Zelda, the post-match analysis

Just finished playing Twilight Princess. So now I'm in the position of having nothing in the way of Wii games that can provide more than a few minutes distraction at best. I'm sure this is a problem that will begin to vanish as dev teams get more used to the system, and stop just putting out cheap ports of PS2 software (not so sure that'll happen any time soon, though).

I was a bit sceptical of Twilight Princess when I first started playing it. It's very slow to get going, and recycles previous parts of the series to an almost ludicrous extent, but it now sits just behindd ocarina of time in my estimations for the series. I do still love Wind Waker, especially the absolutely incredible design, but Twilight Princess just edges it out because of the relationships between the central characters. The character that fulfils the role of the guide in this game is Midna, a strange little imp-type creature. Initially she's pretty antagonistic towards Link, but gradually softens, and they start to depend on one another to a far greater degree. It's strongly reminiscent of the relationship between the central characters in His Dark Materials, in fact some of the parallels are out-and-out spooky. I'd be very suprised if His Dark Materials wasn't the basis for a lot of the story, but then I'm not sure it's ever been translated into Japanese.

It's rare that there's good story in games, even more rare in a case like this, where one character is essentially mute. There's a lot to be said for the character modelling here - they are fantastically expressive, Midna in particular.

Ah well, it's back to Wii tennis. I've never been particularly desperate to have story as the central focus of a game, but now that I've finished Twilight Princess, I find mysself even more keen for Mass Effect and Bioshock.

It seems that a cheeky member of HMV staff has the same love of Jack Thompson as I do:



Delightful.

I feel we've reached an accord...

According to this report the main cause of gun crime is, well, guess what? Guns.

Turns out the root causes of crime are the same sorts of things we always suspected, such as poverty, disaffected youth, all that jazz. But apparently, and this is the really shocking part, if you want to shoot someone you'll need a gun.

I know, I was shocked too. I've seen one of these 'gun' things, and I can't even see where you would put a copy of Grand Theft Auto in one.

Twats. Staggering twats.

This is the logical extension of the whole nonsensical Top Gear culture we have going on at the moment.

Cars are big and heavy, and if you drive them too fast, they're hard to control. Surely people realise this by now?

OMG M$ IS TEH SUXOR!

Sat here, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the Halo 3 beta to happen. Not much going on here. Just... waiting.

I thought I might pass the time by downloading the free Live Arcade game Microsoft have been touting. But that's not online either. Turns out it's only available in the states. Europe gets shat upon once again.

Never mind. I'll troll around for online petetions. Advanced old age is setting in at 26.

"Dear Sir, you suck. Yours sincerely, ZombieDave. p.s. Asshat."

My letters wil be the stuff of cranky old man legend.

What I did in May.

Seems I don't spend as much time as I used to in front of my computer. I'm sure a large part of this is down to the fact that I'm working my way through a huge glut of games that were rushed out to meet the end of the fiscal year. A brief summary:

Zelda: Twilight Pricess - A wizard did it.

God of War 2 - A giant pituitary retard in a skirt did it.

Crackdown (with added bonus shiny) - A giant pituitary retard in a tank got of his tank and did it. With a harpoon gun.

So that's what I've been up to. Games now have harpoon guns in them, and I'm not looking back. It's all harpoon gun, all the time for me. This means I can only ever play Crackdown and XIII.

Slightly less appealing is the demo of the Pirates of the Caribbean game. Just as it was looking like a game being a movie tie-in didn't automatically mean it was shit, this comes along. And it all starts so well. A little in-engine cutscene, Captain Jack looks like Captain Jack, moves like a drunk everything seems fine. Then you take control.

Suddenly Jack moves like he has a broom in him (he might do, it's Johnny Depp after all), and you engage in some horrible, horrible combat. Here's how combat works:

You press 'A' twice. The enemy turns away. You press 'A' again. The enemy falls over. Then you get hit by an off-screen enemy because the camera is in no way dynamic. And you have no way of knowing how many enemies are in the room, because they spawn offf camera. So, unless you spin the camera continually, you don't really know what's going on.

There are some vague attempts to expand the combat, but they're all equally clumsy. It's a piece of shit, basically. It might be aimed at kids, but that's no excuse.

Oh, and captain Jack speaks twice in the 20-minute demo. I couldn't quite tell if it was Johnny Depp doing the voice, as it sounded like it was recorded down a phone line. In the seventies. I don't think it was though.

I don't quite know why this bothers me, as it's not as if I would have ever bought this game, but it has. To sum up: it's a piece of shit.

It has come to my attention...

...that the country of my birth is being run by a homophobic religious demagogue and a man who believes violence to be a legitimate means of affecting change in government.

Who says Britain can't do US-style politics?

But I wants it...

Or, to be grammatically correct, I want them. Gaming sneakers? That aren't entirely horrible designs? I must have them.

That's not Betty!

As I sit here, wondering how I'm from the same family as anyone who would watch Ugly Betty, I find myself thinking of a fun little game. If you catch anyone watching this show, repeatedly and insistently ask them "Is that Betty?" whenever someone who isn't the main character is on screen. If she is on screen, stay silent. I can now confirm that this drives them absolutely nuts. Great fun. The downside is that they think you're a shambling cretin.

Speaking of fun games, I've been playing a lot of GRAW 2. Or Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2, for those of you who aren't into the whole brevity thing. It's great, but you are fighting a ridiculously PC war. Basically any element of the war being morally dubious has been stripped away. It's hilariously clean-cut. Go USA! Despite that, it's great fun. There are a lot of set-pieces this time around, a lot of variety to the levels.

I've also been playing God of War 2, which thanks to the ineptitude of the folk at Currys in town, I've picked up a few days early. I've played about an hour of it, during which time my character has destroyed the Colossus of Rhodes (which was brought to life by Athena), been killed by Zeus, and clambered out of hell. It's pretty intense. It's staggeringly silly. It's on the PS2, but looks almost as good as anything on the new systems.

Oh, and in the first five minutes you kill, like, a hundred guys. I missed my calling in marketing. Though I can do better than one game I saw today, the sole selling point on the back being: "Game and manual in English!"

Yurgh...

I wish we had more knee-jerk right wing commentators in the UK. I'd love to hear Jack try to tie this to Counterstrike.

"He had trained for this in the game, which is why he was able to sever his penis so calmly. If you measure the trajectory of the spurts of blood back to the height of his mangled groin you can tell that his heart beat never got above 60 bpm."

In other news, the storm of inadequacy that is My Chemical Romance is on the TV right now. I'd never noticed before, but the singer looks suspiciously like Jack Dee.

Well, Kal-El, I guess you're just fucked

I'm not referring to Nicolas Cage's kid here (though your dad's a twat and your probably heading the same way: dem's the breaks), but to Superman himself.

A newly-discovered mineral from a mine in serbia has the exact chemical composition of Kryptonite as mentioned in Superman Returns.

It's not green though, it's red. Keep an eye out for evil Superman then. Don't go near any driving test centres any time soon.

100!

It's my 100th post, and of course the topic is... Jack 'Motherlovin' Spoonful' Thompson.

Jack has a habit of randomly trying to set various offices of the law onto anyone who disagrees with his lunatic rantings. This is almost everyone, and he has to sleep on a matress stuffed with his own shed hair at some point, so he tends to focus on those that bother him most.

In this case, Jack and I have something in common: we both hate forumites. Jack, however, thinks that if someone on the internet says a bad thing about you, you can set the FBI on them. If everyone knew about that little trick, each and every male in the US between the ages of 12 and 25 would be in jail right now.

Jack's targeting Kotaku, pretty much the only gaming blog to have professsional journalists working on it. That's a problem for Jack right there. They tend to be pretty thorough about things like telling the truth. Another problem that Jack has is that he can't tell a single comment on a forum from a sustained campaign of abuse. I'm pretty sure the FBI can.

Jack has occasionally claimed to be a lawyer of some kind (though he's dangerously close to being disbarred), something that requires some intelligence. What sort of intelligent man starts a letter "Dear FBI"?

My heartfelt congratulations go out to the guys at Kotaku. You've quite clearly broken him, and you stand a good chance of being the ones that finally take him down.

Work

A brief encounter with a gentle soul today:

Him: "I'm looking for books on the photographer Such-and-such."

Me: "We've one book on Such-and-such. This is it here."

Him "I see. Do you have any others?"

Sometimes words fail me. But not today! Cock.

For Jack, with careful consideration

When Rush Limbaugh is more liberal than you on any issue, pretty much all that's left to do is grow a little moustache and invade Poland.

And it quacks like a weasel...

Every cloud has a silver lining, and every tragedy has a grotesque right-wing opportunistic scrabble for publicity.

I don't honestly know how this can even be possible, but Jack 'Looks Like a Man But is Really a Stack of Weasels in a Cheap Suit' Thompson was able to get on American TV to throw his two cents into the ring on the VA shootings. The worst mass shootings in US history. In order to make best use of this horrible event, Jack got straight onto Fox News (naturally) and singled out videogames as the cause.

I could just about understand this behaviour, if the guy responsible had even been named. But he hasn't. We (and Jack) do not yet know who he was. I could understand if he'd waited even a day before doing this. But he didn't, he decided to strike while the anvil was hot and peddle his twisted viewpoint on TV, this time trading off the deaths of (at present) 32 people.

Way to fucking go, Jack. You've graduated from being a misguided annoyance to being a man with a genuine lack of morals or respect for human life. Good for you.

Once again...

Good Lord, it's been a while.

I'm not very good at updating this with any degree of frequency. Since I know there at least five people mewling for the tiniest trickle of information from me, here we go. I'll try not to be so shoddy in future.

I have my first wiinjury, and by logical extension of that, a Wii. It's great. Not really got much in the way of software yet, but it's all been good fun so far. This doesn't mean I've abandoned my other platforms, oh no. Well, it kind of does in the case of the 360, though I have a suspicion I'll be back to that.

Gaming fun has mostly been from the handheld platforms at the moment. Mostly Portrait of Ruin on the DS, and Gitaroo Man on PSP. Gitaroo man is right up there in competition for the sweetest game ever created. It's not too saccharine though, it's just that Japanese naivete about it. For those who don't know, it's a rhythm action game in which you play a Japanese schoolboy who turns into a guitar-wielding superhero at various inopportune moments. And the guitar is kept somewhere within his dog. Obviously. So that's fine then.

This is quite possibly the best thing ever:



UCSC students built a four-storey Donkey Kong mural out of Post-it notes. They did this because they are true heroes.

So very fucking sick of this now

Let's imagine, for a moment, that we are mayor of New York City. Let's imagine that we have an awareness of that city's history, and how it has been portrayed in literature and on screen.

Let's say a videogame, spuriously based on New York City is to be released. That all data available on the game is from a short trailer. Let's say that the entire trailer is based on The French Connection, a film based on true events that occured in New York City.

What do you do? Do you sit back and wait for said game to be released, waiting until the facts are in, and a sane and sensible judgement can be passed? Or do you just throw words around, in a series of nonsensical press releases, with as little basis in actual fact as possible?

It's B folks, it's B.

What do PS3 and Soylent Green have in common?

The answer, predictably, is that they're made of people. And not in an interesting way, either, just in the ramblings of a demented Sony Executive. Now, this time it's not Jack Tretton, who has said some fairly 'interesting' things. This time it's Ray Maguire, or as I like to call him, 'Commander Batshit'.

"If you take what's considered to be the most expensive and the least expensive - consider the US with its massive land and cheap people. Then you look at the UK - a little island where rent and rates are at an absolute premium, and the cost of people is a lot more. "

Please, someone tell me. What does that even mean? That's meant to be an explanation as to why the PS3 costs more in the UK than almost everywhere else. He's managing director of Sony America, so it seeems that the further up the chain you go, the higher the class of lunatic you encounter. Presumably, if you get promoted far enough in Sony America, you get made President of the USA.

In other news, the PS3 has launched in the UK. I know this because I was in town getting software for virtually every other console - part of the joys of trade in. Found some genuine crap in local stores, but crap that's worth money. Took it into town and turned it into Japanese madness. The system works. I saw four people carrying PS3's on my way into town. Extrapolating, I guess that means they sold more of them than they've produced. I'll look into that. I may have miscalculated.

Apparently not many people have been buying software with the machines. Not entirely suprising, given the quality of the launch titles, but it really seems that a lot of people are buying it as a Blu-Ray player, just as people bought the original PS2 as a DVD player. Makes sense if you want one, it's very cheap compared to all other Blu-Ray players on the market.

In other news, I just made the best burger of all time. Seriously, it was truly the greatest. Just thought folk would want to know.

Gentlemen, activate the retardamopod!

Brief update:

Saw Casino Royale. Apart from the scene of the woman riding up the beach on a white horse, it was much less camp than most Bond movies. That scene, however, was as camp as all the rest put together. I digress. I liked it. It was gritty, had a pretty decent plot. Looked nice, all the rest. The last 20 minutes were flaccid, right up until the point where it becomes clear that Bond likes nothing better than to put on a spiffy suit and torture someone for fun. That he is, in the literal sense of the term, mad as a sackful of stoats. And suddenly, all the other Bond films make sense.

Venezuelans are also insane: A group of Venezuelan religious leaders are trying to block the sale of Mercenaries 2, a game that, if past performance is anything to go by, precisely seven people will buy, on these grounds:

"Our concern is that this game will only deepen an already antagonistic relationship between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments".

That's right, the game will cause the U.S. government to reassess it's stance on Venezuela. I'll just let that sink in for a moment.

Did I mention that quote was from a letter to Bono? Because it was. And so, the prosecution rests. Ladies, gentlemen of the jury. Venezuelans are insane.

Ta Da

Apparently, playing racing games will make you a bad driver. Most of the report here is common sense, but the thing I find troubling is the part where it states that drivers who play games are likely to have slower reaction times.

This goes against virtually every other study in the field (there are some particularly convincing reports on the benefits of gaming in boosting the skill of surgeons). I wonder if the study group used one of the Need For Speed games? They bear about as much resemblance to driving as they do to clay pigeon shooting.

The Vomit Leprechauns

St. Patricks day, and Cambridge's take on festivities for the day has left me with one thought:

Everything is covered in diabolical fluids.

Possibly the least pleasant trip up Mill Road I have ever had.