Gearing up to be a Great Year

 

Coronavirus is still in the back of everyones mind and in the last week or so people in Europe a full on War has broken out and everyone's starting to panic about being nuked to death.  Spend any amount of time on social media and it's enough to make you want to crawl into a sensory deprevation tank and never come out of it.  So instead of doom-scrolling through news websites and Twitter, what you SHOULD be doing is playing video games (or watching me live at www.twitch.tv/taurinensis) because BOY-FUCKIN'-HOWDY there is a lot of good-looking shit that's already out and a lot of even better shit on the horizon.  

Truth be told, I've not played a single game released in the current year yet.  Partly due to a busy schedule of work-life-streaming etc. and partly due to my massive backlog that has made me think twice about purchasing new titles.  However I know that eventually I will cave and hoover up all these games so I just want to take a moment to highlight some games that I'm looking forward to playing or looking forward to being released. 

Starting with things that are out but I've not played yet we got 

1) Elden Ring

 Do I really need to explain why I'm excited for this one? It's the next goddamn Dark Souls game.  I'm trying to avoid as much footage/news/discussion about it as possible to go in as blind as possible but I know that the day I do get around to playing it I will probably not be leaving my little hovel for a long time.

2) Pokemon Legends: Arceus

I'm not much of a Pokemon fan, the game looks like shit and it seems to be buggy as all hell but I still want to pick this one up.  The change in gameplay style and the setting have intriguied me enough to want to pick it up.  Plus if I can hide in a bush and yeet a rock into a Pikachu's stupid fucking face then that alone is worth the price of admission

3) Sifu 

When I first saw Sifu I thought "that looks cool, I'll play that one day" and put it away in the back of my mind.  Then the game came out and I saw a clip of a level that was a playable version of the corridor scene from the movie Oldboy and it shot right up the priority list.  It looks cool as hell and apparently it's quite challenging so sign me the hell up.

4) Dying Light 2 

and

5) Horizon Forbidden West

are both games that I will get my hands on, probably this year, but unlike the other 3 I'm not overly desperate to play them.  They look cool, maybe one day when I get through everything else

Now for games that aren't released yet 

6) Soul Hackers 2 

After Shin Megami Tensei 5 last year I thought I was all Mega-Tenned out.  I had decided that this year I would slowly play through basically all the MegaTen games I could fit into my schedule to fill the void that 5 will leave when I reach the ending.  Well turns out I was totally fucking wrong and Soul Hackers 2 not only got announced but also has a release date.  A sequel to a 1997 Sega Saturn game was not something I was expecting but I'm all for it.  

7) Ghostwire Tokyo 

I've seen one trailer, don't really know what the hell its about but it looks exactly like my kind of thing.  First person game doing Onmyo shit to folklore creatures?  Yeah sure, I'm extremely down and ready to have a kuchizake-onna tongue me to death.  

8) A Plague Tale: Requiem 

A Plague Tale: Innocence was a game that I got for free off the Epic Game Store and went in fully expecting it to be a giant pile of garbage that stinks harder than the rats it depicts.  While it wasn't mind blowing by any stretch it turned out to be at least a somewhat decent experience and I was pleasantly surprised to see it getting a sequel.  Nice to see Amica finally got a clue and decided to get a weapon a bit better than just rocks

9) Kirby and the Forgotten Land

10) Stranger of Paradise 

11) The Callisto Protocol 

12) Scorn 

13) Bomb Rush Cyberfunk 

I mean jesus fucking christ I could do this all day.  I'm sure there's games I forgot and games that I have not yet discovered that I will also snap up on release or do a little jig for on annoucement.

So tell all that sad news that you can't do anything about to go FUCK itself, cozy up in front of your TV or PC or even under the covers of your nice soft bed if you're using the Switch and just enjoy all this cool shit instead

Cool Looking Horror Games of 2019

So as I said previously, 2019 is going to be the year of horror games for Identity Gaming, both old and new.  So I'm gonna kick off this horror festival by talking about some upcoming horror games that I think look pretty good.

 First I wanna start with World of Horror, pictured above.  Here's the trailer

It looks like some kind of retro-style point and click adventure horror title and I can't wait to play it.  The game is still in development but you can download it for free from the website (https://panstas.itch.io/world-of-horror) and then support it by donating to their patreon! 

The one thing that the game seems to be very proud of is it's inspiration from a Japanese manga artist called Junji Ito.  He's famous for writing things like Uzumaki, Tomie and the profoundly strange Gyo, which is about sharks that grow robot legs and attack people on land.  I'm a big fan of Junji's work so any game that takes inspiration from him is one that's worth watching out for.

I know it's free and I can download it now but I'm gonna hold off for a bit and see if it gets a full release soon so I can play a full version straight off the bat.

 Someday You'll Return is another one that I'm keeping a close eye on.  Here's the trailer

While it doensn't look like there's any combat, from what I've read it seems like surviving in the mountains is of paramount importance and hopefully there will be some puzzles that will help separate it from being just a walking simulator.  You can also see some clear Silent Hill inspiration in the trailer with shifting realities and the game is about a dude looking for his daughter and where have I heard that one before?  There isn't an exact release date but it's scheduled for 2019 and I for one am rather excited.

 Supermassive games, responsible for Grim Dawn (a game I've not played but will be buying very soon I think) is back at it again with The Dark Pictures Anthology.  It looks sort of similar to what I've seen of Grim Dawn only this time its on a boat.  To be honest I'm just a huge fan of the trailer and the British man giving us an ominous synopsis of the game. 

Finally there's The Sinking City, a clearly Lovecraft inspired horror games by those guys that did those Sherlock Holmes games.  "Lovecraft inspired" is a term that makes me roll my eyes as much as games about zombies does nowadays but there's something about the trailer that gave me a little shiver with how cool it was when I watched it.  Also deep water and anything involving deep water freaks me the fuck out so this game will probably get right under my skin.  Even just entering the water temple in Zelda kind of makes me feel uneasy and while horror games don't usually freak me out too much this one has a good chance of breaking through my barriers.  Here's the trailer if you wanna see it

And of course I'm looking forward to the Resident Evil 2 remake but I don't really feel like I need to talk about that too much since the hype surrounding it is fairly large.  If there's anything else I should be keeping an eye on, lemme know in a comment!

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.

Happy New Year! Reasons to Be Excited

God damn well I've seemed to have taken a long absence haven't I?  Well while maybe a part of it is due to a little bit of laziness there has been a winter school at my work that makes me come home wanting to die and a family trip from my family that ate all my blogging and streaming time but those things are pretty much over and now I can get right back into the swing of things again.

2016 was a bit of a shit year for gaming I feel.  At the time of writing the only game that got released this year that I can actually remember being any good was Persona 5 and the same can't be said if you live in the west because you aren't getting that shit until April.  I'm sure there was some other good shit but I either didn't play it or don't remember it right now so whatever.  But instead of looking back let us look forward so I would like share with you a few of the games that I am most excited for in 2017

After playing the demo on the PS4 and being stumped by the wooden finger thing for a few hours Resident Evil 7 seems to be a bit of return to form for the series.  Assuming the the demo is it's own sort of stand alone thing and the game isn't just going to be some shitty walking simulator with no combat and simplistic puzzles then I think we are in for a bit of a treat with the new entry.  Hopefully gone will be the awful action game experiences that 5 and 6 gave us and maybe we can get some proper next gen survival horror for once.

If you have not played the first Nier game then you owe it to yourself to go give it a spin before the new one comes out.  Fantastic setting, plot and soundtrack and while the game play was a little.....lacking, the overall experience was phenomenal.  Now we have a sequel that's developed by Platinum games so hopefully we will get the fantastic setting, plot and soundtrack but with equally fantastic game play this time too.  I've been ignoring a lot of the news because I want to go in as blind as possible for my first playthrough but trust me, it's going to be good.  If it's not I'll eat my own shoes.

 A game that originally began development in 2004 and after a lot of shit happening with it is finally getting released now, Nioh is essentially your next Souls game but just not produced by From Software and even Team Ninja have no problem admitting their inspiration from those guys.  That said, it's looking pretty fucking fantastic and while I personally missed the demo I have it on good word from one of the few people who's opinion I trust that the game is pretty fucking good.  Then again if you don't know already just how great Nioh is gearing up to be then you've probably been living under a rock.

Finally one more game that I didn't know about until I wrote this post and decided to quickly google some other upcoming games that I didn't know about and this one caught my interest pretty hard.  What looks to be some kind of RPG where you play as a vampire doing vampire things but your character is also a doctor so you have to keep your cover.  Sort of like Vampire: The Masquerade but without thousands of books of lore you have to understand before you can play.  Looks interesting, I'll absolutely be checking it out as soon as I can.

So 2017 is already gearing up to be a pretty good year and this is just the shit that's being widely reported on.  Who knows what kind of Japan only niche shit will come out for things like the Vita or doujin games you can only get in nerd stores?!  Only time will tell, let's hope its a good one

Happy New Year and as usual, thanks to all for the continued support and donations, hopefully we can raise even more money for Alzheimer's this year than we have ever done before!

Day 1 Purchasing

When a new game gets released it can be an exciting thing.  Granted, I'm the kind of person who has become so jaded by disappointing releases over the years that I personally don't get too hyped any more, but I do remember a time when a new release would have me jumping for joy.  

But is it really worth running to the store and grabbing that new game? Or is it better to just wait? 

Well the answer to that question depends on what kind of game it is.  If it's a game with an online focus then maybe it is in your best interest to drop the first day money on it.  This may be doubly true if it's a game that isn't AAA developed or particularly mainstream.  Waiting on the title may mean by the time you get there the title will be dead and that's no fun at all.  

However for everything else?  I'd say it's almost always better to wait it out.  Let's take a sort of old example to illustrate my point.  

Dead Space was a game that I bought day 1 back in my University days for about £35.  It was a good game and I don't regret the purchase as such but looking at the page on Amazon for it it now costs £13 new or used for like £2 

Granted you may be a bit behind the times with this approach and you risk running into spoilers but you'll end up saving so much more money to buy even more games or other things.  Hell, Dead Space is an old example but a lot of titles see a drop in price even after a week or so.  If it's a single player game especially I'm sure it won't kill you to wait a week or 2.  Maybe then you can buy a whole bunch at once and go on a nice binge.

If you're blogging or streaming and you want to build a following then maybe playing the latest games is the best idea but your average joe should probably just wait it out.  Of course, if there's a company you really love then absolutely buy it new to show support but most of the time a little patience could save you a pretty penny.  

Not Hyped For E3

E3 used to be such a wonderful time for me.  I'd get all excited for the upcoming press conferences and game play trailers.  Me and my buddies would try to make guesses at what all the big companies would be announcing and we'd talk about the titles that we would hope to see during the show.  However, that's all changed and now whenever anyone asks me about if I'm hyped for E3 or not, the only answer I can seem to muster is "meh"

The last couple of years have been a bit disappointing.  Last year I missed most of the pressers live due to work and then found myself not giving much of a shit when I fired up the recordings.  This year especially, I already know a lot of the upcoming stuff I'm interested in so the best I can hope for is an extra trailer or two.  I'm sure there will be some good games announced but I can't help but feel that some of the magic is gone from E3.

I'm hoping this year will go and prove me wrong and some of that E3 magic that I enjoyed so much a few years ago will return full force.  I'm hoping that almost every press conference will have something mind blowingly cool and I'll be able to come away from the stream with a big grin on my face like a child at Christmas.

It's not likely, but I'm sure as fuck going to get myself ready for the streams, cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Project Zero Movie Hype!

Wow, what the fuck is going on, first Ao Oni and now this!

So if you remember a few days ago I made a post about how I was excited for a movie adaptation of Japanese cult hit indie game Ao Oni.  Well now it's happened again but this time with something a little more mainstream. 

For those that don't know, Project Zero is a long running survival horror series which is also known as Fatal Frame in the US.  The game revolves around walking around creepy places and dealing with ghosts but not in the Ghostbusters way.  Your only method of defence against the evil apparitions that want you dead is a camera and the closer your attacker gets to you then the more damage you do.  It's an interesting mechanic in a genre where you usually want the enemies to be as far away as humanly possible.

To top it all off, the games tend to have pretty interesting plots, solid level design and great sound design so it's right up there with all the best horror games like Silent Hill and old school Resident Evil.

So today I discovered this

This is the trailer for the upcoming movie adaptation.  I'm a little more sceptical about this one since there's a lot you could do wrong with a series like this but I really like Project Zero so I'm going to get hype for it! 

I'll cover this and Ao Oni on here as I see them so watch this space!

Ao Oni Movie Hype

A long time ago I did a play through of a game called Ao Oni, if you want to watch it then here it is

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6Wc5_JYKZyOx-38Vl3COajVBaEsofrsy

If you can't work out what Ao Oni is from those videos, it's an Japanese indie horror/adventure game made in RPG maker.  It has garnered quite a lot of popularity on the internet and as a result there has been lots of media released around this one little freeware game.

Last time I was in a book store I remember seeing that there had been an Ao Oni novelisation.

I've yet to read it or even buy it so I'm not sure if it's a book version of the game or a follow up or what but it looks interesting enough. 

So the next big piece of Ao Oni media to hit the scene is the movie, the poster is pictured above but I'll throw in the trailer just for good measure.

Usually, movie versions of games suck total balls but I really don't see how you can fuck up an Ao Oni movie.  All you have to have is a bunch of people running around a house looking for clues while the movie builds up tension for Oni attacks.  I'm actually pretty excited.

The only problem is I have to do a Japanese exam AND it's my wives birthday so it's going to be a while before I actually find some time to go to a cinema and see it but I'm absolutely NOT going to miss this one.

 

Getting Excited For Murdered: Soul Suspect

It's not very often that I get excited for upcoming games much any more and I haven't seen all that much of the game I'm about to be talking about but never the less I'm still very excited for it.

For anyone who is less in the know than I am, Murdered: Soul Suspect is a game coming out very soon developed by Square Enix Japan and Airtight Games (apparently, at time of writing, it has already been released in North America).  From what I know about the game it's about a cop who is killed at the start and it is up to him as a ghost to solve his own murder so that he may move on to the after life.

While that is a really interesting premise the main reason I'm so excited for this game is because it reminds me ever so slightly of something else....

That's right! Goddamn, motherfuckin' Ghost Trick on DS! This is easily one of the best games on the DS and it basically shares the same plot as Murdered: Soul Suspect so if they are even just a little bit similar, Soul Suspect is gearing up to be a bloody good game.

Ghost Trick was very much a puzzle game where Soul Suspect appears to be more of an adventure so it'll be interesting to see how square takes basically the same premise and runs it in a different direction. 

So for anyone waiting for Soul Suspect to come out or for anyone who doesn't have the money to throw down on a brand new release, go find and play Ghost Trick.  It's a wonderful little puzzle game with a great plot and some of the best graphics I've seen on the DS, everyone should try this game.

Then we can all hop on Soul Suspect together and hopefully have another great, ghostly murder mystery game to have fun with!

The Problem With Hype

I know I made a post about a week ago about how totally hyped I am for the new Gauntlet, but getting hyped for something is not a thing I enjoy doing to myself.

You see, if you get hyped for a game and follow its development and look up all the information you can on it then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.  If the game that you've finally been waiting for comes out and it ends up sucking great deals of ass, then you are going to feel pretty crushed.  This has happened to me on numerous occasions and maybe that's why I'm a little jaded when it comes to new releases.

On the flip side, if a game comes out and you weren't really expecting much from it but upon playing you realise it's actually really good, then that's a really nice feeling.  That's not to say that you should go around hating on any release that gets any kind of press in the name of avoiding disappointment, but not getting too caught up in the whirlwinds of hype will help soften the blow a little if a game you were hoping to enjoy sucks.

But building excitement for a title is what's done for any entertainment medium, it's how sales are generated.  But for me, when certain games start getting a lot of hype or a lot of praise on release, I instantly start raising eyebrows and it causes me to judge a game a lot more harshly that I would have done previously.

Halo is the best example of this that I ever experienced.  Halo (the first one) was a good game, I enjoyed playing Halo on my friends Xbox when it first came out, it's a well polished FPS experience.  However, Halo got a lot of praise and I mean A LOT of goddamn praise.  It was being given perfect scores and hailed as one of the best games fucking ever made in the history of games.

However during the time of Halo's peak popularity, I couldn't help but find all the praise to be very silly.  I really enjoyed playing it but I had a lot of problems and quite frankly it felt like a massive step back from a lot of the FPS games that I played during my youth.  When faced with a Halo fan I would start to nitpick every little thing because of all the hype it received and in doing that I ended up kind of convincing myself that I didn't like it.  It was only when I got over myself and popped it in again that I realised that is IS a good game, it's just not the 10/10 supergame that everyone made it out to be.

It sounds really petty I know, but if you throw down a 10 I'm going to pull out the magnifying glass.

New Gauntlet! Get Hype!

It's not very often that I get hyped about things, but I can't help but feel a great sense of excitement when I see the trailer for the new Gauntlet game!

First take a look at the trailer, it's rad

Now in case you don't know what Gauntlet is, it's a game where you pick one character out of 4 classes and you go through a big fat dungeon collecting loot for score and killing HUGE numbers of monsters.  The game is well known for it's fast paced game play and co-op multiplayer and has a large place in the heart of many people my age.

I still remember back in my early teenage years, going over to a friends house and playing the shit out of Gauntlet Legends.  Raging over who was getting all the food and gold and eventually overcoming all the big bads the game had to throw at you.  It was a time filled with both extreme amounts of anger and extreme amounts of joy.

The reason I can let myself get so hyped for the new Gauntlet is because it's the kind of game that's very hard to fuck up.  All you need is 4 classes, a lot of baddies and co-op play, if you have those 4 things then you have at the very least an acceptable Gauntlet experience.  Add some polish, maybe some online functionality to bring it into 2014 and some well designed dungeons and the new Gauntlet will be something really special.

The only thing that pisses me off is the name.  Why is it called "Gauntlet"? Now everyones going to get confused when you say Gauntlet because they won't know if they mean the 1985 arcade game or the 2014 game. 

I'm going to be watching that space with much excitement.

The Blue Bomber Returns!.....Kind of....not really

Remember Megaman?! I sure as hell do because it was only a few days ago during a boring part of my afternoon that I sat down and blasted Megaman 4 on NES.

Anyway, Capcom hasn't been treating it's little blue robot very well recently.  The closest thing we have had to a Megaman game was Street Fighter X Megaman, which is fine but it's a fan game and didn't really have anything to do with Capcom from a development standpoint.  I think we also had that Megaman XOver thing or whatever it was called which was a auto scrolling game that bascially played itself for the iPad.  Not to mention Megaman Legends 3 getting cancelled which a lot of people were upset about, so let's just say that the poor guy hasn't been having a good run.

So, what I can only imagine was a case of people being sick of Capcom's shit, Keiji Inafune and a bunch of other people have taken to the internet to crowd fund their upcoming project "Mighty No9", a Megaman game in everything but name.  Basically they took Megaman and changed everything just a little bit to avoid being sued, but not enough so that people won't know what's going on.

I'm not going to talk about the game itself here because one google search will get you a wealth of information on that, so go look up their kickstarter page which has already met it's goal.  The only thing I'm going to say is that I'm hype as hell and I'm glad this has happened.  It's been far far too long since we had a good Megaman game and even though this isn't QUITE the same, it's close enough to qualify.  Capcom sure as hell aren't going to do it so let's hope Inafune and his buddies can bring back the magic.

Terrible Journalism Strikes Again

How long has this been a thing!? I only found out about it a few days ago and you know after that big gushy post I made about Hotline Miami I'm hyped as hell for this.

So, what does my hype for Hotline Miami 2 have to do with terrible video games journalism?  Well have a read of this article on PC gamer.

http://www.pcgamer.com/previews/hotline-miami-2-wrong-number/

The title reads "Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number hands-on" so you would expect this author, one Cara Ellison, to talk about the game right?  Well wrong, she spends very little time talking about the game and the majority of her post talking about her fucking feelings.

Her issue with the game is that the end of the tutorial features some kind of implied rape scene where the player character has his wicked way with a women and how she feels "betrayed" by its inclusion.  You may be thinking at this point that I'm going to go on another "games being sexist" rant, but I'm not, but before I get into the main point I have let me just point something out about Hotline Miami.

This was a screen shot I took last night while I was going through the levels getting puzzle pieces and A+ ranks.  If you look just in front of the open door, there is a dead male who has had his genitals blown off.  This, if you ask me is just as "bad" as that implied rape scene because you can infer from this situation that he was tortured by having his genitals mutilated before eventually being put out of his misery and shot in the head.  Sounds awful right?

Well on the other hand you could just realise that you are playing a game that is making you perform horrible acts against other human beings for points while showing you other horrible acts to bolster the games atmosphere and maybe even make some kind of statement into video game violence if you're the kind of person willing to read into it that far.

But anyway I'm getting far too into something that isn't my point.  My point is, that these so called "journalists" like Cara Ellison and many others are in the wrong job.  That article should have been about Hotline Miami 2, but instead it turned into another rant on feelings and political correctness.

I know exactly nothing more about Hotline Miami 2 after reading that article than before I came across it.  All I learnt is that the game is violent and that someones feelings were hurt, but I don't care about the writers feelings and I already knew it was violent so basically the whole thing is a big block of text about nothing at all.

These "journalists" with agendas need to be booted out of this industry, they are completely toxic for it and contribute nothing.  They aren't here to talk about games, they are here to talk about false controversy for nothing more than page views and it's getting a bit stupid now.  There are lots of sites such as Kotaku who care more about printing bullshit rather than actually talking about games.

I don't want to talk about this shit either, I just want to enjoy games.  Really I had planned to write a little mini review for 3D Dot Game Heroes since I just replayed it recently but if the people with common sense don't make it clear that this kind of "journalism" will not fly, then within the next 5 years there will be so many social justice "gaming" websites that finding actual gaming news will be next to fucking impossible.

If you want to talk about social justice shit, make a fucking blog or something and stop clogging up sites like PCGamer.com with this shit.  Those sites are for games and game discussion/news and I don't want to read about your fucking feelings on it.

I'm on a Boat!....and E3

Tomorrow is the start of the E3 press conferences!

Tomorrow Sony, Microsoft, EA and Ubisoft are going to hit the stage and deliver some press conferences before the main event kicks off officially on the 11th.

It's going to be an extremely interesting show as Microsoft have to clean up the mess they made with the Xbox One reveal and Sony still have to prove that they are not quite as stupid as Microsoft when it comes to design decisions for their system.

EA and Ubisoft I don't really care all that much about, in the past I've never been hyped for their conferences and I've always been a little bored and disappointed when I end up watching them, but that won't stop me from watching them this year and hopefully we'll get some good games out of them.

So you can expect to see little podcasty vlog type things like I did with the One reveal for each conference and I'll do them as soon as I can once I've watched them.  The problem is that I do have a chance of missing the start of the Microsoft one since I'm getting on a cruise ship today and I don't know if I'll be back for the start, but so far everything seems good for me catching the whole thing.  If I do miss it, I'll make sure to get myself up to speed by finding a recording before I go commenting on it.

So let's all get hype and break out the coffee and energy drinks because I know I'm going to be up until 5am to watch all the conferences tomorrow.

Heaven or Hell! Let's Rock!

Back at university, me and my friends would have a couple of go-to fighting games when we wanted to get our competitive gaming going.  Tekken, Street Fighter Alpha and Guilty Gear X2 were those games.  Until Tekken 6 came out we sunk A LOT of time into good old X2.

So after a busy weekend of eating sushi and drinking far too much alcohol, I come home to find there is a trailer for a new Guilty Gear game!  Check it out!

I've not looked too deeply into it, so I don't know what the general consensus is on the trailer, but if you ask me, I'm fucking hyped.  That's all I really have to say about it for now to be honest, just another upcoming game to throw onto the cargo of the hype train.  Hopefully we'll get some more info on it soon and maybe I'll write a bit more about it when I'm not making posts at 2 in the morning...

More Rise of the Triad-esque Shooters Please

I made a post quite a while back about how I want there to be significantly less shooters on the market because the whole genre is fucking boring now.  Then videos of the now in production Rise of the Traid game come along and slap me in the face and tell me to shut up and do a rocket jump for joy.

For those that don't know, Rise of the Traid is a fuck old PC shareware FPS game released in 1994 and it was one of those shooters that sort of looks like Doom to the uneducated masses but is actually a pretty unique game to anyone who actually played the damn thing.

Anyway, the old game isn't really relevant here, but if you want to play it you can grab it off GoG, but the game is getting a reboot for the new age.  The first time I heard this I just ignored it, I imagined that they were just going to pull a Syndicate and turn it into yet another garbage shooter to throw on the pile.  But one day I got linked to an 18 minute video of the multilayer and holy shit does it look fun! Check this shit out! 

FUCKING. YES! It's like Quake and Unreal Tournament and shit like that.  None of this boring military "erh mah gerd killstreak" campfest semi realistic dogshit.  This is people running at the speed of sound, picking up floating guns, rocket jumping and just generally being nuts.

Bottom line, if shooters are here to stay, then more like THIS and less of this Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Medal of....whatever you get the idea.  Less slow crap, more good, fun shooters like we used to have.

Dark Souls 2 Gameplay Demo!

So today I watched the Dark Souls 2 game play reveal, here is the video for you so you can too!

So basically the video is 12 minutes of a character running around some environments and doing things while a guy talks over it.  I think it is safe to say that Dark Souls 2 is in good hands here folks and it is perfectly safe to go and get all hyped.

Some people have been complaining about the health and stamina gauges being high and enemies not doing all that much damage but do keep in mind that it was a game play trailer to show off the game, so they were probably just playing with a levelled guy so that they aren't getting destroyed while trying to show you the game.

The enemies are doing cooler things now too, like in that scene where he shoots a dude in a cage and he busts out or that guy who uses his curved armour to roll on you if you get behind him.  It'll be great on the first play through when you have no idea just how a certain enemy is going to ruin your shit even when you may think you have the upper hand.  Also deflecting projectiles with your weapon is fucking RAD.

There are a couple of things I would say are a little concerning, like the environments being a little empty, but it's hard to make any kind of solid comment yet because it is just a specially designed game play demo to give us an idea of what it's going to look like.

From Software do good work, I don't think they will let us down.

Hype Train Going So Fast it Might Derail

God damn if I get any more hyped for shit coming out this year I think my eyes are going to burst.

So yesterday I made a post about how much I'm looking forward to Shin Megami Tensei 4, so today we're going for round two with Transistor!

Transistor is a game I know very little about.  All I know is that it's made by the same guys who did Bastion, looks sort of the same gameplay wise as Bastion and I've been told it has the same narrator guy, but I'm not too sure if that one is true.  Anyway the point is, it sort of seems like we're getting another Bastion-esqe game from the same company, and that's awesome!

Bastion blew my god damn mind when I played it a while back, and what this seems to be is that, but in a different setting and with a different story.  You couldn't really ask for anything better, could you?  Supergiant Games made it quite evident with Bastion that they don't fuck about when it comes to writing and setting and the gameplay seems to be a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"

But you don't need me telling you to get hype for this thing, just go watch the trailer and hype yourself up instead!

The Hype Train is Getting Faster

Well here is where I just jump up and down in a silly fashion and gush for a while, because holy shit this looks good!

Shin Megami Tensei is a name you probably know, or have at least heard of due to the series being absolutely fucking huge.  For those that might not know SMT, you've probably heard of Persona, and that is part of the same series.

So Persona 4 is the game that most people have experience with, and that game is really good, I like it a lot but I don't regard it to be as good as a lot of people do.  You see, Shin Megami Tensei wasn't always about school kids solving scooby doo mysteries.  The best way to describe old school Shin Megami Tensei is like Pokemon and the Legend of Grimrock having a baby together.  Even that description doesn't quite fit the bill exactly but it's a good way to describe it to people who don't have a clue.

Anyway Shin Megami Tensei 4 is coming to the 3DS and from what I can tell it's about dudes with Yu-Gi-Oh duel gloves protecting a big city from demons.  This means lots of dungeon crawling, and monster "catching" and all that good stuff.  Right now, I'm pre emptively putting this down as my 2013 game of the year.  They'll have to fuck this up pretty hard, or someone will have to develop something twice as awesome to budge it from that spot.

A Reason to Buy a WiiU

For the longest time, I didn't give a rats ass about the WiiU, and then I saw this.  Get on that hype train once again, because this is one of the most fantastically strange crossovers I've ever seen.

Crossovers aren't a new thing in games, we have things like Marvel Vs Capcom, Capcom Vs SNK and it even happens in RPGs with things like Trinity Universe, but all those games, and the characters from those games are from the same genre.

For those that don't know, Shin Megami Tensei is the series that has given us stuff like Lucifers Call, Digital Devil Saga and Persona.  They are basically like Pokemon, but meant to be played by people who actually have some taste.

Fire Emblem is a series of strategy RPGs where you take a bunch of dudes on adventures to save lands and whatnot.  As you fight things on a big grid map, you level up your characters and make them advance classes so that the next big bad guy in the plot wont ruin your shit.

They are basically two completely different kinds of game, but somehow they are being crossed over.  I'm aware Shin Megami Tensei has had a "tactics" version on the DS and 3DS, so it could be based on that, but then it should have "Devil Survivor" in the title and not just "Shin Megami Tensei"

There is a trailer which I will provide at the bottom but there is 0 information about what they are doing with this thing.  It's basically saying "This is a thing, get hype", and oh boy did it work.  Check it!

Take all of my money Nintendo, all of it.