Available on Gamecube and Playstation 2. Developed by Grasshopper Manufacture.
Here’s an example of a story-based game done right. Killer 7 is a fever dream of a game, comprised of an off-the-wall collection of experimental ideas. Goichi Suda, its writer, designer, and director, deserves the acclaim that this title has brought him. He has made a game that is truly unlike any other. It’s a fine game for action-adventure lovers, but you should try Killer 7 even if you just enjoy a good mindfuck. Killer 7 is not always an easy game to play, or even to understand, but don’t give up on it. It’ll haunt you.
It’s Friday night, and Harman Smith (God) and Kun Lan (the devil) are in the mood for a friendly competition. They take a good look at the world, and see that its nations are at peace, having stamped out terrorism, opened up all trade, and destroyed their nuclear stockpiles. Kun Lan decides that it’s time to introduce a new threat to humanity: the Heaven Smiles, an army of cackling suicide bombers who exist only to inspire fear. In response, Harman takes charge of a mysterious group of assassins called the Killer 7, who are singularly skilled at hunting the Smiles. So begins another turn in the cycle of human history, one that will be marked by many bizarre and terrible events.
THE KILLER 7
Garcian Smith, the front man. He’s the one who takes orders from Harman and missions from the U.S. Government. His silenced pistol is a poor weapon, but he’ll have to risk his neck occasionally to do corpse runs: Garcian is the only one who can recover fallen members of the team and bring them back to life.
Dan Smith, the all-rounder. He’s a cocky and angry fellow in a business suit who hefts a huge revolver. He can “charge” his gunshots to take out even the toughest enemies instantly.
Kaede Smith, a.k.a. Barefoot. Her pistol bears a scope for long-range sniping, and she can open hidden doors by showering them with her blood.
Kevin Smith, the oddball. Kevin is as pale as the moon, he never speaks, and he prefers throwing knives to guns. He can also turn invisible for short periods to sneak past enemies and tripwires.
Con Smith, the kid. Quickness is the name of Con’s game. His automatic pistols fire rapidly, he can sprint at high speed for a short time, and he can squeeze through tiny passages.
Coyote Smith, the thief. Sort of a mix between Dan’s power and Con’s mobility, Coyote can charge his shots, jump onto roofs, and pick padlocks.
Mask de Smith, the luchador. He’s big and slow, but when you need heavy firepower, Mask’s your man. His twin grenade launchers are devastating to groups of enemies, as well as to certain cracked walls.
The game’s look is as memorable as its cast. Few of its polygons are textured. The backgrounds are filled with simple color gradients, and every surface is edged with hard black shadows. It looks like an elaborately lit stage play, and that works to the game’s benefit: you can view any given screenshot of Killer 7 and recognize it immediately.
The game is divided into six chapters, and each chapter is represented by the target you’re out to eliminate. You’ll take control of the Killer 7 and pilot them through large, maze-like buildings and complexes. As you go, you’ll shoot down hordes of Heaven Smile, converse with the ghosts of your past kills, solve the occasional puzzle, and collect widgey-whazzits to open doors and gain access to your targets.
None of these conventions sounds particularly unique for a video game, but Killer 7 grabs them and twists them into new shapes. While most shooting games give you an arsenal of weapons to switch between at any time, Killer 7 lets you switch entire assassins at any time. You choose the Smith you want from the pause menu, and your character literally transmogrifies from one form to another. You’ll have to do this many times to advance in the game.
Another striking feature is that you don’t use the control stick for movement. Instead, you hold A to move your character along a pre-determined path. You press B to turn him or her around to move in the opposite direction down that path. When you reach a point where you can choose from multiple paths or interact with objects, a list of choices appears. You select your choice of direction with the control stick, and then continue holding A to move along the path. You don’t have the freedom to move wherever you like, but in a way, this is kind of a relief. You don’t have to adjust the camera, and you’re only ever presented with meaningful options. You’re not going to be obsessively checking every door, corner, and wall for secrets to hoard, because you can’t. It’s really a daring and brilliant design choice. The only game I can think of that incorporates a similar sort of “on-rails” movement is The 7th Guest, but that game didn’t have bloodthirsty terrorists out to kill you.
The Heaven Smile are a violent lot, but they’re also rather cheery. As you run about the area, you’ll hear these mad bombers snicker at you. When that happens, hold the R trigger to enter first-person aiming mode. While aiming, pull the L trigger to perform a “scan,” which neutralizes the Predator-like camouflage the Smiles use. Suddenly, you’ll see these hideous, gangly beasts creeping toward you. Lock on to them using B, aim manually with the left stick, and press A to fire.
The shooting action plays something like The House of the Dead. None of the Smiles have long-range attacks; their only method of fighting is to march up to you and detonate their bombs. You must finish them off before they can get close enough to do that. The trouble is that most of the Smiles don’t go down easily. You can tear off their arms, legs, and even their heads, and they’ll continue to come after you. Every Smile has a glowing weak point which can be shot for a one-hit kill, but it’s not easy to hit, and sometimes it’s in an awkward place, like a knee or an elbow.
You could just use Mask and his grenades to burn up the bad guys, but there are a couple of drawbacks to that strategy. First, some enemies are immune to grenades, and second, burning the enemies wins you no blood.
Blood is the currency of Killer 7, and you earn it by blasting off Smile limbs or by shooting out their weak points. You’ll collect two kinds of blood: thin blood, which is depicted as test tubes while aiming, and thick blood, which is depicted as a beaker in the pause menu.
Thin blood can be used to heal your character, or to power special attacks. Dan, Kevin, Mask, and Coyote can each “charge up” their weapons by pressing Y while aiming. Each level of charge requires one tube of thin blood. Some enemies can only be killed using these charged attacks, and sometimes you’ll be unable to advance in the game until those enemies are killed. This means that without blood, you’re fucked.
The key to success is to be a sharpshooter. Your gunplay must be accurate enough to consistently hit the Smiles’ blood-spilling weak points, while also being fast enough to kill the Smiles before they can reach you. Once you get the hang of it, picking off Smiles with one shot a piece is a thrilling and wonderful rush.
It’ll take practice to get to that point, but upgrades are available to help you along. You can purchase them at the “Harman’s Rooms” that are scattered about each area. Thick blood is converted into a special serum, which is then used to improve the stats of your team members. You can boost each assassin’s attack power, increase their firing rates, reduce the kicks of their guns, and inflate the hitboxes of enemy weak points. At the beginning of the game, it’s easy to keep every member at an even level of strength, but towards the end, the upgrades become pricey, and you’ll have to make some tough choices about whom to improve and in what areas. Odds are you’ll grow to specialize in the use of a particular Smith, and I recommend you pour most of your upgrades into that guy (or girl).
As a bizarre game, Killer 7 also has some bizarre problems. The worst one is that its difficulty is uneven. It’s all over the place. Early missions have some tough encounters against hordes of spawning Smiles, while later areas can be extremely tame. These tough fights aren’t too bad if you use the different skills of the Smiths effectively, but they still seem as though they belong in later stages. Meanwhile the final areas offer hardly any combat at all.
The puzzles are so simple as to be laughable, and if you still get stumped by them, there is a friendly character who will give you complete solutions in exchange for some thick blood. In case you encounter a confusing obstacle, you can check the map screen for icons that tell you exactly which Smith you need to use to get past that obstacle. It’s nice that you’ll rarely get stuck, but it makes me wonder why the puzzles are even there in the first place.
Then there’s the story. It’s a cool story, told in a tongue-in-cheek, horror-movie style that keeps you from taking it too seriously, but it’s also a little ambitious, and by “ambitious,” I mean confusing. It’s messy and wild, which can be fun if you’re in the mood for it, but after a while it can make you crazy. This is a story you want to seize by the shoulders and force down in a chair so it can start talking sense. It leaps from one plot thread to another in an instant, it dramatically introduces characters who may or may not be significant, it delves into the pasts of some of the Smiths while ignoring others, and it never bothers to piece its own dreamlike fragments together. You might be able to connect some of the dots if you’re especially attentive, but a host of unanswered questions will still remain. The natures of Harman, Dan, and Garcian are especially strange, but the game never clarifies them, so you have to draw your own conclusions. The finale is a series of half-revelations that seem like they could be powerful and resonant, if only they actually explained anything.
I get the feeling that Goichi Suda had a hell of a lot to say in this game, but he didn’t have the time or the resources to make it all fit. If you’re the sort of person who pores over episodes of Twin Peaks, Aeon Flux, or Lost in search of the tiniest connections in logic, then Killer 7 will keep your mind revved and spinning for weeks. If you’d rather ignore a game’s story, or prefer that the it tie up its own loose ends, then Killer 7 is not the one for you.
Killer 7 is a polarizing experience. Its nightmarish look, unorthodox controls, freaky characters, and shattered plot pissed off a ton of gamers back in 2005, and it didn’t sell well in any territory. Odds are that it will still piss off a lot of people today. Your enjoyment of this game will depend on your willingness to be hypnotized by its creepy world. Once you’re drawn into it, you’ll find Killer 7 to be a lovely gem.
If I still haven’t convinced you of how exceptional this game is, check out the following video, which illustrates the action better than I can describe it.
Reviewed on XBLA. Also on Nintendo 64. Developed by Rare (360 version by 4J). Published by Microsoft (360), Rare (N64)
Once apon a time, Rare was one of the top five developers in the world. It’s slate of hit titles for the Nintendo 64 eclipsed Nintendo’s own output. They were also prolific, Their last unequivocal and bona fide big selling classic was 2000′s Perfect Dark. The follow-up to the system selling Goldeneye, but without the expensive James Bond licence, PD introduced the world to Joanna Dark, some choice bad Sean Connery impersonations and a Yoda-sound alike Grey named after a Cheeseburger fetishist.
So it was Goldeneye without Bond or a framerate. It sold well back in the day, enough for Joanna to get a prequel for Xbox 360′s launch, the abominable Perfect Dark Zero, so named because that’s the Metacritic the team was aiming for judging by the released game.
Nearly 10 years after the original release on N64, Perfect Dark is back, ported to the Xbox 360 at 60 frames per second with upgraded texture and sound work (somewhat upgraded anyway), Xbox live support and lofty expectations.
It’s like stepping back in time, but no more so that Duke Nukem 3D. So in a good way.
You play as a Joanna Dark, an agent for the Connery Carrington Institute. Through a number of missions, starting off as simple spy antics, but eventually moving towards more overt science fiction trappings towards the end. You can shoot guns as per any shooter, of course, but you also have a few gadgets thrown in to help with some missions, none of which make a huge difference as they are for very specific locations from a time before context-sensitive actions became commonplace (which, funnily enough turned up in Rare’s next and final N64 games, Conker’s Bad Fur Day).
As a port, it retains the weird AI, the dodgy animation (to modern eyes but not obviously the eyes of Rare circa 2005), the dated level layout, lack of hints and /or feedback, no checkpoints, etc. But also, it has retained the greatness and gained a steady framerate along with its slightly updated texture work.
Multiplayer is much the same with two important additions. It finally runs at a framerate faster than a Power Point presentation and has online play. I can’t vouch for the online portion but I did play a few rounds of split screen with some friends- mainly to kill a certain cab-stealing Englishman. It’s fun in a retro sort of way. But that IS the point.
So it’s silly to complain about the limitations of a game made for the N64. The upgrades have only helped the game but it has to be played in context of what it is, not compared against a modern game like a MW2 or Crysis. The 4J crew have done a nice job in breathing life into something Rare killed in 2005. The reanimated corpse of Joanna Dark is alive and she’s pissed.
Lisvender’s Retro Review: Blood Omen Legacy of Kain
I often criticize games for having immature stories, but here’s one whose tale is quite impressive. Brought to you by the heel-draggers at Silicon Knights and their leader, “Mr. Reciprocity” himself, Denis Dyack, Legacy of Kain is a competent Zelda-like from the Playstation 1 era. Few games feature this level of atmosphere, with moody music, punchy sound effects, phenomenal voice acting, and a grim but engrossing tale. Unfortunately, few games also contain this much loading time. The story makes the game worth playing, but the technical flaws simply can’t be overlooked, even by the standards of its day.
The dark fantasy world of Nosgoth is in sorry shape. The Circle of Nine, the keepers of order in the land, are succumbing to a slow insanity. Vampires and bandits scour the countryside. The armies of a neighboring kingdom are planning an invasion, and Kain, a nobleman who was just out for a drink, is accosted and murdered by thugs for no apparent reason. Seems like everything’s going wrong, but then Kain is granted a boon in the afterlife: an offer to escape death and take revenge on his killers by becoming a vampire. He leaps at this chance, but he soon regrets it, and he begins a quest to cure himself and the world by restoring the Nine Pillars of Nosgoth.
I know what you’re thinking: more vampires, huh? Don’t worry, the toothy ones in Blood Omen aren’t the whiny, beautiful, effeminate things you’d see in a Stephenie Meier novel; they are angry, monstrous hedonists who see human beings as little more than livestock. A major thread of the game’s story involves Kain’s slow acceptance, and eventual appreciation, of his undead powers.
Kain is just an intensely likable character. He will encounter mad magicians, plague-ridden lepers, and armies of hellspawn, but his attitude is all a smooth and cynical charm that actually fits, and doesn’t come off as inappropriate or awkward. Kain will comment on every item he receives, every landmark he sees, and every boss he faces, but it never gets annoying: each bit of speech is a poetic, perfectly-delivered delight. Simon Templeman, who voices Kain, puts just the right spin on his lines, and he turns out quite the droll demon.
Kain will travel all across Nosgoth, dueling with soldiers and town guards, feeding on people to restore his health, collecting weapons and armor, learning magic spells, and exploring towns and caves. The game is played from a 2D, overhead view, and it feels very much like Zelda, but with an emphasis on combat. Most of the items and spells in the game function as offensive projectiles.
The sword-swinging action is fast and fun, and it features a difference from most action-adventure games: when an enemy is one hit away from death, it enters a “waver state.” In other words, it gets dizzy. Press Circle while the enemy’s wavering, and Kain will feed on it, causing its blood to fly straight out of its body and into Kain’s mouth. This is one of the few ways that Kain can heal himself, so you mustn’t attack too wildly, or you’ll kill your foes before you can feed on them. Some of the weapons and armor you’ll find have unique qualities that will affect your feeding strategy: the Spiked Mace doesn’t damage enemies much but it dizzies them quickly, the Flame Sword is a mighty weapon but it burns enemies up and leaves nothing to feed on, and the Flesh Armor draws blood into Kain’s body automatically as you fight, so you don’t have to feed manually. The downside of the Flesh Armor is that some enemies have green or black blood, which is poisonous and deadly to Kain, so you’ll want to change clothes while fighting these guys so you won’t ingest any of that junk.
Kain can also change forms, as most vampires do, to solve puzzles or to facilitate travel. He can turn into a cloud of bats and zip to major landmarks scattered across the world. He can change into a wolf, a speedy form that can leap pits. He can melt into a mist form, which protects him from physical damage and allows him to walk on water. He can also take on the appearance of a living person, which helps him to blend into society and chat with the townsfolk. The numbnuts of Nosgoth rarely have anything helpful or even intelligent to say, though, so the real purpose of the living guise is to avoid the attention of town guards, who attack vampires on sight.
As a game released in 1996, Blood Omen has a curiously cheap look. It was that interesting time when pre-rendered sprites were considered cutting-edge, and motion-capture technology wasn’t yet common. The in-game action doesn’t look so bad, as it’s viewed from a considerable distance, but the CGI videos are nigh laughable, with stiff, doll-like characters reciting deep and dark dialogue. It’s good to remember, though, that Blood Omen’s only real competitor at the time was the 16-bit Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. A visual comparison between the two is completely unfair.
On the other hand, it must be said that Zelda has the upper hand in the technical department. Blood Omen may have a terrific story, fun action, and a big world to explore, but its flaws hang continuously over all these good qualities. They cast a shadow over the entire experience.
The loading times in Blood Omen are completely out of control. Moving from one area to another, which is a breeze in any given Zelda game, requires several painful seconds of loading in Blood Omen. The music cuts out, a big red “LOADING” box appears in the center of the screen, and that delicate atmosphere the game has worked so hard to wrap you in just evaporates. It’s worse than the surprise load times in the Half-Life games. The poor designs of some of the levels don’t help matters. Sometimes Kain will enter a new area and be greeted by an enemy projectile. If you don’t react immediately, the attack will shove Kain backward into the previous screen, forcing you to endure two more load times just to get back to where you were.
That’s not the worst part of it, either. The worst part, the truly, completely, all-encompassingly worst part is that the game loads every time you pause and resume it. Given that pausing is the only way to change Kain’s equipment and set up which items and spells he can use, these load times are absolutely exasperating. In my recent playthrough, I often encountered monsters whom I knew were resistant to the weapon I was equipped with, but I refused to switch up because I knew how long the loading would take. The game’s load times actually pushed me into a strategic malaise! Fighting the monsters with a weak weapon was more convenient than equipping a better one!
Remember the Water Temple in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time? Remember how irritating it was to have to go to the Equipment Screen to change boots every few seconds? Well, imagine what traversing that temple would be like if you added five seconds of waiting to every press of the Start button. It’s not a pretty picture, but that’s exactly what playing Blood Omen Legacy of Kain is like.
Blood Omen is now available through the Playstation Store. You download the entire game to your Playstation 3 hard drive. I downloaded it because I enjoyed the game when it first came out, and I expected that playing it from a hard drive would mean that the loading would be reduced. Well, here it is, free from the sluggish form of the CD, and yet its load times are no shorter than they were fourteen years ago. Now, I’ve always thought that installing games from an optical disc to a hard drive was done to reduce load times during play. Have I been lied to for all these years? Was I just wrong about that? Or is the PS3’s emulator just deliberately including all those excruciating seconds of waiting because Sony thought it would complete the nostalgic picture?
If you can stomach the ubiquitous loading, you’ll find a great game in Blood Omen Legacy of Kain. That’s probably the most tragic thing about it: that few people will have the patience to see its excellent scenario through to the end. If the game had reached more people, maybe Silicon Knights wouldn’t have sold the rights to the IP to Eidos, who then turned the series into a buffet of blandness. If the game had reached more people, maybe Mr. Dyack would have spent more time conceiving good action-adventure games, and not wasting it on the ridiculous Too Human.
The opportunity, now, is gone. Thanks to the efforts of today’s largest game companies, the world may never know what will happen if the great and serious story of Blood Omen was married to decent technology. If there’s anyone who can do it now, it’s Goichi Suda, a.k.a. SUDA51, the guy who made No More Heroes and Killer7. That’s material for another review, though…maybe my next one!
Controller1.com rating: 1/3 (2/3 for the very patient)
Lisvender has sent us this review for your reading pleasure. You remember reading, it’s like listening to a podcast, except with with your eyes.
So we’ve got Wii Vitality Sensors and Jesus Christ even MORE Rock Band crap and Tonight on Alan Wake Prime-Time Dramas and motion-sensing cameras with motion sensing paintbrushes and creepy little Milos staring and for God’s fucking sake the bottoms of avatars’ shoes coming at us this year, and now I want to kill myself in even more horrid ways than I did after last year’s E3. With all this disillusionment pouring down on me like a rockslide, I had to ask myself: is there even one game I still like anymore? Is there still a game out there that can excite me and keep me entertained for hours on end? What game should today’s games be emulating? A few seconds later, I thought of the answer to those questions.
I thought of burly, muscley men with oversized guns blasting the shit out of mutant terrorists. I thought of air-to-surface missiles pounding into nuclear reactors. I thought of babbling dictators, heat-seeking missiles, and throngs of bloodthirsty beasts. I wasn’t thinking of Gears of War, though. I was thinking of Total Carnage.
Total Carnage, a Midway dual-stick shooter that is the spiritual successor to Smash T.V., is my favorite video game of all time. Honestly. I can play through it over and over and never tire of it. E3 ’09 didn’t have a single game that looked to match the verve and balls of this 1992 arcade title, and the gaming world is all the worse off for it. Even recent dual-stick shooters like Geometry Wars can’t compare to Total Carnage; they lack the character, the spirit, and the joy that this game sports.
The story of Total Carnage is a mockery of the first Persian Gulf War. The mad dictator of Kookistan, General Akhboob, has been building an army of mutants and holding Americans hostage in his “Baby Milk Factory,” and that’s just not cool. In response, the Pentagon dispatches “the Doomsday Squad,” two guys named Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem, to find and bring the bad General to justice. They’ll shoot their way through three giant battlefields, killing hordes of mindless drones spawned from toxic waste, grabbing weapons and powerups that materialize from thin air, rescuing chained-up women in bikinis who shout “My hero!”, dodging heat-seeking missiles that telegraph their launches by muttering “Excuse me!”, and disarming time bombs that drop in from outer space. Yes, it’s stupid. It’s really a big joke. The whole game is unapologetically corny, campy, violent, bloody, stupid, silly, and worst of all, patriotic, but as was Midway’s style at the time, there’s always a grin and a wink behind the nuttiness.
The game is gorier than an 80s horror flick, with crowds of baddies that burst into a goulash of goop and flying limbs, and it’s sure to satisfy anyone’s bloodlust. The first boss, Orcus, is a screen-filling behemoth with cannons for arms, a giant, grinning face for a body, and a devil’s head on top, and he can only be taken down a piece at a time. It takes at least five minutes of constant firing to beat him, and watching his parts explode and fly off, as he cries “My arm!” or “My eye!” or even “My head!” is an experience hasn’t yet been matched in video games, not even after seventeen years.
Things only get weirder after that. At the beginnings of the second and third battlefields, players are tasked with weaving their way down long highways, taking down passing armored missile transports with an infinite spread gun. All through these segments, little Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem are hooting and hollering “Woo!” and “Yeah!” with thrill and excitement. The only reason I can imagine that these sequences were included was that, during testing, the designers recognized how much fun it was to simply shoot large targets with the spread gun, and decided to devote huge chunks of the game to it. There are other bonus sequences in which players must level a fleet of parked fighter jets by calling in airstrikes, and all while dancing about a sea of moving land mines. The second boss of the game isn’t a boss at all, but an endurance mini-game where the player must rapidly hit the start button to help his soldier break free from a torturous electric chair. Carnage’s body is twitching and burning, his eyes are tearing up and bulging from their sockets, sparks are flying, the gigawatts are mounting, and the strength meter is dropping. Mash that button and be free! You get a huge bonus if you pull it off.
The final stage is a real corker, one that will make “Your puny head swell,” as the game says. It’s not especially long, but it’s strange. The battle with Akhboob is extremely long, extremely difficult, and extremely goofy. I know the game is pretty damn old now, but I don’t want to spoil its craziness for anyone who hasn’t yet played it. Get this game and play it yourself, or, if I can’t convince you to play it, go to YouTube and watch some gameplay videos. Akhboob is not who you think he is, and if his identity doesn’t surprise you, then the final challenge, not to mention the game’s true goal, certainly will.
Anyone who’s beaten Total Carnage will likely agree with me when I say that it is the meanest video game ever made. It’s really quite rude. For one thing, it’s a quarter-vacuum. It’s very hard. Though the stages always play out in the same way, the timing and movement of the enemy hordes are unpredictable, and the only solid strategy is to keep moving and grab any powerups you can. Practice will reduce a player’s death count, but complete mastery is next to impossible. What’s more, the game is more than happy to taunt players, and berate their performance. General Akhboob will occasionally interrupt the chaos with messages that are hilariously similar to any given terrorist video, and which often end with him blurting “You suck at this game!” Candid text will flash onscreen warning Smash T.V. fans to flee from the arcade machine. The game calls players dufuses if they fail at certain tasks, tasks that they probably weren’t even aware of until they failed them. Even its best ending closes with a venomous lie, one engineered to encourage more quarter-feeding, and to generate gamer gossip about just how in HELL the game is to be beaten properly. So even if you earn Total Carnage’s best ending, the game won’t tell you that you’ve earned it. It won’t admit defeat. It wants you to come back, angry and determined to root out that last little secret, but you’ll never be able to.
I know I’ve made Total Carnage sound like a game made by assholes and for assholes, but the whole daring nature of it is what impressed me as an arcade-dwelling youth, and what keeps me so deeply enthralled by it as an adult. Many folks avoided it in the arcades because its brutal difficulty emptied pockets quickly, but nowadays it can be had on the cheap thanks to its inclusion in Midway Arcade Treasures 2. It’s worth every cent. It is a sensation, one whose feast of explosive outrageousness should be enjoyed over and over for years uncounted. This is what video games should be.
Final Rating: 3/3. Must-play. Find it. Get it. Play it until you beat it, and then play it again. They just don’t make games like this anymore.
Nearly 10 years ago, Sega released one of their last great original franchises. Along with Crazy Taxi and Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio was one of the games on which Sega had pinned their hopes, only to see them crushed like thick pile carpet at a Weight Watchers meeting.
The premise of the game was you were part of a gang of hip kids who roller blade around a stylised version of Tokyoto (that’s what its called in the game) and paint tags on the walls in certain spots. You have two enemies to deal with- a timer and the Law!
With its colourful graphics and early cel shaded models, JSR was hipper than than a well-dressed hippopotamus at the Hippodrome. But it also had one of the coolest soundtracks ever unleashed on the videogaming publish. The late 90′s Japanese electronica perfectly compliments the overall sense of style the game exudes. Its still one of the best game soundtracks of all time.
The game itself, to me, was really a platformer in a set of funky threads. When you found a wall marked to be taggable, the onscreen prompts would direct you to rotate the analogue sticks to mimic the motion (though vastly simplified) of spray painting. The whole thing comes together in a way missing from so many modern cool, hip games
For some reason this game was retitled Jet Grind Radio for its US release but there were also a few extra levels added and Rod Zombie music (why?). The sequel was an original Xbox launch title and removed the timer at the same time as enlarging the levels markedly and tagging was reduced to just pressing a button in the right place. It’s not as good as the original so the DC game is the one to play. A sequel has been rumoured as has an iPhone port but either way you need this game in your collection if you have a Dreamcast.
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.
Reviewed on XBLA. Also on PC, N64. Developed by 3d Realms
Well Duke is back and this time its the original 1996 adventure in its entirety on XBLA. This isn’t a remake, merely a port but even after all these years, this is still a good game.
The game is a first person shooter starring Ass-kicking Duke Nukem, originally a star of a side-scrolling shooter before getting this 3D makeover in 1996. An instant classic managing to hit all the sweet spots for a typical teenage gamer (action, gore, smart ass wrestling style commets and some pixelated T and A), the game is also a case study in making a varied FPS. So much of the game play is done right that its hard to remember its rather unrelenting difficulty and some rather obtuse puzzle elements.
This port brings features online multiplayer and 8-player coop. It also manages to make the difficulty a non-issue without completely re-engineering the gameplay. When you play, the game is recording every move you make so that when you die, you can restart anywhere along the timeline of your current playthough of the level. The game is still hard, its just not as punishing as it was.
The multiplayer is like stepping into a time portal and emerging in 1996. All that’s missing is Ace of Base on the radio and giant cell phones that could cave in the skull of a hippopotamus. If you loved that sort of intense deathmatch gameplay, you might get some feelings of nostalgia but this is an excellent single player experience.
Graphically its still a 4:3 game with either decals or black bars on the side (though you can zoom the image to see more of the VERY PIXELATED graphics. The sound is just as crunchy as it was back in the pre HD era. But you are playing this game because you remembered it being fun and cool, not because you miss 3D games using sprites instead of 3D models.
Is this a portent for Duke Nukem forever actually coming out? I’ve no idea and after playing this and enjoying it, I really don’t care anymore. This sates any desire I had for more Duke unless DNF is very, very, very, very, very good.
Numbers are meaningless. But we’re going to give in a scale that makes sense
0- Don’t buy. It is a terrible game that you will instantly regret buying
1- An average game. Rent if you’re still interested or buy it very cheap
2- A good solid game. You should enjoy this but don’t lose sleep if you don’t play it
3- Excellent. You must buy this game
We also realise that we aren’t necessary the target market for some games. A game may not click for us but may be fantastic for others so we often include a qualifying score such as:
Controller1.com rating 1/3 (or 2/3 if you’re a fan of previous games in the series)
The overall score out of three is our opinion but there maybe a higher or lower score in brackets for some people.
If you really must translate our scores into percentages use the following metric:
(on a 0-10 scale this would translate to 0 = 1-3, 1 = 5 or 6, 2 = 7 or 8, and 3 is 9 or 10)
Also- when we review a game that is more or less the same on multiple projects, we list the title in each of the platform is available. We’re reviewing the game, not obsessing over minute frame differences or counting pixels, but we make clear which platform the game was tested on in the review title.
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on: DS, PSP, PS2, Wii, PS3, PC. Developed by Traveller’s Tales. Published by Lucasarts (NTSC)/Activision (PAL)
It’s the third Lego game based on Lucasfilm source material. And probably the best so the pressure’s on Lego Batman. Lego Indy takes the storylines from the first three movies and turns them into plastic heroin.
Maybe that was pushing it a bit far but what you have is a charming (if
sometimes obtuse) action game with puzzles, combat, vehicles and Short
Round able to destroy metal barrels with his bare hands.
Lego Indy has refined the formula laid down in Lego Star Wars but reducing the number of characters in your party (usually 2, sometimes three in some of the Temple of Doom levels) and very occasionally 4 (as in the final level of Last Crusade) but without characters who only have one talent that is occasionally used and is otherwise a drain on the fun (ie C3PO). Of course now you have phobias (Indy can’t go near the snake pits, Elsa won’t go near the rats, etc). You also don’t have unlimited ammo in guns and can only use weapons dropped by enemies (when they have them). A few shots and you’re empty. Of course any character can pick up a spanner to fix a machine or a shovel to dig up Lego treasure and small characters have their hatches leading to secret areas but on the whole this has refined the approach. There are puzzles based on Simon Says provided one of you characters has a blue book that’s usually sticking out of their pocket and some boss battle where its not immediately apparent what the fuck you have to do to progress (the worst was the thugee on the rock crusher)
That said there’s still some annoying crap such as often respawning on the edge of the cliff you fell off anyway, areas where you are constantly overwhelmed by enemies, some of whom now wield RPG’s that blow you to Lego bits with one shot. Obscure puzzles and boss battles are annoying but you’ll generally work stuff out without too much drama. I scratched my head a bit, but then I’m not very bright. But I think the Comedy 64 is more over-rated than Kristen Bell so I can’t be all that dumb.
Graphics don’t really matter much as they look the same on most platforms but they are quite pretty on 360 with background textures of non Lego items being rather nice. Lego is Lego and as such Marion looks like a tranny, but one without a penis so its not all bad for Indy. Lego Indy, of course has no genitals either so….
The Score is great and It’s nice to hear the music from Temple and Crusade since you can’t buy the fuckers on CD at the moment. The sound effects are also crisp, but many of them are the same as the ones from Lego Star Wars.
So I loved Lego Indy. Would I buy Lego Batman? Well, One Lego game a year is enough and I love Indy and Star Wars so much more than Batman. But I would be up for a Kingdom of the Crystal Skull game, just so I can hear people trying to popularise “nuke the fridge” and be burned like a goat’s bitch. Oh wait.
