Retro Prefect

Final Fantasy Four(ums) (Final Banter-sy)

2018-10-18T05:31:00.001-07:00

7AM on the Nibelheim defense league forums, a heavily pixelated image of an alien is placed next to some angry-looking bullet points, it reads:

Illegal alien Jenova came to Midgar, at taxpayers expense!

Illegal Alien Jenova responsible for the deaths of Shinra employees, what will the government do!?

Illegal Alien Jenova given council house inside six-bedroomed subterranean crater, yet Tonberrys from THIS PLANET remain homeless!!

Comments:

HIDEOUSSPOOK_56: Ridiculous! Since I lost my job maintaining guard scorpions, I've had to downsize to an tiny cottage that harbors a mechanical fiend, and THEY GET AN ENTIRE CRATER? STEP UP SHINRA!

2_BOTTOMSWELLXXL: I bet the people in Kalm town don't mind do they? But would they harbor a Space Alien with multiple forms, I DOUBT IT!

HONEYBEEINN: Download the honeybee app and find hot local guys in your area now!

PROUDCLOD_LAD: SEND THEM TO COREL PRISON IT'S ALL THEY DESERVE!!!

GILFORDAYS69: Heidegger wouldn't have let this happen! Rufus is YET ANOTHER liberal snowflake pandering to the minorities!

AIRBUSTER_BROS: UNBELIEVABLE! When are the government going to finally pull their finger out and shoot a big cannon at it?

8AM on the Dollet women's rights forum, the forum temporarily crashes after being inundated with Gifs of Ultimecia making a sandwich while being dolphin punched. The perpetrators are rumored to be acting on behalf of Final Fantasy 4-Chan but cannot be officially identified due to uniform Kain Highwind masks. The forum degenerates into madness...

DOBENFLO2000: It's UltiMEcia not UltiSHEcia!

MANWITHTHEMACHINEGUN: All it takes is one bad period and BOOM, locked in time compression, CANNOT BE TRUSTED

JUNCTIONBOI45: Nobody wants to watch women play Triple Triad anyway, it's a MAN'S sport!

ELNOYLE: Its Edea not SHEdea! Looks like they have no...'CLUE'

PAPALOVESMOOMBA: It makes you want to take a Doomtrain over the lot of 'em! THEY WOULD PROBABLY BE LESS CONFUSED!!!

TIAMATTHEW890: Balamb Garden has become nothing more than a breeding ground for virtue signalers and social justice warriors, it doesn't prepare these kids for a real life of fighting T-Rexaurs and propelling dogs at high velocity while in space

9 AM on the Treno buy/sell/trade forum, one of the moderators has placed an abridged article from the tabloids concerning famous instagram foodie 'Quina Quen' and her decision to remain gender neutral despite hostility from local Flans. Patrons are keen to offer their expertise on this subject, well versed on gender awareness of course through years of buying/selling things online:

212RAGTIMEMOUSE: WRONG! It's male, female and anthropomorphic rat people, EVERYTHING ELSE IS CLOUD CUCKOO LAND!

XXUNCLEADELBERTXX: It's giving these kids mixed messages, last week I saw a child WITH A TAIL!

TETRAMASTER222: It's trance Kuja not TRANS Kuja!

TRENOBUYSELLTRADE: XXXXXXX Free listings this weekend at the Treno auction house! Enter code 'MINI-CID' for this one time offer! XXXXXXX

OZMAWEP19: If I meet this 'Quina' I will not be pandering to IT, and IT'S idea of gender. Even if IT does try to consume me in order to learn better magic

Its 10AM on the Zanarkand against cyber bullying page, the page is empty because it turns out it never really existed...

Then after that the forums just sort of talked about nothing in particular, with the occassional sub-forum providing a glimmer of interest...15PM wasn't that bad I suppose

The "Radical" world of 90's marketing (Non-righteous edition)

2018-10-16T09:13:00.000-07:00

Hey dweebz, the names Link; that's right, the same bodacious-radical gnarlariffic rude and crude Link you know from the hit games 'The Zeldas' and 'The Zeldas 2: Lost in Bill-Clintopia' I'm back dudes, and this time I'm more righteous than ever. With awesome 32 Megabits of graphics so brain-meltingly coolorific, you'll think you're IN the game, and let's not forget the mondo-mega pumpin' stereo sound, with jams so skitchin, these beats will make Beethoven bop! So what are you waiting for dorks and dorkettes, PLAY MY GAME ALREADY!!!!

...90's video game adverts were a scary time, when Sega wasn't telling you to burn your Super Nintendo like the fucking nerd you were, Nintendo was telling you to ignore Sega's lies, slash your wrists and commit forever to the cult Nintendo. Of course you also had Atari and 3DO on the table, but the table had wonky legs near their side so every time they stood up the table would not provide them with consistent 3^rd party support METAPHOR OVER!

90's comics were particularly guilty of this trope, just look over any issue of X-Factor (The most 90's Marvel that Marvel has ever been) and you'll find companies desperately trying to pedal those unsold copies of 'Chuck Rock' and 'The Pagemaster' with reckless abandon, neither of which are worth playing, let alone mentioning. Nonetheless a younger more impressionable me would ignore the weekly antics of Boom-Boom and Calaban in favor of adverts telling me how inadequate I was for not owning the latest game to feature an overweight caveman. Often they were tantalizing double page spreads, on the left side the interchangeable slogan 'Are you rad/bad/cool/crude/mad enough?' on the right, a child in MC Hammer cosplay having some form of 'sensory' overload as a result of the 'realer-than-real' graphics. Often the children didn't look like they were enjoying the product at all, in fact it was causing them some serious physical and mental discomfort, of course kids were hardier back then; you put a Mega-CD in front of youngster now and they will literally die from how real Night Trap looks

Games have come a long a terrifying way in recent years, developers no longer imbue anthropomorphic animals with attitude and game adverts today usually feature slow motion footage of two characters colliding to an 'Imagine Dragons' song, followed by a vaguely prophetic but ultimately meaningless slogan. 'Endeepen your Deepness', 'All ends must come to a beginning'; 'Smell with your eyes'. As for adverts in comics, real physical comics; I refuse to believe physical paper even exists any more; when was the last time you saw paper? Paper has become the new papyrus, a novelty you bring out at parties/Egyptian hieroglyph classes. The medium is dead based on all those facts I just said, but what if it wasn't...?

RE: EDGE MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2018 ISSUE ADVERTISING IDEA

Dear Retro Prefect

We appreciate the lengths to which your creative marketing strategy attempts to engage a particular, jaded demographic. Unfortunately at this time we must decline its inclusion within this, and subsequent issues of Edge magazine. Many of us agreed that while the campaign showed genuine passion for the product in question (Soldier Combat 4) there were aspects which did not convey the overall ethos of this magazine as a whole. In particular the gratuitous use of profanity, the mention of being 'Balls deep in a woman' and the derogatory and derisive mention of the game 'Peggle' a game which we all agree here at Edge Magazine, is the best game since sliced 'Braid' (An office in joke you wouldn't get because we are sole arbiter of indie games and their success)

Our sincerest apologies in advance,

Miles Edgeworth

(Senior director: Edge Magazine)

ADVERT IDEA FOR SOLDIER COMBAT 4

Picture of burly alpha-male holding nerds severed head, possible double page spread with multiple 'beta' corpses littered around a local newsagent (contact Londis) scantily clad women are writhing in the brain matter whilst looking longingly up at the beefy alpha man (contact Uncle Ned) text box below written in blood/spooky font reads...

HEY FUCK HEAD ARE YOU FUCKING DEAF! You probably can't handle 'Soldier Combat 4' because you're too busy being rejected by women, SNOWFLAKE! Grow a pair 'man-boi' and then try this game on for size, and we'll know if you're lying about your manliness because voice chat is MANDATORY, and our moderators know BULLSHIT from 20 parsecs! (That's a reference you'll understand NERD)! This game comes on a disc but if you expect any of the content to be actually on it, THINK AGAIN CUCK! What's wrong, too POOR to afford DLC? Go back to playing Peggle gaylord! There are 10 different collectors editions, WHAT YOU THINK THAT'S TOO MANY! I'm sorry, but how many collectors editions did Final Fantasy VII have? NONE I ASSUME, BECAUSE RESEARCH IS FOR PUSSIES AND I'M TOO BUSY GETTING BALLS DEEP IN THE ACTION TO READ SHIT!!!

I don't care if you buy 'Soldier Combat 4' or not, I don't care about you and nobody else does, you are nothing...AVAILABLE WHENEVER I DECIDE IT'S OUT!!!

I've still not played Peggle, any good?

Perfect Weapon

2012-07-30T08:16:00.003-07:00

If there was ever a game which deserved the word 'perfect' within the title, Perfect Weapon would be last in a disorderly and disheveled fighting game queue; desperatley trying to cut inbetween Pit Fighter and World Heroes, as Mortal Kombat laughs from its unjust VIP queue position. In a unique twist by unaptly named developers 'Gray Matter' (whos only other title appears to be Body Hazard, a game which the internet has denied the existence of) they have forgone the dissapointment associated with misleading box art, instead plastering in game footage on the front cover that promises men in figure hugging leather being ambushed by blocky lizardmen.

I was first introudced to this fighting debarcle by PC format magazine and it's much coveted front cover demo disk. In the days of terrible internet, when illegally downloading Snes Roms took three hours; the idea that a demo could access games in half the time it took to actually complete them was something of a refreshing change. I feel that Perfect Weapon is definitely suited to the PC keyboard controls , in so much as whatever method of control you use, the game will innevitably still remain a clunky mess. Fans of Resident Evil will understand that the rotating antics of Chris Redfield should only be assigned to the confines of a darkened corridor, and not against the terrestrial polygon hordes of planets which feature a single environmental characteristic. The first level sees you in planet cliche mainstay, ice planet. I was sorely dissapointed by this as the demo planted you instantly in second planetary cliche "Desert" planet. Desert planet seemed like an exiting prospect back in the day, and it is what lead me to ultimatley buy the game 10 years later on the PS1, desert planet has a lot to answer for...

The first thing you may notice is that the fighting system is incedibly ineffectual against most enemies, any antagonist less than a meter tall is impossible to fight due to the impractical nature of the crouching kick. The aforementioned kick requires unprecedented precision made all the more difficult by A: All the rotating you will have to do to constantly re-align with these enemies. B: Short stature enemies don't take kindly to the condescension implied by a squatting, rotating giant. For a Perfect Weapon, the main character is certainly the least worthy candidate of his title, having been forcibly kidnapped and left to die on an icy planet at the cold paws of knee high dogs; he is essentially nothing short of a useless weapon.

I can't say I've played this game for more than an hour since purchasing it, in fact I've probably played this less than the aforementioned demo. But this tells us less about my lack of conviction when it comes to journalistic impartiality, and more about the fact that a game costing £2 from a car boot sale is so unplayable that it's unworthy of a time investment beyond 60 minutes. Perfect Weapon remains within my PS1 collection as a worthless reminder to everyone that a title isn't everything, and the game itself is even less...

Mario Party 3 (Return Of The Formulaic Party Game)

2012-05-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

Dear the N64 console

For many years I have enjoyed the graphical marvel your console provides, the clunky 3-D worlds, the clunky controllers, the clunky plots you try to shoehorn into games that don't need it. The ability to capture every facet of human emotion in a clunky avatar that is more than likely an animal with an alliterated name. But now the year is 2001, and the rising popularity of Robbie Williams strongly suggests we must regress to a simpler time, where women are women, and men don't dress like Gene Simmons in the name of "Entertaining you". A time when Cluedo could be enjoyed without people making suggestive jokes about the lead pipe, a time when board games ruled...this time is now, this time is Mario Party time!

And so with these wise words in mind, Mario Party saw its third and unfortunately nowhere near final installment released in 2001. Six sequels later and the game mechanics have not changed in the slightest, bar the tacked on control scheme courtesy of the Wii Remote. At the time, the idea of a board game interspersed with mini games sounded like a refreshing idea. Of course the Wii has taught us that mini games serve only one use, and that is to appease the working class long enough to not commit acts of wanton vandalism. The fact that the riots co-inside with the gap between the releases of Mario Party 8 and 9 is no coincidence...

As with all board games, playing alone is not only dull; but also a sign of how tragic a persons life has become. The only thing more depressing than a rainy night of boggle alone, is a rainy night of boggle with a incomprehensible green dinosaur that keeps stealing your Boggle cubes. After playing this game on and off for five years with the same set of friends, the game has now developed from an innocent Nintendo endorsed board game, into a coin grabbing ritualistic hate fest filled with numerous catch phrases, racism towards trees, and tragic twists of fate that can lead the winner into last place within a turn. The games major fault really is the brutal tendency it has of stripping a player of all their hard earned/stolen stars and coins. It is for this very reason that the game fails to provide any sense of achievement even if you do win, the best strategy is to spend most of the game without any assets, as you run less risk of losing them all immediately...although as we all know Waluigi is always the party star, and this is a role he never takes lightly

A lot of people have dismissed this game as being nothing more than an unnecessary sequel to an unnecessary series, and I would wholeheartedly agree. But as Mario Party games go, Mario Party 3 is by far the most unnecessary sequel of them all, and for that it deserves its rightful place in the homes of all people who enjoy torturing their friends for 20-40 turns. I give this game two waves of Bowsers clunky "take about ten" coin stealing hands...

The Adventures Of Alundra: A Link To Nintendo's Copyright Department

2012-05-15T06:55:00.002-07:00

The year was 1997...the Internet was just about passable as something that could be used for things, just as long as you had the patience

Imagine however, a world where Wikipedia was absent, where the only way to find out about the latest PS1 titles was to actually buy a magazine inaccurately stating the release dates. You could I suppose troll through the hundreds of self proposed "Fansites" courtesy of Geocities; but that would usually end in tragedy as you scrolled through a slow loading page of animated GIFS, and then got your first taste of pornographic fan art...

So Alundra, well endowed as I came to find he is; became known as a result of the now thankfully defunct "Playstation MAX" magazine. A periodical which embraced the ideals of journalism like a burly retard man who doesnt know his own strength, the neck snapping inaccuracies of this magazine however made me aware of Alundra, a Zelda clone which had I been older and wiser, would have seen it as just that...and still bought it anyway.

I recently took to replaying the game after two previous unsuccessful attempts trying to finish it, I shall recall these attempts in chronological order...

ATTEMPT EIN: Got stuck on a pyramid level although the exact details of why or what went wrong are unknown. I later discovered an array of cheats for the game on my Action Replay cartridge which may have lead to the memory card reformatting itself...game restart became undesirable on account of post traumatic memory card loss

LESSON LEARNED- If thou art to gain glory through cheating, Alundra and other PS1 titles shall be deleting

ATTEMPT ZWEI: Scrolled through the overly long introduction sequence with major disinterest, ended up strolling onto a beach only to underestimate the power of fire breathing turtles, game over without saving, prospect of seeing the intro a second time...undesirable.

LESSON LEARNED- A boring summer cannot be quelled, by a foray into games previously uncompelled (to play to the end)

ATTEMPT DREI: Seemingly ploughed through levels I previously thought of as impossible, possibly as a result of having nothing else to do other than hand out flyers for an Italian restaurant supposedly owned by a Persian. (He was able to reverse time briefly when people denied his flyers) six months have now transpired, prospect of returning to a story driven game I have neglected for over half a year...undesirable but feasible

LESSON LEARNED- In youth, skills are low. When grown, far you go

The problem with coming back to games from your childhood is that A: They are often shit B: They are far more difficult, and my tolerance to play them is far less. I soon discovered however, that Alundra falls into neither of this categories, not only does it hold up, but the difficulty is far easier than I had remembered. Perhaps it may be that now in my mature stages of adulthood, I have developed the necessary life skills with which to traverse fictional coal mines and crypts easily, whereas the ability to converse with a labourer without contempt still eludes me. Alundra still however provides the tried and tested trial and error you can never be expected to really understand.

Games from the PS1 era however, take longer to load than other consoles on account of the mega graficks and the deposit of dog shite in the disk tray. Try as my father might to remove this evidence, the noxious cocktail of fecal matter and lemon zest will forever remain in my nostrils, reminding me of a simpler, potentially blinding time...

Alundra is definitely a hidden gem among the PS1 library and in some ways surpasses the Zelda series. First of all, the story extends beyond rescue the princess by collecting three things followed by eight things and secondly, the bombs you carry are twice as comically over-sized. Regrettably the sequel decided to enter into 3D, and while I enjoyed the game at the time I can safely assume Alundra 2 has aged nowhere near as well as its predecessor. Buy it, play it, never finish it...( a fourth attempt is planned for 2023)

Captain America And The Avengers

2012-05-10T06:59:00.001-07:00

In 1991, if you actively discussed anything to do with comics obsessively to people who didn't care, you would be at the receiving end of a Vibarnium shield. Nowadays however, people get that reference and Thor is now considered an acceptable role model for young children. (Especially young children who aren't aware they are frost giants) So perhaps it's fitting that I pander to an audience obsessed with a film about fighting aliens that have weak motives for invading earth.

Captain America and the Avengers came from a time when comic book plots didn't have to be grounded in some semblance of reality, where Hawkeye thought purple and blue were acceptable costume colours, where Nick Fury was white; where the destroyer armour hosted his own chat show. (discussions with destroyer) It's a game that doesn't try to win over the unconverted by offering hilarious quips from iron man, or jokes about Captain America not knowing about modern things. Which is just as well as the translation efforts courtesy of Data East prove that even the symbol of American justice (racism) cannot escape misguided dialogue translation. "It is you who is not escaping" says whirlwind after being ambushed by a group of heroes who have no intention of escaping...thank you Japan!

Avengers is your typical arcade scrolling beat em up, by which I mean after the initial euphoria of beating up the same non-marvel endorsed robot enemy for 20 minutes; you soon become aware that there isn't much else. The four avengers (Captain America, Hawkeye, Iron Man and the Vision) all play exactly the same. The only difference of course being that everyone wants to play as shiny Iron Man while Hawkeye is often neglected on account of archery not being a super power.

It's clear that Data East couldn't afford to splash out on many of the Marvel A-listers for this game so boss battles are fought against the likes of obscure favourites "The living laser", "Ultron" and "Klaw". Classic Marvel villains that laugh maniacally for extended periods of time and make puns out of their names. "You wont live against the living laser!", "It's time to face the long arm of the Klaw!", "You thought you could beat Ultron, you are Ult-Wrong!" and so on...luckily the red skull appears to remind you that Marvel is not all Klaw and Laser, but this is by the end of the game so no amount of Nazi/Communist sympathisers can save you from the boredom you've already experienced.

Captain America and the Avengers reminds us that adaptions of comic book franchises into any other medium don't always end well. The enjoyment of this game is very much short lived with most of the entertainment coming from poor translations and the occasional sound bytes courtesy of the Super Nintendo hardware. People who complete the game will be disappointed at the absence of an end of credit teaser, but given this was made in 1991, nobody cared who Thanos was anyway...SPOILER!

Mr Eisner’s videogame aggressive corporate takeover.

2012-03-21T13:47:00.000-07:00

“All your wishes can come true so long as those wishes involve all your intellectual property being owned by Disney.”

Order in the court! Once upon a time Uncle Werner Herzog Disney might have been the ice-man at the top of the adventure land totem pole. But now I Michael “Iron Fist” Eisner am the one making all the hard decisions, or at least I was during the 90’s until I was forced out for indecision regarding the Power Rangers franchise. Old Wodan might have thought he had explained the delightful electronic content that the Disney corporation have on offer but everything he says is just fairy stories, much like the stories you hear about people being killed on the small world ride. While the ice-man is back in the chest freezer allow me to present a series of graphs representing our ability to harness the power of a child’s imagination and turn it into cold hard cash. (Specifically Eisner-dollars which will become legal tender once I offer England’s Queen a role in High School Musical 4: Secret of the Ooze)

Aladdin:

Whether it be a Chinese boy fighting his evil uncle Abanazer or an Arabian trying to stop an educated man from deposing a useless monarch, the moral of Aladdin is always that you can’t trust a foreigner. The videogame adaption takes this theme and runs with it, vertically across a series of platforms. Speaking of platforms this game was released for both the Mega Drive and SNES. The Mega Drive version allowed Aladdin to swing a sword at the friends of democracy while the SNES version reduced Aladdin to throwing apples at the face of man and giant snake alike. Like Disney, Nintendo are a family friendly global corporation and they didn’t like the idea of children accidentally slicing each other’s arms of with scimitars. I for one agree with this decision, children without arms are no good to the Disney corporation as they slide through the restrains on space mountain. That’s another frivolous lawsuit waiting to happen, if you read the small print on your ticket you’ll see that Michael Eisner is not responsible for events that transpire in outer space. It’s much safer for children to risk brain damage by hurling apples or similar round objects at each other, that’s just more brain damaged children coming on charity. trips to Disneyland. Whether the money comes from your own parents or the make a wish foundation makes no difference to me, I’m still just going to give it to Haim Saban.

Disney’s action game featuring Hercules:

I was so sick of people coming up to me asking whether the Bambi game was a FPS or an RPG. The only thing I hate more than acronyms is ice cream vans which use images of Disney characters without paying the proper licensing fees. Listen “Uncle Whippy” just because you provide the ice necessary to stop our founders cadaver going gangrenous doesn’t mean you have carte blanche to depict Goofy asking people to mind that child. Goofy is a registered trademark of Disney and any public image of Goofy should be in keeping with his image as an idiotic dog who would no sooner mind a child as follow proper safety procedures while putting up wallpaper. It is true that the rights to our popular characters are sold at a price too high for most to afford, but have you considered using one of our less famous characters? Your ice cream van could feature official sanctioned images of Gurgi from the black cauldron for as little as $50,000 a month. The point is that most games are mysterious like a Cornetto and you never know what is luring at the bottom of the cone but Disney’s action game featuring Hercules is straight forward like a Cherry Brandy lolly. Only instead of unpopular cherry flavour it features unpopular 2D platforming and a Cyclops who quotes the names of Magic the Gathering Cards.

Toy Story:

If you ask Michael Eisner (and everybody does eventually) Toy Story was the beginning of the end (for Michael Eisner). But I am not bitter at the fact that John Lassiter has hoodwinked his way to the top by remaking the Brave Little Toaster. In fact I wish him all the luck in the world because after Cars 2: Back in the habit he is going to need it. However this game comes from a time before films such as “Old Man misses dead wife” “Robot makes futile attempts” and “Not the Fantastic Four” and as such we can enjoy it’s pre-rendered graphics without knowing that eventually all the characters will be destroyed in a furnace. I’m particularly fond of the sections which see Woody carry toy aliens around the windows maze screensaver, as Tom hanks cheaper brother might say “There’s a serpent in my footwear!”

Toy Story 2:

From the producers of “Apocalyptic sentient automobile future” comes Toy Story 2, the Toy Story sequel that isn’t an hour of suicide inducing melancholy and ten minutes of hilarious jokes about Ken. This time the men from Disney have gone all out to move away from 2D platforming and bring you ….3D platforming. You can recreate all your favourite moments from Toy Story 2, such as the bit where Buzz Lightyear repeatedly tried to jump between tree branches or the scene where Buzz Lightyear can’t work out how to get up a desk and uses the level select code to go straight to the airport level. As a down on his luck due to drink driving charges Tim Allen might say “To Infinity gauntlet and beyonder!”

Disney’s Epic Mickey:

This game tells the familiar story of an old relic being “sent away” and replaced with a younger model who knows more about maximising corporate revenue streams. With this being a game of course Oswald the lucky rabbits family don’t team up to oust you from your position after a few mistakes that anyone could make, that is because un like real life games have to be fair. If Oswald the lucky rabbit was so great how come he is a frozen shell while I Michael Eisner am a vigorous man who does not rely on liquid nitrogen to stop his eyes falling out. Even Mickey Mouse can make a few mistakes, I mean who would think a film about a sassy cow in the wild west could be anything other than a massive success? Well in this game Mickey say’s “no” to the irrelevant men of the past and erases them with paint thinner. However it’s not all “black and white” as much like myself Mickey has some difficult decisions to make along the way, for example should he erase Tron –Pete from existence or simply edit out all his politically incorrect moments? Should he help a pirate marry a cow or report him to the authorities and should he create a Roger Rabbit franchise or have his attempts to create a Roger Rabbit Franchise fail due to outside interference. Of course in the end Mickey escapes from the backwards world he is trapped in and gets lucrative jobs in network television. Again Nintendo were happy to allow this game to be exclusive to their Wii system as it does not encourage children to attack each other with weapons, it merely encourages them to drown each other with paint thinner.

Kingdom Hearts:

Combining two popular franchises to create an all-powerful mega-franchise is just the sort of practice that Michael Eisner approves of. It’s just a shame that instead of working with Square-Enix we weren’t able to buy them outright and acquire rights to all their characters. Let me tell you I had big plans for a new series of Bonkers where Bonkers Bobcat pilots a wanzer. (I also had an idea for a Saturday morning Tobal cartoon called Oliems Troop, but I was advised not to talk about that in public ever again) We weren’t able to release the main Kingdom Hearts games on Nintendo consoles due to the gratuitous use of giant keys as weaponry. In fact the main character’s “Keyblade” stirred up a lot of controversy at the time with people making statements such as “A key should open the door to peace, but these keys bash the faces of all key loving people.” and “This is a key moment in the fight against the deformation of keys.” All the stories of key-related violence in the media didn’t help (boy pokes own eye out with key/ childhood keytastrophe/ Asylum seekers given free keys by government.) and for a while many shops were refusing to stock Kingdom Hearts due to the high level of key based violence. Eventually cooler heads prevailed and everyone was free to enjoy the simple story of the boy from the sixth sense travelling through the magical worlds of Disney and producing a lot of unnecessary portable spin offs.

Jungle Book Groove Party:

Everybody likes hastily made cash ins of popular fads that cheapen a once highly regarded artistic achievement, just ask the people that made the Jungle Book 2: Jungle in the city. With Jungle Book Groove party Disney were able to combine the classic songs from the Jungle book with very slow dance dance revolution style gameplay to produce an unsatisfying experience for all. On my personal recommendation Lou Bega was invited to record his own version of “I want to be like you.” Because if you were Lou Bega I can’t imagine anything more than wanting to be more like someone else. (Specifically someone who wasn’t Lou Bega.) Still it was nice for everyone to hear from Lou Bega again a good few years after Mambo Number 5 just to make sure he wasn’t dead. This game was actually supposed to restart Lou Bega’s music career and had it been successful we would have launched Black Cauldron Groove Part featuring Shaggy and Basil the Great Mouse Detective Groove Party featuring Aswad. Unfortunately the “Groove” franchise was not to be ad the Kettle Drum version of the Rattigan song must remain in the Disney vault…for now.

Dance Dance Revolution: Disney Mix:

Where other men might fear to tread Michael Eisner struts in confidently. After the failure of one “groove” game you might think an intelligent business man would shy away from the whole foot-arrow genre. But as Michael Eisner says “If you aren’t prepared to fail then you aren’t prepared for (Vicki) Vale.” With the help of Konami we were able to produce a dancing game that mixed classic Disney songs with other not Disney songs that didn’t really have any business being there. That said until you have heard a house remix of Chim Chimmeny then you haven’t lived and we even included an exercise mode to count calories for those gelatinous beasts that have enjoyed too many official Mickey Mouse Club House pasta shapes. Yes those shapes may have contained an almost lethal dose of salt, but nobody told you to eat them and going blind is just a natural part of life.

Disney’s Think Fast:

Is there a controller more pointless than the buzz controller? All it does it make the buttons slightly bigger, for most of the games you don’t even use the big red buzzer to buzz anything. Personally I (Michael Eisner) feel that the people that made it must have been “buzzed” by illegal substances when they created it. That doesn’t mean that we here at the Disney corporation aren’t going to take advantage of it to produce Disney themed quiz games. After all if we were that picky about employing drug addicts we wouldn’t have hired the crack head that came up with Sebastian the talking crab. I mean what sane person would ever even imagine a crab could talk? They don’t even have mouths just pincers and a negative attitude towards being boiled in pots. I found this out the hard way while trying to make a romantic meal for Mrs Eisner and from that day all crabs have been disbarred from Disney property. That is why the new DVD release of the Little Mermaid instead features a Monkfish called Hydrogen V. What more is there to say about this game other than that it features a man who isn’t Robin Williams or Dan Castalanetta voicing the genie quizmaster and also that it features a disproportionate amount of questions about Treasure Planet. Even I didn’t like Treasure Planet and most of it was based on my own life.

I must now leave the writing desk as it’s time for Meister Walt to be defrosted and last time he caught me touching his things I was forced to watch Lilo and Stitch. Do not worry though Eisner will be back as that old frost giant won’t live forever and even if he does I will eventually discover the codes to the Disney nuclear submarine.

Your Pal – The Great Eisnerheim

Uncle Walts Videogame Pogrom

2012-03-20T15:01:00.033-07:00

"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to repackage them as games varying in quality"

Hi kids!

Uncle Walt "Walltron" Disney here with a round up of your favourite Disney classic films, turned Disney adequate games! I remember back in the days of Space Mountain not breaking down every five minutes and hoping one day, the space age of the future would be the space age of the now. Unfortunately my consistent hatred of the "unmentionable race" means my punishment is to live in a cryogenic limbo with only a Colecovision as company. I may be a man of patience but theirs only so much of a poorly ported "Mr.Do!" one man can take! More like Mr.Don't! Eh readers?

Goof Troop

Do you like games were you have to kick blocks? Do you like games were blocks have to be kicked in a specific way, and this can be easily hampered by a second player? Do you like games were the antagonist is called Pete. As famous musician from the future (from my perspective) once said "Two of those three is acceptable to quotient". Like many games born of the "Social Frameworks society" multiplayer is the way to go, see the joy on your friends faces as you pick up the multi purpose Grappling Hook, leaving them with the ineffectual shiny bell. Smiles light up their face as you walk over all the health pick ups and throw pots at them repeatedly. If you have a competitive streak like Old Uncle Waltzer here, then you'll understand that ruining friendships is worth it as long as you take out a lot of pirates on the way!

Beauty And The Beast

Do you remember that iconic scene in Beauty and The Beast? When Beast clumsily swipes at bats and finds it difficult to land on platforms after jumping. Neither does uncle Wanzer! But I suppose graphics were limited in those days (the future from my perspective) which is why only the most popular scenes were kept in, anyone who enjoyed watching the beast fight against a massive gargoyle can breathe a sigh of relief, it's there in full "Gar-gory" detail!

The Magical Quest: Starring Mickey Mouse

Uncle Wagner's most popular creation becomes the titular hero of a game that tells us "with great platforming, comes great costume changes". Watch Mickey get dressed in several of his iconic outfits such as "Fireman" Mickey "Arabian Magician" Mickey and of course "Bavarian Mountain Climber" Mickey. But don't let the idea of Mickey Mouse half naked put you off, the explicit nature of the game is tastefully handled, although somewhat ruined by the gratuitous smut spouted by the lumbering dunderninny and final boss...Pete

The Lion King

I'm sure you all loved that bit on beginning of The Lion King when Simba got "Jungle Barmitzfah'd" well the less I say about that, the more likely people will forget the terrible things I said and did in my lifetime. Imagine playing the jungle book, except that Mowgli has turned into a Lion cub, and his best friend is Rowan Atkinson (it also helps you stop imagining the Jungle Book) now imagine Simba was powerless to do anything against the entire animal kingdom, even when he grew up to become Matthew Broderick. The ineffectual swipes from Beauty and The Beast return in full, which this Uncle Waninoko is calling "A woeful err on all counts". Everything the light touches...is extremely hard to traverse around!

The Jungle Book

An old classic here made into a future classic, that is of course if I become unfrozen in opposite future...so the past. No amount of upbeat songs from a bear will save you from the brutal realities of a predator infested jungle. But smart old Mowgli has his human wits about him, flinging an arsenal of Bananas to fend off foes, good thinking Mowglers...that'll keep the monkeys at bay! P.S. Kaa proves the old axiom that "If you can't make it against a snake, your game progression is at stake"

Mickey's Ultimate Challenge

Mickey Mouse is back again, in a game that is both educational...and a game! Learn important things you'll need in life like guessing what tools are in an anthropomorphic dogs tool box, and collecting magic beans! Unfortunately the games enjoyment is short lived, taking a mere 30 minutes to complete. But think of those 30 minutes as time invested into making your brain good at space science! Maybe you'll develop the "String Bean Theory" eh readers? (In my time the threat of extra terrestrial beans overwhelming our planet is a constant threat)

Pinocchio

Wooden puppet boys have always been popular video game characters since "Mahogany Michael's Woodwind Snooker", appealing to boys who aspire to be them, and rampant child molesters who aspire to look at them from inside bins. The Pinocchio game drops you in the action straight away, putting you in the wooden shoes of an intense platform experience you will never forget. Never before has the idea of going to school while collecting books on the way been such an enthralling prospect. Of course the action picks up, taking the films cue on the famous "Men made out of shadows on clifftops" scene...

Well old Uncle Wiegraff's time goes short in the modern world, it's back to the chest freezer for me! I would stay longer but the thought of an ethnic ensemble of Disney princesses has left me feeling out of the loop, and nobody puts Walt in the cooler (except the man who puts me in the cooler) But don't forget theirs plenty more games in the sea, or should that be "under the sea"! (I am able to make that pun as I am not jaded by the harsh realities of global warming)

Keep dreaming, and as Oswald the lucky rabbit might say "I am a forgotten mascot of a bygone age" Until next time!

An open letter to Mr.Sega

2011-08-25T06:29:00.001-07:00

Dear Sega (the hedgehog)

In recent months it has come to the attention of myself and many of my cohorts that perhaps your company has gone ever so slightly downhill. Whether or not this can be attributed to scarlet fever, the vapours or some such other "Semite related illness" is beyond my knowing. I do however propose many fresh and inspiring new ideas, may I remind you I was once voted at school "Most likely to succeed at Sega Bass Fishing", as I'm yet to play the game some would argue A: My stake in your company affairs is minimal B: I have thrown away what could have been a glorious career in virtual fishing. I leave that thought open to you, along with several other new concepts that might put the "Rocket" into Chu Chu Jet Set Radio!

SONIC 4-D

Of course we've all heard of Sonic 3-D (except most people) but what about Sonic 4-D! Sega releases a new peripheral which allows players to manipulate space in such a way that it's not as good as it sounds! The basis of the game is Sonic has lots of rings around his messy bachelor pad but Uh-Oh...Amy Rose and her ring allergic mother are coming to dinner! Through Sonics eyes you must pick up rings while avoiding other "Female" duties such as washing the laundry, tidying up and other things that women enjoy!

STREETS OF MINOR DISCONTENT

In a radical break from previous installments in the "streets of "series (streries), Axel and company visit the humble town of Keswick in the search of a passive aggressive crime lord known as Gary Thornton. Unfortunately as a business man Gary has no hordes of street punks, but on the plus side their is a two hour lift stage!

ALEX KIDD IN FAILED REVIVAL WORLD

After trying to shoehorn Segas once never loved mascot into many of its party games, the cards are placed firmly on the table in an all out declaration of wanton Alex Kidd whoring. See as his once semi-passable platform antics are translated into the cel shaded realm, with sub par results! On the plus side, games of "Ro! Cham! Beau!" has now been replaced with a cover system 3rd person shooter

GOLDEN AXE 9 GILIUS GOES DWARF

Deniably popular Dwarf, Gilius Thunderhead fights his greatest foe yet, opium addiction! The game plays similar to previous installments, only the battle against the evil Death Adder and his hordes is nothing more than a rampage through unprepared civilian settlements in a drug assisted haze

ALTERED MAN

Man from altered beast, worried at how the ravages of time and lycanthropy have affected his once youthful face; turns to facial surgery as a means of reinstilling his once unwavering confidence. As the operation goes wrong however, Altered Beast man finds himself weeping in the mirror shouting nothing except "Power Up!"

PAMPLHEX ZONE

Budding pamphlet writer "Pam Flet" is placed smack "Pam" into the "phl-action" when a rival Pamphletier traps Pam in to her very own personal pamphlet pam-tastrophe! Will Pam ever make it out alive, or is it too "Pamph-late" to do a "Pam" thing "Pam-bout" it!? PAMPHLET!

DR.KINTOBORS PLEASANT HARICOT MACHINATION

Before Robotnik their was Kintobor, and before the Mean Bean Machine their was...The Pleasant Haricot Machination. See the prequel to a much loved puzzle game, ripped off from a much loved puzzle game unfold before your very eyes. Find out what drove a promising scientist to personify a single foodstuff with a negative personality, all will be revealed in a game which there has never "Bean" before. (Unless you've played Puyo Puyo)

CRAZY MILKFLOAT

It's time to make some craaaaaaaazy milk deliveries that say a big "Milk you!" to the humdrum nanny PC milk brigade of today! Play as several ethnic and sexually diverse characters in a role dominated in reality by middle aged male sex offenders! If that wasn't enough milk for your money, then what about music by Christopher Cross, the powerful voice behind much loved hit "Arthur theme" and "Arthur 2:On the rocks theme"...and many more!

NiGHTS: INTO REPRESSED MEMORIES

In the last and final installment of the N lower case "I" GHTS series, N lower case "I" GHTS takes his/her ever precarious role as a vessel for children's dreams to levels deemed unsuitable in the waking world. Encouraged by NiGHTS frequently to touch him/her in areas he/she has/hasn't, with the promise of freeing them from a realm of nightmares...what a catch 22 situation! The seasonal release of Christmas NiGHTS: Into Repressed Memories guarantees to feature it's own theme song...again written by Christopher Cross

PANZER DRAGOON FUNF: NICHT HABEN!

In an attempt to glorify an"adequate" series into cult status, only five copies of the next installment will be released, all in a easily perishable cardboard sleeve with disks placed carefully next to the pins of live grenades. Enjoy this epic 26 disk adventure for the cost of a small house or large caravan, just remember not to enjoy yourself too much however as playing the game will ruin the collectors value by a conversion rate of £29 per minute of on rail shooting

JET SET SUPERVISED COMMUNITY SERVICE

All crimes must be paid for, and Sega teaches just that in a brand new installment of the skating series. Beat and his gang must pay for their many acts of vandalism conspiring as art. The game will feature a song about a brother being super and everyone will skip it...this will not be written by Christopher Cross

SUPER MONKEY CUBE

What could be more fun than a monkey rolling in a ball you ask? Answer, a stimuli starved monkey forced into the confines of a static cube. The game works like a Tamagochi or Digimon, only the monkey is always guaranteed to hate you and will die within weeks on account of mental starvation and ridicule from passers by. (Not suitable for those who sympathise with the views of "so called" animal rights groups, more like animal WRONG!)

SHENMUE PETITION

In a hilarious nod to fans of the Shenmue series, Ryo accepts the death of his father and starts one of millions of ineffectual petitions to revive a series which nearly led Sega to bankruptcy. There will be toy capsule machines but they will just contain the generic nostalgic comments of anyone who at some point owned a Dreamcast and fan fiction written about Lan Di having sex with sailors

ZOMBIE REVENGE "PIPE-DOWN"

Dreamcast title Zombie Revenge has been radically re-hauled to appeal to the "Pipe loving generation" of today. Subtle differences invoke a modernised style of game play such as the inclusion of at least one pipe per square meter of floor space, pipe zombies...the product of a bite infected pipe. A level which accurately depicts the inside of a pipe from the perspective of a pipe. Also the game will feature no sound effects except the phrase "Pipe" and all music will be the sound of a pipe banging against a "Pipe". (Q: What's the sound of one pipe clapping? A: NAUTILUS!)

Now with regards to my inevitable royalties Sega, feel free to place the money under my door at exactly 5 o clock. I cannot stress this enough, mother is feint of heart and fears anyone who merchandises hedgehogs so I must be in during the transaction. I look forward to your feedback (E.G. None required...perfection) and hope in the future you wont use the the medieval period unless of course you put the word "Zone" after it...

Regards

B.O. Nanza Bros

Marvel Vs Capcom 3

2011-04-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

Back in those halcyon years of the Sega Dreamcast, the average fighting game fan was overwhelmed with choice. A choice severely stifled by a pad so ineptly designed for the average gamer, that anyone was a hadouken away from permanent carpal tunnel syndrome. Nowadays us poor gamers don’t get much when it comes to fighting games, the once annual King Of Fighters series has somewhat dwindled in popularity ever since it was realised they weren’t that good to begin with, Street Fighter 4 was essentially Street Fighter 2: Arsehole boss edition and Blazblue was Guilty Gear HD, replacing heavy metal music with heavy grating voice acting. But after a good decade of nothing along came Marvel Vs Capcom 3, a game which offers us gamers that wealth of fighting fun once more. X Box 360 fans will also receive the added bonus of having to play the game with a controller designed by a man who hates D pads

Alan Log- Mr Bill Spates, here is my controller what I’ve done. You will find it to be most “X-Boxellent”!

Bill Spates- I DO find it X-Boxellent, I do indeed! But hark, I am troubled by this unwieldy D-Pad…it is most unfavourable to my autistic, entrepreneurial thumbs

Alan Log- Fear not Mr.Spates, for all first party games require precise stick rotating, see for example Rotary Norris and the Heli-Bunch , round table traverser 3-D and Biggy Shackletons pro plate spinner. The future has no need for a D-Pad, because a D-Pad does not move forwards! (Unless it moves forwards)

Bill Spates- I am convinced and this meeting is adjourned…SO SAYS BILL SPATES!

Unlike many of Capcoms previous VS offerings, the upgrade to 3D (or 2.5D) guarantees work has actually gone into the game whereas previously, characters were thrown into games with the hope they would stick. No more recycled sprites which unfortunately means in terms of roster size, MVC 3 has taken a step down when compared with the second instalment. I’m sure many fans will forsake the removal of beloved cactus Amingo and remain perplexed at the continued inclusion of Shuma Gorath, especially as downloadable content. Some of the new character choices are somewhat bizarre too, while I am a self confessed M.O.D.O.K. fan even I question what characters were blackballed before they settled on the mongol headed technocrat that we all don’t know and don’t love. I find something unsettling in the degree of attention that has gone into shading M.O.D.O.K.’s face; it’s sobering to think that at some point during the production phase of this game, a developer was tasked with designing that gnarled countenance for weeks, perhaps even months. I can hardly bring myself to look at it for more than half an hour without needing a lie down so my heart goes out to this probably now deceased, or at least mentally scarred developer. A great relief washed over me however when I found out Zangief would no longer be present in proceedings, lumbering oaf characters are not my forte, and Zangief is the most lumbersome of oafs. Alas, inheriting his title is the slightly better, if not also slightly more homoerotic Haggar of Final Fight fame. Does his title as Mayor of a City named after a transit newspaper give him any advantage in battle? No…but repeated use of his spinning attack certainly does!

Because of modern times, games now have to feature some form of unlockable or additional content to justify paying the many sovereigns required to ensure Indy developers continue to make puzzle games that are clever and intuitive but ultimately not that good. Marvel Vs Capcom 3 has gone the way of so many half-hearted games by promising the addition of unlockable artwork. If I wanted to look at pictures of Super Skrull punching nothing in particular, then I would attend the Tate Skrull exhibit. But as it is, I don’t…I find Super Skrull to be somewhat crass and dismissive of any view which opposes the destruction of the cosmos and on the whole he gives Skrulls en masse a bad name. He needs to take a long hard look at himself, but not while using Sue Storms powers as he will turn invisible. All said and done however, he is one of the best characters in the game…two Skrumms up from me!

As the third instalment in the series, Capcom have added many new technical elements which only Asians will ever be able implement efficiently into any battle, it all plays very nicely and you’re never a photon shot away…from a photon shot of fun! We definitely haven’t seen the last of Capcom’s new 3D models which as of yet have not been prostituted to other VS titles, but expect a game featuring M.O.D.O.K. and a squad based cover system to top the Christmas charts this winter, 4 out of a potential 5 (I’m a member of) S.t.a.r.s.

Retro Christmas Offerings

2010-12-08T12:55:00.000-08:00

Christmas is obviously the most important time of year as it’s the time when I get the most presents (double the amount of birthday and five times the amount at easter!) The games industry obviously knows this because 75% of the games released in the year come out just before Christmas, hence last week alone saw the release of Modern Duties: Will Smith Ops, Medal of Duties: Taliban Ops, Golden Sun 3: Djinn Ops and many other ops related games. However the games industry seems reluctant to make any games that feature Christmas, more than likely because of political correctness gone mad. Anyway here is a list of the top 5 games (only 5 games) which feature Christmas in some capacity. Just remember that having snow in a game doesn’t make it Christmassy because all games have snow levels – even Rayman: Raving Rabbis

Shenmue – If you play the game up to December then Christmas lights will spring up in Dobuita town centre. You may even spot Santy Claus forcing himself between toy capsule machines or getting into fist fights with the burger bear. Just like in real life the Shenmue December the 25th is extremely disappointing, no one gives you any presents AND if you have the job at the docks you still have to turn up for work. In many ways Ryo is like the boy that Santa Clause forgot, he never got any presents and his daddy had been killed by a man in a dress.

Christmas rating – Plasma Sword 2: Blitzens Revenge

Christmas Bonus - Shenmue sailor discussion
“Sailor location known?”
“Sailor location denied!”
“Identify Sailor?”
“Negative!”

Sonic Adventure – Yet again Dreamcast era Sega showed us the true meaning of Christmas by giving us presents, presents in the form of free DLC. If only they had invented ‘Sega points’ and charged 10.50 for downloadable Christmas outfits they probably wouldn’t have gone bankrupt. Essentially Sega is George Bailey only instead of trying to commit suicide they keep inventing new friends for Sonic. Eventually they will realise that no amount of Blaze the cat can destroy the simple joys of a pine tree mysteriously playing the NightS theme and whenever Sonic collects a ring in a game that doesn’t feature werehogs or Arthurian legend an Angel gets its wings. (Or at least a Chao)

Christmas Rating - Heavy Rain(Deer)

Christmas Bonus – New ideas for Sonic friends
Prentox the Vulture, Logarithm the studious porcupine and Uriko the Half Beast.

Christmas NightS into Dreams – A game so Christmassy that it even has Christmas in the title. Also it plays a Christmas medley while you play it, everything is made of candy canes and presents and all the unlockables are called “Christmas presents”. This would be the perfect Christmas game if only NightS: Journey into Dreams hadn’t changed our perception of the main character from a mute dream sprite to a transsexual jester.

Christmas Rating – 9 Lords a Leaping Lizards Mario adventure book.
Christmas Bonus – A fond reminiscence of NightS pinball on Sonic Adventure.

Dance Dance Revolution: Euro Mix – Does one Christmas song qualify a game as Christmassy? The real question is how many Christmas songs does Rock Band have? I don’t know as I have never played it but what I do know is that someone should start a Facebook campaign to get Silent Hill to Christmas number one.

Christmas Rating – Let it project Snowblind
Christmas Bonus – A Christmas joke
                        Q. What did you get for Christmas?
                        A. Presents!

The Sims 2 – You can potentially force your electronic slaves to have Christmas every day as there is no calendar in the Sims or if there is it is in Simlish so instead of Christmas it would be called “Melcranks”. EA went so far as to release a special Christmas edition of the Sims but so far as I could tell it was just the bog standard Sims with a houseplant reskinned as a Christmas tree. Still “Beggars can’t be juicsters” and its always fun to see a family dressed a teddy bears give each other presents while the youngest cries for help in a room with no doors or windows.

Christmas Rating – Merry Christmas (Warcraft is over)
Christmas Bonus - Q.What is John Simm's favourite game? A. SimmPsons road rage.


The moral of the story is that more games should feature Christmas either in the form of DLC for Trauma Centre where you have to do a c-section in a stable or a game based on the Santa Clause 3 where you can press a button to make Jack Frost keep saying “I INVENTED CHILL!”

Gears of War?

2010-10-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

Is Gears of War retro? Maybe not but if I don't keep going who will? Not Patrick Moore as he's too busy giving out cheats on the Mario advert.
- R.LaFemme

My first attempt at enjoying ‘popular’ computer games resulted in me firing my copy of Modern Warfare onto the dual carriageway.* So you would think I would have more sense than to dive back into the ‘American Shooting’ genre that makes up 90% of the Xbox catalogue. However I am nothing if not ‘sense-less’ and so dived straight into playing the most popular Xbox game that isn’t Halo of all time – Gears of War.

Right away I should say that Gears of War is probably the most homoerotic game I have ever played, a bold claim considering I used to own pit fighter. A less experienced reviewer might claim it was the most homoerotic thing they had never experienced, but they obviously don’t remember the time that guy kept putting his arm around them and telling them how funny they were. I’m guessing the main market for this game is sexually confused teenage boys who enjoy seeing men’s veins bulging out of their thick necks. You can definitely identify with the characters as the entire game revolves around them trying to deny their homosexuality by pointing phallic objects at other big men or getting inside them with chainsaws. I’m glad to say that by the end of the game the four main characters have killed enough men to feel comfortable rolling around on the grass with each other and having a bit of a play fight. The moral of the story is that there is nothing wrong with being gay but watching four fantasy muscle men kill things does not make you gay because violence is excellent – especially violence against equally muscular men.

Just remember, because this is a modern game you have to do everything as a ‘squad’ because one person fighting all those monsters would be a ludicrous proposition but one person and three unreliable idiots doing it is perfectly feasible. Your ‘Squad’ does change a little bit, but mostly you know that it can never go over four so if an extra person joins you someone else is going to get ‘done in’. This seems to happen early on in the game to demonstrate how bad war is (very bad) but near the end it doesn’t happen because of marketing. So who are the members of your muscleman squad? Allow me to introduce them and pretend they have distinct personalities.

Mark – Mark is the main character who starts of in prison for unknown crimes. (Killing his wife) however in times of war they need every man they can get, especially men who have spent all their time in prison taking steroids and learning how to talk in a gruff voice. Luckily Mark already has lots of war experience (from killing his wife) and it doesn’t take him long to get back into the swing of things. His main motivation is to escape the memory of so many prison rapes by throwing grenades into big holes.

Dom – Dom’s real name is Dominic but he likes to go by ‘Dom’ in honour of Dom Jolly. He is the main assistant of Mark and spends a lot of time looking at him adoringly. He dose mention that he has a wife but if he can’t be that bothered about her or he wouldn’t be spending all his time hanging around with men.

Whiney Man – I can’t remember the name of the whiney man because he wasn’t grotesquely muscular enough to be worth remembering. He does however look an awful lot like Cid from FF7 only instead of swearing and driving space ships with faulty oxygen tanks he makes fantastic wisecracks. The whiney man seems to spend a lot of time making funny jokes about how there are not enough women about but secretly he’s just making sure everyone is on the same page. (The page of man love)

Coal – In my humble opinion Coal is the most hateful character in all of computer games, even more so than the prince from Warrior Within. He looks absurdly inhuman even compared to his muscle-bound comrades but more importantly he is VERY ugly. Coal loves killing things and he is often found telling everyone about how great he is at fighting and how he can’t wait to find some more men to ‘get’ with his chainsaw gun. One day he will realise that he can connect with men in ways other than fighting them but until that day comes he remains the world’s most irritating virtual space soldier.

The game itself is basically Phantasy Star Online but instead of RPG elements you can stand behind things and instead of leaving behind meseta the enemies leave behind blood. Also every character is a ranger. It is most like Phantasy Star Online in that enemies keep appearing from nowhere and then the music goes “ten ten ten ten TEN TEN TEN” to make the atmosphere more tense. Also a lot of the levels are underground caves so you could play those and pretend you were on the caves level of Phantasy Star Online or you could just play the caves level of Phantasy Star Online. The choice is up to you.

Fans of Gears of War (Known as Gearophiles) might accuse me of being slightly unfair as the main point of the game are its cooperative elements. i.e. yet another game relying on your own social interactions to make up for its failings. I tried playing the co-op with Brother Jonas Bruner but he was constantly getting killed or trying to chainsaw me in the back. If anything it was even less fun as was continually making racist remarks or talking about Saint Seiya: The Hades.

My main disappointment with this game was that because it was called ‘Gears of War’ I thought all the enemies would be cog robots and gear operated spiders. However the enemies aren’t cog robots at all they are just more muscular men. Furthermore the heroes work for an organisation called COG but they do not seem to operate any clockwork style machinery. The only cog you ever see is the one representing the mysterious health system, what’s wrong with a health bar epic megagames? Also why is the ability to run named ‘roadie run’? how is it different from normal running?

Overall I give this game a COG soldier out of an annoying car bit.

* Thought for the day: Does Call of Duty have anything to do with Call of Juarez? Also how come the spellchecker accepts Juarez as a word?

Capcom Fighting Game Mega-review (EX + Alpha)

2010-09-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

If you are enjoying the slow trickle of Capcom scrolling beat-em-ups from the Retro prefect then you will probably find this comprehensive review of one on one Capcom beat-em-ups adequate. Enjoy children.

- R.Lafemme

The Capcom meetings

Annual Meeting - 01/12/1999

Captain Christopher Om (Chairman in charge of going for broke): Well men, so far our plan of releasing a good game every five years and then killing it with spin offs is going very well. In fact we are so rich that we can afford to erase the Street Fighter film from everyone’s memory and by that I mean kill everyone that has seen it. Can anyone think of any other way to make lots of money, or as I like to call it “woman bait”.

Terrence Bonne: (Chief of triumph or die): Well sir there is a new console coming out called the Dreamcast. I’m sure it’s going to be a big hit because it’s made by the same people as the Sega Saturn AND it has a memory card with a screen. Perhaps we should release thousands of 2d fighting games and hope that they suddenly come back into favour.

Captain Christopher Om: Good idea Terrence, get on it right away. I’m off to stop the art department wasting pencils on drawing new sprites for Morrigan. If it was good enough for Darkstalkers it’s good enough for Marvel Vs Capcom!

Annual Meeting - 01/12/2002

Captain Christopher Om: Well our strategy of releasing thousands of fighting games for the Dreamcast has left us floundering. Why is this?

Megan Mann (Officer for facing it straight.): Well Sir it wasn’t a total failure as testing indicates that nobody noticed the Dreamcast pad was totally unsuited to fighting games. The trouble is that nobody noticed because only three people actually bought a Dreamcast and they just used them to go on the Dreamarena chat rooms.*

Captain Christopher Om: Well, can anyone get us out of this mess?

Ross O’ Vulcano (1,2,THE END administrator): Well sir we could release a very average game called Devil May Cry that for some reason people will pretend is amazing. Also we can release loads of other games that are a little bit like it but that people wont pretend are amazing. That’s sure to put us back on track.

Captain Christopher Om: Well that sounds good but what about our rich fighting game heritage?

Ross O’Vulcano: Fuck it

Sue Dario 51 ( Visiting advisor in charge of “Ahh Garcien”): Also we should make a game called Killer 7 that no one will buy.

Captain Christopher Om: Good plan, lets get started.

*As an exciting aside, our very own Uncle Pete was thrown out of the Dreamarena chat room for repeatedly typing “Edit the Fantasy”

Annual Meeting - 01/12/2005

Captain Christopher Om: Un Forastero!

Megan Mann: Where’s everybody going, bingo!?

Annual Meeting – 01/12/2009

Captain Christopher Om: Well I think we’ve finally released a version of Street Fighter 2 for everything powered by electricity. What should we do now?

Ross O’Vulcano: Why don’t we bring out Street Fighter 3 for everything powered by electricity?

Captain Christopher Om: No, Ross. I think releasing it for the Dreamcast and the X-box is good enough.

Ross O’Vulcano: But Sir, the controllers….

Captain Christopher Om: NO! People must never be able to easily perform Tyrant Slaughter!

Dr Ian Dark (Manager of feeling it coming over me and feeling it all around me.): Sir why don’t we bring out a NEW version of Street Fighter?

Captain Christopher Om: But we haven’t made a fighting game for ages, what if we’ve lost our Capcom magic?

Dr Ian Dark: It’s fine sir it’s been so long since we released a fighting game that no one will realise if its rubbish, even if we put less characters in it than previous games!

Geese Thompson (SNK spy pretending to be chief of can anyone stop this fighting machine?)
: Oh also instead of putting in lots of characters that people like we could make up some really bland new ones.

Captain Christopher Om: That’s a great idea but I think we should make one look incredibly fat and grotesque so no one will ever want to pick them.

Geese Thompson: Hah! Predictable!

Annual Meeting - 01/12/2010

Captain Christopher Om: Well Street Fighter IV is currently selling better than ‘loaf’, despite being inferior to nearly every fighting game we have ever made.

Ron Lento (Head of in Japan Mike Tyson is called Bega): It turns out that people will buy anything so long as it has fancy graphics! I think now is the time to make a new version of Marvel Vs Capcom…but with far less characters than previous editions.

Geese Thompson: Oh and you should character spaces with characters from games that people don’t really care about like Viewtiful Joe, Onimusha 4, Megaman Legends , Lost Planet or Dead rising. That makes far more sense than putting in characters like Strider or Salazar.

Captain Christopher Om: Good idea Geese, we certainly wouldn’t want to appeal to our fans.

Megan Mann: Well as long as Shuma Gorath is in it I don’t mind.

Ron Lento: Yes, Shuma Gorath is the most important character in the Marvel universe and definitely a fan favourite.

Ross O’Vulcano: I love Shuma Gorath

Everyone except Geese Thompson: MYSTIC STARE

Geese Thompson: Raging Sto…

Captain Christopher Om: GET OUT

Despite my extensive ramblings on the subject of SNK I must confess that my true Fighting love is and always will be the might Capcom. They might have left nearly a ten year gap between Street fighters three and four but as the chicken said in Robin Hood “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”. In any case that was punishment for buying Guilty Gear XX. In order to prove my devotion to Capcom I will now recount every Capcom fighting franchise I can remember playing i.e. a lot. As a fun game why not try to count how many of them reuse the Morrigan sprite? (All of them)

Street Fighter II (Turbo/NewChallengers/EX Revival/HD remix)
The original and best? Probably not as the selection of character is poor and Sagat is ludicrously difficult to beat. Street Fighter II was definitely brilliant, but that was in the olden days if you tried to play it now you would just spend all your time trying to work out how to assign a groove to your character (you can’t) or how to do your supermove (you don’t have a super move) or waiting for the announcer to say “Face it straight, triumph…or die!” (he doesn’t say “Face it straight, triumph or …die”). In spite of its problems Street Fighter 2 has been released for anything that can play games, except for the DS because a ‘A hadouken with stylus is about as good as listening to the wireless’. The versions are all pretty similar but I have a particular fondness for the SNES version and it’s huge black bars across the top and bottom of the screen. Still at least I wasn’t like Uncle Benjy playing the knacked Megadrive version, it might well have had the new challengers but you also had to press start to alternate between punch and kick on the standard Megadrive pad. In the end it’s hard to dislike a game that features a bonus stage where you kick barrels and detailed images of your characters mangled face on the continue screen.

I must also give special mention to the fact that Cousin Lone Soldier (almost ten years my senior) insisted repeatedly that I would never beat him at Street Fighter II and then I did. This left him shamefaced saying “Well you won’t beat my brother’s girlfriend”. Because his brother didn’t exist we will never know if this was true. What we do know is that when I was faced with a similar challenge from young cousin Grocery Storer we defeated him soundly by constantly using M.Bison’s psycho crusher. It may seem petty to reduce a child to tears by constantly ramming into him while surrounded by psycho power, but it’s the only way he will ever learn! I later utilised this technique to destroy a small child in a branch of Gamestation.

For this reason I will award Street Fighter II a well deserved “I am the strongest women in the world” out of a “Go home and be a family man”.

Street Fighter III (Massive Attack, Double Impact, Third Strike)
“Make your first move, so what’s it gonna be? Welcome to the new world of Street Fighter III”
The apparent black sheep of the Street Fighter family, if you ever ask a Capcom employee about Street Fighter III they say “What Street Fighter III?” and then run away. For reasons best known to themselves Capcom restricted access to Street Fighter III to the following platforms 1. Dreamcast. 2. All four copies of the X-box version of Street Fighter anniversary collection BUT NOT the Playstation 2 version. 3. An arcade cabinet in the Barnsley Odeon.
   It’s unknown why Capcom didn’t whore out Street Fighter III like they did with every other game they ever produced. (Even Megaman got a re-release on the virtual console.) Maybe they were ashamed of how they tried to look all cool on third strike by hiring a rapper to do the music. “Let’s get it on yeah. Select and make your first pick. Let’s get it on yeah. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6” More likely is that people complained at the absence of Zangief, Hugo is just as craggily and useless just give him a chance! In fact Street Fighter III featured only four Street Fighter regulars (Ryu, Ken, Akuma and Chun Li) causing people to become confused and frightened. If they had only looked deeper they would have seen that the newcomers were all brilliant (except Q, Twelve and Necro who were awful). Special mentions have to go to Makoto who I am surprisingly adept at using, Alex the worlds first none rubbish wresting character, Dudley the worlds first none rubbish boxing character who as a bonus is incredibly posh and Urien who looks like Kramer from Seinfeld. (He is constantly Tyrant slaughtering the door down and saying “These pretzels are making me Aeigs Reflector”)
As the game that first introduced the concept of scarring DNA with the mark of your dignity I am proud to offer Street Fighter III a solid “Lets fight like Gentleman” out of a parrying system that sounds good but is in reality too difficult to use.

Street Fighter Alpha (1,2,3, Max, Upper, Saiko Edition)
I used to love Street Fighter Alpha 3, I really did. It had a character roster that grew with each release (my pet hate is fighting games where certain characters are removed so there is never an ‘ultimate’ version. I’m looking at you Super Smash Brothers.) Had a load of different modes including a decent single player world tour mode, characters had proper endings, there were characters to unlock and above everything else there was no online multiplayer.
I played it so much that my thumb got a dent in it. Unfortunately Capcom decided to try and beat the record set by Street Fighter II for game with highest amount of pointless re-releases. Granted I didn’t HAVE to buy them all but if I didn’t I might have missed out on being able to play as Eagle in the Game Boy advance version! To add insult to injury Capcom then reused the Alpha sprites so many times that the original drawings eventually went on fire. My verdict must thus be that while Street Fighter Alpha is great I cannot even bring myself to think about it anymore. It is therefore awarded an honourable “It’s all about your skills” out of a “Can anybody stop this fighting machine?”

Darkstalkers (1, 2, 3, Chaos Tower)
Imagine Street Fighter but instead of Street Fighters it was monsters i.e. Vampire, Werewolf, Bee Woman. That game would be called “Monster Fighting – on the street” and it would be a blatant rip off of Darkstalkers.
   Darkstalkers has never been Capcom’s most popular series, but in my mind it certainly has a lot of things going for it. Most of those things are related to the abundant lesbian erotic imagery provided by Morrigan and Lillith, but we can also recommend Darkstalkers in the basis of Demitri having a special attack where he forces opponents to change sex and then rapes them (if they are already female he changes them into a schoolgirl) and Vampire lord Jedah who’s main form of attack is laughing at opponents and then molesting them with pink tentacles. I’m elaborating slightly and most of this business goes on behind closed doors but there is definitely something slightly seedy about playing Darkstalkers, which is why I keep my copy well hidden. (Inside the case for Battle Raper 2)
   So is Darkstalkers any good as a fighting game? Well it’s probably average at best but to young men like I used to be such concerns are irrelevant. What’s really important is that you get a story mode where you can level up your chosen fighter indefinitely. I don’t think there is anything more satisfying than levelling up J.Talbain to the point where he can just constantly use his giant dragon firing attack. Constant performing of the half circle towards and punch certainly creates some interesting looking finger craters and it is for this reason I award Darkstalkers a Bishamon out of a Raptor also has a mouth in his stomach.

Plasma Sword (Star Gladiator)
Here is a joke the Retro Prefect told us “You can Bill stein but you can’t Hayato” I don’t understand this joke because I only played Plasma Sword on two occasions before realising it was utter rubbish and also because it makes no sense. For some reason he decided to play Plasma Sword quite a lot and as a result we can only assume his brain became slightly mangled. Plasma Sword is the sequel to Star Gladiator which I haven’t played at all but I can make this joke about “Did you hear about Bill Stein he was (Star) Glad he ate her!” The moral of the story is that Plasma Sword was an attempt to make Soul Calibur in space but it ended up more like masters of Teras Kasi. i.e. rubbish and forgotten. I cant award it anymore than a solitary Arden Lynn out of Jodo Kast but what I can do is make some more jokes.

Q. What’s the difference between Hayato and Black Hayato?
A. Black Hayato makes this look good!

Q. How many toes does Hayato have?
A. Three…a left toe, a right toe and a wild Hayatoe!

Q. What’s the different between Bilstein and a Piano?
A. You can Tuna Stein but you can’t Bil Piano!

Street Fighter EX (+alpha 2, 3)
Street Fighter EX is easily the greatest of the series. It may be slow and ugly as sin but it makes up for it by sheer force of personality. It’s only a shame that the EX characters are never allowed to make their way into the mainstream series because people are missing out on the likes of…
* Allen Snider: What Street Fighter was really missing was a Ryu clone wearing a purple gi and sporting a ginger bowl cut. Although to be fair this one has opted to learn the forward thrusting “Justice Fist” instead of the more traditional Shoryuken uppercut. Never before has an Allen been so fearsome.
* Doctorine Dark: Known as D.Dark by his friends. Doctorine is an insane war veteran who’s special moves involve tying people up with bits of string and then cutting them with knives. In his spare time Doctorine likes to lay down bundles of dynamite while proclaiming “explosive.” Does he have a brother called Nectarine? Only time will tell.
* Vulcano Rosso: Vulcano is obsessed with volcanoes, so much so that all his special moves are named after volcanoes. The only problem is he can’t spell Volcano! (Also he can sort of levitate)
* Darun Mister: Darun comes from an alternate universe where Zangief was born in India and has a wonky moustache. Is that a spinning piledriver? By no means it’s called the Ganges DDT and I INVENTED IT. Darun is so sick of people comparing him to Zangief that the pupils have disappeared from his eyes but it doesn’t mean he can’t tell how fetching he looks in his big gold belt and tiny orange trunks. The real question is “Darun Mister or Mister Darun”
The reasons for these characters not appearing in Street Fighter Iv have never been revealed but needless to say I shall be writing a stern letter to Capcom demanding that Cracker Jack be made the main character of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Until that happens I will console myself with the presence of a photo of Mr T on M.Bison’s stage and award the EX series a Cycloid Gamma out of a Cycloid Beta.

P.S The EX series features the best stage music, especially the Charlie Brown jazz on Guile’s stage.

Tech Romancer
At the tender age of 16 I was first able to experience ‘romance’. At the time I was living in the area of Europe with the highest rates of teenage pregnancy but I still managed to avoid this romance comprising a bit of clumsy fumbling with a drunken girl. How did I manage to miss the veritable orgy of virulent, underage sex happening right outside my window? Easy, I never left the house. How then did I first enter the world of adult affairs? Through the Capcom window that was Tech Romancer for the Dreamcast!

I should probably point out that when I say “Romance” I actually mean “big robots fighting each other”.

That’s because Tech Romancer was a fighter revolving around parodies of various famous giant robots that no one in England is aware of.
As a lvl 5 geek I was vaguely aware that Pulsion sort of looked like it could be from Evangelion and I was able to deduce that G-Kaiser was a parody of whatever Gekigangar was also a parody of. (Thanks for showing two anime series Sci -fi channel!) however with robots such as Dianna-17 and Rafaga I knew only that I had seen something like them in the ‘adult animation’ section of HMV. That and Blodia who seems to feature in loads of games despite Cyberbots itself being a load of old rubbish.

Was Tech Romancer any good? Well it was impossibly slow but that didn’t matter because giant robots are slow but it also featured some very accurate mecha anime sound effects and explosions which made up for its failings. More important it had a mangleated name which meant every review at the time sported a “No this isn’t a game about sex with ipods..” type joke.

For this reason I give it a Wiseduck out of a Twinzam V.

Rival Schools (Project Justice)
How is it that the ‘Music Industry’ is constantly complaining about copyright infringement and yet is perfectly happy to thieve other people’s intellectual property? The band “Hadouken!” very rarely sing songs about fireballs and I don’t think that Robots in Disguise would be approved of by Galvatron. Worst of all is the band Rival Schools who forced Rival Schools 2 to be called ‘Project Justice’ and to my knowledge released no songs about the bizarre Kyoko’s office minigame. If music would accept its proper place in the entertainment hierarchy i.e. below anything that has images AND sounds then perhaps we would be getting more games in the Rival Schools series. Instead we get Lady Gaga flashing her private zones to distract from her broken face, where is the (project) justice in that?

In any case Rival Schools is a wonderful reminder or my own school days when I would wander around with my friends getting into fights with children from other schools and occasionally performing team up attacks on them. It may sound cliché but your school days really are the best days of your life, especially when the head boy starts waving a sword around and mind controlling students into being well behaved. I also remember the various mini games we used to play such as “Home run”, “Penalty Shoot” and “Volleyball against cardboard targets” they certainly seemed to make the days last longer even if they did appear out of context. In Japan the game featured a “School Life mode” which centred around character creation, minigames, violence and dating simulation. This mode was pulled from the western release because the English speaking world cannot cope with pretending to chat up Japanese schoolgirls; we are however perfectly equipped to smash them in the face with a baseball bat. Again this recalls my own schooldays as I could never pluck up the courage to talk to girls but I could certainly throw knives at them while laughing hysterically.

For these reasons I am awarding Rival Schools a Raizo out of a Fletcher.

Power Stone (1,2, collection)
“A good beginning may lead to a perfect ending…go for it”
Wise words from the people behind Power stone, a game with much to teach. Mainly those things involve shouting “POWERFUL” whenever you collect a Power Stone but also extend to knowing that you can create a bubble gun by fusing together a ray gun and an umbrella.

This wisdom is wrapped up in what is basically a version of Smash Brothers but with coherent art design. Unfortunately the power of Nintendo and their mascots (i.e. Mario, Evil Mario, Mario’s Brother, Dr Mario and Fox McCloud) is such that no one has even heard of Power Stone. That’ll learn Capcom for making games for the Dreamcast and then re-releasing them for the PSP. To be honest Power Stone isn’t really up therewith Sango Fighter, for sure it’s fun in multiplayer but so is sex and you don’t see me giving that good reviews. (Although the ladies always give it 5g’s eh readers!)

For these reasons I’m giving Power Stone a slightly disappointing Galuda out of Mr Game and Watch.

Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness
Rumour has it that Cyberbots was originally slated to feature only ‘partial metal madness’ but top bosses at Capcom felt that nothing less than Full Metal Madness would appeal to the discerning beat‘em up fan. As it was the game was never released outside of Japan due to strict EU regulations on the portrayal of alloy based mental disorders. Luckily I was able to acquire a dubious copy from my local Cash Converter, the shop of choice for thieves and drug addicts alike. My copy of Cyberbots was mysterious in many ways, the badly photocopied inserts made it clear that this was a pirate game but then the actual disc looked genuine. By far the biggest mystery was that it contained a cover insert for Darkstalkers with a phone number on it. We were eventually able to convince an Irishman to call the number in the hopes of getting a copy of Red Earth. Unfortunately the number had been disconnected and so the mysteries of the Cyberbots disc went unsolved.

As for the game itself I’m afraid that my attempts to solve its mystery were far more interesting than the act of playing it. It turned out that Cyberbots was nothing but a poor mans Gundam Battle Assualt and it’s a very poor man indeed that can’t afford Gundam Battle Assault. Therefore I’m giving Cyberbots a Zaku out of a Zeong.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure
If you enjoy seeing 80’s pop stars have their imaginary friends attack each other then you’re sure to enjoy Jojo’s Bizarre adventure. Your appreciation might be improved further if you also enjoy highly unbalanced game play and side stories about people trying to hide bombs in oranges.
   To explain properly – Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is based on the 3rd volume of the manga of the same name. It revolves around highly effeminate young men who can summon ‘special friends’ called Stands which they use to drop tractors onto each other. Unfortunately the powers of these stands don’t really match up to each other so poor old paedophile Allesi with his ability to turn people into children so that he might better molest them dosent stand up to the likes of Jotaro Kujo who merely punches rapidly while shouting “Ora ora ora ora ora”. The playstation version of the game kept the Retro prefect busy for many hours with its full featured story mode, unfortunately I was cursed with the arcade perfect Dreamcast version which sacrificed the story mode for better animation and a few special attacks that were too violent for the impresionable playstation audience. Personally I would have preferred the mini game where you have to throw iron bars at a monkey captain.

Therefore I must award JoJo’s bizarre adventure an Emerald Splish out of an Emerald Splash.

Marvel Series (X-men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Superheroes, Marvel Superheroes VS Street Fighter, X-men vs. Street fighter, Marvel Vs Capcom, Marvel Vs Capcom 2)
There really isn’t a lot of point in playing any of the games in this series other than Marvel Vs Capcom 2 as it’s was essentially produced by Capcom throwing the sprites from those games at each other and then adding a few more Darkstalkers characters and a cactus man. It certainly made sense for Capcom to waste all that time inventing new cactus based characters rather than including favourites from other Capcom games. Who wants to play as Jedah when you could have a space filled up on the character select screen by Ruby Heart?

The odd choices extend to the soundtrack, with the good people at Capcom deciding that over the top battles between armour clad mad scientists and ninjas from alternate soviet controlled universes should be set to thoroughly laid back lounge jazz. A strange choice indeed but it does mean that you can easily fit Marvel Vs Capcom 2 into a sophisticated dinner party without making a scene. In fact there is nothing that makes an evening more agreeable than some lively conversation over the last of the after eights and a Hyper Viper beam. That is until that dreadful bore Anakaris butts in with his repetitious sarcophagus summoning!

Of course the ultimate problem with this game is that no one will ever be satisfied with the character line-up because everyone want’s their personal favourites to be involved. It does seem strange that obscure Dr Strange villain Shuma Gorath gets a place ahead of favourites such as the Dread Dormamu, Baron Mordo or MODOK but I’m sure all the Shuma Gorath fans were ecstatic to see his mystical staring abilities replicated so faithfully. For this reason I must award these games a Sunday best out of a Proton Cannon.

* Funny bonus joke – In Marvel VS Capcom the last boss is Onslaught the sloppy cousin from keeping up appearances!

Capcom VS SNK (1/2/EO)
A true meeting of fighting game giants, SNK made an utter mess of their version but made up for it with the cardfighter games meanwhile Capcom were charged with redrawing all the SNK characters to try and make them slightly less bland. They eventually managed it but the effort was so great that on the Capcom side they only had time to do a new sprite for M.Bison and they had to recycle the rest from Street Fighter Alpha. This means that the game ends up looking extremely scrappy especially as the poor Morrigan sprite appears to have been thrown in a skip and then rescued at the last minute. Despite this Capcom Vs SNK 2 is easily the best of the Capcom fighters and also one of the most difficult to get to grips with. However this did not stop me from beating the games prefect ten times in a row with a team made up of Blanka, Morrigan and M.Bison. An achievement so great that I was actually awarded a handsome certificate. Rumours abound that I made the certificate myself and that I was later beaten nigh on 20 times with Sagat are completely unfounded. Perhaps you should stop listening to fairy stories and do a bit more practicing!
   Again my only other quibble with Capcom VS SNK is the character lineup and by that I mean 1. Who cares about the useless woman from Final Fight 2? And 2. NO DUCK KING
Because of this I’m awarding Capcom VS SNK 2 a well deserved all man team out of Barrensburgh.

Street Fighter IV
Q. How good is the theme to Street Fighter IV?
A. So good that I paid actual money for it on itunes making it the fourth piece of music I have paid for in my life. (1. Star Wars CD, 2. FF8 Soundtrack, 3. Mandy Moore cover of senses working overtime)

So exciting was the release of a new Street Fighter game that I actually bought an X-box 360 to play it on despite the fact that the Xbox is the spiritual home of online gaming and the dreaded first person shooter. I expect buying a PS3 with its lovely d-pad would have been the more sensible decision but then I didn’t have £400 to spare. My impressions of it were that it played more or less the same as every other Street Fighter game, that it looked nice but the characters looked slightly too ‘meaty’, that the anime cut scenes had been drawn by the people that design colouring books and that the main menu was too small to see with human eyes. That isn’t to say that I disliked Street Fighter IV, I thought it was great but I couldn’t help that feel that in many ways it was a step backwards from Street Fighter III. Most of those ways being in just having all the characters from Street Fighter II in it again and having an impossible to beat last boss. Most damaging of all was the revelation that Zangief had gone from laughing stock to the most powerful character in the game – literally a world gone mad.
Speaking of Characters there weren’t nearly enough of them and the new ones all looked like SNK cast offs, that is with the exception of Rufus who is so grotesque that the man who designed him should be fired out of a cannon.

For these reasons I can only award Street Fighter IV a Fajita Buster out of a Tostada Smash.

Tatsunoko Vs Capcom
Tatsunoko VS Capcom is a game made by idiots, ACTUAL IDIOTS. Making a fighting game for the Wii is like making a fighting game for the Gamecube or N64 i.e. pointless only it’s more pointless because the Wii dosent even have a pad at all it has a Wii-mote and a nunchuck (which people always call a nunchunk for no good reason). This is why Tatsunoko VS Capcom has a messed up control system where you can’t decide whether you want to punch or kick. There is a lot of difference between hands and feet just ask ‘person with no legs’. Also Tatsunoko are a rubbish and useless company who have only made Battle of the Planets and then lots of things that look slightly like Battle of the Planets. To make up for this Capcom sabotaged their own character side with people such as “man from dead rising”, “man from Onimusha 4” and “Robot from Lost Planet.” SIGH!
   Tatsunoko vs Capcom has only two things going for it, one is the inclusion of Batsu which allows you to imagine that one day they might make a new Rival Schools game if you keep picking Batsu over and over again. The other is that it features a huge gold robot called Gold Lightan who likes to shout “Gooollllllddddd Ligghhhhhtttaaaannnnn” and whose main attack is treading on people. The Retro Prefect thinks Tatsunoko Vs Capcom is better than Street Fighter Iv but that just proves that he’s an idiot who spends too much time daydreaming about Tekkaman Blade.

I’m only giving Tatsunoko VS Capcom a Polimar out of Casshan and it’s mainly getting that because it was the last game I played before I was drafted.

Pocket Fighter
The best thing about Pocket Fighter is how I asked for it for Christmas and then whenever Uncle Pete went out I would stealth into the present cupboard and retrieve it for hours of ‘super deformed’ fun. By Christmas morning I was of course bored with it, but then I had also asked for Final Fantasy 8 and that had come in cellophane meaning I could not open it until the designated holiday. The moral of the story is that Pocket Fighter is a bit like playing a game with a “big head” mode cheat only sometimes your character will dress up as a cowboy or hit someone with a plank of wood. The other moral of the story is that the best thing about Pocket Fighter is the personality quiz which allocates you a character based on answers to multiple choice questions about your favourite weapon and whether or not you like sweets. The only question that remains is whether people who were “super deformed” would actually look like that or would just be amorphous freaks reminiscent of the elephant man?

Overall it gets a handsome Gem Fighter out of not so handsome Uncle Jem fighter.

Capcom Fighting Jam
Another brilliant jape from the men at future publishing “You may think this is a game where preserves battle each other?” Imagine the confusion when Capcom Fighting Jam did actually turn out to be about jars of jam fighting each other, except it wasn’t about that at all! It was about JARS OF JAM FIGHTING EACH OTHER. At least that’s what it said on the box but actually it was about Capcom being very lazy and making an unbalanced where the likes of strawberry jam (Ryu from Street Fighter) are smashed into the floor by a large damson jam (dinosaur). The end result can be nothing but a ‘jammy situation’. In the U.S the game was known as Capcom Fighting Evolution because the translators spent all day on the phone trying to explain the difference between jam and jelly. In the end they gave all the jelly jars to the bees and went back to trying to understand why Alex can’t air block but Hydron is a kraken that covers the entire screen.
   Fortunately Capcom Fighting Jelly is able to alleviate all its faults by featuring Jedah in a starring role. Personally we never tire of his various laughs and we like to think he is a man who enjoys his work. (His work is throwing rotating scythes at people and then smashing them onto giant contracts) Therefore I risk my professional reputation by awarding Capcom Fighting Jam a Hauzer out of a Krauzer.

So there we have it, a marathon of Capcom fisticuffs critique and what have we learned at the end of it all? Mainly that I don’t actually like fighting games and that instead of buying all this nonsense I should have been increasing my knowledge with Broderbund graphic adventures.

Captain Commando

2010-09-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

Very clever of Capcom to sneak a hidden message within its game titles, take the first three letters from each word and what does that leave? That’s right! Tain Mando, the widely known bare knuckle boxer known to his fans as “The Bhutan brawler” despite being born and raised in Staffordshire…the spiritual home of fictional wrestlers. Captain Commando was Capcom’s attempt to create a popular mascot. Like Sega’s Alex Kidd this didn’t really provide a lasting memory, the lesson learned here is you can shoehorn your company’s unwanted characters in as many tennis and kart racing games as you like, people will still meet them with contempt. This is one of Capcom’s earlier attempts and it shows from the quite unashamed recycling of goons. Expect to be punching green man with pillow on head from now until the end of the game! To its credit, the offering of playable characters is somewhat more inspired than most. If the bionic captain doesn’t tickle your groin (which I’ve warned him about), then why not pick from the ninja, the mummy commando…or perhaps the mecha pilot named “Baby Head”. Perhaps owing to the fact that he is indeed a baby and I hasten to add, one with a head. Its a relatively forgettable knuckle based romp that will unlikely please fans into the long hours, not like that whore of the night that is Tetris!

Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories

2010-08-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

If you enjoy long rambling annecdotes vaguely linked to computer games and a healthy dose of casual racism then you are sure to be happy with the news that the Retro Prefect has given me the 'Key to the Kingdom' board game. (I will be playing this game later, here's hoping I'm first to the well readers!) He has also given me the 'keys' to this website so here is my first post with no editorial control whatsoever.

All the best

-R .LaFemme

New York is apparently ‘So good they named it twice’ in my opinion it has nothing to offer that old York didn’t, apart from the gun crime! Needless to say the adolescent version of me wasn’t too impressed by the Big Apple but then the only thing I have ever been properly impressed by was Jurassic Park and I later found out they weren’t real dinosaurs. What I did like about New York though was the fact that it had a giant Toys R Us featuring a model of the dinosaur from Jurassic park, a Lego Darth Vader and most importantly of all a games department full of delicious NTSC region games.

I knew this would be my only chance to ever purchase authentic American games so I had to choose carefully. Uncle Pete could only afford flights to the U.S because of September the 11th and the spectre of international terrorism wasn’t going to loom over us all forever. I had to make sure that I made a wise decision and chose games that had no chance of ever being released in the U.K. (Bear in mind that internet shopping was still an unknown quantity due to the vagaries of 56k dial up.)

How did I fare in my endeavours? I’ll let you be the judge…

* Samba De Amigo – Now released for the Wii but without the Sega game tunes. A marginal victory.

* Final Fantasy Tactics – Eventually released for the PSP but not for ages, it also featured a rubbish new translation which changed ‘Dorter Trade City’ to “The Market City of Dorter”. Another marginal victory.

* King of Fighters ’99 – SNK recovered from bankruptcy and issued compilations of everything also it’s a King of Fighters game. DISASTER.

* Yu-Gi-Oh: Forbidden Memories – Released the month after in the U.K. Another P.R disaster.

And that my friends is the ludicrous preamble to my review of a Yu-Gi-Oh! game.

Forbidden Memories was designed by a man who had obviously once seen a clip of Yu-Gi-Oh! and then blagged his way through the interview by writing the names of the cards on his hands.

Max Pegs (Chief of card HR): So where do you see yourself in five years time?

Yuri O!: Probably Black Lustre Soldier.

Max Pegs: Hmm and why do you want to work for our company in particular?

Yuri O!: Well Twin Headed Thunder Dragon, Mystical Sands.

Max Pegs: Welcome to the company!

Yuri O!: Prodigal Sorcerer!

Max Pegs: Excuse me!?

Yuri O!: I mean um…Bolt Penguin.

Max Pegs: Ha Ha Ha Ha. Very Good Yuri, I like your style!

I say this because Yu-Gi-Oh!: Forbidden Memories in no way matches up to the rules of the card game as seen either in the TV series or in real life. In fact the cards aren’t even card shaped they are in fact square shaped. The game revolves around trying to get the post powerful card possible by fusing different combinations together. Of course these combinations actually make no real sense so it’s just a case of experimenting and then remembering some key combinations.
So ingrained into my mind are these combinations that I can still recite them now. (An amzing feat considering that I can’t remember anything from my degree)

Pot the Trick + Nekogal = Mystical Sands (21000 atk)

Thunder Dragon + Thunder Dragon = Twin Headed Thunder Dragon (24000)

These two combinations got me through a good third of the game by which point I had acquired the all powerful B.Meteor Dragon. If you can’t afford this game then a fairly good simulation would be to imagine a picture of a Witch on a Broomstick breaking pictures of insects and bolt penguins, then imagine a picture of a dragon with two heads breaking pictures of dragons with one head and ultra bolt penguins and finally imagine a picture of a large purple dragon breaking everything. I say pictures because their were 3D representations of the cards available but they looked like they were made of twigs and took ages to load and so were immediately turned off.

It wasn’t just the game mechanics that Yuri O! Couldn’t be bothered to look up on wikipedia. He also decided to invent his own story set in Egyptian times where you must face an evil Pharaoh named “Heishinn” a man with an unfeasibly large face. This is not necessarily as bizarre as the ‘Duelist of the Roses’ game for the PS2 which casts Yugi as Henry Tudor during the war of the roses but it certainly doesn’t help matters that one of the characters is a mysterious blue fellow named ‘Simon Munran’. The questions raised by his blue skin and resolutely non Egyptian name are never sufficiently answered. I expect a sequel “Simon Munran: Unlimited” was planned but ultimately never came to pass because Max Pegs overheard Yuri O! telling his wife how much he loved the Merfolk of the Pearl Trident.

Special mention has to go to the games soundtrack which is actually some of the best music I have ever heard. Unfortunately I am unable to convey these sounds through the medium of words so you will just have to look them up on You Tube or buy the official soundtrack if such a thing exists.

The final thing to say about Yu-Gi-Oh! forbidden memories is that I finished it the very same day I was interviewed on Sky news and made the stunning pronouncement “It’s quite worrying really…basically your life is ruined.” They might have asked me about A-Level results but I was thinking about the nefarious maze inhabited by the paradox brothers!

Overall I’m giving Yu-Gi-Oh!: Forbidden Memories a probably undeserved Pot the Trick out of a Celtic Guardian.

Alien Vs Predator

2010-08-09T06:54:00.000-07:00

Despite being responsible for many of the events within the film series, the human race seems very keen to omit themselves from every instance involving aliens and/or predators. Why is it that the first film wasn’t titled Alien vs. Humans considering that’s all it was, its only salvation is the bizarre “Batman VS Predator” comic which saw Alfred the butler save the day by shooting a Predator in the face with an antique elephant gun. Like Cadillac’s and Dinosaurs there is a choice of four characters two human and two predators, staunch xenophobes might enjoy not picking the Predator foreigners because they go around killing our jobs and being employed in our women. Speaking of women, there is a woman character…that’s that taboo deftly handled. AVP (Andrew Viper Beam) gets more hectic than the previous two titles, by the final stage you have to wonder how anyone completed this in the arcades. The simple answer is they didn’t, they went home after spending hard earned savings to face a family grown apart by an easily solved beat em’ up addiction. The only consolation is that some bozo had left 20p in the machine so the first credit only cost 30p…but from then on it was all downhill. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that Alien Vs Predator is quite good.

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs

2010-08-03T08:18:00.000-07:00

Cadillacs and dinosaurs had the sad misfortune of being one of those long forgotten cartoons of the 90’s, along with Swat Cats, Jem and anything that featured the phrase “...with attitude!” Understandably, simply combining Jurassic era biology with one specific brand of car seems unlikely to create lasting appeal. Proterozoic Ford Escort had tried and failed long before, but Capcom was unwilling to listen to the rumours and slander spread about the poorly received cartoon series, offering to scrap major elements of the story in exchange for a 4 player fighting romp. To Capcoms credit this worked very nicely, there is no place for story in any game involving fighting. If Street Fighter has taught us anything it’s that a set of vague reasons for kicking the shit out of ones fellow man/woman are ample justification. Save the bollocks for fan fiction writers, they’ll most likely make the Cadillac gay anyway. Cadillac’s and dinosaurs offers the largest selection of food stuffs off the ground than any other of Capcoms titles, a veritable pavement smorgasbord ranging from a single stick of gum…with all its major chewing/healing properties to a bowel punishing lobster left in the baking sun. Although a minor addition, the ability to dash helps speed up the game considerably, unless you play as the requisite hulking oaf character Mustafa, the son Popeye only ever speaks of with contempt…he never graduated from spinach school. Perhaps I would enjoy this game more if only the black man had said "Lets ditch this dino-joint" at least once

Super Sidekicks 3:The Next Glory

2010-07-31T10:22:00.000-07:00

Dearest friend of mine Rou La Femme began his sporting career at the prime age of 76. Being 46 at the time his ability to transcend his own age still remains a baffling scientific enigma. But his lack of physical skill never got in the way of his ability to get thrown off the pitch by fellow players and in some instances members of the crowd. I think it was the aformentioned individual who summed up the beautiful game in a single phrase "It's a ball based sport...but it aint on no court!"

Whats the story? The next Glory?

Or more accurately “Super Sidekicks 3: The Next Glory”.

Somehow I managed to let Super Sidekicks 1 and 2 pass me by and so had assumed that Super Sidekicks 3 would be the third in a series of games that followed popular Superhero sidekicks (i.e. Robin, Bucky Barnes, Rick James, Benderboy, Fabulocity X and Young Grendell) saving the world. Of course that’s a lie as “The Next Glory” came bundled on my copy of SNK Arcade classics Vol I and so I was able to observe the football related imagery long before I was able to process information relating to the title of the game. In fact I had thought it was called “SNK Grass Masters” until the retro prefect told me to review it.
Now normally I wouldn’t be playing ‘footy’ type games because they rarely feature lengthy cut scenes where Ryan Giggs try to find his true reasons for playing football.

Glen Proud Cloddle: “Back then I could get by with just grazed knees”

Reno Van: Nistleroy “…..”

Glen Proud Cloddle: “Gone talking to a wall”

Reno Van Nistleroy: “…..”

Glen Proud Cloddle : “….”

Reno Van Nistleroy “….”

However I decided to give this game a go in honour of the “International Coca Cola Cup” which was happening at the time and also because the Retro Prefect had visited and we were running out of stuff to entertain him with because he is so very demanding. Not only did he keep demanding more peanut noodles but he cried for half an hour when we beat him soundly at Saint Seiya: The Hades.

I was expecting The Next Glory to look and play like Super Soccer/Sensible Soccer but in actual fact it has a strange Streets of Rage style viewpoint and Flashback style animations. Conrad Hart might not be playing on the team but the game certainly has the “hart” of rotoscoping, whatever that might be. It also has the ability to play as 64 different teams, I know this because I looked it up on wikipedia. I cannot comment as to whether these teams actually exist or were wearing the correct heraldry (I know there is a team called England but I thought they had pictures of Jeremy Irons on their shirts) but the ability to play as many now defunct African countries always brings a smile to my face. I believe that the players are nameless in order to match their featureless faces but they do manage to differentiate themselves by having slightly different haircuts and skin tones. How do they see the ball without eyes? The same way they manage to make racist remarks without mouths – telepathy!

It isn’t just the unique and slightly disturbing running animations that separate the next glory from the Fifa Street 2’s of this world it’s also the fact that the games last mere seconds as way for SNK to force you into putting more coins in the slot. Worst of their money grabbing tactics is the fact that you effectively have to pay to decide the outcome of a match as after your time runs out you must pay the price and select a rematch, penalties or sudden death. A rematch is pointless as goal scoring is largely impossible due to the restrictive time limits and the fact that it is impossible to actually get the ball into the net without first kicking the ball at the goalkeepers head and briefly concussing him and then stepping over his comatose body to deliver the coup de grace. Sudden Death is perhaps the best value option as you must continually play until someone gets a goal, unfortunately this will never happen even if you try and let the other person win because the Goals Guardian is always AI controlled. Eventually you will be thrown out of the arcade because the manager wants to go home, but not before he presents you with a miniature plastic arcade cabinet for your collection. The best option is of course penalties as this gives you a nice penalty kicking mini game where you get to look at the back of your mans leg as he decided where indeed to kick the ball. A good tactic is to constantly tell your opponent that you are “going left” and then pretend that actually you aren’t going to go left but then you go left anyway. This only fails if they also decide that the goalkeeper should go left but the chances of that are 1/3 i.e. unlikely.
The game also gives you the option to empower your team with different abilities such as “speed” “teamwork” and “power” none of these make a noticeable difference apart from speed as it allows you to constantly run into your opponents and steal the ball by virtue of phasing through them at high speed. Again I don’t know how true to life this feature is although I do hear that Wayne Ronstok always selects ‘Teamwork’ when fighting against the Gargons.

What really elevate the next glory to the upper echelons is the amazingly rendered goal celebrations. These often feature images of your team, apparently illustrated by the man who does pictures for crime watch. My personal favourite is where two players psycho crusher towards one another at high speed but we must also give special mention to the image of the player with the huge rectangular body being hoisted aloft by his team mates. There are others but much like the antics of Confuser Gaz they are beyond my ability to explain.

So as far as football games go The Next Glory is probably the best I have played. The only other football game I have ever played is the one that came with Klik’n’Play featuring inly four players on each team and an incredibly interfering ref. Still The Next Glory never features a man limply saying “It’s a goal” whenever the ball gets into the net so you can’t have everything. For these reasons I would like to award The Next Glory three Bull Boy Shoes out of a Gareth Southgate.

The Punisher

2010-07-31T10:18:00.000-07:00

Fans may be familiar with the Marvel comic’s series of the same name, a series which is yet to appear on any of the Capcom VS games despite Frank Castle’s potential for many infuriating projectile attacks. When playing this with friends, the second player has the unfortunate fate of controlling pre black Nick Fury. While filmgoers may have an image of the S.H.I.E.L.D captain as the smooth talking mother who enjoys acronyms of defensive items, the 90’s saw Mr. Nicholas as a middle aged heavy smoker sporting a memorable beige top and matching boots….very autumn! The punisher is definitely the one of the better beat em ups owing to the surprisingly violent nature of the game, it also features a number of drug references that went over my head as a child and came swooping back to scar my mind years later…a mental boomerang if you will. To see the potential damage such a concept can cause, just look at the Australians.

Retro Prefect in: Capcoms non stop coin-op…post op

2010-07-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

Capcom headquarters annual meeting (1989)

Madelyn Von Geargang (Chickens under barrels division): News just in folks, Final Fight just hit the arcades and it’s a big hit, pun intended!

Roland Toe (Supervisor of giant hooks): Even though it clearly steals everything from Double Dragon except for the inclusion of a shemale accompanying a lumbering retard?

Madelyn Von Geargang: The shemale rumours are unconfirmed, and besides…people steal our ideas all the time!

Gordon Axe 2 (Senior Gilius Thunderhead): If I change Cody to Axel, no one will ever know!

Madelyn Von Geargang: In light of this revived interest in the scrolling beat em up/ street em up/ beat em street/ breet em strup…I think we should look into it further, any ideas?

Harry Gar (Former mayor and pipe user): How about we reuse the same game engine on several established franchises over the course of the early to mid 90’s?

Madelyn Von Geargang: Give that man a pipe!

Roland Toe: But my area is small rotating sticks…

Madelyn Von Geargang: I said give that man a pipe!

Anyone who ventured the arcades, or took to illegal emulation several years after their decline will remember that the 90’s was the age of the scrolling beat em up, a game which due to the necessity of 3-D in anything new has effectively marked its demise. Over the course of several years, Capcom was able to gain the rights to a number of popular franchises and somehow shoehorn a lift stage and pipes as weapons into them all.

Over the course of this month, I shall be unleashing several smaller Beat em up reviews as a means of writing less, but making it look like I’m doing far more. It may one day reach the point were I start using bullet points

Comic effect!

Metamorphic Force

2010-07-12T11:18:00.000-07:00

BEAST! No, I haven't taken to shouting Kelsey Grammer on screen portrayals for laughs and giggles as you might assume. Rou La Femme has once again exhumed that bloated videogame corpse of the past in an attempt to provide a post mortem to the grieving gamers of yesterday. Or words to that effect....FRAISER!

Lets face it sports are absolutely rubbish and useless. That’s why football players are always gang raping people out of boredom. Cricket has serious lag problems, Tennis features some of the worst voice acting I have ever heard, the draw distance on weightlifting is atrocious and (get ready for the joke) certain characters in gymnastics are hugely UNBALANCED!!!!!

Despite all this, local sports and leisure complex the Metrodome stands as a pinnacle of human endeavour (in Barnsley). As expected all the sports stuff in there - football courts, boxing castles etc are rubbish but the Metrodome also has several high points such as a wicked wave machine, a sort of anti gravity water slide, the Rigby Suite Carvery and best of all proper arcade machines. Arcade machines with joysticks and buttons that don’t cost £2 a go or require you to make use of a plastic guitar/gun/dance podium/horse. Although they did for a while have the wonderfully dangerous version of Super Hang On where the main challenge is not falling of a steam powered bike. Games were rotated on a fairly regular basis and included favourites such as The Punisher, The Avengers and the slightly disappointing Raiden II. (Disappointing as it didn’t feature a man in a cat basket hat flying across the screen shouting “Aramawoggi”) Burning brighter than all these though was a hidden classic, the undeservedly forgotten Metamorphic Force.

Like all arcade games in the early 90’s Metamorphic force was a scrolling beat em’up, however it had an amazing twist in that it also ripped off the ‘turning into animals’ mechanic of Altered Beast. The trick being that Altered Beast was essentially and unplayable mess with funny voice acting and confusing sexual undertones whereas Metamorphic Force was not only brilliant fats paced and colourful but featured sprites the size of a babies head. What I gleaned of the plot from the arcade attract screen was that some huge ethereal woman in a toga had chucked four guys with animal transformation powers down onto the world in order to do in a load of bipedal animals. I would guess that these animal men were the bad guys as they were mostly baddie animals i.e Frogs/Lizards/Goats they also employed baddie weaponry such as Tridents, Curvy Swords, axes and shields with pictures of skellingtons on them.

You had a choice of four men with which to force these animals into extinction.
They were –

Ivan
A huge mustachioed Russian guy who fought with a log and appeared to have based his fighting style on the bit in chucklevison where old chuckle would swing round with a beam and smack younger chuckle in the face. “Oh dear Oh Dear brother Barry, looks like another trip to the hospital. What do you tell the doctors?” “I walked into a door brother Paul, I’m sorry for being so clumsy” “That’s right brother Barry because you don’t want to split up the family do you? What would mother think!?” Upon collecting a golden statue more than slightly reminiscent of an Oscar Ivan would transform into a bear man and the phrase “BEAST” would emanate from the Arcade machine at ear destroying volume. Needless to say as an impressionable youth I had hours of fun yelling “BEAST!” at people and then cursing my inability to assume an animal form and fight back as they kicked me in the shins.

Max
A mysterious character that turned into a black panther and campaigned for racial equality in extreme ways. No one ever picked him due to Panthers being such a rubbish animal, but I believe his fighting method was “bear knuckles” a wise choice against a heavily armed chameleon.

Ban
Ban, Ban, Ban is a kung fu man. He is also the most boring and generic character – reminding everyone of Axel from Streets of Rage or Cody from Final Fight. Upon attaining beast status he turns into an Ox – the dullest of all animals. In my eyes he should have been ban(ned) from the game.

Claude
Calude is an effeminate French swordfighter and also the best character in the game, if not the best character in any game. He noodles around the battlefield in jodhpurs and a frilly shirt showing off his long blond hair and occasionally stabbing a toad in a loin cloth. Upon achieving the coveted beast form Claude would become a metrosexual wolf with impeccable finger nails. The best thing about Claude though was that if you left his standing still for a bit his idle animation consisted of him flicking and fluffing up his perfect hair. I still hope to one day see Claude become the spokesman/wolf for herbal essences.

Special mention also has to go to the bonus item drop character who looked like one of those sinister Mickey Mouse toys they have in foreign grabber machines. Mostly under names such as “Michael the Disney style rodent friend” or “Uncle Walt’s Lunar Rat”. This mouseman would scurry along the screen with a swag bag of bonus statues which he would be forced to drop when you gave him the beating he so richly deserved. At first you feel a bit sorry for poor messenger mouseman as he has been cursed to be bottom of the animal/man hybrid foodchain. However he just keeps coming back with more statues so we can only conclude that he was a rich pervert who didn’t mind losing a few of his gold statues so long as you would hurt him like the bitch he was.

Overall this game featured graphics, sounds, music, an impossible goat boss at the end of the first level who rather prophetically stated “You will never beat me”, and an impossibly cool French Werewolf. Therefore I would give it Claude Greengrass out of Jean Claude Van Damme.

Poy Poy 2

2010-07-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

For those of you who enjoyed poy poy (the first) to the extent that you thought it necessitated a sequel , then I can conclude you've either lived a sheltered gaming life, playing exclusively on unwanted copies of power piggs, skullmonkeys and a variety of other sub-par anthropomorphic titles; or more likely you don't actually exist. Its a shame to see that the 'crate throwing' genre never really took off as it had potential to move into other hybrid areas such as 'first-person crate throwing' and 'crate em-ups'. The latter purely for the opportunity of an announcer saying "Crate combo!".

Poy poy 2 struggles to be anything other than four people throwing things in a confined space, effectively simulating how Russian democracy worked for many years. Konami however has managed to create depth to something that really didn't need any, the Poy Poy cup is that most coveted of prizes among people who don't mind inanimate objects embedded into their faces. Being a televised event one might think the cameramen would like to find some edgy shots to invoke audience participation, clearly the cameraman in question is a junior rookie given a shot at the big time. His unique static camera method may not be the norm now, but when he becomes the first person to nab rare pictures of Spiderman its greenhorn no more!

Playing the 'story' mode in the loosest sense of the word provides that epic feeling of watching the second half of Eurovision. An irksome announcer introduces and closes the show with a grating voice that more than makes up for the absence of awkward banter normally seen between two presenters. Followed by every round is a score tally by a woman who possibly due to equality regulations has just as irritating a voice as her male counterpart. The score tally marathon tends to take between 3-5 minutes as the disk slowly loads up the individual sound bite for each characters name. Considering there are several divisions you begin to resent any competitor with a name over two syllables, especially when they have names like Ten Ten. Clearly he was so adept at throwing things at an early age that they decided to name him stupidly twice.

I'm sure when four players gather round for 'Poy Party' as we all know them might increase the games appeal. I along with many owners of this game however find it difficult to justify inviting three people into my home for the sole purpose of playing something they probably haven't heard of, and I know just about enough to struggle through an article about it. I know many retro gamers are all for seeking out the niche titles, but much like the ark of the covenant they are often hidden with good reason. I'm not saying Poy Poy 2 will melt the faces of the master race any time soon, but it might unlock the secrets of an ancient alien race...that secret being throwing things is the basis for a lucrative TV show.

SNK Special

2010-07-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

Having being accosted frequently by former gold bullion enthusiast 'RouLaFemme', it is with mixed feelings of contempt and arousal that I introduce a showcase of SNK offerings through the eyes of Rou. Some might say those eyes are of a blind man, well I say that never stopped Daredevil...from making a bad film

The SNK meetings vol.1

01/05/1994 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage (El Presidente): Right it seems that our plan to sell exact replica’s of our arcade games for about £100 a go isn’t that successful. Apparently people feel that Samurai Showdown isn’t worth taking out a second mortgage for. Does anyone have any ideas?

Geese Thompson (Chief of animating people falling from ledges): Well why don’t we just keep releasing more and more fighting games in the hopes that we can beat the Street Fighter series by sheer force of numbers. Oh and the last bosses should all be ludicrously unfair.

Sir Nicholas Kage: Good idea Geese, I like it!

01/05/1999 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage: Well we seem to be having problems again. People seem not to like these really unfair boss encounters and they say our games are starting to look a bit old fashioned! Does anyone know how we can turn this around?

Allan Krauser (Head of saying “Out O Bounds”) : Sir why don’t we put all our money into bringing out a handheld console? After all look how much money the gameboy is making and that started off with a green screen!

Sir Nicholas Kage: I like this idea but we need to have some feature to set it apart from the gameboy…a selling point people can really get excited about.

Geese Thompson: Sir how about instead of giving it a d-pad we give it some sort of fudge between a d-pad and a joystick. Also the stick should click incredibly loudly so that when you play it in public everyone will look at what you’re doing.

Sir Nicholas Kage: I like it! Lets get started right away.

01/05/2002 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage: Right I’m afraid we’re bankrupt and we’re going to have to sell all our intellectual property to a pachinko company. Its been nice working with you all.

Geese Thompson: Sir this isn’t fair, I have loads of ideas for new bland fighting game characters! SNK will rise again. I vow it!

01/05/2004 2:00 PM

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: Right by marrying into the wealthy Playmore family and for some reason adding their name to my own despite being a man I have managed to raise the funds to recreate SNK except now it has to be called SNK-Playmore.
So what’s the first order of business?

Geese Thompson: Well Sir I think we should buy back all the intellectual property we had to sell last time. It boils my blood to think of my bland designs being used on pachinko machines when they could be being used in lots of new StreetFighter clones.

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: But Geese didn’t releasing lots of bland fighting games send us bankrupt before? I don’t think those characters were doing out company any favours!

Geese Thompson: But Sir that’s just because they were ahead of their time. People couldn’t handle how cool Terry Bogard was with his baseball cap and jeans but now everyone’s wearing that. You don’t hear people saying “Shoryuken” these days, nowadays its all “Gng dwn twn fr dbl rnbken m8”. This time it will be different!”

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: You’re right dammit! Go buy back everything, I don’t care what it costs!

Todo Jenkins (Newly appointed chairman of badly mangled dialogue): Sir shouldn’t we update out games for the new millennium? Maybe we could use 3D models shaded to look like watercolour paintings and retain the classic 2D gameplay.

Sir Nicholas Kage-Playmore: Don’t be foolish Jenkins, nobody would want to play anything like that! Now go away and write some incomprehensible dialogue for the new king of fighters game.

Poor old SNK. Everyone used to say their games were amazing but only the three kings of Europe could afford them and now that you can get their entire back catalogue in the form of PS2 collections everyone has realised they were generally a bit rubbish. Never mind SNK, we still love you and to prove it here is a review of every SNK fighting franchise. (That I have played)

World Heroes: I can’t be too harsh on World Heroes as I was given World Heroes Collection as a festive gift by the Retro Prefect. We wouldn’t want to recreate the feelings of betrayal that occurred when he gave Uncle Pete Sideways on DVD for his birthday and received a very disappointed look. Let’s just say that if you like Street Fighter clones featuring vaguely historical characters such as Captain Kidd the homoerotic pirate, Brocken the cyborg Nazi, Mudman the hilarious racial stereotype cannibal or Rasputin the flower child Russian mystic, then you may possibly glean some enjoyment from this game. However if you prefer games where characters perform the required action when you press the button rather than two years later then you best give it a miss. It’s rare for a games best feature to be a SS officer launching missiles from his knees and it is for this reason that I score World Heroes only one Brocken Bomber out of a Psycho Crusher.

Art of Fighting: More like ‘Art of Street Fighter clone’ eh readers? I know that the games prefect has a soft spot for this series mostly because of a character named Mickey who mysteriously changes from a muscle-bound punk in the original Art of Fighting to a flat topped Guile impersonator in Art of Fighting 2. He obviously felt out of place with the rest of the cast who are all shameless in their imitation of the classic Capcom line-up. Art of Fighting is a sort of Aldi version of Street Fighter so much so that they should have just called it “Pavement Combat” and had done with it, just remember kids ‘Jive’ looks like a Twix so it seems good value for money but the instructions are in foreign and the chocolate is bitter because it is made of ground up glass. The same goes for Art of Fighting and its cast of characters who for legal purposes have different names but use similar coloured packets. Characters like Lee (Masked, claw wielding, ineffectual) King (High and low fireball, kickboxing, cross dresser) Ryo (Fireball throwing, uppercutting, main character) Takuma (Overpowered clone of main character, at parties wears a Tengu mask and calls himself Mr. Karate) can all go back to the continent where they belong! The only exception is Mr .Big (baton wielding pimp sub boss) whose total inability to jump endears him to the nation. For this reason I give Art of Fighting two “I am actually a woman”s out of a Garcia concern.

Samurai Showdown: One of the more highly rated SNK franchises and with good reason. Samurai Showdown combines huge colourful sprites with interesting character design and the fact that it isn’t a blatant copy of Street Fighter. In fact Samurai Showdown managed to popularise a lot of fighting game staples such as the super move bar that increases as you take damage, the ability to kill your opponent at the end of a match and the addition of weaponry. Unfortunately for Samurai Showdown, Soulcalibur later stole the crown of weapon based fighting using fancy 3D graphics and gratuitous cog falling scenes but in our hearts we all know Samurai Showdown was the original if not necessarily the best. Unfortunately a lot of the home ports of the Samurai Showdown games were done by a bottle man and so run at about a fifth of the speed they probably should be, thereby rendering them unplayable. Combine with this the fact that Charlotte is a fencer rather than a Samurai and Samurai Showdown can only be awarded a Cham Cham out of a Tam Tam. (With extra marks for lots of attacks which involve a pause and then something neatly falling into two halves.)

Fatal Fury: A fighting game based around the premise of men (and it is all men in the first one at least) being so angry that they might actually die. Actually it has nothing to do with that it’s just a silly name for another Street Fighter clone. Fortunately it’s not as blatant as Art of Fighting and the characters are generally more charismatic than the Mickeys and Roberts of this world. Fair enough most of the characters look like they could have played dancing gangster’s in the ‘Beat It’ video but I think this only adds to the appeal. Apart from early 90’s idea’s of cool Fatal Fury also featured the ability to leap in and out of the foreground, just like in a real fight. (That takes place on three separate two dimensional planes). It sounds like an incisive play mechanic to stop projectile based characters gaining the upper hand in fights, but really it was a bit rubbish as it meant large parts of the fight were spent chasing your opponent back and forth across the three planes. Such is my love for Fatal Fury that not only am I able to ignore this rubbish feature but I am also going to list and describe every character when I give my score. Therefore I would give Fatal Fury a Terry Bogard - Quintessentially cool in baseball cap, jeans and red leather jacket. Dressing like him and walking around Sheffield saying “Are you ok…BUSTER WOLF” doesn’t make you any friends. Andy Bogard – Terry’s inexplicably Chinese brother. He likes to dress in white pyjamas and pretend that he’s Ryu from Street fighter. Everyone hates him. Joe Higashi – Commonly regarded as the joke character. Kick boxing Joe is actually ludicrously overpowered; he likes to upset people by punching tornados at them or briefly becoming a jaguar’s head. Richard Meyer – Richard is the manager of the Pau Pau café and like all small business owners he is always trying out new ways to attract in the customers. Using a yoyo to attach himself to the ceiling might not be his best scheme but it certainly seems to help him in the constant fights that break out. “You wanted decaf, I’ll decaf your face in with the help of my yoyo.” Raiden – Huge wrestler with the mysterious ability to conjure bees from his mouth for extremely long periods of time. Precursor to the current trend of featuring Luchador style wrestlers in every game ever made. Michael Max – Balrog with a tornado punch and a more potato like face. TunG Fu Rue – Admittedly I had to guess his name on account of it being in foreign. What isn’t foreign is the small Chinese man’s ability to rip his shirt off and become ha huge muscle-bound freak halfway through every fight. Even more mysterious is his ability to regrow his sleeves when he shrinks back to normal size. Duck King – Like all gang members Duck is an expert in funky dance fighting and has a colourful Mohawk. Unfortunately his original MC hammer outfit was replaced in later games by a more conventional hooded top but he made up for it with the Duck King themed rap which plays as he fights.
Geese Howard – Snake faced final boss with an impossible to perform special move known as “Raging Storm”. His hobbies include letting himself fall from balconies and saying things are predictable. Out of Billy Kane wasn’t in the Megadrive version so shut up.

I might possibly add a Blue Mary to that score for ‘Mark of the Wolves’ due to it’s hi res sprites and vision of a future where Terry Bogard has a new coat and is in love with Geese Howard’s son.

King of Fighters: Cross over fighting games are great because they feature all your favourite characters punching each other in the face. SNK must be raging (storm) at the success of the VS. games because they invented the entire formula ten years previously. King of Fighters features characters from Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury and Ikari Warriors as well as many original characters aiming to smash up their opponent’s features. The King of Fighters series has never reached the heights of popularity enjoyed by Foyles War Fighting Jam or Mortal Kombat VS DC Thompson, but that doesn’t seem to have deterred SNK from updating the franchise on a nearly annual basis. Most of the twelve core titles have featured some sort of ongoing storyline however a combination of extremely badly translated dialogue and apathy means that I have no idea what this story is supposed to be. For the most part it seems to involve some of the most difficult and unfair final bosses in fighting game history, lots of clones of Kyo and Geese Howard repeatedly coming back from the dead. It’s hard to dislike a series where throwing your sunglasses at someone counts as a special attack but for every K- and Iori there are about five men in hats with names like “John” and “Ralph.” Furthermore there are too many systems with names like “Tension Break” “Reverse Council” and “Player Mugabe” which only autistic frame counters are able to make use of. It is for that reason that I must award the King of Fighters series one Heidern out of a Jeidern. I would however grant the Maximum Impact spin off’s a Jeidern out of a Heidern as they are the closest thing you can get to Rival Schools without cutting your eye on the broken Dreamcast box of Project Justice.

Last Blade –Samurai Showdown with nicer graphics or a more level headed version of Guilty Gear? Probably one of the better SNK franchises Las Blade was unfortunately cut dead in its prime by the unpredictable nature of my Dreamcast and the low quality of ‘Mr Data’ CDR’s.
Therefore I must give Last Blade an ill informed Last Bronx out of a Last Blade.

SNK Vs Capcom Chaos – SNK prove rather successfully why Capcom make much more money than them despite being far lazier. One infinitely reused Morrigan sprite out a what on earth is Hugo doing in it?

I think that’s probably all of them. By the time you read this an SNK lynch mob will probably have severely Psycho Balled me into next week for my omission of some obscure Japanese only franchise (Like Gal Fighters) or for insisting that King of Fighters ’99 is nowhere near as good as King of Fighter 2001. This sounds nasty but I’m sure after the initial awkwardness we can become firm friends and I will let them try on my water damaged Terry Bogard hat

U.S. Championship V'Ball

2010-07-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

You might be asking yourself "what audacity have Technos, masters behind Super Double Dragon and River City Ransom; got attempting to create a simulation of a common if not exclusive to beach sport? Also, why have they felt the need to abbreviate the sport in question, thus removing the entire 'volley' aspect of the game?" Well fans thats a lot of questions, and in times like these I would suggest you write to your local MP who with any luck is a keen enthusiast of the sport, a 'volley dolly' as they are referred to within certain circles. (Or should that be certain balls?)

Its nice to see a game that doesnt shy away from creating an atmosphere of homoerotic bliss within the tropical locales of Hawaii, Daytona and Croydon. Alas the latter location was removed on the grounds of strict parrying policies, that and the severe lack of beaches in London boroughs. Character selection is resereved to the hand of fate, with each corresponding coin slot there is the choice of one of the following:

Player 1: Man in yellow pants
Player 2: Man in pink pants
Player 3: Other man in yellow pants
Player 4: Former sex offender (In pink pants)

Some players might speculate that yellow pants man and pink pants man are indeed the same person, shamelessly re-coloured to avoid the task of redrawing another homosexual from scratch. A daunting task for us all, but for every John Barrowman theres always going to be a pink pants equivalent if this carries on. I of course speak in jest, there is nothing more manly than sweaty half naked men grunting as they hit balls while looking apathetically towards the bikini clad audience.

Behind those rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia lies the cyclopian-esque ability to shoot beams of light at Ian Mc Kellen, only instead the projectile takes a more spherical form. A unique feature in U.S. V'Ball is the way in which pink and yellow pants can return a serve. Rather than gently patting it over the net like so many of todays budding volleyball enthusiasts. It is possible to smash the ball with enough force to not just knock the opponent off their feet, but also send them hurtling several meters backwards accompanied by the on screen text "KABOOOM!". On the plus side there is nothing more honourable than an onomatopaeic death, which is why I have always considered silencers to be somewhat cowardly. The incapacitated partner then has to rely solely on the abilities of his partner amidst two opponents as he slowly remembers what it was like to have a non crushed spine.

U.S. Championship V'Ball is a game of two halves notably left and right, playing this game alone is tragically unsafe and can cause suicidal thoughts and general questionings of ones sexual preference. With four people however this proves that despite the uncomfortable silences as players grease each other up, it can be a game enjoyed by all. But not too much mind, as theres only so many backs for so many walls.

Super Smash TV

2010-06-30T10:01:00.000-07:00

As we all know 1999 was a year of contemplation for all of us, not two years before had the Queen of our Hearts been so cruelly snatched away from this mortal coil due to a calamitous mix up involving English Royalty and a Lewis Carroll creation of the same name. Still, the public found solidarity in such a premature death by viewing copious amounts of it via a worldwide broadcast. Rou La Femme elaborates in that way he does (with words)

In the year 1999 the main form of entertainment will be a game show where a man in red trousers shoots wave after wave of cyborgs in order to win a toaster. Of course the premise of Super Smash TV seems laughable now; traditional game shows became extinct around 1992 and were replaced by a Geordie man attempting to psychologically torment a group of prisoners into killing/having sex with each other. It amuses the Geordie man to know that everyone wants one of these things to happen but if it ever did it would never be shown on television. With this in mind was Smash TV really that wrong in its bleak predictions? Well yes obviously it was as the technology required to graft a man with learning difficulties to a tank does not yet exist. Does this mean that Smash TV was a bad game? Let’s find out together dear reader. (It was a good game)

In reality Smash TV would have made a poor premise for a TV show, watching two contestants blast away at wave after wave of enemies might have been entertaining for a while but audiences would soon get bored. Thankfully your average games player is slightly less discerning and can derive hours of fun from standing next to a doorway firing wildly at enemies resembling the robots from batteries not included. The first few rooms might encourage the player to assume Smash TV is a mindless blaster, where all you need do is stand in a corner and hold down B until anything that moves is reduced to rubble. It soon becomes apparent that Smash TV is all about making use of available space and carving yourself out a small section of screen that isn’t covered by enemies. This does become a slightly easier prospect in two player mode but then you have to compete with your fellow contestant for a decent share of luxury luggage sets and VCR’s. Really it shouldn’t make much of a difference as to who gets all the prizes but at the end of each level when the values are added up you don’t want to be the one looking dejected as your opponents prize levels reach up to the stratosphere and don’t forget that in the end the winner has the right to say “Imagine if all these prizes were real!”. You wouldn’t want to imagine that your friend had twenty toasters and you only had five, how could you ever look your poor wife in the eye? The children want their toast and you are having to make it in batches, what kind of man are you? Not a man at all ….BUT A MOUSE.

Of course this is all fantasy; the game was so hard that neither red nor blue man would ever make it past the second level. That wife would have no toaster at all and would be grieving for her husband who had died of being run over by a giant face. Sadly the SNES version of Smash TV only provided a finite amount of continues meaning the third and fourth levels would remain a mystery until I bought Midway Arcade treasures and played it through to the end. Needless to say the final half of the game was so hectic that I have not managed to retain any memories of it aside from the fact that the game show host was the final boss.

I have managed to get this far without actually mentioning the host of Smash TV, unfortunately convention dictates that I must now repeat all of his catchphrases and then describe how he would occasionally pop up flanked by transsexuals and wiggle his eyes.

The gameshow host was well random and funny lol I well remember him doing good phrases, I like to think about what he said and done a lol. Also the women in it looked like transsexuals. i.e. they were actually men.

“These prizes are numerous and the amounts of currency are steep. I am in favour of this.”

“I would make a financial transaction where I would exchange that item for a dollar.”

“Utter Problems!”

In my humble opinion the game show host was overrated, he had a stupid face and he had copied all his moves from the far superior Mutoid Man. Now there was a boss to ironically make a fuss about. Let us explore further the legend of Mutoid Man.

Mutoid Man is a large bald man with a tank where his legs should be; he wears a fetching green outfit and is definitely educationally subnormal. His ability to speak is limited to guttural noises such as “Weerghhh” and occasionally saying “No way” but he hasn’t let that stop him get to the top of the pile. How many men do you know that are composed of a metal skellington on some tank legs which is actually covering your own head on the same tank legs? Not many but its certainly comes as a surprise! Not only does Mutoid Man have two helpers on his tank legs who fire cannons at you, but he will swipe you with his meaty fists and fire beams of electric at you from his pig like eyes. He also likes to laugh at people who try to shoot him with the basic gun as it merely ricochets from his powerful frame. The only real way to do any damage to Mutoid Man is using the Whiny grenade launcher to smash grenades onto his face, but even then you run the risk of him absent mindedly running you over. The only thing we can question about Mutoid man is how come he doesn’t get more of a starring role? Instead of the game show host popping up to make quips it should be Mutoid Man shouting No Way and then accidentally crushing one of the transsexuals. He didn’t mean to do it but the police would never believe you. Mutoid Man could never survive in prison, people would be constantly trying to make him say ‘No Way’. Far better take him somewhere peaceful and do him in with the whiny grenade launcher. Personally I would have framed Scar Face for the deed, but no one thinks like that in a crisis.

It is for this reason that I give Super Smash TV one Robotron clone out of it would be better if it featured Eddie the common truck driver from the Weakest Link Game.