The Weird Longevity of DDR and IIDX

 

Rhythm games are a thing that I assume most people, even the most enthusiastic of gamers, don't think about very often.  Around 2005 the genre got a pretty big boost in popularity for a while with the release of Guitar Hero and that boost was bolstered in part by the subsequent release of Rock Band but the whole thing turned out to be just a fad and the genre once again faded back into obscurity once those games died.  If you are a person who owns a Guitar Hero, Rock Band or DJ Hero controller I can almost guarantee that it's caked in dust and you probably forgot to take the batteries out and they have no leaked everywhere.

This is a bit less true for the Japanese arcade scene where the genre has been a staple almost for as long as the genre has existed but even in a space like this games come and go all the time.  Various rhythm games will pop up for a while and then vanish without a trace or be reduced to one machine stuffed in a single corner of the arcade that never gets used.  For example when I first moved into my new house in January of this year, there was a new game called Chrono Circle and at current time of writing I am completely unable to find a single cab for it anywhere.  It's been removed from my local place despite them initially having 5 cabinets and none of the bigger arcades I frequent in central Nagoya have them either, dead on arrival.  

But then there's Dance Dance Revolution, a game that has been a core part of the arcade experience both in Japan and the west since I was in primary school and a series that doesn't seem to be slowing down its content updates even in the current day.  I remember seeing it for the first time, I must have been about 10, in a bowling alley near my old house in Manchester.  Most arcades were either sit-down fighting game cabs, novelty games or rail shooters but then this motherfucker just sat there with its giant pad and massive speakers blasting out J-Beats and it sure as hell got peoples attention.  I played in that arcade pretty much all the way to me graduating high school and it was the one machine that would often stay fairly well maintained and updated with the place replacing the Euromix 1 cab with a Euromix 2 cab almost as soon as that version dropped.  Fast foward to my life in Japan in 2022 and DDR is STILL going strong, being one of the most popular games in basically any game center you go to and still being updated on the regular.  Hell, the last version to be released was DDR A3 which came out March of THIS YEAR with new songs being added constantly.  Also I can't speak with any degree of certainty but the few enthusiast arcade places I know about in the UK seem to always be packing at least a Euromix 1 or 2 cab.

Beatmania IIDX is another game with a similar life span as DDR but with it being Japan only its a game that most people outside of the rhythm game enthusiast circles actually know about.  It started with Beatmania back in 1997 which had 5 buttons and a turn table for a controller which was probably quite unique at the time.  Then in 1999 Konami released Beatmania IIDX which was a bigger, badder, louder looking machine with 7 buttons and then there was a Beatmania 3 in 2000 which had a pedal or something? and everyone hated it and it died after 2 years.  IIDX however, like DDR, is still getting content updates and new versions to this very day with the newest version IIDX 30: Resident being released very recently 

There are other games in the Bemani franchise such as Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania which have also had similar life spans and still get updates but the machines are stocked less and barely used by anyone that I can see.  Meanwhile, DDR and IIDX are so popular that most places have to have multiple copies of them and even with an average (based on places I go to) of 2 DDR cabs and 4 IIDX cabs there are still queues CONSTANTLY to actually get to play them.  Some of newer games from the Konami library are starting to cement their places in the arcade such as Jubeat and Voltex but if they are still around in, lets say 10 years, only time will tell 

I can't imagine why this is the case really other than that the skill ceiling for mastering these two games inparticular is IMMENSELY high.  Seeing extremely high level play for games like Voltex, Chunithm, Taiko etc. isn't exactly uncommon if you spend enough time hanging around these places but really high level play for DDR and IIDX is not something you see very often at all.  If I was to hazard a guess I guess it's the drive that these players have to truly master these games that keeps them coming back and pumping coins or Paseli credit into the machines which in turn keeps Konami updating them and pumping out new versions for people to get good at.

That's just my game theory on the matter anyway.  Does make me wonder if DDR will still be around in 30 more years.....and if I'll still be able to play it at that point

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 8

Silent Hill Book of Memories is THE WORST Game Ever Made

I'm so happy I didn't pay for this game.  I'm "happy" that it was given to me for free via my PS+ subscription on my Vita before Sony stopped making that a thing.  For a long time I thought that Silent Hill: Homecoming was the worst Silent Hill but this thing really steals this shit show like nothin' else.  But not only is it easily the worst Silent Hill game it is quite possibly the worst video game ever made BAR NONE.  Worse than Hydlide, worse than Action 52, worse than any game you could possibly ever mention.

The story, what little of it I've bothered to pay attention to, is about a guy who gets a book of memories.  The book is sort of like a Death Note but it comes pre written with everything that's happened to you up to that point.  You are then free to change the contents and the book will bend reality to fit whatever it is you wrote in it.  It's actually, in a non-Silent Hill setting, not a bad idea for a plot but that combined with the fact it's told almost entirely through poorly written notes and poorly voiced audio clips makes it completely uninteresting.

Game play wise Book of Memories is a hack and slash game with random dungeons.  Think Diablo but instead of having a huge budget it was made by a team that seem to have been paid about 32p and given a single tube of Pringles to share.  You start by making an incredibly generic looking character and picking a "gift", which ends up doing fucking nothing and then hacking your way through a bunch of dungeons until you reach a boss.  Rinse and repeat until you finish all the worlds.

The combat is clunky, unsatisfying and lacks any challenge whatsoever.  Part of the lack of challenge comes from the fact that your stats and gear don't actually mean ANYTHING.  The only stat that matters is strength and MAYBE if you want to make the game even easier on yourself, throw a few points into vitality.  Strength does the obvious thing of making you hit harder and Vit makes your first aid kits heal for more and makes your character harder to hit.  Couple this with the enemy AI being dumber than a pile of rocks and you've got one really tedious game.  Assuming that you have working fingers and you're more than 6 months old, the only enemies you MIGHT die to are the Bogeymen (From Downpour) because he's got a heal, and an AOE ground pound that takes 70% of your life and the Insane Cancer's (3) that explode when they die and if they hit it does about 90% damage.

The absolute worst part of this game though is the sound design.  There's no point during play you won't be either extremely annoyed or cringing so hard that your body turns inside out.  Go and look up an old game called Dark Castle, either play it yourself or watch the AVGN episode of it or something, but Homecoming sounds almost EXACTLY like that.

This is hands down, the worst game ever made.  The development team behind it should be ashamed.  I don't know diddly jack shit about video game development outside of making text adventures with Python and I could probably shit out a better game in a week doing everything by myself.  The worst part is that it tries to worm itself into the series by changing the character motivations from the first few games but thinking about it just makes me too mad but there's plenty of YouTube content out there that explains that side of it.

If you ever see it on sale, run, run and never look back

Paying To Save With Metal Gear Survive

This is a game I've mostly ignored.  I saw some of the initial stuff that was put out and I was so disgusted that I just ignored it from then on out.  It's a fucking disgrace that a series like Metal Gear Solid has been reduced to an online zombie survival game.  I mean the groundwork is there to make some kind of legit survival type game within the Metal Gear universe that you could play online but instead they just copped out and used fucking zombies.  But whatever, I'm sure fans of the series know how shit it is and even newcomers probably aren't going to be swayed when there's so many other fucking zombie games on the market.

What I'm mad about with this post is the news I caught wind of about how you save the game.  When you start the game you are given one save slot, if you want to have another save slot you have to pay 1000 "SV Coins" which is the games premium currency and this basically translates to $10.  Now people have been complaining about loot boxes recently but this just takes the fucking cake.

A loot box, by itself, isn't THAT bad of a thing.  The only game I'm currently involved in playing that has them is Overwatch and in that game the boxes contain nothing but cosmetic shit to make your character look different.  Someone who is level 50 and has opened a ton of boxes has no inherent advantage over the player at level 1 who has opened 0 but the level 50 guy probably looks a bit cooler.  This got shaken up a bit with Battlefront when the loot boxes started containing game changing shit like weapons and gear which meant that players who paid money had an advantage over those who didn't in a game that was already like $60 just to play in the first place.

But that's nothing, NOTHING compared to the bullshit that is being forced to pay money to save your game.  I guess it's another character slot or something like that but even then that's bullshit.  Imagine if you are the kind of person with lets say, 2 siblings who all love Metal Gear SO MUCH that all of you are willing to give Survive a chance.  So you log on Steam, you drop 35 fucking Pounds for the game itself and you make a dude and you have a grand old time.  Then your brother wants to play so now you have to pay an EXTRA £10 just to let him play his own guy because you don't want him fucking up your shit.  Then your sister comes along and decides SHE wants to play so that's ANOTHER £10 just so she can make her character and play.  That's £55 for the game and enough slots just to let people who live with you play.  Don't tell me "just share the one slot" either because if this was me and my wife, I wouldn't want here anywhere NEAR my save files, fuck that.

The only game I remember doing this other than this is FFXI and at least in the game you can KIND of justify having the one character because each job in that game levels up individually.  So if you wanted to play a thief and your brother wanted to be a black mage then those two jobs level up independently so while still bullshit at least you and someone else could, in theory, play your own shit.  Also my time with FFXI was extremely limited back in high school so there's even a chance I'm wrong about that one.

What's even worse is that not only is paying to save complete dogshit but the launch itself has been SO BAD that there's been an apology issued in the form of 100 SV coins.  So for your unplayable mess of a shitty Metal Gear game you get 1/10th of a save slot.  I get the feeling that this Metal Gear won't be Surviving for very long.

I'll see myself out.

IIDX Is Just Too Hard For Me

No one likes to admit they suck shit at a thing.  It's hard for one to throw their hands up and say "Yep, that thing, I'm fucking awful at it" but I think it's about time I throw my hands up and say yes, Beatmania IIDX (or 2 DX) is just flat out too hard for me.

I've been trying to git gud at this game for multiple years now and every time I just get frustrated and quit.  Back in high school, IIDX was the reason I got into importing Japanese games.  I got a Swap Magic, a IIDX controller and IIDX RED off Play Asia and tried to get good at it in my house since England didn't actually have any machines to play on.  Although I do think there was an original Beatmania cabinet in London, but who cares about Beatmania 1?

Rhythm games are usually something I'm pretty good at.  I play DDR fairly well and I can rock most of the top level shit in the arcades for certain titles.  Here's a video of me playing Night of Nights on Chunithm in the arcade just to prove I'm not a total inept moron when it comes to this genre.

However, that's Chunithm, now check out this video of some dude playing an IIDX song.

It's just another fucking level that I can't wrap my head around.  What's depressing about this whole this is that I actually LIKE IIDX so being shit at it genuinely saddens me. 

Still though, I'm not one to give up.  Maybe from today I'll give it another shot and hopefully in a month or 2 (or 6) I'll be able to come and make another post about how I conquered it and got good.  The chances of that ACTUALLY happening are quite low though since 1) I'll probably get frustrated and 2) The machines are usually busy and I don't wanna wait.

Still, I can dream 

Museca Arcade

The strangely named Museca is a game that has been released recently to Japanese arcades and with that big strange controller I couldn't help but give it a try.  With so many rhythm games available in the arcade just how does this one stack up?

Well, I did the first thing one does with every Konami game and I scanned my E-Amusement card.  If you're unfamiliar with how gaming IC cards work, please refer to this video for a quick primer

After typing in a name and setting a pin number I was met with a whole ton of story, which is strange for this kind of game, that I just skipped through and went straight to the music select.

The games music selections at the start are you standard Bemani rhythm game fare with lots of J-Pop and a couple of Touhou tracks which seems to be a standard every sine Sound Voltex.  Usually I like to crank up the difficulty level since I play a lot of rhythm games but I couldn't quite figure out how to do it and since it was my first credit I didn't care all that much. 

The most interesting part of this game is definitely the controller

There are 5 buttons in a sort of Pop n' Music style arrangement that can be both pushed and spun.  Under the machine there is a pedal for a special type of hold notes but 2 of the 3 songs I played for my first credit did not feature any pedal action so I'm guessing that's something that only shows up at higher level play.  There are 2 main types of notes which are taps, where you push the button in and spins where you spin the button like a turn table.  It's fun to play and for my first time, surprisingly confusing sometimes.  Considering that I play a little bit of IIDX I thought 5 huge buttons would be easy to adapt to but I still found myself losing my place on the pad a couple of times, guess I'm just a moron.

When you finish, assuming you have a card, you are given a screen where you can unlock new music.  I could only afford to unlock songs on their easiest mode because buying intermediate or expert tracks is outrageously expensive on the in game currency.  Then again, It seemed pretty easy to gather so I'm guessing it won't be too long before I'm able to try some higher level stuff. 

Well, that's enough reading.  All in all I think the game is pretty good.  I filmed a video of me playing the highest level song available to me at the time so check it out.  I'll be coming back to this game a lot so watch this channel for some cool videos in the future

The TGS 2015 Roundup!

Well I'm back in Nagoya and I'm recovered from my post show drinking hangover so now I'm ready to share my thoughts on the Tokyo Game Show.  While I had a lot of fun at the show walking around and staring at all the shiny new games, I was a little disappointing and there isn't really all that much I came out feeling excited about.

So, let's gets started with the good stuff. 

The first thing we saw as we came into the entrance this time was the Playstation indie booth thing which contained a number of games made by different people from all sorts of backgrounds.  2 games of note that I got my hands on were Slashy Hero and Illan.

Slashy Hero is a dungeon crawling game for mobile platforms where you control a little dude during Halloween slicing up monsters for candy and collecting loot to progress.  It's free to play, fun to muck about with and the system of changing costume to modify stats reminded me of Costume Quest a little bit.  However, Costume Quest sucked a massive cock and Slashy Hero is actually pretty good.  It's available for free next month and I'd totally recommend checking it out.

A little later in the day I got my hands on Illan: Shades of Memories which was a really cool puzzle platformer for PC.  You control a cute little black thing called Illan and you must solve puzzles and do some light platforming to progress.  Really fun and kind of relaxing to play but taxed my brain just enough to avoid becoming boring, nice and chill.   Right now Illan is not available for purchase BUT if you are interested then it is available for voting on Steam Greenlight, so go hit that vote button and get this thing on the store.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=507636802

After we left the indie booth we looked at the cosplayers for a while which was your same old attractive Japanese girls wearing either not much or incredibly elaborate costumes.  I snapped a few shots but right now my camera is inside my bag and I'm too lazy to get it out, so maybe I'll upload later.

Next we came across Star Wars Battlefront which looked absolutely INSANE

I don't really need to say much about this one since people are familiar with other games in the series and there's already a lot of excitement.  That said, this thing looks INSANELY fun and I can't wait to get my hands on it.  Tokyo Game Show are very uptight when it comes to taking pictures and videos on the show floor but I managed to get a minute or so of footage of the game play so I'm just going to let that do all the talking for me.

Moving on from there we saw the Sony booth which had a number of cool looking games including a new Star Ocean, some JRPG thing called Exist Archive, new content for Bloodborne, a collection of the Uncharted games and a whole host of VR stuff which unfortunately we couldn't get our hands on.  Other cool stuff included a new game play video for Persona 5 and a remake of a PS2 game I really enjoyed called Odin Sphere. 

The final thing to jump out of my mind was a title called Nioh

A game being developed by Koei Tecmo and what essentially looks like Asian Dark Souls which is not a bad thing.  I'd never heard of it before but apparently it was showcased back in 2005 and then vanished for some reason and now it's resurfaced at TGS which is cool.  Game looks really fun and is just another reason that I need to go out and buy a fucking PS4 already.

Now let's talk about the not so great stuff about the show.

Now I'm not the biggest fan of mobile gaming, I don't mind giving the occasional title a try and sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised but there was SO MUCH fucking mobile at TGS this year.  You couldn't walk 5 fucking minutes along the show floor without seeing a booth that had a fucking iPad hooked up to it.

I can understand why companies may see mobile as a decent platform because almost everyone has phone so your game will reach a much wider audience.  However, you can't get a decent experience from a game on a mobile device.  Mobile is perfect for games like the aforementioned Slashy Hero because that's the kind of game I can muck about with on a train and then put away when I get to work.  But playing RPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest or god forbid even trying to play FPS games on a mobile platform?  FUCK. THAT.

Call me a purist, call me a snob, that's fine but Tokyo Game Show was fucking drowning in mobile stuff and I couldn't help but feel like it was a bit of a shame.  Hell, one of the biggest games at show was a fucking social RPG from 2013

Now granted, since returning from the show I have downloaded and given Granblue Fantasy a go and it is one of those rare mobile games that is actually pretty decent.  Hell, it even has Nobuo Uematsu and Hideo Minaba of Final Fantasy fame behind it so I guess that has to say something about the amount of effort in it's production.  That said, the game is from fucking 2013, why is it so prominently displayed at a big games con 2 years later?!  It's not new, I go there to see new shit, not to wank over above average phone RPGs from 2 years ago...

Konami was also a fucking disgrace this year

When I arrived at the booth my eyes were greeted with a football (soccer) game, a baseball game and 4 girls (admittedly rather pretty) dancing around and lip syncing to some shitty Japanese J-Pop song.  We were so bored and disgusted that we left after a short time but upon googling something I remember seeing in the background of the dancing girls there WAS actually a game being talked about.

The game is called Tokyo Xanadu, being produced for the Vita and actually looks like it could be kind of fun.  However I wouldn't have fucking know that if I hadn't remembered the title that was hidden away behind 4 girls dancing about.  Fuck you Konami, you're a fucking mess.

The last thing that kind of ticked me off was the content for The Last Guardian

All they had was some fucking projection of the dog-eagle thing that you could stand in front of and it would kind of react to your movements and a short demo video of footage that we had seen months ago.  I'm excited for this game but what was on display at the show was disappointing.

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So that's it folks, my thoughts on TGS 2015.  Not completely shitty but definitely not as good as it was last year.  Few things to be excited about and some cool indie games made it worth while.  Here's hoping that next years show will bring much more excitement. 

I'm not sure if I wrote about everything, I'm going mainly off the top of my head, if I remember anything extra I'll throw it up on twitter.

Remember Dance Dance Revolution?

Way back when I used to live in the UK tons of people would talk about DDR all the fucking time.  Assholes at my school would be like "have you seen that game where you play with your FEET?!" or I'd see it occasionally on news websites as this revolutionary new thing that is not only fun but kind of good for you too.

Well now, apart from the die hard rhythm game fanatics that I surround myself with with, I barely hear anyone talk about DDR.  It's popularity, at least in the UK, started waning when Guitar Hero started to rise up and then after the western rhythm game fad died out I didn't hear anyone talk about it again.

But then I moved to Japan where every arcade has entire fucking sections of their gaming areas dedicated to rhythm games.  DDR, Drummania, Guitar Freaks, Voltex, Mai Mai, Groove Coaster, Pop n', HOLY SHIT, so many fucking god damn rhythm games.  Here in Japan, DDR is very very far from being forgotten and still requires a short queue up if you want to get a turn.

That said, DDR seems to have done away with all the individual titling that other Bemani games tend to follow.  For example Beatmania has a new fucking iteration like every goddamn year and Jubeat seems to have some new random ass word added to the title every time I enter a game centre.  Seriously, the last version of Jubeat was called "copious", I mean what kind of fucking name is that?!  Anyway, like I said DDR doesn't do that shit.

That doesn't mean that DDR isn't being updated but the versions that I see in arcades now seem to be a big compilation edition that just has everything on it.  Basically every song from every version of DDR is on there along with a great deal of the songs from every other Bemani game under the sun.  Having Konami's E-Amusement pass also unlocks more tracks as you level up and there's some thing involving medals and "boss songs" that I'm collecting as I play but I always skip through it too fast to know what the fuck is going on.

So yeah, DDR, the big old fucking granddad of rhythm games is far from a forgotten old fossil.  Still going strong and still enjoyed by many around the world.  I just wish I wasn't so out of shape so I could do all those expert tracks that I spent so much time practicing in my teenage years.

Silent Hills Apparently Cancelled and I'm Kind of Happy

Apparently it's all over and Silent Hills is a dead project.  A quick google search tells stories about Del Toro saying "It ain't gonna happen" and Norman Reedus confirming the canning of the project over at Konami.  This all comes along side news of Hideo Kojima, the big name behind the project, leaving Konami after the completion of Metal Gear Solid 5.  A lot of people are upset by this news but me, I'm kind of happy.

Now don't get me wrong and start raging, Silent Hills looked OK and had a lot of talent behind it and I'd be overjoyed to get a modern Silent Hill game that doesn't suck complete ass.  Hell, the first 3 Silent Hill games are some of my all time favourites but as a fan of the series I can't help but feel that the axing of this project is probably for the best.

There was a lot wrong with Silent Hills up to this point.  P.T, while very effective as it's own horror thing wasn't very "Silent Hill".  The second trailer that got released for Silent Hills which involved a person running away from monsters in what looked like a school made my heart sink pretty hard.  The whole thing looked something out of a haunted house and it looked like all the subtlety of the previous games had been removed for big set piece monsters chasing you through corridors.  If it was it's own IP then it's the kind of thing I would have been keeping an eye on but as soon as you attach "Silent Hill" to something like that I start to lose interest. 

The problem is though, Konami have come out and said that they will still be developing the Silent Hill series and this upsets me greatly.  Silent Hill is OVER and it's been over since 2003 (or 2004 depending on how you see it).  There is absolutely no need to develop any more fucking Silent Hill games, just let it die.  We are now at a sad point where there are more terrible Silent Hill games than good ones developed by people who don't have a fucking clue about anything.

Silent Hills was a little different because even if Kojima and Del Toro didn't have a fucking clue about the storyline at least it probably would have been a good game.  The problem is that the story is one of the most important aspects of Silent Hill and even if you make a decent game under the name, getting the story wrong just ruins everything.  If news comes out in the next few months that Kojima is carrying on the project with Del Toro under a different name my interest may spark.  "Inspired" by Silent Hill is great but being a part of that series sets you up for so much failure.

People should just let Silent Hill die and focus on bringing forward the next big horror IP.  We have all this awesome technology and graphical power now, I'm sure someone somewhere can make something that's just as chilling as SH1 was when that first came out.  A new IP would mean I'm not looking at it through the SH lens and nitpicking every single aspect of the story, presentation, game play, characters etc.

Lord knows gaming needs a good new horror game but Silent Hills was not it and I can't help but feel the series is better off without it.  Good luck to Kojima after he leaves Konami and I am kind of hoping the project gets restored under a new, original IP and it's just as scary an engaging as Silent Hill used to be. 

Silent Hill

It's kind of criminal that I've not made this post sooner.  All the speed runs I do, all the time I've spent talking about the latest entries in the series and how shit they are.  Hell, I've even talked about the fucking PLAY NOVEL more than I have the actual game, so it's about time Silent Hill got some love.

I picked the PAL box art for the post picture because the American box art is shit.  Even the Japanese box art is better and that's just a tile wall with a little bit of blood on it.

Silent Hill is one of those games that basically everyone with even a passing interest in the medium of video games is aware of.  It's one of the big grand daddies of the horror genre and is famous for being WAY scarier than any of the other survival horror games.  Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark and all that stuff were kind of scary, but Silent Hill was the first instance I ever saw anyone put down a controller and be like "whoa man, this shit..."

The plot involves Harry Mason on his quest through Silent Hill to rescue his daughter.  Not too long after the game starts you get caught up in all sorts of shit involving demons, shifts into a nightmare and a satanic cult.  I'm not going to go into any length about the story because there are people who have dedicated significant amount of time picking apart this games wonderful plot and if I did it in this post it would be way WAYYYYY too fucking long.

The game uses the old tank control scheme that games like Resident Evil used, except it was a little more developed.  For example, readying your weapon didn't lock you to the floor and you were free to maneuver with your gun drawn or big fuck off pipe ready to swing.  This made melee combat an actual option whereas other games in the genre, locking yourself in place to slice at something was guaranteed death for the player.

The game also had a ton of replay value since there was a few secret weapons to unlock and an extra ending to be acquired upon fulfilling certain conditions in a New Game +.  The game also had 4 normal endings so that's at least 5 playthroughs where you will end up with something different after the final boss has been toppled. 

I mean, I could talk about this game for fucking hours, it's just that good.  If I tried to go through every single goddamn thing that I enjoyed about Silent Hill then this post would be really goddamn long and I don't think anyone wants to read thousands of words of gush.   So instead, just go and play the fucking thing.  Dig it out of a closet, borrow it off a friend, buy it off PSN, I don't care how you play it just fucking play it.  The new Silent Hill games are all shit so if you've never experienced it before and you want to see just how strong a start this series had, get on it ASAP.

Silent Hill's 1,2 and 3 are THE BEST horror games to date, bar none, fight me.

Just in case, if you're interested in seeing my current fastest speed run (39:39 IGT) then the video is below.

Metal Gear Acid

Even though I beat this game a while ago, it's taken me more than a month to actually get on the blog and talk about it because it's just a bit shit.

"No way!" I hear you say, "There's no way in hell a bad Metal Gear Solid exists!".  Well before you start getting upset with me for slagging off Metal Gear, I'm not, I love Metal Gear but MGA is a fucking mess.

Story wise it's a pretty classic Metal Gear setup.  There's a bunch of terrorists who have invaded some place and they are after something that isn't called Metal Gear but is blatantly Metal Gear and it's up to you to stop it.  Since I'm writing this so long after finishing it I've kind of forgotten some of the plot.  Mainly it involved Metal Gear, some shit on a plane and child experimentation but the fact I've forgotten the plot might clue you in to just how forgettable and lack luster it was.

But the story isn't the reason Metal Gear Acid is a fucking mess.  No, the story is just a bit dull but it's the gameplay that really makes this game just unenjoyable.  In case you're not aware, Metal Gear Acid isn't played like any other Metal Gear game because this is a card game.

That's right, a fucking turn based CARD game.

 You have a deck of cards that fall into different categories such as weapons, items, actions and special effects that are represented by different characters.  Every card is used to move around the board and lets you move 3 spaces, while special movement cards will allow for greater movement.  Every card also has a cost, so the better cards cost more to use and that means that you have to wait longer between each turn.

Now the reason this game is a load of bullshit is because everything you do is dependant on what kind of cards you draw.  It's fine at first but there are certain points in the game where you NEED specific cards to do specific things and if you don't get lucky and draw your card then you'll just be sat there discarding shit for 5 or 6 turns until the card you eventually DO want shows up.

An example of this is there is a level where you are required to snipe flying cameras so that you can cross a bridge.  By that point in the game I had maybe 3 or 4 sniper rifle cards available, but I lost the mission multiple times because the game wouldn't give me the fucking cards to use, so they would just eventually move into my half of the map and spot me, calling a bunch of guards to enter the level and fuck me all up.

Now I guess you could just say to me "well why didn't you go and get more sniper rifles then?", but the problem with that is the only way to really get more cards quickly without having to tediously grind out old levels is to buy booster packs.  A booster pack gives you 3 cards, and usually it gives you 3 shit ones.  Through my entire playthrough I only got one rare card in a booster and the rare was so shit that I ended up never using it.  The one good thing about the boosters is the variety in the packs.  For example, at the start you only have access to Metal Gear Solid 1 themed cards, but as you progress you unlock MGS2, 3 and even Metal Gear 1 and 2 themed cards, so if you're the kind of person who enjoys collecting digital cards then you have a lot to work with here.

I'm being overly harsh when I say Metal Gear Acid is a fucking mess, but it's certainly frustrating and sometimes VERY unfun to play with certain levels being made an absolute chore by the games fucking stupid card thing.  Still though, it's a unique take on the Metal Gear series and maybe the sequel that I've not played is way better, so it's at least worth a quick go on your PSP.

A Different Kind of Card

Think of this post as part 2 of things I found inside Swedish arcades.

So if you remember a long long time ago, I made a post talking about stat cards in Japan.  I used a picture of my old E-Amusement pass as the image and it looked like this.

Just so those who didn't read that post last summer don't have to dig through the archive, these cards are used for certain games inside Japanese arcades for tracking your play records and unlocking new things within the games.

Now if you look back to the first picture, you may notice there is a card reader strapped to that crazy taxi machine, but it's not for stat cards.  Sweden, unlike Japan or the UK doesn't have this nice convenient coin that you can just drop in like a £1 or 100 yen.  If my memory serves me correctly, the standard price for 1 credit in the arcade was something really awkward like 16 Kroner or some such nonsense so you have to swipe some kind of credit card in the machine in order to get a credit.

At least I think that's how it works, I don't know any Swedish and the one Swedish guy I do know doesn't know anything about games.  Still, the awkward pricing of arcade games out here just makes me yearn for a good Japanese game centre or even just a simple Time Crisis cabinet in a British cinema that takes a single fucking coin.

I thought Patches were to make things better, not worse

Sim City is just the shit gift that keeps on giving, goddamn.

So, while I was browsing round the net on Thursday morning I came across an article about Sim City patch 2.0.  What does patch 2.0 do exactly? well it breaks your fucking game is what it does.  Go and give it a google search but this patch has caused all sorts of weird things like small making all your sims shit absolutely everywhere and causing trees to make car noises along with much more.

I'm hoping that as I write this post that it's been fixed because a patch breaking your game is bullshit.  A while ago I made a post about how people need to stop finished unfinished fucking games.  If you're going to put something on the shelf and charge £40+ for it, then at least make sure the fucking thing works was the general gist of that post.

Now I'm a reasonable guy, I'm not expecting the developer to iron out 100% of the problems, a couple of little bugs aren't too bad providing they don't break the game, but shit like this is just fucking everything up and ruining it for everyone.

What makes it worse is that these aren't release bugs, the game was PATCHED to do this.  The whole point of a fucking patch is to make bugs that you missed go away, yet when EA patched this mess of a game it went and broke it even harder, what the fuck.

EA isn't the only one guilty of this shit because Silent Hill HD did the same fucking thing.  But in that case the patches just did nothing rather than break it.  You couldn't really break that game any harder.

Fucking stop this shit, indie games made by 3 or 4 people have less bugs than these huge budget games with massive teams.  What sense does that fucking make? you'd think with all these people working on it, it'd be easier to spot something going wrong.  Just make sure your game fucking works before you start selling it in the first place.  Fuck your deadline, I'm sure fans would appreciate a delay for a product that works out the goddamn box, pricks.

Don't Lock the Difficulty

A while ago you may remember me having a bit of a gush about Metal Gear Rising, I thought it was great.  If you don't remember me having a gush about Rising, have a flick through the archive and dig out my "review".

Anyway, Rising, along with many other games did something that I really can't fucking stand.  In the game there are 5 difficulty levels.  Easy, Normal, Hard, Very Hard and Revengeance.  I'm not trying to sound big or anything like that, but if you're like me then you want the biggest challenge you can get out of a game, so I always play on the hardest settings when possible.  However Rising doesn't let me do that, I have to beat the game fucking TWICE to unlock revengeance mode. 

I just want to challenge myself with the toughest thing that game has to offer, why does the game feel the need to make me prove my worth before it'll even let me fucking try.  That said though, Rising is a bad example because it turns out you can put in the Konami code to unlock them all from the start, but who's going to go looking for cheat codes on a first playthrough?! It's still bullshit.

Still, Rising isn't the only game that does this whole locked difficulty thing, in fact most games do and I seriously wish they would fucking stop.  Games today are pretty fucking easy to begin with, so don't make me play through the snoozefest easy modes before I can even attempt what sorry excuse for a hard mode you came up with.

Bottom line, make all difficulties available from the start of the goddamn game! No cheat codes! No having to play the game multiple times! No any other bullshit you can think of to make me work for bullshit that should be there anyway!  Just let me play the game on the difficulty I want to play it at, arsebag.

Tomm Hulett Leaves Konami!

Look at him....look at that smug, bald face of his, god damnit I hate him so much.  But today we have good news!

Tomm Hulett has left Konami! Break out the champagne glasses and raise 'em high! This is a great day!  For those that haven't seen my previous posts describing how much I hate this man, he is the guy that basically ran Silent Hill into the ground. 

Thanks to this man, and a bunch of people who must have masters degrees in missing the point, Silent Hill went from being one of the greatest Survival Horror series into a chain of shitty not scary action games that even the most brain dead gamer wouldn't find entertaining.  Hell, his latest abomination was a fucking Silent Hill themed dungeon crawl type thing that I've not played yet because I refuse to give Konami money for that.  It might actually be quite good as a game, but the fact that you had the nerve to slap Silent Hill's name all over it just to generate sales really gets under my skin.

Still, not content with just ruining Silent Hill, he's moved on to WayFoward to probably go and ruin something else.  He's gonna have to make something pretty fuckin' spectacular to turn my, and many other fans of Silent Hill, opinions around.  Good luck to you Tomm, maybe now that you're not focused on destroying gaming history, you might be able to produce something worth playing.

Right now, I hate you so much I wrote a Haiku about it

Fuck off Tomm Hulett
You are bad at making games
I hate you so much