It features MTTG administrators GeneShark, Dazza, zxPieSqrd and occasional MTTG writer MasterCheese!

Just head on over to TurtleStomp.com, and you can hear our lovely, dulcet tones raging about Wii games, the number 17 and various other things. A podcast of videogames, technology, nerdgasms and hilarity (Hopefully), and you should tune in.

There are two and a half episodes up right now: #0, #0.5 and the latest as of writing, #1.

We record Wednesdays, with hope of getting the cast up for your listening pleasure by late Wednesday or early Thursday. You can listen to totally live fail via the TS3 server, and come chat in our IRC channel.

<3

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As you start the game you’re greeted to a simple but effective cutscene, showing a spaceship’s crew get scattered across a deserted space station during some sort of dimensional disturbance, shock, horror! You must take the role of Captain Viridian in order to rescue your crew by locating and reactivating a series of teleporters aboard the space station, sounds easy, but little things like dilapidated security measures, fiendishly brilliant level design and the breakdown of reality around your pixellated ears would disagree.

Flip, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce...

The mechanic present throughout the game is that whilst the captain cannot jump, he can ‘flip’, reversing his gravity and leaping to the surface above. This can only be done on a flat surface (No mashing the flip key to fly for you!), and whilst it seems simple, is used to great effect throughout. VVVVVV is similar to Portal in this way, it’s such a simple mechanic you’ll think you’ll get bored of it in a few levels time… then the level design throws something new at you, and again, and again. Insta-flip bars, looping screens and the whole slow breakdown of the dimension thing all come into play, making for fast-paced, teeth-grindingly infuriating gameplay.

Infuriating perhaps the wrong word there, I never once got angry at the game for being too hard. Instead opting to rage inwardly at my cursed inability to flip at the right time, or to judge where I’d end up after hitting 4 of these flip bars in a row… and the less said about my hair-tearing ineptitude during ‘The Tower’ the better. Yes, the game is unforgiving in places, requiring you to keep your reactions and your problem solving at the ready to progress, but this has taken said unforgiving nature from classic games and baked it into a deliciously masochistic cake, before sprinkling on some improvements like infinite lives and instant respawn. Perfect for old school gamers.

This will happen. A lot.

With it’s story told by computer terminals found throughout the game, and the humourous dialogue and room names, VVVVVV certainly has a lot of charm, multiplied by the atmosphere created by its excellent soundtrack PPPPPP, composed by Magnus Palsson (aka Souleye) which really drags you back into your old gaming memories with its upbeat and catchy chiptunes. Lovely stuff.

At its $15 (Approx £10) price point it can seem a little expensive, but it entertains for the entire duration. If you need more convincing than my word, there’s a demo available online [Kongregate], or for download. You can download the demo, and purchase the full game at thelettervsixtim.es, which is probably my new favourite URL.

So go play. What are you waiting for, me to end this review properly? Ha! Like that’ll happen.

PS: As of writing I have 12/20 trinkets and 1084 deaths over 2 hours, 16 minutes and 31 seconds. Yay, stats!

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Unfortunately, I’m currently without any consoles apart from a DS, and away from my gaming PC (Typing on a borrowed laptop, thanks Rhys) so what I’ve been playing is quite boring. Pretty much consists of over 40 hours of Pokémon Ruby, because clearly I’m hardcore. Or sad. One of those, it’s just how I roll.

And now, it’s time for your comments!

“Got Mass Effect 2 last week, completed now. Also been playing FIFA 10 again, after a long break from it. Other than that I have been quite boring.” - Jonobrow

Joe playing Mass Effect 2, FIFA 10 and in his own words, being ‘quite boring’…

I can see that this Weekly Play will go down in history as being the single most riveting piece of text on the internet, ever. Also the latest Weekly Play so far… starting to regret including a timeframe in this feature’s title…

Till next time… comment bitches!

<3

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Ponyo is the new film to come out of Studio Ghibli, with Disney handling the English dub and distribution, fitting as Miyazai has said that the inspiration for this film came from The Little Mermaid. It’s the story of a young boy who lives high on a hill with his mum and his dad is a sailer. One day he finds a goldfish in a bottle down by the ocean, and decided to take it home. As he looks at it he thinks it looks more and more like a little girl. She’s the daughter of a magical wizard of the sea and a goddess. She decides she wants to be a human girl and runs away.

Now, as with most Miyazaki films, the story doesn’t sound great, but when put on-screen it works wonderfully. It’s not the most original of story lines, it’s fairly predictable, but it is the magic of Miyazaki that he can do it in a way that means you can just lose yourself in the film. There’s a slight eco message in there aswell, but not one that gets rammed down your throat.

I found myself sitting in the audience, smiling like a kid in a candy shop, laughing, and entirely un-worried that I wasn’t a small child who this film was aimed at. There have been criticisms levelled at the film for being “Miyazaki light” or “B-Level Ghibli”, but personally I don’t think this is a fair accusation. It’s certainly aimed at the kids, it lacks some of the darker elements present in some of his other work, but this is definitely nothing short of spectacular.

The music from Joe Hisaishi is wonderous as ever and serves to only enhance the joy of the brilliantly drawn visuals. Whilst the end credit song of the English dub starts well enough, with a simple translated version of the Japanese, it does get distinctly painful when it turns into an auto-tuned mess of a pop song.

Let’s be honest though, if the only criticism I can level is that I didn’t like a one and a half minute piece of credit music, I am either clutching at straws or that song was terrible. Here’s a link, tell me which one you think it is.

Finally the elephant in the room. Dubbed or subbed. Personally I have no problem with the dub. Yes the Japanese is the original and therefore usually the best, but there is no problem with the dub. The voice acting is brilliant, the dialogue maintains something of Miyazaki, and it has clearly been handled with care by the English Language producer John “Toy Story” Lasseter.

The film is magical, thoroughly enjoyable and holds something for everyone from the very young to the very old. Take the kids, take the grandparents and take yourself, or go without kids, there’s nothing wrong with that. This film needs to be watched, just leave when you hear the credit music start to change.

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This content is reposted from the Random Blog of Random Blogginess. The original post can be found here. It is used, with permission, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

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This time, it’s gaming habits. Recently, myself and various other MOREtotheGAMErs signed up to Raptr, a Last.fm-style website for games that’s been running since late 2008 (Never let it be said this feature isn’t cutting edge). Raptr takes your account names for various gaming services and compiles your games, playtimes, achievements and the like into your account, publishing new additions to your friends’ newsfeeds.

This happens in automatic realtime for most PC games and all 360/PS3 games. Other platforms can be added manually, but are less accurate and often forgotten by me at least. But it pretty much works as well as it can do, with older platforms having no way to automatically report playtime anyway! Steam achievements, 360 achievements and PSN trophies are all synced automatically too, so if you’re the achievement whoring type it’s quite handy for bragging rights.

Immediately I began to notice just how much time I spent gaming. The week before I signed up, I had to estimate how much time I spent gaming a week on a beta registration form. After a lot of umming and ahhing I think I ended up making a joke about my memory, and guessing around 15 hours a week. A week after installing raptr I’d played about 27 hours of games, and that wasn’t including the few times I broke the client, so probably around 33 hours in total, scary.

Another thing about this realtime sharing of what I was playing, is that I began to get people shout at me over my habits. Some people irritated I was playing instead of talking to them (Yes, I’ve chosen shooting zombies over a one-sided conversation with you about how you’re pissed off at someone I don’t know, deal with it?), had some fellow photography students yell at me for gaming when I had coursework to write and even had my grandmother comment on facebook after Raptr had sent an automatic message to my wall. Yeah, gaming isn’t seen as a legitimate hobby by many, and they’re usually the type to enjoy voicing their opinion.

Of course, this is less a criticism of Raptr, it’s more a lesson in how I set up my permissions on Facebook, but y’know.

The final and possibly worst reason sharing my gaming habits is terrifying, is that my gaming friends can see them, and criticise what I’m playing. Yes I play far too much Bejewelled Blitz,  but please don’t call me a ‘casual gamer’ as if your hours of COD make you a better gamer than me. I like flash games, they’re an interest of mine… maybe 40 hours of Mass Effect don’t appeal to me? Hmm?

So yes, Raptr. Not without it’s drawbacks, but overall an interesting service. One I shall remain using, especially when I get my gaming PC back.

Sorry for not posting for a while, life got in the way a little, I’ll try to keep up. In other news, these rants are now being posted on TurtleStomp, the podcast I appear on with a few other writers. They’ll still get posted here, it just gives me an excuse to plug the site at the bottom of each of these posts! Also, I finally thought of a name for this segment… simply “Tom talks too much”, I think you’ll agree.

This post originally appeared here on TurtleStomp, and is posted here with permission from the Author, which is me!

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Considerations of canon aside, the crowning achievement of SAW is that it manages to perfectly replicate the look, feel, and tense atmosphere of the films. Again sharing a similarity with its source material, most would be hard-pressed to describe the game as fun – though that hasn’t stopped the popularity of the movies, and is a common trait in many survival-horror games.

Another thing that SAW does well is that, by its very premise, conventions of the genre are excused with a completely legitimate in-world reason. Tapp’s wounds have been treated — the bullet in his chest replaced with a key, which everyone else in the game needs to free themselves — and he finds himself in a disused asylum which has been rigged with no end of traps by the cancerous, occasionally-dead serial killer/antihero Jigsaw (excellently voiced here, as in the movies, by Tobin Bell; it’s unclear whether other actors’ voices are used) . Several other characters from the movies also make an appearance, and to its credit, the game does a good job of tying up loose ends, although many of these concern fairly minor characters and plot points. Given that Jigsaw is in control here, the linearity of the game makes logical sense, and puzzles (which occupy the lion’s share of the game) have been part of the series since its inception.

However, the game is not without a number of flaws. First, and most egregious, is the combat; while the survival-horror genre has been plagued with poor combat systems for years, SAW is a particularly terrible example. While a variety of weapons are available, all break after a small amount of use, and some are only useful for one (often instantly fatal) attack. There are two attack buttons, purportedly a light and heavy attack respectively, but in practice both attacks are so slow and cumbersome, regardless of which weapon is equipped, that it is almost always a matter of luck rather than skill whether you hit your opponent before they hit you. Fortunately, with the exception of one particularly tedious sequence near the end of the game, combat is rarely a focus; besides, the game is generous enough with checkpoints that losing a fight is usually a momentary irritation rather than cause for a long trek back to where you died.

The other major drawback to the game is in repetition. It’s often said of the horror genre that you shouldn’t use the same scare twice; whilst being forced to fish around in a dirty toilet full of used syringes to find a key is an unpleasant experience the first time round, by the third or fourth time you’re asked to do this, it loses its impact. Along similar lines, while the game has a number of unique puzzles – the end-of-chapter traps being, usually, a particular highlight – three types of puzzle are overly repeated, with only small variations, to the point of extreme frustration. One type involves switching panels on a circuit board so all the lamps receive power; another involves arranging gears to connect one point to another; and the third, and most annoying type, asks you to connect a maze of pipes by rotating concentric rings. This latter is comparatively more difficult than the other two, which is exacerbated by the fact that you’re often forced to complete the puzzle under a tight time limit – caused, for instance, by the room filling with poison gas.

Under conditions where you have more time to think, the puzzles can be enjoyable and cleverly designed; when under pressure, they’re simply an aggravation. Similarly, although there’s not a time limit, unlocking doors and medical cabinets for vital items — rather neatly, your waning health results in colour draining from the world, and you must replenish it by injecting yourself with syringes — requires the completion of a simplistic minigame, while certain secure cases, often containing weaponry, re-use the gear puzzle.

While the movies have often focused more (to both acclaim and criticism) on new and inventive ways to butcher people rather than gritty realism, the game asks too much of the player in terms of suspending disbelief. We are only ever shown Jigsaw himself and one accomplice, and yet we are asked to believe that they were able to reconfigure an entire abandoned asylum with an array of traps, kidnap and torture (often to the point of death) several dozen victims, and set up an often-elaborate ‘game’ for each of them to play, all without eliciting notice from law enforcement or raising red flags by purchasing a large number of deadly weapons and tools. This is too difficult to accept as possible, and it decreases immersion in the game world.

The game also features a rudimentary crafting system, and in what is presumably an attempt to turn the tables, you can (theoretically) use traps against other inhabitants of the asylum, along with the ability to bolt and block some doors. In practice, though, this is almost always far more trouble than it’s worth, and while you find plans for making three types of mines later in the game, the promotional copy on which this review is based came (as usual) with no instructions, and it wasn’t possible to work out how to place them once they were crafted. Evidently, it was at no point vital to use them.

Like many survival-horror games, SAW features multiple endings. However, the choice is presented in as literal and unimaginative way as possible: after solving the final puzzles, you receive a key which will open either a door marked “Freedom” (giving you the ‘canon’ ending) or one marked “Truth”. The two endings are in no way dependent on your in-game actions – simply which door you choose – so it’s easy enough to go back to a previous save once you’ve seen one ending in order to see the other.

In conclusion, SAW is a fairly middle-of-the-road game which will chiefly be of interest to fans of the series, who are more likely to overlook its numerous flaws in favour of immersion in the plot and atmosphere. However, it fails to learn the lesson that the movies try to teach; it’s not about the elaborate traps, it’s more about the characters and what they’re really like under pressure. In the ‘real world’ of the films, a character choosing to walk barefoot over a path strewn with broken glass is faced a tortuous decision; in the game world, it’s simply a matter of losing a little bit of health.

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I’m sure you’d have wanted to vent some anger at me due to lack of content. Well good news! Now you can. E-mail the editor@moretothegame.co.uk and I will personally delete read and reply to each of your e-mails. You can also follow news from the editor away from my personal life and general MTTG updates on twitter here.

In other news, I’m sure many of you have realised it’s only 3 months until our epic trip to MCM. All information about it has been updated and hotel booking will be done next month. I hope to see as many of you there as possible and we’ll be posting content about the event whilst we’re there. Also, speaking of trips. If you hear about any event this summer we’d like to know. I’m sure some of us should be able to go and provide content from them about  upcoming movies and games.

That’s about it for now,  I don’t think I’d do another post like this for a while, but for small updates always check our facebook or twitter. And remember, keep writing, your submissions will be out soon.

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Since the last post, I’ve been using the Raptr gaming service, which I’ll comment on further in a rant-esque post soon, but it does mean remembering what I’ve been playing becomes a whole lot easier. So, I’ve played roughly:

19 hours of Left4Dead 2
12 hours of Half-Life 2
8 hours of Left4Dead
4 hours of Bejeweled Blitz
4 hours of CounterStrike: Source
3 hours of Pokémon Fire Red

And a whole bunch of other stuff, including Freedom Fighters (Which is an awesome PS2 game that has been nostalgia-ing me for a while), Cave Story (Once again, still stuck on the Sacred Grounds!) and Zombie Panic! Source (Though I’ll be damned if I can figure out how to actually play).

The big purchase of course, being Left4Dead 2, which has since been played and achievement whored. Lovely stuff. Combat Shotgun + Fire Axe = Devastating combination.

Ok, so enough from me ’cause I’m feeling unimaginative and unfunny today, so let’s have your comments to make me feel better about my writing skills:

“Not much change since the last week except for I have the full L4D2 now and have been playing it constantly with Alex, Joe and my brother sometimes on splitscreen. Got half of the achievements now. Doubt I’ll get them all (Mainly to do with Complete all campaigns on expert and survive a campaign on expert with realism mode enabled).

Did go on Lego Rock Band for an hour to get some more trophies (when I had remembered I had a PS3 that is) at about 50% on that too now. Starting to get a bit crap after having not played Rock Band or GH for a long while.” - Daryl

“While you’ve been playing Age of Empires, I’ve rediscovered Civilization III, a game with similar objectives but completely different gameplay; turn-based rather than real time. I’d forgotten how addictive it can be.
As mentioned above, I’ve been playing a little Left4Dead and Counterstrike:Source, whenever I can find people to play with. I still need a lot more time on L4D to become anywhere near good at it.
Also, we’ve taken my Dad’s old Atari 1040ST out of storage, so expect some retrocity articles on games from that machine in the next few months. I’ve mostly been playing Rainbow Islands on it this week, a vertically scrolling platform game.
I have also found time to play on a few online games, so much so that I could probably have a pretty good attempt at Flash Friday articles by now. Most notably I have rediscovered one of my favourites from a few years ago, Need For Madness. In this game you drive vehicles and can win a level either by finishing the race first, or ‘wasting’ (smashing to pieces) all your opponents.” - JMB22

“As Daryl said we’ve been on L4D2. To be honest I have finally ressurected my RPG on the pc, its now a full 20 mins in a speed run. I also went on COD 4 for the first time in months. Very few people on there now :P” - Jonobrow

“More Assassin’s Creed.

That is all :P

Not really :P, I ve been trying to complete the game in one go apart from the flags and achievements, I can do those later. The guards have finally got a bit smarter and can actually get a hit every so often :D. I like the challenge, but I can still just kill them quickly with a counter move so meh. I also like the fact I had to assassinate someone, who could out run me even though he had two throwing knives sticking out of his back :P.
Altair’s climbing speed is still annoying and I’ve given up trying to out run guards I just fight until they’re all dead,not so fast but easier to lose them :D. Hopefully I’ll be onto Assassin’s Creed 2 by next week :D” - Bumblebee_Prime

“Right, first of some games I’ve played recently is on my Raptr profile (http://raptr.com/zxpiesqrd) which will from now on be the source of my games played in a week.

However, I’ve managed to grab get onto L4D and CS:S enjoying shooting people and zombies :P (Also yay fail L4D Vs team, we suck \o/)” - zxPieSqrd

And that’s it from this relatively uneventful Weekly Play, do be sure to leave your comments and I’ll try and get back to actually making this weekly play.

<3

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The story is strangely simple whilst maintaining quite complex undertones. Essentially it is a tale of grief. After the baby of a man and woman falls to his death whilst they are locked in, shall we say, a loving embrace, the woman struggles to deal with her grief. The man is a therapist and decides to help his wife by trying to get her over the grief. He finds that the only way to do so is to make her confront what she fears most.

So far, so normal. The thing is, this is a Lars von Trier movie. Lars tends to take nice, simple, film concepts and do something with them which is new and exciting. We have, in this film, something which owes a lot to the horror films that came along thanks to the cheap availability of hand-held cameras. There are elements of the alone-in-a-cabin films, and, as anyone who has heard anything about the film is probably aware, it owes a lot to the torture porn movement

But whilst these are all over-used concepts lately, Lars does something new with this. It could be something with the wonderful way it’s been shot, the constantly changing visual style, with everything from high-contrast black and white to slightly washed-out hand-held and with fantasy scenes mixed in. Perhaps it’s the truly superb performances from Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Whatever it is, this film does something with established conventions, and makes a great film from it.

It is worth noting, before you go out and buy this DVD, that there is material that some people may find somewhat objectionable. In the interest of maintaining a spoiler-free approach to reviewing I won’t give details, but will let the BBFC have their say.

It is clear that ANTICHRIST is not a ’sex work’ but a serious drama exploring issues such as grief, loss, guilt and fear. The brief images of explicit real sex (sight of a penis penetrating a vagina during a consensual sex scene and sight of the man’s penis being masturbated to climax) are exceptionally justified, in this context, by the manner in which they illustrate the film’s themes and the nature of the couple’s relationship.

ANTICHRIST also contains two scenes showing violence towards genitals or genital mutilation. … The shot in question exceeds the BBFC’s Guidelines at ‘15′ … Even at ‘18′ the BBFC recognises that the scene will be shocking and offensive to some viewers. However, the Board is aware of no evidence to suggest that the viewing of this scene is likely to be harmful to adults. The scene is not presented in an eroticised or attractive manner and is not likely to encourage emulation or arousal.

So there you have it. The work is offensive, repulsive, and in some places close to being a “sex work”, but it’s not arousing and not harmful to adults.

All of this is mixed in with a clear sense of misogyny and images of death and the ruthlessness of nature are rife throughout the film, just take the appearance of a talking dead fox (yes, you might laugh at it when you see it) or a mother deer with a still-born fawn hanging from her.

All this is aimed at getting a response, and it worked. Undoubtedly not a film for the squeamish or those easily offended, but if you’re not going to run from something that would have been banned in the 80s as a video nasty, Antichrist is worth a look.

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This content is reposted from the Random Blog of Random Blogginess. The original post can be found here. It is used, with permission, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

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Results

Ok here are the results, in-case you were unable to look at the side:

So according to YOU 2010 looks to be an exciting and big year for games, let’s hope so :D. In terms of comments, I got 1 person (who I’ll paste in a bit further down).  When looking at the results for this I had a quick search for reasons why 2010 might look to be a big year, and I found a list of game releases this year. As for well known titles, I had found:

• Mass Effect 2 (Out on date of this post)
• Battlefield: Bad company 2
• Pokémon Heart Gold/Soul Silver
• Command and conquer 4
• God of War III
• Gran Turismo 5 (Eventually, but apparently features the top gear test track)

There are probably more, but that’s what I could pick out easiest from the list of all upcoming titles I found.

Extended Views

Ok, I think I forgot to mention this, but as well as commenting with ideas for new polls comment extending your views behind your answer and use it for discussion too!

So yeah as I said I got one comment from Tom about what he thinks about the upcoming year:

New Poll, GET VOTING!!!

And here’s the new poll (I can tell Brett is going to love this one):

Before you go, VOTE (^It’s only up there y’know^). Then after that you can go, although feel free to comment with more in-depth views or even suggest another poll for me (have put yours on my backlist GeneShark) and that’s about it for this week.

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