Unbored

Nintendo have played quite an interesting game for the last few years. They realised it was a fruitless battle trying to compete in the arms race of graphics and processing power against both Sony and Microsoft who were desperately scrabbling for sales from the gamer demographic. So they decided to market their machine to everyone else instead of the sweaty nerds. But hell hath no fury like a geek scorned and the internet was swept with a veritable torrent of complaint from those who felt cheated by this apparent betrayal.

While every single frame of Nintendo’s advertising and marketing has shown they want nothing to do with their old fans; that they’ve moved on in favour of cleaner, slimmer people that live in featureless white rooms and wear fixed smiles upon their faces. The sad fact is that the people it appeals to, normal people, don’t actually buy that many games. They buy something like Just Dance or Wii Party and play it every so often at parties… But the nerds will always come back for more every month or so.

So what is a faceless corporate machine to do? Why re-hash a sequel to one of your old series of course! Which brought us New Super Mario Brothers Wii (what happens when a sequel comes out? New-new super Mario brothers?) and now Donkey Kong Country Returns.

The story goes that a bunch of weird mask things have hypnotised all the animals to steal Mr Kong’s bananas… and when he turns out to be too stupid to hypnotise, he sets out to retrieve them one smashed skull at a time.

I will give it this. It’s a damn fine game, it’s so good you’d almost forget it’s on the Wii if it weren’t for the hand cramps you get from the controller. It plays like an old-school platformer with exploration and jumping on enemies to kill them. There’s nothing particularly special or new there, but Nintendo aren’t known for innovation any more, they’re known for their ability to polish something to such a degree that it almost seems brand new despite being utterly familiar.

I actually had flashbacks while playing this. Back in the days when I was but a lad and the word Wii would have made me giggle slightly more than it does now (hee hee!) I used to play games like The Lion King and Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega genesis. Platform games with loads of exploration and incredible scenery… DKR does all of that, and does it brilliantly.

To remind players that they’re not just playing an emulator of a genesis game or something, the developers have done some really clever stuff with the scenery and levels with environmental effects and little hidey holes to explore. There is a level where the background is a storm along a shoreline and you have to find cover before a wave smashes you into the screen, and the water will blow any collectable items away if you don’t get them in time. I found it incredibly clever and very fun to find all the little details.

There is also a co-op mode where you can play with a friend, but I never found a reason to buy a second Wii controller so I didn’t get to try it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more fun than a barrel of monkeys in bowler hats, or that it causes fights over who has to be Diddy Kong.

If you’re a gamer and have a Wii, you would do well to give this game a try. Maybe with games like this and Zelda: Skyward Sword there will actually be a good reason for me to play the damn thing for anything other than iPlayer.

This is a pleasant surprise. A game about Wizards by a team of eight Swedish students is one of the best games this year And here I was thinking Scandinavia was just about rally drivers and really good crime fiction!

In Magicka you play as a wizard with command over the elements. Earth, cold, fire, water, life, arcane, shield and lightning. You pick up to five elements you want to use in your spell and let rip, and while you can stack five lightnings and just go nuts, your best bet is to combine them to see what results you can get. For instance, fire and earth combine to create a fireball you can shoot at your enemies. And if you get five earth elements and click the button to ‘perform on self’ you can drop a massive boulder on your head, killing yourself… I did that by accident and felt a bit silly.

The players have found over a thousand of these combinations and still there’s no end in sight, especially when you consider that there’s also the fact that not only can you combine your spells, but you can also combine them with spells from other players, or effects from the environment. For instance, you can’t perform lightning based spells when you’re wet, so I like to make a shield around myself and perform a rain spell that leaves everyone dripping wet and especially vulnerable to my ‘lightning-y electric death(TM)’. I’ve seen videos where players have exploited the fact that fire and cold explode in contact with each other and crossed beams of them to make the resulting explosion eviscerate entire legions of victims.

The game supports four player co-op play and I can’t wait to see what kind of madness we’ll get up to with another three wizards running around firing magic at stuff. And for only eight quid, that’s not a bad deal at all.

This game is also incredibly funny, dialogue is written in a sort of quasi-gibberish a bit like the chef from The Muppets, with real words peppered in here and there. I thought I’d find it annoying, but it’s actually quite charmingly funny (unless of course the language is actually Swedish, in which case boy is my face red!) And the game is full to bursting with pop-culture references and jokes that not only make you laugh but actually have use in gameplay. For instance, various weapons you can find include Excalibur… with the stone still attached, making it into a sort of hammer, A 40K warhammer (with extra darkness and grit) and an M60… as in the machine gun! This is the third comedic game I’ve seen this year with Bulletstorm and Duke Nukem forever. If both of those keep up the same standards as this, then I’ll be very happy indeed!

The graphics are nice, it’s not exactly Crysis but that’s no bad thing when the pretty lights of pure destructive force are filling the screen every five seconds and your PC has a little breathing room. The spells themselves are gorgeous to look at, and that’s all that matters really.

This game has had some serious technical issues from its release, my copy wouldn’t play because I’d made the mistake of having an Nvidia graphics card (Technophobes note: That’s basically half of all PC’s that play games.) and I’ve heard of people crashing out to the desktop, or characters not appearing, or cutscenes not starting. Yeah, it’s been a bit of a problem child. However, Arrowhead Studios have been patching it pretty much every day and fixing every problem pretty much within hours of finding them. So I’m not going to hold it against them.

If you have a Steam account already, give the demo a whirl. If you don’t, get one (it’s free) and give the demo a whirl anyway, Email me your Steam ID’s and we’ll wizard it up in this bitch!

Before someone jumps through the internet and lynches me, I think I should say that I do understand why people like games like Gear of War and Call of Duty. They’re good games, and they’re well made. That doesn’t stop me from thinking that they’re also tedious, unimaginative affairs where a bunch of undereducated twats walk down corridors firing guns at other undereducated twats at the other end. Usually while spouting patriotic dogma at every available opportunity.

Bulletstorm is just one of the games that shows we’ve grown beyond such childish, jingoistic shit and moved to a more mature and nuanced era… an era where you get extra points for shooting someone in the willy!

Unlike other FPSs where the only real objective is to not die while making other things die by lining your crosshairs up over their head. Bulletstorm encourages and rewards you for being a little more imaginative with your murderising. Shooting them in the face till he falls down? Meh, nul points! Shooting them in the bumhole and kicking them in the face? Better. Shooting them in the willy, wrapping them in grenade bolas and kicking him into a crowd of his mates? Now you’re talking!

The demo only contains one level, but the entire intro video explains in quite a lot of detail about how you can go over the same level over and over again trying out different combinations and kill methods to come up with the best score which you can compare with your friends.

With any other game, this demo would last all of five minutes. I was playing this for hours. It turns out shooting a guy in the willy is harder than you’d think, it’s a much smaller target than you’re used to with popping headshots, and every time I played I’d find a new way to hurt someone. It’s a surprisingly cerebral experience trying to think up a new way to kill an enemy every single time. It’s like Just a minute with guns.

The demo doesn’t even bother to explain what the story actually is, instead deciding to break the fourth wall and refer to itself as a demo of a videogame you haven’t bought yet. “Challenge yourself, beat your best score? Well what else are ya gonna do? Read a book? HAR HAR!

The developers at People can Fly have a really good sense of humour and that’s really shone with their marketing. And that alone earns my respect. If we’ve learned anything from Call of Duty it’s that trying to be subtle just doesn’t work. All of those past-death quotes about how war is bad and soldiers are just murderers didn’t penetrate into the gaming populace, so let’s just drop any pretence and go kill some sentient creatures in increasingly vindictive ways.

It looks like this and Duke Nukem Forever are the start of a new trend, a trend of silly shooters with big guns and bigger characters. Right now it’s refreshing and hilarious and fun. But what will we think of it in five years? Will these become the new ‘boring brown shooters’?

My answer? Hell no! Shooting people in the willy will always be fun!

As a great philosopher once said. “Hey dick-tits! This game ain’t gonna pre-order itself!”

Wise words my friend. Wise words indeed.

Bulletstorm will be released on the 22nd of February. If you’re on the fence you can download the demo over Xbox Live or Playstation Network. If you do nothing else you at least have to try that.

I don’t really think there’s much to say about Ivy the Kiwi. I could probably rant for several pages about how stupid it is that the title has a question mark for no reason. It’s almost like one of the designers thought it was a tentative title and nobody reminded him to change it back before they went to print.

The story follows a Kiwi bird called Ivy, she’s looking for her mother. That’s it. The levels consist of Ivy walking around completely oblivious to any obstacles or deathtraps in her way, changing direction only when she hits a wall or a slope that’s too steep for her to walk up, you have to draw lines of Ivy on to the level to make ramps for her to walk up or platforms to walk on or catapaults to fire her straight into walls. She can also walk on them as you draw them, so you can either gently lift her over spikes and fire and stuff, or if you’re feeling frisky you can fling her over them and try to catch her.

It’s basically Lemmings but without the senseless violence, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was looking after a feathery Mister Magoo.

Every level opens with Ivy making this high pitched ‘cute’ Mweee wee! sound that… well maybe I’m not being fair, I do like cute things normally, I like charming things with personality and a kind streak, but that sound hits me like a brick covered in ground glass. It’s trying so hard to be cute I just find it infuriating. Maybe that’s just me, I’m just doing this review so I can get on with writing about BulletStorm so, my sensibilities probably lie elsewhere right now. Look this game up on Youtube and see how it makes you feel if you’re interested. But I could feel my testicles slowly shrinking as I played.

The graphics are functional and little else. The levels are made of stone blocks laid out into an obstacle course, the only variation between them to remind you that you’ve actually got anywhere is a different watercolour painted background every now and again. They’re quite pretty, but they don’t exactly add anything. The music would change with each world, but they’re recycled between worlds. Don’t play this for any length of time. It will become the sound of your nightmares.

The gameplay follows the Wii’s noble tradition of being incredibly simple to learn and hard to master, and the Wii’s shovelware tradition of not actually expecting you to be capable of mastering anything. The problem is that each new element is added so slowly that you will get bored waiting for the game to deem you worthy of learning about how ‘enemies’ work. Again, I shouldn’t complain, I’m not eight years old so I’m probably not in the target market. But on the other hand, when I was eight I’d have probably thought this game was too easy as well.

Overall, it’s a nice game with some good ideas and some clever puzzles if the style suits you, but I would recommend the DS version over the Wii version as it’s made for short plays while on the bus or waiting for the STD clinic results to come back. Playing it for any length of time will get repetitive and infuriating, but in short bursts it might be a nice little distraction from the fact you’re in an STD clinic.