Should retro stay that way?

I've always had this niggling feeling when i play old games - games that i have fond memories of and that i loved playing when i was younger - a feeling that they're just not as good as i remember them.
There will always be classics but for the most part any retro fare that i partake in is always met with mild nostalgia and then severe indifference. I don't intend to bad-mouth the retro game, i know that alot of games have been essential to the progression of the industry but i always find them a little....prosaic.
In this currrent climate of gaming luxury that we enjoy, and i'm not referring to graphics, gaming has become such an immersive experience. RPG's are deep and involving providing indepth character focus and an emotive storyline, similarly FPS's are fast-paced and atmospheric, often thrusting the player into a dramatic war-torn landscape.
It's this attention to detail which makes the retro game a slightly stale experience with the obvious exceptions of timeless classics.

A case in point is when i purchased the MegaDrive collection on the PS3. I looked on the back of the case and was instantly elated to see dozens of my favourite MegaDrive titles from my wayward youth - Sonic (in all his forms), Comix Zone, Shining Force, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Phantasy Star....the list went on and my gaming euphoria was paramount. At the time i remember thinking that £25 was a tad steep but i looked past the monetary concern and focused on the fact that these were classic games. Games that my brother and I bonded over as we each took a pad in hand and assumed the role of a dwarf or a bird in a tight fitting red lycra mini skirt brandishing a metal pole. These, my friends, were games from a golden age.

Rushing home with no regard for speed limits or children naively crossing from behind a bus i burst through my front door, took the stairs three at a time and literally threw the game disc into my PS3. The game loaded and there they were in all their glory, a plethora of games crammed onto one disc - a feat that if you told me it were possible 10 years ago i'd have gathered an angry mob and burnt you at the stake for witch-craft, possibly stopping to dunk you to see if you floated along the way.
I eagerly loaded up E-Swat, it being the game i have fondest memories about and began to soak up the memories. All was good until i reached level 3 and discovered that the game followed exactly the same formula throughout albiet with the ocassional change of a suit. Walk from left to right, duck, shoot and then usually die. It was a hard game and i suddenly remembered how punishing older games used to be.


I love you E-Swat. I'm just not in love with you.

I recall playing Dizzy for hours on end, dying after playing it for hours and having to start all over again!!! Nowadays that's unheard of, imagine playing Killzone 2 or Gears of War only to die on level 6 and starting from the beginning again? It's madness.


Ah Dizzy how i enjoyed your cruelty. Like an abused spouse i would take the beating you handed out and then come back for more.

I desperately wanted to love the Phantasy Star and Shining Force series as well because they as good as got me into RPG's when i was younger but this time around i just found them too limited. After the haze of nostalgia had cleared i was left with the reality of retro gaming, that ultimately they were amazing back then but that they should probably stay in the past.


I remember being absolutely enthralled by Shining Force back in the day. It still plays well even today....but just not that well.

If game companies were making brand new games but in a retro style they wouldnt shift many copies without the added pull of recapturing some of your youth, they have my never ending gratitude for furthering the games market and for being on the forefront of the games revolution but unfortunately retro games are staying firmly in my past where they belong - along with He-man, 2000A.D. and Woof, that series about a boy who kept turning into a dog but the dog was played by Pippin, that dog who now has a five minute slot on BBC2 in the mornings doing tricks with special needs kids.

The road to Shangri-La is paved with G's.

It occured to me last night that i haven't so much as switched on my 360 in the last 2 months and i pondered why. There was the slight technical faux pas with is burning gouges into all of my games but really stealthily so that i didn't notice.
That eventually culminated in me on my knees imploring my 360 why, after so much quality time spent together, it would stab me in the back like that. Et tu 360?

So yes, that soured relations between us slightly. Then it began to crash every so often - ordinarily it wouldn't be that much of a problem but i found that it would choose key times to decide to just give up. One example was on Fracture when i finally completed a level that i'd been attempting for ages only to get a mere inch from a save point and the 360 spitefully froze. This little quirk has certainly compounded matters in the 360 snubbing but there was something else, something more obvious that i just wasn't seeing. What was this niggling problem? This enormous bug-bear sat defiantly on my 360? Achievements.

Don't get me wrong, there was a time when i enjoyed the intrepid hunt of the G, when i would holler for joy at the little silver logo appearing at the bottom of my screen, but then it happened. One day, a few weeks ago, i was sat at my 360 playing Spidey: Web of Shadows and i'd been on the same part for almost an hour. I wasn't stuck, oh no, i was trying to get an achievement - for 40 minutes i'd been running around on a wall monotonously killing robots to try and get 20Gs for ending the life (albeit mechanical) of things on walls.
At that point i had an epiphany - what in gods name was i doing? I had become a G whore. I broke down in tears, the stark realisation of what i'd become hitting me like a hammer - i was neglecting quality games, games containing style and originality, for second rate tat just to fuel my craving for G's.

At that point i'd reached around 36,000Gs but it suddenly dawned on me that it would never be enough. Where would it end? I felt an enormous pressure to perform, as it was common knowledge how many G's i had as i was on-line i felt like i was competing with people that i wasn't even aware of. Suddenly gaming had turned from an enjoyable part of my life to one big competition - i was playing games i actually hated and encouraging the production of low quality crap just so i could get my G counter up! I felt ashamed. Something had to be done.

2 months, 3 weeks and one day ago i turned off my 360 and it has yet to be switched back on again. I'm no fanboy but i just find that my PS3 sustains my needs nicely and doesn't have a tendency to destroy disks, freeze up on me, generally implode and do its damndest to break me over its proverbial knee.
With the utmost clarity i know now that gaming isn't all about G's, in fact the never ending hunt for G's scuppers most gamers progress.
Why play King Kong on the 360 when you can play Okami on the PS2? Why flog a game that you hate to death when you could be playing something you enjoy that just happens not to have achievements?
Ultimately i believe achievements are there to enhance the gaming experience not to justify a games longevity.

Disagree? Comment me hommes.

Resident Evil 5 - more endurance than survival?

In readiment for today i spent a few hours playing Resident Evil 5 last night, i've already been playing it for a few days but i just wanted to remind myself of its nuances and make sure i wasn't doing it an injustice.
Clearly this is going to upset many people but i'm going to say it anyway. It's just not that good a game. Having seen reviews in the press i'm actually amazed at how high a score it recieved in some very respectable game publications. I could imagine the reviewer writing the final score with a quivering hand, a bead of sweat running down his brow as the gun from the man at Capcom is pushed harder into the side of his head.

Firstly - do not buy this game if you intend to play it in single player. It just doesn't work. At all in fact. But I'll get on to that later.
Also, in a final detraction and dumbing down from the Resi series this edition does away with puzzle solving, reverting it back to a mere action game. In my eyes Resident Evil had always been a forerunner of Survival Horror but Resi 5 shuns this, making the ammo fairly abundant and restorative items relativley commonplace. The survival aspect has almost been stripped away as you no longer have to worry about resources or save points; the latter being removed altogether and replaced with checkpoints. As long as you keep killing you can keep going.

For me the games dumbing down is a step too far as it actually manages to fail where Resi 4 succeeded. In Resident Evil 5 you feel no engagement with the characters, in fact apart from the usual partnership bravado there really is no interaction between them at all. Couple that with the fact that the levels are extremely simplistic and revolve around finding a key from a boss character until you move on and repeat, Resi 5 really does feel like you're playing an entirely different game from its namesake - it's Resi in name alone.

I suppose having been spoilt with the excellent control system of Issac in Dead Space it comes as a shock when Chris Redfield, with all his years of military experience, can't actually point a gun and move at the same time. The commando equivalent of a cat with a sock on its head, Chris stands stock still the second you aim your gun which results in a kind of POINT, FIRE, RUN AWAY, POINT, FIRE, RUN AWAY strategy. Later in the game this works a little better but at the beginning when you're plugging away at a zombie with your pathetically weak pistol and discover you can't walk back as it bears down on you you begin to realise the critical flaw in this dynamic.

The main bugbear in the game for me is the odd addition of Sheva. I have yet to play the co-op experience and can only assume it works more proficiently because in single player it's actually, genuinely, laughable at times. Often i found the tragic humour of what Sheva was going to do next was the only thing that was keeping me soldiering on.


Unfortunately for this actress Google claims that she's the inspiration for Sheva. She best keep one eye open at night.

There are many examples of Shevas demonstration of her wayward spirit and i believe if she actually existed she would be diagnosed with having Attention Defecit Disorder. Many is the time that i've screamed at the screen, "SHEVA WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!" or, "DON'T USE THAT YET!! YOU DON'T EVEN NEED TO!!!" or, "STOP FIRING!! SHOOT THEM IN THE HEAD!!"
The AI behaviour of Sheva is what i imagine to be the same as playing co-op with someone who either really hates you or is doing everything in their power to scupper your gaming experience.

Two things stick in my mind after my excursions with Sheva; firstly was her buggering off with the lamp in the mines to leave me banging around in the dark surrounded by zombies and secondly was her insisting that she could finish off some zombies on a cliff top. Reluctantly i gave in, i'd been tricked by Sheva before but like an idiot i decided to give her one last chance - i boosted her up the cliff and watched as she sprinted off with a grim resolve on her beautiful face.
A few minutes elapsed as i polished off the zombies on the ground and i began to look at my watch and grow concerned. Then i started to see her health bar going down. I started hammering the circle button trying to recall her so that i could heal her (again) and probably restock her ammo as she had no doubt used it all again with wanton abandon, shooting squirrels and rocks and generally just being flipant about the whole mission.
A few minutes more and a message appeared on my screen informing me that my partner had died and that, consequentally, i had died as a result - despite the fact that i was just standing around waiting for something to happen.
What Capcom were thinking when they added this unpredictable, chaotic element into the game is beyond me - Ashley in Resi 4 was a nuisance but at least you could throw her in a bin until things cooled down. In contrast Sheva steams in there, firing bullets everywhere and refusing to equip weapons that are handed to her. Many is the time when shes wheeled on me, mid firefight, and demanded more ammo even though i know full well she has a fully stocked machine gun and is just being awkward.


A typical in-game shot, this is taken moments before Sheva no doubt empties a clip into a passing dog, throws a grenade at you and then runs off. Probably to die somewhere like cats do.

Don't get me wrong, as a game this is passable - as a Resident Evil game, however, it falls significantly short of the mark especially in light of what Resi 4 delivered. If you can forget that it has much to do with the Resi franchise and don't mind playing a somewhat shallow, stripped down version of what should've been an amazing game then by all means go out and buy it. You probably have already considering the hype over the last few months.
For me though this game has been an enormous disappointment, especially considering as this is Resi's first foray into the next gen market. The return of Chris Redfield, the ideal setting of Africa which harks back to classic films like Zombie Flesh Eaters - for me the formula seemed perfect.
It's such an enormous shame that Capcom felt the need to dillute the experience in order to tack on a co-op mode. Maybe i'm just anti-social but i don't always want to play games with others and i feel that this game, in particular, is a grim forebearer of the future - a future where if you don't want to play co-op your single player experience will be greatly diminished. If this is still classed as Survival Horror then the only Survival part for me is trying to play it through to the end and the Horror is that i paid £39.99 for it.

My verdict: 6/10

Any criticism or opinion is greatly welcomed, join me tomorrow amigos.

The inception of the addict (or how to live a virtual life).

For a university assignment i have to write a 28 day blog to experience online journalism. With the greatest of intentions i'm going to attempt to post daily about my greatest passion which is videogames and the playing of them. Mostly it will be a review of sorts, my own opinion of a game that has been released or possibly a game that i hold dear to my heart.
Comments are more than welcome and i expect copious amounts of flak from fanboys and obsessives the world over. As a reminder these are just my personal opinions about games, gaming culture and on a subject which i hold very close to my heart.

Ever since i can remember i've played videogames, i'd probably go so far as to say that they've been an integral part of my life since i was 4 years old. I recall with a Disney-like charm the day that my dad came home carrying a monstrous contraption that was soon to replace the unhealthy fixation i had with watching "The Littlest Hobo" and "The Incredible Hulk" on television.
For anyone not in the know the Littlest Hobo was a dog (possibly a husky?) that roamed around helping people (usually children) and then moving on to the next town. Think Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter but a furrier version with four legs and less guns. If you don't know what The Incredible Hulk is then you should stop reading this and go and find out - ask your mum, she probably knows, or type into Google, "Don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when i'm angry.", and that should garner positive results. Actually i think the guy who used to be painted green to become the Hulk now appears in the King of Queens, you could check that too - i think he's called Lou Ferreno.


They've now released a DVD of The Littlest Hobos exploits. I've yet to see it but i hope that included on the extras is The Littlest Hobo performing various tricks, jumping through flaming hoops etc and a biography of all the Littlest Hobos that featured on the show because i refuse to believe that it was only the one.


Anyway, the bulky bundle of joy that my dad was lugging into the front room turned out to be a Phillips G7000 with a few games thrown in and i remember the love that i instantly felt for this inanimate new best friend that i'd acquired.
Initially me and my brother couldn't actually believe what we were seeing, we could actually become cowboys or spaceships or intergalactic warriors brandishing lances and riding ostriches. This truly was the stuff of dreams although i'm fairly sure Joust was never on the G7000 and came later.


The G7000 in all its glory. The boxart is almost exactly what our family looked like after the introduction of the G7000. Out went the piano and the hum drum of parlour games and we enjoyed an unparalled and new-found sense of comraderie.

Obviously back then (26 years ago) one had to conjure things with the imagination. Now you have perfectly rendered characters on screen displayed in crystal clear clarity at 1080i (preferably 720p according to experts) and 7.1 speakers that calculate spacial awareness and make you feel like you're actually hearing those things.

Back then we didn't compare graphics, my brother and i wouldn't sit down and turn our noses up at a game because the graphics weren't up to scratch as that simply wasn't an option. This was predominantly because the graphics were all the same and usually made up of a few pixels. Want a cowboy? A spaceship? A Mad Max-esque car? Stick some white pixels together.
It mattered not to us though. We'd spend hours, days even, moving our characters up and down the screen firing pixel bullets at each other and f'ing loving it to boot.

With the amount of wear it got the G7000 broke a year or two later and i vaguely remember dad and me in the car driving out to some random house in the sticks to procure another that by chance had been advertised in the local paper. In retrospect it seems like a morbid, dark affair; a kind of Texas Chainsaw Massacre farmhouse in a remote part of Cornwall where the denizens feasted on weak girls who fall over and scream alot but after all that butchery and violence there's nothing they enjoyed more than to relax in front of the good ol' G7000 and while away the winter evenings by playing Pac-Man. God knows why they sold the G7000 because it was in mint condition and likely their only source of leisure apart from eviscerating bodies - i like to think that maybe one of them had come of age and they needed the money to purchase a new chainsaw.


The man we bought the G7000 from.

So yeah, that's my overly complex inception into the cult of gamers. After that i think i owned every machine except a Spectrum 28K. My brother still owns nearly the full gamut of consoles even now, from Master Systems to GameBoy Advances to a dishevelled, world worn Atari Lynx. It never saw much action and now resides in a corner gathering dust, the weight of rejection weighing heavily on its shoulders, embittered at a world who never loved it like a jaded whore.

We also owned quite a few computers which seems odd now as all i actually used them for was playing games. It was, of course, easier to convince my parents to buy the computers as opposed to the consoles as i could veil the purpose of the computer under the guise of a school aid. At 11 years old i implored my mum, "How on Earth am I to compete with the other children at school if i have no computer?! There i am with my archaic 2B pencil and a scrap of A4 and Tom Osborne has a computer to type up his work! I've failed before i've even begun!!"
Looking back i'm not sure what educational advantage it would grant if one could type up their work as opposed to write it but as it turns out Tom Osborne is infinitely more successful than i am now, something which i contribute solely to the fact that at the time he probably had a better computer than i did.
I'm not bitter though as that particular blag netted me an Amiga with which i enjoyed many hours playing Eye of the Beholder.


Despite knowing their capabilites i think i had a passionate, almost romantic view of computers back then, when one PC still occupied an entire room of an office block and still consisted of tape reels and LED's.
Not that they could (and still can't today) but i believed that my computer allowed me to pretty much do whatever i liked. Literally nothing was impossible when i sat in front of my Amiga and, although i only really used it to play Heimdall, it allowed me the capacity to do so much more if i wanted to. It screamed potential. I recall a time when i spent an entire day using Paint (i'm not sure if that's the name) - crafting, what i believed, to be works of master art. Works that people would look back on in years to come and think, "Jesus. That was a wasted talent. Who is this artist who evokes such emotions using a simple paint program?" If Michelangelo had an Amiga and a copy of Paint he no doubt would have used it to design the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.


I'm not over-exaggerating when i say i created an almost exact copy of this using an Amiga and a copy of Paint. The only difference was mine didn't take so long.

I can't remember what the utility was, Speak possibly, but when i first made my Amiga talk i almost wept. Like Dr Frankenstein i had created sentient life and it would change my life forever.
It didn't of course, ultimately i found the scope of it quite limited and reality came lumbering along life a greasy fat person punching me squarely in the face. That didn't stop me from brifely feeling like Michael Knight with an albeit stationary and far less bourgois Kit however.

Moving swiftly on i took up a part-time job when i was 14 (i think), washing dishes and looking the other way when the chef dropped food on the floor and then put it back on the plate - it was all worth it though as my 2 years of toil resulted in my purchase of a Sega Megadrive with a copy of Altered Beast. I actually couldn't believe it when i got it home.
It was the first time i'd seen one up and running and the very concept that a man could turn into a myriad of beats (a dragon?!) to save the one he loved appealed to me. It was a blatant rip-off of Manimal but it worked well and my motivation for playing was to see which creature the protaginist would turn into next.
Also used in Altered Beast was my first encounter with barely recognisable digitised speech. When i first turned the game on and Zeus procalimed "Rise from your grave!!" i thought it was witch-craft. Actually, my first reaction was to turn the game off and on again so i could make out what he was actually saying, the first time i could make out the word grave and then after 2 further listens i realised he wanted me to rise from it. Which i did. Happily.

Wow. That was a long introduction and i apologise, suffice to say i've owned pretty much every console or computer released in the last 30 years and played nearly every game except for sports simulations. For some reason they've always been the Devils work in my eyes. I just find no enjoyment in them at all with the exception of Mutant League on the Mega Drive and California Games, predominantly because of the Hackee Sacking.
(If anyone's still reading this was it just me or was surfing on California Games pretty much impossible? Oh, and was it possible to hit a seagull with the Hackee Sack if you timed it correctly?)

From this point onwards i'll be striving to look at games and the politics and culture around them but with my own slant on it. There's things i feel passionately about and things that probably alot of people reading this will not agree with but i'm always up for friendly banter.
So begins 28 days of a videogame addict - i apologise to my girlfriend in advance as i may well use this as an excuse to play more games than i normally would.....which is an obscene amount.
Join me tomorrow biatches.