Reminder: DPD Are An Awful Company

This afternoon I was browsing the "memories" section of my Facebook account and apparently, 6 years ago today is the day I discovered that most of my gaming collection from the UK was stolen!  I've blogged about what happened in the past but I'm going to jump at any chance I can get to bash the company that stole all my shit.

I remember it clearly, I had just finished my course at university and I was gearing up not only to leave Uni but also the country.  My family had moved from England to Sweden and I was moving from England to Japan.  I had such a large collection of games at the time that there was NO WAY I was going to lug all of my shit to Japan so I decided to send it to the family home instead and have it sit there.  I only took my PS3 collection and my portables since those are region free/small and the rest I loaded into boxes and gave to a courier service to deliver.

So some time past and I get messages from my mother saying that the boxes arrived to the family home but they weren't the boxes I sent.  Instead of games my mother received boxes of Jay-Z albums and Bill Clinton bobble head dolls or something.  I was mad, my mother was mad, everyone was mad, so of course we call up the piece of shit courier service that we used called DPD.  According to them and the tracker, the boxes were at some warehouse in Germany.  Why the ended up there I have no idea but for some reason they "couldn't be sent" and shortly after that they were just "lost".  Now I'm not an idiot, I know full well that at some point on my collections journey, some fuck face must have cracked open those boxes, saw all the games and decided to help himself.  Here's a list of what was stolen

All my PS2 games (nearly 100)
All my Wii games (about 50?)
All my Xbox 360 games (about 70)
A random assortment of PS1 games (a decent 20 or so)

The company is pretty adamant that no one stole my shit and paid me £600 in compensation.  If my shit wasn't stolen then why pay me any compensation? Also £600 to replace ALL THAT SHIT, good fuckin' luck.  Luckily thanks to Steam and the abundant game stores offering old stuff for cheap I've been able now to replace a good chunk of it but I'll never forgive the gigantic sacks of shit at DPD for stealing my shit in the first place.

The moral of the story is don't EVER use DPD for ANYTHING.  If you are planning to send something and you're thinking of using DPD to deliver, DO NOT.  You'd be better trusting Garett to run your shit to the location, a literal member of a thieves guild, than having DPD even go near one of your boxes of stuff.  We're all going to lose games at some point, maybe by stealing or by wear and tear but to lose so many all at once still hurts 6 years down the line.

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.

Dead Island: Are You Serious?

Two posts in one day isn't usually my thing, I'm too lazy for that, but this just took the biscuit.

What you are looking at in the above image is the Dead Island Special Edition package, which comes with a model of a bikini-clad dead woman's fucking torso.  I mean seriously, what the fuck is wrong with the people who produced this, and is there seriously people who look at that and go "yeah, I want THAT on my desk"?

You know, I'm not getting on this things case because I'm offended or anything like that, it takes way more than a dead woman's torso to offend me, but this is just stupid.  I mean, what do you usually think of when you get cool models in special editions?  A character, a monster, an iconic item from the game or SOMETHING like that.  I mean hell, if you wanted to go for sex appeal you could have had a sexy bikini woman smashing a zombies face in or something, but you went for THIS?!

With this, not only are you loading the gun of every anti-game person on the face of the earth right now, but in the future, when there's another bit of gaming controversy, people are going to point to shit like this to "prove" the fact that people who play video games are "disturbed" or some shit.  Plus if people see shit like this, and then you tell them later that you enjoy a bit of video games now and again, they are going to feel something negative towards you because THIS is the kind of shit you're associated with, and it doesn't matter if you even like Dead Island or not.

There is drumming up controversy for publicity, and then there is just retardation, guess which this one is?

A dark day for my game collection

Well, I was gonna use this space to write about Castlevania 3, but the most insane, idiotic thing has happened and it feels like it would be a crime not to rant about it.

Basically, at the end of May I moved to Japan, and previous to this my family moved to Sweden.  While all this shit was going on, I was attending university in a city called Preston and I couldn't exactly cart 5 consoles and all those games to Japan with me, so I sent them to my new home in Sweden. 

Anyway, I fuck off to Japan and I'm having a grand old time when I hear there are some problems and the boxes are being thrown back and forth between Preston and Germany like some kind of shitty fucking tennis match and eventually I just give up paying attention to the situation and bank on them arriving eventually.  I mean after all, even if they arrive I can't use them for a year at least, so no point worry about it, as long as they get there right?

FUCKING. WRONG!  So today, a single box arrives in Sweden filled with SOME of my stuff.  The majority of my rarer PS1 and Gamecube titles are intact but the consoles, and 4 sleeves worth of Xbox360, PS2 and Wii games are still not accounted for at the moment.  In place of my consoles and a shitton of games, I got a metric crapton of cutlery and dolls of Bill fucking Clinton.

I mean seriously, what the fuck, how do you fuck this up so bad?  I give the company NOTHING but video games, and they some how mix it in with fucking Bill sodding Clinton dolls?!  Oh yeah, and on top of that there is an assortment of Jay-Z CD's and some other artists that I've never heard of and are probably wank.

Now while writing this post, I got an update saying there are 2 boxes just milling about in a German depot somewhere that need to be delivered, so hopefully they contain all the shit, or at the very least the 100+ titles in those sleeves.

Tomorrow, I'll get back to the gaming and not post personal rants on how my shit that I can't use or talk about on here has gone missing, but this story is so stupid it needs to be told.

Asura's Wrath and Movie Games

So a while ago before I came out to Japan I played through a game on the Xbox 360 called Asura's Wrath.  I'm not exactly going to "review" the whole thing here, but it was a strange little game as there was very little actual game to be had in Asura's Wrath.  The whole game is a series of quick time events and little beat em up segments that are piss easy and require no real effort or strategy on your part even on hard mode.

Despite all that though, I quite enjoyed Asura's Wrath, it was cinematic and the story was interesting and watching a very angry man punch a God the size of earth in the face was quite entertaining, I'll do a full review thingy later.

Anyway, the thought I had about this game, was that maybe, the guys over at Capcom have discovered a way to make movie games good.  You see, for those of you who may not be aware, 99% games based on movies are fantastically bad and equate to nothing but cheap cash ins from developers and no one is happy with this crap.  You go and see a movie, probably a marvel superhero movie or whatever, and then you see the game and if you're really stupid you go and drop money on the game and shortly after you pop it in your machine you want to kill yourself in some kind of extremely painful way for falling for that crap.

lol movie games

By the way, I didn't buy Thor, but it was the worst recent movie game I could think of.

Anyway, what I thought when playing Asura's Wrath was, that what if you make all movie games like this one?!  For example, take the  Iron Man games, right now, they suck massive sweaty balls, but if you turned it into an Asura's Wrath clone, it would actually be pretty good, or at least playable.  On top of that, recreating scenes from the movies (what most people who buy these games actually want) would be really easy.


So in short, since Asura's Wrath feels more like a movie than a game, the best way to make passable movie games would be to just remake the movie but add timed button presses.  Asura's Wrath was never a movie to start with, which is what kept it interesting, so these games would still be arsebags, but I bet people would feel a little less ripped off if they were made this way as apposed to a buggy rushed mess.