Paul Haine | Tales from the city
Games
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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.
I’d resisted buying an Xbox 360 for a long time; hardware issues never seemed to be out of the news, with consoles erupting into terrible flaming death as soon as they were taken out of the box. Gaming forums were awash with advice on how best to care for your Xbox 360 as if it was a frail, demented, urine-soaked relative – keep it in a well-ventilated area; consider suspending the power supply over an empty cardboard box so that one side of it wasn’t smouldering in the deep shag; make sure the console was kept upright/horizontal at all times (opinions on that one tended to go both ways); in the event of the Red Rings of Death, try wrapping the console entirely in towels and leave it on for a while; check the wattage of the PSU as that could reveal hints about which chipset the console was using; try and get hold of one with the quieter BenQ DVD drive…it went on, and on, and on, and I thought “This is bullshit.”
Why were people so tolerant of this? You’d read about people on their fourth or fifth Xbox and wonder what on earth they were doing to the damn things, and why they didn’t think it was an issue. People would take decibel readings of the fans and disk drives and they’d take temperature readings and publish them online for comparison like this was a normal thing to do with your console.
That said, things have been much quieter on the hardware failure front since Microsoft woke up and threw money at the problem. An opportunity arose to pick up the ‘Elite’ model for £150, I was going through a bit of a gaming drought at the time, and the Xbox library had diversified enough to attract the likes of me so I took the plunge.
If I hadn’t known of the hardware issues beforehand, I probably could have guessed. Really, the whole thing feels like it’s going to fall apart every time I touch it. It sweats cheapness from every pore, from the under-sensitive touch-sensitive power switch that needs me to push the console back a few millimetres each time I use it to the DVD drive that rattles nervously out of its holding like it’s been taken out of a seven-year-old PC; from the power supply that’s bigger than the Wii to the conspicuous absence of any built in WiFi.
I thought the machine was loud, but no louder than, say, my Dreamcast, until I actually bought a physical disk to put in it and then the thing sounded like a fucking hovercraft; fortunately you can now install games to the hard drive so its no longer an issue but I don’t know how I’d have coped beforehand – put the console in another room, maybe, and hope that the wireless controllers would stretch that far? I suddenly understood why people were posting decibel readings; as soon as the disc spun up I wanted to invite friends over to marvel at the thing like it was John Merrick; step up, step up, ladies and gentlemen, step right up! Be amazed, be dazed, be tearful and be fearful of the CONSOLE THAT SOUNDS LIKE AN ELEPHANT!
I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!
Still. In its short time in my flat it’s settled in quite happily, and has already gained more use than the PS2 that I owned for seven months and never really liked. So far I’ve played, completed and generally enjoyed the unfairly-maligned Mirror’s Edge, I’ve blitzed through Beautiful Katamari and concluded that I may as well have just stuck with the free demo, I’ve whizzed through Portal and, whilst I loved the script and the concept and the voice work, felt that it was far too easy, and am currently working my way through Half-Life 2, a game that holds a special place in my heart due to fond memories of the original Half-Life, a game which I played during my first year at university and which demonstrated to me that you could have a cinematic, story-driven experience in a first-person shooter even though to progress through it meant killing everything you saw right in the face. There’s a whole host of downloadable games and extra content I plan to get just as soon as this ‘recession’ thing has passed by and we can all get back to being mindless consumers once again.
I also need to get Fable 2. This is something that needs to happen.
Obviously I’m not using the console like a typical Xbox owner would. I allowed my Xbox Live Gold membership to lapse to Silver as soon as my free trial had ended. I’ve yet to play any game online and the headset that came with the console remains in its plastic wrap. I have still never played a Halo game. I have turned off the ‘Achievement Unlocked!’ notification messages that kept interrupting me. I’m only going to be online at all due to spotting a wireless adaptor for £35 on Amazon this weekend; I wasn’t going to pay the RRP of £60 for one, nor was I going to lay down several hundredweight of ethernet cable across my flat as if I was trying to telegraph someone in New York.
The console doesn’t fit at all with my minimalist aesthetic but it does, at least, have enough games of interest to me to justify its purchase. But I do worry, every time I turn it on, that this time will be the time it chooses to explode in my face. Still, at least it would be something else to write about.
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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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Game On
Currently in London at the Science Museum, there lives a beautiful thing. It is Game On, an exhibition that purports to explore the history, technology and culture of computer games but is basically an excuse to play Xevious with all the free credits you can eat. Starting with Space War on the Vectrex and ending with Wii Sports, it’s also how I imagine my house would look, if I could only disregard time, money, space and reality.
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In-Game Music
Modern videogames do not provide ringtone-friendly music. It was Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children that started this particular train of thought more than a year ago, so bear with me; there’s a point in the film when a character’s mobile phone goes off, and the ringtone it uses is the opening part of the fanfare music that appears in most Final Fantasy games. For the uninitiated among you, you can listen to that music, in glorious MIDI, here.
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Cost and Effect, II
Last week saw me ramble on for far too long about Apple product updates, leaving me with no space to talk about the Nintendo announcements that took place around the same time. Unlike Apple, Nintendo didn’t release news of any new or updated products, just launch details — dates and prices — for the Wii, something they’ve held off doing for some time now.
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Gaming for Girls
As I seem to be making the confession genre on Joeblade my own special domain, here’s another: I’m a girl. And I really, really enjoy playing computer games. (Come closer so I can whisper in your ear: Sometimes, I even play them on my own.)
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Bandai Wonderswan SwanCrystal
It haunts me. To this day, it haunts me. The SwanCrystal, the third and final iteration of Bandai’s Wonderswan handheld console, is precisely the sort of hardware that a hardcore gaming nerd such as myself ought to possess — displaying it proudly alongside his Hello Kitty Dreamcast and his Sam Coupé — but having owned one for only a few months, I re-sold it in a fit of financial realism.
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Nintendo name their console ‘Wii’
So, though I am technically supposed to be spending my time on something else at the moment, I felt unable to let this one pass by unmentioned. As you may have heard already, seeing as the internet exploded with the news last Thursday, Nintendo have revealed that their next console, previously known as the Revolution, will, in actual fact, be known as Wii.
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Nintendogs Revisited
I thought I’d just update you all on the state of my puppies, Buckley the beagle, Titus the King Charles spaniel and Cardigan the dachshund; they are dead. I killed them.
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