21st Century Digital Boy

Take that, bitches

So I bought Tomb Raider: Anniversary recently. On the Wii. After they heard about that, friends of mine mentioned that Eurogamer slagged it very bad. I was worried for a bit, until I actually played the game.

I’ve played to about halfway through the Egypt episode now, and I’m afraid I’ll have to be a dick and disagree with Mrs. Gibson’s rather controversial statements such as

As for the Wii version… I never thought it would come to this, but here we are: I’d rather play Angel of Darkness.

or

The shooting in TRA Wii just doesn’t work. The remote is ridiculously sensitive; the blue dot on the screen jiggles nervously even when your hand is absolutely still.

I’ll have to agree on the point that the cursor does jiggle a fair lot - however, for all I can tell the wiimote is no more sensitive than in any other game. The difference, and a very noticable one at first, is that the cursor movement isn’t “smoothed out”. You know what I mean - most Wii games smooth the movement of the cursor to prevent the “jiggling” that Ellie describes. TRA doesn’t, which feels weird at first, but I’ve actually come to like it, possibly even better than the heavy smoothing most Wii games (Mario Galaxy, for example) apply - if only because the cursor doesn’t feel “laggy” this way.

Either way, I honestly don’t see where this causes problems with the game, since there is a rather heavy aiming assistance for everything involving the cursor. If you lock on to an enemy or target, the camera will (usually) keep them on the screen, leaving you with the task of dodging their attacks and pointing the cursor within a rough 10cm distance of them so you can hit them. The same holds true for shooting targets, with the exception that those don’t move around.

Now I haven’t played the 360 or PS2 versions of TRA, but I have honestly not had any problems at all with the controls in the Wii version. Nor the camera, for that matter - the camera can be turned with the cursor when holding C (the upper nunchuck button). Much like the lack of cursor smoothing, this feels a bit odd at first but works surprisingly well, giving you full control over the camera on a console that doesn’t have a secondary analog stick to control it with. Moreover, if you hold C and Z on the nunchuck, you get freelook AND target highlighting, which is excellent for scanning your surroundings for stuff to shoot. Aside from enemies sometimes passing behind objects and the camera not turning quite fast enough to keep up with them when they run past you, I have yet to experience any of the camera issues described in the Eurogamer review. Much like in Legend, the camera pretty much always helpfully turns to show you where you’re supposed to go next.

They ruined [the T-Rex battle] in the first versions of Anniversary with the bright lighting and the boring cut-scene and the Quick Time Event nonsense… It’s the same in the Wii version, except instead of pressing buttons you wave the remote and Nunchuk as directed. It feels silly.

I’ll actually go and say that unlike Ellie, I really like the gimmicky added Wii controls - such as having to tilt the wiimote backwards to pull levers or holding the nunchuck and wiimote facing each other and pulling them down to pull levers with handles, or having an “off hand” grappling hook activate with a flick of the nunhuck - thus not requiring you to move your fingers to another button in mid-jump. The rhythmic button pressing from Legend is also back in slightly modified shape. Instead of mashing A, you flick the nunchuck back and forth to speed up climbing, swimming or shimmying - a motion that long-term fans of the series should have little problem making while gaming.

What, did you think I could write about a Tomb Raider game without making a joke like that?

My main gripe with the “added” “puzzles” in the Wii version is that their implementation is rather… hamfisted. It’s the same two basic puzzles (a Lights Out!-style switch puzzle and a Connect-The-Gears puzzle), which would be fine if they hadn’t just done three variants/default setups on each and put the clue/item needed to solve them right bloody next to the puzzle itself. A bit more effort with this would have gone a fairly long way - just simply spreading the gears to pick up out a bit further, or moving the hint two rooms ahead instead of mounting it conveniently next to the puzzle mechanism, just, you know, things to make it seem less like they just carved out a niche and dropped Puzzle Prefab #2 into it in their level editor.

The graphics are as good as those in the PS2 game, though there’s a disgraceful amount of frame-dropping going on.

Again, an issue I can’t really say I noticed. I haven’t played the PS2 version so I can’t make adequate comparisons about the graphics, but I don’t really notice any significant slowdowns. The game doesn’t run at 60fps, but the framerate has been almost exclusively solidly playable for me so far. The only point where I did experience notable slowdowns was the Damocles chamber. I don’t quite see why, since there’s not an incredible amount of detail here, but I’m going to guess that it’s the sheer size of the room that makes the Wii sweat a bit.

All in all, I can only summarise that while the “problems” described in the Eurogamer review are indeed all present and in the game, I feel that their impact on the game is heavily exaggerated (if I’d even consider them to be a problem at all). Despite what the review says, I feel that the Wii version of Tomb Raider Anniversary, too, is an excellent re-imagining of an excellent game, and it’s refreshing to see a multiplatform game actually have some differences on a platform that’s different from others without completely redesigning it. It could’ve done with a bit more work put into the added puzzles, but doesn’t suffer too much.

So I was at Bloodstock Open Air last week and had crazy amounts of fun. The Korpiklaani moshpit was FUCKING EPIC, big <3 to all involved. Happy Little Boozer and Beer Beer in particular were glorious. Pretty much my other favourite band of the weekend was Finntroll - even though their show wasn’t quite what I’d hoped it would be and the sound mixing was a bit eh (the keyboarder could just as well have been absent for some of the songs). Trollhammaren in particular was great fun in the moshpit and soiled one of my two pairs of jeans with mud. After they played that, the front guy asked the audience if there were any requests, and some guy from the moshpit just shouted “PLAY TROLLHAMMAREN AGAIN!”. Awesome :D

Two bands I really really liked there in spite of not specifically going for them were In Flames and Beholder, the latter having played cover versions of Soil, Metallica, Pantera, some weird country-ish stuff and god knows what else in the bar tent Thursday night. They also managed to blow one of the amps within the first two songs they played, and their front guy is great and definitely knows how to instigate a good moshpit.

What I didn’t like at all was the mixing on the main stage, particularly on Thursday and early Friday. Scar Symmetry barely had any vocals and no lead guitar for the first two songs, and Testament had no lead guitars for a while as well. Nevertheless, particularly the bands I mostly came for were utterly glorious, and if the lineup for next year gets good enough I’ll most definitely head up there again. In spite of the upped ticket price.

Much <3 also to J and G and their spouses for the lift, Saturday night accommodation and putting up with me for three days. Thanks folks, it was awesome and I’m looking forward to (hopefully) doing the festival again with you next year :D

[edit] Also, there was this guy: Finntroll Moshpit Hero. Must’ve been hell to get all of that mud back out of the furs, too. [/edit]

COMPLETELY UNRELATEDLY, I love Bioshock. My copy arrived a day early and I’ve basically spent the last two nights playing until my eyes bled. I also really like Space Giraffe, in spite of the somewhat messy visuals. A few more very very short reviews of games I’ve recently played a lot:

Crackdown: I am a goddamn VIKING. Who throws cars at Mexican gang members. What’s not to love?

Lost Planet: The cutscenes are gorgeous (even though the plot is rather hamfisted), and carrying mecha chainguns around to shoot giant alien bugs with is badass.

Chibi-Robo: This is more or less what Katamari could have become had it been sponsored by iRobot. I like the style, childish as it may be.

Red Steel: I still haven’t figured out if this game is cheesy on purpose or not. However: Raving Rabbids samples and slowmo gunplay.

Earth Defence Force 2017: Giant ants. Missile launchers that fire 20 shots per second. Two-player coop play. Collateral Motherfucking Damage.

That’s all for now, I think. Time for more Bioshock.

QTTabBar (XP, Vista) is a freeware addon for Windows Explorer which adds tabs, a quick search bar, a drop-down menu for navigating subdirectories, preview tooltips for various image formats, a customisable application launcher and god knows what else. Really, really nice little thing. The only thing I don’t quite like is that there’s no option to have its toolbar display small icons and text labels (or text labels at all). Other than that, it’s nice and quick and offers some really nice options to improve Explorer’s handling.

In other news, I recently bought the Naki Ultimate Fighting Stick off eBay since this seems to be the only not completely shit arcade stick available for the Xbox. It boasts an impressive feature set by working with both the Xbox and PS2, having vibration motors and even two analogue “trackballs” that can be used as analog sticks on both consoles. It’s also wireless, running on a mere three AAA batteries.

Fighting Game Nerds over on the shoryuken.com forums stated that the buttons and stick on this thing were terrible, which worried me a bit - and, as it turns out, they weren’t quite wrong. The stick has a fairly large range of movement and the buttons feel a bit mushy, but it’s decent enough if you’re not an uber precision/speed geek. What bothers me the most is that the buttons don’t click as nicely as the ones on most other sticks. That aside, the above-linked thread also mentions that the parts can apparently be replaced with proper arcade-grade gear with not too much effort if you’re so inclined.

Aside from the buttons being somewhat spongy, the only things that bother me slightly are that the shoulder trigger buttons don’t work if the thing is connected to the Xbox (which is forgivable, considering that the triggers on the Xbox gamepad are fully analog) and that the plastic cover on the case hole for the stick is loose. This seems to be common practice though, but something that I consider a minor annoyance. There’s no input lag of note on either the PS or the Xbox, and the general feel and layout of the stick works quite well.

In general, I’m quite happy with this as a 30 quid purchase (including shipping). Being able to play Guilty Gear on my Xbox with a proper arcade stick = yes, and having a second stick around for the Playstation (I already own the official PS1 arcade stick by Asciiware) in case it’s necessary is also a nice thing.

So it seems that most companies were not aware that the new dashboard update for the 360 would bring a revamped Marketplace, including Genre texts for the Games section. I’d seen Amped 3 saying “Sell Text” before, but… well, see for yourself.

So I’ve (re-)discovered a clone of my favourite shmup EVAR not too long ago and figured I should share the love. This game is EXCELLENT. WELL DONE. ACE. KILLER.

Typhoon 2001, being a clone of Tempest 2000 (that being an excellent remake of the 1981 arcade game Tempest by the similarly-excellent Jeff Minter) is about Shooting Stuff That Comes At You Really Really Fast. The game setting consists of a web of corridors floating in Bizarro Space, with starfields that form beautifully symmetric patterns and distant layers of… something. Your blaster, also known as The Claw, is stuck to the upper end of the Web, and Stuff Comes At You Really Really Fast from the other one. That is all the story this game has, and all the story it needs.

You can move around the top and shoot down the corridors of said web to prevent Stuff that’s moving up the corridors from Getting To You And Splattering Your Entrails All Over The Freaking Place. There’s a small(ish) but nasty set of enemies, a few basic standard shmup powerups, many funky colours, a kickass pumping soundtrack… and this.

You are now officially boned.

The no-contest nastiest enemy among what the game throws at you are Pulsars. Yellow, lightning-shaped things that move very quickly and will periodically turn the corridor they’re on into an Electric Path Of Certain Death. Moreover, if you don’t dispatch of the bastard quickly enough, it will reach the upper end of the Web and turn THAT into an Electric Path Of Certain Death. At least the other enemies have the courtesy of just stumbling around the rim trying to chase you down - not so the pulsars. Instant Doom.

I loved Tempest 2000 with all my heart, but was a bit disappointed about it never having received a good clone or remake - and, to be frank, this very one was confusing, completely overloaded on visuals, slow as molasses and generally barely playable at all just about a year or one and a half ago. Massive props to the author for taking it and making this brilliant little piece of freegaming out of it. Just like in Tempest 2000, the graphics manage to be trippy and colourful, but never obscuring what’s going on in the game. Particularly the game’s recreation of T2000’s “particle displays”, which constructs text messages such as scoring numbers and PULSAR WARNING! out of separate dots, is quite brilliant and helps a lot - the concept allows for nice-looking graphical displays that you can still see through, without the need for annoying and boring solid-colour transparency.

So, yeah, if you like arcadey shoot’em’ups, you want to play this. And chances are that you will love it.

Endangered Gamer (via clockwork, Kotaku): god, I’m laughing so hard at this. The invisible coin blocks are sheer and utter brilliance.

Sort of relatedly, this.

This is pretty freaking awesome. Reduced the amount of space I take to store all of these Tesco bags (which I use as trash bags) massively, and they’re easier to get to than “in a large plastic bag below the sink” as well.