level I just scout, keep the bombers close behind, keep the fighters in the back until their charged and then let them rip, and that's it, missions usually over by that point.  That feeling of routine that has sunk in with each mission really makes me not want to play it for long periods of time, it does an absolutely garbage job of keeping me engaged.

The third issue I have with this game is the ships.  Here is an example of the Research and Development menu to build new ships.

Sorry about the image quality, I had to take it off my camera because I don't know how to get proper screen shots off a PSP, so whatever.  Anyway, unless you've played the game you have no idea how good or bad these ships actually are, but take it from me, apart from the bomber they are ALL garbage.  I refuse to even waste resources on a Orbit Fighter because it's going to be a load of crap just like the rest of them.  Oh, and that bipedal thing is a load of wank too, and that's the upgrade that I own down at the bottom.  It has like, 2 movement and can only melee, so yeah, fat lot of fucking good that ship is.  Finally, that bomber, is the most overpowered goddamn unit in any turn based game I've ever seen.  It comes equipped with a nuke, that just bodies whatever the hell you fire it at.  It never misses and it does HUGE damage.  So you keep a resupply unit on each of your bombers and your set for every mission.  Sure, the fighters get a super powerful charge shot, but it takes like 4 turns to charge so that can piss off too.

Anyway, one final issue I have with this game is the load times.  Loading between missions is OK, but occasionally the game will do that Advance Wars thing where it shows the groups of ships firing on each other.  At first its cool, as an R-Type fan to see the ships and bosses rendered in 3D but the problem is, the game has to load each sequence and it takes a LOOONG time.  You can add about 10 minutes of mission time just in loading time for those sequences so to make the boring missions go faster you end up just turning that shit off anyway.

Up there I said somewhere that I enjoy playing R-Type Tactics, but over the course of writing this post I think I've made myself hate it.  Anyway I'll slog through it and post some updates about the rest of the game later.