Month: December 2008

2008: The Year in Review

Another year older, another year wiser, right? If I look back to the 2007 Year in Review, this little snippet catches my eye:

There’s far more games than time, and my records show that I’ve still got 63 games incomplete. Maybe I should consider making a New Year’s Resolution regarding the “incomplete” list? Something along the lines of reducing it to around 50? Hah – I’m nowhere near that naïve… a more realistic resolution would be to not let it blow out much further.

I think I used up all my wisdom right where I said “a more realistic resolution would be to not let it blow out much further” – because, at the time of writing, The List only shows 65 games incomplete – hardly a blowout at all! (Of course, this is largely due to a ridiculously productive December, which saw no less than five games get knocked off).

But let’s not focus on the numbers too much (however much they rule my life); let’s have a look at a number of pithy categories in which I can toss the names of the games that have touched me (oo-er) this year. Forgive me for recycling several topics from earlier compilations…

Disappointment of the Year: That Wii Fit hasn’t magically halved my weight. Bastard!

Proudest Achievement of the Year: Easy – Mutant Storm Empire‘s Black Belt Grandmaster. There’s a little bit of ninja in all of us, and World 4 Level 2 made me dig deep and harness that little bugger up good. An honourable mention should be made of No More Heroes and its deliciously difficult Bitter Mode.

Under-Appreciated Game of the Year: Everyone slated Microsoft’s choice of Undertow as compensation for a spotty Xbox LIVE service last Christmas, which is a shame – it was a thoroughly enjoyable shooter that really came into its own when played with online co-op on the hardest difficulty level. But, hands down, No More Heroes takes this award for being the game that everyone seems to be sneakily sliding into their Top Ten lists to appear edgy and cool, but which no-one bought. You bastards.

I’m-Still-Waiting Award: The PS3. Come on, tempt me with a game that I actually want to play! The closest it’s come so far is with PomPom’s Astro Tripper (which, given I’ve played Space Tripper to death, isn’t even that compelling).

Pulling Teeth Award: Bullet Witch‘s Hell Mode. All that effort for One. Fucking. Point? I guess that’s why I call myself O/C. Or maybe I’m just a beggar for punishment.

2008 Blast From The Past Award: Let’s give an award a game prior to this generation, purely because I have been – and will always be – catching up on my gaming history. Psychonauts? Killer7? Let’s go with the former; barely a single criticism can be levelled at Tim Schafer’s previous game, and my appetite is well-and-truly whetted for Brütal Legend.

Where Have You Been All My Life Award: Killer7. Because I can’t bear to let it go unrewarded (see above), and because it’s absolutely, completely, stonkingly brilliant.

Funnest Gaming Moment of the Year: Seven cars sitting at the bottom of the quarry in Burnout Paradise, side by side as at a drive-in movie, waiting for our online compadre to finally nail his barrel-rolls. A cheer goes up – he’s done it! – followed by a yell of “Car Cuddles!” as everyone proceeds to smash into each other, laughs and merriment a-plenty. Ten minutes later, the next Challenge starts :)

Multiplayer of the Year Award: Burnout Paradise – see above. Challenges, or simply smashing the shit out of each other, there was nothing that came close to the online experience of cruising Paradise with seven friends.

Bringing Indy To The Party Award: Braid, or World of Goo? Both displayed impossibly impeccable production values; tiny teams easily upstaged the bigger names. Goo gets this award, since it’s a shining example of what two people can do with a gorgeous demo; having said that, Jonathon Blow‘s contribution to the indy gaming community is far from overlooked.

Gaming Payback of the Year: No More Heroes, Bitter skill level, the third boss encountered – Shinobu. I’ve written about this previously, but this fight turned my gaming world on its head – previously, boss battles had been automatically deemed abhorrent in my little mind. Shinobu changed all that.

Earnest Navel-Gazing Award: Braid, for slipping a story of weight and depth into a brilliant game… even if most of it is hidden from those who brand Braid a “Mario rip-off”.

Best Game Writing of the Year: No More Heroes, hands down. It’s got no plot, and yet the paper-thin characters still manage to feel convincing, and the fast-forward exposition prior to the final boss fight is deliriously good. Proof that a good page trumps bad volumes.

Worst Game Writing of the Year: Mercenaries 2. Because, playing as the hot chick merc, you can pimp yourself as follows:

Chinese Contact: “Ah, welcome back mercenary. I have need of you.”
HCM: “Well you can afford me, let’s not waste time.”

And, as cool as that may seem on paper, it actually leaves you feeling a little icky. So you dress up in a chicken suit, drop a MOAB on a building, then sky-dive out a helicopter. It’s all good, right?

The Gasping Grin Award: World of Goo, end of World 3. I’ve no idea why, but the laughter and evolution of that level left me wrung out, in much the same way that Braid conjured emotion.

The Gasping Gasp Award: Braid, the final level. I’ve never felt a greater cognitive click.

Still Kickin’ Award: Rez HD. Into its eighth year and Rez is still as glorious as ever.

AAA-Title I Missed Award: Ummm, that goes to pretty much all the triple-A and mega-hyped titles released in 2008; pretty much the closest game I got to AAA was Burnout Paradise.

So there you have it, kids. My 2008 in a nutshell. Big props to Braid, Burnout Paradise, No More Heroes, Rez HD, and World of Goo, with belated kisses and cuddles to last-gen’s Killer7 and Psychonauts. These are the games that made the biggest mark on me this year, though honourable mentions should go to a couple of older current-gen games, Excite Truck and Mutant Storm Empire, for continuing to bring the fun.

“That’s a nice capsule summary up there, Pete,” I hear you say. “But I need something more concise. Come on then, you crapulent wordsmith: what was your Game Of The Year?”

…

I think you know ;)

BraidMarbleNukem: OcarinaOfRain

We’re halfway through the traditional end-of-year holidays – no break for me, though, back into work tomorrow. Still, here’s hoping that you all received the games you wanted over the break – and managed to give some gaming love, too. I did my bit, educating my nephew with Super Mario Galaxy for his new Wii :)

I finally Pete-Completed Duke Nukem this week – all secrets, all levels, all Duke-isms. There was one level I wanted to re-visit after having mopped up all the Achievements but, once I restarted it, I became quite aware that I simply didn’t like this game. It’s not fun. The level designs are, for the most part, cheap and full of surprises – the Doom monster closet philosophy. Great sense of humour, though – but that’s not enough to make up for the icky gameplay. Still, it’s been appropriately OC-ed now, so that’s another one off The List – the fifth for the month!

As Duke was wrapped up (and I proudly looked at another 200/200 on MyGamerCard.net) I noticed that the Agoraphobia Expansion Pack had been released for Marble Blast Ultra. Another 200 MS Points to purchase, this doesn’t seem to be as good a deal as the previous Marble Fu Expansion Pack – the new maps are a bit of a pain in the arse, to be honest, but the final Achievement was easy enough to snaffle… once again, MBU doesn’t really trouble The List.

Searching for another XBLA game to work on – and desperately trying to avoid a return to Texas Hold’em (I haven’t built my patience up yet) – I elected to have another look at Braid, just to see what was required for the Speed Run Achievement. Another playthrough reminded me what a stonkingly great game it is, and a peek at some speed-runs on YouTube yielded some great tips… buggered if I know how I finished the game the first time without them! The Speed Run still looks hard-as-nails, though – and the hidden stars look even harder. Long term project, that.

As mentioned before Christmas, I snaffled Suda51’s “latest”, Flower, Sun and Rain. A re-imagining of the 2001 Playstation 2 Japan-only original, it’s… really odd. Essentially a point-and-click adventure, it’s not so much a game as a Groundhog-Day-esque interactive story – you’re never put in a situation that you can’t get out of, so there’s no sense of danger. The writing is fantastic, displaying the darkness of Killer7, the humour of No More Heroes – and there’s plenty of puzzles and collectibles to keep the OC in me happy. Mind you, I’ve already resorted to GameFAQs once – but I felt dirty doing it, especially when I realised that I’d passed over the solution because I didn’t want to think through it, didn’t want to put the effort in. Lesson learned – and the internet will be ignored for the remainder.

FSR has some really odd production values, though – for a 64MB game, there’s some very expansive videos… and horribly angular 3D models. And the controls are thoughtful in places, and fucking annoying in others: the theatrical approach to puzzle solving (when accessing Catherine, your problem-solving computer pal) is brilliant the first time, but horribly button-mashingly infuriating thereafter.

The last bit of action this week saw me resurrect The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I’ve already finished this magnificent game, but I’d started an OC-friendly 100% run aeons ago on the Gamecube (with the Collector’s Edition disc that included Zelda, Zelda II, Ocarina, and Majora’s Mask). It’s mostly complete, except for a couple of collectibles – the most galling of which is the Biggest Quiver.

Remember how to get that?

Gerudo Fortress, archery on horseback.

Shitpigs.

Now, I’ve heard that this was quite doable on the N64, but the sensitivity of the analogue stick on the Gamecube port is insane. Regardless – as an OC Gamer, it’s something I need to complete, so I fired up my old save and gave it another bash. Another 36 bashes, actually. I scored 1080 points of the 1500 required once, but that’s cold comfort – this is going to be a prickly assignment.

Only a few days left before the end of the year, and the inevitable year-in-review post. I’d better get writing… :}

A Christmas Present!

Normally I’m a bit of a humbuggy Scroogey grumpalump come Christmas, but not this year!

FLOWER, SUN AND RAIN NDS In Store – awaiting collection

Happy, happy, Suda51-filled days ahead :)

…oh – and a happy holidays to all those who bother reading & commenting. This blog is one of my catharses, and there’s a very tangible little thrill every time I see a new comment roll in. Thank you :D

GooDashDuke

Recently I bitched about the fact that I hadn’t knocked any games off The List lately; and now, a mere fortnight later, December is looking plump with Completion. First came Mercenaries 2, then Mutant Storm Empire, and this week saw the Pete-Completion of World of Goo and Dash of Destruction.

World of Goo has been an absolute delight. I was one of those who jumped through homebrew hoops to get their PAL Wii to chat with the US Shop Channel, purely to allow the purchase of this independent masterpiece. Goo picked up the Indy Game of the Year at last week’s VGAs, and was finally released onto the PAL Shop Channel last Friday – the very day I finally knocked off the last of those nasty, nasty OCD challenges. It’d be a tad fibulous to say that I enjoyed every minute – some of the OCDs are incredibly frustrating (leading me to question whether Goo is actually better suited to mouse-control, rather than Wii-mote) – but the sense of satisfaction from having all the OCD flags pop up is immense. Highly, highly recommended – get thee to the Wii store! …or just buy it for your PC or Mac.

A paragraph ago I mentioned that I’d Completed Dash of Destruction – the Doritos-sponsored advergame – this week. In truth, it took less than 30 minutes to see all it had to offer: a cutesy, but shallow, combination of Rampage and Crazy Taxi. With tongue planted firmly in cheek (constant references to its freely available GamerScore abound), it’s absolutely worth the price of admission – that is, free. Go on, kids, click this link and add it to your download queue… it’s cheerful, fun in its small dose, and costs nothing. And it boosted my Completion Percentage by 0.18%, so that’s nice.

The rest of the weekend has been taken up playing Duke Nukem on XBLA. My Completion target for this one is all levels + all secrets + all Duke-isms, and it’s going pretty smoothly (using the excellent 3D Realms walkthrough for reference). I’ve certainly got much further than I did when I had my dodgy copy of the game on the PC, and – with the exception of wishing the weapons had hotkeys – the controls don’t suffer at all from the conversion.

And that’s my task for the week of Christmas – finish Duke Nukem, and bring The List down to 64. Piece of cake.

CrackGooEmpireNights

Aside from a brief reminiscient blast through Ninety-Nine Nights (to test out the NXE’s dump-to-HDD performance with that title), most of the week was taken up with – you guessed it – World of Goo. I’m having a blast hammering through those OCD ranks on my second profile; only eleven left now, but one of those is the deeply unfair Bulletin Board System. Still, this actually feels like a doable endeavour, so I hope to knock the Goo off The List before the New Year.

The weekend, however, was a different story. At the turning of the page on the calendar for the last four months, I decreed that That Month would hark the Completion of Mutant Storm Empire; all that remained were some very gettable co-op multiplayer Achievements. I had an accomplice who pledged to assist in the endeavour, but every time we made a serious attempt we’d encounter some type of glitch: players getting stuck on walls, cameras zooming off in the distance, and other happenstances that could be used as an excuse for our generally poor play. Given that he was in the UK, and I in Australia, I attributed such glitches (except for the poor play, of course) to network latencies, and decided last week to search for a partner who was a little more local.

I peeked on the Achieve360Points forum, but couldn’t find a partner-seeker who’d already been sated; the Xbox.com forums yielded one potential match who, when contacted, claimed to have never played the game. Odd that it was on his GamerCard, but who am I to stalk? Eventually, though, I found a chap in Wales who enthusiastically agreed to help out and, after two big sessions on the weekend, we managed to get the 10x Multiplier and Millionaire Twins Achievements… thus allowing me to cross Mutant Storm Empire off The List. Cheers Edd! :)

Once that was done, however, I ducked back to help another pal out in his quest for Achievements. Today’s target? The O/C Gamer’s GOTY 2007, Crackdown. And fuck me, it’s still absolutely brilliant. We both cackled with unbridled glee as we romped through the easiest skill level, engaging in massive amounts of mayhem as we went; my Mercenaries muscle memory only helped in that regard as I kept mashing the reload and switch-weapons buttons inappropriately, leading to room-filling explosions rather than the intended close-quarters gunfire. If anything, I left that joyous session nostalgic – pining for the first time I encountered that world, the almost motherly embrace I associate with my growth and progression through the game.

And then I wonder – has anything made me feel like that this year?

The OCD Dilemma…

So I’m playing World Of Goo. As I mentioned earlier, I had 38 OCD ranks to acquire before I’d award myself Completion status. I’ve chewed through a bunch, whittling it down to 25, when I decide to give one of the later Level 4 stages a go. “MOM’s Computer” was its name, and it seemed fair game for an easy OCD ranking.

Unfortunately, it seems that there’s a teensy little bug with World Of Goo that prevents you from attaining OCD status on any but your first attempt.

Which is a bit of a bastard, really. I could start a new profile to ensure a clean sheets of OCDs, but that’s a whole ruck of additional effort… especially since I’d already managed a 9-second run on that evil prick “Hello, World” level.

So what do I do? Do I start the new profile, or carry on regardless?

…

I started the new profile.

Quick Notes…

Lordy! Posting to my own blog two days in a row! Who’d have thunk it.

But events warrant such outlandish action! For one thing, fire up your 360 and pop on over to Live Marketplace and download the latest Marble Blast Ultra map pack; it’s a mere 200 MS Points to buy, contains a bunch of new multiplayer maps (three of which are great, one is a shocker, and another scared me just to look at it). There’s another new Achievement wodged in there too, which is pretty easy to snaffle with a bit of online play. I really like this approach to MBU‘s DLC, and firing it up again today just demonstrated how lovely the gameplay is. Can’t wait for the next map pack.

After goading a mate at work into trying to pick my next Target Game from The List (go on, readers – what game do you think my focus should be on next?), I realised that I hadn’t updated it to contain World of Goo, purchased from the US Wii Shop via a bit of Homebrew Channel hackery. So I’ve rectified that omission and, inspired by typing the word “goo”, decided to fire it up again. And it’s still as brilliant as when I first laid eyes on it (then promptly ignored for a month).

The end of Level 3 is a real treat, right up there with the emotional brainfuckery of Braid – but without the headachey bits. And tonight I managed to finish the game – but I’ve still got 38 (fittingly-named) OCD ranks to snaffled before Completion. I’ll say it again – an absolutely fantastic game, well in contention for Game of the Year.

Speaking of which, at the moment my yearly highlights are Rez HD, Braid, No More Heroes, and World of Goo – with a bit of Burnout Paradise thrown in for good measure. What about you?

Another Unsuccessful Foray

As November drew to a close, I painfully reminded myself that it’s been another month without any games crossed off The List. There was a patch earlier in the year where I had a good run – one game one month, a couple the next, always a little progress. But the last four months has seen no decrease at all, and – feeling a bit glum from my day job and in need of a little retail therapy – I decided to splurge on something that would ensure that November would be a winning month.

A cheat system for the DS: the CycloDS Evolution.

I’ve mentioned cheating before, and truth be told I only wanted this particular device for one game – The Rub Rabbits. The one remaining barrier to Completion in this game (as I’ve written before) is the horribly unfair Stampede (in Memories) – but the CycloDS, with its real-time save feature, offered a solution that I considered completely tenable. After all, I reasoned, if I merely create a fall-back save every time I successfully get past one of the dreaded heart-of-hearts… well, I’m still actually playing the game, aren’t I? I’m still actually performing the actions required to get the game done, right? Maybe not in the time-frame the creators had in mind, but still.

Now, I’ve got a couple of other flash-cart combos for my DS – an old M3 / Passcard combo (still incredibly useful for ripping my own ROMs and grabbing existing save-game information), and a relatively new R4 (an utterly lovely bit of kit and a real revelation after the rub-your-tummy-whilst-patting-your-head trickery of the M3). The CycloDS is very similar to the R4, in that it supports unpatched, raw ROMs – simplicity itself to use – as well as presenting a polished interface, and access to Action Replay-style cheat codes. The R4 is slightly nicer in that it pre-empts the DS’s normal boot sequence, saving you the hassle of actually booting the cart – but apart from that there’s little to separate the two cards.

…Except for the CycloDS’ real-time save feature. Once enabled, the rather contorted A+B+X+Y+L+R button combo interrupts the game, allowing you to save the current state of the game back to the flash-cart’s Micro-SD card – easily reloaded at a later date to enable you to pick up exactly where you left off. Thus, my task was simple: play The Rub Rabbits‘ shitty Stampede mini-game, save the state when I get over a tricky bit, reload if I fail, and just push on through to Completion. And it turned out exactly as planned, though for some bizarre reason I was able to complete the six heart-of-hearts in a total of seven attempts (but some other sequences caused a few problems). Still, twenty minutes later, the job was done.

I could cross The Rub Rabbits off The List.

…Except that something didn’t feel right (again). Could it be that the DS ROM’s save state was stuck on my Micro-SD card, rather than on The Rub Rabbits‘ cartridge? That’s not an issue – I could reverse-dump the save state back onto the cart no problems. Or could it be the fact that I was objecting to my own (subjective) cheatiness? Surely not – even back in the C64 days, before I started devoting time to coding assembly rather than gaming, I’d use my trusty Expert cartridge to do much the same thing as I was doing now. I still remember the utterly convincing joy I felt after slowly-but-surely conquering Uridium.

Clearly, that was not why I was feeling slightly icky.

…Except it was. And, I think, part of it was the ease at which I managed the task when all pressure was off; only one botched heart-of-heart! Now my mind’s playing tricks on me – why can’t I reproduce that quality of play in regular conditions? Maybe all that’s required is the ability to calm myself, pretend that there’s no pressure there. It’s all about control – mind games.

More games.

And suddenly I’m playing The Rub Rabbits again, original cartridge wodged in the DS, utterly convinced I can do this absolutely, unequivocally, one-hundred-percent legit. And failing miserably. Fuck knows what that scoreline looks like now – let’s just say something like 30-1 heart-of-hearts attempts have been unsuccessful.

And so, once again, my brain has conspired to prevent me from moving on, from crossing something off The List. November was yet another dry month.

(Luckily, though, December has already been covered – Mercenaries 2 has stepped up to fill in the void. More on that later…)