Paul Haine | Tales from the city
Games
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The Nintendo e-reader
The Nintendo e-reader isn’t what you think it is; it isn’t a device for reading e-books. The truth is, I’ve just lured you here to read an article about an obscure peripheral for the Game Boy Advance by implying that Nintendo made a Kindle-style e-reader. E-readers are hot right now, aren’t they? It’s all Kindle-this and iBooks-that. I bet a Nintendo one would be lovely, all white and curvy like that Wii U tablet controller.
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Late night gaming
Just as I have a specific type of game to play on a quiet, lazy Sunday morning, there are also games which I never feel right playing unless it’s late at night.
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Jack Marston is a prick, but that’s probably ok
The character of Jack Marston in Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption doesn’t compare favourably to his father, John Marston, but with a bit of mental squinting I came to the conclusion that this character-hobbling was not only deliberate but desirable as well. Spoilers follow for the ending of Red Dead.
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A few minutes with the Nintendo 3DS
I only had a vague interest in the 3DS, having abandoned the DS platform some time back. Passing a shop that had a demo unit, I figured I should at least check it out. Could the much-vaunted glasses-free 3D effect bring me back to Nintendo handheld gaming? Spoiler alert! No.
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Metro 2033 is a double-hard bastard
Based on the novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter set in the Russian Metro after a nuclear holocaust has made the surface of the planet uninhabitable. I’m not big on first-person shooters — I’m a lover, not a fighter — but the subject matter of Metro appealed to me so I gave the game a go. Sadly the game proved to be — for me, at least — almost comically challenging.
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The morality of Fable III
Fable III is not a game with many shades of gray. By and large, the decisions you face always have a heavily-signposted ‘good’ or ‘evil’ option with nothing in between. It’s a cartoonish, black and white view of the world and the consequences are largely the same each time: pick the good option and the people will love you, but at a high economic cost which later translates to a high human cost. Pick the bad option and you’ll be hated, but lives will be saved in the long run. It’s a paternalistic perspective that treats the general population as children, who may lash out at being treated severely but ultimately aren’t capable of seeing that it’s for their own good.
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Edgar Wright and the videogame aesthetic
The videogame film adaptation has a sorry history. Street Fighter; Super Mario Bros.; almost the entire filmography of Uwe Boll. That the barely-passable Tomb Raider with Angeline Jolie is generally seen as the pinnacle of the game to film transition speaks volumes.
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Where can Nintendo take Mario next?
The Wii is unusual as it’s seen not just one but three ‘proper’ Mario games: Super Mario Galaxy, New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Super Mario Galaxy 2. Normally, we’re lucky to get one of each of Nintendo’s headline games per console generation: Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64, Super Mario Sunshine on the GameCube. I thought this was a good move, but having played the last two Wii games I’ve been left feeling bored and jaded with the whole thing.
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Video games: the addiction, apparently
A long and somewhat rambling article on videogame addiction in a recent Observer caught my eye. Tom Bissell, a journalist, critic, and fiction writer, details how his writing ability was decimated by an addiction to videogames. Really, Tom? Really?
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Hands-on with Project Natal
Guest writer Louise Troy plays with Microsoft’s new motion-sensing camera attachment for the Xbox 360.
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I hate sequels
Guest writer Ian Edhouse talks about Valve Software and the sequel to their 2008 hit Left 4 Dead.
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Sunday morning gaming
Most of my gaming is done on a weekend; I find weekday evenings I’m usually too tired to really dedicate the stupid amount of hours a typical game requires, so I binge over Saturday and Sunday. When Sunday morning comes and I slump on the sofa in my dressing gown, a mug of builder’s tea by my side, the games I play have to meet a few requirements.
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I play games on easy
I’ve recently come to terms with my inability at playing any game with any skill; from now on, I’m playing games on the easy difficulty settings and I don’t care who knows it.
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The Xbox and I, revisited
Long time readers may remember my brief excursion into the world of the Xbox back in 2004, when I bought a limited edition Crystal Xbox in order to sell at a profit only to discover that they had been re-issued and I was lucky to get my money back at all. Back then, the Xbox platform held no interest for me, with its library appearing to consist almost entirely of shooting and driving games, and the online aspect didn’t hold any appeal either. Fast forward to the present day, and we find me adding an Xbox 360 Elite to my ever-changing collection of consoles.
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iPhone gaming
Mobile gaming — that is, gaming on mobile phones rather than dedicated portable consoles by dedicated videogame manufacturers — has always been an aspect of gaming that I’ve been happy to let pass me by, because mobile gaming has almost always been awful. When the iPhone was first released it didn’t come with any games at all, and although there was a promise of some iPhone version of Super Monkey Ball in the future, the iPhone’s usefulness as a gaming device didn’t factor at all into my decision to buy it.
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World of Goo
I’m a very fussy gamer, often owning consoles only for one or two games, and often abandoning games to ebay after about 30 minutes or so if it fails to entertain or show signs of promise. I’ve recently abandoned such critically-acclaimed gems as Shadow of the Colossus and Final Fantasy XII, and I’m giving serious consideration to giving up on Dragon Quest on the DS, despite having eagerly waited for it for months and only being three hours in. I’m tempted by Chrono Trigger, also on the DS, despite knowing deep-down that I’ll probably play it for five hours over the space of a fortnight and then forget all the controls. I’m about six hours into Okami with perhaps another 50 to go, and despite being an utterly beautiful and joyful game, the notion that I may not be putting the final thing into the thing until fucking April fills me with dread.
So with all that in mind, I hope you’ll understand the gravity of the following statement: World of Goo is one of the best games I’ve played in about a decade.
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Game
We hear a lot these days about how the internet is killing high street stores, and although I do feel a smidgen of nostalgia and sorrow for the passing of chains such as Fopp, every time I find myself in a branch of Game I end up hoping for imminent bankruptcy, because Game is rubbish.
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Pokémon Curious
Nintendo are often criticised for their first-party releases being largely based around the same few franchises. Mario in particular appears to whore himself out to all manner of genres — platform games, sporting games, puzzle games, even non-game software such as art and music packages. What critics don’t realise is that the inclusion of Mario is, more often than not, a sign that the game will be of a high quality, just as, for instance, the inclusion of Sonic the Hedgehog can be taken as a sign that the game will blow goats in a big way.
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I Just Wanted to Play Zelda
I am contemplating buying an Xbox 360. This is not because I particularly want an Xbox 360, though they do hold more appeal to me now than the original Xbox ever did. No, the reason I’m contemplating this is due to a process of elimination: aside from handhelds, the X360 might be the only console I can both buy and use, and I find that mildly upsetting.
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Drums Keep Pounding Rhythm to the Brave
Last year, I lamented the lack of iconic, memorable music in today’s games, but it’s dawned on me — partly because I’ve been playing Nintendo’s Soundvoyager, more on which later — that I may have been a little harsh. The focus of my writing back then was on the catchy jingles older games excelled at providing, but while today’s in-game music may not be as well-suited to the world of ringtones, it does provide us with another gaming genre; that where the music is not incidental, but actually integral to the in-game experience.
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