Orson Scott Card is apparently a prolific Science Fiction author, I wouldn’t know about him since I’m in the UK, except recently he’s been all over games media because of his OPINIONS about gay people and related legislature. People are not buying Shadow Complex because of this. I’m not going to recall my entire train of thought since it has since completely left the station, however what it came down to was that this author is not in a position of power where his money will actually make a difference beyond what any other ordinary human being can do, and that to not buy it is an insult to the other people who worked on it. Also there was a point about in any game you play there will be someone whose opinions do not agree with yours.

Allowing politics to affect our game purchasing decisions as opposed to the content is a disturbing idea. I enjoyed Shadow Complex immensely, but that’s not to say that I would buy a game that had a motif of “All Gays must have no rights and die and other things.”

Because that would be offensive.

Batman: Arkham Asylum tells the story of Batman’s bad evening, having escorted the Joker to the titular Arkham Asylum. It’s sort of like an episode of 24, except instead of Jack Bauer demanding to know the location of explosive devices, it’s Batman demanding to know where the Clown Prince is so that he can get back to being a big business bollock by day.

There is a reason for writing this; I played both games recently, and while I completed Batman a few hours ago, I uninstalled Prototype out of sheer frustration. This is all linked to the combat systems of each respective game, in that they’re almost identical.

In both Prototype and Batman, you play the anti-hero/hero up against swarms and swarms of enemies of varying levels of lethality. Prototype’s hunters are Batman’s Titan henchmen for example. In Prototype you eventually have access to various power-sets which you can swap on the fly, anything from a massive knife to a knife on a whip or huge fists. In Batman you have Batarangs, the Bat cape, the Batboot and the Batfist.

Prototype’s combat is not very good. Batman’s is excellent. In Prototype you’re expected to know what the enemies are doing against a muddy sea of reds and browns in the background, while fighting a sea of enemies coloured in red and brown tones. It’s like fighting in a swimming pool filled with blood and shit, you’re not sure if your punches are going to land but everyone will end up in pain, coughing up blood. The impetus for me uninstalling was not too dissimilar from that description, it was a late-game boss fight with multiple regenerating parts on the boss itself, and an infinite supply of monsters and military attacking you and only you.

Batman’s combat however makes you feel like a badass. Without the myriad power-sets – being Batman is a power-set unto itself – combat flows freely, with one button for “hurt dude,” another for “hurt dude who’s about to attack you,” and one for “flick your cape at that dude with a knife.” Combat is easy to do and requires an almost balletical timing, one misstep and a counter that you could have done becomes a punch on Batman’s forever scowling face.

Both games ended up resorting to an easy trick; “We can’t possibly add to or innovate the combat any more, let’s throw everything at the player in the hope that that provides some semblance of entertainment.” In Prototype’s case, it failed spectacularly. It didn’t provide entertainment, it provided me an excellent excuse to reclaim some disk space. With Batman: AA, the combat was still fun because old tactics gave way to new ones. Titan henchmen turned into weapons once sufficiently weakened, the skills learned and used up until that point were actually useful.

In Batman you were badass throughout the experience, you were never outgunned because you always have the ability and toolset to deal with any obstacle. In Prototype, you are weak. You are never truly powerful because the game invents new ways to make you weak.

Persona 4 is (to me anyway) an obtuse, deliberately awkward JPRG. If there were a genre of “Deliberately Fucked on Purpose,” Persona 4, Trash Panic and Dark Mist would all fit in there.

I find myself using FAQs to find out an enemy’s weakness, if I don’t my party will fucking die. This happened around 2 am this morning; fighting some enemy who would summon allies every single turn. By the time I gave up there were 5 monsters pummeling my party. I opted to go to bed.

About an hour ago, I got to the same point, but knowing the weaknesses this time got me through it. All was going well until Floor 5 of Yukiko’s Castle. That was where I met Avenger Knight. He critted my two allies and then the main character. Dead. In the first turn.

Yet despite that, I do intend to continue. Its like repeatedly learning the stove is hot. You don’t learn to not touch it, you just invent ways to touch it without getting burned.

I come from a neither rich nor poor family. Mum made enough to get us by, and she even saw fit to gift me with my first game console when I was… oh christ I can’t remember. It was an Atari 2600 Jr which was initially released in 1982, at least in America. I was born in 1984 but I can’t have been two, so I must have been four. The point is, at the time , I had two games for the system, Road Runner and Midnight Magic. I loved those games so much, I poured hours and hours into running away from Wile E Coyote, and flipping balls. Eventually I moved onto the NES, Mega Drive, SNES etc. Each time, the console was bought by Mum, and each time, games were limited. But each time, I played each one to death.

Skip to now, I currently have 40 Xbox 360 games not including digital downloads, I have probably completed about half of those. The ratio is definitely worse when discussing the Wii and PS3. I know I am applying my own situation to make a generalization, but when did we become a generation of incompletionists?

I should feel guilty about spending money on another new Shiny Shiny when I have plenty of existing product I either haven’t touched or abandoned shortly after starting. This week alone I plan to buy another game for the Wii. Despite all this, what do I inevitably play after the rare occasion I actually complete a game? Final Fantasy VII or Team Fortress 2.

I have a theory why we do this. Why we buy new games when we have experiences we haven’t… experienced. It’s because we’re making an investment in that experience that we will one day cash in. However I doubt that day will ever come. For there will always be a new Shiny Shiny for us to buy, consume, and put away.

I started this article on June 24. Thanks to my insufferable, possibly ADD-addled brain, I completely forgot I was working on this. During the time away, I’ve just ended up with more product I will probably never complete, a post about one such purchase is forthcoming. For now though, I will just post this in all it’s incomplete glory, because I honestly forgot what my original point was. Oh well.

“Hey, if Activision liked it, then they should have put a ring on it,” Schafer said. “Oh great, now Beyoncé is going to sue me too.”

I hate Activision.

Nothing too special about it directly, however, that cable means I can now use this:

The Sega Multi-Mega, aka the CD-X

The Sega Multi-Mega was a short-lived attempt by Sega to converge and condense the Sega Mega Drive and Sega-CD addon into one unit. They definitely succeeded at this goal, the unit is barely bigger than a DVD case, although 3 times as thick. It sports all the features of both consoles and is supposedly still compatible with the Sega 32X addon, which I have yet to acquire. It was produced in limited quantities toward the end of the Mega Drive’s life, making it a somewhat sought-after addition to people’s collections. Getting one of these for the price I did last year was a bit of a coup for me, as I have since seen these selling for double what I paid.

If you think I’m lying, look up gameplay videos on YouTube, it’s right there! Assigning buttons A and B to items which you then use, the open-world areas where you must use these items to progress, a huge (for the Game Boy) cast of characters, I could go on.

Combine this with a mish-mash plot that manages to work in both Jaws AND Oddjob as villains make it one of the unsung “best” Bond games, right next to GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64. Coincidentally, both these games released in 1997 and since then, every Bond game has been dire.

In that time I have come to realise a few things:

• I cannot write in a professional style without it feeling forced.
• I am lazy.
• Third bullet-points are for losers.

I did have a calendar detailing what post should go up on a particular day, but as you can tell that didn’t really pan out. Instead of writing about games which is what I intended I ended up just playing them, which I love doing. What I also love doing is collecting. Between the last post and this one I have collected quite a bit, including a Nintendo DSi, which will be pulling photo duty, as it is the most convenient camera I have at hand. Also, the pictures it churns out are not that bad for web-use:

Oh Reggie, what japes are you up to now?

So in order to justify paying for the hosting and future retention of the URL, I might as well start posting again. But posting on a regular schedule? That probably will not happen. Sorry to disappoint all my reader.

• Chrono Trigger – One of the finest RPGs of all time gets a minor update and re-release on the Nintendo DS.
• Fallout 3 – Oblivion with guns. This is absolutely not a bad thing.
• Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts – The traditional platform gameplay jettisoned in favour of creativity. Highly recommended.
• Fable 2 – Like the first one but much better, even if the Knothole Island DLC was a waste of money.
• Dead Space – Rumoured to initially be the next System Shock game, EA dropped that name in favour of creating a new IP. It worked.
• Mirror’s Edge – EA once again stepping up to allow DICE to create a new IP. Slightly janky controls did not hamper a unique gameplay experience (for me, anyway.)
• LittleBigPlanet – The creativity of creators and the promise of DLC level packs in the same vein as the Metal Gear Solid pack make this game a keeper.
• Valkyria Chronicles – Action-Strategy-RPG combined with a unique art style to produce a truly engaging game with solid gameplay.
• Saint’s Row 2 – Don’t be angry I rated this above GTA4, it’s just that I had more fun with this compared to it.
• Metal Gear Solid 4 – A strong finish to a highly-regarded franchise. Let’s hope Konami doesn’t milk the goodwill of it’s fans.

Zachary Moir is currently in a jail cell after assaulting his mother, throwing the taco was just one facet of the incident which also included physical assault and verbal abuse. News sources reported on this as a simple case of parental abuse, which is exactly what it is, with the video game angle not emphasized in the least.

However, a certain site has decided to play up the video game angle, surprisingly, it’s Kotaku. This isn’t me having a pop at Kotaku at all, but this left a sour taste in my mouth. What that blog is doing is the equivalent of trying to get a fight going between two people in a school, riling up their readership over the way the media covers incidents where video games are only vaguely mentioned.  Of all the sites mentioned above, only Kotaku mentions Xbox in all but one of their paragraphs.

Clearly this Zachary is a pathetic piece of shit in many many different ways, but this violence wasn’t video game motivated. It was the latest in a series of assaults “provoked” by the most minor of incidents. It’s just surprising that the only media source emphasizing the video game angle is a video game blog. Whether or not it was posted deliberately to rile the masses, I don’t know, but I’m cynical by nature so what do I know?