Freaking.Space.Lasers

Legacy of Kain…

…the story of an arrogant man afflicted with a terrible curse.
…the tale of a faithful servant betrayed and murdered, given the chance to exact bloody revenge.
…the unfolding of the destiny of a world in peril, stuck between light and corruption.

Actually it’s about time-travelling vampires.

Following on from my scathing recommendation of the Jak (and Daxter) series of games, I’d like to again cajole you into buying junk. This time around it’s the Legacy of Kain series, a heavy tale of blood-suckers without much blood-sucking. I’m no great fan of vampires - in general I think they’re a creaky plot device for people too profoundly bland to come up with their own ideas. However, there are exceptions to the rule, if there’s enough originality in the mix. The Legacy of Kain series of games fit the bill.

First released in 1996, Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen (PC, PSX) chronicles the journey of the titular Kain from arrogant idiot noble to arrogant sociopath vampire. Struck down outside a local pub, he is resurrected as one of the thirsty undead and quickly sets about murdering his murderers. Finding himself still firmly undead, he also tries to seek out a cure for the curse of vampirism, accidentally uncovering a grand destiny in the process (as it usually goes). Along the way he discovers that in order to heal the world, and himself, he must defeat 9 powerful dudes who have been driven mad by madness. In the closing of the game the player is offered a choice between sacrificing themselves to heal the world, or sticking around to rule in hell.

There are four other games in the series, and it’s safe to say they don’t track the rainbow loveliness of a perfect utopian fantasy.

Soul Reaver was the next fanged baby to tumble out. In a twist not entirely common, this game is set hundreds of years in the future and has a completely different main character. Raziel is Kain’s top vampire henchman in the ruined shithole of future Nosgoth. Vampires in this world evolve and change over time, and Raziel has been a very naughty pokemon - he grows wings before Kain. Kain, of course, rips the bones right the fuck out of his back, has him tossed into a giant whirlpool of death and pain, and cuts up all his vampire credit cards.

Ressurected by an ancient, squishy god, Raziel becomes a reaver of souls (get it?), having to consume the spirits of the dead to survive. Extremely pissed off and trapped in a tug of war between the spectral and physical realms, he runs off to kill the life out of that bastard Kain, accidentally uncovering a grand destiny in the process (as it usually goes). It inevitably results in copious amounts of time travel. Really.

Savvy individuals may have noticed that I’ve barely mentioned the gameplay. They ARE good games, by gaming standards, usually falling into a sort of third-person action RPG chasm-type-thing. There’s a lot of variety in gameplay, from hacking and slashing at demons and vampires, eating the souls of the dead, shifting magically between worlds and showing off with spiffy magic powers. Which is all well and good, but not at all why I’m recommending these games.

As you may have gathered, the story of the Legacy of Kain series is complex and awesome. Taking the tired old concept of vampires and taking it in a new direction, the games weave a mythology which is entirely their own. The story is fantasy based, yes, but actually interesting. The games deal with heady concepts like fate and destiny, playing with the question of what control we have over our own lives.

AND I LIKE STORIES. I’ll play a terrible game to hear a good story. I hate myself that much. Anyway, if you’re a fan of twisted narrative with a Shakespearian delivery, pick up some of the Legacy of Kain games. Better than watching Twilight because you won’t want to cut your own throat 10 minutes in.

Some gaming tropes are silly. Like the one about always meeting someone you know, or knew from the before times - before the game started. You know the scene, the hero is calmly going about his mission to save A from B by doing X, when suddenly it turns out that his ex-girlfiend is the contact he had to meet in Russia, or the invisible metal ninja is actually his old war buddy (who is also undead), or the evil overlord was himself the whole time.

OH MY GOD. SNAP. What a twist! Except it isn’t a fucking twist, is it? Not when every game (and movie) does it at every opportunity. Playing through a story-driven game is more like a family reunion in hell. And talk about awkward. I played the new Bionic Commando recently, which is lousy with this sort of shit. You’re pulled out of future prison to save the world from bad dudes by your old commander, only to discover that your old best friend is actually part of the evil group, a group headed by your German ex-nemesis. Oh, and you’re only doing it to find out where your bitch of a wife went.

I would love to see a game where you’re a total stranger to everyone:

Evil Steve: Finally I have you, Megabob.

Megabob: Oh, uh… hi. Do I know you?

Evil Steve: You fool! I’m Evil Steve! Your arch nemesis!

Megabob: Look buddy, you know how this works. I meet you and we fight here. It’s a tough fight and you totally mess me up. I probably win, but you manage to escape because of outside forces or possibly a play on my heroic nature. One (or both) of us swears revenge. Then later on you jump out again and I’ll  be like “YOU! I’ve been waiting for this since that jungle back there! This time you won’t escape!”

Then later on it turns out that they are not long lost brothers.

If you like old things repackaged as shiny new things, then Nintendo loves you in your private game bits. High on the success of their plan to release ancient Gamecube titles as new Wii games by slapping the phrase NEW PLAY CONTROL! on the front of the box, those clever sprockets have… done the same thing with a different game. This time it may well be awesome, however. Because it’s Metroid.

Metroid Prime, actually.

All three of the games in the Metroid Prime series are to be released on a single disc for the Wii around August 24th, 2009. The first two games - Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime: Echoes - have been rejigged with Wiimote functionality, while Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has been included to mock people who already bought it.

All three games will be accessible via the main menu, letting you jump in and out at the press of a few buttons. There will also be achievements (and possibly other things) to unlock by completing parts of the games.

For fans (like me) this is a great chance to replay three great games. The Prime series has given us some of the better games on both the Wii and Gamecube. For newbies, it’s a chance to not suck and be lame, finally. At only the price of a single new game, it’s almost a good deal. Buy it anyway.

In the beginning, Final Fantasy really was supposed to be final. The last ditch effort to save an ailing company from fried doom. I guess it… worked? Twenty-two years later we’re staring down the barrell of the 13th installment of the main series, and it looks pretty freaking sweet.

Final Fantasy EX EYE EYE EYE is stamped with a 2010 release date. Agonisingly long. For now we’ll have to be content with the trickling out of gameplay and story trailers, and other miscellanea. Some choice bits:

• The game features a female protagonist, a big change from the usual “basically a girl with an implied penis” male lead.
• Her name is Lightning, or as I like to say it: LIGHTNING. Then I stare some dude off. We may never fully understand the FF team’s obsession with weather and dihydrogen monoxide themed names. One of the other characters is named Sudz.
• Sudz is actually Denzel Washington from an alternate universe where he became a merchant communist. Sudz keeps a chicken in the top of his afro.
• One character looks like they’re a gypsy. Side-quests involving horse theft, I hope.
• The gameplay seems to combine the real time maps of FFXII and the turn based monkey business of other things called Final Fantasy.

The visuals are looking predictably gorgeous, although it does nothing to lessen their appeal. And I welcome a step back with the battle system, since playing FFXII felt like saving the world by proxy. Stay tuned for more epic. Yes, it still counts as epic if they’re just doing the same old shite.

I know, right! A chicken in his hair! Amazing!

Sometimes games just shit you right off. It’s not that they’re bad games, exactly, it’s just that they do bad things. Nobody really knows why they keep doing these bad things. Don’t they know they’re KILLING THEIR MOTHER?

1. Swimming/Underwater Levels

In real life, swimming is a fun and relaxing activity. In games, swimming is a way to punish you for reaching the swimming level. As if it wasn’t frustrating enough to have an extra dimension to deal with, you also have to monitor a ridiculous bar that records how close you are to death by drowning. So you get lost, run out of oxygen, and contemplate sticking your real head in your real toilet to make it stop.

2. Sniper Sections

I can honestly say that I have never thought, while playing a game involving guns, that I was too close to the targets, had too much control and my field of vision was too large.

3. Flying Assholes

For some reason, designers also think that stopping what you’re doing to to swat away flies is totally one of the best experiences in life. So they attempt to replicate that by making your game self battle crows, bats, slugs, moths, bats, bats, beetles and bats. Epic distraction action! Play with your friends!

4. Fetch Quests

Why yes, I do want to sail all over the world looking for 72 shards of the magical gem key. Thank you for offering!

5. Escort Missions

If you’ve ever been powering through a game thinking “gee whiz, this would be much more super keen if I had to look after a defenceless little girl at the same time” then game developers are looking out for your needs. Nothing murders your enjoyment of a fun action-oriented game faster than a slow-moving, whiney, instant game over screen following you around like a feckless puppy.

6. QTEs

Quick Time Events hope to trick you into thinking you are awesome by making you press buttons in simple combinations while showing you kickass things. It’s as badass as pressing the pause button on a DVD. You stud.

Assassin’s Creed. Sigh.

It really could have been a great game. Really. The idea of being a trained assassin in the Holy Land circa 12th Century practically hypes itself. I even liked the silly science fiction madness that framed the whole thing.

Unfortunately the game is best described as a flawed diamond. Or a very pretty piece of coal. Or an iredeemable pile of steaming shitburgers, if you ask my wife. Despite being a game in which you are an expert assassin, most of your time was spent running away from guards. Most of your other time was spent fighting guards. And by fighting I mean standing in front of them while you waited for the right moment to press the magic “oh no you don’t” button.

Outside the fights and running, there were the horrendously boring “preparation” tasks for each assassination - a repeated series of quests involving such exciting objectives as following a guy, following a guy slowly, and sitting on a bench for three minutes.

And don’t even mention the ear-gougingly terrible voice work on the main character, who inexplicably seems to be a monotone American.

But there was gold to be found if you could stand all that. The game itself is absolutely gorgeous, with shiny and expansive representations of famous Holy Land destinations like Damascus and Jerusalem. The free running aspect was also great fun, although a little too guided to make you feel like you had even an ounce of skill.

Regardless, I liked the game enough to still be super hyped that the sequel is almost here. Below is the recently released gameplay footage, with drab walkthrough commentary by a developer drone:

Reasonably sweet, yes. Aside from the epic lulz of Leonardo Da Vinci as a main character in a video game, there are signs that the developers have taken criticisms of the first game on board. For a start, it looks like you may actual be A FUCKING ASSASSIN. Unfortunately, the assassination itself still involves storming the castle like a mother bitching commando robot, which seems a tad… retarded. As a friend noted, “why not just stab him while he’s on the toilet?”

Still, we can only hope that this isn’t indicative of the majority of the missions. And we can be buoyed by the repeated notion of “variety”, something the first game treated as a filthy hooker of a word to be avoided.

The wife will probably still hate it though.

Tetris has reached its mid-twenties. Recently the innocuous little puzzler reached its quarter-century anniversary to a level of fanfare appropriate to a block stacking exercise.

It was, of course, the introduction to gaming for a lot of people, and spawned a endless load of copies, rip-offs, pointless sequels, cosplay and a gameshow craze. Not bad for a game which puts you in charge of making a series of squares conform to government specifications. And everyone has their own stories about it. My wife is a 5th level Grand Tetra, and I had a friend in high school who reprogrammed a portable Tetris clone to only spit out straight line blocks, because he was mentally incorrect.

Now enjoy Guillaume Reymond’s version of Tetris, with human blocks and severe awesome:

Today I’m going to be a complete asshole. First I’m going to tell you about two fantastic PC games from a bygone era, ones which should really be played by everyone. Classics. Then I’m going to suggest that you go out and buy them as soon as possible. And when you go out to find them and realise they’re both no longer available new and very rare second-hand, I’ll be too busy doing your mother.

Thousands of years ago, there was no need to have a fancy computer to play games on. The rolling juggernaut of corporate greed and the lumbering titan of technological progress took care of that, but luckily those of us who are still using glorified calculators can still play games that were released almost 20 years ago. What follows details two of these games, and they both also fall into a genre (sadly) more dead than the idea of low-tech gaming - POINT-AND-CLICK ADVENTURES.

Blade Runner

If you’ve read the book (Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep) your response to the idea of a game might be somewhat positive, if you’ve seen the film then you probably just involuntarily spat on your monitor.

Set in a universe which seems to straddle both Phillip K Dick’s novel and Ridley Scott’s film, Blade Runner is a point-and-click style adventure/detective game from the now defunct Westwood Studios. It features a new story in a recycled setting from the film, following Blade Runner (the catchy title for cops who murder robots) Ray McCoy as he tries to solve various unsolvables. What begins as a simple case of animal murder quickly spirals into a full-blown hunt for Replicant fugitives through the city.

The game has you play as Ray, moving through locations and collecting clues as the story unravels. As mentioned, it’s a point-and-click game, and just so happens to be the first 3D game for the genre. Given the source material of the book, it’s not hard to see why this would make a fantastic adventure, what with a crumbling society and shaky ideas of wrong/right (and human/not). Given the source material from the movie, it’s amazing that the game didn’t make you want to gouge out your eyes, put them back in, and gouge them out again before setting fire to your head.

Instead what it offers is amazing looking sets (many of which are practically-perfect recreations of scenes from the film’s admittedly pretty designs), a cast of memorable characters, an intriguing storyline and a fun game. By far my favourite feature, and one that still fails to impress in modern games, is the branching nature of the plot itself: multiple endings. There are 13 endings in total for the game, and the real feat is that none of them feel tacked on. Each playthrough offers up a multitude of small and large differences which eventually funnel you towards an inevitable conclusion, some changes directly a result of the player’s actions (or words) and others being completely out of your control. The result is a world which truly feels alive, despite the restrictive nature of clicking on things with a computer mouse.

Good luck finding it 12 years after it was released, but certainly worth the trouble. Try to avoid becoming a pedophile, though.

Sanitarium

Pointing at something else, we click through to Sanitarium. In response, it burrows into our brain and lays eggs made of disturbing psychological goo. You are cast as a man who wakes up in a mental asylum with no memory and a severely bandaged head. Naturally your first act is to walk around picking up everything, but following that your task is to find out who you are and what brought you to the looney bin.

Sequences in the aformentioned crackpot lounge are interspersed with strange, dream-like visits to horrible and twisted worlds which may or may not be a product of the main character’s imagination. Is he really crazy? Has he crossed into another world? Do Androids Dream? Settings include an awful town populated entirely by hideously mutated bitch children, a circus, a creepy organic spaceship, and South America BC. You’ll have to solve puzzles and battle evil crows (yes) in order to find yourself and answers, and as things build towards the climax you might have to confront some unpleasant internal issues.

From the gothic architecture to the mad inmates beating their heads against the walls because it feels good, a lot of effort has gone into pushing the theme of insanity, and many of the themes and ideas may stay with you after youswitch off and go to bed at night. Thankfully, just as much care has gone into the story itself, so it isn’t just a bunch of scares with no backbone. The gameplay is interesting too, with not too much of the randomness that ruins many adventure games - combine the gumball with the wrench to dislodge the rope and make the clown move sideways to reveal a news clipping which has a code that lets you open the safe that holds your will to live.

This one is probably even more impossible to find, considering it was much lower profile than the likes of Blade Runner, which was able to piggyback off the film. My copy came straight from eBay for a damn expensive price considering how old it is.

Remember, old games are good for your street cred.

I can barely see the computer screen to type this. I’ve gotten no sleep in the last week, it’s making me start to see things and my head hurts like hell. My wife lost her job and sits around at home all day. Our lives are falling apart but it doesn’t seem to matter, we’re waiting for the next big score. There’s a burned in image of a unicorn on our television screen. Peggle was here.

The monstrous evil in question has been out for quite a while, but only recently released on Xbox Live - which is where I snagged it from. The game is simple, as all puzzle games should ideally be, and easy to get into. You fire a ball from the top of the screen and try to make it bounce off all the orange pegs as it falls to the bottom.

And that’s really it.

You have 10 shots to clear all the orange pegs, there are bonuses for difficult shots, free balls for getting it in the bucket, special power pegs to help you along, moving pegs, a bunch of different levels, and a list of characters to choose from. So far so normal, so lets have a quick game. Good fricking luck. Playing Peggle for just five minutes turns into just five more, which becomes “I’ll stop after 9pm”, which turns to deciding if you can wait “just 5 minutes” to put down the controller and go pee. It’s menacingly addictive.

It’s extremely random, of course. There is a certain skill in predicting the angles at which two round surfaces bounce off each other while affected by gravity (ask a pool player if you can find a sober one), but once you fire off the ball you have no control over it, all you can do is watch and hold your breath as all your peg lighting dreams come true or you crash and burn, exiled from Pegopia for all time until next game - but surely that’s a vital ingredient. That the game is 50% skill and 50% chance means that while you can learn to control your shots in angle and choice, you can never really master the game. Trying to dominate the bitch of Fate and get that perfect bounce keeps you coming back for more day after day.

The other thing that keeps drawing you in (even when you are losing) is the wealth of little touches the game includes to make you feel like you are always achieving something. Hit a tough bounce shot and get a “Long Shot” bonus, get it straight in the bucket after a hit and the game commends your “Free Ball Skills”, and if you hit a lot of orange pegs on one shot it’s an “Orange Attack”. The climax of each level is punched up to the absolute maximum, blasting a mood-altering rendition of Ode to Joy as everything slows down and you let your superior virtual peg hitting skills speak for themselves. Even when you miss completely the game flips a coin to decide whether you get a free ball, seemingly out of pity. It’s not hard to get wrapped up enough to spend half a day on the ridiculous thing.

Of course you may choose to play secretly, since the entire game is engineered to look like a Kinder Surprise toy, presumably to forcibly emasculate players already reduced to whimpering puppies by the game itself. The “Peggle Masters” are a mix of adorable kitties, cute rabbits, hampsters, goofy-faced pumpkins and a Swedish unicorn, winning a level sets off a trail of brightly-coloured sparkles followed by a smear of rainbow informing you of your score, and the opening of the game is a serene field of pretty flowers.

So if male, prepare to perhaps spend considerable time explaining to your male counterparts that you really truly meant to switch on Halo in order to murder some alien scumholes.

Recently, on the topic of second-hand video game sales and the apparently epic danger they pose to the future of the industry, talking to Venture Beat, Nintendo America boss-man Reggie Fils-Aime noted that the company does not believe used games are “in the best interest of the consumer”. I’m sure what he meant to say was the best interests of Nintendo.

He went on, for some reason:

“We have products that consumers want to hold onto. They want to play all of the levels of a Zelda game and unlock all of the levels. A game like Personal Trainer Cooking has a long life.”

You could slice the arrogance with a knife, but we can forgive a little market spin. Meanwhile… Personal Trainer: Cooking? This is the most compelling reason to keep games until the end of time? Some day I hope to hand down my electric Japanese cookbook to my grandchildren. And the assumption that all games are great, or even good, would be crazy enough without the following screaming fail:

“Describe another form of entertainment that has a vibrant used goods market. Used books have never taken off. You don’t see businesses selling used music CDs or used DVDs. Why? The consumer likes having a brand-new experience and reliving it over and over again. If you create the right type of experience, that also happens in videogames.”

Is he that good at spin or just incredibly stupid? Only his doctor knows for sure. The next time you pass a used bookstore or video rental place selling old DVDs, stop and laugh at the fact that they don’t even really exist. I think at the very least he overestimates the appeal of opening shrink-wrap, and it’s very unlikely that the solution to the problem of lost revenue from second-hand game sales is to act like an ignorant boob.