PS3, PS4 and the Switch Controllers Can Kiss My Ass

 

Somewhere in a cardbox box, probably located in the family home I still have the Sega Mega Drive I got when I was 4 years old.  I can hook that bad boy up and shove a cart inside it and I promise you that the controller will still function.  I will be able to sit down and play a game of Gunstar Heroes or Vectorman on that thing from start to finish with no issues.  This level of durability seems to have gone completely out of the window in semi-recent times and I absolutely can't stand it.

First the PS3 controller.  The PS3 Controller is a pretty good pad that feels nice and is easy to game with, a good piece of essential gear for the system.  However, lurking inside the controller is a small piece of styrofoam that over time, with use, will wear down.  When this sucker wears down it causes your controller to start putting out random inputs.  For example I've been trying to slog my way through Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, an absolutely terrible game that gets even worse when the main character, Gabriel, is just doing whatever the fuck he wants.  Sometimes I would be in combat and despite me not pressing the X button to jump, he would jump.  Even more annoyingly is that killing enemies drops souls that you absorb to charge a magic bar with the L3 button, but pressing L3 would also, for some reason, press L1 which would activate the magic mode and waste whatever energy you just absorbed. The game is already shit and with this extra hurdle it makes me want to not play it at all.  

So I head online and try to find a fix and thankfully I find one.  A simple fix that involves opening the pad, finding the little piece of styrofoam that is apparently the cause of the issue and wrapping some electrical tape around it.  So I did that, great success no problem!  However when I put the pad back together, that plastic that keeps the shoulder buttons in place was so old and shitty that it basically just shattered in my hands.  It's not like I was slamming the controller back together, I was trying to be as careful as possible and the whole thing just fucking fell apart.  But even if I was doing an Incredible Hulk impression with my controller, why the fuck do I even have to do this in the first place?  I have retro controllers that are god knows how many years old and those all work fine so why the shit is the PS3 pad made like this?!

What's even worse, is that I ordered a Hori 3 controller off Amazon to replace it.  I went for this pad because its compatible with the PC and I wanted a pad to replace the shitty PS4 controller.  The reason the PS4 controller is in the title is because while it does work great when being played with the PS4, playing with it hooked up to a PC is a FUCKING. NIGHTMARE.  The micro-USB connection in the top of the pad is looser that your mum and disconnects from the computer constantly.  If you've ever watched a stream where I'm using the pad, you will hear that disconnect/reconnect sound CONSTANTLY and its really fucking annoying when it happens in the heat of game play.  I've never had this issue with any other device that uses micro USB, why is the PS4 pad made like such garbage in this regard?

So the Hori 3 works great on my PC but plugging it into my PS3 turned out to be a complete shit show.  I fire up Castlevania and all the buttons work but for some reason the sticks don't work.  I can do everything except what is possibly the most important function of the character, move.  This would also happen when using the PS4 controller with the PS3.  All these pads are the same fucking thing why do they have to operate so differently between games?!  It's not even consistant either since I had an issue when streaming No More Heroes on PS3 where I couldn't block attacks only to realize that the issue was that in that game, the shoulder buttons weren't working and everything else was just fine.  Playstation hasn't changed its controller layout since the fucking first system they put out, how is this so much hassle? It boggles the mind.

Now I was only going to complain about my Playstation pad woes in this post but any chance to shit on Nintendo I'm going to take.  At least with the Sony controllers they either worked properly for a long time or have annoying things when being used out of their primary intended use.  However the controllers on the Switch don't even get that and the Joycons are quite possibly one of the worst things I've ever had the displeasure of using.  Not only do they feel like shit but they start to drift if you so much as look at them funny.  I was getting Switch drift in less than a year of owning the system and MAYBE I'd understand if I was playing Smash Brothers 10 hours a day but my sticks starting drifting after playing though Fire Emblem of all fucking things.  No real intense stick use, just moving a cursor around a grid and selecting things on a menu was too much for that flimsy sack of garbage.  The only game I played before that was Breath of the Wild which, while a bit more intense on the stick, wasn't too heavy on rapid or strong movements.

But we all know the reason why the Joycons suck so much shit.  It's so that you shell out an additional 6-8000 yen for a Pro Controller.  Do you want to enjoy the games for the system that you already paid money for or do you want to torture your hands and give yourself permanent muscle damage from using the Joycons? Well if its the former better break out your wallet, motherfucker

Fuck you Nintendo, I hate you

Dante's Inferno

 

When Dante's Inferno came out way back in 2010 I pretty much ignored it but thanks to the power of the stream request system and a friend of mine loaning me a copy to play on, I finally got around to giving it a go.

The one thing that everyone says about this game is that it's a God of War clone and it was for that reason that a lot of people I knew at the time either didn't buy it or gave it a bad rap.  Being honest, they are completely correct, Dante's Inferno is a SHAMELESS God of War clone in pretty much every detail.  The combat feels very similar, the boss fights all end in bombastic QTE's, you get souls to upgrade your character as the game goes on etc. etc. But none of that make Dante's Inferno a bad game, there are a lot worse things you could be cloning and as far as it goes, despite some jank here and there, it plays pretty well.  If you like God of War then there's no real reason I can think of as to why you wouldn't enjoy this.  

It does have some things of it's own though, such as the dual upgrade trees that are marked "holy" and "unholy" and gain experience based on if you commit gruesome murder or if you commit gruesome murder in a slightly more pious way.  Each of these trees have their own skills and upgrades, with Unholy being focused on your scythe and Holy being focused on your shooty hadoken cross thingy.  The other thing it offers is a sort of judgement system where you find lost souls and you choose to absolve them to heaven or stab them through the face for huge amounts of experience points in one of your upgrade trees.  The weird thing about this system is that if you choose to absolve a lost soul then you have to play Dance Dance Revolution for about a minute before the game gives you the exp which can bring things to a screeching halt and is generally quite an annoying thing to have to do.  

The one thing I hated more than anything else about this game was the difficulty level balancing.  I started the game on Hellish, the games hard mode and I started getting my ass kicked.  This was fine, I wasn't expecting hard mode to just let me win but as I progressed and got stuff off the upgrade tree and unlocked more equipable relics it hit me that the game wasn't really playing fair.  With a New Game+ file hard mode seems challening but reasonable but from a fresh file Hellish mode is just hair pullingly annoying.  Enemies will do damage like it's Dark Souls in Hellish but in Normal they do <1% of your health with a big wind up unblockable.  On a new game plus this would be offset by a relic you get about half way through the game and you'd have a lot more options with spells and combo upgrades from the unholy tree to deal with the scenarios but when your a baby crusader taking your first trip into the rings it's borderline impossible unless you have a lot of prior experience. 

So despite some jank, the hard mode being way too hard and the normal mode being laughably easy Dante's Inferno isn't a bad little game at all.  It's the kind of thing that would be good to play when you have gaming friends over, something to fiddle with and you don't have to think too hard about while you have conversations about whatever.  The cutscenes and game help boxes are also equal parts awesome and hilarious so even if you end up hating the gameplay it's probably worth playing just for that to be honest.  

The game ends on a very saddening "to be continued" screen as well.  I imagine the developers had plans to do games for heaven and limbo but this game probably just didn't do well enough.  Give it a go if you can get your hands on a copy.  Brain off, scythe out and just enjoy the sights and the action.

Dragons Crown: Money Grub Edition

So I was talking with my friend the other day and he said that all I do is complain on here, like I'm full of nothing but rage and negativity.  This may be partly true so I planned a bunch of blog topics so that the next handful of posts would be nothing but sunshine and rainbows but then I saw this and now I can't help complaining again.

Dragons Crown is a game that was released in 2013 for the PS3 and Vita and was a bit of a side scrolly hack and slashy affair and if there's one thing I can't be mad about it's the game itself.  If you haven't played Dragons Crown I would totally suggest picking up a copy and giving it a spin, it's really fucking fun. 

So ATLUS did this a while ago with a similar game called Odin Sphere which was awesome.  The original Odin Sphere came out on PS2 and playing a PS2 game on a modern TV can look a bit crappy, which was a shame for a game with such a beautiful art style.  Not only did it get a bit of a facelift though, it came with some extra content and tweaks to game play which made it worth buying.  I have no problem re releasing an older game if it has some, even just a little, extra or different shit in it to warrant the purchase.

Dragons Crown on the other hand is a different tale.  This is a game from just the last generation that looks just fine on the PS3.   It's not like the PS4 can do all that much to improve the look of that game really, the generational face lift is not needed here.  It feels like that sort of pointless remake that's put out just  to milk a bit of extra money from the fans, kind of like the "HD" version of The Last of Us.  Not only that though but from what I can tell after reading some of the news stories about this game, there is NOTHING new in terms of content.  The only thing I can find is that it contains all the original games original features.  It's a fucking sad day when the fact that we're not having anything removed from a remake is noteworthy.

Unless for some weird reason you don't own a PS3 (or a Vita), don't buy the £50 pro edition of the game.  Just go find a PS3 or Vita version in a store or on Amazon or something.  At time of writing the original PS3 version is available on Amazon for like £30 so save yourself the money and get the exact same game at a much lower price.

Finally the thing that irks me is the name.  It's not Dragons Crown: Remaster, it's Dragons Crown Pro Edition.  With a name like that you'd expect it to be tweaked to be harder or something.  Like, the PS2 SMT RPG Lucifer's Call (Or Nocturne depending on where you're from) in Japan has something called a "maniacs edition".  This is the version that featured slightly tougher combat, an extra hard as fuck side quest and Dante from Devil May Cry.  There's nothing "pro" about this version over the other one, it's just the same fucking game with some slightly better graphics.

Anyway, go try Dragons Crown because it's fucking sick, just don't pay out the nose for this version and grab it on PS3.  ATLUS have been good in the past with shit like P4G so don't let them get away with this crap.

Pixeljunk Monsters

I've had this game on my PS3 since my second year of University and I've never fucking beaten it.

Pixeljunk Monsters is a tower defense game that came back in 2007.  The game play is simple, you control a little man who goes around building towers on trees.  Monsters come out of one end of the map and walk towards a little house on the other end of the map.  If the towers fail to kill a monster by the time it reaches the house it kills a little thing inside and if this happens 20 times then it's game over.

The game itself isn't too hard but it makes a big deal out of perfectly clearing a stage.  To perfectly clear a stage you have to complete all waves within a level without losing any of the little guys from your house and maybe I'm just shit but this is a really difficult task.  What will usually happen is the game will throw one type of enemy at you for a whole bunch of waves so you end up with a large amount of towers that counter that specific type.  You spend ages thinking everything is just fine and then BAM out of nowhere a different type comes out late in the level with tons of health that you're just not ready for.  Then you restart because you lost a guy and you start trying to prepare for the thing that you know is coming but you find yourself under prepared for the shit the comes before so you end up losing guys and restarting again.  Rinse and repeat this process for fucking HOURS and eventually you strike the right balance and beat the stage with a perfect and all you get for the trouble is a stupid fucking rainbow above the level tile on the map.

Beating the game itself isn't actually that hard but because I'm a perfectionist I feel obliged to try and perfect every level on the map.  If you aren't like that you'll probably have a lot of fun with Pixeljunk Monsters but if you want those fucking rainbows this game will drive you absolutely mental.

Kratos Is A Shit Character

So recently I've been playing the God of War HD Collection for the PS3.  God of War was a game I played a long long time ago during my high school days and while I enjoyed the first two entries in the series I never played Chains of Olympus on PSP (despite now owning 2 copies) or God Of War 3.  I'm actually surprised about how little I remember about these games.  As far as the first game in concerned I remembered everything pretty vividly up to the point where you go and get Pandora's Box and then it almost feels like I'm playing it for the first time once again.

Kratos, the lead character of these games, while not as universally recognizable as something like Mario or Sonic is a stand out face in the world of gaming.  God of War is a big popular IP for Sony and people who are at least a little into games have probably seen Kratos at some point.  Hell, even at the last E3 people were losing their shit for fat dad Kratos since there was a new God of War game on the horizon.

However what my current play through of the first game has led me to feel is that Kratos is just a bit of a shit character.  Now the shitness of his character doesn't reflect on the quality of the games, they are good games, but Kratos is a completely unlikable prick. 

His story seems to be that he was a general in the army who was pretty good at killing things but in some battle against barbarians he got his shit kicked in.  So just as he's about to get his head smashed with a hammer he calls upon Ares, the God of war and Ares comes down, saves the day and makes Kratos his bitch.  So Kratos does his bidding for a bit but one day wanders into a village and "accidentally" kills his own family.  Pissed that Ares made him do that, Kratos vows to kill him and so begins the first game in the series.

Granted that I've not finished my re-play of the first game yet so maybe the ending will make me rethink this entire post but it feels like they were going for some kind of redemption plot line.  Kratos wants to kill Ares, get his life back so he can stop being a prick.  But it's impossible to feel sorry for Kratos since being a prick was all he was made to do, with or without Ares and my bet that if that whole silly family killing thing hadn't have happened then he still would have carried on in his hobby of draining things of their blood.

Playing as a hilarious asshole can be fun, there's nothing wrong with that, but trying to throw in certain story aspects to try and make us feel sorry for a character who is just a prick and nothing more feels silly.  Like I said though, my memory of the first two games is fuzzy at best and my lack of experience with the third means that there may be things that they have done with the guy to make him a bit more likable but the first games attempt is quite frankly, laughable.

Motion Controls Were A Mistake

We are now moving into an age where VR is all the rage.  With the release of things like the Occulus Rift and the HTC Vive, when people talk about novel ways to control games that's at the forefront of the conversation.  But not so long ago motion controls were all the rage with things like the Playstation Move, Nintendo Wii and the Kinect.  It was a terrible time but it seems to have been a fad that is mostly dead now.

It all started with the Wii, when it was announced that instead of having a traditional controller it would have this remote type thing.  People were understandably excited because imagine playing something like Zelda where you could manipulate the sword freely, it was a cool concept.  What the controller for the Wii turned out to be is an awkward piece of shit that didn't quite work correctly and a lot of the best games for that system don't make all that much use of the motion part of the controller.  Hell, I remember buying Monster Hunter Tri for the fucking thing and having to drop extra money on a "proper" controller so that I could play that thing.

After that, Sony tried to imitate the Wii because despite the awkwardness of the controls, it did sort of work and the system was selling well.  The PlayStation Move came out and was largely ignored.  I've never met a single person who owned a move and now that I think about it the only game I can think that actually used it was that Time Crisis spinoff thing.  Microsoft was the company that really came along and ruined it thought with the Kinect.  A terrible, barely functional camera type thing that had 0 compatible games of any quality.  It's legacy can be boiled down to a Star Wars game where they made a bunch of corny Star Wars versions of pop songs that you had to dance to for points.

Motion controls were a thorn in the side of the industry and we are better off now that they are mostly gone.  They still exist in some capacity, for example you can tilt the WiiU controller in certain games for certain effects and that feature also extends to things like the Vita but it's not so bad since the movements are slight and the applications limited.  When a game does feature that sort of movement control as a main feature it's usually not very good.

Like I said before, we are moving into an age of VR now, so it'll be interesting to see if this is another "innovation" that will cause a slew of shit titles for years to come or a quality innovation we will stick with in the distant future.  VR is sort of a cool idea so I'm hoping that it's something we stick with but as of right now, this very second, things aren't looking so hot.  Give it time though, I have faith.

Sony Slim Woes

I'm not the kind of person who treats my shit badly.  I try to store everything the best I can and my systems will, at worst, get a little dusty.  However for a few years now I've been having constant problems with the slimmed down version of Sony products.  I own a slim PS3, a Vita 2000 model and a slim PS2, so lets work our way through that.

PS3 Slim

To be fair, this one has behaved pretty well.  I bought it in 2011 or so, used, and it's been pretty much perfect.  I've carried it half way across the world from Japan to Sweden and then back to Japan again and it works just fine.  Despite being the "slim" version it's still sort of big and bulky so I guess that's why I'm not having any trouble with it.  I did have an issue where the controller would just randomly start pushing buttons on its own but this just kind of went away on its own.  I have no idea what caused it and no idea what fixed it but I'm just happy I can play my games.  That's more of a controller issue than a system issue anyway.

PS2 Slim

I bought this guy a few years ago when I came back to Japan long term.  Generally speaking it works pretty well but there was one issue about a year ago that pissed me off pretty hard.  My wife fired up the thing to play Kamaitachi no Yoru 2 with her friends where the system just wouldn't make the disc spin.  The fucking thing wasn't recognizing that the drive door was closed so the disc wouldn't spin and therefore you couldn't play the fucking game.  I realized that inside the system there's a little switch that gets pushed down when the door is shut and for some reason this wasn't being pushed.  I put some tape on it which remedied the problem but I had the original PS2 from pretty close to launch and used it all the way up to the end of university with no problems, this thing is just built like shit.

Then there's the issue of the controller which for some reason will just start going right and won't stop until I smack it.  I have a new controller that seems to work well now though and once again that's more of a controller issue than a system issue and could be because I bought it used.

PSP 2000

Now this fucking thing has been a problem since I bought it years and years ago.  I probably should have traded it for a less defective fucking thing but I was too lazy and now I'm paying the price. 

The first issue I had with this thing was dead pixels in the screen.  A red one and a greenish looking one  which should have set off alarm bells in my head but they are in such unimportant parts of the screen that I didn't think anything of them.  While annoying in any part of the game that goes bright white, generally speaking they aren't noticeable but it's frustrating that they are there.

The second issue is a bit more serious.  During game play I will randomly get the grey "Do you want to quit the game" message despite the fact I've not touched the home button.  The button itself isn't sticky and I think it has something to do with a little switch behind the UMD door but I have no idea what the fuck is going on really.

Then a few days ago I went about 10 minutes down the road to a place with my wife, took the thing in my pocket.  I didn't fall down, run or jump on anything and yet when I arrived at the place and took it out for a spin, there were some strange transparent lines going down the left hand side of the screen.  Play it for too long and I get graphical distortion and more lines and a quick google search seems to indicate that the fucking thing is dying.

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So if I've learned anything from this experience it's that slim type Sony products are a bunch of shit with the exception of maybe the PS3.  I know that when I go and buy a new PSP in a couple of days I'm going right back to the PSP 1000 with its metal frame and bulky ass case.  Reliability over portability from now on.

Hyper Dimension Neptunia

This is another one of those games I'm going to talk a little bit about despite the fact I haven't quite finished it yet.  I've been playing the fucking thing for almost a year and I've still not managed to polish it off and this is due to it being in Japanese so sometimes I'm just not in the mood to read that shit and just because it's generally not very fucking good.

So from what I understand, the game is set in a world that kind of representative of the games industry.  There are a number of islands with silly names like "Rui", "Leenbox" and "Raystation" and  each one of these has a goddess that presides over it (In Japanese referred to as "hards" as in hardware)  and one day they decide to gang up on one of their own and chuck her out of the goddess world or whatever.  On the way down, she loses all her memory, changes form into some small annoying girl and starts hearing voices from someone or something called Istoval (different in English?)  Istoval wants her to collect pieces of a key so she can free him/her/it from confinement otherwise something really terrible will happen to the world.  Thus begins the adventures of Neptune and her companions Compa and IF(?) on their journey for key that will save the world or some shit, I dunno.

The story surprisingly has a lot of charm to it and while it's not exactly the best written thing ever it's entertaining.  Where this game really falls down is in EVERY OTHER DEPARTMENT.

The combat is OK as there is a system in place where you can create your own combos with the skills that you acquire as you level up but after a while it all becomes very dull and unsatisfying and every encounter feels like a chore.  There is also this weird fucking thing where you can't use items by yourself, you have to put points into item skills which give them a percent chance to activate under certain conditions which can really fuck you over at some points.  Also combat difficulty will just be all over the damn place with some of the game being painfully easy and then suddenly a side quest or dungeon will be full of impossible shit that just doesn't want to die.

The game also features a ton of side quests which is cool and all but all the dungeons in this game are fucking IDENTICAL.  There are maybe 6 or 7 different types of dungeon and the only thing that changes is the layout.  You will always been running around the same looking cave, factory, castle, temple looking thing and the layouts are just standard crappy mazes with a couple of rooms with treasure in them if you're lucky.

Other problems include things like music that's so boring it'll put you to sleep, voice work that will cause heavy cringe if you're playing with anyone else in the room, slow animations in combat and many other things.  The only reason I'm still playing it is because if I don't finish it it'll forever remain unbeaten in my collection and I can't be having that.

Now, what I have heard is that the games that followed it, Mk2, V and a bunch of other stuff on PSP, Vita and other systems are way WAY better so once I finish this one I'm not going to give up on the series just yet, like I said there is a small amount of appeal to be had here.  I'll be interested to see how they stack up after I finish this shitty one in about 10 years.

The Last of Us: Remastered Vs Persona 4 Golden

Somewhere buried in this blog, there's a post where I had a moan about The Last of Us Remastered.  I moaned because the idea of "remaking" or "remastering" games from the last gen is nothing more than a shitty cash grab to try and make people buy the same game twice. 

So I'm playing Persona 4 Golden on my Vita when I start thinking, what is it about The Last of Us on PS4 that makes me angry while P4G doesn't?  Both are games that aren't all that old except while TLoU feels like a shitty cash grab P4G doesn't.

Before I start, I just want to say I'm not commenting on the quality of The Last of Us as a game, the game is a'ite.  I don't think it's the second coming of Jesus or the best story ever written for a game but it plays well and it's fun.  I've also not played Remastered but I've spent a damn long time googling the version differences before I made this post and with what I found I can safely say, if you bought Remastered (after owning the original), you are a moron.  If you bought it on PS4 because you didn't own it on PS3, fair enough.

Anyway, let's start with what I found regarding TLoU: Remastered.  What I found is that Remastered comes with all the DLC, features a photo mode, some commentary and runs at a higher frame rate.  BIG FUCKIN' WHOOP.  I googled the price on Amazon too and they want fucking £35 goddamn pounds for this shit.  Are the added "features" in this version worth another full price sale?  I don't fucking think so.  The big fucking hubub seems to be that it runs at 60fps on PS4 but is there any reason I couldn't have done that on PS3?  I'm pretty sure Metal Gear Rising runs at 60fps and that shits a lot more hectic than TLoU so what the fuck is going on there? 

I suppose you could argue that with all the DLC thrown in, it's kind of worth it but fuck the DLC.  The single player add on is like 2 hours long and who gives a fuck about the multiplayer?  There are much better games if you want multiplayer shooting. 

So what about Persona 4 Golden?  Why is that so much better?

Well fuck, if I tried to list of the reasons it would take all day because there's A LOT of shit going on with P4G.  While graphically there isn't much going on, there are so many things added to the game itself it'll make your fucking head spin.

There's extra dungeons, extra social links, extra arcanas for your monsters, extra cutscenes, new dialogue, re-worked combat, extra anime scenes for those who like that and this is just a small selection of things.  When I first fired up P4G I was expecting the same thing as the PS2 version but I ended up getting all this extra shit for no extra cost.

Now let's talk cost.  If you happen to live in the UK and you want to play P4G, it only costs about £13 off Amazon.  £13! Hell, you could buy the PS3 version of The Last of Us and get P4G with the money you saved.  Persona 4 isn't fucking around either, this is a meaty game with tons of shit to do that will last you way WAY longer.  Then, if you're a perfectionist, you even get some replay value for your £13 and there's even an insane difficulty mode for the true SMT masters.

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I'm expecting someone to pop up at some point and call me a prick for ragging on TLoU: Remastered but it pisses me off because it's a cashgrab of the most transparent kind.  Go look at the wikipedia page and it says that development on Remastered began straight after they finish the original game so obviously Naughty Dog think their customers are fucking idiots and judging from sales figures, a lot are.  Like I said, if you bought it because you didn't own the original and thought you'd get the "better" version, then fair enough I guess but remaking a game from one generation ago is fucking disgusting and it shows me how little respect some of this AAA game devs and publishers have for their customers.

Finally, before anyone calls me a hypocrite for buying P4G, all my PS2 games were stolen and I lost my original PS2 copy.  But even if that wasn't the case, P4G is still worth buying because it has tons of extra shit for a super low price. 

Dark Souls 2: Underwhelmingly Good

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

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

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

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

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

THAT'S FUCKING RADICAL!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eternal Sonata

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't Make a Movie of The Last of Us!

I like to chat a lot of shit about The Last of Us with my buddies, but I do actually think it's a fairly good game.  It just gets a lot of undeserved praise but that doesn't make the game bad, it just makes the people who give it that praise look like idiots.  It's a very well polished and enjoyable experience, but all the buzz that surrounded the game when it came out was a bit much.

So word on the street is that some kind of Last of Us movie is in the works.  This is a TERRIBLE idea and should be scrapped right away.  I'm not saying this because of any negative opinions I might hold about the game, but video game movies have a habit of being absolutely terrible.

But The Last of Us is one of those games that's bordering on being a movie anyway, so surely it would be easily adaptable for the big screen, right?  Well even if that was true, what would be the point?  The game is already pretty cinematic and if you do a quick google search of the movie, all they are planning to do is adapt the games story to the movie, thus making the whole thing pointless.

If you're a fan of The Last of Us, you've already played the fucking story, why would you want to see it again but with all the interactivity taken away?  Seems like a complete waste of effort to me.  This is the problem with almost every video game movie adaptation; it just turns into a shitty version of the game it's trying to copy.

Now maybe, if the movie was going to be an expansion to the games story then there would be SOME merit there, but even that is made completely pointless because Naughty Dog can do and have done that with DLC.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that this movie is a complete waste of time and the only thing it will accomplish is to piss off fans of the game.  The game is already cinematic enough and people enjoy playing it, why waste all this money creating something that will only serve to annoy the fan base?  Why not channel all that effort into an original movie or some kind of spin off to expand on the world of the game?

But no, they are going to go ahead with this movie just so they can squeeze some money out of the more gullible members of the fan base.  If it ends up being an amazing movie then I'll be genuinely surprised but I think I have more chance of winning the lottery or something.

Killer Is Dead

Killer is Dead is a game I have not finished yet, but due to it being fucking amazing I just had to talk about it right now.

The game follows one very smartly dressed assassin known as Mondo Zappa and his adventures doing work for an orginisation that involves killing an array of downright weird targets with the help of his happy go lucky school girl friend.  He has a big robot arm and a tormented past and he gets caught up having to deal with some guy called David doing all sorts of evil stuff from his base of operations on the moon.  Keep in mind though that this plot was written by non other than Suda51 of Killer7 fame and isn't scared to go right off the handle at basically any point during the game.

The gameplay revolves around hacking and slashing your way through levels of strange robot zombie things called Wires before eventually fighting one of the games strange and incredibly intresting boss characters.  On the way you'll find pickups to improve your weaponry, health and blood gauges that will help make the killing of extremely dangerous criminals a lot easier.

On top of all that there are a ton of side missions that involve all sorts of varied and interesting goals such as securing a bonsai tree or making laps of a Kyoto village while running over Wires.  If you need a break from the killing there are the games Gigolo Missions which involve hitting on attractive women and giving them presents so that their mutual feelings result in them giving you an upgrade of some description.  I could rant for an entire post about the press's reaction to Gigolo mode but instead of that I'll just say that the content off these missions has been grossly exagerated.

The graphics are also really slick with cool looking character models and interesting levels that are varied enough to stop you from being bored visually speaking.  The music is also pretty good and the game comes with both Japanese and English voice audio if you're the kind of person that wanted to hear the script delivered by the Japanese cast.  The English voice actors did a good job of delivering the lines though so it would be worth switching between the two for the full experience.

That said the game isn't perfect and the biggest thing they fucked up with this one was the difficulty.  Hard Mode was obviously designed to be played on a new game+ (assuming there is one) and playing it on your first time round can seem a little unmanageable at certain points, especially the side missions.  The problem with this is that normal mode is way too easy and I have no idea what the challenge is like on easy mode but judging from my current experience you could probably beat the game with one hand there.

The game also has a few bugs of which I shall share two stories with.  On one level, after performing a special kill on an enemy I just fell through the floor and had to restart the mission from a check point which was rather annoying because sometimes the checkpoints can put you quite a ways back.  On a side mission involving a gun turret one of my targets glitched behind a wall that I could not shoot through which resulted in me having to start the whole thing over from the beggining which pissed me off to no end.

Still, difficulty problems aren't game breaking as you can still enjoy the experience on any setting and game bugs are infrequent if a little annoying so Killer is Dead is still worth picking up and blasting through just for it's truly unique brand of Suda51 strangeness.

3D Dot Game Heroes

Right, less doom, gloom and controversy, let's talk about some fucking video games.

3D Dot Game Heroes was a 2009 PS3 game released in 2009 and developed by a bunch of people over at Silicon Studio.  The game is basically a Zelda clone through and through but it's one of those self aware comedy titles that has tons of personality and is an absolute blast to play.

The story follows the adventure of the hero of Dotnia as he must venture through the lands and collect 6 magic orbs to stop a bad guy from destroying the world.  The story is about as bare bones as it gets but it serves its purpose of pushing the player from one location to the next.  The game is full of funny bits of dialogue that won't have you laughing out loud but you'll find that you'll have a big stupid grin on your face the whole time.

From a gameplay standpoint it plays pretty much exactly like old school Zelda games.  If you have ever played Zelda or A Link to the Past then you pretty much know how this game works.  Sometimes I found the controls could be a little floaty and this would cause me to accidental fall down a pit and lose half a life point, but nothing game breaking or rage inducing. 

For a game about a world made of pixels it's actually really nice to look at.  There are nice water and particle effects as you explore and kill stuff, enemies will explode into piles of dots when you kill them and there are some really nice lighting effects as well.

The absolute best thing about this game though is the sheer amount of content you get, this game is massive and if you want to do the game 100% then you're looking at quite a lengthy play through.  Aside from the main quest there are tons of side quests, mini games and collectibles that will sap away the hours of your free time.  The game itself is quite challenging and if you plan to do all the extra stuff then don't think you'll have an easy time with the mini games just because they are a side objective.

On top of actual in game stuff, there is a character creator where you can build your own hero pixel and pixel and play with something truly unique.  If you're not into that or can't be bothered then there are pages of pre made characters for you to play with that can be changed at any time when you load a game.

So, if you have a PS3 and you have not played 3D Dot Game Heroes, go get it.  It's a fun, light hearted adventure with enough content to last you long enough to not buy anything for at least 4 or 5 days.

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.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

I don't know why I suddenly got this urge to play Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, but over the last few days I've managed to bash it out on hard mode, so now it's time to look back and reflect on the 2007 cover based shooter.

For anyone who's not played Uncharted, the game is basically about this snarky prick looking for a long lost treasure and on the way he has to gun down hoards of dudes.  Occasionally you'll have to perform some platforming but mainly this game is about gunning down dudes from behind cover.  The story is actually a lot more boring and uninteresting than I remembered it and just pulls this weird turn where at one point it becomes fucking zombie shooting game for like 4 chapters.

Anyway it may sound at this point like I don't like Uncharted, but you'd be wrong.  Uncharted: Drake's Fortune is actually a pretty fun game but it's not aged well.  Obviously, with Uncharted 2 and 3 making huge improvements on the gameplay it feels like a bit of a step back to play the first one now, but looking at it in 2013 really makes me wonder what all the fuss was about back then.

When I played it, I had just got a PS3 so it got a bit of a free ride since back in '07 this would have been the shit, but the controls can be a little wonky and the game I found was a little bit buggy.  I remember the first time I played it I jumped at a rock and the character entered a falling animation for about 5 minutes before just dying out of nowhere.  This time I had a couple of moments where I would just fall off things while platforming for no reason, which was a little annoying but due to generous check points it wasn't too annoying.

However this game committed a sin that I absolutely cannot forgive.  I've mentioned a few times that I like to play my games on the hardest possible setting and the hardest possible setting in Uncharted is called Crushing.  But I wasn't allowed to play it on Crushing because I didn't have a clear save due to my old fat PS3 that I originally beat the game on being fucking stolen last year.  I hate it when games just lock me out of modes like that for no reason, and I absolutely don't feel like playing it all the way through again now.

Anyway, Uncharted is still pretty fun to play now but if you really get an urge to play one of Nathan Drake's adventures, just play 2 or 3, you might ruin those early PS3 memories if you play the first one again now.

The Final Batch of Japanese Purchases (For Now)

OK! I have no idea what's going on but blogger won't let me embed my own videos anymore.

So I just made a little vlog about the last couple of games I bought in Japan before I am due to leave the country on tuesday, you can check it out at this link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln0cosxVXUM

Sorry that I can't embed them like I used to, but I'm sure that one extra click wont kill you.  Enjoy!

If I find a way to fix it, I'll go and fix it at a later date.

Let's Talk Sonic

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

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

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

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

1) Get rid of the fucking friends

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

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

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

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

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

Metal Gear Rising Revengeance

I already mentioned this once as the game that basically restored my love for gaming after 2012 ended up being so incredibly shitty, well now I'm going to gush about it!

So to start, I did a google search on the world revengeance, because I was convinced that was just made up to sound cool, but it is actually a thing, so straight off the bat I'm learning new things by playing this game.

Anyway, silly words aside, it's really quite hard to find a single word to describe Metal Gear Rising.  The best thing I can come up with is "Radical", but even then this games level of rad are so high that it doesn't really do it justice.

So I don't really know where to start with this "review", so lets start at the plot.  The game starts out with some group trying to destabilise stuff in order to cause war because war generates money for Private Military Corps and they like that.  Then it turns into a plot around child organ harvesting and shit gets really crazy from there.  But for the first time ever I didn't really give a flying fuck about the story in a Metal Gear game.  It's not bad by any stretch, but when there is all this high octane hacking and slashing going on, I just want to concentrate on that.

Which brings me to the game play, oh lord is it good.  The core game play revolves around hacking and slashing enemies until they die and if you have played anything like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, you can expect a combat system that's just as fun and rewarding.  The thing that everyone knows about though is the games "Blade Mode", where you are basically free to cut anything in any way and this is used to harvest spinal cords for healing yourself or killing big enemies.  This is also a really fun mechanic and doesn't interrupt the flow of game play.

Now for the blocking, because I've seen a lot of people complain about the blocking.  There is no dedicated block in Metal Gear Rising and instead we are given a parry which is performed by pressing forward towards an enemy and doing a light attack.  The parry comes in two flavors which is a standard parry which prevents damage, and a perfect parry which prevents damage and counters.  I saw a lot of people saying things like "it's not well explained" or "it's too hard to perform".  Please ignore these people because they are just bad at the game since the window for just pulling off basic blocks is huge and the game explains the controls behind a parry right away in a VR mission AND gives you plenty of time to practice.

Anyway, for all my griping about people slagging off the parry system, I'm not saying this game is perfect.  The final few chapters feel a little bit rushed and have very little length and it's a bit of a shame the second half of the game wasn't a little more fleshed out.  Also there are some quick time events and while they aren't too bad I'd still prefer it if they weren't there.  Also the stealth segments of the game are fucking crap and while they aren't mandatory it feels that they were shoehorned in there just because it's a Metal Gear game. They are incredibly out of place when just slicing up dudes is just as, if not more effective than sneaking.

Finally the length, I'll admit it is a little on the short side with my total playtime being six and a half hours on hard mode, but that's not counting cut scene time and I'm pretty sure failed attempts aren't included in the total time either.  That said the game is full of replay value, because my six and a half hours of playtime were filled with pretty crap grades, so I want to go back and improve my skills.  On top of that, beating the game unlocks another difficulty and doing it again unlocks an even harder one.  On top of THAT there are 20 VR Missions which task you with killing dudes as fast as you can for a big gold star.  Finally on top of THAT there are 20 collectable thingies to get throughout the game which only give stupid shit like concept art but are hard to find and for a completionist like myself, add some more replay value to the game.

So the TL;DR version of this entire post is, game is awesome go play it!  If you're a fan of action games like this who were left wanting after DmC, this will perk you right up.  If you aren't a fan, go play it anyway and you will be soon enough.

My Faith is Being Restored!

I'm not going to lie to you here, 2012 was a shitty year for gaming, a REALLY shitty year.

There were a few good releases but generally speaking it was full to bursting of disappointment, shit games and stuff being ruined by idiots.  It got to the point where I was moaning and griping about so much stuff that a good portion of my friends started saying stuff like "maybe you just hate video games now" and other such crap.

Deep down I was sort of worried that was true as well, all I was ever really doing was complaining, but then a couple of days ago it happened....

...I started playing Metal Gear Rising.

Holy shit I've not had this much fun with a video game for a long LONG fucking time.  I shall "review" it properly at a later date but the long and short of it is that so far, I've been having so much fun with it that any problems I do have with it I am able to completely ignore.  At least for now.

Also if you look back through the recent posts there have been quite a few "holy shit check this upcoming game out!" posts, so all in all I think the video games are about ready to stop sucking and making me upset and start delivering on the fun again.

It's a shame that there are still so many companies treating people like dicks though....but one step at a time.