Gav's ChuckleBucket

Howdy!

A year has passed since my last awkward, stumbling post on E3 2009. Our dreams of podcasting have taken a similar lurch to the wayside in recent months, as we compete with personal issues, technical problems and outside interference.

Over a year ago, we set out to produce a gaming podcast with a difference. The difference being that we understood our place within the show’s heirarchy. Unlike so many other gaming podcasts, we would take measures to ensure that the games came first. We would not slip into the trap of believing that sharing stories on our weekend escapades (Lol I was so drunk last night lol wut) was more important than discussing the topic at hand.

Without getting into the entire debacle, let me assure you that we are as dedicated as ever to bringing you a podcast in the near future. Honest.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about games. I’ve got two titles pre-ordered for June, so let’s have a look at them together. Like pals.

Mario Galaxy 2: Nintendo Wii

The usual sequence of events following the announcement of a new Mario title are as follows.

• Nintendo will announce the game, showing a small promotional video.
• I will foam at the mouth until the game is released.
• Upon release I purchase the game and play until completion and near-orgasmic satisfaction. 

Despite these events playing out on an almost yearly basis, this iteration of the acclaimed plumber’s adventures initially left me cold. Rumours that the game was no more than a glorified map pack, piggybacking on the success of the first stand-out title were disconcerting to say the least (Cue sarcasm from teh interwebs). Nintendo did little to quell those rumours at first, which only served to reinforce them. Nonetheless, it was a new Mario game, it had Yoshi and frankly that’s all they needed to sap £40 from my wallet.

As launch approaches, my hands become 3% sweatier with each passing day. Extraordinarily positive reviews and mountains of gameplay videos swim in my blood like a damned virus. It’s not a glorified map pack, it’s an exercise in platform gaming at it’s finest. I have to have it. I will have it.You cannot stop me.

Demon’s Souls: Sony Playstation 3

My interest in this game is much harder to quantify. I’ve been a fan of gaudy platforming since I was old enough to swallow the missiles off the Thundertank. The genre of the super-hard, doom-and-gloom dungeon crawler is at best something I keep at an arm’s length.

Having heard tales of it’s gloomy setting, unforgiving levels and rock-hard difficulty, I wasn’t enamoured with Demon’s Souls at first. I watched gameplay videos, read forum posts on the games finer points and even watched the game be played first hand, but could not understand the appeal until I finally played it.

The game makes you think that you’re amazing.

I was reasonably nervous going into my first level of Demon’s Souls. I had a small audience as I picked my character’s name and class (Galen Snowfalle, the thief) and was sure that I would be annihilated within seconds. I trudged across a massive stone bridge, greeted by skeletal hordes of the undead. I swung my trusty rapier and behold, they dropped to the floor. I forged onwards, getting further and further into the crypts and labyrinths that the game laid before me. My audience seemed reasonably impressed that death had not taken it’s grip as yet. Inevitably I was struck down by a group of three guards with razor sharp pikes. As I died, a thought flashed through my head;

“I can take them, next time”.

Restart.

That is the essence of Demon’s Souls. “I can get that fucker next time”. With this in mind, I ordered my own copy which should arrive at the end of this month. Hooray.

That’s a small rundown of what I’ll be playing in June. With any luck ModNation Racers and Splinter Cell will have dropped in price sufficiently in order to tide me over in the wait for Crackdown 2. More on Crackdown 2 later on, folks. I tire!

Leave now, before the beast breaks loose!

It would seem that everyone is in a decidedly predatory mood this E3. While every major publisher and developer looks to steal the show with their latest offerings, it can be extremely easy to fall into the trap of trying to decide who ‘won’ E3.

Microsoft’s opening salvo was an impressive one, a presentation which got the entire industry talking. Their take on motion control- Project Natal, is definitely an impressive piece of kit. Lionhead studio’s tech-demo with the virtual child Milo was without question the talking point of the presentation. The level of interactivity with an in-game character is unprecedented. There is no doubt that we saw something that will have a profound effect on gaming; perhaps not this generation, but definitely in generations to come.

Nintendo’s presentation was a decidedly more familiar affair. When Nintendo take the stage you can be assured of a few things. They will not offer any new IPs. They will expand upon their current roster of franchises. Casual gaming will be their focus. Never ones to disappoint, Nintendo revealed that they would expand upon their casual brands. For the Nintendo fanboy in all of us,  Nintendo then announced several sequels to popular franchises. There was nothing spectacularly innovative in the presentation, although there is certainly enough to warrant sporadic interest from the core crowd throughout the year.

Sony’s show was focused on their multi-tier brands. Those still clinging to their PS2 will be comforted to know that support is still there for the console in 2009-2010. The PSP GO! was revealed officially, showing that ergonomics are not a concern in this day and age. If I may pose the question why hardware manufacturers take such pains to create ergonomically sound controllers for their consoles, but insist that all handhelds are brick shaped and cumbersome to use? Sony then brought out their own motion controller, which for all intents and purpouses looked like a light-up dildo. Using the PS3 Camera, the pointer’s light is tracked and provides (almost) 1:1 control. The technology is in an early development stage, but it is clear that this could have several applications in existing game types.

Without delving into the specific exclusive titles coming soon, I’d like to focus on the technical side of things. It would seem that everyone was extremely impressed with Microsoft’s Natal presentation. So much so that any other motion control device was deemed irrelevant and laughable by those jackal-like denizens of most internet gaming sites.

While Natal is most definitely impressive and boasts a plethora of robust features, I can’t help but wonder how this technology will translate to current gaming. Can this be used in an FPS? Will we be able to have workable controls for say, a racing sim? From the looks of it, I can’t see how it can make the experience any better than the traditional method.Perhaps this will force developers to think about how this technology can be best utilised and (gasp) create some new genres of gaming. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Motion control is lauded as the way forward for fomenting immersion in games – frankly I think Sony’s motion controller does just as good a job in that aspect. The applications for Sony’s tech are much easier to anticipate. This tech lends itself well to current game mechanics such as FPS and RTS genres. It would seem that both companies are trying for the same concept, but are going separate ways about it. Nintendo of course, are now a few steps behind in motion control technology as well as processing power. That doesn’t mean that we can’t expect fun games to come from them beyond mini-game compilations. I have faith that the 2009-2010 Wii lineup will renew some faith in the system.

I’m interested in seeing where all this tech leads.With any luck, all companies will push towards providing unparalleled levels of entertainment in this generation and beyond.

I don’t particularly care who ‘won’ E3. The real winner will be the company with the games that are the most fun to play. Simple as that, fuckheads.

It’s been a while since I’ve made the leap to the ol’ Tumblr for some blog action. It would appear that Twitter has me in it’s 140-character grasp. Some things are hard to convey in 140 characters, so I’ve ‘fired that motherfucker up’ and started on the ol’ blog. Let’s turn the mother out, and put some heat under the sucker…

UFC 2009: Undisputed

Hooray for violence, man. I love the stuff. Undisputed gives that visceral bump to the noggin that has been sorely lacking in previous MMA titles. From the title screen, with the obnoxious nu-metal soundtrack (it has that ‘Click Click Boom’ song - if you can believe that), you’d be forgiven for thinking that this game was marketed to the idiots who thought that ‘Fight Club’ was a competent fighter. Luckily, the game feels more like Fight Night if you were able to bludgeon someone with your elbow and then kick them upside their bonce. There seems to be a deep fighting system here, with context sensitive controls which really make it seem like a fluid fight is taking place. I’m happy to say that as ‘The IceMan Chuck Liddell’ I managed to rack up three consecutive victories by knockout. There’s something extremely satisfying about this game, which maybe says a lot about me as a person.

Red Faction: Guerilla

Hmmm. Difficult one this. Never being a big fan of the Red Faction series (more through ignorance than anything else), I came into the RF Universe with a clean slate - ready to be wowed.

The first few minutes of the demo underwhelm. It’s a standard Third Person shooter experience which feels a bit like Gears of War but with no weight to the characters. I was beginning to get the impression that this wasn’t a particularlly polished title, which is odd since Volition is involved (and I love me some Volition). Once the demo picked up (by picking up I mean getting into a massive fucking walker/mech), you can really appreciate the levels of destruction you can inflict upon the landscape. Buildings crumble and explode as you would expect in real life, if you smacked them with a giant metal arm. Again, there’s a real sense of satisfaction when you completely destroy a wee house. The demo rounds up with an on-rails section where you are defending said mech on the back of a truck. Luckily, the weapon provided for this section is very chunky, meaning it provides intense joy when fired. A decent, if short demo. I don’t think I’ll pick this one up - I’ll just nick it off Blue once he buys it. Fantastic.

I’ve also had to opportunity to play Prince of Persia on the 360. As you can probably tell, I am up with all the latest and current games. More details as events warrant.

The developers of Ninja Blade made a couple of grave errors when creating their martial-arts opus.I have a couple of points on it.

1: If the very first thing you have the player do in the game is a Quick Time Event, you are a bunch of cunts.

2: Having huge flashes of light every time you hit someone means you can’t see their counter attack - so you can’t block in time.

3: Don’t make this game, when Ninja Gaiden II actually exists in our reality.

On a plus side, Peggle is fucking amazing- and about 2.4 times better than the DS version - which I already love. So yes, 800 points to ol’ Microsoft.

The Wheelman Demo is surprisingly fun, and seems to be a well polished game. What a wee surprise! I’d recommend getting the demo at least. This’ll be sprung for once it has dropped in price a smidge.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate is fucking abysmal. Absolutely terrible, clunky controls coupled with really uninteresting combat. Decent ‘curving the bullet’ mechanic but It’s nowhere near fun enough to justify spending much time with.

Legends of Wrestlemania combines stiff arcade-like controls with the element which will actually sell the game: nostalgia. Having played through the demo several times, I can say with no hint of shame (maybe a little) that this’ll be bought come payday.

The Watchmen Demo really just shows that old fashioned brawlers can still be fun in small doses. Just get the demo - I’m sure the full game itself won’t hold many more surprises.

One final note: I love you.

Everyone loves Chicken Wings, eh? You can’t really beat a good portion of hot, spicy chicken wings. Chicken Wings.

Chicken Wings.

Limmy’s show was pretty good. A few things we’ve seen before, but altogether really funny. I think he’s actually better just as himself, talking to the camera - while the sketches were good, I’d prefer him just to talk shite for half an hour.

Playing Big Bang Mini on DS. Also - pretty good!

Pretty Good is a term you’ll see a lot on here, because I’m fucking thick and can’t think of better descriptions.

Now I’m off to play WCW/NWO Revenge!

The laptop is fixed. Good news. Got myself working on a few new ideas which I’ve been sketching out.

I got 10 seats confirmed for the Wrestlemania event at the Sports Cafe. Hooray, and shit.

So hopefully I’ll be getting the ol’ laptop fixed tomorrow. A good friend is coming to inspect the damage and basically wipe the fucker clean.

So it’ll be back to drawing with the mouse, instead of pencil and paper.

Like a fucking neanderthal.

I had a packet of Walkers ‘Roast Chicken’ crisps.

They were so pungent, a dog barked.

I’ve just had one of those ASDA Snack Pots. Unlike Pot Noodles, you actually get a nice pasta experience. Lovely tomato & herb sauce, nice little pastra strands. Lovely.

I’ve just had a look at the BAFTA gaming nominations - how dull.