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.