Category Archives: Games

super mario galaxy 2

Posted on July 4, 2010 by lsd

If you’re like me, the experience of playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 can be summed up by the words you’ll find yourself involuntarily muttering again and again:

“Haha, what? No way! That’s awesome!”

Following up Super Mario Galaxy was always going to be a hard task; it turned 20 years of platforming tradition on its head — sometimes literally — with its mind-bending, gravity-defying spherical worlds. Rather than trying to reinvent the genre once again, Nintendo has simply taken the shell of the original game and stuffed it to bursting point with an incredible wealth of crazy, inventive, and unique ideas.

It’s hard to understate just how imaginative this game is. Just about every time you enter one of the game’s dozens of levels, it throws some new gameplay mechanic or concept at you, and as soon as you’ve mastered that, you’re thrown off to the next level and the next crazy idea. Incredibly, with just a couple of exceptions — Spring Mario, which makes a (thankfully brief) return from the original, and some motion-controlled gliding levels — all of those ideas are not just brilliant, but brilliantly executed as well.

The result is, simply put, one of the finest, most enjoyable games I’ve ever played. If you’ve ever been a fan of platformers, you need to play this game.

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the misadventures of p.b. winterbottom

Posted on March 2, 2010 by lsd

Can you believe it’s been nearly a month since the last post I made that didn’t have an MP3 attached? I blame the convenience of Twitter, which lets me dispense with random thoughts and witticisms without all that harrowing long-form writing business. Nevertheless, I’m back, and with a perfect topic — a delicious little Xbox Live Arcade game called The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom.

Winterbottom, as it will hereon be known, is a time-travelling puzzle platformer, so comparisons to Braid spring to mind immediately. Really, though, it’s more like The Incredible Machine games, or Bill’s Tomato Game, an old Amiga game that I’m sure no-one’s played. In Winterbottom, you record yourself performing actions, and then watch as clones of your character are brought to life to play through your recordings.

The aim is to collect pies — a very worthy goal — and there’s often a limited time that they must all be collected within, so completing a level often involves setting up complex, choreographed sequences, where clones run around flipping switches, jumping on levers, or even kicking the player or each other, so that you can get to every last pie in time.

Winterbottom started life as a student project at the University of Southern California, and it’s a perfect example of the kind of game that there’s now a place for in the market thanks to the likes of XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare. It’s 2D through-and-through, though like World of Goo and Braid it has a highly developed art-style, taking its black-and-white cues from early silent movies. The sound design is similarly silent-era, with honky-tonk piano tunes and few sound effects.

It’s definitely not as cerebral as Braid, and I don’t think it’s quite as fun as World of Goo, but it’s unique, it’s beautifully presented, and it’s refreshingly challenging — some of its levels are really quite taxing. Unless you’re easily frustrated by precision platforming, I’d highly recommend it.

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new mario, new music

Posted on November 15, 2009 by lsd

There’s an overwhelming number of new games coming out right now, but despite the pressures to buy Modern Warfare 2 or Borderlands, I caved in to my inner Nintendo fanboy and picked up New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Well, I’ll admit, Toys ‘R’ Us selling it for $70 helped. Either way, it’s time to talk Mario!

NSMBW, much like NSMB on the DS, is a straight-up 2D Mario game, with all the usual trimmings and a smattering of new stuff thrown in. After getting it home I quickly played through the first world-and-a-half, and while it was fun, it was tough, and actually frustrating in a way I hadn’t seen in a Mario game before. A lot of that frustration came from the D-pad on the Wiimote, which seemingly isn’t ideal for pushing diagonally.

Fortunately, NSMBW adds one significant spin to the Mario formula that elevates it far above its minor problems — four player co-op gameplay. Like MediaMolecule’s LittleBigPlanet, Mario’s latest lets four of you run across the map simultaneously, but the character interactions you can perform in the Mario universe multiply the hilarity and confusion of LittleBigPlanet ten-fold. It also avoids some of LittleBigPlanet’s issues by giving players a variety of options for getting through the tricky bits.

This game should come with a warning, though — do not play it with casual acquaintances, or people who might get on your nerves. With the thousands of ways you can end up killing, or just generally griefing, each other mid-game, you might never speak to them again.

In other news, I’ve been working on a new track; in fact, I think it’s nearly finished. Everything’s recorded, but the drums need more work to add a bit more variety. Once it’s finished I’ll be sure to post it!

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october games

Posted on October 30, 2009 by lsd

I have half a long post about Brütal Legend kicking around on my laptop hard drive, and I may finish that one day, but it’s getting less topical with each passing day so I’ve decided to sum it up quickly instead. I think it’s a great game despite a few flaws, and I think it’s well worth checking out, but opinions on it are definitely mixed. I loved the world, and the story and characters, and I enjoyed cruising around in my hot rod listening to rockin’ tunes while soaking in the environment and looking for hidden treasures. I even enjoyed the vaguely RTS-style battles that make up much of the campaign’s latter half, even if many others didn’t.

One thing I’ll definitely say, though, is the Brütal Legend does a terrible job of teaching you how to play. It spends a lot of time teaching you traditional RTS moves, such as issuing orders to individual squads of troops, when what you should really be doing is building an army and head-long in to the jaws of hell right along with it, using your weaponry, your killer guitar solos, and even your kick-ass hot rod to gain the advantage. Meanwhile, it completely neglects to teach you some very basic abilities, like how to find Motor Forges, the game’s shops.

Despite those problems, I absolutely loved the game, and no trip to work in the car is now complete without cranking up a few tracks from the game’s phenomenal soundtrack, which have conveniently found their way on to my MP3 player.

Speaking of driving, Forza 3 is out, and it’s exactly what I wanted (and expected): Forza 2 with more content. A number of the cars and tracks are carried over from Forza 2, but they all look better here, and the new tracks and cars are great, particularly the point-to-point rally tracks that run through Italian sea-side villas and winding Japanese mountainsides. The new career mode is also a nice addition, giving the game’s sheer bulk of content a nice, easy-to-navigate structure.

Gameplay-wise, it’s actually improved more than I expected. The physics model is very impressive, and the developers have done a great job of tweaking the controls on the standard 360 controller; so much so that I’m playing without the ABS and traction control assists that I always seemed to need in Forza 2. The other big feature is rewind, which lets you stop the game and rewind it at any point in the race, ostensibly to undo the kind of horrible mistake that would otherwise have you restarting the race. Maybe it dulls the game’s tension a touch, but so far, rewind has been a godsend for me.

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two things

Posted on October 15, 2009 by lsd

First thing: my 360 returned today just under two weeks after I sent it in. It has the same serial number, but it seems like a new console — it has a different DVD drive, and runs cooler and quieter. It even has that new electronics plastic smell! There was also a three month Xbox Live membership card in the box, which was a nice way to make up for having to send back my console. Having to send it in still sucked, but MS handled it very well.

Second thing: Brütal Legend, the new Tim Schafer game. The gameplay is a strange blend of brawler/racer/RTS, and so far it’s been a lot of fun, but what really makes this game ate the characters, the story, and the game world, a free-roaming fantasy realm inspired by classic heavy metal album covers and motifs. Jack Black is pitch-perfect as Eddie Riggs, the game’s roadie protagonist, and the metal star cameos, including Ozzy Osbourne and Lemmy, come thick and fast. The landscape is littered with monstrous bone piles, massive V8 engine blocks, and crumbling stone monuments, and it’s a hell of a place to explore, especially when you’re gunning your hot rod’s engine and cranking metal tunes from the game’s massive library.

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bye bye 360

Posted on October 1, 2009 by lsd

I thought I had a good chance of not running in to any trouble with my 360 — after all, my model was a second-revision system, produced after MS admitted the system’s issues, and for two years it had soldiered on without a problem. That came to an end last night, though, when after a week or so of random crashes it finally become unusable, displaying the classic Red Ring of Death.

Thankfully, sorting it out hasn’t been much of a drama yet. Requesting a repair (it’s still under warranty, thanks to the three-year warranty for red-ring issues) was an entirely automated process on the Xbox website, and that gave me a printable prepaid packing label. I packed it in an old box at the office today and dropped it down at the post office, and all reports suggest that I should have it back within two weeks. At least it’ll be back before Forza 3 hits!

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gaming silly season 2009

Posted on September 24, 2009 by lsd

With September nearly past us, we’re once again moving toward the silly season, and that means another Mega Holiday Gamesplosion — in fact, you could probably argue that Tuesday’s release of Halo 3: ODST marked the season’s official start. A tonne of games that were due before Xmas have since been pushed back to early 2010, but there’s still a solid line-up of stuff that I’m interested in (though I may have forgotten something):

  • September: Halo 3: ODST
  • October: Forza Motorsport 3, Brutal Legend
  • November: COD: Modern Warfare 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii
  • December: Zelda: Spirit Tracks

I’m as surprised as anyone that there are two Nintendo games in that lot — for all its talk of Wii Sports and Vitality Sensors Nintendo is actually pulling out a couple of big guns this season. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (forever henceforth known as NSMBW) is aimed squarely at the 2.5D co-op platformer space that was so neatly filled by the infinitely charming LittleBigPlanet last year, and I have no doubt that it’ll inspire the same crazy four-player sessions in our house.

Beyond that, I’m trying to limit myself to one game a month, and the only other guaranteed buy there is Forza 3, which is easily my most anticipated game of the year. Brutal Legend will be an eventual must-buy as well — maybe I’ll get that in December instead of Zelda.

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random updateapalooza

Posted on September 10, 2009 by lsd
  • The Beatles: Rock Band isn’t the only thing I’ve been playing lately; I also picked up Shadow Complex, which I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The short review for this is: Shadow Complex = Super Metroid. The graphics are entirely 3D (and quite sophisticated at that — Unreal Engine 3 and all), but the gameplay is 2D, and a shameless ripoff of/homage to Super Metroid. For 1200 spacebucks, it’s a bargain, and an absolute must-buy (or must-download-trial at the very least) for anyone with a 360 and an interest in classic 2D action platforming.
  • I have a couple of little upgrades at my little home studio — I’ve borrowed Kat’s old keyboard to replace mine as the controller, since it has aftertouch and my old Yamaha doesn’t, and I picked up a little mixer as well. The mixer’s mainly there to give me some mic preamps, since the next thing I want to grab is a decent entry-level mic.
  • I’m writing again! It’s just a small part of a feature article, but the invitation to do that was quite a welcome sight in my inbox. It’s due on Monday, so I’ll have to get cracking on it over the weekend!
  • The work coffee machine is back! It was out of action for nearly two weeks after the guys here managed to burn out its element from sucking too much hot water out of it; the damage was damned impressive. The whole thing was especially annoying because my home machine has broken down as well, but my trusty plunger came to the rescue.
  • On the subject of coffee, it’s actually interesting to see a minor resurgence of non-espresso coffee in some of Melbourne’s best cafes. There are no plungers as such, but Seven Seeds has a Clover, which is somewhat akin to a very sophisticated plunger, St Ali serves coffee made with a vacuum brewer (usually called a vacpot or siphon), and Liar Liar has both on offer. St Ali also has a new espresso machine: it cost over $30k, it’s called the Slayer, and yes, it’s fucking metal. \m/
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it took me so long to find out, and i found out

Posted on September 10, 2009 by lsd

So, The Beatles: Rock Band is here, and I can happily report that it’s just as awesome as I hoped for. I fired it up the story mode last night, and within three hours I’d finished the whole thing, mostly on guitar/bass, but with a chunk of singing in the middle as well. At it’s core, it’s what you’d expect — Rock Band with Beatles songs — but what sets it apart from the earlier Rock Band games is the incredible amount of care and attention that’s gone in to it. It’s an amazing game to look at, from the song visuals themselves through to the photo-collage videos that bridge between the game’s different venues and eras.

All of the modeled venues look great, but the really impressive stuff is in the “dreamscape” sequences, which are used for the songs performed at the Abbey Road studios. Most of these start with the band in the studio, but then transition in to idealised performances in surreal, and sometimes very trippy, settings, and each of the songs set in Abbey Road (nearly half the game) has its own dedicated sequence. There’s also a tonne of unlockable Beatles memorabilia to check out, such as photos and videos.

There’s one genuinely new feature in this game over previous Rock Band games, and that’s the vocal harmony system, which lets you have up to three vocalists singing at once. Harmonix has been very clever with this — anyone can sing to any vocal line at any time, so all three vocalists can just sing the lead if they want, but if you do choose to harmonise and you pull it off, you get bonus points. It also supports the Lips mics on the 360 (and the Singstar mics on the PS3), so I already have three mics ready to go.

So, as both a love-letter to The Beatles and a super-fun party game, The Beatles: Rock Band definitely delivers. The only thing that could improve it is a greater selection of songs, but with the amount of work that’s gone in to each of the game’s 45 songs, I think it’s good value out-of-the-box. Besides, DLC is coming — all of Abbey Road will be downloadable for a fee on October 20, with Sgt Pepper’s following in November and Rubber Soul in December.

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i am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

Posted on September 8, 2009 by lsd

The Beatles: Rock Band is out tomorrow! I’ve sure as hell got my pre-order in, and I can’t wait to get my filthy little mitts on it. In the meantime, please enjoy this parody video announcement of Guitar Hero: The Beatles:

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