Bulletstorm: The Audiobook Adaptation
What’s this? Bulletstorm as an Audiobook…
May contain traces of dick.
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Review: Donkey Kong Country Returns
Reviewed ennui. Developed by Retro Studios. Published by Nintendo
So it must be time for controller1.com’s annual review of a Wii game. This year, it’s Donkey Kong Country Returns, brought to us not by Rare but by Retro (formerly makers of Metroid). A spiritual follow-up to the beloved SNES games produced by Rare during their ascendancy, DKCR is a 2.5D side scrolling platformer in the vein of New Super Mario Bros from 2009. Wii-mote held sideways? Yes. Lots of shaking the controller? Yes. Superguide in case you suck too much? Yes.
You’re Donkey Kong and you’re pissed off with the world. You just want to run left to right; jump over things; pound on the ground to destroy nearby objects or daze enemies and most importantly, collect bananas. You’re a big ape and there’s a little monkey on your back some of the time. Just like in the original SNES titles, you can have Jr. on your back. He gives you a little jet pack boost when you’re in the air for some additional maneuverability but if you take too many hits, he leaves you in peace albeit a peaceful state involving greater vulnerability for yourself. The fucker.
In addition to the standard platformer moves, you can occasionally cling to some grass covered surfaces, blow candles out by shaking the controller and be fired from one barrel cannon to another. You go from point A to point B, but in various ways and with various exploratory detours to collect bonus booty. Your rhinoceros pal is back, ready to charge the hell out of anything that gets in your way and smashing through rock barriers like an asteroid at a polystyrene sales conference. Every now and then DK has to take a ride in his hard to control rocket barrel, avoiding oncoming obstacles with all of the precision of a demented, inebriated ant. And of course, the evil genii at Retro have revived the mine cart levels. Evil, evil men and women.
How does it play? It starts off fairly gently. Then it gets harder than whatever the hardest thing in the world is these days. Which, funnily enough, turns out to be this game. So with that in mind, if you get too sick of constantly dieing over and over and over and over again, you get the option to have Super Kong run through the level and beat it for you. And of course, once you done that, there’s no point in playing the rest of the game since it’s unlikely get any easier. It gets harder and harder as you progress, and then you realise that you aren’t progressing and so you send in Super Kong. And then you come to the conclusion that YOU aren’t the one progressing through the game anymore and so you eject the disc, put it back in the case and list it on eBay.
It looks and sounds good for a Wii title with cartoon art style and a silky smooth 60 fps frame rate. It also has a lot of the same memorable tunes associated with DK (one of which goes all the way back to the first game in the arcade). You do get a lot of warm nostalgia glow for your cash with this game.
It’s a quality title, especially if you like games with a high difficulty level and fairly punishing gameplay. 2D fans will love what’s on offer here. I’m only marking it down because having the computer play the game for you is not a substitute for balancing the game better.
Controller1.com rating 2/3
Video: The King’s Flatulence
Hey- The King’s Speech is an awesome movie. I found it inspirational as I too have a speech defect (it’s called an Australian accent).
Not game related but hey…
The Podcats- Books
Jane Austen’s Videogame Book Club
since Frostback asked-
Power Up (may be out of print)
Ultimate History of Video Games
and in researching these links found another book that may shed more light on Nintendo- Nintendo Magic. I have yet to read it so YMMV
Uncloaking the Xbox 360 and Opening the Xbox
Review: Medal of Honor
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3, PC. Developed by Danger Close (single player, DICE (multiplayer. Published by EA.
After Saving Private Ryan was released in 1997, Steven Spielberg hadn’t yet gotten WWII out of his system. A gamer as well as adirector, he helped found Dreamworks Interactive to make games like Medal of Honor for the original Playstation. FPS’s had never really taken off on the PSX but the first MoH showed you could make a pretty good shooter on the hardware, even if the Germans looks more like Autons than Teutons. Both MoH and it’s first sequel, MoH: Underground were well received at the time and it is these games that laid the foundations for a franchise. Unfortunately for EA, that franchise just happened to be Call of Duty…
Several things happened. MoH was a hit so EA absorbed Dreamworks Interactive, then gave Medal of Honor to 2015 for them to make a PC game and the result was MoH: Allied Assault, which is still recognised as the series’ peak. After AA, several of the team left to found Infinity Ward making the original Call of Duty and the rest is history (and we know history repeats like a bad taco). Medal of Honor, as a franchise, floundered (as did 2015 who made a poorly received shooter Men of Valor and promptly disappeared like Amelia Earhart) through an ill-advised and badly executed foray into the Pacific Theatre; then slowly attempted to rebuild with various console titles such as European Assault and Airborne, all of which tried to alter the classic formula with promises of less scripted levels and open worlds; before we arrived back at Medal of Honor, now set in the present and so thoroughly copying Modern Warfare that it makes Dante’s Inferno look like an outstandingly original piece of art with no basis in God of War.
Ok, so you know how to play CoD right? Well close your eyes at the loading screens and pretend it is. It’s not hard and that’s obviously what EA were going for. The result is a CoD game that is locked at 30 frames per second on consoles (unlike the acyual CoD games) and using Unreal Engine 3 for single player and DICE’s own Frostbite engine for multiplayer though you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. So apart from temporal resolution, it still looks and plays like CoD.
You play as various soldiers in Afghanistan. Like Black Ops, you generally have someone with you for most of the game telling you what to do at each and every turn. Listen to his advice and be glad it’s not Sam Worthington. While the controls and missions are much like CoD, one thing is missing from most of the game and that’s the hyperbole and hysteria that the action in single-player CoD is now all about. Less bro, more schmo. MoH has its intense firefights but they really don’t get to the level of the latest from Activision (though they try). But while this lack of constant intensity is a nice change, it also means the game doesn’t have a tension that other slower shooters like older Ghost Recon games had. It’s like playing CoD on mute. It’s just missing that spark.
I did have fun with the single player as a sharp relief to the over the top wall of enemies I experienced in Black Ops but it seems for all of EA’s hype before the game’s release (a game they seem to be publicly disowning now), things like enemies facing the wrong way and other rough edges with presentation lead you to conclude it’s missing some of CoD‘s spit and polish as well a the charm. It has beards but so do the Taliban Opposing Force combatants so in some missions it’s often hard to know who you actually are shooting. To mix things up there are some turret levels, helicopter gunners and the like and occasionally you get to site weapons for air support, but this doesn’t give you much of a thrill since it’s doled out fairly regularly.
As I received my copy the day after Black Ops was released (I’m not using Zavvi again for anything I’m busting to play), multiplayer was a ghost town of 30 fps CoD-lite. It’s been described as being part way through DICE’s own Battlefield games and CoD. No, it’s CoD. It was good but with no one to play against it was a bit sad since the multiplayer was probably the strongest part of the package from what I could see. I played a decent game with the three others and I think they must be desperate for people to play against (I received friend requests from all three afterwards). Listen guys, never talk about marriage on the first date!
The graphics are mostly good and the sound is great but at the end of the day this is one of EA’s most egregious examples of “Hey let’s make a competitor to the market leader and just copy them exactly without offering anything new ourselves.” It’s an opportunity squandered as the talent was there but I get the feeling the pressure from above was just to remove anything that would scare off CoD fans.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with MoH. Multiplayer is a bust not because it’s bad but because it’s got less life in it that King Tut’s cat. The single-player (which is not all that long) may entertain you but you’d want to be getting this game supremely cheaply (ie when it comes down to Brutal Legend levels)
Controller1.com rating 1/3
Now Playing: Donkey Kong Country Returns, Floods
I’ve finally managed to bust out DKCR on the Wii. My average of one Wii game a year continues unless I decide to pick up Goldeneye at some some stage on the cheap. I’m currently enjoying the hell out of it though I can see how I’m going to find it incredibly frustrating down the track much in the same way I found New Super Mario Brothers similarly frustrating back in 2009. One measly checkpoint in the middle of a level may not counter the fun to play levels.
It’s colourful and vibrant too look at, sounds wonderful and plays like the older game, but more fluidly. It’s like if in the first Back to the Future, Marty McFly had scored with Lorraine after all. I still don’t get very far whenever I try to play the original I bought through WiiWare. But I just sat and played through the whole first world in or DKCR this morning.
I was holding off on playing DKCR for a few reasons. One, I was too involved with Fallout New Vegas and BLOPS on PC but those single player campaigns are now finished. I still had Medal of Honor and Enslaved to play on 360 but MoH has also been finished and Enslaved just isn’t enough fun to make me keep playing. Lastly, my 46″ Samsung HDTV has a small issue with it. It doesn’t switch on immediately (it will eventually activate after about 5 minutes of trying to switch on by itself) and I’m expecting it to be carted off for repair under warranty (once things locally get back into swing). The plan was to cart out one of the older CRTV’s in the spare room to play DK in SD.
So floods. Lots of rain. It has been fairly wet here for several months, much more than usual for the time of year. Brisbane is split in two by the Brisbane River and it’s this river that has flooded many suburbs near to the river and parts of the Central Business District.
Now the last time we had floods of a similar magnitude was in early 1974, when I was just a few months old. My parents lived in a low lying area not far from the river and their house WA swamped. They lived in a typical house in that area- older, wooden single story cottages, but raised about eight feet off the ground. You would park your car underneath and maybe your laundry appliances. My parents tell stories of having hearing the floating washing machine bounce against the floorboards, which signalled to them it was time to get out. After those floods, my parents and most of their relatives who lived in nearby suburbs all moved to the newer housing developments on the southside, a long way from the river. There had been flood mitigation works carried out by governments for years yet we flooded again, almost as badly (but probably not as bad as it would have been had those mitigation works not been carried out).
So I and most of my family are some way from the flood affected areas though my wife has not been able to go to work in the city due to the flooding. As far as I know most of my friends are unaffected. One thing I have to say, there doesn’t appear to be a lot to criticise about the way our governments have handled the situation. Our State Premier, who was considered highly unpopular before this event has shown her worth as being compassionate and on top of things. Our Prime Minister, on the other hand, is a robot and hasn’t done her reputation any favours by spouting the same platitudes over and over.
Julia Gillard, Australia’s first Fembot Prime-Minister, surveys the flood damage from a safe distance lest she short circuits
On the brighter side, the TV coverage has provided us with a drinking game by their constant use of the same few words OVER AND OVER again. Now, everyone is going to use, misuse, overuse, abuse and misspell the words inundate and vision (as in ” we now have vision from the scene” ie- video footage).
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