controller1.com

Controller1.com FOCUS TEST- RESIDENT EVIL 5

We all have a go of the Resident Evil 5 demo. Is Cam infected? Is Clint really a zombie? If you shave George all over do you get Jill Valentine?

 

 FT RE5: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

RETRO: DAY OF DEFEAT SOURCE

Reviewed on PC. Developed and published by Valve

The original Day of Defeat was a free WWII mod for Half Life and after Counterstrike was one of the few mods to be successful enough to be bought up by the makers of the originating game (as happened with Counterstrike and Left 4 Dead). In 2005, the game was ported with semi upgraded graphics to the Source Engine, though with only 4 maps at launch though others were added intermittently. At some point, spurned on by the success of Team Fortress 2, DoD: S received a mini makeover with a film grain effect and killcams straight out of TF2 (yes Call of Duty did them first but these are literally the same as TF2’s down to the sound effects and the ability to take screenshots). Now you have nemeses and can gain revenge on those who kill you too much.

The game is a really simple class-based game with two teams  (one German,  one American). Most maps are simple capture the flag deals, but with a very fast paced capturing system compared to the eternity it takes to capture a control point in a  Battlefield game. Other maps involve demolishing enemy installations (tanks, anti aircraft guns, etc) but basically its a “shoot and respawn until the map runs out of time” game. There’s a simple, yet deep game here that’s been keeping a loyal band of people still playing in this PC shooter environment ruled by the trio of CoD4, TF2 and L4D. People use grenade launchers and there’s no nasty n00btube comments like there would be in CoD4.

It doesn’t hurt that the Source-engined version of this game is over four years old and will run on almost any PC still in circulation. On a modern machine it looks ok but you may be missing the graphical OMFG you get with Crysis. Call of Duty 1 and 2 were bigger sales successes yet I can’t find a game on my ISP’s servers. There’s that typical Valve feel to the way it works and sounds, with the nasty touch that when you lose a round, the winners have about 10-15 seconds where they can kill any enemies still alive with impunity. Ouch!
So here’s the question- why has there never been a sequel to this and why not a console port? CoD WaW’s success proves there’s still a large market for good shooters, even WWII ones. I guess the new Wolfenstein will just have that Nazi-hunting FPS market to itself this year.

WHY BUY THE SAME CONSOLE TWICE?

Have you ever bought the same piece of hardware twice? Ok, if you owned a  Gamecube and then bought a Wii, then yes, you technically have 2.5 Wii’s.  We all know about PSX’s needing to be stood on its side to work, PS2 drives dying and of course RROD’ing 360’s. But under what circumstances would you rebuy a console you already have?

If you’re  giant Xbox 360 fan, and you don’t want to buy a PS3, what do you do when your launch 360 breaks and there’s no warranty to cover repairs? Do you shell out for a new Arcade unit? Do you pay for repairs? I have yet to have a completely dead console that wasn’t covered by warranty. My PSP 1000 is completely dead though.

I have one game on it I wouldn’t mind playing at some point- God of War: Chains of Olympus. My PSP is now dead dead. I can’t see why I’d drop AU$300 to replace it when I would only be doing so for one game. If my Wii were die,  I’d have just as much of a choice. IE, I wouldn’t bother.  If my PS3 died, I would have to replace it IMMEDIATELY. Last weekend I enjoyed the following movies on Blu Ray: Pirates of  the Caribbean at World’s End, LA Confidential, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Awesome times. Apparently I can play games on it at some point.

My 360 has RRODed twice, but the last fix seems to have taken as the machine has nearly gone 18 months since its 2nd failure. Its working now. There’s currently no reason to replace my launch 360 apart from the fact I’d like HDMI, a quieter DVD drive and a much bigger HDD drive. Reason enough, but I’ve decided to wait until I can be guaranteed to get a ‘Jasper’- the latest hardware revision with supposedly quieter and more reliable hardware.

I have a DS Phat. I haven’t really played it for ages but I entertained the thought of getting a Lite, but by the time the DSi turned up, the DS was dead to me. Considering Nintendo haven’t released a game for me on the DS in years, I think I’ll pass.

How about you? Have you ever bought a console twice and WHAT THE HELL WHERE YOU THINKING?

VAPORWARE: The Plasmaboy

The Plasmaboy, from Plasmablam industries, was gaming’s first attempt to meld 70 inch Plasma screens with portable gaming.

PICTURED- Plasmablam’s first magazine advertisement announcing the Plasmaboy. Billboards featuring this ad were removed after dozens of complaints

Plasmablam industries was a failed manufacturer of Big Screen TV’s whose CEO Richard Ozen famously said “No one needs more than a 480p Plasma screen.” He also went to corner the market, buying up all of the 480p plasma screens coming out of China in the year 2005. After the market moved to 720p as a base minimum resolution, or 1080p, the idea of a 6o inch screen with a low resolution (for the massive size) 480p retailling for $8,000  seemed to be somewhat obsolete.

Attempts to foist the low resolution screens onto emerging markets failed when Ozen saw a magazine comparison of a Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS and hit apon a foolproof way of divesting himself of his inventory of old hat screens. Merging a relatively cheap handheld device and a giant plasma screen seemed a marriage made in heaven.

Screen aside, the system was roughly as powerful as a Nintendo DS with games tendning to be solid, if unremarkable riffs on popular games such as Metris, Furio Kart and So-So Furio Cousins.

Of course, Plasma screens are renown for using a lot of power so children wanting to play the Plasmaboy on a long car ride either had to plug into the optional battery pack (pictured) or run a very very very very very very very long cord to a power socket.

The Plasmaboy, alas, was not a success in the market and what units they did manage to sell only resulted in lawsuits from gamers who did not heed the warning to not rest the unit on the genital area. Plasmaboy is responsible for large numbers of infertile gamers, though funnily enough the birth rate has not been affected in any way.

VIDEO: FISTIANA PWNS and the Raiders of the Last Temple of the Crystal Fridge

Dr Pwns in his latest adventure…

Controller1.com Focus Test: Left 4 Dead

Clint plays L4D for the first time, Cam bitches about a new videogame for neither the first or last time while George *facepalms*

 

 Focus Test L4D: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Game You Play After the Best Game in the World

For those who can’t let go, I have some advice- Let go. Where I work, people regularly use their PC’s to play multiplayer games at lunch and after work at the end of the week. Because the place is so big and stuffed with geeks there are several different games going on around the  building. There’s the WoW fraternity, TF2 players (whose ranks have been thinned recently), Left 4 Dead and CoD4 Modern Warfare. Yesterday we had some interesting conversations on our private CoD4 mailing list and it highlights a problem when you play a good multiplayer game for a long time and tire of, but have no immediate successor lined up.

So these guys have basically played Call of Duty modern Warfare at lunchtimes for over a year. They don’t like CS or TF2 or LEft 4 Dead, they love CoD4. They are very good at it and most are ranked level 55. They also play a mod, so they’ve levelled up using this bot mod only with the bots turned off so they’re basically playing standard CoD4 but one where they can only play against each other if they want to preserve their rankings). This is why its hard to tear away the TF2 guys from their game or WoW players to a new MMO. They’ve invested so much time in the game but are so sick of it but they’ve invested so much time in it but they are so sick of it but, well, you can guess the rest.

So back to this group of CoD lovers. One guy, who’s one of the better players, and the one who wrote the bot mod we played, has basically had enough. I know because I’ve played him on the 360 version as well as the PC- He’s spent more time on that one game than I have on sleeping in the past year by the looks of things. you know the type, complaining about others using the grenade launcher (the n00b tube) So he’s trying to rally the troops into playing something else. So what about Call of Duty World at War? Nope- WWII, buggy, yada yada. Which is funny because he hasn’t played it. Ok, then what?

Operation flashpoint was suggested. The group was all excited but apparently was a colossal let down. I could have told them that. Then Codename:Eagle, apparently a pre EA DICE made this before BF1942. Apparently buggy too so that went down in flames. Its funny, but I’m sure many games have this same dilemma. What do you play when you’re sick of something. I recall years ago, when we played Medal of Honor Allied Assault multiplayer, we moved straight onto Call of Duty (the original). When that grew stale, there was no immediate successor until the UT2004 demo came out. Battlefield Vietnam came out and filled the void for a while but that didn’t last. Eventually someone suggested the original Counterstrike and they went back to that (without me for the most part since CS has never gelled for me). WoW kind of killed the LAN gaming network for a few years (that and some other loopholes being closed by the IT department). Counterstrike source came and went a few times, lots of RTSes and MMo’s and then new FPSes becoming fashionable again amongst theses fairly PC-centric types with CoD4 and TF2 (and then Left 4 Dead).

But the habits are hard to kick. Left 4 Dead took away some of the TF2 players (not all), but CoD WaW has not pulled the CoD4 guys away. I’m guessing that either these dudes will be bringing in CoD2 next week or Battlefield 1942 or BF2. And it won’t last. I reckon give it a month before thy come back to Modern Warfare.

I myself played Left 4 Dead but i found the online wasn’t more fun than SP for me and I kind of lost interest after writing the review. Then I saw on steam my Day of Defeat Source needed an update so I patched it and tried it having not played it since CoD2 came out in late 2005. Well, you can see the TF2/influence now. Film grain effect and killcams straight out of TF2 (same sound effects) but that aside, this is still one of the better fast paced shooters. It has changed so little that I can’t help wondering if these guyus will ever get bored with playing these same maps over and over.

What makes guys play this sort of game over and over so much, even years later? CoD WaW has come out and sold very well, but I find the PC community to be quite small. My ISP is one of the larger server providers and there are only two normal TDM servers for CoD WaW compared to about six to eight for Modern Warfare. Hey, people are still playing Quake III somewhere.

Its hard to let go.

THE SUPER WII

Many of you will know the Wii is basically Gamecube hardware slightly overclocked with more RAM and motion controllers. Its the same way the Super Nintendo is just 14 NES chips sellotaped together and how the XBox 360 consists of six Intellivisions co-habiting. But controller1.com is breaking the news of the next iteration of the Wii. Its THE SUPER WII.

The SWii is being put together at Nintendo HQ in Japan as we speak and is intended to fix all of the percieved mistakes in the Wii Hardware. Features of the SWii include Motionplus controll, a 2 TB hard drive, 16 cores, NVidia graphics, liquid cooling, Blu Ray playback as well as DVD, Video CD, CDI and Laserdisc playback, Xbox Live, backwards compatibility with Wii, Gamecube, Nintendo 64, SNES, NES, Gameboy, DS, Virtual Boy and Radarscope arcade machines.The SWii also has six sensor bars, a 3 x 3 Balance board, 5.1 microphone and 19 megapixel webcam. The motion sensor bars, placed to surround the player, also have a built in body scanner so that your new Mii is now Pixar movie quality.

All SWii games will output resolutions of up to 3200 X 2400 via HDMI and 9.1 surround sound. There is also a credit card reader for built-in microstransactions and the SWiimote jacket is now made of leather.

The pack in Title is still Wii Sports and future games for this console include Wii ports of Mario Tennis and Pikmin

The Price? Well now that Nintendo has the Soccer Moms by the short and Curlies, the 4 SKU range will retail between US $499 and $999 when it is released in Fall 2010.

NEWS: KAZ HIRAI INHALING OWN PRESS RELEASES

Sony Computer Entertainment head honcho Kaz Hirai recently made gaming headlines for some interesting claims made to a Playstation magazine. Despite the fact that worldwide there are over 45 millions Wiis and around 20 million PS3’s and 27 million Xbox 360’s (5 of which are in Japan- gaijin and/or homosexuals obviously). Hirai made the claim “I’d like to think that we continue official leadership in this industry.”

OK?

Children’s Letters To…

Children write letters to Santa, The Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and, in the case of kids whose folks work at EA, John Riccitello.  Sometimes they get a response and sometimes their parents get laid off. This week, the Post Office breaks all privacy laws and ignores any sense of common human decency to show us kids’  letters to their favorite videogame characters.

Metal Gear’s Solid Snake  is one such recipient of children’s adulation, exemplified by nine-year old Mary-Marie Ryan

“Dear Snake,

I have played all of the Metal Gear games ever since the debut of the series on the MSX computers. I recently got Metal Gear 4 and noticed you look quite old. Maybe you should stop smoking before you die? Also, I like cats. Do you like cats?

Mary-Marie”

Solid Snake’s curt response really says it all

“Metal Gear?”

Six- year old Simon Greenblatt wrote to Toad from the Mario games

“Sup Toad?

Dude, what up with you and Peach man?  She be some fine honey, why ain’t you hit that yet?  You scared of Mario?  That fat pipe jockey?  Sheeeeeet son, you got gallons of suave on that spaghetti slurper.  I’ve seen the way she looks at you man, you’re in.  Don’t trip, you and her should rock it with Daisy and I sometime.

Peace!
-Simon B”

Mabel, aged 11 emailed her favourite Street Fight character

“Dear Miss Li

My mum has thighs just like yours. They are very big and muscular. My mom says the doctors says its a thyroid problem and she’s receiving treatment for this condition. I thought you might like to see a doctor in case your Thyroid has a problem like my mom’s big thighs. My dad, who has mysteriously broken his pelvis several times, says its like being with Xenia Onatopp, but I don’t get what he means by that.”

Eight year old Jerry send a letter to his favourite character Vault Boy

“Dear VB,

I very much enjoyed your appearance in Fallout 3. Can I also get Fallout 1 and 2 on my playstation 3? Your adventures have inspired me and every night, I say a prayer hoping a nuclear holocaust will devastate the globe so that I might one day live in a bomb shelter. Either that or join an Emo band and sing songs about death.”

12 year old Tina H writes to Faith from Mirror’s Edge

‘Heya Faith,

I really like that tatoo you’ve got on your face. Its just so stylish and fasionable and I know after having seen my big brother play your game that I want just that look when I go back to school. My mom’s being a real cunt about me getting a tattoo like you’ve got so I put a hot iron on my face, giving myself first degree burns. Do you like Fallout Boy? When I get out of these pressure bandages, I’d like to go see them in concert.

XOXO Tina’

Faith writes back

“Hey, Tina. Its actually just black makeup and I don’t listen to much Fallout Boy. Hope you’re face heals soon

F.”