A whole new shade of red

"Hooray! Tekken 6" I thought to myself when I got my copy home. "What's this? All the characters are already unlocked and the main mode seem to be some crappy adventure version of Tekken". Ah well, suppose the multiplayer is still good, and I can hopefully unlock some nice cinematics by finishing the arcade mode. Cut to 20 minutes later and we find our intrepid gamer in a fit of rage. Azazel, the final boss of Tekken 6, is a cheap, spammy, overpowered, mummified bastard.

There's nothing wrong with making people earn thier rewards but this is just ridiculous. I thought Seth at the end of Street Fighter 4 was bad, holy crap was I wrong. Pretty much every move you make does bugger all damage, every time you knock him down he swoops on you and knocks you down, he's constantly attacking you from a distance with huge spikes that shoot from the ground and swarms of beetles, if you attack him while he's attacking your attacks do nothing and if all that wasn't bad enough when you get his health down to a certain amount he does more damage. LIKE HE FREAKIN' NEEDS IT!! I've been playing Tekken since no.2 and I'm by no means bad at this game but this boss sure made me feel that way. There's nothing quite like have a huge bastard of a boss beat the crap out of you over, and over, and over again.

If i'd been playing this at the arcade it would have cost me nothing short of about $40. When you beat this guy that should send you a bloody medal because god knows you've earned it.

ARGH!!

Does anyone else hate watching characters in TV shows play games? Maybe it's just me, maybe I'm the only one who gets frustrated by watching something done poorly, and maybe Joey Ramone was actually a very handsome cyclops from another dimension who could shoot lasers from under his fingernails. Games get mislabelled, misquoted and more than anything, NOT PLAYED! The amount of times I've seen someone "playing" video games, stop turn around and have a conversation and then continue playing is countless. "What's so strange about that?" I hear you asking, well the simple answer is that while they aren't watching and often aren't holding a controller, THE GAME KEEPS GOING!

They don't pause which i find very interesting, if I'm fighting some mother ship or equally difficult boss at the end of a game that's taken me a good 50 hours to complete, I'm not going to just put the control down, let the battle continue and have a conversation. Do these people have no goals? Maybe they just have attention spans the size of atoms, or maybe they have master telekinetic powers, they're often doing quite well even when they're in another room!

I just wish that TV creators would make sure these small things get done properly, the show itself loses a bit of it's magic when you realise they are just acting. Often quite poorly as they mash all the buttons at once of their controller with no battery pack, belonging to the console that isn't plugged into the TV. Sigh...

The master of unlocking!

Since it's coming up to Halloween again I thought I would go back and take a look at a classic game in the horror genre. My game of choice!? The Gamecube remake of the Capcom classic, Resident Evil. Apart from boasting amazingly better graphics and voice acting (thank god) than the original, this remake also comes with some added story elements. This game has such atmosphere compared to most horror games I've played and even though I've finished it a hundred times, I still get edgy when I have to go down a corridor I know is swarming with crimson heads.

Now out of the two playable characters (Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine), I'm the only one I know who picks Jill. The only perks I've observed playing as Chris is that you have Rebecca to heal you anytime you want for a portion of the game, and you get a flamethrower with a terrible range to use for about 5 minutes. If it weren't for Rebecca, Chris would never have gotten out of that mansion. Jill on the other hand, did it all herself. She solved the puzzle that needed some piano skill, she mixed chemicals to kill a giant ceiling plant and she can pick locks. Now as far as i can tell the only skill Chris learned while in training for S.T.A.R.S was shooting.

When it came time for Capcom to throw down against Marvel, which Resident Evil character did they include? Was it the magnum toting Barry? How about Leon with his oh-so-special hair? Or perhaps it was the man with a plan himself, Wesker? (though that would have been awesome). The answer, as I'm sure you've all predicted, is none other than little Jill Valentine. Not Chris, can't pick locks, can't mix chemicals, heal me Rebecca, Redfield, but his partner. And though in Marvel Vs Capcom 2 she constantly shouts, "I'm a member of S.T.A.R.S", she actually kicks a fair bit of arse.

So to all those people who didn't pick Jill because she looked just a little average or wasn't manly enough for a video game, just remember. She's a member of S.T.A.R.S.

Deja Vu?

Namco made an arcade game in 1991 called StarBlade and i only just finished it once i rediscovered the game as a bonus in Tekken 5. It's a space themed rail shooter which takes you into the heart of a man-made asteroid threatening earth, and only you and your crack squad of pilots can destroy it and save the world. Sounding a little familiar yet? If not you probably haven't played any of the Starfox games.

Especially not the very first in the series, Starwing on the SNES. Now clones of games aren't rare. There are countless Mario and Sonic clones so it didn't seem strange that someone would steal from the Starfox franchise. The amount of times i thought, "wow, i can see where they stole this from" when playing StarBlade was a little too much to just be coincidence. That is until I learned that StarBlade was made 2 years before Starwing. The music, the bosses and even the way you enter the final level all seem to share a little too much. Hell, even the credits look the same!

StarBlade starts you by launching you from a space station directly into combat with a large fleet of enemies, once destroying everything here you travel into an asteroid field, once you've passed here you end up in the final area which consists of a short flight across a desert planet before heading inside to destroy the core.
Starwing starts by launching you from a station on a planet, then you move through an asteroid field, then a enemy fleet, before coming to the final level in which you travel over the surface of a desert planet before heading inside to defeat the final boss.

Starwing is one of my all time favorite games so I'm really hoping that everything I've written about is a coincidence. It was Picasso who said "Good designers copy, great designers steal." and I'm really hoping that isn't the case here.

Is that my old format?

Backwards compatibility is something very important to me, don't get me wrong though, the future is the place to be, but it's always nice to see how far we've come. Plus some of the best games I've ever played are on older consoles. This is where Nintendo Wii shines, just plug in your old Gamecube controller, chunk in a memory card, slide your disc in and you're good to go.

Sadly the same can not be said about Sonys Playstation 3. I recently found a stack of PS2 games i thought I'd lost, so I rejoiced and then slid one into my PS3. Wouldn't you know it? my PS3 doesn't play PS2 games. I thought it just needed an update, so i plugged it in and waited the half hour it needed only to find... FAIL! still no joy. I got my PS3 when Metal Gear Solid 4 came out so it's not the oldest model you can get, but i did find that a friend of mine who got his on the launch date, does indeed have some backwards compatibility. Maybe you're thinking "why not just trade in your current one and get one of the new slim models?" Well i would but the first Playstation i got was a PS1, not a PSX but the slim version. I played it for about a month before it broke and the only repair i had available was to buy a new one. Moving on to my PS2, i got one of the old chunky ones and it worked for a long time before it died, then i purchased a slim one. Same deal, it was a piece of crap. Now if i want to play my old games i either have to buy an old Playstation or upgrade the one i have.

Naturally i choose the upgrade and i still run into problems. I've downloaded WipEout HD, Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Medieval and they are all saved onto the hard drive. Now if i buy a new slim version, I still get no love. Sony decided to give up on the whole backwards compatibility thing with the slim versions so if you want to play old games, you better have the old consoles. INFURIATING!

Should they have made a external hard drive like the Xbox? or made it so you can copy your data onto a memory card like the Wii? Either way i think Sony needs to have a good long, hard think before they release the Playstation 4.

Lame, so lame...

Ever been shamed by being beaten by Luigi? How about losing a race to tails? There are so many characters in games that just leave you feeling humiliated when you lose to them. I've sunk to all all new low, how about being beat up by a unicorn? Pretty sad huh? Well on this occasion i would have prefered that. I WAS KILLED BY THAT UNICORN!! There i was, sneaking up on a minotaur for a surprise attack and who should come up and ravage me from behind? But thier gang leader.

This is the bastard here, look friendly right? WRONG! That's just to lure you in so it can stab you up and eat your bones. Doesn't matter what race you are or where you come from, you step on it's turf and you're a gonner.

Watch out for him, you've really got to watch out for all mythical animals in everything, they're mythical for a reason. That reason is that someone came along and wiped them all out because they're a menace, a menace to everything and everyone.

Heed my words mortal, or you might be the next victim. It might not be today or tomorrow, but one day a fluffy little Hippocampus is gonna come along and you'll be all smitten by it's adorable, cuteness and then BAM! You're lying face down in a pool of your own blood.
You've been warned.

Super Street Fighter 4

After the release of Street Fighter 4, it was inevitable that eventually Super Street Fighter 4 would come. So far we know that there is going to be a butt load of gameplay tweaks and 8 additional characters, including some new! The first of the new characters announced is Juri.
All we know about her so far is that she practices Tae Kwon Do and was previously somehow associated with S.I.N.