Confused About Retro

So I've joined a couple of retro gaming groups on Facebook recently and thanks to their stream of delightful posts now filling up my feed it got me wondering, just what constitutes a "retro" game? 

When I think about retro I think about stuff that looks like this 

This 

Or this 

Hell, I guess at this point you could even consider PS2 kind of retro although I hate to admit that because it makes me very much aware of just how old I'm getting.  

What I found interesting is when a post came up saying "What retro RPG would you like a remake of".  The usual slew of SNES games and things like that came up but then one guy came along and said "Lost Odyssey".  This made me raise an eyebrow because that game is on X Box 360, surely that can't be retro, I mean look at it

At first glance it doesn't exactly scream retro does it? For arguments sake I decided to ask my wife how old something has to be for it to be considered retro to her.  She said that anything older than 10 years she would consider retro.  This would place Lost Odyssey, a game released in 2007, in the retro category.

However I also did a Google search and found a forum where a number of users agreed that anything older than 2 console generations is retro, which would then place Lost Odyssey in the category of modern game.  

The lack of consensus presents an interesting topic for debate but becomes a real pain in the butt when it comes to things like streaming on Twitch.  For example I'm currently streaming Ys Origin which was released in 2006.  Now streaming under "Retro" would be preferable because more people would be watching there rather than the individual game.  But Ys Origin isn't a game I'd consider retro really and I wouldn't want to piss off Twitch admin or viewers by streaming in the wrong category.  

To me, retro is pre-PS2/GameCube/XBox is retro and that era is old but old enough quite yet to be considered retro.  I'm always interested to hear other people's opinions on it though.  Like I said before I think I don't want those systems to be retro because it makes me feel old but I'm sure to some younger gamers those consoles are ancient history. 

Dead Rising

Last weekend I streamed Dead Rising from start to finish and oh boy was it fun.  It took just a little over 9 hours and the last hour of that was pretty grueling but generally speaking this game is pretty fantastic.

If somehow you have never heard of this game I'll take a quick moment to explain.  Originally released back in 2006 for Xbox 360, Dead Rising follows the adventures of Frank West, a photojournalist who gets trapped in a mall full of zombies.  The game was interesting because you only had 72 in game hours to play with and the story segments happened at specific times which, if you missed, would lock you out of the plot for the rest of the game.  What really made this game popular though was that the mall setting allowed for the player to use a whole crazy array of weaponry against the undead.  You could opt for more traditional stuff from a hardware store like a sledgehammer or go nab a gun from a zombie police office OR you could get silly and use gumball machines, shopping carts or children's toys to try and beat the undead back to death.  There are also human boss characters the game calls psychopaths which you must kill to rescue people or to progress the game.  There was a colorful cast of lunatics which made each encounter interesting and you would really have the think on your feet the first time playing if you wanted to win.

I love this game personally, it's one of those titles that is not only fun but sort of doubles up as a stress relieving tool.  If you want to uncover the zombie mystery of the mall, then play the story but if you just want to beat the fuck out of some zombies then ignore that timer and just go crazy.  Once you beat the game there is an Overtime mode which gives a bit of extra story and and endless mode if you want all the zombie killing with none of the pressure.

I only really have two problems with this game.  The first being is that it's too fucking easy.  I said above  that the first time you play you really have to think on your feet with the bosses but once you learn that an early boss unlocks a sort of pocket chainsaw in infinite supply the game becomes super easy.  The pocket chainsaw is SO strong that I think that there's only two bosses in the game that aren't insta killed by it in like 3 very quick hits.  Once you fill up your inventory with chainsaws the game becomes LAUGHABLY easy and the need to have any other weapon sort of goes away.

My other problem comes in the third day of the game.  You end up finishing all the games "case file" missions and then you are left to just sort of wait for your ride to arrive.  The lack of things to do of substance sort of makes the last hour of the game quite dull.  Even the zombie killing comes to a screeching halt as the mall fills up with dudes with machine guns which is a damn shame really.

However don't let my two complaints about the game deter you, if you haven't already played it then you absolutely should go and try.  Oh yeah, finally, don't try to rescue survivors because the AI for this game sucks dick.

The series seems to have taken a bit of a downturn with 3 and 4 since it's trying to be all gritty now from what I can tell but the first game is a ton of fun and fantastically dumb story and dialogue will leave you with a huge grin on your face.  Play it.

Dark Souls 2: Underwhelmingly Good

There aren't many games that I pay full price for anymore.  We live in an age where steam are just giving people free money if you play their free to play stuff and digital sales are so cheap that it barely seems worth it anymore.  That said I'm totally happy that I paid just about full price for Dark Souls 2!

The game is great and I loved almost every second of it.  It was challenging, engaging, interesting and above all, fun.  But as I sat in front of my PC last night watching the credits go buy I cant help but feel a little "meh" about the whole experience.  I know that sounds really weird and contradictory but I'll try to do the best I can to explain myself.

From a game play perspective, DS2 is fantastic.  It takes elements from the first Dark Souls that weren't all that good or just a bit annoying and makes them better while adding a few things of its own and that's great.  The world is also pretty huge and filled with plenty of lore so from a story standpoint it holds up but, and maybe this is just me, the game did absolutely NOTHING to immerse me in it's world.  At no point did I feel like I was on a grand adventure, I just felt like I was going through the motions.

Demon's Souls tells you straight up that the world is fucked because of some fog and it is up to you as a brave adventurer to go and un-fuck it.  That felt like a grand adventure and the icing on the cake was getting to learn all the radical shit about Boletaria.

Dark Souls did a great job of making me feel like I was on a grand adventure by laying on the insurmountable goals thick and fast.  One minute I'm just some prick with a sword or whatever and I have to ring some bells.  So I pull that off and I'm told that maybe I'm the Chosen Undead or something but probably not but just in case I should go and get a big pot from a castle.  So I undergo all sorts of terrible trials to get this big pot and the fucking thing turns out to be empty so I have to travel the land far and wide finding DEITIES to kill so I can steal their souls and put them in my pot.  Then once I've done THAT I have to go and fight what is essentially the father of all creation or some shit and kill him and once that was all said and done I get to decide the fate of all man.

THAT'S FUCKING RADICAL!

Dark Souls 2 on the other hand didn't really have much of anything and it's core plot felt a bit lazy.  In that game I'm just some cursed dude who's drawn to the land of Drangleic for......reasons.  When I get there some bitch tells me to go see the king but to do that I have to go and get 4 very powerful souls.  ALRITE! SOUNDS GOOD!  But once I've done that what comes next?  Well a lot of fucking nothing really.  I explore a castle, kill some bosses, open some doors and when all is said and done I don't feel like I achieved anything.

The final boss of the game is the most challenging boss in a Souls game to date from a game play perspective but I don't really know what the fuck I was fighting there.  The design of the thing made it look like Gravelord Nito's sister or some shit.  [Spoilers] Then when I killed her all I did was have a sit down in a chair and the game fucking ended [End Spoilers]

My reaction to beating Dark Souls 2 was "is that it?", and that's not the kind of reaction I should be having to a game that is supposedly about grand adventure!  Anyway, that was the biggest letdown with the game but it was full of other problems too.

Dark Souls 2 is way, WAY easier than any other Souls game.  The only parts where the game gets challenging is where poison comes in.  There are so many fucking poison segments in this game that it feels like they just forgot how to design good enemies so instead gave everything a poison attack or just make the floor poison or something to make things harder.

But even then the challenge isn't really a big deal because the Ring of Life Protection is repairable and the cost to repair it is super cheap so once you get just one of these rings then you basically never have to worry about losing souls ever again.  Death means -3000 souls while before dying meant that if you weren't careful you could potentially lose fucking everything.

Also the game makes a big deal of you losing a little bit of health every time you die, which is a big thing at the start of the game but after a while human effigies drop like candy and even if you are the worlds most unlucky person you can just buy them so that whole feature of the game just becomes completely pointless.

Despite all my complaints though I still really like Dark Souls 2, just not as much as the other Souls games.  But that says a lot about the quality of Souls as a series when a bad entry of the series is STILL really fun to play.  So even after reading about feelings of slight disappointment with this game, you should still totally go buy it

Eternal Sonata

There may be spoilers here, so if you care about the spoilers for a game this old, then proceed with caution.

Eternal Sonata was a game that came out for Xbox in 2007 and while I played it at launch I didn't get round to actually finishing it until much later.  Then my Xbox version got stolen and I decided to replay it on PS3 recently so I thought I'd spend a little bit of time talking about it.

Eternal Sonata is a game with a very strange premise.  You follow the adventures of Frans Frederic Chopin, the pianist, through his death dream.  On his adventure through his own mind he meets up with a colourful cast of characters and together they have to stop the evil Count Waltz from taking over the world. Obviously there's more to it than that, but if I tried to tell you every facet of the story I'd be here all fucking day.

The game itself is actually really good with a really interesting combat system, good music, nice art and really well done voice acting (at least in Japanese) despite some of the silly lines.  You spend most of your time exploring environments and fighting monsters but the environments are so varied and the combat is so fun that the the games formulaic structure never really gets all that boring.

Aside from the interesting locales and fun combat the game is also split up between chapters with some real life information about Chopin himself which is really interesting.  Each little history section has one of Chopin's pieces playing in the background and it brings a nice bit of realism into what is essentially a very silly and outlandish anime game.

The game does suffer from a few problems though.  The story does like to stop and spin it's wheels while the characters do something completely pointless like explore a mirror or some shit.  There are certain segments and certain dungeons that do feel a bit like filler in order to pad out the game.  Also the combat, while not too challenging really is extremely unforgiving.  When an enemy attacks you have a chance to block and successfully doing this will greatly reduce the damage.  Not getting a block is OK for most normal enemies but there are some boss fights where missing the block will mean the death of a character.

The ending is also fucking retarded and I had absolutely NO idea what the fuck happened.  Someone died and then came back and then someone else died and came back and they had a chat about something or other and it all made no sense.  Also the game just fucking removed ALL subtitles for the credits sequence.  This is fine for me because I can speak and understand Japanese but for people who turned on the Japanese voices just because they prefer it that way get totally shafted in the games final moments.

However these are all little niggles in what is essentially a great RPG for the PS3 and Xbox 360.  I would recommended Eternal Sonata to any RPG fan who needs a fix of whimsy and light hearted adventure. 

Dying Light

There are so many zombie games now that the whole concept has become sort of meaningless but somehow the guys over at Techland have managed to get me excited for their upcoming zombie game Dying Light.

At first I sort of rolled my eyes and thought "oh great, another zombie game" and the fact that it was made by the same guys who gave us Dead Island didn't really make me any more excited but then I found a 12 minute game play video.

Granted it's still a work in progress but right now it's actually looking pretty promising.  No silly levelling systems or some other feature to make zombie killing easier.  Right now it just looks like the player is given a bunch of objectives and they have to survive while they fulfil those objectives, simple and fun.  There seems to be some extra side missions to which will have some kind of effect on the story but it doesn't look like you'll be running around doing "quests" for people.  Also the free running mechanic looks like it'll make traversing the areas of the game quite fun and give you quite a few options on how to deal with an upcoming horde.

The thing I quite like about the game play trailer is that during the day it's sort of a bog standard first person zombie game, but things get interesting once night falls because the zombies stop being zombies and they become strange creatures that can perform all sorts of acrobatic feats to come and chew your brains out.

Still, with it being a zombie game I'm not jumping out of my seat in excitement but I'm most definitely looking forward to more news to see how this one turns out.  I'm down for some free running, zombie killing action so sign me up and give me a pair of running shoes and a shotgun.

Deadly Premonition: Directors Cut

You don't know what this is? I'll tell you what this is! This game, this fucking game, is one of the best things I have ever played in my entire life despite being fucking awful.

Deadly Premonition: Directors Cut is a updated version of 2010 pseudo survival horror game that came out for the Xbox 360.  I call the game a pseudo survival horror because really it's only a survival horror about 20% of the time, and the rest of it is spent playing out an episode from a cop show.

They story of Deadly Premonition follows the adventures of FBI agent Francis York Morgan as he takes a trip to the American town of Greenvale to solve an extremely brutal murder involving a woman who had her guts cut out and a load of red seeds.  As you play you discover that York is one of the nuttiest FBI guys you'll ever see in any kind of fiction ever and that the town likes to go around mimicking Silent Hill every so often.

The game play is sort of standard for a third person shooter with Resident Evil 4 style controls for combat and then when you're not fighting things you have a big (and I do mean BIG) area to explore and do all sorts of side quests and collection objectives and whatnot.  That said, the aiming is a little iffy at times and York does feel very stiff which can make having to deal with multiple enemies a bit taxing at times, but overall the game isn't very hard so you won't find yourself smashing controllers and yelling "bullshit!" at the TV.

The graphics are a bit more than just iffy though since Deadly Premonition essentially looks like a PS2 game with low resolution textures and 3D models that sometimes look worse than the most fucked up Barbie doll.  It's not just the visuals that are off too, the music is badly mixed in places and choices of songs sometimes don't fit the situation they are being played in.  The thing I remember most about sound is when you are driving around and York starts to whistle, it kind of crackles and kind of sounds like it was recorded with some dudes laptop mic that was running Windows 95.

So with everything I just said, you may think that Deadly Premonition is awful and just not worth your time right? FUCKING WRONG! Deadly Premonition, despite being godawful, is one of the most compelling games I've ever played.

The story is REALLY strong in this one, despite being a little nuts and corny in places, I was pushed forward through the game by a genuine interest to find out who the killer was.  Also, despite what I said about bad mixing of sound in certain places, the voice acting is especially strong with York's actor really standing out with his ability to absolutely NAIL all of the flat out strange dialogue.

Deadly Premonition really is a labour of love from the developers at Access Games and the effort they put into it on what I assume was a limited budget really shows.  You get a lot of content in here too with the main game taking me about 20 hours on a first time run with very few side quests which is a breath of fresh air after spending so much time playing 6-8 hour corridor shooters.

Finally, I've heard that this game shares a lot of similarities with the show Twin Peaks, but I can't comment on that since I've never seen it, although I know what I'm going to hunt down now.  So go and buy Deadly Premonition because if you can get over your initial shock at the presentation, you'll have one of the best gaming experiences this generation.

As a little final note, if you don't own a console, don't worry, it got Greenlit on Steam.

E3 2013 Microsoft Conference Thoughts!

Microsoft gave it their all on that stage out there today, and to be honest I think they did a good job!  Check out the video to hear my thoughts on what went down

Let's Talk Sonic

13th December 1993 was the day I first received a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis if you're American and wrong) with a copy of The Lion King from my parents.  On the 25th December of that year I got Sonic 1 and 2 as presents, that was a good day.

At the age of 4 I was fucking enthralled with these video games and thanks to Sonic and The Lion King I am now the game loving lunatic who writes crap articles on a blog you are seeing today.  Sonic was fucking great back then and he was a big deal too.  There was all sorts of sonic related shit like merchandise, comics, TV shows and the list goes on.

But something went wrong, arguably around 2006 when he got a game on the Xbox 360.  Ever since that fucking game the Sonic franchise has been in the absolute shitter, and the only game that has come close to delivering a good sonic experience is Sonic Generations.

What makes the whole situation really sad is that you could fix the whole Sonic thing on basically no money and it baffles my goddamn mind why they don't do this.  So, here they are, 2 points that would save Sonic the Hedgehog.

1) Get rid of the fucking friends

Sonic's friends are the fucking worst, I can't stress how bad these characters are.  I'll give you Sonic, Tails and Knuckles, they are fine but shit like Shadow, Amy, that fucking cat from Rush, Cream and every other strange creature just need to fuck off forever.  NO ONE with any kind of brain or taste like Sonic's friends.  The people who do like this group of stupid arseholes are the kind of people that do weird fan art on the internet and do character cosplay to go fucking shopping.  They need help, not games designed for them

2) Just make it 2D; the more Mega Drive-like the better

Part of the problem with modern Sonic is the whole 3D thing.  I mean it was OK in Adventure 1 and 2 but for the most part, playing Sonic in 3D is fucking arse.  Trying to control a character who moves at that speed is basically impossible and I think this fact just has to be accepted.  So I said before that you can make a good Sonic game for no money, here is now!  Simply take the engine used for Sonic 2 or 3, get some level designer who knows what he/she is doing to get a bunch of shit together, get a decent musician to bash out some catchy 16 bit tunes, release it on PC under steam or some shit and BAM! Sonic might not be terrible anymore.

Megaman went and released fucking TWO 8-bit games on the PS3/360 and they did pretty damn well.  Why are you clinging to this fucking 3D garbage when no one wants it.  I don't care that you have designs for Cullus the Dung Beetle or some shit ready to go, throw that shit in a fire and go make a 16 bit Sonic game so that you remember how to fucking do it.

Then mail me 50% of your profits. You're fucking welcome.