Severed

So when I was on the plane to the USA for my summer holiday I decided to pick one of the random Vita games I got for free as part of PS+ and the first choice my finger went to was a game called Severed.  I didn't have any expectation for this game but what I got was actually really good. 

The first thing I noticed right off the bat was the art style.  I thought I'd seen it before somewhere and it wasn't until I got off the plane, hit Wi-Fi and was able to Google it that I discovered that Severed is made by a developer called Drinkbox Studios who also made another great game called Guacamelee! Just as an aside, if you haven't played that you should also go check it out because it's fantastic.

So the game starts out and you find yourself in the role of a young girl who's family has been taken away by monsters and your arm has been cut off.  You walk through her destroyed house and an evil thing in a mirror gives you a sword and then you go on an adventure to get them back.  The story is a bit bare bones but it's got everything you need to make you want to press on.  A missing family and a world full of weird monsters and places to kill and explore.

Game play wise the game plays sort of like Zelda had a baby with one of those weird first person horror dungeon crawlers on the Amiga or something.  You have to explore dungeons and each dungeon gives you a piece of gear that will not only solve the puzzles in that dungeon but open up extra bits of the world for you to go and find secrets and whatnot.  There are three "worlds" let say with one hub area that connects them and as you gain gear and skills you'll want to back track for heart pieces (for more health of course) and brain pieces (for mana)

It's the combat however where this game really shines.  You use the touch screen to swipe enemies with your sword and each enemy has different patterns that you have to work out in order to deal damage and to block their oncoming attacks.  At first you just work out how to kill them and then kill them but as you progress through the game it starts throwing multiple enemies at you which surround you.  This puts you in situations where your having to manage not only attacks and blocks but doling out the occasional smack to the enemy behind you or to your side so that their attack meter doesn't fill up and slaps a bunch of your life away.  If you deal out enough hits without being attacked or blocked you fill up a bonus meter and when the meter is full it allows you to....SEVER!....enemy body parts which you collect and use to power up your characters skills.

I have two complaints about this game, the first being that it felt a bit short.  I don't know if it's ACTUALLY short but I managed to finish it after spending only a couple hours on the plane and then a couple more on a bus tour ride but it could just be that I'm really good.  Also the upgrade system is broken and you can basically get all the upgrades you need even if you suck at the game.  Sometimes in pots and things you find "giblets" and one of the first skills you learn is how to transmute giblets into upgrade items.  Even if you somehow manage to go the entire game not being able to sever a single body part (impossible) you could still power up enough for the final boss to be a complete cakewalk.

Still, despite these complaints I had a great time with Severed, it's a fun game with a lot of personality.  I played the Vita version but apparently it's on mobile, Wii U and Switch so go check it out.

Streets of Rage 4

Well it's been more than 20 years since we last had a Streets of Rage game and since then the side scrolling beat em' up has been very much a niche genre since those days but that didn't stop this trailer from sweeping in and making every old school gamer squeal like a school girl.

At time of writing there isn't much information on it.  Hell, we don't even know what platforms it's going to be on yet.  It's like this video came out to tell us nothing other than it exists but to be honest that's more than enough for me.

I do have one little problem with it which is the art style and it's not that it's bad I'm just not really digging it.  But me slightly disliking the art style of the trailer and the game isn't enough to turn me off, it still looks like not only an honest to goodness old school side scrolling beat-em-up but also a really good sequel to a classic series.

As of right now it looks like a lot of love is going into this project and let's hope that further developments will keep it that way.

Rampage (Movie)

Of all the games that you could make a movie of, why in the name of FUCK would you make a movie out of Rampage?!  I mean look at it.

It was a fairly simple arcade game released in 1986 where you controlled one of three large creatures as you punched buildings until they fell down for points.  How the fuck do you make a movie out of THAT?

Well they did it by hiring The Rock and having him be best friends with a CG gorilla that he communicates with via sign language because they were ripping off Jurassic World.  The movie starts with Evil Corp having an experiment they were conducting in space go wrong and the containers of evil juice they were working on drop to earth.  A wolf, crocodile and of course, The Rocks gorilla get a face full of the evil juice and turn into giant...RAMPAGING....monsters (eh! EH!?!).  The monsters get mind controlled by evil corp to come into town and start smashing it up but because the rock is best buddies with the gorilla he talks him down and together they kill the wolf and the crocodile and save the day (oh yeah, spoilers).

It's not so much that the movie is bad, because when the source material you're working with is so basic it's hard to fuck it up, but it's just PAINFULLY pointless.  Almost every big action movie released in the last 10 years, action movies better than this, have bits in it where buildings get smashed.  Only difference between those movies and this is the incredibly stupid relationship between The Rock and his gorilla so if you're life long dream was to see The Rock get flipped off by a CG ape then this movie was clearly made for you.


It's not bad enough to laugh at or be angered by like House of the Dead or Bloodrain but it's also not good enough to warrant a real watch either.  If you REALLY want to see it then wait until you can find it in a Tesco's bargain bin for £1 but until then just play the game instead.

Gaming on a Plane

 

If you've ever been on a plane for a long flight before you'll be familiar with the in flight entertainment system.  Most people use these things to watch movies on but if you actually take a moment to go through the menus you might have seen that a lot of them have a selection of games on there.  This sounds cool but unfortunately gaming on in flight entertainment is one of the most frustrating things in the universe.  

Straight off the bat there's the problem with selection.  Most of the games on offer are crappy little flash games or things like parlor games but this is sort of minor because you'd have to be a bit stupid to expect the latest version of Dissidia or Wonderland Wars.  The real problem is that despite these games being so simple and undemanding the systems can BARELY handle them.  For example I killed a few moments by trying to play Bejeweled at one point and the screen was so unresponsive that I had to push a gem about 5 times before it would select. The passenger next to me tried to play a bowling game that involved a flick on the touch screen and she attempted this gesture for a good five minutes before the game shot her ball off into the gutter at 5fps.  

There was one flight I took that actually had Street Fighter 2 on it that was controlled with the little handset mounted under the screen.  This sounds cool but it ran SO POORLY that even moving your character a step to the left side or right was an exercise in pure misery.  Even the Commadore 64 version of SF2 2 ran better. 

Now most people have the good sense to bring a portable system with them.  I had my Vita for my last trip and tried these games for curiosity's sake but I'm sure there's some people who, on a 10+ hour flight who have desperately wished that they could play a game of Zuma instead of sitting through another AAA Hollywood blockbuster.  

But the real reason I'm making this post isn't JUST to shit on bad quality plane games.  I really wanted an excuse to talk about the Sega Mega Jet! 

This was a handheld device that worked with the seat monitor on JAL flights.  It allowed passengers to bring their own carts onto the plane and play to their hearts content.  Obviously you can't use them anymore but a long haul flight would be a hell of a lot less boring if I could rock some Dynamite Headdy.  My biggest question is why don't we have this today?! I know we have a lot more options for portable gaming nowadays but taking my hardware outside of Japan always makes me horribly paranoid since using a system in public in England and maybe America makes you a target for heavy judgements at least and a mugging at most. Wouldn't it be cool though if let's say Valve released a thing where you could put a couple games on a USB and then play them on the screen in the plane.  Even if it ran like shit some in flight Slay the Spire would help kill the boredom. 

Still no one expects plane games to be good and this is such a non issue I don't really know what the fuck I'm on about

New Megaman 4 PB (44:53) [Twitch Link]

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/295441429

I don't know how to embed video lol

Why Silent Hill 2 Is So Damn Good

If you've not at least heard of Silent Hill 2 at this point in time you're either VERY new to gaming or have been living under a nuclear blast proofed rock for many many years.  When people say the words "horror game", at lot of people instantly bring to mind either Resident Evil or Silent Hill and if it's the latter they usually are thinking about the second one.  While my personal favorite Silent Hill is 3 because I really like the occult story line in that game, there's absolutely no denying the impact of SH2 on not just it's own series but the horror genre in general.

The reason that I feel it's so effective at what it does is that no matter what age you are, there is a level of horror to be found in Silent Hill 2 that will freak you out.  I remember when I first played it, I don't remember my exact age but it was around high school time I think.  My parents, every evening after work, would unwind and relax before making dinner and doing housework by chilling on the couch with a glass of wine and a bowl of nuts.  Meanwhile, I'd be on the PC or something gaming away or just generally wasting time.  Most of the time they would be watching TV but there was one occasion where the TV was vacant so I decided to jump on and the game I set on that evening was Silent Hill 2.  It was daylight outside, my family behind me and yet just the opening section of that game freaked me the fuck out.  It didn't need a dark, isolated room and a pair of headphones, it managed to scare me regardless of all that.  The spooky atmosphere and the creepy monsters managed to freak me out in a way that a lot of games didn't back then and even don't now.

Now when I was younger, scary monsters and things like slasher movies had quite an effect on me.  I was a bit easy to scare back then but as I got older that stopped happening.  The idea of a zombie apocalypse stopped being a terrible prospect, monsters jumping out of my closet became a laughable idea and ghosts flopping from my TV lost it's charm.  Admittedly, I'm very hard to please when it comes to horror.  I can enjoy a horror game or horror movie but it's a VERY rare occasion when I'll actually be scared.

But then I replayed Silent Hill 2 in my adult years and was JUST as freaked out now as I was back then.  What makes Silent Hill 2 isn't the fact that it managed to keep scaring me despite the fact I'd seen it before AND it pierced my adult cynicism but the fact it scared me for an entirely different reason.  Silent Hill 2 is about the main characters wife getting sick and dying, the plot twist (spoilers) being that he killed his wife because she was going to die anyway but mainly because he couldn't handle it anymore.  When I was younger this was just a "wow, how horrible" moment and then I went back to being scared of tables with tumors on them but playing it now it was THIS part that shook me to my very core.

I grew up and got married and one of the things that worries me to no end is the idea that one day I'll lose my wife.  When you play Silent Hill 2 and you see what James went through in that game your brain starts asking you questions that you don't have the answer for.  "What would you do if YOUR wife became terminally ill?", "would YOU be able to handle it?" and worst of all "is there a chance YOU might do what he did?!".  Of course you'd hope that you'd assume you'd be a good person and care for the one you love but Silent Hill shows you that very real, very human weakness that maybe you just aren't as strong as you think you are.

It's multi-faceted horror like this that makes Silent Hill as good as it is.  Doesn't matter if you're a teen scared of monsters or an adult scared of loss or even a lack of knowledge about yourself.  It's something I've not seen in a game EVER since Silent Hill 2.  I've seen games try, but never do it this masterfully. 

If you've never played it you ABSOLUTELY must.  Go do it right now

Creatively Bankrupt at Capcom

Capcom used to be one of the biggest and best companies out there.  Street Fighter, Megaman, Dead Rising, Monster Hunter, Devil May Cry, the list goes on forever of great franchises under their belt.  While some of their stuff has gone a bit stale like Megaman, recent releases like Resident Evil 7 show the company clearly still has it somewhere.

Recently they released news that they were remaking Resident Evil 2.  This remake not just being like the RE1 remake on the Gamecube back in those days, but a full on remastering where it's all new fangled over the shoulder stuff now and basically nothing like Resident Evil 2 at all.  Sarcasm aside it doesn't look too bad, even if it's not the remake I wanted or hoped for, it'll probably still be, at the very least, a good game.  However the hype surrounding the remake has set off some money alarms at Capcom headquarters and they have realized that remaking old games=BIG BUCKS.  They have said they are going to "explore" the idea of remaking more of their older games.

This may be exciting for some people that we may be getting nice shiny new versions of Dino Crisis or whatever but to me this news screams that they now have an excuse to be lazy.  Now that they know that remaking old games will generate hype AND dollars, why bother trying to make anything new?  If you google "upcoming Capcom games" the three titles that appear at the top of the search are Devil May Cry 5, Megaman 11 and Deep Down.  So two sequels and Souls-looking dungeon crawl.  Google that in six months and it'll probably just be a list of remakes and a tweak to Street Fighter.

Maybe I'm just mad and cynical because I'm sick of seeing remakes and sequels EVERYWHERE.  Of course, gaming isn't devoid of it's original IPs, there's plenty of indie devs and other companies putting out original stuff but I just feel that it's a shame that a big lad like Capcom isn't using the piles of money it has to try something different.  Let's at least hope that if they do start churning out remakes, they are at least of good quality.

Ajin

I've been sort of off anime for a long LONG time.  I watched a hell of a lot of shows back in my high school and early university days.  I dropped off not only because I just didn't have time but because I just couldn't seem to find anything decent that wasn't full of squeaky anime girls.  Not that I'm anti squeaky anime girl, Dungeon Travelers 2 on the Vita was pretty much ONLY that, but when it's the only thing available I lose interest.

I don't know what came over me but I suddenly decided to look for something to watch and the first genre I turned to was horror.  I started by reading the manga for Parasyte which was enjoyable and from there started looking into a show called Kakegururi which was about squeaky anime girls gambling so I was getting off track. To get myself back on track I looked up a show called Ajin and found myself getting hooked pretty fast.

The show is about a high school boy (because it always fucking is) who gets run over by a truck and is outed as a much feared Ajin.  Ah Ajin is basically a fancy anime way of saying "immortal" but in the case of this show it's not that you can't die, but when you do die you just get back up again.  This leads to some pretty cool action sequences but also some really grotesque horror stuff.  There's one point early on where the protagonist is captured and tortured for "science" and it's not what's happening to him that's disturbing as much as the idea that you have to suffer that over and over again.  There's also stuff with fighting ghosts but I feel they're there for more anime fight purpose and the real enjoyment comes with watching how each Ajin in the story deals with their outcast status.

I've not really been hooked on a show like this since early 24 or The Wire.  I'm not one for binge watching shows but each episode ends with some insane bullshit that just makes you want to see what happens next and I can't resist that "next episode" button.  If you're looking for a show that isn't just weeby cutesy crap that check out Ajin.  There's a second season I've not watched yet but I'm sure it's awesome, go check it out!