Game Curmudgeons

People love top 10 lists! I read it on the internet! In the spirit of such discovery, we’re proud to present a list of our top 10 most intense games ever. Games that make a pulse pound, often keep a ridiculous pace, and never fail to remind you how fucked you are.

Honorable Mentions, because we’re whores: Roguelikes, as a genre, deserve mention. Games where you can be wiped out by bad luck alone or the severe early ignorance you’ll have keep you on your toes, even if they tend to be turn based. Nobody has ever had a relaxed game of Nethack or Elona, especially when it turns out that ring you put on was a cursed ring of polymorph, and you are now a fish surrounded by dragons, dwarves, and/or jaguars.

Shadow of the Colossus almost made the list, but there are plenty of open relaxed areas when you’re not in the middle of a fight. Riding around the world hunting lizards and fruit is beautiful, but then a giant angry thing shows up which is both boss battle and puzzle. Climbing the beard of a giant or riding a flying stone bird is nothing less than gripping, and frankly not a single battle in the game disappoints, but that’s what happens when everything is a stunningly well crafted boss battle.

And now, the real top ten! Moar! »

So here’s some stats from Microsoft regarding Grand Theft Auto IV. You can’t be surprised by any of them, can you? The game doesn’t even need reviewed, you just need to buy it. Even if you weren’t that into the last ones, like myself, this is a whole new level of gaming, and definitely raises several bars. All of these come straight from the Gamerscore team at MS, so when you find out it’s a lie, don’t blame me!

• Actual MS sales data from last week shows Xbox 360 console sales at retail went up 54% week-over-week as a result of GTA’s success
• According to retailers more than 60% of all GTA games sold in the first week were the Xbox 360 version
• Retailers are telling us that the game is attaching strongly to new console sales, with roughly 40% of new consoles selling with a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV
• In the first week, more than 2.3 million people played Grand Theft Auto IV on Xbox LIVE
• GTA IV is now the number one played game on Xbox LIVE
• Over the weekend, we saw the Xbox LIVE service reach 1 million concurrent users
• Gamers have unlocked more than 12 million achievements worth over 100 million gamerscore points in GTA
• Grand Theft Auto IV set a new record for time played, with the average gamer spending more than four hours playing the game on LIVE in the first week alone

Nothing interrupts an experiment in drunken gaming like something awesome coming along.

Viking, for a moment, got better, when I unlocked a combo of sorts. Then the bad design started rearing its ugly head, and overall awful level design, bad enough to make you question your undying but undeserved love of Sega, and the skills of Creative Assembly.

Well Ikaruga, you came along and reminded me of why I still love my Dreamcast. Ikaruga is a ridiculously great shooter that requires thought and strategy beyond holding the fire button to do well, and at a certain point, to survive at all. The game’s key mechanic of polarity(absorb one type of enemy fire, get decimated by another) means paying attention to your surroundings, knowing when to flip, and being able to pick out fire patterns with two sets mixed in. One color to dodge, one to ignore, but getting complacent will result in that flipping around on you without being prepared.

A full review of Ikaruga will come within a few days after I dive in obsessively and gleefully, but for now, grab the demo off X-box live. Blow things up, and appreciate one of the finest pieces of a generation and of its type. Excercise brain and reflex in one wonderful game!

Two pints and some whiskey later, this game is still unfun, but I am at the extreme early stages.

The combat and pacing are slow and repetitive currently, despite the fact everything else around me seems a bit quicker than normal. It’s also horribly easy, even on hard mode.

For a quick change of pace into something with some sort of non-snail-like motion, I threw in Burnout Paradise. Ironically, alcohol has caused me to get my worst crash score ever. Who knew?

But hey, even if my skills are low and Viking is lame, at least Guiness is pretty fucking great. More to come!

Viking:Battle for Asgard isn’t the best of games. It’s not the worst either, but it could be a lot better.

Today, I begin an experiment in game enhancement. Sure, we’ve all put on sunglasses when we’re playing a flight sim, just to feel extra cool. Or a wristband, both functional and cool for Guitar Hero. Some enthusiasts will even don headgear(functional or otherwise) for Battlefield and the like.

Today, I’m going to get the full viking experience. I’ve got three bags of beef jerky, a full jug of mead, and lots of Guinesss Draught. I lack a pewter mug, but I do have a Klingon Blood Lager pilsner, and god damn it, that will have to do.

Check in tomorrow to see how the game, and my liver, hold up under these new circumstances!

Why did Super Smash Brothers Brawl win an extra cane just now before the completion of the review?

Sonic the Hedgehog’s stage uses the theme song from Sonic CD.

Sonic Boom. +1 cane. Excellent work, Nintendo. Excellent work. And way better than that awful Donkey Kong rap.

I don’t think they’ve done anything wrong myself, but that’s because I’m having such a good time running them.

There’s going to be a longer review up tonight we expect, but we’re having some issues with a post system. But it needs said that if you like 4x games, or RTS, well, this is the game for you. It manages to walk the line perfectly in slowly passing time with very few qualms to be had(and those are already being addressed for the next major patch). It’s a lot of fun, it has good AI, a good challenge, and all that wonderful Stardock replayability and customization. Not to mention an amazingly clean and effective interface to control astounding numbers without any scrolling at all.

Go ahead and get it, it’s a 5/5. We’ll tell you why tonight, what sets it apart from Galactic Civilizations and other space based RTS, to make a fine blend.

CD Projekt doesn’t care to sit idly by, it seems, and has seen fit to fix the issues with the prior release. Major complaints, like load times, the lacking English dialog, and the clunky inventory panel? Fixed.

New NPC character models, more animations for dialog, and totally redone facial animations and lip-syncing are on the list too, to really solidify the immersiveness. The new enhancements will be sold in boxed form, and freely available to any who already own the game. And as if it wasn’t big enough already, this is estimated to have 10 more hours of content for an already long game.

For the TL;DR version, click the cut.

Moar! »

Ooooh sit right back and I’ll tell a tale

A tale of a sinking ship

What started in a cartridge port

In the days of 16 bit

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Sonic the Hedgehog was a god damn revolution in gaming. It was a whole new kind of platformer designed to replace the prior mascot Alex Kidd. A game where instead of collecting powerups and jumping on heads and/or swinging swords, you charged ahead at full speed, plenty deadly from the start, rolling around and impaling anything in the way like a self-propelled pinball. Instead of mushrooms, you grabbed rings, which gave both gave and saved lives. Get hit? Grab your rings, and charge forward again. Once in a while smash a monitor which lets you go even faster, saving time on the limited clock(though rarely did one hit the dreaded 10 minutes), granted a shield to prevent ring loss on the next hit, or sometimes full on invincibility(unless you get crushed, too bad then). The formula was amazingly simple, and very effective, especially considering the platforming conventions of the time, and the first time a player ran a loop, that was an instant love for a new mascot. Moar! »

And now, the game of the year awards which I’m just going to type down without much if any explanation.

• Best Farm simulation/Dungeon Crawler- Rune Factory
• Best Objections-Phoenix Wright:Trials and Tribulations
• Best obscene value for a package-The Orange Box
• Best dialog ever-Portal
• Best cube-Weighted Companion Cube, presented by Portal
• Best ending theme-Portal
• Best villain, physical-GLaDOS
• Best villain, concept or metaphor-Objectivism, as portrayed by Andrew Ryan
• Best multiplayer, realistic-Call of Duty 4
• Best multiplayer, arcade-Team Fortress 2
• Best game that took way too long to come out-Team Fortress 2
• Best “Jesus fuck, that’s not right” moments-Bioshock
• Best port of a game that was way too good already-Puzzle Quest:Challenge of the Warlords
• Best re-release license crossover co-op game-Lego Star Wars:The Complete Saga
• Best TV based game-Naruto: Rise of a Ninja
• Best crazy long RPG with an actual morality system that goes beyond “I’m a knight in shining armor” and “I eat babies”, console-Mass Effect
• Best crazy long RPG with an actual morality system that goes beyond “I’m a knight in shining armor” and “I eat babies”, PC-The Witcher

And now, the absolute worst shit of the year.

• Worst abuse of tiered systems-Hellgate:London
• Worst abuse of paid downloadable content-Ace Combat 6
• Worst community playing a game that would be fun if it wasn’t for the 10 year olds at frat boys-Halo 3
• Worst case of hype-Crysis
• Worst game that could have been good if the rail shooting segments didn’t have lots of enemies who can kill you that never enter the range your gun can fire-Power of Destruction
• Worst voice acting and dialog-Two Worlds
• Worst spiritual successor that was nothing like the game that it was based on-Enemy Territory:Quake Wars
• Worst TV based game which isn’t really a game because the only way to lose the game is to change your resolution in the options menu-CSI:Hard Evidence
• Worst game I’ve played this entire year-Monster Jam(Really, I understand how it felt to be the guy who took the tubgirl pictures now)