Splatterhouse, I'll splatter your house.

Splatterhouse is the first game for me that truly screams 'deadline abuse'. Despite the fact that games are, for better or worse, a creative work (note I didn't say art, I'm too clever to open up that debate of nightmarish hell) that needs constant tuning and work (like a book or a painting), games also have the added problem of needing lots of money and working hours to complete. So the money comes from the Namesless Ones (ie marketing, or as more commonly known among Vikings, The Spawn of Satans Arsehole) and hence the game developers have to bend to the whims of these money-centric morons because nothing says 'food on the table' quite like keeping your job.

Saying Splatterhouse is unpolished is like saying that the Gentle-Beauty isn't polished just after a raid. Saying that it's not polished is moot, due to the vast amounts of blood, mucus, vomit, cartilidge, brain matter, and hair that is all over the blade (most of it not mine {except perhaps the hair}).

Splatterhouse is a game based on an earlier series called splatterhouse which was a 2d platformer that's only call to fame was the (then considered) absurd amounts of gore. In 2010 it returns, with gore, and not much else.

You play as some skinny, un-viking like nerd whose about to drown in his own blood (which is the thickness and consistency of maple syrup, as if he had some mutant strain of diabetes) from having his insides ripped open by a monster (which I will describe its lack of detail in detail later) that's been set upon you by a mad scientist who also steals your girlfriend. About to die, a mask lying next to him says 'put me on and you'll live!' so our nerd puts the mask on and turns into a hugely muscled super-human, much more viking-like, and then beats the crap out of some monsters. At this point I thought, great, not much thinking, just gore and monsters. A game I can tune out to. How wrong I was.

I haven't really paid any kind of attention to the story because it started off with mindless horror and now, halfway through, expects me to pay attention to and understand some prophecy and rips between dimensions and shit. The banter between the mask and the nerd is fairly pathetic, and the mask won't shut the fuck up during combat, but seeing as the combat sequences are so loud it's like the mask is merely narrating under his breath, like a crazed lady in the back of a movie theatre asking rhetorical questions to the characters in the film and not having the decency to just die. So, with mask glued to face, we chase the scientist in hopesm of getting our woman back. Blood taken from your fallen (and dissected) enemies is what increases your powers and makes a general bad-arse, despite your complete inability to jump properly (explained later, when I felt less Viking rage).

The level design is extremely linear to the point of banal, and the game consists of running from one box room to another to fight different enemies before moving on. The only part of the level design I do enjoy is when, for no reason, the game shifts into a (roughly) 2d platformer where jumping rolling crouching and general timing skills become essential. This part of the game I enjoyed was also the part I hated the most, and is where the first orphan tears stain appears on the proverbial axe.

No double jump is forgivable. What is unforgivable is that the jump distances are further than your jumping distances, UNLESS YOU STEP ON THE INVISIBLE FLOOR ON THE WAY TO JUMPING. Yes, that's right, Splatterhouse, a game of 2010, has invisible floor. If you don't know what I mean, think back to your early ps1 days, when your character hadn't quite fallen off the edge of a wall/rampart etc because of some invisible barrier holding them up. The same goes for the earliest versions of Castlevania, when the was pixel or two (roughly the same size as the characteras foot) could go over the edge to perform a jump.

You can either have it so the jumping distance is long enough, or is long enough WITH invisible
floors. Relying on gamers to just use the invisible floor is just shoddy craftsmanship.

The jumping problems also run well into the the rest of the game. There is the same sense that your jumping somehow distorts the physics of the world to such a degree that it seems like the ground is supposed to come up to your feet instead of you down, and promptly forgets so it can blow a homeless man under a bridge. There are parts where you 'auto jump' in which we use all of our skills to press 'x' in the .00005 second gap where it will actually work and also on the one pixel and character position you need to be in for it to go, for a very liberally given value of smoothly.

Before I begin combat, I'd like to try and give you a visual of your enemies. Imagine brown coral, the size of a large dog, and it jumps around and bites you. That's what you'll be facing (in many varieties of coral such as light green and purple-brown) for the entirety of the game.

The combat is...well, just plain old boring. Like God of War, it has that same curse of 'press square to win' except with diffculty curves that would need a fourth dimension to figure out.

As an example, the regular enemies die after a hard session of smashing square and triangle, and they will barely damage you during this time. Another enemy that only takes a dirty look at to kill will end you in two hits. Yes, I can see how this all balances out and makes 'priority fighting' necessary, it just comes off as FRUSTRATING. These points become null and void if you pick up a machete, in which all enemies die in one stroke.

There is the usual option of doing a finishing move when an enemy is weak, except Splatterhouse decided to replace a cool animation with a two minute sequence and 'quick-time event' (and by quicktime I mean an either retarded mashing of buttons or just holding a direction) which happens EVERY FUCKING TIME YOU DO IT. In the 6 hours or so I played the game, at least 45 mins of that time was spent holding a direction to rip off what could only be assumed the 'head' off a piece of coral (enemy).

The only good thing about the combat (and the game) is the damage you take. Skin and muscle will be ripped off you, revealing your ribs and innards for everyone to see! Your arms can also be ripped off and grow back afer a short period of time, but not short enough so your enemies don't take advantage of your one-armed state.

Splatterhouse could have been really good, and the reason I blame the Nameless Ones and deadline abuse is because of how truly unpolished (see Gentle Beauty reference above) it is.

I'm giving Splatterhouse 2/5 pieces of coral.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

MMORPG; noun; pronounced: meh-meh-morp-e-ga

MMORPG's are traditionally said to be for people with little to no value in their daily lives. This is mostly true.

'But Viking Gamer, even successful people play WoW and Guildwars and those other retarded free MMO's that litter my favourite sites with their ads!'

And yes, that's completely true as well. However all this depends on how loosely we refer to word 'success' and what the person is doing in their lives.

For instance, if you're a computer programmer, rocket scientist, engineer, editor or anyone else with two brain cells to rub together (notice I didn't mention sales or sports professionals), you will always find what the imagination can offer you so much better than real life. If, after realising the truth in my words (and it is truth, there's a reason why I'M THE ONE IN THE HAT), you may envy those money eating sales people or those iq deficient ball-throwers and their simple acceptance of life (which basically consists of vibrant colours in the former and raping things in the latter), but all you have to do is remember for every pretty colour and large chested woman that distracts these people, you will always be more interesting.

Games are supposed to capture the imagination, much in the same way books are. If you are a worker in one of the afore mentioned jobs (or one of the numerous jobs that require you to be consciously working on a task for more than five minutes), there's a good chance you read. If you read, there's a good chance you fantasize. If you fantasize, there's a damn good chance you've fantasized about a lifestyle different and much better to your own. One example would be fantasizing that you're a mage setting villages on fire or a ten foot tall orc able to plough an axe through someones sternum in one blow (ie fantasizing you're a Viking).

So when you compare the acheivement of finally landing that Jefferson account (as a Viking I'm not familiar with what peasants actually do, so I just assume this Jefferson person is of great importance to you) to finding a sword that's the same size of your body before banding together with wizards and shamans to bring down a dragon the size of your average oil tanker, it's a no-brainer as to what is going to be preferable.

So when I hear that people are 'wasting their lives' with these games I only agree because most of these games consist of about ten thousand hours of 'Hey adventurer! Kill exactly ten of these creatures and bring me back one of their organ/orifices and I'll give you xp!'
If I found an MMORPG that managed to break this cycle I'd be all over it like a sales person on a cd gently spinning in the sun or a football player on something that can be raped.

But wasting their lives? Hell no. For those of you who don't earn enough to regularly travel (I'm required to travel for work purposes {there are very few peasants who choose to start crops in ice deserts}), seeing the four corners of CGI land may be just as good. Also there are dragons.

There are three reasons I don't like MMORPG's:

1. Collecting animal parts is not an adventure.
2. Hate playing with randoms (see this article or even this one)
3. Pointing and clicking doesn't show any actual god damn skill.

Having already dealt with the first two, the general gameplay for all MMORPG's is click the enemy until death, which for insinuates that instead of cutting the head of a fire demon with a Great Axe of Murder, im actually using my pointer to make annoy him to death by clicking a million times.

Demon's souls would have made a great MMORPG due to it's leveling, combat and weapon upgrading systems. If there was some way to mix these two things together the result would be so addictive that heroin would be used as a way to come down from the high.

MMORPG's are both a bane on the productivity of society as well as the ultimate escape from what is a world assaulted be mediocrity and dashed dreams, hopes and expectations.

I'm giving MMORPG's 2.5 out 5 because they are only half bad.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

AC DC...Wait, AC Brotherhood

Many of my usual readers won't be reading todays entry because they've wept themselves into a coma due to my late posting.

I'd apologise, but I don't feel like I should and as you all know by now, I'm the Viking and it's more than likely you are a peasant who I'd gladly axe in half to in order to read your entrails and get a reading on the future.

AC Brotherhood was under some speculation before it's release. Was it a whole new game or was it just AC 2.5? Rest assured after playing it for ten hours (the reason I was late posting) I can definitely say that AC Brotherhood is the .5.

That's not to say it's bad, to the contrary, it's particularly fucking awesome, but most of my time playing is mainly based on fucking around with mini games and trying to achieve 100% synchronisation. I'd explain what that means, but that would imply that my audience hasn't played or seen or had a concept of AC, and that would make them the equivalent of a ice-cave hermit that doesn't believe in 'dat 'ole interwebs and whatnot'

To give a very brief background on the game so you don't embarrass me further, you play as Desmond who then plays as one of his Assassin ancestors through a machine which allows him to relive memories. To make sure these memories 'synch' you must play certain parts exactly as the ancestor did to achieve 100%.

It sounds easy, and sometimes it is, and here is where the review starts:

AC Brotherhood has the exact same gameplay as our last AC, albeit countering attacks is now for people that have the same reflexes as a dead seal and the AI of the enemies hasn't improved to deal with Ezio (the current ancestor we play as) as a man who can kill any enemy with the single push of a button.

While this does reflect Ezio is an awesome killing machine, it does make the game incredibly easy to a point of boring. Yes, trying out all the new weapons you can have now is fun, but you'll inevitably wind up using the normal sword for two reasons:

1. It's the most balanced and easy to use, as well as having the added benefit of enabling you to counter any attack even when the hilt of your sword should well and truly be stuck in an enemies skull (would have shown you the video if Microsofts latest update didn't KILL MY FUCKING VIDEO CARD)

2. The heavy weapons are so slow that I managed to braid and unbraid my beard in between killing strikes.

The other added combat feature makes the fighting sequences both painfully easy and ridiculously hard.

When you kill an enemy, you can tap the attack button again as you target another enemy and you will insta-kill him. It doesn't matter who he is, what armour he's wearing, if he's a kilometer away, if he's reading the newspaper or if he's currently engaged in swinging a man sized axe into your face. Dead. Seal for my supper dead.

The ridiculous difficulty comes in with my earlier reference to 100% synch. It turns out that you will have to kill streak about 13 of these useless Italian soldiers occassionally, as well as kill 15 or so wolf-pelt wearing cult fanatics without taking damage.

This is where two things got frustrating at once.

The start of the 'memory' (memories are like levels but not called levels because that would just be too complicated) involves the wolf-men attacking you as you try to draw your sword. You will fail to do so in time, many, many, MANY, times. Because you may want 100% synch, you'll probably restart the memory. When you do, you have to wait till it reloads the memory, then you can either sit through the cut-scene again or skip the cut-scene, which the game then has to load and takes JUST AS FUCKING LONG AS THE CUT-SCENE. In between getting frustrated at the nigh impossibility of this task and completing it, I went to Italy and punched one of their buildings so hard it's leaning on it's side. Tower of pizza my hairy Viking arse.

Ezio now has the ability to recruit Assassins as well. These guys will level up as you use them and can be sent on missions to level up more effectively and bring in the money. They can also be called to assassinate targets (which looks cool but eventually takes the fun out of wiping them out yourself) and can also be called into combat (which just makes the time spent in combat much easier, as if it already wasn't a stroll on the faces of small children to begin with). Have enough assassins and you can perform a shower of arrows, which kills lots of guards in an instant.

Once you have your assassins at a high enough level, there's not much else to do besides get the best armour set, and that's not difficult. Considering how much I've played the game, it seems like most of it has been me signalling for AI to do my bidding. I'm a Viking. Ezio is pretty much a Viking as he only rarely actually does any real assassinating, it's more jump in, demolish all enemies, walk casually away.

Having said this, the real highlight of the game are the quests from Leonardo. Each one involves a warmachine, like a very early machine gun on the back of a wagon in which you shoot cavalry that's racing after you, Ezio miraculously hitting every enemy soldier off their horse even if you were being a particularly vindictive Viking and aiming for those smug bastard horses.

Another mission involves you using a fire spurting cannon thing to bring down ships, which for some inexplicable reason blow up when their masts have burnt down. Realism in this game is like a twenty meter high wave. At first you're admiring the sand and shells and then you look up and see the wave, and all you can think is 'seriously, what the fuck?'

The games plot is boring as hell, so boring that I haven't bothered keeping up with it Me. The Viking who is constantly referring to story being the most important part of a game. ME. The reason I was initially drawn into AC was the story and the conspiracy theory, my love of which is explained by the fact that I live in a barren snow land where a conspiracy theory involving the death of millions of people would be a welcoming idea to me and my neighbour who lives on the neighbouring iceberg a good 600km away.

All I understand is people are pissed Ezio didn't kill the bad guy from the first one, some other family is being a prick to the people of Rome, they have to die. I couldn't care less.

I would have reviewed the multiplayer but as it took me over an hour to find one game and then get beaten at it because I couldn't figure out what the fuck to do, I haven't bothered wasting any more of my time devoted to watching the game say 7/8 players... until it slowly drops back down to one, the one being yours sincerely, Mr IjustwastedmyfuckinglifeVikinggamer.

All in all it's a good extension, not good enough to be called a game in its own right, having only taken the most time consuming parts of its former and then reshaped them into its own $100 disc.


I'm giving it 4/5 of your entrails, which are telling me that NNIB.com.au will be up on New Years.

This will also be the time to tell you the Viking Gamer will no longer be doing weekly reviews and articles, as now you will have lesser mortals entertaining you with their thoughts and ideas in the meantime. However, this also means I will have more time to play games and get a better handle on them so you, the small and feeble public, will know what games to buy and which ones to throw at me in terror as I kick down your front door.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

FF Tactics and my General Greatness

For those of you I haven't already impressed into a lust induced coma, I am awesome. In fact, I've been awarded a PSPgo for all my awesomeness.

I would like to thank my fans who made it all happen, and I would also like to thank the Sony Corporation for giving me another PSP which is pretty much useless due to its lack of entertaining games to begin with.

Funny I should say that, as this weeks review will be on Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, a PSP exclusive (unless of course you have an emulator or the original PS version, so it's not so much exclusive as too bloody difficult to get any other way).

Final Fantasy Tactics is the first Final Fantasy I have played since the release of Crisis Core that I actually enjoyed in any sense. While I did have a morbid sense of enjoyment pulling apart the big steaming pile of shit-cake that was FF XIII (which was way more fun than ripping a literal shit-cake apart and not quite as fun as cutting off mutliple peasants legs and then getting them to race each other).

In Tactics, our main protagonist, Ramza, is a noble born knight in the house of Beoulve. The youngest of three brothers, Ramza's mother was a servant girl, and later finds out that his brothers resent him for it. His best friend, Delita, is of low-born status, and is a knight in training only because Ramza's father had taken a liking to him.

The game starts out beautifully, recounting the War of the Lions and the hero Delita, and goes on to say that history had forgotten a major player in the shaping of the time, namely, Ramza.

This is probably very confusing to some of you because it seems like I've described the story backwards. And I have. Not due to concussion, but because the game starts in the middle, goes back to the start, then to the middle and then onwards to the inevitable end. If you still don't get it, I suggest you become a peasant so I can raid you and then confusion will seem like a minor annoyance in comparison to having your legs chopped off and then forced to race.

When the game announced that the hero of the story was Delita and I was to play Ramza, I was confused. Why the hell would I want to play as the nobody? I am the Viking Gamer, goddammit, I demand to play a character the earns similar respect!

However, when I found out that Ramza had quite a lot to do with the story, I realised knowing he would ultimately be forgotten by history intrigued me. Why was he forgotten? How could one man achieve so much to just then be cast away? Why should I give a damn?

It turns out I give a damn because it's FINALLY AN ORIGINAL HERO STORY!

I'm so sick of every other hero set-up. Normally the 'the name was lost to the mists of time...' is cliche and full of wank. The reason Ramza is forgotten is because he doesn't have political interests and makes immediate decisions based on their moral value. In a world where everything was moved by politics, Ramza is a pawn that isn't black or white and struggles across the board because EVERYONE IS AN ENEMY.

Delita is the hero because he is involved in the politics and comes out on top, just like in real life.

Moving on, the game play for FF Tactics is completely different to any other FF I've played. The only familiar thing from Tactics is the job system, in which you can train you characters in different jobs to gain different abilities and use a variety of weaponry and armour.

The battle sequences place characters in an environment, like a forest or desert or waterfall, and battles are fought across them in a chess-like fashion. Each character has the ability to move (depending on class and skills depends on how many squares they can walk or how high they can jump) and Act (which includes attack and any other special abilities). All abilities and attacks have a certain range, and magic can be directed at a person or at a square.

Say for instance that I want to attack and I can only attack squares that are next to me. I have to move the character to a square next to the enemy and then select attack. If I'm ninja class I have the option to throw, in which I can throw shurikens or axes or dictionaries (I'm not sure why dictionaries) several squares across and around me. Magic normally hits five squares (like a cross, one in the centre and one to each side), so that means that if I aim it on an enemy and another enemy is next to him, the both get hit. But if an enemy is next to one of your characters, your ally will get hit. Due to the spells having a delay time there is always the chance that your spell may miss or hit your allies.

Having explained this badly and understanding some of you would probably now prefer to race legless rather than read through this again, I assure you the whole process of this game is simple yet tactical, and probably why it's called FF Tactics.

While the game play is quite fun and requires your average gamer to use more than two braincells, there are two problems I have with it. The first is that enemies very rarely have normal attacks. These normal attacks are replaced by their default attack, which is normally the exact same fucking thing as a normal attack but takes THREE TIMES AS FUCKING LONG TO DO. So having to go through the same ten second animation to complete can feel like an hour, especially when you get really into the battle (mostly because in this game you actually need to concentrate on the battle and your next move).

The second thing are the summons. They follow a similar problem of overly-long animation, but their animation is also super shitty. It's like they put a picture of the summon on the screen, light flashes around it, it does a shitty effect of its elemental power, and then goes away. Fuck that for a laugh, if my characters move around on the screen, then why wouldn't you make it so they ACTUALLY HAVE A CHARACTER MODEL WALKING AROUND AND FUCKING SHIT UP ON THE SCREEN AS WELL? Seriously, why the hell am I not giving ideas to gaming developers? Is this stuff really too hard to think of?

The battle camera is also a little dodgy as well. If there is a tree in the way, you can switch to a different view, but this may not be the most comfortable view for you either. While there are about three or four camera angles you can choose to get the angle that suits you best, there will be times when trees just wont get out of the way. It may make you angry. It may make you want to drink yourself legless and then have a race. It may me drink and get legless and then cut someones legs off to make them have a legless race.

The best thing about this game, besides the plot and the fact there is actual political machinations going on, is the dialogue.

It is eloquent and grand, not exactly Shakespeare but actually heart-felt. It is incredibly well-done. Because each character speaks in the same style it doesn't seem like complete wank, like in other games how one character will inevitably come across as a wanker because he thinks he's sophisticated and talks 'properly'.

Final Fantasy Tactics is a great game to play on those hour voyages when I go to work (to raid booty), and has a satisfying storyline and game play that will keep me interested till I slay the final boss and crown myself king of everything.

I'm giving it 4.5/5 legless peasants racing.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

NNIB

I'd apologise for the late post, but I won't for three reasons.

1. I'm a Odin-damn Viking.

2. I'm busy, Christmas is prime raiding season.

3. I've got big news.

I've decided to expand my blog of Viking Greatness into a website:

NNIB.com.au.

NNIB promises to be a community website with quality articles on gaming, table-top and miniatures, music, dvds and Viking theory.

Don't spread the word just yet, as I will be making further updates as the site progresses.


Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Due to a malfunction involving myself, Ianardo and a T-rex sodomizing a duck wielding a chainsaw, I will not be able to show you the videos I have saved of me:

• Getting several 7 long killstreaks
• Ballistic knifing people in the face
• Shooting an explosive tipped crossbow bolt and then watching as they run and around and blow up
• Kill someone by throwing a grenade into their face (no explosion mind, just straight crushing of the skull with 3kg of pure metal)
  

But seriously, I am awesome.

I whole-heartedly love the Call of Duty series. It provides me with competition, encourages me to figure out the human mind, tests my reflexes, tests my ability to contain my rage, and most importantly, lets me blow off the heads of other people.

Some of you may now be screwing your faces, brains trying to click all the gears and cogs into place to figure out why a Viking that could single-handedly decimate every Spartan there ever was armed only with a sewing needle and a sock, would feel a need for competition.

Despite reading in a recent article that summarily dismissed Black Ops as a game that could only be enjoyed by pimply youths who didn't get out much (would have loved to have posted a link, but it seems the pure bullshit this guy was spewing would have been taken off the site due to the thousands of complaints he would have received for being an arrogant tool), I have to argue this premise:

Competition is what makes online fun, and because no-one can compete with me in real life I have to settle with a simulated scenario.

Is it any less of an achievement because its a game? Golf and cricket are inventions of Odin as a punishment for some sin some Viking committed aeon's ago, and for some reason people love that shit. It doesn't matter it's as boring as watching a sloth race, people still poor hundreds and thousands, if not millions of dollars, into these sports.

I threw a grenade in a guys face and killed him. That is not boring, in any way, shape or form.

If I wasn't a Viking and I had a regular 8:30-4:30 job as an editor in a legal publishing firm, I would still love the sense of competition. After a long day trying to find semi-colons and invisible text, the very last thing I might want to do (if this scenario was real, and it's not) is go somewhere to do strenuous physical activity. Maybe I want to feel the same sense of competition and achievement, of domination over another human being from the comfort of my own home.

And with no respect and absolutely no refrain, anyone that thinks that gamers are still these fat, sad, lonely stereotypes deserve a friendly Viking word of advice:

FUCK YOU.



Black Ops is just like the rest of the Call of Duty series, but it's so much more. If you remember my previous blog on shooters, every reference I made to what made Call of Duty great applies to Black Ops, except they've managed to improve and expand on everything.

The first thing you'll notice different, and the most fun and awesome thing, is that you can now dive. Diving is awesome. It serves very little practical purpose, but its incredibly funny watching five or six players simultaneously diving on a flag or objective to capture it.

The second thing you'll notice is something I originally wasn't a fan of but am growing to love immensely, and that is the amount of customisation that goes into your character. For instance, your playercard picture is insanely customisable, and after seeing a picture of a man fistng a llama with a love heart above his head, I knew that this was something I could sink my teeth into. Not that I'm into llama porn.

The reciticles (pointed sights on guns) are now interchangeable, which is great because some people (like a certain Viking) fucking hated the plain red dot site as it was almost impossible to see where the enemy went if they moved even slightly to the side. I much prefer the inverted triangles or the nuclear symbol, as I just find it easier to play that way.

Weapons are still unlocked at certain levels, but attachments are now no longer earned by achievements, and instead are earned by a monetary system within the game. I find this to be a much, MUCH better system than before as I can only guess at the amount of hours I put into getting some of the attachments on guns only to find shortly after my ability to use said weapon had flown out of the window and I had to start again with a new and less infuriating weapon.

My two absolute favourite changes to the game are the shotguns and wager matches. Shotguns are now primary weapons, and due to a change in map design, shotguns are now useful in all maps.

Wager matches are games in which players bet their in-game money on their winning the match. My favourite wager match thus far is 'One in the Hole', which sounds like a porno but is actually a game in which players are restricted to a one shot kill pistol with only one bullet and their cq weapon (knives). When a player kills another they gain another bullet. The maps are small but not restrictive, and the tension in the games is HUGE. Ianardo, a man I've seen stop a speeding Buffalo with a stare, froze up at one point out of tension.

He then went on to get the most amazing killstreak I've seen in a different game type, but there you have it.

The thing I hate about Black Ops is the either the Playstation Network or whatever system Treyarch is running for their multiplayer. I'm so sick of getting d/c, or having trouble joining a friends game, or having the connection interrupted when I WAS FUCKING WINNING ODIN DAMMIT!


I'm giving CoD Black Ops 4.5/5 crossbow bolts in an enemies face, because it's just that awesome to do.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

Fable 3, or Fable meh

Unfortunately due to high demand of my skills as a Viking and a writer, this blog will be a little short. Also, I don't know how to connect my Xbox to record my awesome playing ability. and most devastatingly the fact that Fable 3 has come down with a chronic case of the 'meh'.

Fable 3 is set one hundred years after Fable 2, the start of the industrial age, and you are the evil kings brother or sister (one of the first choices you have to make, and the only one that seems to have effect on how something looks in the game). After having your lover/friend shot or some stupid peasants shot, you run away like a little bitch with your butler and some guard or soldier guy that will INCESSANTLY talk whenever you two are walking towards your objective. Well, when I say walk I mean I run and he dawdles his lard arse behind me. This somehow fails to kill the conversation that follows you despite being about three kilometers away.

Combat is split up into three sections, melee, magic and shooting.

Magic: is finally useful, unlike in Fable 2 where if magic was what you focused on you would inevitably lose like the chump you were. The area damage it provides now can actually stop attackers, making it useful during gameplay! When I discovered this I almost wept with joy, and I probably would have if Vikings knew how to weep.

Melee: is still retarded and not quite as good as shooting, especially when you might be doing roughly the same damage, the advantage being that you wont get hit. Having to hold down a button to block is something else that mystifies me. The whole point of a game is to minimise reaction time between pressing and action to make the game more immersive. So instead of last minute blocks you are more likely to get slashed the fuck out of before you finally hold your weapon up in front of your face by which time the enemy is quite content to stand back and laugh at your bleeding face.

Shooting: is shittier than it was in two but still quite good, and this is where the 'industrial age' climate of the game truly shits its pants and then tries to blame the smell on you.
Imagine this: nearing the end of Fable 2 you can buy the best possible 'normal' gun from a travelling salesperson. Clockwork pistols and rifles, which shoot, as I recall, about 6-7 times before reloading and the reloading is as smooth and quick as the Gentle Beauty through a peasants abdomen. In the industrial age, however, they've decided to forsake clockwork machines and give you a shitty pistol that fires slowly, only fires 4 or so shots, and takes about as long to reload as it does to swim to France (my best time including one count of raiding is about 5 hours).

Your abilities are no longer bought after killing enemies in certain fashions like in 2. Now you get points from doing missions and talking to people and crushing skulls and then to use these points you go to a secret road and open chests that magically unlock new power. In reality the main difference is that the points are universal now. That would have been great, but unless you somehow don't do every main mission you will always end up with enough points to open up the more important chests. No longer do you focus on one area, you just suck it up like a chump and become 'multi-skilled' or more accurately, 'bland'.

Despite Fable 2 taking as long to play as it takes me to walk down to the corner shop and pillage it, I really enjoyed it. Once you got over the fact that melee and magic were useless compared to the shooting, and the fact that the shooting skill tree had all the useful abilities (such as the ability to dodge. Seriously, figure that shit out) it was quite a ride.

Fable 3, on the other hand, seems like so much more of an effort. No longer can you pose and dance and belch for scores of people to come over and eventually love you, you have to talk to all of these suckers individually. I don't like people, it's what makes being a Viking much easier. Not only do I not like people, I fail to see how I should give a damn about cgi people that have the same charming conversation techniques as characters from the Sims do (with their irritating gibbering).

Getting people to like you is the next step in the drunken stumbling of this game. Once you unlock the ability to flirt, your character becomes a raging bisexual and cant talk or interact with anyone of any sex without dancing with them or tickling them or just generally being a massive pervert.

Because you can only talk to ONE PERSON AT A TIME, you have to go through this same song and dance (quite literally) before the dumb schmuck will inevitably send you on a quest which requires you to either run around the corner and dig something up or deliver a letter or parcel to some other schmuck somewhere else. And then they like you.

I would not go through that effort to save my Viking mothers life (if Odin had not already taken her soul in that Longship collision...it was late and it had been raining, the hull slick with oil...they swerved, but too late, they were never seen again...). I'm serious. If I got asked to make ONE MORE peasant like me from people threatening death on someone I love, I would give them this message:

Dear kidnappers,
Fuck no.

Yours sincerely,
The Viking Gamer

Fable 3 also failed to keep a lot of promises, or intends to and just fails miserably. If Fable 3 had promised you a sandwich it would have given you two mouldy slices of bread with a nicely coiled turd in between.

Guns and weapons evolve depending how you use them. Well, that's a complete pile of shit sandwich. The will evolve if you reach a certain criteria, like kill 500 enemies during the day time, or eat a shit sandwich. This is the equivalent of an rpg saying; 'you can go anywhere you want, but if you want to go anywhere it has to be down that road' to which you would reply; 'but you promised the gameplay would change on how I played!' to which it would reply yet again, 'and it will, as long as you follow that road only'.

This isn't where it ends though, and if you've just bitten into afore mentioned sandwich and your teeth are brown and you wonder why you ever bit into it in the first place, prepare yourself for another, big bite and try to swallow this:

Guns and weapons damage differs so greatly that there is no point, I'll say it again with more emphasis, NO POINT in wasting your time trying to kill hundreds of enemies or walking however far for the upgrade. If one weapon is 50 damage and another is 100, unless the former weapons upgrade makes it more powerful than the 100 ( and assuming the 100 stays the same or gets a different power which isn't upgraded damage) then WHY WOULD YOU EVER CHOOSE THE FUCKING 50 DAMAGE GUN!?

Fable 3 promised innovation in making your character unique, but it lies. It's a phony, a big fat phony.

Fable 2 had weapons with slots in them, in which a player could fill with an emerald that caused fire damage or something that stole life or something that made it more powerful. Mathematically anyone could have had up to 1000 different weapon combinations. Choice=individuality.

Fable 3, on the other hand, makes you a giant bland sack that needs to be beaten.

Lastly, the choices. Oh the choices. I've done two missions with choices, one where I either killed this guy so I could marry his wife who he got me to seduce so he could get divorced, or another when I gave two dead brothers a book of death that they used to summon a party for ghosts.

In the former I let the guy go because quite frankly his wife was a bitch. To do so, I simply walked out of the house. In the second occurrence, I was supposed to either tell the brothers to go back to their graves where their dead mother had asked me to tell them to go, or give them the book.

What I got instead was the option to give them the book, and that was the ONLY OPTION.

I have no idea if it was a glitch or a bug, either way it would surprise me as this game is only too full of glitches and bugs, such as that glowing trail never, EVER being there when you actually need it, or prompts just simply not appearing on screen or buttons simply not working.

I'm giving Fable 3 four 'mehs' out of five, and a score of 2/5.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

The multiplayer conundrum

It's hard to make friends when you're a Viking, mostly due to the fact that the larger portion of the people you meet are peasants of the village you are currently raiding.

It's also hard to make online friends, because when you live in a place that has a small population density (eg. my hut in the barren snow and ice of Greenland or in the suburbs of Sydney), it becomes the norm that my connection will either drop out during a game or cause a lag that will inevitably leave me frustrated and with a wall decorated with angrily thrown axes.

Add to that every gaming systems inability to make an easy to use 'add friend' mechanic, coupled with every games ability to induce brain haemorrhaging irritation whenever you try to start a game with a friend, the whole multiplayer scenario starts to feel like its dying.

'But hey!' I thought, strapping myself in for a round of online CoD, 'surely playing with and against complete strangers will make the game feel like a multiplayer experience!'

Well, it does and it doesn't. It's kind of like rowing a longboat next to someone you don't particularly like. While you do enjoy the activity, it's hard to keep a positive outlook when the hairy, sweaty guy next to you keeps calling you a noob, threatens to rape your family and then swears he'll 'tea-bag' you, because nothing says ‘I'm a dominant alpha male’ than homo-erotic acts.

But luckily, this rowboat is equipped with a mute button, and after some time you begin to think, maybe this isn't so bad, and then the day drags on and you realise that despite being surrounded by people you are still well and truly alone and may as well be rowing with some particularly clever (or stupid) AI.

So...what the hell is multiplayer now? Before anyone starts, no, online capabilities are not bringing people closer together. I've heard the arguments, and yes, I know you can talk to people from around the world, but when the world throws some kid from New Zealand trying to single handedly ruin his countries tourism industry by annoying his team mates with his consistent and persistent offering of a free Big Mac to anyone that would ‘add’ him (this actually happened) at you, I can’t help but think that this is not the multiplayer we used to have.

I remember days after Viking school (learning how to set things on fire, threaten peasants etc) when we all used to come back to my place to crowd around my Playstation and its multi-tap to play four player Crash Team Racing.

I remember only two years ago, playing four solid hours of Killzone with my friend (who had to travel over 10 km of snow and kill a polar bear with his controller to get to my hut) on my sealskin couch while we talked about current events.

But now my most distinct memory of multiplayer is a New Zealander with a fetish for giving out burgers.

With the release of the newest generation of portable gaming systems, I thought we had arrived at a new system of multiplayer. Surely now we had the power of last gens systems in our hands, players could easily game within the same room!

But I was to be more disappointed than little Ulric who was told he was too young to go on the raid with us this year.

There are no decent multiplayer games on the new hand-helds. Many of you are probably waving your hands and screaming and pointing at copies of Monster Hunter, but any game that rewards you for searching through faecal matter with your bare hands isn't something anyone should be interested in.

Surely someone out there had a better idea for a Diablo rip-off than whoever thought to create a Dungeons and Dragons game.

Think back to Champions of Norrath. Great game both single and multiplayer, offered hours of gameplay and, most importantly, team based gameplay. You're going archer? Well I'll be the Barbarian and the smelly kid can be the Elf. All set? Let's play.

Is the problem the brilliance of the idea or is it simply that it’s harder to put them onto smaller discs and cartridges?

What I don't understand is why a poor (but humble and quite handsome) Viking is telling the gaming industry what is incredibly clear to its market.

The concept of multiplayer is always changing, but a lot of us still remember and treasure the days you could play with your friends and be in the same room. If you can't do it for the consoles, then do it for your hand-helds. If you can't do it for the hand-helds, then you're practically forcing innocent gamers like myself to buy one of the many thousands of multiplayer Mario games that Nintendo will NEVER stop releasing, just so I can be a gamer and social.

I'm giving my nostalgic memories of mutliplayer 5/5 and this new dang form of multiplayer 2/5 due to the fact I sing when I forget I have my headphones on.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

Graphics: who cares?

I was re-reading my masterful blog entries the other day and I realised that whenever I use the word 'graphics' there's a good chance that it's followed by a compliment, and it reminded me of my own growth into power and coming to accept and, in time, get bored with power that's readily available.

As you should all know, my Dragon Punch technique is so powerful that when Hitler heard that it's might was capable of going through time to destroy peoples noots he ran into a bunker and shot himself.

But now it's only a mild fear (depending on how close you are to the actual event). Before people only whispered of the Dragon Punch whilst now fourteen year olds will fill thread upon thread whether my Dragon Punch could beat Sephiroth or Vegeta (which it could).

What does my ultimate ending technique and new-gen graphics have to do with eachother?

There is no longer a point in mentioning a games graphic capabilities...unless it's awful.

Ever since the release of the current gaming systems I honestly haven't noticed much change in graphics or their capabilities. The games look amazing, even the bad ones. Hell, even FFXIII, the worst game EVER, looks amazing. But who gives a shit?

No-one...unless the graphics are bad. We're at a point now in gaming technology where taking even a minor step back will cause people to check their HDMI cable hasn't fallen out and then question why they've just paid a hundred or so dollars for a game that could have easily been played on the Ps2 (or the Wii {and I'm looking at YOU, DRAGON AGE}).

So knowing now that people see great graphics as the norm, what should people expect? How do we judge games on look now?

The answer?

STYLE.

Now that developers can make games look as clear cut as my pectoral definition, the door to STYLE should be flung open. But it's not...not really.

Out of the last 20 or so games that I reviewed the ones that primarily come to mind when I think of style is Shank and Deathspank. Shank because of its great cartoon-like feel and Deathspank for having the balls to make a game that looks like it could have been on the Nintendo 64 and still being fun to play.

Many of you are probably thinking;

'But Viking Gamer! What about Bioshock and Fallout and Demon's souls!?'

Well noobs, the great things about those games are the ENVIRONMENTS, which is completely different to style, and here's why:

STYLE is about what the graphics are based around. In Shank the graphics are based around a cartoon/comic book look, while in deathspank it looks like someone accidentally created a purple 3d blob and put him in a diorama. This gives us the sense of THE TONE OF PLAY.

EVIRONMENT is about the landscape. Bioshock gives us the sense of claustraphobia and fear with things using shadows and walls to kill you from, leaking pipes and areas of business to show that you are REALLY UNDERWATER in what was once a thriving economy and posters and messages written in blood to help us understand what happened here. This gives us a sense of WHERE WE ARE.

Lost Planet and Demon's Souls look just as good as eachother, but the styles are only marginally different and that's purely for gameplay purposes rather than aesthetics.

There are a few reasons as to why this is, but I'm only going to mention the important one:

Gaming developers are massive, massive pussies. Folklore (which is awesome) switched between the gameplay which was the usual awesome visuals we've come to expect, and some fairly sketchy comic book like interaction which, as a STYLE, worked really well.

But along came the haters who couldn't understand why they would add this in, and I can only suspect they had come down with a severe case of George Lucas-itis in which they couldnt get an erection unless EVERYTHING was done in cgi.

So, after reading lots and lots of bad reviews on a game that was generally a lot better than the fifteen thousand Mario remakes that get made and recieve good reviews EVERY TIME ONE OF THOSE SOULLESS LEECHES IS PRODUCED, I decided (again) that the general public could go and fuck themselves with their 'we don't understand any game that isnt Mario' flags.

So, to keep the unoriginal appeased, it's only fair that they produce games that consistenly look samey (albeit excellent).

The sense of style and difference was one of my main motivators to get back on the PsP. I needed a break from the flawless to get back into the flawed, the original, the games we loved despite their inferiority.

I'm giving graphics and any score based system around them 1/5, because I realise now that some reviewers only talk about graphics to have more to write about.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

Psp Problems.

First things first: James Bond is the worst secret agent of all time.

Why? He tells his name to everyone. I'm surprised there hasn't been a scene yet where a guy asks him to pass him a coaster and all hell breaks loose.

'Sorry mate, could you pass me that coaster?'

'Bond.'

'...What?'

'James Bond. My name is James Bond.'

*In the background, shifty looking Russian/Arab/Not White characters start pointing at him and drawing out guns, motioning and laughing how they are going to shoot the shit out of him.

'Yeeeeaaaah, sorry I just wanted you to pass me a coaster'

'Oh...did you know my name was Bond by the way? James Bond?'

'Sure thing James, about that coaster...'

'Most people call me Bond. Or Mister Bond. But when they call me Mister Bond they're either leering or have accents because they are Not White and it sounds like Meester Bond. I'm a secret agent you know. For the British government. And my name is JAMES BOND!'

'Jesus Christ man do you want everyone to hear!? Just pass me a fucking coaster will you?'

*Both Not White characters come forward and step to either side of Bond

'Excuse me, are you Meester Bond?'

*Drinking a martini like a big girl and an impotent flair of cliche charm

'Yes. I am'

*Massive gunfight later, everyone dead, especially Bond who was shot at by the Not Whites and other members of the British secret agent society who were ACTUALLY not blowing their cover like that showy retard.

'Dont fucking bother I'll get the coaster myself'

*Reaches over bloody, bullet ridden, chunks missing corpse and grabs coaster.

What a moron.


Now onto my problem with the PSP. I noticed in my console reviewing article that I did't mention the PSP, or I did and it wasn't very interesting.

Realising on my latest raid into France (I ran out croissants, and a good Viking breakfast needs a baked roll of pastry and lard to get him through the day) there wasn't much to do on a longship except row or laugh at the people who have to row (the French that we abducted on the previous raid), so I decided to revisit to my PSP.

Having owned every game worth having on it (Final Fantasy 1, Final Fantasy 2, Final Fantasy Dissidia, Final Fantasy Crisis Core) I came to the conclusion that the PsP is pretty much fucked.

Why? Well it's not the graphics, because they are actually pretty damn amazing for a handheld device. The controls work well, the battery lasts ages and it's memory capabilities are entirely dependant upon how much you're willing to fork out for a memory stick duo, in my case 4 gigs worth which seems to do the trick for me.

So the PSP, on the whole, is a pretty damn amazing machine. Except it has NO FUCKING GAMES. If you liked Monster Hunter (which I don't) then you're pretty much set for the next 20 years because it seems there's about 3 or 4 of them on the market and they seem to be released weekly.

Other than that you can play the games that you loved on the PS one but have since moved on (about 20 years moved on) and no longer wish to see again.

So what can a gamer who loves his PsP but has no idea what the hell he can do with it besides use it as a very small plate to eat croissants off after/during a raid on France, do?

Well, I can tell you what I did NOT do.

I, unequivocally, DID NOT get my PSP 'hacked' which allowed it to be used as a portable usb gaming device in which I would not have to pay for the chance to maybe play an hour of a shitty game.

I also DID NOT use this new found freedom to download Final Fantasy Tactics which is turning out to be as NOT addictive as sniffing the cardboard pine tree that gives off the scent 'new axe'.

HAD I done such a thing I may have felt guilty that my loyalty to Sony was about as strong as a fresh Frenchman after his first day behind the wheel of an oar while being given a Viking Burn (like an Indian burn but the Viking performing it will set his own hands on fire first).

But, HAD I done this, I would have researched where I could buy FF Tactics so that I could buy a copy, perhaps just to own or to pay what was due to a great game.

BUT LO AND BEHOLD (hypothetically), it was nowhere to be found unless I wanted to buy it on some obscure site online (what the fuck is Ebay anyway?).

Looking through the list of games I'm finding Little Big Planet *yawn*, basketball *YAAAAAAWN*, FPS's that they couldn't make first person and are barely shooters *SUPER CONTAGIOUS YAAAAAAWN* and some kid who has a green wristwatch called Ben and he's ten or something.

So they discontinue the games that may have sold some copies here and there over time, yet keep publishing these bland games over and over for some reason. WHOSE BUYING THEM!? YOU'RE ONLY ADDING TO THE PROBLEM!

You could always risk the money and buy some random JRPG or a spin-off of a popular title on the consoles, but why bother (unless you have money to burn {in which case I may very well earn you a Viking burn [I'm subtely threatening you for your money]}).

What I don't understand is why they don't use what the PsP actually is to its advantage. It goes online and its completely portable, so why not have a Diablo like game that people will want to congregate over (yes, I'm already aware of this capability used in Monster Hunter, but I mean a game that isn't slow, tedious, and requires me, A FUCKING VIKING, to delay in the pursuit of killing huge, angry monsters to PICK THINGS OUT OF SAID MONSTERS FECAL MATTER).

The machine is powerful enough to do this. So do it.

Why is it not working on its ability to have a potentially amazing social aspect? Why aren't its FPS ripoffs also FPS? WHY AM I NOT PAID TO COME UP WITH THESE GREAT IDEAS!?

The only I advice I can give is that if you own a PsP, YOU SHOULD DEFINATELY NOT GET IT 'HACKED'. It's unethical that you shouldn't pay for any game that's on the PsP and surprisingly some that havent actually been released on the PsP, as well as have it downloading and ready from the comfort of your own home.

I'm giving the PsP 4.5/5 for being an awesome gaming device, and a sweaty, Viking burned Frenchman for having fuck-all games.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

Enslaved

Before I begin my review of Enslaved, I have a statement to make:

The natural state of any vegan should be dead.

Why is this? Well, for one if I ever see another one or have another pamphlet passed onto me about veganarisms or whatever it's called, I will make it my personal mission to hunt one down and use his skin to create canvas that will then be turned into anti-veganism campaign posters.

Secondly, it's because not eating meat is stupid. My diet consists of Bison, Moose, meat, and vegetables (of course by vegetables, I mean an animal that has a diet consisting only of vegetables, and as we are what we eat, I'm technically eating medium-rare bull/oats).

Nothing is worth making pamphlets for (except for anti-veganism). So why cut down trees or make plastic copies (which both destroy the habitats of all of gods delicious creatures) and them hand them to me?

Is it because we're superior to these animals? Apparently yes and no. Morally we are superior because we have the choice to not eat meat. But we aren't any different from animals, we're alllll equal on the foodchain, it's just that we're morally superior. But not different, equal, except for morals in which we are superior.

That argument has a roughly circular shape to it.

If those pasty tofu munching morons want me to be equal or act my part in the animal kingdom, then I am going to eat their babies. Lots of animals eat the young of their species. It promotes evolution and strength and pure unadulterated taste sensations. And imaggine that, ME, the Viking Gamer, eating away at a part of the gene pool that wants to stop my consumption of bacon. Therefore, I have resolved to eat one vegan baby for every pamphlet I receive.


Onto Enslaved.




Enslaved is about balance. Balance of power, balance of nature, and a fair balance of good gaming and some really poor design.

Our main character, Monkey, escapes from a slave ship travelling over the remnants of a post-apocalyptical New York city with no help from the mysterious woman who escapes moments before him.

Having climbed, dived and dodged around the crashing slave ship, Monkey reaches the escape pod the strange woman is in. Refusing to let him enter, she engages the escape pod with Monkey still hanging on and crashes into the ruins of New York.

On Monkeys awakening, the woman is sitting watching him suspiciously, and informs him that she has put a slave headband on his brow and that she needs him to help her get back to her colony. Monkey cannot refuse, and if he does, he dies. If her heart stops for any reason, he dies. If he goes forward with helping her, there's a damn good chance he'll be cut down by robots and then die.

So Monkey is pretty much fucked.

This relationship between two characters is not uncommon in gaming. What is common, however, is the lack of any kind of anger or emotional outburst from the person who is put in the delicate situation.

Monkey, on the other hand, was going to kill her. Straight up rip her head off with his gigantic steroid abuse arms. From that moment I vowed to finish the game, because, quite simply, if I was in that scenario (which I would never be {and if I was unconscious in front of a woman she would lose control of herself and have her way with me and when I came to she would be waiting with my breakfast and the slave headband on her head and begging me to tell her what to do}) I would have done the same thing.

The relationship between Trip (that conniving bitch) and Monkey (that giant steroid chugging guy) continues to evolve through the gameplay and is quite an essential part of the gameplay.

Because this video was made for purely aesthetic reasons (and looks like shit due to technical issues) there are many points of this gameplay I'm going to have to explain through words.

Enslaved is pretty much Uncharted. It has to be said. The gameplay concept is incredibly similar with minor, but MEANINGFUL, differences.

The first is the use of Trip. Trip is super useful, as she can hack the shit out of machinery, let of an emp burst that will temporarily destabilise any robot attackers, and also provides some woman to look at if you get tired (and jealous) of looking at Monkey's incredible physique (it's the reason I rarely take off my shirt, too many suicides {because I'm so well muscled, not because of my back hair}).

Trip can is also plays the role of support woman and complete burden, as is the role of most woman, and vital in the role of a wife.

Because the ruins of New York are scattered with gun turrets and robots with guns and flying guns and just generally with things that want to shoot you, it's up to Monkey to keep Trip alive and it's up to Trip to help Monkey survive. So when Monkey needs to tear down a turret with his bare hands Trip can use one of her gadgety doo-dads to create an illusion that the turrets will shoot at until it runs out of power. Monkey, if he needs to create a distraction for Trip, will simply lean out and shout 'Hey!' (which just goes to show that men are more efficient than women) before using the command to have her follow him.

This is where the difference between Enslaved and Uncharted becomes more pronounced, and ultimately makes me appreciate Enslaved more, as well as provides me with a segue into other facets of the game.

Whereas Uncharted required you to be sneaky in some places, and was the better option in nearly every account, Enslaved enables you to go in and just rip some metal monsters to shreds. How does he do this? With a futurisitic extendo staff which he uses like a god-damn pro. The extendo staff (it's just what I'm calling it, Vikings have discovered and named shit for centuries! No need to thank me, Planet Earth) is what makes this game more fun than Uncharted. Using guns was all well and good, but when there is no auto-aim or aiming help or first person abilities, its just too hard to aim. You could change the controller sensitivity, but what's the point when it throws out the rest of the game that doesn't need the controls to be that sensitive?

Another thing about Enslaved is that every fight and evasion scenario are on some kind of timed basis. Either the wall protecting you will crumble or the enemies will call for back up or Trip will be in danger, and in any sense you can't waste time fucking around.

The combat in the game isn't too complex and not entirely rewarding, but still requires you to keep on your toes...just a little.

When you purchase an upgrade from Trip that lets you detect what the enemy is currently doing or about to do (blue for blocking, red for attacking, yellow for vulnerable) the combat becomes much easier, more decisive and much, MUCH easier to handle. You're able to both block and roll (though not simultaneously DUUURHEHER) which is great because you can't block most of the larger enemies attacks. Which is how it should be. Imagine if somoneone could block my attacks! I wouldn't eat at night! I'd be hungry alllllll the time!

Despite the combat being fluid and easy to control, Monkeys normal running around lacks initiative. When running to an obstacle that I am able to jump over I find that there are too many occasions where I'll just run into it and stop or run into it and go into a roll or run into it and turn around. In a game where running, climbing and general Monkey-ing (hahahHAHA!) around is the basis of the game, the controls have to be intuitive to create for a smooth ride.

Having said this, Monkeys movements are superbly realisitic and resemble the movements, confidence and climbing ability of an actual monkey. His reaction to explosions, falling and climbing are all a joy to watch and show that the future of gaming is going to look just awesome.

I'm going to give Monkey a 5/5 for his reaction to being enslaved by a woman he could use as a toothpick or back hair comb, and the game 4/5 women being used as back combs.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

Devil May Cry...But Vikings Wont

After realising there's no use complaining about a bruised and psychologically bored thumb, I decided to revisit a game I thoroughly loved but had not finished.

The original Devil May Cry set the benchmark for all new action games that were to follow it. For me especially, as this was the first game I can remember playing when getting close to a boss or touching them didn't make you lose health.

BOSSES ARE NOT ALL MADE OF ACID.

Losing health because you touched an enemy is for classic games. Mario, Megaman, Kirby; NOT NEXT GEN ACTION HEROES.

I can hear some of you asking: 'But Viking Gamer, when people get near you or touch you they lose health and/or appendages!'

Damn right they do. I'm a private sort of Viking, I don't like people constantly fondling me and twirling my beard in their fingers. And if you look at it logically, most of the people I get close to are people I'm currently raiding/butchering/making love to. And even in that last scenario there's a good chance that I'll accidentally rip off a leg or an arm in my violent, thrashing love making. But you know what they say; 'once you go Viking gamer you lose an appendage'.

Moving on, Devil May Cry was the first game that encouraged you to get close to enemies. The first boss, a giant, flaming spider, allowed you the pleasure of jumping on his back and then slashing and shooting the shit out of him.

Devil May Cry 4, in my opinion (which is the only opinion that matters) is the best action/hack and slash game I have ever played. Solid storyline, brilliant voice-acting, original looking and acting enemies, balanced difficulty, and most importantly, smooth, stylish, brilliant game play.



I've decided to make this video more for the benefit of describing why this game is so Odin damn awesome, rather than my usual flawless attempts at turning games into fine pieces of art.

You'll notice in the first section of game play that the moves I make not only look amazing, but also have a direct relation as to what is going on around me. This kind of action fighting is dying due to God of War and its cronies who keep the idea that swinging some kind of whipping device (whether it's a scythe or swords on chains or a cross or some other 'magical' weapon that not only has an unlimited amount of reach but also defies physics by not getting inadvertently wrapped around enemies and smashing the owner of said weapon in the face {I would have loved to see Kratos cutting his own jaw off due a miscalculated attack}) is somehow inevitably linked with 'skill' and 'fun'.

The second part (17 secs in) of the video not only displays my amazing gaming ability, but the fact that yes, dodging and NOT ATTACKING are just as important and fun as beating the shit out of an enemy. Not only does it look spectacular, you can see your skill and reflexes being rewarded. It's also good for the brain. You have to calculate your moves, how much damage you are willing to take so as to finish off an enemy or whether dodging is the best bet or if you should use your devil trigger (the ability to go into devil mode and become more powerful for a brief period of time) to dish out as much damage as you can...it's not pressing square square square triangle and waiting for the next cutscene.

If you remember my blog on Monster Hunter Tri (see I hyperlinked it so you can read it to remember), you'll see my distaste for enemies with retarded 'weakness' spots. When I'm playing against that giant fire lion thing, you'll notice that I attack his face and his mane (40 secs in). This requires me to grab his face with my demon arm to get up there, which exposes me to the most chance of getting smacked into the ground, but has the benefit of stunning him (notice how the flame goes out [54 secs in]). This is the anti-retard of weak spots. It has benefits and risks, and ultimately I have choice. I COULD have slashed away at his flank, been hit and flung back at the cost of a little bit of health, before dodging his frontal attacks to run to his flank to start hacking away again; the kicker being that attacking him in this way doesn't leave him stunned and takes forever. But the point is I have a CHOICE.


While we have all come to realise that I am a Viking and kick arse in battle, even Vikings like to watch animes and Jet Li movies and wish that we could do those amazing well timed ninja-esque moves. I know I do. It's all well and good being able to take an axe to the bicep and then pull it out with your teeth and force someone to the ground and then cut his head off while chewing at the blade and forcing it through his neck, but it doesn't look good (as my PR agent keeps telling me).

In the fifth part (1 min 12 secs). Seriously, just look at it. I'm a demon ninja, I'm going nuts on ice monsters. Even in Ninja Gaiden there aren't awesome combos as demon-ninja as that. And what's that at 1 min 18 seconds? I've dodged behind an ice attack, ninja teleported through it, Goku instant transmissioned through the air and kicked the other monster in the face. There are no other games that make you feel this powerful or cool.

Before I get to my last point, I have to say that I've left a few things out of the videos. One is the classic aspect of gaming that Devil May Cry DID decide to keep.

Timing. The first games were based on timing and jumping and moving. Frogger has it, Kirby had it, Megaman, Sonic, Mario etc, ALL had jumping and timing parts and that made games not only fun but addictively and excitingly so.

Devil May Cry has always had punishing timing sections of the game between enemies which is a great thing. In this way players that finish Devil May Cry have a lot more to say on their gaming resume. Picture it this way.

I, the Viking Gamer, go for a gaming interview saying I've finished DMC 4 and some Noob has finished God of War.

'So Viking Gamer, I noticed on your resume that you finished DMC 4. I assume you have skills to deal with bosses who take knowledge, tactics and skill to take down as well as being able to estimate and get through punishing time related challenges which can be frustrating but are ultimately more rewarding. When can you start?'

"I Answer To No-one!"

[Queue slaughtering of boss and the rest of the staff]

Noob with God of War accreditation:

'So...Noob...I noticed your good at...pressing...buttons.'

'Well sir...'

'GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY OFFICE!'

See? It doesn't work out for poor Noob does it?

The other thing I didn't manage to include in the video was the ease of which players can change between weapons and combos for a consistently changing combat environment (at least for Dante who has these different weapons).

Shotgun? Two presses away. Different styles of combat? One press away. Different weapon? A few presses away.

All to mix up the pattern of gaming so you're not stuck swinging chains and scythes, praying that a jaw gets lopped off.

The last thing I have to say makes this series not only awesome but shows that the developers actually give a damn is that they are always developing combat. Nero's devil arm allows you to perform different moves (1:01, 1:31) on enemies, much like in God of War or Darksiders. The only difference being is that it's part of the combat and not solely a finishing move. It also looks shit loads better. There are only so many times an enemy can be cut in twain (two) before it gets boring. Stabbing a gorgon in the eye over and over? Yawn. Nero pulls a spinning pile driver midair and crushes an enemy into the ground. A game that knows awesome is not taking yourself too seriously.

I'm giving the Devil May Cry series 4.5 spinning pile-drived enemies out of 5.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

My Thumb Hurts

As most of you will know, I have told you that I didn't really like God of War, yet, MIRACULOUSLY, a mention of the game makes it into my blog just regularly enough for you to think I actually want to have some hot Viking on Spartan action.

In fact I was beginning to question myself. Why would I even mention a game that I wouldn't tip my horned hat to? Why wouldn't I tip my hat to it? To it why would I not hat tip to?

And it struck me as violently as my grandmother did when she found out I had been sneaking copious amounts of Red Bull and Prozac to my Bi-Polar beserker cousin to see if he would invent a new emotion in his increasingly bizarre and agitated state.

"My thumb hurts".

As far as ideologies go, it's like this: moronic women have 'He's not that into you'. Moronic men have 'I'm never drinking again'. Gamers have: 'My thumb hurts'.

Why does it matter that my thumb hurts?

If any of you have ever performed 1v1 combat or 1v10000000 combat like I have, you'll know that just before and during the battle, there is no concept of pain. There is no concept of tired, uncomfortable or fear. There is only the now. It is where we reach enlightenment and touch the true essence of life itself. It's not a place where your thumb hurts.

After the battle or killing spree or what have you, THAT'S when every injury, every broken bone and every burst blood vessel starts taking its toll. If it hurts during, that's when you find yourself another hobby, sport, culture or game.

Playing Ninety-Nine Nights 2 (or 188 Nights, I'm not exactly sure), I realised during the first mission in-game that there was an unfamiliar sensation in my thumb. I couldn't quite figure out what it was, but it became more and more pronounced as the level went on. As I had been in the same level for over an hour, and was bored to tears and wanted nothing more than to say 'FUCK THIS' and charge horn-first into the TV, I came to know what the sensation in my thumb was:

PAIN.

I rarely ever feel pain. But there it was, in my thumb, from the constant pressing of the same buttons over and over and over and over again.

I flashbacked to my time playing God of War; the same pain, the same sense of just wanting to see what happened at the end and not go through the monotony of killing enemies that couldn't kill you back unless you put down the controller and left it there for a day.

And so it came to pass that I realised my dilemma with God of War and produced a wise saying that gamers will surely use from here on and ever after: 'My thumb hurts'.

Ninety Nine nights represents a problem in current gaming. For a hack and slash, whether it be Devil May Cry, God of War, Ninety Nine Nights, Darksiders etc, there has to be something in between the hacking and slashing that makes the game worthwhile.

The reason God of War and Darksiders didnt do it for me was because the things in between the hacking and slashing consisted of running too slowly over a vast area to get to a place to hack and slash. Not very interesting. Darksiders tried to make up for this in puzzles, whereas God of War decided to cause a little bit of me to die inside every time I had to turn a lever or move some weights.

In a demo I played of Castlevania I hacked and slashed, then proceeded to mount a horse who furthered plot progression, had to try and keep balance whilst hacking slashing other enemies whilst riding and then after dismounting was forced to solve a puzz.e

From this it's easy to point out a simple rule of thumb (HAHAHAHAHAHAH!) Running in between hacking and slashing does not equal gameplay.

Another problem I'm having with today's hack and slash is that enemies don't seem to have the ability to kill you or even hinder you anymore. In 99 Nights I killed about 200 enemies (all the same dark grey colour with about as much inspiration as a crayon left to melt in the sun) before taking a single hit which took off roughly 1/1000000000 of my life.

What should the norm be? Look at Devil May Cry, for instance. Ever level has a multitude of different 'first tier' enemies that will, if left without a bullet in their skulls, punish you severely. These enemies make it so that you either act quickly so they never had a chance to attack or, failing that, make dodging a necessity in staying alive.

I loved Devil May Cry. Dante is my kind of hero. Bad-arse, sarcastic, doesn't take himself too seriously, and can be impaled and sliced open and pretty much annihilated and still come back for more. The added bonus of the Devil Trigger meant that, for a little while, you were pure bad-arse and got to handle out some death, or it could also be saved until you were in a bit of trouble with too many enemies. As I recall God of War did something like this and he glowed with armour...or something. It was too boring to remember.

The lid on the whole 'My thumb hurst' insight came when I read a comment saying that a particular gamer couldn't get into games like Devil May Cry because it was so hard. Was it really? I dont recall it being hard, but I do recall it being a hell of a lot harder than pressing square, square, square, square, triangle over and over again until the multitude of completely incapable skeletons or ghouls or whatever other unimaginative enemies had been slain.

Is it the fact you HAVE to dodge? Choose different weapons for different enemies? Figure out how to do combos with timing rather than have it done for you? BASIC GAMING?

So the next time your mindlessly mashing buttons, remember there is always a rule of thumb (HAHAHAHAHA THERE IT IS AGAIN!): If your thumb hurts it's no good.

I'm giving 99 Nights 1 hurt thumb out of two. If you were wondering, it's a bad score.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

Reaching for Reach...Halo that is...

This review is dedicated to the one, the only Svenzy, whose Halo skills rival that of a toddler with only half a pupil and no thumbs. DEATH OR TESTICLES!

When I leant over the counter of the gaming store I had walked in (and by walked in I mean raided {and by raided I mean killed everyone inside}) to pick up a copy of Halo Reach, I felt like I was holding history and a human head. In a sense I was holding history, but in reality I was holding a very popular game that had decided to call it a day. And a human head.

Halo was a game I had avoided for a long time. I think my first impression of Halo was unfortunately shaped by prior prejudice. The prior prejudice being that I liked good quality shoot-em ups.

That, and the shoot-em ups that I had been used to before this were Quake and Unreal Tournament. So Halo took me a little out of my reach *snigger*and proved to be a game that I really didn’t ‘get’. Going from a system where the cross-hair showed where you were shooting to having a cross hair that was a circle that went red when you were close enough but still didnt really depict where you were shooting was something I really struggled with.

Playing it now, almost a decade later, I’ve realised a two things: It doesn’t seem to have changed much and the system I once struggled with is now something I can deal with.

Playing multi-player on the same map I was in all those years ago (it’s that one in a valley and there is an ocean on one bases side and a rock face on the other bases side, no idea what it’s called, don’t care either, I’m a Viking not a cartographer) and the only difference I can see is that I’m armed with an automatic rifle instead of the assault rifle, and that I can choose to have a different load-out with differing abilities.

The abilities include camoflauge (which enabled me to blow up a tank that was destroying the shit out of our base), healing shield bubble thing, shield lock (which, for some reason, activates as you punch the ground), diversion (which creates a hologram of yourself that runs off and thus ‘diverts’ enemy fire) and a few others that I can’t remember but has no bearing on my point anyway.

The point of course being: Sprint is a special ability.

For some reason, these ‘supersoldiers’, these ‘Spartans’, can only sprint when given the added ability to. Other than that they do a particularly fast walk. What the hell? Sprinting is in EVERY good modern shooter, COD, Killzone, even that piece of crap MAG had the option of sprinting.

This might not have been so bad, if like in Unreal Tournament or Quake the map forced you reasonobly close together, but NO. I spent most of my first games in Halo running around giant maps just to find where the enemy base might be before getting killed and making the same two minute hike to getting where I needed to be to get killed, again and again. Maybe I’m just used to COD, where your enemies are never more than a 15 second sprint from wherever you are. Maybe I’m used to Unreal where the maps were a reasonable size, and if there was a larger map all I simply had to do was jump and cover an enormous distance to shorten the gap between myself and my target or simply run the normal speed which suited the gameplay and level environment.

Having said that, I find the game fun. It’s in no way ground-breaking or adrenaline inducing (like COD or Killzone or Unreal), but it’s fun. It’s the shooter you play to relax.

The campaign, on the other hand, is the first campaign in a shooter I have thoroughly enjoyed playing. To those who don’t know, I have never finished or really enjoyed a shooter’s campaign. I don’t see the point when multi-player is right there and is the real testament to your skills.

But playing the campaign, albeit with a friend, was enormously entertaining. We all know that games are better multi-player, but this was different. It was simultaneously competitive and co-operative, we had the joy of killing aliens (who were thankfully REAL aliens for once and not just the most unpopular race on earth at the time) and got to drive around in some fun-to-use vehicles.

But once again, the game isn't hugely exciting. It's like raiding a knitting club; you raid it when you feel like raiding but don't want to make a real commitment to the bloodshed (needles still hurt though).

The game itself is immaterial in this review, as everyone thinks it's fun and it got all these great reviews etc etc, BUT, what's being left out is this:

I have no video to put online.

Why? One reason is that I am too lazy to figure out how to do the whole recording with the wires and the usb and the Xbox and whatnot, and the other is that the game has an in-game recorder.

I thought, booyeh, I can regularly post any awesome kills I get. And there is a small chance I might be able to do this... as long as I buy a Bungie subscription.

What the fuck is wrong with Microsoft? I'm sick of their bullshit. Their Xbox didnt have wireless in it when released, which even the Wii had (despite it only having the power and of a Gen 1 gaming machine) and they then wanted you to buy an external wireless adaptor for 150 bucks. They then wanted you to pay extra to get online to then pay for services and games online.

Fuck you Microsoft, and fuck you Bungie. I recorded my game, I want to put it on my website. I'm not even sure if I could do it had I subscribed to the Bungie membership system, and I know that you could only view it had you also been a Bungie subscriber.

I dont understand the squeezing of the extra dollars. Halo is a massive franchise, they made 200 million in the first 24 hours for Reach. I just want to put the tank I blew up online, and that awesome headshot I scored against the guy driving on the opposite end of the battlefield (both true accounts).

The reason that Halo has sold so many copies and is so poluar is because it's suitable for a larger age group then COD or Killzone or such games. Why, just today there was some stupid kid from New Zealand refusing to shut the fuck up about him working at McDonalds and asking me if I wanted a big mac. That boy alone could kill New Zealands tourism industry which is the only thing keeping their economy going to begin with.

Halo is simultaneously a pain in my muscular Viking arse and a game that I would love to play if I had more friends on Xbox live.

I'm going to give it a 3 out of 5 and a mention that if a Spartan and a Viking got in a fight, the Spartan would be murdered so hard Greece would sink.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.

PS. If you didnt know the Viking Gamer got into the Game Informer, you do now. Seeing as this months Game Informer didn't have a new 'Next Big Critic' (amatuer writers section) I can only assume that my article was so great that no-one else thought they could live up to its standard and thus did not submit their feeble articles.

SHANK

After trying to play Dragon Age again, I decided that I'd rather place my horned hat in a field, steal a plane mid-flight, play anything by Miley Cyrus over the loud speakers at full volume with a church choir singing the words from Twilight, find the field, jump out of the plane and have my horned hat impale me. If this didn't kill me I would have repeated the process until it did.

So there will be no review of Dragon Age, but if you do want an impression of what I thought of it see above or go here.

However Odin and Playstation Plus were looking down on me that day, and my PS3 had downloaded an unlikely looking demo called 'SHANK'.

After finishing the first level, and LOVING it, I paid the twenty dollars to get the rest of the game. It ended up giving me about 5 or more hours of enjoyable game play, which is 5 more hours of enjoyable game play than Dragon Age gave me.

I had paid five times the amount of SHANK for Dragon Age. Shouldn't it logically be five times better? Five times more awesome? Five times less a waste of my life?

Sadly games do not follow a mathematical equation of price to excellence. Demon's Souls, for instance, was only 70 dollars as a new release. Not only did I give it an excellent score, I have bestowed upon it the honour of an involved replay. I say involved in italics because Vikings are a passionate people. If we did not feel strongly about our hats, culture, looting, maiming and pillaging, then we would simply be for-profit murderers in funny head gear. So I say involved, I mean involved. Priest in a child smuggling ring involved.

Onto Shank.



Shank has the same storyline as Kill Bill, in that he was betrayed by his gang-leader and his lover got killed by the gang made up of a variety of differently skilled individuals and they tried to kill him but he lived and they are SUPER SURPRISED to see him alive. Lots of killing ensues.

Even though I recently commented on originality and how it's lacking, I was surprised that I still thoroughly enjoyed the characters and plot development. Probably more surprised than the gang members were of finding out about shanks apparent good health (in that he was moving and breathing). The voice-acting was really good which I didn't expect from a game that was one fifth the price of the game that gave me the 'evil guy' voice. As well as that the dialogue and voices perfectly suiting the roles of their respective characters. Cliche, but well done. Like a steak. Bison steak, topped with a mushroom cream sauce. Served to me by a buxom waitress. But yes, voice-acting. And steak.

Game progression was a big part of what made the story enjoyable. For instance, some boss battles were at the start of the level and, in turn, introduced the types of enemies you would be versing next, rather than vice versa. If you don't understand that means I have to explain, and there was a good reason I turned down the chance to be Chair of Viking University. One is that I am not furniture, and never will be, and the second is that explaining is for mortals.

Here's an example anyway: if I'm in a level where the majority of my time is spent hacking the beaks off bird enemies then it is more than likely the boss of that particular level will be a giant bird. Like an albatross. Done in a rich peppercorn sauce on a pile of grilled eggplant. Served by a naked and buxom waitress. But yes, giant albatross, example and naked waitress.

This breaks up the games flow so that you don't settle into a routine of hack and slash, hack and slash, try to figure out how to beat the boss, beat the boss, FMV, hack and slash, hack and slash etc.

Another INGENIOUS method that's been used to break up the flow is the in game movies that appear at the top of the screen as you're still playing. It gives the impression that things are still in motion behind the scenes and that the big picture is being revealed at the same pace as you're playing it. So much passion, so many italics.

The game play defecates all over Dragon Age. It's smooth and quick and fun. Not press X and wait ten years for your character to bludgeon an enemy to death with a blade. Note, I've said bludgeon and blade in relation to one another. The only person I know that has successfully bludgeoned a person to death with a blade was me, and I was at least using the flat of the sword. And the victim in question had eaten my SANDWICH! (note the extra passion).

For starters, Shank has a great array of weaponry. Starting out with knives, a chainsaw and twin handguns, he moves onto using twin machetes, a shotgun, uzi, chains and a katana. Each of the weapons has their own range and fighting style and damage, and most importantly, their own individual animation for specialised kills.

Before I move onto the specialised kills, the great thing about this array of weaponry is that it's quick and simple to switch between them, which means you don't have to fuck around to deal with situations that require different weapons. If anyone remembers the difference between Devil May Cry 1 where you couldn't switch quickly and Devil May Cry 3 where you could, you'll remember the sense of freedom in dealing with different situations as well as the added enjoyment of breaking up what can quickly become a monotonous task of killing enemies in the same way.

The specialised ways of killing enemies are AWESOME. Against your regular enemies you can grapple them and then use any of the ten or so weapons to make them feel pain or feel dead (if dead is a feeling). The Katana is my favourite in this instance as the grapple leads to an assisted Hari Kiri (once again, I'm not furniture and very busy, use google for that one).

There is also the lunge, where Shank will leap halfway across the screen, pin an enemy down and proceed to stab their bodies until they become lifeless corpses with a Viking style efficiency.

Because the switching between weapons, attacks and different combos are so smooth, simple and above all, quick, this game feels incredibly fast-paced. And dying? Don't worry about it. Shank is one of the few games I have played that doesn't make dying as frustrating as polishing a dent out of your helmet. You die, you immediately start at your last checkpoint. No screen emphasising an already obvious fact that you lost, or asking you to re-load, or any other such time wasting crap.

This game also has something I haven't seen since Devil May Cry. He wields two handguns, so they've given him the ability to shoot in TWO DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS! Amazing! And if DMC and Shank can do it, WHY CAN'T YOU OTHER GAMES? IS IT SO HARD!?

The boss battles hold the only real problem I have with the game. While finding out how to beat the bosses is fun and challenging, some of the action sequences of damaging them are the same or very similar. In a game that's greatness lies in the fact that it manages to shake up regular routine, watching the same processes gets old more noticeably and much more quickly.

Shank is still an awesome game that's worth every dollar of the twenty you'll spend to get it off the Playstation Store. I give it 4 Shanks out of 5 kidneys.


Til next time, the gamer with horns in his hat (and videos in his blog).