Category Archives: Sega

Games, Movies & TV, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

This is Getting Silly

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I make no bones about how annoying I find the tendency of the games industry to pile all their big releases into the Christmas period and leave an incredibly lean summer. I understand why they do it but for those of us to whom picking up the latest releases is an obsession – part of the growing Xbox Live mentality where you have to play what all your friends are, I suppose – it’s tantamount to torture.

I went through various release lists and worked out all the games and hardware that I intend to buy before the end of the year. Take a look:

October

  • Contact (US DS)
  • Final Fantasy XII (US PS2)
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (US PSP)
  • Power Stone Collection (US PSP)
  • Pro Evolution Soccer 6 (UK 360)
  • Splinter Cell: Double Agent (UK 360)
  • Tony Hawk’s Project 8 (UK 360)

November

  • Call of Duty 3 (UK 360)
  • Elite Beat Agents (US DS)
  • F.E.A.R. (UK 360)
  • Guitar Hero II (US PS2)
  • Football Manager 2007 (Mac)
  • Final Fantasy III (US DS)
  • Final Fantasy V Advance (US GBA)
  • Gears of War (UK 360)
  • HD DVD drive (UK 360)
  • Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (US Wii)
  • Lumines II (US PSP)
  • Rainbow Six Vegas (UK 360)
  • Wii (US)
  • World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (Mac)
  • Yoshi’s Island 2 (US DS)

December

  • Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin (US DS)

Throw in a few HD DVDs and all the summer movies that are hitting DVD and you have some serious wallet rape going on here. The average person isn’t going to be able to afford to spend a tenth of that on games alone so surely this practice of all saturating the market at the same time can’t be beneficial.

I’ll bet that there’s more than a couple of European gamers out there who are silently thankful that the PS3 was delayed.

Games, Impressions, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

O Sega, Where Art Thou?

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So I downloaded the Sonic The Hedgehog demo on Xbox Live…

Jesus fucking Christ. This just sums up everything that’s happened to Sega over the last few years. The trailblazing company that brought us so many great and innovative titles on the Saturn and Dreamcast just seems to have rotted away, leaving a festering carcass that just churns out complete pap.

The anticipation that I used to feel for a new Sega game is replaced by a creeping dread that somehow they’ll have fucked up the unfuckupable like Phantasy Star Universe. Even Sonic for that matter should be easy – run really fast through some pretty landscapes and that’s it. No digging for emeralds, no dark emo hedgehogs, no vehicles, and certainly no cats fishing for their frogs.

If you haven’t played the Sonic demo, it’s rubbish. Complete pish. For a start Sonic isn’t fast, which is like making a Zelda game where Link doesn’t have uncomfortably effeminate personality traits. The camera is so slow that it has to be a joke (maybe the whole game is a joke). You spend more time watching Sonic fall to his death than actually doing anything that resembles gameplay. Twitchy controls, slowdown, and it looks like Sonic Adventure 2 in 720p. Just wrong, and that’s even without Shadow in it. What the hell is Sonic without a sense of speed?

This isn’t the Sega that could do no wrong. Only a few years ago they gave us Shenmue, two pretty competent 3D Sonics, Phantasy Star Online, Jet Set Radio, Skies of Arcadia, Crazy Taxi, F355 Challenge; the only recent Sega game that I’ve enjoyed can’t be described without the word ‘flawed’ in there. They didn’t put out rubbish like this on Dreamcast or even in the early days of their multiplatform life: Jet Set Radio Future and Panzer Dragoon Orta were as good as anything they’ve done. Sonic Heroes wasn’t.

So what’s happened to them? Is the current Sega an evil imposter or something?

Games, Impressions, PlayStation, Sega

Sleeping With The Fugu

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Yakuza

It’s not Shenmue, but Yakuza is somewhere in the vicinity. It’s a bit of a unique beast, mixing elements from Yu Suzuki’s great classic, the ubiquitous GTA, and even parts from Sega’s Streets of Rage. Probably the main thing that it’s inherited is that it’s a very flawed game and has a shitty dub (though not quite that shitty), but still manages to stay enjoyable.

Still, it’s good to have a crime game that isn’t played out entirely in Ebonics. It would have been nice if it was in Japanese being that it’s in Japan and I doubt many Yakuza bosses sound like Michael Madsen and are unable to get through a sentence without saying “motherfucker” (yes, too much swearing can get annoying and lose its potency). In all fairness it’s worlds better than the dub in Shenmue – these people can act and it doesn’t sound like it was recorded in a broom cupboard – but this isn’t GD-ROM anymore: can’t they have put the Japanese dub on there as well?

In any case, while this isn’t going to attain classic status it’s a pretty good game nonetheless. I played a couple of hours this afternoon and found myself enjoying it, and my only complaint was that the names that are thrown at you in the first few hours can get overwhelming and difficult to follow, especially when some aren’t seen in person while still requiring you to keep track of them. The loading times are also a slight annoyance as you get a good few seconds before every fight, and fighting tends to happen a lot.

The combat system is nice and brutal, with plenty of weapons to grab and a growing library of suitably brutal moves. Finishing someone off by smashing their head into a wall is oddly therapeutic. A couple of hours into the game you’ll have to fight your way out of a hostile area and I thoroughly enjoyed it, with enemies surrounding you and affording you the opportunity to knock groups of them flying with a weapon. Or one of them if you can grab them.

So my first impressions are that while this isn’t a classic, it’s still an enjoyable game and worth a look. If I finish it you can probably expect a review.

Games, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

So Long, E3

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So fresh off one of the biggest and certainly most controversial E3s in recent memory we find out that it’s going to be the last. It’s certainly going to change the dynamics of the average year in this industry but now how are games journalists supposed to get an annual free holiday to California?

Honestly, they might as well not bother putting on a show now. Publishers hold their own little events all year round (EA and Ubisoft have had them in the last month, for example) so nothing will change there, and since the huge events are incredibly popular it’s tempting to speculate that this is only going to make the venerable Tokyo Game Show and neophyte Leipzig Games Convention even bigger. Tempting in that it’s easier for me to get to Germany and preferable for me to go to Japan than Los Angeles.

But now how are fanboys going to endlessly debate who “won” E3? How are we going to see Peter Moore’s tattoos and Kaz Hirai’s hyperbole in the same place? What else do kids who run fan sites have to blag their way into? Where can shitty doomed peripherals go without Kentia Hall? And now there’s one less career path for jobbing “actresses” who are willing to drape themselves over cars and guns while overweight men in shorts have their photos taken with them.

And I’m not at all bitter that I’ve never been and now never will…

Completely off-topic I know, but I’ve also written a review of New Super Mario Bros. for the DS which can be found here and on the review index. Take a look.

Games, Life, Nintendo, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

Nothing To Post About…

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My hatred of the summer is reaching fever pitch what with the influx of tourists down here and weather than ranges from tropical heat to tropical storm (last Saturday was nuts), but also because there’s nothing to play. There are a few games out in August but I’m going all antipodean for most of that month and then, as I complain about every…single…year there’s a torrent of games due towards the end of the year. It’s even worse when there are two new consoles out and another just hitting its stride.

So in the meantime I’ve been playing some older stuff that I’ve either not played for a while or never got around to finishing. My Dreamcast has been restored to my desk (it’s gone all yellow like an old SNES which is annoying) and I’ve been hammering on Shenmue, Jet Set Radio, Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, and Marvel vs Capcom 2. Still an amazing system.

I bought LocoRoco after I liked the demo but have been fairly disappointed in it because it gets very repetitive and isn’t exactly challenging. On the PS2 I’m still enjoying SFA Anthology and I’ve got preview code of King of Fighters 2006 which is OK as far as 3D fighting adaptations go. Call of Duty 2 and Battlefield 2 multiplayer are where I’m at on the 360.

The Game Boy Micro has been getting a lot of playtime over the last few days, especially when it comes to the SNES ports – I finally finished Zelda: Link to the Past (only took me 15 years) and now I’m working on completing Super Mario World. Final Fantasy IV is on the to-do list.

So I guess I should be thankful that I buy far too many games to actually play properly. It makes these long summer days easier to bear.

In other news I passed my second year of uni! Now only another year before I can get a real job! Yay!

Editorials, Games, Impressions, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Sega, Xbox

E3 Thoughts

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Nothing mind-blowing from any of the big three, then. Some impressive stuff, to be sure, and some things better than others, but no clear advantages for this console war. My biggest thought so far has been “OMG!”:

Halo 3's Ark...or is it?

This is probably going to be a long post…

First the conferences. I stayed up late to watch the Sony one live and, like most people seemed to, came away disappointed after all the hyperbole. Only three games really struck me – Final Fantasy XIII, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Virtua Fighter 5 – and the rest seemed spectacularly unspectacular. Tekken 6 didn’t even look as good as DOA4, and Resistance looked like a browner Call of Duty, for example. I was impressed with the very cool Eye of Judgement demo and the aforementioned three games, but then…$600. It’s not even a generation ahead of the 360 but is $200 more? No thanks.

There is a $500 unit, but who wants that? You lose the HDMI (so none of the advertised 1080p, ever), memory card slots, and wi-fi. At least if you buy a Core 360 you can buy the things to take it up to the premium one at a later date, but with the PS3 you’re stuck with the crippled one. I’m not going to get started on the “amazing innovation” (their words) of the motion sensitive controller but suffice to say that Nintendo must have been pissed.

What made me laugh was listening to Radio 1 the next day which is usually the home of PlayStation fanboy chavs and the opinions that were called in were universally negative. They even said that the consensus seemed to be that they’d “copied Microsoft and Nintendo and slapped a massive price tag on it.” Continue reading E3 Thoughts →