Controller1.com THE PODCATS- Sgt Pepper’s Dusty Old Magazine Club
Sgt Pepper’s Dusty Old Magazine Club flips through some old magazines published 20 years ago
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The Top Games of 2009 According to this Site
Controller1.com’s top games of this past year.
Sleeper of the Year (aka The game that came out of nowhere, the one you expected to ignore but couldn’t because of the great word of mouth)
RED FACTION: GUERRILLA. Volition and THQ’s third RF game came out of nowhere to be one hell of a blast of supercharged entertainment. Sure, Volition misunderstood the difference between easy and insane. But the core mechanics of the game and the freedom you had to progress meant few stumbling blocks to gaming nirvana. I have no idea what the story was about so let’s assume it’s rather ordinary and skip to the good bits: blowing things up. I can’t name a game where destruction has been done better.
Runner Up: Borderlands
Overhyped Game of the Year (AKA The game that was expected to make coffee, bend time and rule all but in the end was a bit meh)
KILLZONE 2. Sony and Guerrilla Game’s follow up to the justifiably ignored Killzone was meant to be many things. Here’s what it was and wasn’t.
IT WAS: A decent FPS, put together well and looked beautiful.
IT WASN’T: a system seller, or a particularly great game.
Year of PS3 got off to a false start and was almost disqualified from the race with KZ2.
Runner up: Scribblenaughts
Most Disappointing Game (AKA Games with buzz and hope that just didn’t deliver)
Wolfenstein Coulda, should but didna. Wolfenstein squandered the hope that long term fans had for a worthwhile follow up to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. What they got was a good single player that seemed to need a teeny bit more polish and content and a terrrrrrrrrible multiplayer. Do you get this game? Do you like MP more than SP? Flip a coin.
Runner Up: Modern Warfare 2
MOST IMPROVED (AKA They fixed the shit in the first one that was busted)
Assassin’s Creed II. Oh Lord is it ever so much better than the first game. In every single way, this game is more fun than the original. The content is better organised so that the game is not “here are 10 things you can do, go do each of them 500 times.” The whole concept is still a bit silly and Kristen Bell’s character looks like she had a lip transplant from the original Kryten but overall any game that has Uncharted Guy doing voices is good.
Runner Up: Uncharted 2
BEST DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT: SHADOW COMPLEX
BF1943, GTA episodes and Trials were there but Shadow Complex was by far the best DL only game released in 2009. A Metroidvania that’s probably more palatable to a modern audience (since it has Uncharted Guy doing voices, of course), the game managed to astound, entertain, stir up controversy and offer a good few hours of gameplay.
Runner Up: Halo 3 ODST (no, not really, but it should have been)
Best Game Only on Wii: NEW SUPER MARIO BROTHERS WII
OK, so it was really only one of two Wii games I bought this year. But it was the one I didn’t sell (HotD: Overkill). It’s frustrating as all fuck, has a save system that’s as pointless as the one in Dead Rising and I’m not playing it right now. Why am I not playing this right now? I don’t know.
Best Game Only on PS3: UNCHARTED 2
Sony had two really good games this year. Uncharted 2 and Infamous. Infamous is blown out of the water by Uncharted 2. Uncharted 2 is the quintessential adventure game. Whereas the first game promised platforming but delivered a gears of War Clone, the sequel mixes things up so successfully that you never realise when the game is going to go from one style to another. yes, you know at least once per chapter there will be something you’re standing in collapsing around you leaving you hanging from one arm but that’s beside the point.
Best Game Only on Xbox 360: SHADOW COMPLEX The 360 almost had a gap year with the only big exclusives being Forza 3 (which a LOT of people love and recognise as the driving game of 2009 to play), Halo 3: ODST which really was just a bit too much recycling with such a short single player campaign.
Best Game Only on PC- this is the year 2009.
Best Game on Everything: Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. IW may have pissed off as many people as they please with MW2. There’s the story that eschews any semblance of realism for moments of turkey-slapping-a-sleeping-lion thrills, OTT Multiplayer perks and combos, poor matchmaking and the various PC issues that made the game into a must play for many into a meh for some.
Best Pissing Away Goodwill. TIE: Infinity Ward and Activision.
Infinity Ward for doing the dirty on PC gamers and Activision for driving Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero into the ground. Oh, and splitting Starcraft II into three different games.
Most Improved: Sony. They cut the PS3 price from hysterical to merely funny (after three years it’s finally at the PS2 launch price), released the Slim and released Uncharted and Infamous. It still takes way too long to download and install a patch and most people still spend more on Blu Ray than they do on PS3 games, and PS3 ports are still often slightly lagging behind 360 in terms of graphics but it’s basically where it should have been three years ago. Just in time for God of War III
Most Potential for 2010: Microsoft. Really, they sold the 360 well but didn’t release that many 1st party games so you’d think game over, but then you see they have Crackdown 2, Halo Reach and Alan Wake. And then there’s Natal.
Least Potential for 2010: Wii
So we have a vitality sensor as the big piece of hardware? Really? Few games still support Motion Plus. Few gamers care and the signs are than grandma doesn’t either.
Game of the Year: Uncharted 2. Are you at all surprised? Naughty Dog redeem themselves after the disasters that were the Jak and Daxter sequels. This is the only game this year that a non-gamer will sit and watch as if it were a movie and enjoy it.
Runner Up: Modern Warfare 2.
It was a pretty good year overall. The only disappointing part of the year was the end. While we had some cracking titles such as Uncharted 2, ODST, Left 3 Dead 2, Assassin’s Creed II, MW2 and Super Mario Wii it still felt like something was missing.Oh that’s right about 2 or 3 more must-haves in the lead up to Christmas that we wouldn’t get to play till 2010 anyway. Having them all come out in the first quarter of 2010 seems to have upset the natural balance.
Controller1.Com THE PODCATS: Text Sells
Or at least, it did in the early 80’s. Text Adventures aren’t dead, but they aren’t doing too well, like Tiger Woods trying to sell car upholstery cleaning products. Get your Zork on!
HEY GUYS, IT’S THE START OF THE WEEK
TEN YEARS AGO
The year 2000 isn’t technically part of this decade but since most people started the Millennium a year early it hurts no one but pedants and calendar fetishists is we look back all the way to the year 2000.
Bill Clinton was President and Al Gore was a shoe-in the November elections. People were in love with The Sopranos and Sex and the City. Friends and ER were popular network TV shows. Britney was hot and Reality TV was in its infancy. Michael Jackson was reviled as a creepy pedo and the Matrix was considered a movie classic.
In video games the Sony PlayStation was the market leader and Nintendo’s 64 was all but dead. Sega has finally launched the Dreamcast into a market of wait-and-sees and made in impression on an entire generation of Sonic Fans to whom rape was something they never seriously considered happening to them. The PS2 was released in Japan and around the world later in the year, legitimately selling out everywhere. The original PlayStation was slimmed down to the cute PSOne and PC was a thriving place to make profitable cutting edge games.
The biggest games of the year were (US numbers): Pokemon Stadium for the N64, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 and 2 on the PlayStation, Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask and Gran Turismo 2 on PlayStation proving when you have staggered generations of hardware, install base wins over the new shiny. The biggest selling game released in 2000, Pokemon Stadium, sold nearly 4 million copies worldwide. Compare this to Modern Warfare 2 in 2009 selling six million units just in the US in its first three weeks. Tony Hawk Ride, the latest in the skateboarding series sold a fairly meager 144 000 copies in its first month. Pokemon still sells in huge numbers (though maybe not to the same extent), same with Zelda, and both of those seem to have found a comfortable home on the DS.
People started buying a PS2 since it was a relatively cheap DVD player and The Matrix DVD was the biggest PS2 title. Skip ahead 10 years and a lot of people are using PS3 to jump onto the Blu-Ray wagon. A GSM Cell Phone (ie 2G, Edge, the original iPhone) may have had a basic ringtone composer but was basically a phone, SMS device and may have played Snake or a Tetris variant if you had a high end machine. Now with smartphones we have music players with more storage than most PC’s had in 2000, 3D games, movie player, web browser, still and video camera AND phone and SMS capabilities. The Gameboy Color was Nintendo’s top of the line model without only minor competition from SNK. All it did was play games.
Consoles didn’t have HDD’s so you couldn’t patch games (like GT2’s 98% glitch). They also weren’t connected to the internet apart from Sega’s Dreamcast which offered a 56K modem in some markets. Broadband penetration was about as widespread as the travel diary of a skinny hermit who’s never left the room he was born in.
A Typical PC in the year 2000 was an Intel Pentium III of around 5-700 MHz with maybe 64 MB RAM and a 10 GB Hard drive. A PC gamer might have been raving about his GeForce 2 or the latest Radeon or even a Voodoo5. MS released Windows Me for home users (which many ignored) and Win 2000 for business users. Apple was basking in the enhanced street cred of the original CRT iMacs.
The Internet Bubble of the late 1990’s imploded with many promising companies disappearing faster than a serial killer’s neighbours. Today we still have Amazon.com but multimedia on the net was limited to that god awful Read Video or Real Audio formats. MP3 was taking off as a way to get those crunchy star trek soundbites out onto the web. People still used newsgroups and Netscape Navigator was the anti-MS web browser of choice. Google was in its infancy and people were just as likely to use Yahoo or Altavista for their search needs.
Some fun games were released in 2000. On PC there was No One Lives Forever channeled Austen Powers, Flint and 60’s James Bond; Deus Ex cyberpunked all those who could get into it; Return to Castle Wolfenstein returned to Castle Wolfenstin for real and of course, there was The Sims. Oh and there was the years big doomed-to-fail titles, John Romero’s Daikatana, with American McGee’s Alice close behind. MMO gaming meant Everquest. Warcraft was an RTS franchise but Blizzard’s title of the year was Diablo II, the click and click adventure that involved clicking a lot.
The Nintendo 64 started as a contender and was almost dead by the end of the year with Nintendo greatly winding down their release schedule in preparation for Game Cube. We still had Pokemon Stadium, Majora’s Mask, a port of Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Perfect Dark, Rayman 2, Banjo Tooie, etc but the writing was on the wall. PSOne continued to be the machine that everyone wanted to own, to play and to buy games for.
And they had Final Fantasy IX and Tony Hawk 2 on the PSone side. But we also had the PS2 with more Ridge Racer, Tekken Tag Tournament and, er Fantavision. The big breakout hit from the PS2 launch was EA’s SSX.
Poor Dreamcast, having no games from EA, made do with it’s own in-house sports games, still highly regarded by some. Someone other than EA made NFL games in the year 2000. They also released games like Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio. JET SET MOTHERFUCKING RADIO. Of course, all Sony had to do was announce the specs for the PS2 and large numbers of people decided to wait for that instead. There was a time where most people only had one console. Really. There was.
10 years ago, I started my current job, Cam was a Games journalist and Clint was a teenager. My PC at the time was bought in late 1999 and never seemed to work very well at games so I only managed Half Life and Unreal on it before giving up on PC gaming for a few years. I was mainly an N64 gamer at the time and in 2000 I was playing Banjo Kazooie, Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Rayman 2, Perfect Dark and Battle for Naboo (I loved Rogue Squadron).
I also picked up a DC even though the only games I had for it initially where Hidden and Dangerous (which was APPALLING) and Rainbow 6 and Rogue Spear (which were also appalling but strangely playable despite convoluted controls). It wasn’t until I found Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio that the DC made sense to me. I even got my first PSOne so that I could play all those PSOne games I had missed so 2000 saw me playing Crash Bandicoot 1-3, Metal Gear Solid, Spyro 1-3 and Medal of Honor.
For me it was a very good year. For most gamers, it was a very good year. For Sega, not so much.
Controller1.com Focus Test- Street Fighter II HD
Cam has bought the various iterations of Street Fighter II so many times that the ridicule he endures in the podcast is not for the feint hearted.
The Greatest Video Game EVER MADE!!!
I can barely see the screen I’m that giddy with excitement. This is probably the greatest thing to happen to the human race since sliced bread, penicillin and Alyson Hannigan. In June 2009, The Great Giana Sisters DS will be released.
I KNOW! HOW AWESOME IS THAT! HOLY FRENCH BREADSTICKS IN A PORN FILM, PEOPLE!
Now as you all know, The Great Giana Sisters is one of the best video games of all time. It’s one failing – if it can be considered a failing, because to me it’s its greatest asset – is that it’s best played on a Commodore 64.
The Nintendo DS is one of the greatest game systems of all time. It’s one major failing is that, unless you’re one of the cool kids with a homebrew cart, is that there is no way to play Great Giana Sisters on it.
WELL NOW THAT PROBLEM IS OVER. One of the greatest games ever made is coming to one of the greatest gaming systems ever made so therefore it will be THE GREATEST THING EVER DONE BY HUMANKIND.
Seriously, everyone out there who are still making video games: Just stop. There is no point any more. You’ve been bested. It’s like making music after The Beatles did Rubber Soul. You’re kidding yourselves. Video games have now reached their zenith and we can wrap it all up and go home.
CHECK OUT THIS VIDEO I MEAN DAMN
Dear people who are making this: I love you. I love you so, so much, with a love that is as pure as it is somewhat creepy. Send us beta releases so we may fawn over every pixel, sound effect and gaming bliss contained therein.
Now excuse me I need to clean myself up.
DUKE NUKEM 3D
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.
controller1.com Rating 2/3
Controller1.com Focus Test #3 PODCATS ATTACK!
This week Fighting Games. Normally the best fighting games are made in Japan. So today we go all Ninja Gaijin and play fighting games developed in the West.
Mortal Kombat on DS, International Karate something on Commodore 64 and Castle CRASHERS!
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