Silent Hill 2

by noodles on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 21:14 - Comments: 0

I guess the best person to write a game about psychological horror is someone that has genuinely troubling psychological problems. At least I imagine that the gamedesigner Masashi Tsuboyama spends his days picking imaginary cockroaches in his hair while mumbling about how doctors are killing his pet turtles on odd weekends.

What I'm trying to say is that Silent Hill 2 is a sick and twisted game. I don't mean that as in disgusting, I mean it as in being a very disturbing game. It's filled with metaphors, psychological trials and plain out brainfucks. Nothing seems to be random, everything has a meaning and represents something and can be interpreted in some way or another, all connected to the story.

You take on the role of James Sunderland. You start out in a restroom just outside of the town called Silent Hill. You're here because you received a letter from your wife, asking you to come here and meet her at your special place. Thing is, she's been dead for quite a while. Hey, if my dead wife asked me in a letter to come see her, I'd probably be too curious to pass it up too. Either that or figure out when I have to surrender my credit card and pin-number.

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tags: 2 silent hill

Resident Evil

by noodles on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 14:52 - Comments: 0

Audio; it's more important than you think.

The Resident Evil franchise, know by the more story-based-appropriate title in Japan: "Biohazard", has gone on for over 10 years. The high sales-numbers are not from the launch-weekend, but from different versions that are slowly seeping off the shelves across all the years. While the latest numeral iteration came out this year for the current-gen consoles, I took a trip down video-game-history-lane and in an attempt to explore my recently discovered discomfort with horror-games experienced the Nintendo GameCube-remake of the Sony PlayStation title Resident Evil; on my Wii.

Being one of the original titles from the "survival-horror" genre, I'm guessing that anticipation played a big part of my comfortless relation to the game. I do, however believe that the updated visuals and audio of the remake may have helped my (way too easy) immersion.

You get to play one of two characters, Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield. What character you pick only affects the game slightly, or so I've heard, so I went with the guy for no other reason than him being a guy. Don't get me wrong, I'm not unfamiliar with playing female characters.

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tags: wii resident evil horror playstation gamecube jill valentine chris redfield survival

Shadow Complex

by belajjal on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 13:31 - Comments: 0

Shadow Complex

At E3 this year the creator of Gears of War, Cliffy B of Epic games, showed a demo of a 2,5D Castleroid (or Metrovania if you like) clone. A few months later Shadow Complex was released on Xbox Live for 1200 MS points. The game is set in the universe of Orson Scott Cards novel Empire, which I had never even heard of before I played the game. You play as Jason Flemming who are on a date in the woods. After a game of hide and seek in a cave your date Claire gets kidnapped by unknown men in uniforms and helmets and carried in to a futuristic door in the cave. You pick up her flashlight and backpack and set out to find her. Once inside the door a large underground complex is explored bit by bit in a style that is very close to Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night.
The game is presented in full 3D but played in 2D with the exceptions of enemies in the fore- or background where you character auto aims. This brings us to my first issue with the game, the auto aim. There is no way of forcing the game to aim at someone in the background as this is handled automatically. I had several instances of enemies blasting me to pieces from the background with my character shooting straight in to a wall.

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tags: shadow complex metroid castlevania

Haze

by noodles on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 14:27 - Comments: 0

An interesting faction-mechanic hidden in a haze of terrible story, characters and mediocre gameplay.

Wearing the suit of Shane Carpenter, you're a sergeant in Mantel Corp's military. On a mission to clean out insurgents and capture the notorious "Skin Coat", a guerilla leader so nicknamed by the rumor that he wears a coat made from the skin of his enemies, somewhat à la Silence of the Lambs. To help you is your squad, made up of characters that really go out of their way to make you dislike them. Not you, as a character, but you as a player. Their frat-boy manner and moronic commentary seem to be drawn directly from a antagonist quarterback from a college-movie; you know, the one that treats his "girlfriend" like crap, drives his dad's SUV, and makes a sport out of hitting nerds in the head with beer-cans while discussing how much they want to join the army so they get to fire guns at terrorists. Luckily, you don't have to suffer their sub-intellectual behavior for long, as you'll switch faction to the rebels after only a few hours.
Oh did I spoil the story for you? No, wait, I didn't, because it says so on the friggin' box! After some questions that any school-child that has a problem with authority would ask, Skin Coat converts you to fight for his cause instead.

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tags: haze average nectar mantel

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

by noodles on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 09:51 - Comments: 0

I went in expecting adventure and got a shooter. Gears of Indiana Jone... - I mean, Uncharted was not what I hoped it would be.

A descendant from a more or less famous treasure hunter, Francis Drake, you climb into the pants of Nathan Drake. With your travel-companions, a female journalist that's documenting your treasure-hunt and a older male long-time partner-in-grave-robbing, you follow uncover clues that will supposedly lead you to the lost city of gold, El Dorado. The story plays out in the same manner that the movie-series The Mummy rips off the Indiana Jones franchise. There's old languages, graves, tombs, clues, trails, multiple characters after the same treasure, a hint of super-natural, and yes - even Nazis. It's basically a summer-blockbuster-adventure-movie in interactive form, except the main emphasis is on the gun-fights and not the adventure part.
This leaves you with the same interest that you would have in it'snon-interactive counterpart. Some will be swallowed by it, some will finish their popcorn and then leave the theater to wait for the DVD instead.

Gameplay-wise it's a third-person-shooter. Basically, if Marcus Fenix, of locust-bustin' Gears of War-fame, had a baby with Lara Croft, plain busty Tomb Raider-fame, that baby would be Nathan Drake.

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tags: uncharted nathan drake fortune

Silent Hill

by belajjal on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 07:15 - Comments: 0

"The fear of blood tends to create fear for the flesh."
That is what welcomes you as the intro starts and it sets the mood perfectly for what you will experience in this game. This is a game based on psychological fear rather than moments that make you jump. The game is Konami's response to Capcom's Resident Evil success and where RE had dogs busting through windows Silent Hill had morbid nurses and children crying in closed lavatories.

Harry Mason crashes his car trying to evade running over a little girl on the road. When he comes to his daughter, Cherryl, is gone and he sets out to find her. When he exits the car he sees her wander off into the fog that sits heavily over the town. Harry chases after her and winds up in an alley where the world suddenly transforms into rusty metal and bloody corpses pinned to the walls. Suddenly small children with knifes attack the defenseless Harry who passes out. He wakes up in a cafe, wondering if he just had a nightmare. A female cop, Cybil, found him passed out in the alley and brought him there. Cybil tells Harry she didn't see anything strange but suddenly a winged creature crashes through the window. Harry takes it down with a gun Cybil gave him and sets out to continue his search for Cherryl.

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tags: silent hill

Vacation roundup

by belajjal on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 08:24 - Comments: 0

Only 2 weeks of vacation this summer. Sucks! But I managed to nail the "best" (read hottest) weeks of the summer so far but the problem is that I'm not at all comfortable with 30+ degrees Celsius in the shadow.

First few days was spent in a constant drunk state (I still managed to finish Luigi's Mansion) in my home town and then we went to the west coast for a few days. While my wife was sunbathing and sipping on a drink I sat in the shadow playing games on my laptop. I finished Zelda 2 (see review below) in one go before going out for beer in the evening. We went back home and I was assigned to play Metal Gear Solid next. The goal is to play MGS4 but I wanted to refresh my memory of the series first and I hadn't played the GameCube remake. I started playing but real life events stopped me from continuing.

A few days went by with BBQs and beers before we took the train to visit my mom for a few days. Weather was still hot as hell so I stayed away from the sun most of the time. This gave me an opportunity to play some more games. After a routine playthrough of Killer Instinct I needed a more solid challenge and found Donkey Kong Country that I hadn't played since the 90's.

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tags: metal gear solid donkey kong country gunstar heroes vacation

De Blob

by noodles on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 00:29 - Comments: 0

I haven't had this much fun coloring since kindergarten.

What started out as a school-project for the PC was turned into a one of the best examples of style > graphics for the Wii, proving once again that a great looking game doesn't have to have more polygons than all other titles combined.

Led by Comrade Black, the monochrome armies are turning the colorful city Chroma City into a black, white and gray police-state, where citizens are, among other things, forced to work as accountants. And not any type of accountants, the ones that sit in front of a computer and get to pick between two button, indicating that the screen is either black or white. I'm not making this up, it's in a cut-scene. The somewhat egg-shaped, rainbow-colored citizens of Chroma City are attacked by a military regime, the INKT corporation, consisting of star-shaped, black-ink-colored soldiers. To their disposal, the oppressive forces have four-legged bots that literally suck the color off buildings, billboards, vehicles, mountains and people.
Of course, not all raydians take this hostile take-over and spectral-light-sucking laying down. They form a rebellion. A small, four-man rebellion.

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tags: wii de blob nintendo wiimote

Zelda II - The Adventure of Link

by belajjal on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 10:23 - Comments: 0

The black sheep of the Zelda family, but why? is it because it uses a completely different formula from the first game, or is it because there are too many JRPG influences? I'm not sure but I do know that I loved this game as a kid and played it a lot more than the first one. I played the original a few months back and I was a bit disappointed as I felt the game hadn't aged very well. Playing this one really brings back memories of why I liked it better, it's more complex and more mature. Perhaps this was an indication that I would end up liking the RPG genre wich wasn't present on the European market in the 80's.

The game starts some time after the first game and Zelda have been magically put to sleep. Ganon's forces are trying to resurrect him and they need Link's blood to do it. To wake Zelda up you need to put six crystals in six palaces to gain entrance to the shrine where a second triforce is located. Sounds easy!

You start in the palace where Zelda sleeps, the first thing you notice is the 2D side scrolling view which is very different from the last game. When you exit the palace you find yourself in the overhead map view where the game looks more or less like a very zoomed out version of the original game.

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tags: nes zelda link adventure

Luigi's Mansion

by belajjal on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 10:00 - Comments: 0

One of the release titles for the Gamecube back in 2001 and strangely the only "Mario" release title. Many people criticized this lack of a proper Mario title, forcing Nintendo to rush the even more criticized Mario Sunshine to the market.
Luigi's Mansion in underrated. If you see past the Mario-release-title situation you will find a strange combination of a cute Resident Evil 1, Ghostbusters and a lot of influences from point-and-click adventures. The game has no in-game clock but I estimate the playtime to be about six hours long. The short length is more or less the only real complaint I have about the game.

Mario has gone missing after winning a mansion in a contest he didn't even enter. Luigi starts looking for him and the game starts when Luigi enters the mansion. After an incident where a ghost faces the easily-scared Luigi the mad scientist, Elvin Gadd, shows up explaining about the mansion. The house is apparently created by the Boos (the shy ghosts from the other Mario games) and many of the doctor's captured ghosts has gone missing. He gives Luigi the Poltergust 3000, a Ghostbusters style vacuum cleaner, to suck them up. A total of 21 main ghosts have escaped and the doctor asks for your help.

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