Friday, September 29, 2006

In today's news...

Megaman cleared of murder. Not a headline I was expecting to see. In other news, Sir Arthur cleared of indecent exposure.

Friday, September 15, 2006

The rough and the smooth (some thoughts on taking them)

So, it's going to cost £45 for a complete Wii controller. This is not a particularly good thing, particuarly in terms of luring in new gamers. The base unit is cheap, and games haven't had the artificial £10 "hey kids, welcome to the future" markup that Xbox 360 games have, so I can just about cope with it personally, but it hauls Wii gaming by the gonads out of the mainstream, and dumps it in the naughty corner with the Oric enthusiasts. I think this might harm Nintendo more than naming it's console after an aqueous solution of urea.

But here's the rub. It's going to cost trivial, inconsequential amounts to play classic games. £5 for a perfect port of a SNES game? To play on my great big TV? On a classic (styled) pad that isn't knackered and covered in 12 years of pad skank?

Yes, I'll take some of that. I'm a big fan of Live Arcade, but the games really aren't there yet. A back catalogue of Nintendo and Sega games? That'll do boys, that'll do.

Dead Rising

I've put off writing about this, because I wanted to have some non-zombie related news to post first, purely for my own sake of mind.

In essence, Dead Rising is superb. It's really everything a next gen game should be. It does something the previous generation couldn't - namely enormous hordes of the shambling undead - and straps it to a finely-honed game mechanic. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a complex game, but it does what it does really well.

I've seen it compared to Resident Evil, which seems a bit lazy to me. It is made by Capcom, and it does feature Zombies, but it couldn't really be more different. The best comparison I have for it is Spider-Man 2. It's a game full of simple tasks, and getting from one point to another is really the only challenge in the game. The point is, if you make getting from one point to another interesting and entertaining enough, you have a great game.

There are faults - ally AI is poor to the point of maddening, and the time pressure means you've very little time to experiment with the various weapons on the first run through (unless you don't care about saving anyone, in which case I reccommend stocking up on shower heads and just having yourself a ball).

At the end of the day though, any faults can be forgiven with the sort of quality on display here. Well worth getting a 360 for.

Time for Wii.

Apologies for the pun. With that out of the way...

It's been given a date, so that means it's actually coming. It's been given a price - £180. This seems to have induced the quickest backlash in the history, because this is about £30 more than the US bundle. But people have forgotten acouple of things:

1. The price for the American release doesn't include sales tax. The UK does. So our American cousins will actually be paying more than the stated $250.

2. We always get fucked in the eye a little bit in Europe. It 'getting fucked in the eye' terms, we're not doing too badly here. We've usually had to wait much longer than three weeks, AND pay much more than the other major territories. I really fail to see what the problem is.

Perhaps people have been spoiled by the 360 worldwide launch. Although this was met with much screaming and gnashing of teeth at the time. It was said that Microsoft should have waited until they could put out more units on the first day. As far as I'm concerned, the system worked perfectly - I got mine on day one, all my friends had to wait. I could phone them any time of the day or night and gloat. And I did. Absolutely perfect.

It's coming. It looks great. You don't even have to open the curtains to find out what the weather is.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

You had me at braaaaaains....

Every site I access today seems to have advertising for Dead Rising on it. There seems to be some sort of video, and it's slowing everything down.

Why are they trying to sell this to me? I bought a 360 the best part of a year ago, purely based on my insatiable lust for this game. Tomorrow it shall be here, and I may just burst with pure zombie love.

It begins...

Despite the title, this blog has very little to do with zombies, or only as much as the life of the average mid-twenties, middle-class white guy does. Which is to say, everything.

Apart from zombies, and their infernal allies, evil clowns, I will mostly be writing about movies and video games. Sadly, these are the things I give the most consideration.