2Doods1Blag

Why? Because the Nintendo Wii and DSi are fucking garbage. Don’t get me wrong, I used to love Nintendo. I grew up with the SNES and N64 and I love them to death. I am also one of those odd doods who is a fan of the Gamecube, mainly because of the massive amount of excellent first-party games Nintendo shelled out (Pikmin is greatness). The DS Lite’s touch screen technology works great and the handheld has many great games.

Then the Wii came out. The prospect of using motion to control your games had me excited for a while (It’s Nintendo, what could possibly go wrong?), but now I am damn glad I was never able to pick one up when it first came out. You can read all the little details in my System Comparison, but needless to say, having bought my PS3 before my Wii (and now owning a 360), my experience with the Wii has been entirely underwhelming.

First of all, Nintendo’s game support has been mediocre. The only franchises they care to support are Mario, Metroid, and somewhat Zelda, although TP is a Gamecube game. Sure those franchises are great, but what about F-Zero, Pikmin, Wave Race, 1080, Star Fox, Donkey Kong, and Kirby…? Or how about a brand new franchise that isn’t part of this garbage “Wii <insert>” series that they think fills the void? The last time they made a new real franchise was 8 years ago when they made Pikmin. The sad part about this scenario is that Nintendo actually has the audacity to rerelease Gamecube games under the “New Play Control” label, with minimal improvements, and expect us to take it. You can buy the gamecube games cheaper when used and play them on the Wii anyway. 3rd Party support has been even worse. Games like The Conduit are just plain garbage, and whenever someone says “good for a Wii game”, god kills a kitten, because good for Wii obviously isn’t good enough.

The wiimote is a joke of a controller. I honestly can’t think of an example of when the Wiimote would be functionally better than a normal controller, aside from rails shooters. The motion control is slow and gimmicky, making it useless when the classic or gamecube controller are compatible (which every game should have, but don’t). They obviously know they fucked up because they released the MotionPlus, but I refuse to pay Nintendo even more than the $270 the system costed just for something that should’ve been in the system in the first place, and something I doubt will have much support aside from crappy minigame collections and sports games.

Now let’s talk features. PS360 does what Nintendon’t, and the Wii has never dropped in price. That is all (read comparison).

Now most recently the DSi has come out. What excitement does it provide you may ask? Take the DS Lite, take away support for GBA games, add in 2 shitty cameras with some editting software, then add a game download service that only ever has been supported with clocks and calculators. Wait, that’s not all! The price is the best part, a smooth $180.

It makes me sick that Nintendo has been easily dominating the market.

I’d say if anyone had to own any one game for this Wii, this would be that game. I had just as much fun playing the game as I did watching someone else play, not to mention that the versus multi-player isn’t too bad either. Featuring characters from both Punch Out!! and Super Punch Out, this game feels like I’m playing the old games with updated visuals. Just about the only complaint I do have for the game is the mandatory waggle controls for the menus. It’s really annoying to have to rotate the wiimote just to select who I want to fight, or choose exhibition mode to go a few practice rounds with the next opponent’s hologram. Speaking of practice mode, I love it. I’ve only used it for a few fights, but for those fights it made the difference between randomly punching, and getting a TKO in the first round.

Now, as far as the multi-player goes, I had a blast with it. It felt a bit awkward to be fighting someone from Mac’s perspective, and since there’s no set pattern to who you’re fighting it turns into a dodge and counter-punch match, that is until you fill your special meter and transform into Giga Mac. That’s where I had the most fun, just beating the other guy senseless as someone twice his size, but why couldn’t Mac do that for the single player game? It would have been nice to get up to the same level for some people, but I suppose it might have made the game a bit too easy.

There’s really not much to say about this game, since it is essentially just like its older counterparts; but has some nice effects added to it, such as the various items that rotate around your opponent’s head when he’s stunned, and the audio from Doc Louis between rounds, which got a chuckle from me from time to time. There really isn’t much of anything bad to say about Punch Out!!, and I highly recommend it to anyone who owns a Wii. It’s well worth the 40 or so bucks you’ll be paying for it.

The Good: All the Punch Out!! goodness of the arcade and NES/SNES games, with updated graphics and nifty visuals

The Bad: Obligatory waggle menu controls.

Overall Score: Definitely a 10/10, A++ would buy again.

-Kekkimaru

Lets celebrate my new found ability to review Wii games with a quickie. Now I know some of you may be thinking “Hey, this is a screenshot from the DS!”, well guess what! I don’t give two shits! This game is pretty much just a DS port for the Wii, when I first started playing it I thought someone had fucked up and just put the DS version of this game onto a DVD with an emulator, but that wasn’t the case. I wouldn’t waste money on something this lazy if it were the last game on earth, and I sincerely mean that. If I wanted to look at both the status screen and the actual game-play screen simultaneously I’d just play the game on my DS, and I recommend that anyone else who feels the desire to play this game do the same. At least then you’ll be able to enjoy the game rather than be distracted with  lazy background and border aesthetics.

Quickie Rating: Just go play the DS game, you’ll have a much more pleasant experience with it.

As for the DS counterpart, if you enjoyed playing FFCC Ring of Fates, or just want a nice little RPG to hop in and out of multi-player with, I’d go for it. I haven’t played much of the game myself, but I did enjoy Ring of Fates, and from what I understand it’s just a spiffed up version of that. So by all means, get the DS version, just stay away from the lazy Wii copy.

-Kekkimaru

Ever wondered what it would be like to mix Halo with anime? Well, according to this trailer, your answer is spartan gundams, female spartan drama, and Master Cheif vs. a gorilla.

Halo Legends Trailer

This is Microsoft’s attempt at selling Halo in Japan, with an Animatrix-style anime collab. The difference is that Animatrix is good, this is not.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, might as well be now. It’s something that bothers me and I honestly can’t believe it isn’t mentioned more often. And to me, it is the cancer killing PC gaming. And no, it’s not DRM.

Bad developers. They are the cancer killing PC gaming. The other day, I was reading about how Street Fighter 4  was being released on the PC. Capcom released a benchmarking tool in order to see what kind of performance we’d get out of our machines. When I read various results and comments, I was very pleased. The game looked beautiful, and yet it still ran like a charm. The requirements were somewhat low, for the time we live in, allowing for machines circa 2004/2005 to run this game at reasonable settings, and it came with extra content. All was good. And then I looked at another PC port coming out: Ghostbusters. Not only did the game have seriously inflated minimum requirements, it lacked Multiplayer, which the PS3 and XBox 360 versions have, and it came with DRM and some serious bugs. YAY!

It seriously makes me sad that PC users won’t grow a pair and stick up against this half-assed PC ports. I’d rather not play the game at all if what I’m playing is an inferior, unoptimized, broken version of the product. I mean, when a multi-platform game is released on a console and one version is somewhat inferior, the whole community raves over it for a good couple of weeks. PC gamers? They prefer to shut up and eat the shit they are being fed, as they fear that if they scream too loud, no games at all will be ported, and they will be subjected to playing yet more generic FPS’s.

I'm not even going to mention this piece of shit

Look, what we must do is praise and admire the companies that make good ports. Street Fighter 4 is an excellent port, and Capcom deserves to be congratulated for it. Resident Evil 5 is on it’s way as well, and seems to be another case of an excellent port, with added features and smooth performance. Over the years, I’ve played some REALLY shitty ports (Resident Evil 4, I’m looking at you), and it makes me sad that bad ports are now the norm, and not the exception. And I blame all of this on the lazyness and stupidity of PC gamers, that don’t really care about the quality of the game, as long as they can pirate it for free. Turns out it ain’t so free after all, and now we all are paying the price.

When I first heard of this game, I was actually pretty excited.  One of my all time favorite movies is getting another video game!  The old Ghostbusters games were pretty hit and miss.  The Genesis game was just awful while the NES and Arcade Ghostbusters game was pure gold.  I had high hopes that this would be the latter but that hope was shot down when I saw this game was being developed by none other than Atari.  Atari has gotten a pretty bad reputation lately with releasing a lot of over-hyped games that didn’t quite make it up to par such as Alone in the Dark.

After I obtained my own copy of this game for PC (which is the same version as the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions), I installed it (which took way longer than it should have).  I booted it up and noticed a few immediate frame-rate issues.  After tweaking with the very limited options I had, I was able to get the game running smoothly.  My first impressions were pretty good.  All the characters looked just like the old Ghostbusters that I loved and had the original voice actors as well!  So far so good… at least until I gained control of my own character.  Immediately I noticed my camera controls lagged behind my mouse movements by a very noticeable amount.  After a bit more tweaking in the options I was still not able to fix this so I restarted the game with my Xbox 360 controller plugged in.  There was still a delay but it was much less noticeable now.

Control issues aside, I continued to play.  After a few minutes, I realised exactly what I would be doing for the rest of the game.  The basic process for trapping a ghost is this: First, you must try and hit the damn thing using your particle beam and keep hitting it until you take it’s health down to a certain level (it takes a good deal of shooting too).  After that, you have to grab the ghost with said particle beam and start slamming it against the walls and floors.  Once you tire it out enough, you have to then throw your trap, drag the ghost over to it, and struggle trying to keep it in the range of the trap until it’s caught.  This sounds all fine and dandy but there are other factors to this.  The other members of your team are trying to do the same thing so you’ll be fighting against them and trying to avoid crossing the streams.  When that does happen, you get knocked on your ass.  The ghosts are also usually throwing shit around in the room which also knocks you on your ass.  You’ll also trip over objects on the floor in the room which, you guessed it, knocks you on your ass.  Another kick in the teeth is that whenever you’re about to throw your own trap, your teammates will do the same which makes what you did pointless.  Everything that I’ve played in the game could have been handled without my help.  Your team does a real good job of playing the game for you (it’s a hell of a lot easier this way too).

In short, this game does have a few things going for it.  Pretty graphics and nice destruction effects make this at least a nice gimmick.  Other than that, this game is pure shit.

The good – Pretty graphics and true to movie characters

The bad – Everything else

Overall score – 3

-Raptor

Oh my fucking god!  I got an email this morning saying that Die by the Sword Xtended was released by Hazard.  I had no idea a project like this was even being worked on!  I had hoped there would but the only DbtS community left was VERY inactive.  This has seriously made my day and I just fucking woke up!  Here are some of the improvements

Xtended is a modification of several parts of Die by the Sword.
It includes the following features:

- fixes several bugs that may lead to crashes on modern PCs
- new Direct3D9 graphics engine
- supports all screen resolutions (even wide-screen)
- supports Antialiasing and Anisotropic texture filtering
- Fullscreen and window mode
- loads textures in full 32bit quality (16 million colors) instead of just 8bit (256 colors)
- allows you to override textures with new ones without replacing any existing files
- the override method supports high resolution textures
- new cool pixel shader effects for lava and water
- a modmanager included in the Launcher
- press F12 in game to save a screenshot to the “screenshots” subfolder

More features like an improved scripting engine are planned for future releases.

The only thing I could possibly ask for now is improved networking!  If you have Die by the Sword, PLEASE download this mod!  It brings back life into a game that has long been forgotten which should never have in the first place!  If you do not own Die by the Sword yet, you can get it VERY cheap off of Good Ol’ Games for about $6 and is COMPLETELY DRM free.  I’ve been using GoG.com for awhile and I love it!

Here’s a video I made quickly of me playing this with a few mods

Die by the Sword Xtended mod page

I also suggest downloading the mod pack he has posted on that forum post
-—-Direct Download for Hazard’s Mod Pack

Die by the Sword GoG.com store page

-Raptor

[edit]Version 1.01 of Die by the Sword Xtended has just been released!  You can grab it over at the Hazardous Modding forum.

-Raptor

You know, I actually got a laugh out of this. Here, just go check it out on Kotaku.

http://kotaku.com/5306691/korean-pc-game-rips+off-team-fortress-2

-Kekkimaru

Half-Life is a sci-fi first person shooter developed by Valve. It is Valve’s first game and received critical acclaim, as well as numerous “Game Of The Year” awards. It was praised for being the most immersive shooter at the time, with strung-together environments, logical item placement, and always seeing things through the protagonists eyes. Unfortunately, most of what made this game special is in every shooter today. I don’t have the luxury of nostalgia with this game, and that makes it impossible for me to forgive all of its flaws.

You are Gordon Freeman, a scientist working at an underground facility called Black Mesa. You take part in a risky experiment that goes wrong, and break the border between earth and an alien planet. You must escape Black Mesa and save the world. That is the extent of the story, the rest of the game is practically storyless. You get the impression there is something more, but all you get are hollow conversations with clone scientists every so often. From start to finish, the story is only an excuse to shoot aliens.

The gameplay certainly hasn’t aged well. For the most part you’re shooting aliens and other enemies with the standard weapons, with the ability to control turrets to add a bit of variety, but there’s also a ton of platforming. These platforming elements are terrible. It combines a large amount of momentum with the inability to see exactly where you’re falling, creating a huge amount of trial-and-error and frustration. Speaking of trial-and-error, there are a lot of times where I feel being hit is absolutely inevitable. Sometimes I will climb up a ladder to an area scattered with soldiers and die before I hit the surface. You have to be extremely careful, but it really tests your patience. There are many portions in this game where absolutely nothing happens, leaving everything to platforming in some pretty bland environments. Without pretty graphics to hold me over, I just start running during these points instead of carefully looking around every little corner. The ability to save anywhere doesn’t help the situation, but promotes recklessness.

I don’t have the original game to compare, but I’ve read the benefits Half-Life gets from the source engine include improved lighting, water, physics, and special effects. There are no improvements to the textures and models, and it doesn’t include the “High Definition” pack that was included with the Blue Shift expansion pack. As for music, there isn’t much to talk about. A track will pop in at specific points in the game, but what’s there isn’t very good. The 3D sound effects are serviceable and sound the way you would expect.

Pros: Immersive (for it’s time).
Cons: Too much crappy platforming and trial-and-error, practically no story.
Verdict: It hasn’t aged well, so I only suggest this for people who enjoyed it back when it was originally released.

Release Date: October 31, 1998
Publisher: Sierra
Availability: Easy to find (Steam)

I promote anyone who played this game around it’s release to add a second opinion. I know I’m in the minority when it comes to what I think of this game.