Podcast 4 Blogpost!

Hey, watch out behind you!  There is a vicious Good or Blog Amazing Fantastic Audio Program waiting to pounce!

Artist's rendition.

Episode 4 is here, and the critic agrees that it sure is sequential sounds arranged in what some may call "a fashion of sorts."  Using various rhetorical techniques such as "themes," we have lovingly crafted a podcast with some semblance of topic flow!  A startling departure from our regular MO. In this pile of verbal discharge, we discuss how we feel about things and stuff.  List of things and stuff: E3, disappointing games, surprisingly good games.

Segment 1 - Did you know that E3 just happened?  Because I didn't!  But listen as we all of us discuss waggle sticks and sequels.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7VOF7TUD

Segment 2 - Good games that weren't good, and the people who play them.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ODNF60Q6

Segment 3 - In which we regale our pirate-esque metaphorical treasure discovery.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=44HVHB7Y

Segment 4 - This segment is not yet available in your area.  But it's totally about music and how awesome it is.

Rapid Fire Review Round Up

Rapid Fire Review Round Up
Okay so Henry has been writing a bunch of reviews and making everyone else look bad. So in the spirit of camaraderie (and making him shut up) I decided to do a couple quick reviews of the last games I played.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare for the XBOX 360

They're pretty important.

Okay, I might be a little behind on this one, but better late than never, right? It's easy to see why this game has earned so much praise (and a well-deserved sequel). If it weren't for the amount of times I died or lost I would hesitate to even call it a game. It's more like an experience, some kind of summer blockbuster action movie where it just so happens that you have all the leading roles. It has all the twists and turns of a good popcorn flick without sacrificing the depth. The game takes its time with its, frankly amazing, roller coaster ride. But the truly amazing part is how it manages all this just beneath a crisp and skillful FPS.
But easily the best parts of the game are when it slows down. The air support section could easily be mistaken for one of those military videos that leak on the internet showing real people get really killed. It's shocking really, how the most removed section of the game is the most startling. Then there's the sniping section, the stealth, the infamous nuke scene... it's all just compelling gameplay linking to excellent set piece scenarios to reward your slog through scores of troops.
My few qualms with the game come from some wonky close quarters stuff (why would you put back the knife if there's another guy right over there?) and the fact that by the end of the game, every motherfucker in the Red Army has an RPG with them. Still, it isn't enough to upset the delicate crystal clear excellence the game has formed, or to take it's rightfully earned 1 out of 1.


PathPix from the Apple App Store

Not as complicated as it looks.

I will go out on a limb and call this the best puzzle game the App Store has to offer. Nay, this is the best game the App Store has to offer. Fuck Plants vs. Zombies and it's Hipster Bullshit. For 2 bucks you get 169 nifty little colored logic puzzles that form a neat little pixelized image paired with a quote. And the higher level images are pretty well made.
The rules are easy enough to understand. If you've played sudoku or picross, any of those other cute number games for white people, this will all come easy enough. Just link pairs of colored numbers with a line that occupies the number of squares indicated by the number. The logic flows naturally from this and it just becomes second nature. I've even solved multiple puzzles in the midst of conversations with real people. Bottom line, this application is just a great way to sink some time.
Now, I tried not to over-analyze this one, but there's just so much time to think when doing some of the easier puzzles, and I've concluded that PathPix is actually a carefully laid out statement on Autotheism. That, or bears.

Lots and lots of bears.

1 out of 1.

 Click for Final Fantasy 12, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and more!

Contra - Hard Corps

 

             

    First of all may I point out the three gleaming guns, or the fact that the laser rifle is being held by a mini combat robot. How about the jean wearing, wraparound sunglasses adorned, arm cannon wielding wolf man. Well yes, you get to play as any one of them, and even partner up with another member for tag team annihilation. Who wouldn't want to be part of this Hard Corps team in this first non-Nintendo iteration of Contra with a lineup like that?

    Contra has always been a "man's" game full of nonsensical action, explosions, guns, aliens, and more guns and this is by far no different, but not the slightest bit held back by its reputation. It has the guns, and explosions, and my word, the amounts of explosions... and guns! Each character has their own set of weapons they prefer to choose. Ray (The Ranger Joe Bro Dude) just starts with a laser gun, and upgrades to missiles, the all powerful spread gun, and more missiles. Sheena (the only woman in the game) just loves machine guns, grenade launchers, death ray lasers, and homing shotgun spread lasers. Then that cute little robot named Browny just has a machine laser rifle, boomerang grenades, an energy electrocuting yo-yo, and a shield bubble making missile energy laser rifle thing.  Also he can fly. Not forgetting  Fang (The Wolf Man) who has bionic arms that transform into fireball machine guns, flame punches,  a flamethrower, and energy blasting punches that take out bosses in two hits. You can see why everything ends up exploding in this game already. Seeing that I had a choice between those four I quickly went for the one who forwent guns for flame and punches with nothing but jeans, a bandolier of bombs, and undeniably slick set of sunglasses.

Best decision ever.

    True to its franchise name, the game opened up with a van barreling through the streets exploding on its way. Those explosions never once stopped until the credits rolled or a stage clear screen was seen. Shoot first, explode second, no questions taken. The story was the one they are all about. Aliens were here, the last Contra man blew them all up several times over 5 years past, and now another evil doer wants to resurrect the aliens yet again. I guess they just want to be punched to death don't they? Point made short, the story is set in concrete, it's short, simple, and so very sweet for you to take your desired choice of destruction on its path. It creates a line for you to have fun with. It isn't some over dramatized soap opera with intricate stories and emotions galore. 'Here is some bad guys, here is their plan, it involves aliens; let's go kill them.' Seriously, you are briefed by some ex marine commander in four or five lines three times in the entire game taking a grand total of 39 seconds to watch it all. That's all I ever wanted, and the player does exactly that: kill everything, or die; never a second thought. So just as the story does, straight into game play.

    Holding down the fire button and bum rushing through the streets I found myself plowing throw a city of soldiers and odd robot contraptions, riding on a jet bike on the highway, running on said highway by foot room a madman in a mech suit with spiked mace balls for arms, fighting my way through a research lab of alien doom, to a junkyard taken straight out of Swat Kats fending off rouge bikers. I even found myself in the amazons literally, so true to every sense of the word, blasting back hundreds - hundreds! - of mutant imp jungle men in a wall of fiery death with my punching flames, before running into a waterfall alien and then being saved by a dinosaur. I soon ran into the man villain after beating the recurring arch nemesis at the entrance to his lair of doom. That villain wore a black cape and fly on a hover disk. So badly I needed to punch him. Then I carried on through a death pit arena of aliens, a runaway train with a robot that tries to stop it, a secret alien breeding center, riding the waves of the sea, taking a space elevator to a space station, hanging from a helicopter fighting skull plane bombers and long-shoting ninjas, to riding rockets to stop a ICBM in mid flight literally - again in every sense - filled with aliens. With all that wonderful excitement of manly brutality, I realized this game had choices you could make at various points that led to one of six endings. Six whole endings making this highly repayable as the endings are customized to the character you played as. At one point I even had the choice to join the villain in his global domination.              I even married a monkey.

You didn't think I was exaggerating were you? Also, note explosion.

    The mechanics of the game was the same as most Contra games. You had no health, just a number of lives to spare and a continue. The score was hidden off game as to not distract from your intense desire to murder everything on screen. Second player could easily sit down mid play and press start to just jump in and add to the chaos. It did however expand on a few aspects such as the ability to collect all the weapons and switch at your disposal rather than tactically choosing which weapon to replace each time you came across a weapon drop adding to the fun rather than the struggle to find that spread gun item without dying. You still lost the said weapon equipped at the moment of death. Though perhaps the best addition was the slide ability. At any moment you can slide kick into your enemies and avoid utter danger that otherwise you could not come out alive adding the intensity of the game. The actual design of the game shifted away from the level gauntlets of endless enemies and focused more on the massive amount of bosses and sub bosses each very fun to play and all very unique. At one point you are chased by a robot monstrosity in a hall, but soon you find yourself chasing it as it tries to scramble its scrap hulk away.

    This game was made in the generation known for the golden age of 2D gaming and this is a prime example. The game is just crammed full of small details you won't notice even after a few play-throughs and just looks amazing, despite being  16 years old; and it continues to age exceptionally well. The  controls are superb as well: a shoot button, D-pad, and a jump button; all you need. Except for the extremely surprising feature to switch in mid game between run-and-gun style and shoot-and-aim-while-standing. While holding the fire button down, all you have to do it hit the button next to it and you toggle control style to one where you can aim in a direction without having to move as well; absolutely perfect for all the boss fights. The game is just so well constructed, you question nothing, and do everything it wants you to, and you just like it. It's just good.

    With a very very stark contrast from my last review, we have a game here that gives the bare essentials of a story, short and solid. An extremely intense action packed, fun game full of surprises and extremely well made design. Quite the opposite of Kingsley's Adventure, but still amazingly fun. The one similarity both share is their love at what they do. If you love guns and shooting  aliens while atop helicopters with not a single tacked on thing such as a romance story or quirky mini games, then this game is your dreams. It does what it was meant to do, nothing more, and all utterly perfect.

---

    What more can I say about this game? One out of one.

 

Godspeed Contra.

Strange Journey Review - 1/1

Maturity is a strange beast. I often struggle with the concept of maturity when I'm writing reviews for video games, editing a podcast about video games, buying video games, and even playing video games. It strikes me as a little juvenile to have so much of my life revolve around a hobby that amounts to jostling plastic to manipulate electronic personae. But at the same time, it's a hobby that's important to me and hey, everyone needs a hobby, and also it's better than most of the shit that's on TV these days. Still, I'm offered a bit of comfort by the extensive community my hobby shares, as well as the video games I like to think of as “mature”, a list of which includes the likes of the Silent Hill series, Kane & Lynch, Gears of War, them Ico games, etc.
The unifying element of those titles, I've begun to notice, is a pervading sense of loss. I felt like, growing up, these games embodied something I thought was going to become more and more a part of my life. But something about Strange Journey, a video game on the Nintendo DS, lead me to conclude that maturity and being mature aren't what I thought they were.
Strange Journey is another one of those games I was so ready to like. I forget where I first heard about it, but I remember seeing the Japanese cover and hearing that the English title would be Strange Journey.

That robot just gave me a boner.

Kingsley's Adventure

    As the cover implies, you are a fox named Kingsley, and you have an adventure to do: namely, saving the fruit kingdom from a very bad cook. Before you go on thinking this game is all sorts of fruity, look at the castle on the right side. It is made of carrots. So this game is fruits and vegetables, exactly what any young aspiring gamer should eat as part of a nutritious diet, even if you are a fox with a very smug set of eyebrows.
    I came across this title on the mud pile that is /v/ under a thread entitled "Games only you played." I saw this and wondered; I'm fairly sure whoever posted this is the only person who played it. Well I intended to change that. I got my hands on this and started it up, soon to realize that this was not a very high inspiring game, it was very clear the developers understood they would not be immortalized in history for the glory that is this game. Yet that is a good thing, as through every moment I could feel that this game was made to be played, not merely to be sold.
    The game itself is very much so like any 3D Legend of Zelda, with it's dungeons, and puzzles, and swords of adventure. At the same time, it is nothing like Zelda in which this game comfortably lives within it's boundaries. It does nothing new, and it very well accepts it's technical limitations without question. It does so with dignity though, which is more than many games can claim.

There are mountains behind that shack.

    As you can see on the left we see a deformed figure in the distant blue horizon by the sea, yet as we approach said denizen of this beach, we soon come to see beyond our initial 20 foot vision (I counted actual footsteps) a pier with a shack was right behind him. Clearly (or not so as it was hard to see at first) this game suffers from a horrendous lack of draw distance. So bad, that during every boss fight, they sit well beyond your sphere of vision firing magic missile at your tail. Even so, it was quickly overlooked for the charms that I could see within my vision sphere.

Is that not the most adorable spider that still wants to kill you?

    Seriously, look at that spider with his crazy Nicholas Cage smile. Don't you just was to kick it's face? Well you do, as that is the default attack when dealing with them: kicking them clear across the room.
    The hub world consists of the Carrot Castle which you happen to live in as an orphan (every game needs a hero with no parents: see FF3, FF8, Dark Cloud 1, near any Zelda game), and take upon yourself to become a true knight and recover the magic cookbook the evil chef stole from the queen. You connect to the various places with "foxholes" found in the basement and around the garden; taking you to the seaside town to save them from an evil scurvy pirate with a cannon for a gun and retrieve the stolen Galleon with sea eels with tridents and orcas with clubs for minions, to a village ransacked by a dragon who built a conveyor belt from the town to his dinner table, then a village who thrives on root beer made by secretive monks unaware their latest batch was poisoned, to a countryside castle run by an evil wizard who stole the spiffy robes of the good wizard. As you save these lands of evil, you attain the pieces to the true knight, from armor to an axe, to a sword crafted from the dragons fork and knife, to gauntlets of power, and boots of steely spring, and finally a magic gem of shielding power. These items each help you access a special area in each of the four worlds to defeat the dark knights that inhabit them. Once each one is saved, you go straight to the evil cook/wizards lair above a floating island inside a volcano (of course right?). When the evil is slain and the book returned, all is well in the fruit kingdom as you are knighted as Sir Kingsley.
    You may ask why this game is so purely stereotypical and old. Well, it is actually, but it goes about it in such a way that no other can, with charm and mild wit. From the fruit shaped keys, to the goofy enemies, and the smug look on Kingsley's face at any given time, you can't help but love the character design.

It's called caffeine addiction Paul the creepy faced dolphin.

        

    Even if the rooms are made of less than 25 polygons and and the enemies make no sound as they shoot at you through your painfully limited vision sphere, you press on shooting back where the arrow came from and smirk as you hear their painful grunt; swinging your sword or axe and holding your shield strong in order to save the cheerful people from their generic fate.
    Even I was skeptical at first, with the odd non-camera motivated controls (pressing back makes him actually walk in a backwards fashion and dedicated shoulder buttons to help strafe), I found it cute with his little back-flips to avoid the spiders; or the very bad vision, yet colorful and well-put together character models. After a few moments I soon forgave it's limitations that only existed from the hardware it came on, and enjoyed this very "family-orientated" action adventure alternative. The developers liked what they made and didn't particularly care if it made big money.

Yes, that switch has my paw print on it, yes that key is a cherry, and yes my shield has my emblem on it. But hey, when did you last slay a dragon and forge his eating equipment into this sword or kill the bat fiend in catacombs beneath a monastery and save a village from being poisoned?

    So if you are tired of the Zelda franchise yet want your swords and adventure and can bare to tear yourself away from the shimmering glittery fanciness of current gen "grafix" with it's incessant need to have gore and maturity for it's mature gamers just to make it worthy of play, go on and play this one, it will only take about 4 hours of your time. Even if you are a fox orphan child in a fruit kingdom full of other crazy animals and their wacky stories, this game is for all ages.
    One out of one.