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.

ALF

I have no idea who this fucker is, I think he's from some 90s American sitcom that I have never seen, but I played the fuck out of his shitty Master System game recently, so lets talk about that for a bit!

I have no idea what the story of the TV show is, but the game is all about trying to find fuel for Alf's space scooter so you can go back home to your ship and see your girlfriend again or something, it's a load of crap.

ALF on the Master System is basically an adventure game where you must find items to solve puzzles and eventually get back home.  Adventure games are usually known for being pretty lengthy, but ALF is stupidly short.

However don't let that fool you into thinking that you're going to sit down and polish off this game during a work lunch break, because ALF also suffers from being stupid hard for all the wrong reasons.

Between finding items in order to get your ship working, you must play through 3 or 4 "action stages" each one more bullshit than the last.  The screen shot above is the first one, where you must navigate a cave while fending of bats with salami.  It doesn't sound too hard, but the hit boxes are really stupid and the jumping in this game is just broken.

Most sane people would just turn it off and never look back at that point, but because I'm a huge glutton for punishment I beat the damn thing, and you get nothing more than the usual 8-bit "well done" screen at the end so really all I did was prove how adept I am at wasting my own time.

I was going to go on for a bit longer but I realise I've probably wasted enough of YOUR time talking about this shit game, so I'll end by saying that if you're looking to go retro with some Master System games, don't play this.

Shifting Blame Won't Help You

So it's gone and happened again....Another idiot somewhere in America has taken up arms and opened fire on a bunch of small children, killing and injuring them.  This is awful, and stuff like this should never happen.  You'd think that in this day and age people would stop doing this kind of thing to each other, but I guess not.

But I'm not really here to discuss what went down at that school, nor am I here to discuss topics like gun control, that topic is for people with far more knowledge on the matter than me.

What I am here to talk about, is how sickening it is just how quick American news outlets were to blame things such as reality TV, Facebook and once again, goddamn video games.  We've been through this many times.  The industry monitors itself pretty godddamn well, developers and ratings boards are doing their best to make you pricks happy but this isn't enough, they do everything you want but there are still idiots who aren't happy.

The game that's come up for this tragedy is fucking Mass Effect 3 of all things too, but let me go into some details why the bullshit on this bit of finger pointing is through the roof.  First of all, it seems that no one talking about this shit has a fucking clue what Mass Effect 3 is all about, but that's not relevant here, not really, standard scaremongering and all that.  It's the fact that the brother of the perpetrator, who was wrongly identified as the gunman liked this game.  So of course now Mass Effect 3 is the face of everything evil and the cause of all problems in America, right? WRONG

Stop doing this shit, blaming Mass Effect 3, or the video games industry in general isn't going to stop this kind of thing from happening again.  I live in Japan, the fucking home of video games and I can pop round the corner and play a game which involves me kicking the shit out of people in an arena for 100 yen.  Does this mean I'm going to kick some poor persons head in on the way home? Of course not, don't be so fucking dumb.  In fact, violent crime in general is pretty low over here and there are probably more gamers here than most other places.

America, like every other goddamn country on this planet has problems, but these problems need to be addressed, and worked out properly.  Don't just point fingers at the next big thing and say it's corrupting the youth, it makes you look ignorant and nothing gets done.  If you spent more time looking at the real problems and less time shifting blame, you'd probably have less of these horrible events occurring, so shut up and do some real goddamn work.

Sometimes people make me sad

So over the last few days, I've been watching the Intel Extreme Masters tournament for Starcraft 2, a highly entertaining tournament with some good casters and a very familiar host.

I've been watching the stream of this tournament through a certain casters website, and while observing the tournament there is a chat box to the right of the stream window.  This chat box really makes me lose faith in humanity sometimes and I'm so happy there is a full screen function in order to turn it off.

Maybe it's just me, but I thought that people watching games of Starcraft 2 would like to discuss Starcraft 2, but all people seem to want to do is just argue about stupid shit all day.  The one that annoys me a little bit is the whole Starcraft 2 being better than League of Legends thing.  First, this argument is fucking stupid because the 2 games aren't even in the same genre and secondly I don't want to hear about League when I'm trying to enjoy some high level goddamn Starcraft!

I'm not going to get into this debate in any detail, but it's fucking obvious that Starcraft has more depth and requires more skill than League, harping on about it just makes you look like an ass.

But the absolute worst thing I'm seeing in this chat, is the whole USA being better than the EU thing.  Why is this even a fucking issue?  It's not like the players care, it's not like the casters care and it's not like anyone actually at the tournament gives a fuck where your from.  Even worse than that it's not even a case of "America! Fuck yeah!", the whole thing is swapped with stupid comments about how the EU is bankrupt and America is the greatest country in the world yadda yadda yadda.

I don't want to hear this garbage, I'm sure there are plenty of places where you can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of living in certain countries, but a fucking Starcraft 2 tournament chat is NOT the place to fucking do it.  Discuss the game, have some fun, but don't bring your patriotic bullshit into the fucking conversation.

Time and place people!

EDIT: As soon as the chat got filtered to subscribers only, it was filled with good healthy discussion of the tournament and the game itself!  Guess it aint all bad