TeH |\|1p|>0nZ!!!!111oneone

So, it has been a long time, friends. I wonder how you have been doing while the silence between us lasted. Perhaps you doubted my return. Perhaps you even strayed to other blogs. But I told you I was in this for the long term! I always intended to come back, when the chaos of moving to Japan was over. You knew that. And still you moved UK: resistance back up into the number one spot in bookmarks. But never mind. Let's forget the past. Let's start again.

Wow a lot has happened. As anyone would have expected, moving to Japan has been quite a shock to the system. One of the first things I noticed was how damn stylish everyone is. Seriously, how am I ever supposed to impress the ch1x0r when everyone else is THIS cool?

Yes the general level of English around here is so bad, that it is not a problem to demand fellatio on a T-shirt. In fact, I would venture to say that it is encouraged. One of the great side effects of the shockingly poor level of English understanding in Japan is the amount of freedom it proffers in public. It is quite liberating to be horrendously rude about everyone in ear shot. Even more than usual, I mean. Because over here they don't realize they should be punching you.

Having mocked the Japanese people's English, it's probably only fair I say a few words about my Japanese. After some careful deliberation, I have decided on the following words; 'Oh dear.' They seem to sum it up for me. I did not do any kanji revision over the summer holiday, so that my grasp of the written language has recessed back in on itself faster than Shinji goes back into the feotal position. (w00t!) I'm playing the DS Zelda in Japanese, partly to avoid the hassle of shipping a JAPANESE game from England, and partly due to a stubborn 'I'm in Japan, I'll play it in Japanese even if it's less fucking fun than Dead or Alive' attitude, and it is like having two games for the price of one; A Zelda game, and a Japanese reading-comprehension game. One of those games is fun.

It's hard for me to be fair about the game, because I am playing it through a filter of 'What? "The flaming road of the permission to continue is for when the wind of breath reaches the flame of the road?" What the fu... oh, what, you want me to BLOW ON THE CANDLES? Jesus.' But it looks gorgeous, I do find that I end up blocking the screen a little with my hand, but I'm getting more used to the control system, and I think it is much better than some kind of button-pen compromise, the score is not up to Ocarina of Time standards, but will probably grow on me, and I love the fact that the faerie uses Navi's sample for "Hey!" when she wants your attention. I always liked the idea of cell shading in Zelda, it was other factors altogether that left Windwaker feeling hollow and foreign to the Zelda world - The DS one is much closer to the mark. All in all, this game feels very comfortable, like it naturally belongs in my hands. I'm looking forward to what it holds in store.

So what have I been up to in the land of the l337? Less then you might have expected, to be honest. I've been busy with school and everything, and some of the geekier areas of Tokyo, quite frankly, scare me. That's not to say I have been completely inactive. Oh, heaven forbid. I felt incredibly lucky to have a chance to go and see the Tokyo Game Show, surely something of a mecca for people like you and I. So now that enough time has passed to render all the 'hot' and 'exclusive' information from the show completely and irrefutably yesterday's news, I get around to writing a little about the show. To be honest, I wasn't privy to that much 'hot' information anyway, as this was not a press-day, but an open-to-the-public day, and also, the sheer scale of the thing was overwhelming, and I spent a lot of the day in awed, aimless circumambulation. The crowds were mad. As much as I wanted to see the new Biohazard (That means Resident Evil, you noob!) and Final Fantasy stuff, the crowds were just too much. I did cue up so that my Japanese friend could give the upcoming Dragon Quest on DS a try, and it looks beautiful. Fairly old-school, but I have a felling that it's going to be a real joy to play. Square-Enix are pouring the same amount of love into the upcoming Final Fantasy DS stuff, there's really going to be a lot to get exited about.

I also had a runabout on the upcoming DS Ninja Gaiden (A lot of DS I know, but it is the only console that I have out here) and it looks great and plays as smooth as butter. It is all done with the touch pen, and somehow it is even more satisfying to hack and slash your way though than Zelda. The demo went as far as the first boss battle, an angry looking red dragon. It was pretty easy to dispatch the sucker, but things will surely get harder, and the game will be a distracting play regardless of the difficulty.

In other news, they were showing videos of what is going to be the 3rd in the 龍が如く series (Yakuza 3) and it is set in Samurai times! You play as one of Kazuma Kiryu's ancestors (who looks miraculously like him) At first I was a little upset. No more nasty-looking suits. No more screams of "What the fuck!?" No more super-realistic vision of Kabuki-cho. But the videos looked amazing, and if Sega manage to carry through the lovable antihero and feeling of the originals, then this may well be the first of the PS3 games to really excite my interest. Don't hold your breath though. Yakuza 2 has not even had a confirmed European release, so things look equally dodgey for Yakuza 3.

Even If I never get a playstation 3 and never see Yakuza 2 or 3, being in Sega's corner was the closest I've had to a religious experience yet. It was great just soaking up the Sega vibes; even if half of the games on show were obscure JRPGs that I will never play or care about. As much as I don't consider myself into the kinky booth-girl stuff, there is something really, really hot about a girl in a capcom dress. I suppose this is one case in which the brand on the clothes is important. After those photos I made a bee-line for the Tecmo girls, but the girl I was with started getting annoyed. For annoyed read: fucking furious. Don't worry, if you want to see all the booth girls there is a website dedicated to the subject; Destructoid.

Well, I saw a lot at the game show, but I think I have pretty much written up the best of the bunch. I hope everyone is appropriately jealous, and messages me to say so, because if not, what was the point of coming all the way to this very difficult-to-live-in country?

Ouendan 2

Generally, I consider myself a moral person. Not that I am claiming virtuosity from a viewpoint that has any pretensions of objectivity; conversely, I have my own idiosyncratic honour system, patched together from bits of outdated chivalry and bushido. It is a system that formed itself without any particular reference to practical application in the actual world. As a rule, my cobbled together honour system is sufficiently unmalleable to cause considerable difficulty in life and its delicately indefinable shades of grey.

Strange, then, is the alacrity with which I have delved into the ethically unmarked territory of computer games. The duality of the Zelda series, (which broke me into the world of hardcore gaming) when its classic hero-comes-of-age myth comes up against the encouragement of casual theft and aimless violence against nature, is well documented. Not to mention the shoplifting Easter egg in Link’s awakening. In fact this ream of amorality runs back into the genesis of computer games; before games began entertaining the concept of plot, players had little reason to attach real human meaning to their actions on the pixel plains. Games’ first steps into storytelling were tentative, like a toddler who has just discovered a way of irritating his mother into distraction; simultaneously triumphant and terrified. SMB on the NES/Famicom may have had us rescuing a princess, yet that unforgettable opening frame saw our primary-coloured plumber placed into the three-quarters sky, one quarter repetitive pixel landmass of the first level without so much as a cursory piece of explanatory text. In fact, for those of us with a consumer conscience weak enough to buy an unboxed second hand game, or those of us who were too ADHD to read the instructions, (that’s me on both counts, then) the first point at which it was clear a princess was being rescued by all of this surreal jumping and squashing was at the end of the first world. By this point, we were so hooked by Mario’s exploits that we did not really care why we were supposed to be taking part.

Picture, if you will, the openings for ‘Doom’ and ‘Escape from Castle Wolfenstein’; the player was dropped into the foreboding corridors of the game world covered in his afterbirth, still blinking in the light after the relative darkness of the womb of reality. No introductory text, no cutscene, no training mission incorporated into the plot in a clumsy attempt at concealment; nothing between you and a brand new, unforgiving game. Although we would never allow a game to have so little story in these enlightened days, in retrospect I can not help but admire the Spartan purity of those games. It was a type of beauty.

As computer games have marched on into the present, it has become difficult for developers to come up with new excuses for us to solve puzzles, dispatch enemies and explore worlds that in many ways remain unchanged from those simpler times. Storylines are often spurious and ‘tagged-on’ to the game. Computer games are a unique creative product, as the plot is so often a slave to the format. This leads to an inability to truly inspire empathy for a game character. If one were to create a stronger bond between play and plot, the landscape would look a little different. Everyone loves a good antihero, yet the GTA franchise opted for strait down the line villains who kill and steal without ever satisfactorily explaining why. If we truly suspended disbelief in the game world, I think that a GTA game would really be too horrific to play. Yet people play, putting no emotional weight on the events of the game world. This missing connection is endemic amongst the makers and players of games. I have heard it said that the problem with the few games that do offer moral frameworks is that they utilize systems of cause and effect; and the games then breakdown, as players choose actions depending not on the whispers of their hearts, but by calculating which choice has the most beneficial results on their character, stats, or situation. They turn a moral choice into a strategic one.

On the other hand, the design of the games we play often seems held back by the story. Surely the great art of games design is the creation of original and expressive ‘gameplay’ (dirty word). Generally, an action movie story would make an awful novel, and the plot of a novel would have trouble squeezing into the framework of a modern poem. The content is dictated by the form. However, the baby format of computer games still looks to its big brothers for inspiration, and our games stories are often compromised versions of what should really be scripts for substandard action films. These stories, themselves altered into unbelievability in order to fit the accepted kill-run-repeat format of computer games also detract from the freedom of games design – there must be buttons for shooting, jumping and reloading etc. not leaving much space for innovative game design. It begs the question, have action games really moved on since the Diehard trilogy on the Playstation One?

So the plot conventions stunt our games, and the way games have been designed has twisted plot conventions towards immoral, inhumane and unquestioning murder marathons.

I think I have found the cure.

燃えろ！熱血リズム魂　おす！闘え！応援団２ (Burn! Hot-blooded rhythm soul Go! Fight! Cheerleaders 2)　or Ouendan 2 as it is more practically known, is an epoch making revolution, disguised as a light-hearted rhythm game. You may ask ‘What is so revolutionary about a rhythm game?’ and the answer is that the gameplay alone may not be revolutionary, but this game is more than the sum of its parts. What is special about the gameplay, is that it will make you feel as if the DS was made specifically so Ouendan could come into existence. The interface is so intuitive and immediate that any game that expected you to do something as dull as memorize the buttons on the Playstation controller, now seems more than a little offensive. Here where you hit beats, run along slides and scrabble around spinning wheels as you see them, there is nothing between you and the actual ‘playing’ of the game. There is no need to worry hard-core pwnerers, this game gets very hard. And you can not call yourself a man until you have ‘done’ the cheerleader girls. Literally.

Of course, no one has made an action film about dancing your way to victory (that I know of, but I would seriously love to be corrected on this one), so Ouendan is free from those stylistic hangovers that haunt games so unforgivingingly. This game also frees itself from the ‘kookiness’ of rhythm games like Parappa the Rapper, and the pure plot evasion of DDR, Taiko games, and just about everything else on the rhythm game market. No, Ouendan is a proper story game.

Ouen is the Japanese word for ‘cheer’ as in ‘to cheer someone on’, and the Ouendan of the title are two groups of young hard-as-nails men, who wear uniforms redolent of those preferred by extreme right-wing political parties and gangsters in Japan. What do these suspicious young men do with their time? Car-jack and transport drugs? No. Embark on cop killing crusades, doomed to end in a bitter-sweet blood-spattered last stand when the swat hit the scene? No.

They solve ordinary Japanese people’s oppressively ordinary problems by dancing to J-pop.

In an obvious sideswipe at the current state of computer games, these violent, dangerous looking men take part in the campest of action to solve the smallest of problems. At first, the extreme ordinariness of the stories may seem silly; ‘I have to help a high school girl organise a choir club? Why?’, but as your hyperbole and cliché frazzled brain slowly accustoms to the game, you will care about and believe in these characters more than 500 hundred identikit fantasy worlds on the brink of destruction.

Continuing the theme of breaking the stale computer game blueprint, these stories are all exemplary pieces of moral correctness. Objectively. With every level, your heart will weep tears of joy (well, tears of blood, probably, but Joyful ones.) to have finally found a game that lets you do right again and again. The Ouendan use their cheer-leading skills only for good, bringing nothing but happiness. And as wanky as that sounds, it feels really good. Help a Sumo wrestler win matches so that his sponsorship money can support an orphanage? YES! Protect Japan from a rampaging Godzilla-sized kitten by building a giant robot which will challenge the feline fiend to a game of Chinese chess? YES! YES! One game has you help a young werewolf hide his canine side so he can share a successful date with a girl he likes. However, you are helping him to build a relationship on lies. Never fear! When you succeed, a deus ex machina kicks in, the guy reverts to wolf form, and the girl accepts him as he is! YES! YES! YES!

Obviously, some of the stories do slip into the supermundane, but they do it with a style and charm that I have not witnessed in computer games in years. People may argue that the connection between music and story is spurious, but when is the last time that you solved anything by picking up some heavy weaponry and murdering armies of evil people with bad AI? That is right, never. And how many times have you been cheered on by great songs at times of trouble? Probably a few more times. The music is absolutely spot-on throughout the game, and from what I have seen of the track list for the Western conversion, Elite Beat Agents, it kicks the SHIT out of our attempt.

This game has broken games down, and built them up again from the beginning. Instead of dropping you in a clichéd world that you have to save despite not really loving, this game instead concentrates on showing you how to love the world. And once you have cheered these believable people on through their very human hopes and dreams, if the world were to come under threat, it would be something you would feel a real passion for fighting to save...

When Edge gave this game eight out of ten, at first I accepted that, as a very high score for Edge. But to be honest, I was wrong. a critic can not simply decide the value of a game, he must observe themes that it is trying to express, and the success with which it achieves its goals. Ouendan 2 is a ten out of ten game. We should not accept Edge’s scoring scheme, whereby the maximum possible score is eight out of ten, unless it is a Zelda game, which will get nine out of ten irrespective of whether it is any good or not. Edge holds on to that number ten for some mythical game-to-end-all-games. Well, Ouendan is the opposite. It is a new beginning for games. Developers take note, and don’t fucking waste it.

Ps. Once more, you can download the soundtrack to Ouendan 2 here

Pokemon

I have said before that I do not really feel qualified to talk about the new Pokemon games, as I have not really played deep enough into my copy of diamond to warrant it, and even if I had, my experience of the series as a whole is next to nonexistent. Oh happy chance it is then, that I have friends better qualified than I. I will shut up, and let Max do the talking.


Pokemon - the thinking man's chess

Pokemon is one of the best game franchises in the world. It is. No, it IS.
I am very, very good at the Pokemon games, partially because they directly reward obssessive behaviour. The more you battle your Pokemon, the higher their levels, the more opposing Pokemon Trainers you can gleefully trash. But there's more to Pokemon than cutesy animations and hour upon hour of ceaseless battle.

Pokemon's great strength lies in the fact that it is more multi-faceted a game than any other out there - there are just so many ways to play it. Of course there's the narrative to play through, which combines compelling characters with increasingly apocalyptic plots. In Pokemon Red, Blue and Yellow you were battling bring down a criminal organisation called Team Rocket. In Gold, Silver and Crystal, Team Rocket regrouped and set about kidnapping and dissecting and selling parts of Pokemon. In Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald you had to stop Team Magma and Team Aqua from destroying the world. In Diamond and Pearl you are battling to stop Team Galaxy from destroying the space-time continuum. For a supposed "children's game", it's all pretty heavy stuff.

There are also Pokemon Contests, in which your Pokemon has to perform to a crowd and appeal to a panel of in-game judges in one of five categories: cool, beauty, cute, tough or smart. These are a science in themselves, and there are players who take enough pleasure out of them to spend most of their time in the game competing against each other and the in-game opponents. Then there are gamers that spend most of their time breeding, in which you can exercise unprecedented control over a Pokemon's stats, natures and move-set and provide such an edge that no serious battler would dream of competitively using a Pokemon they hadn't hatched themselves.

Increasingly, games are filled to splitting with different modes and unlockable treats, but invariably these are just add-ons - they're not woven into the fabric of the game-world. All the aspects of Pokemon I've mentioned are not different modes with the same game mechanics and ideas behind them, they are literally different ways to experience the world of Pokemon, and each has an effect on the others. As the graphical capabilities of the consoles increase, sports sims and racing games are touted as being more "immersive" than anything seen before, and yet Nintendo have managed to create a game that is more genuinely immersive than any of those in Pokemon. And they've done that by creating a believable world. The concept of Pocket Monsters that fight each other may be ludicrous, but if you take their existence as assumed then the world that they would inhabit would almost certainly be the one depicted in the games. For example, the beginning of Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald saw your character moving house, and the moving company consisted mainly of Machokes to move the large, heavy furniture around. Thinking about it, it's obvious that it would - if they existed then that's one of the things they'd be doing. People need help moving their furniture. The creators of Pokemon seem to have considered the impact that the existence of Pokemon would have on every aspect of life and the world, from transport (where you can fly on bird Pokemon or surf on water Pokemon) to electricity grids (powered by Voltorbs), from lighthouses (each with it's own Ampharos) to cooking (over heat generated by Slugmas). They've not been afraid to depict the mundane or practical applications of Pokemon, and that completeness is what makes the world of Pokemon so immersive and so compelling.

Pokemon is seen as a children's game, even by some of my closest friends, but that's because they are RISIBLE FOOLS who don't take the time to properly look at a game, or dismiss them just because they have cartoon monsters. If you think that different elemental types being super effective against others is the extent of battling, and that chatting to sparingly animated Pokemon Professors is the extent of character interaction, and that Pokemon Contests can be written of as pandering to Japanese fangirls because they have a competition catagory labelled "Cute", then that doesn't mean that Pokemon is a child's game, it means that you are a child.
Superficially, the demographic that Pokemon is aimed at are children, but to say that it's a "child's game" is derisive and patronising and implies that adolescents or adults can't enjoy or learn from it. There are parts of Pokemon that are quite clearly not aimed at children. For instance, there are moments of clear innuendo in the dialogue at the Veilstone Massage Parlour in Pokemon D/P, the beach in Pokemon R/S/E, and the Viridian Forest in G/S/C. How many children will laugh any of those? Of course, it's the fact that these borderline explicit pieces of dialogue are found in a game most would consider immature that makes it daring and unexpected and ultimately funny. Similarly, the battling mechanics. Most casual gamers get as far as the instruction manual's "fire beats grass, grass beats water, water beats fire" Pokemon battling "strategy". But beneath that is a very complex and even profound system. It's profound enough that the Pokemon community can battle over the Internet and in worldwide tournaments every day of every year for over a decade and still keep inventing new ways of structuring teams, and profound enough that 200 page booklets are being written just on potential movesets and tactics. My best friend and I have studied Pokemon Battling strategy for a long time now and we know a lot of stuff, a hell of a lot of stuff. A volume of stuff that would make many people out there seriously reconsider their friendship with us if they knew.

Over the many years and the four generations of Pokemon games I've clocked up over 500 hours of gameplay, and I'm proud to say that I still haven't seen it all and it's still fun enough to keep me up at night. How many of your "adult" driving games can do that?

Max the Felicitous

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorny

The stench of death fell over me like a wave. Well, it would have, if a wave could fall out of a closet, with blood all over that cute little white number that she was wearing last time I met her. McCain was scum, with means and a motive. But no matter how down and dirty he was, that didn't stop him from being a two bit microwave-chip bootlegging sap. And no sap could have done this to my Cindy. Something screamed 'set-up'. And it wasn't just McCain, who certainly screamed 'set-up' as I left him in his cell downtown. No, there was more to this, and I was gonna get to the bottom, as sure as oil in salad dressing. French style vinaigrette dressing. Not Cesar's, or that mayonnaise based stuff.

Why am I indulging in my favorite pastime of stretching metaphors long past the point where they lose their elasticity, like a pair of well-loved old boxers, stretched around a beer belly that you can not acknowledge by throwing them away, and stained with the confusion of a hundred readers? I'm celebrating something that the video games has been missing since Max Payne; the simile-slinging, hard-punning underdog detective.

Do you remember the nineties? Because I don't, grandad. They were over by the time I was fifteen. Ha! However, I do remember buying loads of outdated nineties games to play on my awful home-made PC. There was a whole army of point and click noir-styled detective games referencing everything noir from Raymond Chandler to Bladerunner.

The Phoenix Wright series is something of a spiritual successor to those detective games, having the same clue gathering, witness grilling, wisecracking set-up at its heart. However, this time, you do not just catch the bad guy, you get to drag him through the courts, and pound him with the evidence you have gathered.

This style of game can hardly be described as a 'game' - it is a very closed system, with 'right' answers at every step, and you have to achieve this steps in a prescribed order. (Japanese-made 'point-and-clicks' are known to be even more firmly 'on rails' than western ones) It works a little like a choose your own adventure. What it is that drags the the player into an incredibly immersing experience then, is the brilliant writing.

Each character is beautifully realised, with their own quirks of speech and behaviour, and their own emotions; even a side-character in Ace Attorney is more fully written than the average modern computer game hero. The rival lawyers you love to hate slowly become sympathetic as the game progresses, and the criminals, even if they can not be forgiven, can always be understood. The dialogue is genuinely witty, and often had me laughing out loud.

You may have read my previous whinging, and remember that these days, I rarely complete games. However, I completed the second game in the Phoenix Wright series in two weeks, even though it was my exam revision period. Now, for a hardcore gamer like me to chose Phoenix Wright over anything else when my gaming time was so limited, must mean something. Basically, it exemplifies the power of good writing in games. I kept playing to see what would happen next, and to hear (read) more of my favourite characters' amusing vergiberations. Now I am not a particular advocate of 'nu-casual-gaming'; I would prefer to see the games market expanding in every direction, without losing anything we have come to love already. However, a game like Phoenix Wright has a very far reaching lesson. If good writing can do so much for a game, why do we accept less? Why is it okay for developers to hire uninterested hacks to populate our games with uninteresting two-dimensional characters (Hell, we can see them in 3D!) and wooden dialogue?

Writing like that found in Phoenix Wright should not just be found in 'story games' - most games purport to have a story of some form or other, and I think it is no longer satisfactory for that story to be poorly written. I remember how the creators of Fahrenheit made such a fuss over the idea that a game's plot could take influence from cinema. It is a pity that particular game took its influence from awful cheesy Hollywood thrillers. While it was commendable that the game makers wanted to show that a game could inspire the emotions of a film, it is sad that those emotions were the standard array of boredom and embarrassment inspired by the cliches of Hollywood. The fact is, there is a wide world full of writing out there, and it is about time games considered themselves part of that world.

The eternal joys of heaven pt. 2

When the DS first materialised, I was sceptical. Perhaps it is only a stunted imagination, but I could not picture how a stylus and touch-screen might sustain a games platform for its entire lifetime. I had a similarly unconvinced moment when the details of the Wii were first released.

It was the actuality of the Wii that convinced me to give the DS a try. The Wii controller still stuns me. It is robust enough to be flung about with force for Wii tennis, yet sensitive enough to detect small movements, like zooming in with a sighted weapon in Red Steel. Completely unable to guess at the science, I am convinced that if you were to open a Wii controller, it would be empty. Do not question it, just believe.

So I was made proselyte by Nintendo’s crazy science. However, as I hope to go to Japan next year, it does not make sense to buy a television based console. Despite this, the idea of being left behind by current gen consoles makes me feel ashamed and afraid. The portable, region-free DS seemed like a perfect compromise. And should that dirty little old-school twitch arise, I still have a copy of Doom 2 on GBA port. Boom! Head shot!

First, a quick look at the machine. Mine is a DS lite, the sleek little black number. I was warned that the black version is particularly susceptible to smudges and finger marks, but frankly, I could not care less. The stylus is a little bit of a worry; I have already lost one as I fell asleep during a Phoenix Wright marathon. But, hey, that was kind of my fault. Yes, GBA cartridges do jut out of the machine, but that just goes to show how much bigger and clunkier the original DS was all the time. The button layout is that of a Super NES controller, and is therefore as warm and comforting as the foetal position. The buttons are pretty close, but serious cramps are only incurred with control systems that combine extensive stylus/button combinations.


People moan that the DS’ power does not match up to the Sony PSP. To be honest, with two processors (each comparable to the one in the SNES) providing 2D graphics for each screen, and a third, (comparable to that of the N64) handling 3D graphics and sound, I would argue that there is quite a bit of oomph for developers to play with. It has just been organised in a different way to the macho ‘as many polygons as possible, on a tiny screen’ outlook of the PSP.

And that, for me, seems to explain Nintendo’s approach for both the Wii and the DS. The boobs in Dead or Alive on the Xbox 360 seem like a good indicator of the current state of gaming. When I was sixteen, I loved boobs. I still do, god help me, and there is a pasty sixteen-year-old in me that is overjoyed to see how the world has moved on from Chun-li’s pixelated mammaries to glorious 3D monsters that respond to gravity with unreal bouncing hyperactive joy. It is because of this part of me that developers target the sixteen-year-old misanthrope in all of us, and the graphics get nicer, the engines get tweaked, but the bigger our hypothetical girl’s boobs get, the more she looks like a cheap stripper.
Graphics as boobs - cunning metaphor or lame excuse to show this?

At the grand old age of twenty, it has already occurred to me that as much as I like boobs, they are probably not the be all and end all. (Or perhaps I have just learnt to admit that I will never find a pair of porn-star tits that are attached to a girl that will have me, but that is an argument for another day.) I would rather compromise on a kind, clever girl whose boobs are merely nice, with a good personality. And the DS has a good personality.

Those of you who want nothing more than to see once fun, now boring games like GTA and Halo get bigger and better are fated to remain forever sixteen, playing Dead or Alive and wanking. Metaphorically and literally. Stand aside, because some of us are ready to take Nintendo by the hand, and grow up with them.

The games industry has been talking about the need to expand their reach to a wider market for years. And when Nintendo is the first company to bite the bullet and admit this might alienate hardcore gamers, all the pussies who did not make the move (and the money) first start bitching about the specs.

Yes, I do worry that I might have trouble reconciling that corner of me that is hardcore with Nintendo’s new simplicity ethic. Yet to be brutally honest, I have not completed a game in some time. The last game I managed to get all the way through was We Love Katamari, and I could hardly imagine that the pwner is shaking in his pro-gaming boots. I could, like everyone else who has out-grown their games, lie, and say it is because my time is limited. Bullshit. When I was a kid, school took up nearly all my time, and my N64 was at my dad’s, who I only visited on weekends. I spent all week thinking about the Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye, and on the weekends I would play instead of sleep, and feel sick on Monday. I made time.

No, the real reason that Katamari is the last game I mastered is because it was genuinely different, the simple mechanic did not require constant practice, and it had a genuinely amusing post-modern sense of humour.

We love Katamari -nothing to do with boobs. Literally.

The DS and Wii are aimed at people who are not satisfied with playing the same fps, with better graphics, over and over. The cool thing is that by buying one of these less ‘powerful’, unorthodox consoles, you are implicating a willingness to explore other aspects of games. This is the message sent to the developers, who must be taking note of Nintendo’s all conquering sales figures. Therefore, developers working on these consoles feel free to get experimental with their games – the market has already shown that it is willing to consume products that are not simple Halo remakes when everyone bought a DS. (Forty million DS sales world-wide.)

When I first got the DS, those hardcore instincts kicked in, and my first game purchase was Metroid Prime Hunters. Despite the fact that I had bought the console in anticipation of the weird and wonderful I felt the need to ‘try the system out’ with a fps. To be honest, the game is pretty technically impressive. Also, the stylus operates like a mouse would for a PC based fps, in what is probably the best console-based fps control system I have ever seen. However, the game is a little lacking in character. The multiplayer is a really important aspect, and is initially very impressive, playing along the lines of a stripped-down Unreal Tournament. However, it lacks the gloriously tactile weaponry of UT, as the weapons are basically all variations on a laser beam. Compare the joy of the physics and timing of the UT rocket launcher with the lacklustre missiles that Samus utilises. The alien power-suit setup is also unimpressive. Where is the joy that UT afforded when you turned your opponent into a mush of bouncing, blood spurting chunks of cat food? Most of the multiplayer gaming sessions I have been part of quickly moved on to Bomberman and Mario Kart.

Metroid - Underwhelming

Which, by the way, are amazing multiplayer games. The way the DS works like a LAN match, only requiring one game for multiplayer is incredible. Remember how many of the defining gaming moments were social ones? Four people sharing SNES controllers to play Micro Machines. Genuine fights over accusations of ‘screen watching’ in Goldeneye (solved by the LAN-esque setup of the DS). Trust me, five people scuttling around the dual-screens of Bomberman is quite an experience. On the subject, there has been a lot of animosity regarding the necessity of friend codes to play online. Admittedly, this is probably largely because Nintendo are worried about unsavouries and paedos online (or more pointedly, they are worried about what cash haemorrhaging parents are worried about) but I do not find the idea of friend codes such a big problem. It is much more fun to play against your friends then against some random American geek who knows all the spawn spots, and therefore wipes the floor with you, exclaiming ‘lol! Noob! Fag!’ all the while. I think we should be encouraged to view games as part of our real social lives, instead of raping strangers in Second Life, and making up for a lack of social skills by forming guilds in WOW. (‘Basically, WOW is, like, the gay.’) I like the idea that I will be able to destroy my friends at Mario kart from any where on earth, and know exactly who it is that is crying at the other end of the world. Max.

When I lightened up and began to buy games about Doctors and Lawyers, I really began to realise that the DS is the future. More on the marvels I have found later.

(Thanks for the proof-read go to Max and Giorgio from shakebeforereading.com)