Best of 2005, GOTY

Best of 2005 #8: Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

Leave a comment

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow

When the 2D Castlevanias achieve near unanimous rave reviews it’s a wonder that they keep pursuing that losing battle of trying to make a decent 3D iteration of the series, and this keeps up the trend by being probably the best new entry to the series since Symphony of the Night on the PS1.

Konami deserve credit for just picking up from their good work on the excellent GBA Castlevanias (they even carry on with the new protagonist, Soma Cruz, introduced in Aria of Sorrow) and, on the whole, resisting the urge to shoehorn in functionality based on the unique functionality of the DS. There are some touch screen functions that work like the breakable blocks and some that don’t like the annoying seal-drawing to deliver the final blow to bosses, but most of the additions use the extra power to make some cool cosmetic touches and, naturally, some bigger and more impressive enemies.

Castlevania games are reliable for being lengthy and addictive action adventures, and this is one of the best in a long time. It therefore happily sits in my best of the year.

General

I Love DVD Sales

Leave a comment

Christmas isn’t even here yet, but at work we’re stocking up for the post-Christmas sales already, and I can’t think of a better time to stock up on DVDs that you might have missed during the year or some older ones needed to round out your collection.

Can anyone argue with Sideways for £5.99, and Team America and Anchorman for £3.99 each? I grabbed those and also saw Friday Night Lights (five stars from Empire, and only released in September) for £5.99 and Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy for £8.99. I definitely recommend hitting the shops as soon as possible before all the good ones sell out – all our copies of Team America had already been nabbed for that price.

General

Ban This Filth

Leave a comment

This made me laugh so I thought it needed to be blogged – I was doing my daily check of Mail Watch (Christians are oppressed and discriminated against in all provincial councils, didn’t you know?) and saw that an enterprising fellow hater of the right-wing press has come up with Daily Mail-o-Matic, a program to automatically generate Daily Mail headlines. It kept me entertained for a few minutes so try it out.

For those of you who might not be familiar with the Mail, I suggest you begin your research by looking at this and checking one of my older rants on it here.

Best of 2005, GOTY

Best of 2005 #9: Call of Duty 2

Leave a comment

Call of Duty 2

Despite what I said about WW2 FPS, when they’re done right they can be very, very good, and Call of Duty 2 is certainly done right. The marketing for the original told us that no man won the war alone, and this follows the same credo but with the added horsepower of more modern PCs and the Xbox 360 to enhance the atmosphere. In a game that was all about chaos going on around you that made all the difference, and I think that overall this is the better game because of that.

What I thought were the biggest flaws of the first game – namely that the British campaign was quite poor and that you had to get through the rest of the game to get to the best part, the Russian campaign – have been solved. The Russian campaign now comes first and the other two have been improved, giving them much the same gameplay but with enough changes to atmosphere and setting to make them distinctly enjoyable. The same mix of objectives that range from demolitions to sniping are here, but the aforementioned added power means that you’re now demolishing massive buildings and making your last stand against whole platoons. Only the end, which goes out with a splutter instead of a bang, let the action down for me.

Even in the series’ first wholesale conversion to consoles (previously consoles have received their own, markedly inferior, games) nothing was lost besides the cut-down multiplayer. The graphics run smoother than all but the most monstrous of PCs with their equally monstrous price tags, and even the controller wasn’t a hindrance. That made it my favourite game on the Xbox 360 so far, and my ninth favourite of the year.

General

Canadian DVDs Suck

Leave a comment

As I’m sure many of the UK residents who have ordered region 1 DVDs from PlayUSA have found out, for some time now they’ve only stocked Canadian DVDs. You’d imagine that there wouldn’t be any difference, but because of laws giving the English and French languages equal rights it means that many of them have French titles and synopses plastered over them, ruining the cover art.

I’ve never been too bothered because they just have to sit on my shelf (although a reversible cover that was completely English on one side and completely French on the other would seem like a simple solution), but now that I’ve seen first-hand that they drop features from the DVDs to make room for the French language I’m hunting for a source that sells US R1 DVDs.

It all happened when I decided that as I didn’t have Sin City in my collection I needed the new Sin City: Recut and Extended package. I ordered it from Play for the great price of £17.99 and sat back and waited for it to arrive. Then, as I was waiting, I was browsing IGN’s DVD General Board and saw a topic entitled “Canadian version of Sin City recut replaces DTS with french 5.1 track???” (requires IGN Insider), containing the following post:

It’s true… no DTS track. Not a *huge* deal for me, but CURSE YOU UNE HISTOIRE DE SIN CITY – VERSION LONGUE ET NOUVEAU MONTAGE!!!

It’s not a huge deal for me neither (my current 5.1 system can’t even handle DTS) but when I buy a DVD I want all of the features, and now I have to go to the trouble of sending this one back and getting a refund and find somewhere else to buy it.

My problem is the principle of it – I have foreign language DVDs and most of them have the original language in Dolby Digital 5.1 and/or DTS and, if they even include a dub, English in 2.0. Why then do English-language movies have versions of the original language dropped to include a 5.1 French track? Can’t they cram in a French 2.0 track and leave the original languages intact, or even just add French subtitles? I know plenty of film buffs who wouldn’t dream of watching a dubbed movie so are French people philistines or something? In my experience definitely not – they have more appreciation for art than most.

This has really annoyed me and I’m not risking Canadian DVDs again. From now on I’m going to have to risk customs charges through DVD Pacific or hope that a UK retailer like DVD Concept are selling the unbastardised version.

Best of 2005, GOTY

Best of 2005 #10: Battlefield 2

Leave a comment

Battlefield 2

Admittedly I have no basis for comparison, but I’d imagine that no game makes you feel like a soldier the way that Battlefield 2 does. For all it’s flaws, of which many are fixable and should have been fixed by now (this is a Battlefield game so I don’t know what I expected), few games have ever immersed me as much as this. Team-based multiplayer FPS always do well with me, but this one just took the idea and ran with it, and thankfully didn’t make it yet another WW2 FPS.

The basic game mechanics are essentially the same as in BF1942 and Vietnam in a modern setting, but thanks to vastly improved infantry combat, an overall balance to the weapons, and a focus on urban warfare I loved this game and really wish for the next one they’d actually finish it before release. The lack of patch support for the bugs is the main reason why this didn’t place higher.

Most games make the single player the focus of their gameplay and generally that’s the best idea, but with BF2 I can think of few gaming experiences more satisfying than joining up to a 32-man army and moving, street by street, into an enemy city, with teamwork and the use of all your combined talents and different weapons as the best way to success. A heavy weapons guy keeps the enemy armour occupied while the machine gunners pin down the infantry so that your own infantry can outflank them and capture their base: there are so many possibilities to how each game plays out. and it makes the list in spite of the problems simply because the core gameplay is so well done.