Red Dead Revolver

Suddenly I realized that my Playstation 2 game collection is almost solely comprised of Japanese shit. So I went out and got Red Dead Revolver used at Rasputin Music for four dollars. Seriously, that place can’t be a legitimate business. Prices that low have to be the result of some shady doings going down behind the scenes.

Anyway, RDR is a wild west shooter made by Rockstar. This is probably the most infamous game developer due to the copious amounts of questionable content in their games. You see that little R with the star, you just have to flip over the box and read the novel of parental warnings on the back. When I did this to RDR I was shocked to only find two things; blood and violence. That can’t be right, I thought. Sure enough, it wasn’t. Off the top of my head they forgot use of alcohol/tobacco, sexual themes and language.

In Red Dead Revolver you play as Red; a bounty hunter who’s parents were killed when he was twelve. The game is part sequence of events story and part bounty hunting where you take jobs. Each mission brings you closer to tracking down the consortium of bastards that killed your family. You get money for bounties which you use to buy guns, repair guns and buy extras like characters and levels you’ll never use in multiplayer versus. You also get money for every hit you make depending on the anatomical region, which is weird and a bit excessive. A headshot is actually worth eight dollars. By the end, you have so much money, you’re lighting your cigars with it.

When I first went through the tutorial, I was surprised that the way you shoot requires holding L1 to draw your weapon and pressing R1 to fire. Usually in PS2 shooters it’s hold R1 to draw and press X to fire. I wasn’t sure about this R and L thing at first but then I played it a little bit and it wasn’t so bad. Then I played it a little bit more and decided, no I was right the first time. It sucks. It’s fine for earlier levels where there are miniscule amounts of bad guys thrown at you at a slow pace. But when it gets intense and you’re just up against one continuous flood of enemies, you’re constantly holding that L1 button and let me tell you it really wears out your finger. You’ll get to the point where you’re strafing around shooting your gun off one second and then the next it’s holstered. Red’s like, “No, I’m done. Piss off.” You think something’s wrong with the game or the controller. Then you notice that your finger is actually too weak to hold the L1 down any longer.

You can take cover behind walls and objects and then lean around the side to shoot. This is a mixed bag. It’s nice to have something that shields you but you really don’t want to be glued to a wall when a handful of enemies storm around your cover. The funny thing is that when you surprise an enemy that’s glued to the wall, they are practically invincible until they actually leave their cover. *Then* you can kill them. The other thing that blows about cover is that when you’re against a wall you can’t dodge bullets. This seems like something you shouldn’t have to worry about when you take cover but if your hand is sticking out past the edge unprotected, it *will* get shot until you pull it back. But by the time you realize what’s happening, you’ve already lost half of your health just from getting shot in the fucking hand. Whenever you poke your head out to shoot, that will get shot too. Case and point, somehow you get shot a lot more hiding behind a wall than you do running around alone in a barren field. Never take cover.

The game’s gimmick is the “Dead Eye.” As you kill enemies, your dead eye meter fills up which basically equates to how long you get to use the ability. When you activate it, time slows down. Then you drag your crosshairs over the bad guys in sight. Little red targets appear all over them; as many as there are bullets in your gun. When you exit dead eye mode, you fire off a staccato of bullets which if executed well makes short work of them. In a way it’s kind of like bullet time but without the fancy John Woo acrobatics. This ability is however pretty useless for far away enemies and enemies that are moving, which is very annoying.

Another unique aspect to shooting is the duels. Okay, this is something I’ve never understood about the wild west mythos. Two guys face off, draw their guns and shoot each other. It’s the logistics that kill me. It’s not ten paces, turn and fire. It’s draw and shoot at any arbitrary moment. Obviously someone has to initiate. And if someone goes first, how is it fair, or at all an unbiased evaluation of who was the baddest. And what’s with quickdraw tournaments? Who the fuck would enter a tournament where basically everyone dies?

Anyway, there are parts in the game where a dueling sequence is initiated. You can be up against anywhere from one to three opponents, (which is pretty fucking ridiculous.) When this happened the first time, I was trying to read the tutorial which was coming up on screen. Damn this is complicated, I thought. This is the most complicated part of the game. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to fully comprehend it because the stupid tutorial was scrolling through automatically. Thanks a lot. After my unavoidable loss, I read the manual because it actually *lets* me read it. Dueling is basically just a manual dead eye mode. You press down and then up to grab and draw your weapon. Then time slows down. You drag your crosshairs over your opponent(s) The cursor turns red whenever you cross a part of the opponent’s anatomy that you can hit. The whole deal is to locate and tag as many spots as you can as fast as you can before your opponent fires on you. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you fail to draw your gun. I don’t know if it happens when you push up too fast or what but it’s really aggravating.

You actually get to play as several different characters as the story progresses, which is interesting. Except for when you play as General Diego. Not that it’s not interesting but that level is horrible. General Diego is one of the bad guys. In the one level that you control him you are supposed to fight Yankee forces on the other side of this bridge like that one scene in the Good the Bad and the Ugly. Shit’s exploding all around you and you can’t see from the smoke and debris in the air. The North side’s cannons are constantly firing, sometimes at you, so you have to just keep running. Although that doesn’t even work. They predict where you’re running and they put a lead on you. You have to do serpentine. Unfortunately you can’t focus on that because there are a bunch of assholes running around and shooting you too. You try to take cover under the bridge to take out the men but somehow the cannonballs get you anyway. When you get hit it takes you a while to get back up again and by the time you do, another cannonball is already inches from your face. The only level checkpoint is too far into the level which means you get to do the first half over and over and over.

Come to think of it, pretty much anything involving Diego sucks. Fort Diego is also a pain in the ass because you basically get to the end of the level and then die. The intensive trial and error part is conveniently located at the very end and the only way you get to do another trial is to play the whole level again… then die again. Rinse and repeat. The whole thing is that you’re supposed to get up to this gatling gun and take out the guys using it. (And yes, it takes a long time to get there.) Now once you capture a giant gun, what’s probably your next course of action? *Use* the giant gun! The courtyard below you is full of enemies. Why not cater them with a buffet of led sandwiches? The problem is that once you get on the gun you start getting shot a hell of a lot, (even more than if you were behind cover.) And occasionally someone will sneak up behind you while you’re using it. Also the gun is a piece of horse shit. It swivels around radically out of control, making it nearly impossible to train it on anything. And even when you do, the bullets have about as much stopping power as the old revolver that you started the game with. So compare that with the gatling gun from Darkwatch. That thing was slow but once you got it centered you could rest assured that anything behind your crosshairs was going to be vaporized into red mist. But point being, you go for the gatling gun, it gets you killed without fail. Don’t ask me why you’d go out completely unprotected into the courtyard filled with enemies that already have a bead on you, but that’s what you do. You spend like three or for minutes killing enemy after enemy only to have them continually respawn and only after the allotted amount of time has been wasted can you progress to the boss fight and receive a checkpoint. What a crock of shit.

Among the other levels that suck is the bar fight level. There are no guns. Just fists and bottles. For some reason you’re trying to protect the three saloon girls that run aimlessly through the bar. (What the hell did they ever do for you?) If two of them get knocked out, you lose. The fight is well, perfectly random. There are about a dozen fighters all punching each other and/or saloon girls. The combat is terrible. (Think fist fight with Silent Hill controls, terrible.) It takes half an hour to move the camera to where you want it and by that time you’ve been thrown across the room by someone and have to adjust it again. After being tossed four times in a row, you’ll begin to think that that’s the only thing they know how to do. And the process takes so long, you wish there was a fast forward button just so you can get back on your feet again. Sometimes you’ll be standing a good ten paces away from an enemy and you’ll just suddenly gravitate or teleport into their hands so that they can throw you. Everyone runs around chaotically making it extremely difficult to actually engage anyone. They all have WAY TOO MANY hit points. Ideally you want to work one of the assholes into a corner where they can’t escape and then just wail on them for three minutes until eventually they don’t get back up again. The level is hard but thank God it’s short… or at least simple.

The last level is the assault on the mayor’s mansion… and it’s a fucking nightmare. I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse that your two friends Jack and Annie are with you. Sure, they shoot guns but Jack has a tendency to get himself killed which is an automatic game over and Annie has a tendency to kill you, which is also a game over obviously. Easily the worst part of the whole level is when Jack has to pick the lock on the front door of the mansion. You have to hold off an enemy tsunami of unbelievable proportions for three minutes while he sits there defenseless. Why are we even picking the lock in the first place? I bet ten to one we could just kick the door in and if not, just jam a fucking stick of dynamite in the keyhole.

It wouldn’t be so bad if all of the enemies were just regular guys but there are also guys dressed as generals who have their own names and life bars. I think they’re all on drugs or something because they have super human strength. It takes like three to four pointblank headshots to bring one down. That will never happen though because they don’t walk in a straight line for longer than a fourth of a second. They jump around like an acrobat and sprint up flights of stairs backwards doing 75 miles per hour. If you don’t kill them quick, (which obviously you won’t) another one will show up and then you have two. Then you get another one and you’ve got three plus half a dozen regular guys and then you’re just fucked.

Once you beat a level, you get rated on things like accuracy and damage taken. Passing the level automatically unlocks something but if you get a high enough overall rating you get a second unlock. You have the option to continue to the next level, replay the last level or quit. Chances are that the only reason you’d want to replay the level right then and there is because you want a higher score to unlock the second thing. If you don’t play it again right then and there, you don’t get to play it ever again unless you play through the whole game again. Seriously now, what is this? No level select = Bullshit

Red Dead Redemption is out in May. Looks awesome.

Banjo Tooie

About ten years ago, I couldn’t wait for Banjo Tooie to come out. I had just played Banjo Kazooie, which I thought was awesome and I couldn’t help but be excited by all of the secret sneak peeks for the sequel that they stuck into the game… I never played it. I ended up selling my Banjo Kazooie cartridge and eventually I forgot all about Banjo Tooie, until now.

I must say that starting this game was a bizarrely intense nostalgic experience… but that won’t stop me from ripping it a new one.

The game starts out exactly where the last one left off. The evil witch Gruntilda is still trapped under a giant boulder. Her two, previously unheard of, sisters come by and rescue her. Then comes an extremely tedious cut scene with dialogue that takes forever. It’s almost as if they consolidated every cut scene in the game into one giant cut scene, because you literally don’t see any more scenes until the end of the game.

So, the weird sisters kill bottles who was the mole that taught you various moves in the previous game. Then you have to go talk to King Jingaling and you find that all of the jinjos are gone again and you need to find them. Boring… Then you talk to Master Jiggywiggy. Come on. Come on, damn it! I want to play a video game, not read a 500 page novel.

Eventually you get to go in an actual level and do something. As you play, you begin to notice that the golden jigsaw pieces that you’ve been accustomed to collecting aren’t as easy to find anymore. You used to be able to just climb something really tall and find one there or shoot eggs at everything to unlock stuff. You used to be able to just look around, find a puzzle, solve the puzzle, get a fucking jigsaw piece. Banjo Tooie however, is a lot more ambiguous about things. Some levels you could literally go in for the first time and waste an entire two hours before you figure out how to get a single jigsaw piece. It gets boring pretty fast.

Some of the pieces you can’t get without a special move from a later level. Sometimes you’ll activate something and you’ll see a little scene where a door opens or a jigsaw piece appears somewhere but you have no idea where it is. You might think you know and you’ll rack your brain over it for quite a while before finally giving up. Then, three levels later you’ll find that place. Interlacing the levels like this was an annoying idea. You gain access to levels by getting more jigsaw pieces over time. It’s really frustrating to be working on some puzzle that you can’t fully solve until several hours later in some locked place you’ve never seen before. How are you even supposed to know that you can’t solve it yet? I did one where I pushed a giant ice cube off of a cliff in one level. It fell in hot water in a different level where it melted. Then I went to that level where I hit a switch that let the water flow into yet another level where I got the puzzle piece. That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if each step of the puzzle wasn’t revealed to me in reverse order.

In each level you can find Mumbo who was the witch doctor that helped you in the previous game by transforming you into different things and also Wumba, the sexy Indian girl. In the old game, Wumba didn’t exist. Now that she’s here, she’s the one that transforms you into things while Mumbo helps you by letting you control him and use his powers at specific locations indicated by a pad on the ground with his face on it. Having the two of them seems pointless to me. Either replace Mumbo or don’t introduce Wumba. We already know that Mumbo’s capable of doing both jobs, so… yeah.

By the way, big T-rex is the best form for looking down Wumba's top.

To get any magical assistance, you have to give each one of them a globo which are these weird creatures that predictably hang out within feet of whoever’s house. What the hell is the point? If the globos are always right there next to where you need to use them, why not just make the price free?

And now it’s time to play “Old Game Versus New Game.” (never mind that they’re both old games)

In the old game when you collect five honeycombs, your life bar increases by one on the spot. In the new game when you collect the specific ever-changing amount of honeycombs, you go to the fucking store and buy a life bar upgrade.

In the old game when you collect all five jinjos in a level, you get a puzzle piece. In the new game when you collect a random-ass number of same-colored jinjos scattered across random-ass levels, you get a puzzle piece. There are also asshole fake jinjos that attack you when you get close to them.

In the old game you could shoot eggs and that was the solution to everything. In the new game you can shoot eggs, fire eggs, ice eggs, grenade eggs and remote control exploding eggs; most of which you‘ll never use. The only two that you really need/care about are grenade eggs and the remote detonation eggs.

In the old game Banjo and Kazooie stay together where they belong. In the new game you get to separate them, thereby making them both grossly inferior to the whole. The first time you get to separate them, you automatically play as banjo. You notice that your life bar is about half of what it was and suddenly you realize that you don’t have any moves other than run and jump. Then you ask yourself, why in the hell would I EVER want to separate them? What purpose does it serve? In truth it’s a great way to get you killed but eventually you do learn some character-specific moves that make it a little more bearable, (pun not intended.)

I have to say though that the worst part of the separation aspect is that life bar. I already mentioned that it’s smaller but not only that, the bar you have with a solo character and the bar you have when they’re together are independent from each other but only in a negative way. If you get the crap beaten out of you playing solo, (which is highly likely,) and then you join back together, your together bar will be proportionally lower. However, if you heal yourself back to full health while you’re together and then separate, your solo bar remains the same as it was before you healed yourself. How does that even work? You were at full health and now suddenly you’re injured again without ever even taking damage? Furthermore, if you fully heal one of the characters in solo but not the other one and then join together, it will show no change on your together bar. Then if you separate again you will find that the character you just healed is now back to the health they were before you healed them. In short, the only possible way to heal your characters in solo is to heal both of them in tandem before you join back together. The only way to heal your together bar is to be together while doing it. But if you’re goal is to injure yourself, the life bar system is suddenly highly flexible and accommodating.

Aside from that there are just a lot of little stupid things. Like everywhere you go there are various holes in the walls that you’re supposed to go in but there’s never any indication as to how you’re supposed to get in. You might need to be Kazooie or Banjo (concealed in his backpack) or transformed into some other animal or you might need to be using one of the remote control explosives. You’d think that the hole’s size would give you some kind of clue but no.

Look at that. I’m clearly small enough to get through but it still won’t let me through!
When you step on a character switch pad you have to press A to use it. But when you step on a warp pad you have to press B to use it. You will ALWAYS get it wrong.

Music notes are used as currency for getting new moves instead of getting jigsaw pieces. They also greatly reduced the number of notes per level and greatly increased their worth. You will never not have enough. They stick them all together in the same place which is lame.

Pterodactyl Land only has one family of pterodactyls. What, do they rule the land or something?
The game in general isn’t as good as the first one. Although when I started it, I had only two wishes that I wanted it to fulfill.

1.) No Snacker the Shark. I fucking hate him! Surprisingly, he was not in the game just like I wanted. But I was still extremely hesitant to enter any body of water due to PTSD.

2.) No quiz show. In the fist game you had to beat this quiz show where Grunty asked you stupid questions about things in the game. It was long and tedious and If you got too many wrong, you died and had to start over from the beginning. Well there WAS a quiz show but it wasn’t nearly as horrible.
The final battle is right after that, where unbelievably Grunty will continue to occasionally ask you quiz questions. If you get them right she goes easier on you. Come to think of it, the final battle is also easier than it was in the first game.

The ending is, well… Did you ever see Hostel II? Where the girl’s head gets cut off and the kids play soccer with it. It’s the same ending. What the hell Rare?

What is a man?

A miserable little pile of pumpkin guts...

Dino Crisis

Dino Crisis is a survival horror game on Playstation/PC with a dinosaur twist. The game’s made by Capcom and it has a very strong Resident Evil feel to it. You play as Regina, a government operative. You and four other agents go to this island research laboratory in order to kidnap the head scientist guy there. Soon after landing by parachute, you lose a team mate and have to move on without him. Immediately after infiltrating the perimeter you realize that something is very wrong on account of the bullet casings and eviscerated bodies on the ground. Basically from there you’re trying to finish the mission and escape the island. Similar to Jurassic Park but a lot less interesting plotwise.

One thing I notice right away is that there’s a lot of audio dialogue. This is weird because most games from that era either had a small handful of sentences uttered or noises like gasping and laughter or just had no voice acting at all.

The other thing I notice is that the only thing I have to defend myself with is a small handgun and ten bullets. Though all of my team mates have awesome weapons. What’s with that? Am I experiencing the firearms glass ceiling or was I in the bathroom when they were handing out guns?

Gail: I call the AK-47.
Rick: I call the .50 cal sniper rifle.
*toilet flushes*
Enter Regina
Regina: What’s going on in here?
Rick: Here Regina, you get the stick with the pointy rock on the end.

When you come across your first dinosaur, (a raptor,) your first thought is probably to kill it. After all, you have a gun and some bullets. What else would they be for? You start shooting at it and then you get critically slashed across the torso. After about five bullets the raptor goes down. It’s not moving so you walk past it to leave. Then it springs to life, biting you in the leg. You shoot it about three more times and it finally dies. You’re not looking too good either at this point. At least that’s what you guess since Regina is now limping and bleeding but you don’t know how close you are to death because guess what; there’s no life indicator. Wasn’t that fun? You’re out of ammo and you just spent your first aid kit. Let’s hope that was the only dinosaur in the game.

As you progress, you find little ammo boxes with items in them. You find some health related things and some weird stuff like intensifiers and multipliers which you can mix with some items to upgrade them, (just like in Resident Evil.) But all along you’re thinking; okay, this ones going to have some ammo in it, right? But it never does. Eventually you accept that this might in fact be survival horror in it’s purest form; AKA just run away. But if that’s the case, why the hell did they give me a gun in the first place? I’m obviously not allowed to use it.

Later, you get a shotgun and a modest amount of shells. (And by “modest” I actually mean it would be almost as useful to beat the raptors to death with your shoe.) It takes a lot of bullets to kill anything, which is understandable since they‘re dinosaurs, but are you going to give me enough fucking bullets to do it or not?

Working your way through the facility involves a lot of running. The dinosaurs are all raptors which is boring but there are different ones later. In some of the halls there are these laser grids that you can turn on and off to form a gate that protect you from the raptors. When they run into the lasers they get zapped and fall over. There are various puzzles that you have to solve on your way through. They’re fun and interesting at first but then they start recycling them over and over. I had to fix about four generators, recode two keycards, operate two cranes, and crack I don’t even know how many door codes.

Those door codes are the worst. The system used to access certain doors in the building are locked by what it called the DDK lock system. Why it’s called that, I have no idea. I’ll ignore the fact that no facility would ever have their doors locked like this. First you have to get two things. One’s a key and I guess one’s a decoder or something. After you use both of them at the correct door you have to do this little puzzle where you decode a matrix of random letters with some kind of key code. It involves canceling out the wrong letters and being left with a password that you then type in and enter. They start out easy enough but eventually the rules to the decoding system changes and they become these horrible Mensa entry questions. Look at this…

Does that make any sense to you? It’s great how they put in Saturday Night Fever subliminally. That’s not distracting at all.

Around the building there are notes and documents lying out on desks that you can read. Most of them are irrelevant and a waste of time if you read them but some of them have crucial instructions, like how to use the DDK or operate the reactors or they have key codes for various locks. When you read these you either need perfect memory or a pen and paper to write shit down. Unlike Resident Evil and Silent Hill, there’s no document memo in the pause menu for you to reread something. You have to just know everything because if you come up to a lock and you find you can’t remember the code, you’re sure as hell not going to remember what room the document containing said code was in. I consider having to write stuff down for a video game a design flaw.

The items that you require to progress are always keycards, chips, disks or some other electronic device.

They all have stupid acronym names. See?

Now think, do any of those names give you the slightest clue as to what the item might be or what it’s used for? No, they don’t. They’re just a bunch of random letters. It would be easier if the names were all in Latin. But at least they give you a vague description at the bottom.

The names of the facility parts and the names of the keys and the devices are all so non-descriptive and similar that it’s really easy to get confused. And just when you think you’re getting somewhere, something bad happens and you have to do a ton of other things to fix it just to have something else happen. A common scenario in DC on the PSX and PC would be that you have a locked DDK door. You have one DDK input disk H but you also need the DDK code disk H. It’s in the level B2 main office but you can’t get in there without a C. O. pass card. So you go get the B2 key chip 1 and the B2 key chip 2 and you put them in a computer and enter in the code that was written on one of them. Then you use the F. C. device to collect someone’s fingerprint, put that into the computer and do a puzzle to rewrite the C.O. pass. Then take the C.O. pass to get into level B2 and get the DDK code disk H. Put that into the DDK door with the DDK input disc H and then do a DDK password puzzle. Then the door opens. Is that not the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard? Not only is that a giant hassle just to open a door but they’re like a hair’s breath away from calling the grenade gun a “GG” and a door a “D.”

About half way through the game you actually start getting ammunition. There are these glowing deposite boxes in the walls, either green, red or yellow. Green has medical stuff in it. Red has ammunition in it. Yellow can have anything. But you can’t just open the boxes. You have to get plugs which you find around and use anywhere from one to three to unlock a box. After that, you can put things in and take things out of the box and even access same-colored boxes you’ve already opened.

What’s annoying about this is that you can’t stack like items in your inventory. In the picture all I want to do is stack the 11 S&W bullets together with the 15 S&W bullets, (which would equate to less than the maximum amount allowed in a slot,) but it won’t let me. If I take out the 11 bullets they have to take up their own separate space which is bullshit.

Eventually you get to see some different enemies other than the T-rex and the raptors. There are pteranodons and compies. Then you come across these…

I don’t know what the fuck these are but I wish they were slower, weaker and smaller. They hurt you bad. Their fat asses block almost the entirety of the hallways, making it impossible to circumvent them without getting hurt. When they run into the laser grids they don’t fall over like the raptors so you don’t get a head start running past them when you deactivate the grid. Basically if they’re in the room they WILL get you somehow. And if they manage to knock you down, you’re dead.

In general the dinosaurs in this game are real assholes. Sometimes you’ll be running past a raptor and they’ll whip you with their tail, making you drop your gun. Now you have to go snatch your gun off of the floor and sometimes the raptor will be standing right on it. Sometimes you’ll enter a room and the dinosaur will be right there in mid leap at your face. You could literally walk in a door and die instantly with absolutely no chance to react.

Then there’s the shitty fixed camera. Often you can hear a raptor snorting off screen somewhere. If where you’re going happens to require you to run toward the camera, there’s no way to see what’s ahead of you because the camera isn’t going to switch positions. You just keep running and hope the raptor or whatever isn’t directly in your path.

Possibly the most annoying thing of all is that the dinosaurs respawn. At first I thought it wasn’t respawning but some kind of random thing to keep you from ever truly feeling safe, because the dinosaur doesn’t reappear when you leave the room, it actually comes in through the door. Later, when I had ammunition and was actually able to kill some of the dinosaurs, I noticed that every time I killed a dinosaur, left the room and went back in, a new dinosaur of the same species would always come in through a door. This is outrageous! Half of the game you can’t kill dinosaurs at all and then when you finally can, they just come back. THERE IS NO POINT IN KILLING DINOSAURS. You might want to to be able to explore a room without being constantly chased and there are a few times where you have to fend off the T-rex but other than that, the guns are completely superfluous. What a crock of shit. I had one expectation/goal when I started this game and it was to kill some damn dinosaurs! And for all intents and purposes it never happened! I didn't want it to be Turok but... I almost want to say it's false advertising.

The levels are boring. I mean they weren’t at first but after you’ve spent five hours running through nothing but laboratories and cargo bays, they are. I was expecting to go outside the facility at some point, maybe run through some jungle or something but you never do.

At a few points in the game you have to make decisions as to which course of action to take. Your two team mates, who are only ever present for cut scenes, always have differing opinions on what to do next. Now I know Gail is in charge so why would it even matter what Rick thinks? I don’t know. Anyway, some of the decisions will influence the ending you get. In the beginning I was going with Rick’s ideas because they involved avoiding the dinosaurs in exchange for having to deal with the facility and its shitty proclivities. Later, when I got fed up with collecting acronyms and repeating puzzles, I sided with Gail; opting to deal with the dinosaurs instead. Then I found that it really doesn’t matter which way you choose. THEY BOTH SUCK HARD.

At the end of the game you find out why there are dinosaurs on the island which, believe me, is really stupid. Lets just say I really enjoy Capcom’s quasi science. Then you escape the island. I don’t know what the other two endings are but in mine I was chased by the T-rex through a big hall while in an emergency escape helicopter. Luckily, the helicopter was carrying a bomb. Must have been the Die Hard or the Rambo emergency escape helicopter.

Chaos Legion

(on the back of the box)
“If you loved Devil May Cry, you’ll love Chaos Legion.”
--PSM Magazine

Me: Oh boy! I loved Devil May Cry! This’ll be awesome! *animated blue birds sing and the sun smiles down upon me as I skip home from the game store.*
Two hours later…
Me: What… What is this?
It’s a third person swordplay game with RPG elements made by Capcom but that’s about where the similarities end.

The main selling point of the combat and I guess the game in general is the legions. (Hence the name.) Think of them as poke’mon on PCP. You summon them and they fight next to you . There are seven different ones you can get, all with different attacks and deadly sin sounding names like Arrogance and Blasphemy.

A legion’s lifebar is powered by souls which come from enemies when you beat them. Every hit the legion takes from an enemy removes a little from the lifebar. Of course, when the bar reaches zero the legion’s crest breaks, it disappears and you can’t summon it until you regain a certain amount of souls.
Legions don’t really last too long in battle on average, which is annoying. But it’s actually a lot more beneficial in most cases to just not summon them at all. For one, you can run when they aren’t on the screen. But the second you summon them you’re forced to walk at a leisure mosey. Now it takes forever to get anywhere and you basically become a sitting duck. Second, there’s not a whole lot of difference between a legion and an enemy. You might have as many as six of the same legion on screen at the same time and really what that translates to is chaos and visual pollution. You’re no longer in control of the fight. You can’t focus on anything. It’s like trying to orchestrate a bar fight or a soccer riot.

You’re already on average fighting like thirty giant fucking spiders at a time but at least when the legions aren’t there you know who the enemy is and when they’re going to attack you. When you have them out they inevitably end up blocking your view of some enemy somewhere and then you get hit because you either had no idea they were there or you were distracted by some other asshole in the faceless crowd.
One nice thing though is that while the legions aren’t summoned you can use an assist attack which only summons the equipped legion for a couple of seconds to do a single attack at the cost of some souls.
Each legion is good for doing specific things. Some are better at fighting mechanical enemies or protecting you or shooting enemies from far away. Too bad there’s absolutely no way of knowing which ones you’ll need for a level until you play the level. You can only pick two legions to equip before the start of a level. If at some point during the level you discover that you picked the wrong two legions, well tough shit. You either have to restart the level and reselect the ones you actually need or just man up and slog through with your shitty choice, (if it’s even possible.)

The first legion you get is called Thanatos. He’s actually the strongest one of the seven, (nevermind that both it and you die constantly.) At the end of the first level it’s crest shatters into nine pieces which you can go collect if you want. And after that, the game actually asks you if you’d like to switch to easy mode to “just enjoy the story.” This struck me as funny because A: the story isn’t too compelling and B: I’m not a grandmother. Although it didn’t take me long to question my refusal to switch.

A couple of legions are pretty much useless. Arrogance is supposed to protect you but it’s nothing like what I had envisioned. Yeah, they’ll protect you if they happen to be between you and the enemy and I guess you could command them to stop and then hide behind them if you wanted to waste time but other than that, no. What they actually do is absorb attacks when they are hit, though it still does damage to them. The more hits they take, the more they charge their attack. You can command them to release their attack at any time and depending on how big of a beating they took they’ll shoot a beam that does proportional damage. There are of course several setbacks. Providing the legions survive long enough to even use their attack, their beams aren’t that long, their aim is horrible, they attack randomly if you forget to lock on something, they only travel for a short distance to get in range of the enemy and if it’s too far away they just give up and come back and the whole process of freezing the legions in place somewhere they can absorb attacks, keeping them alive, waiting for them to charge and actually getting them to successfully attack what you want them to attack is so arduous you just never want to use them. So they’re not good for protecting. They’re not good for attacking. What exactly ARE they good for?

Then there’s Blasphemy which takes the form of an orange bomb a little bigger than a soccer ball. Summoning it is about the worst thing you can do. All it does is waddle over to the enemy and explode on them. It really doesn’t do that much damage but every time it explodes it takes away from it’s life bar. So basically if you just want to waste all of your souls it’s great for that. The assist attack is decent though after a high enough level. You just throw it, (kick it,) like a grenade which seems much more effective for some reason. Still, I’m not going to ever equip this piece of shit because it doesn’t stack up to the other humanoid-shaped legions.

The attacks that your character actually gets are executed thusly; press the attack button. Press the attack button some more. Keep pressing the attack button. Swinging the sword is your one attack. As you gain experience and level up your legions, you can learn a few different moves through them. The problem with this is that you can only use the specific moves when you have the corresponding legion equipped. It really blows when you try to use a move, only to realize that you can’t because you don’t have that legion with you. Although after earning a ton of experience you can actually retain some of the moves without using the legions.

The first thing you notice when you start the game, (if you’re me anyway,) is that it’s kind of hard. In fact it’s REALLY fucking hard. Your measly life bar will sustain about three hits and then you‘re dead. The first level is an extremely boring and repetitive prologue. Everything looks the same. Actually the first five levels are all monochrome and interchangeable as far as their architecture and design. The prologue is supposed to be a learning experience but it’s way too long. I had the tutorial turned on, so every other thing you do brings up a tedious explanatory screen of text. Now that I think about it, this is the worst tutorial I’ve ever seen in a game. The explanations don’t explain anything. They’re worded badly and when they make reference to the button(s) you’re supposed to push, it says stuff like “press the assist attack button while in assault mode” or “use the shift button to switch legions.” Okay… That’s great. What the hell are you talking about? How am I supposed to know where those buttons are? You have to get out the manual to look up the function names and where the corresponding buttons are located. Now the reason I used tutorial mode in the first place was so I *wouldn’t* have to do that. If I wanted to read the stupid manual, I’d read the stupid manual. Why the hell couldn’t they just have a little picture or the default name of the button come up on the screen like every other game tutorial?

And another thing; why is the square button a confirm button? I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where square was confirm. It’s ALWAYS cancel. You really have to train yourself out of it quick too. Every time you go into the menu to use one soul or life recovery item you end up using two instead because you select it and press X to confirm and then square to leave but it’s not leave, it’s another confirm button.

Going back to the tiny life gage; there almost seems to be some kind of retarded bug with it. You rarely pick up healing potions and even when you do, you can only hold six small ones and two large ones. When you take damage and you’re about at half of your life, you wouldn’t think to use a potion because they don’t grow on trees and you still have half your life left. This is a 100% surefire way to get yourself killed. The next hit you take, no matter what monster it’s from, it WILL kill you. When you die you have to start back at the beginning or at the last checkpoint. The checkpoints are usually pretty far apart, so you’ll be repeating shit a lot. Luckily the game gives you back any items you used before you died.

The whole time you’re playing, you feel drastically underlevelled because everything is so difficult. There will be parts with thirty-some enemies on screen shooting at you and ramming into you from behind. There are machines that make enemies respawn after you kill them. You can destroy the machines but the only problem is that they’re completely surrounded by the same enemies that they make respawn. How long can you last? A lot of times you find yourself pussyfooting around. You go up, hit the enemy and run away because you can’t afford to ever get hit. That’s not fun, it’s fucking stupid. You can go back and play levels you’ve already done to make yourself and your legions stronger but you only get the ability to replay levels when you’re mostly done with the game.

Just when you think you’ve figured out the game, they make you play as this gunslinging girl that kind of reminds me of Lady from DMC3, only less badass and holding Trish’s guns… If Trish’s guns looked like humongous derringers. This turns out to be a completely different ball of wax requiring a whole new set of shitty tutorials. Initially I was very annoyed but soon found that even though I had no idea what I was doing, I was still doing a lot better with her than the main character. Unfortunately you only get to do this for one level. Screw this legion crap. Why can’t I play as her?

As you play through, you occasionally pick up level-up items. There are things that will increase your shitty life bar, things that increase attack and things that increase defense. When I first got one of these upgrades, I was totally mystified as to how to use it. It was in my inventory but it wouldn’t let me select it. Later I figured out that you don’t need to do anything. Just having it increases whatever stat. I have never heard of that before. Typically to raise a stat, you equip/wear an item or you use experience points. In the Diablo 2 expansion there were charms that you could keep in your inventory that did stuff if you wanted to be extra buff but in Chaos Legion it’s the primary level-up method. So every time you look in your inventory you see things like Defense Up X12 and Life Max Up X24. I’m not sure why but this bugs the hell out of me. It looks so sloppy. Why can’t I just use them to permanently add stat points and then they go away? Or at least put them on the stat screen so I don’t have to look at them.

At the end you have to fight the main antagonist who, for reasons unknown, is Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. Okay, it’s not actually him but they literally copied him verbatim. They even used the same cinematography from Advent Children.


Continuing with the Final Fantasy theme, they rape you in the ass with three consecutive bosses. Just kidding… Final Fantasy would have at least four. Anyway, it’s bullshit and if you want my advice; go get Thanatos. Or don’t play at all.

There Can Be Only One

There is currently an internet poll going on at Gamespot that will undeniably and irrefutably decide the greatest video game hero of all time. Typically I wouldn’t comment on something as trivial as an internet poll, (because everything else I write about is very serious business,) but this is an interesting insight into a weird subculture coupled with a shocking, (and hilarious,) statistical anomaly. Round one recently ended and as it turns out, the iconic Halo character Master Chief has been defeated by…

Bub and Bob. Yeah, remember them? I know you’re probably thinking, how the hell did this happen when Halo has such a rabid fanbase? Well let me explain. I first heard about this poll while browsing the video games board, (or v,) on 4chan. The point of the thread was to basically tell people to vote for B&B and destroy Master Chief. I went to the poll and saw that the two dragons were already ahead of MC, (possibly legitimately.)

It didn’t take long for everything to go south from there. 4chan users on v generally have an irrational and intense hatred for Halo. Myself, I never really played it that much. It seemed average. Also I don’t think I ever played Bubble Bobble. I have played Bust-a-Move though in many an arcade. So anyway, v starts voting for B&B, but they don’t just vote normally, they keep refreshing their IPs so that they can vote multiple times. The dragons pull away and soon they are ahead by ten percent.

Under every character match is (was) an area you can post comments, backing either character. Needless to say, this became a medium for a humongous shitstorm. The Master Chief side was full of whinny-ass Halo fanboys crying. The Bub and Bob side was full of old school gamers and trolls. It was a sight to behold; one of those special experiences only procurable through the wondrous internet. Though, as expected, that forum disappeared REAL fast. In fact all chat was turned off, period.

Most of the MC comments seemed to either say that Halo is a revolutionary art form or list reasons, (including saving the world,) why MC is the best hero, following up with “what did Bub and Bob ever do?” Well maybe their accomplishments are a bit more simplistic but there is one very important element that B&B have that Master Chief probably never will and that is… a fucking face.

As it is, a first person shooter makes you really detatched from the character because the character almost ceases to exist. YOU are the character. But on top of that, Maser Chief is a John Doe that looks exactly like every other guy in Halo . It’s really hard to care about someone completely walled off behind a bunch of regenerative armor. The helmet never comes off. He doesn’t even have a real name. He could be a robot for all I know. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter what he accomplished because I have no way to connect with him.

Then you look at Bub and Bob. Daaaw, look! They’re so damn cute! I like them. They don’t even have to say or do anything. They’re already awesome.

Social sciences aside, it was quite delightful watching the pains of one of the most annoying fanbases in existence. All I need now is the Sonic and Cloud fans to cry, (both currently losing.) Also Donkey Kong should go. He sucks in Smash Bros. He sucks in sidescrollers. He sucks when he’s trying to kill you with barrels.

Yes, the poll is overly charged with animosity when all it is is a web poll. I won’t cry when everyone I care about eventually loses (like always.) I’m betting that either Link or Duke Nukem will win the whole thing, and I‘d be Okay with that. I just hope Mario doesn’t win. That would be the lamest thing ever.

Come on Dante! MOVE YOUR STUPID ASS!

Dracula X: Rondo of Blood

Ever since I played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night I wondered about the game that came before it. At the beginning of SotN the first thing you do is fight Dracula from the previous game using the previous protagonist Richter. That’s kind of cool. How many games exist that have what is essentially a fully interactive recap? I wanted to play the previous game just so I could hear Dracula’s “What is a man?” speech again.

Then I find out that the game before it was “Dracula X.” This seemed weird to me since I can distinctly remember already having played that game a long time ago and I don’t remember the final fight with Dracula being ANYTHING like what was in the beginning of SotN. A couple of Google searches later I find out that the Super Nintendo Dracula X that I played was actually a shitty port from a PC engine game called Dracula X: Rondo of Blood which was only released in Japan, not counting the ‘07 PSP remake.

So I… acquire the game and boot it up. Naturally I’m expecting it to be in Japanese which puts me off because I assume the characters are actually going to be speaking to one another unlike in the port and I’m not going to understand any of it. But my mind is instantly blown when a black screen appears and I begin to hear a German narration with Japanese subtitles. What the hell? Why German? My only guess is that I’m in Germany. I mean anyone named “Richter” has to be German right? But why’s Dracula in Germany? I thought he hung around Wallachia or whatever… Transylvania. Though I guess his castle does have a tendency to appear in random-ass places. But in the port it actually says you’re in Transylvania so I don’t know. After that I’m only further mystified when I find that the beginning menu screens are all in English. Well that’s nice for me but how many languages are going to be in this game? I haven’t even started it yet.

Unlike past Castlevania games this one lets you create a file and save your progress instead of having to use passwords. When you start a new game you get to see a cinematic of a village getting attacked and Richter coming to town to kick some ass. The whole thing looks like some cheesy early 90’s anime, which is… awesome. Richter looks exactly like Ryu from Street Fighter.

There were no cinematics like this in the port which is lame. You get one explanatory one if you wait at the start screen and another one at the very end and they aren’t nearly as impressive; they also lack dialogue but it’s not like I could understand it in Rondo anyway.

Once you start playing you immediately notice that everything’s different. A lot of the stuff is similar but they also changed A LOT of things. It’s like déjà vu. You’re in the same burning town with slouching skeletons attacking you but the background is less detailed. There are enemies you’ve never seen before and the entire level has been redesigned. At the end of the level in Rondo of Blood you fight a fire-breathing dragon. In the port you fight a fire-breathing cerberus panther thing. Why’d they change so much stuff?

Now the reason that Richter is in the castle is because his girlfriend and her sister, (who also bares a strong resemblance to another character,)

were abducted by Dracula. You can rescue them in both versions of the game, (albeit a completely different ordeal in each of them.) The thing about Rondo though is that you get the option to play as Maria which means throwing cats and birds at skeletons and bats. What’s stupid is that you can’t switch between characters except at a game over screen. It would be nice to just be able to switch characters any time for particular obstacles along the way but no. In Castlevania III you could switch between characters by just pressing “select.” But what was stupid about that was that the characters shared the same life bar. They’re not one person. They should have exclusive life bars.

I played Rondo on PC, not through an emulator which meant no save state. I was reduced to doing it the old fashioned shitty way that the game makers intended. AKA play the same thing over and over and over until every minute detail of the level has been burned into your mind before finally beating the boss and advancing. This is typical of every Castlevania game prior to SotN and it really irks me. You get three lives and as you go through a level there are a few check points that you can respawn at when you die. There’s always a checkpoint just before the level boss and however many lives you have left after the level is how many shots you have at killing the boss. Once you’re out of lives you have to start at the beginning of the level. Why do you have to do that? I already passed the level. I don’t want to do it again. It’s not fun to have to keep doing it over and over every time you come across some ludicrously difficult boss. It’s just fucking annoying and a waste of time. Shinobi on PS2 is one of the most difficult and cruel games I’ve ever played but even they had the sense to have infinite boss retries without having to play the whole level again. And It’s not like I just use save state to cheat in all the boss battles I just don’t want to replay the fucking level every time I fail.

There came a point where I couldn’t stand it anymore. Stage 6 was where I decided it would be much more fun to stop playing. The nice thing about the level is that there IS no level. It’s just a boss, or bosses. When you go into the room the dark priest Shaft is there… doing something. He disappears and then brings back the boss bat from the first Castlevania. Then you have to beat it. When he’s dead the medusa/gorgon thing from the first game appears. (They’re all from the first game.) After that, the mummy appears. I assumed this would be the last boss just because it’s the third one. I don’t know… It made sense to me. It took me like 20-30 tries to finally beat all three of them. When I did I was very pissed off to find that Frankenstein’s monster appeared and killed me. OK, so there are four bosses. You know, it’s kind of dumb that all these bosses are like 1930s Hollywood monsters. What the hell is Frankenstein’s monster even doing here? I thought this was DRACULA’S castle, not Dr. Frankenstein’s. Did Dracula kidnap him too? So like 15 tries later I beat him as well. Good, now I’m done. No, Shaft reappears and I die. What is this shit?! Will it ever fucking end? Putting two bosses in a row is a dick move unless one’s really weak, but five all in a row with no checkpoints? That’s completely unreasonable and logically you’d think Dracula would be even harder than that. Fuck this shit! Where are the cheats? Give them now!

There is only one cheat as far as I know. It gives you the ability to select any stage. So I go straight to Dracula and… it’s still not like the scenario in SotN at all. They both have floors, which is more than I can say for Dracula X. (Dracula’s actually harder in the port than in Rondo) Richter and Dracula don’t talk. It’s a lot harder than it was in the recap. Maria doesn’t come to save you if you die. (I realize this is a necessary change because it would be stupid to expect you to just beat Dracula first thing without a handicap.) There are moves that Richter can only do in SotN like running, twirling the whip and the slide kick that he can’t do in Rondo or its port.

After beating Rondo Dracula, (much easier that beating five fuckers in a row or that stupid room with all the pits in the port version), I came to three conclusions.

1. If you only played Rondo and then later played SotN, you’d be confused.

2. If you only played the port and then later played SotN, you’d be like “What the hell is this? I’ve never seen this before in my life.”

3. They really fucked up the port. How can they even call it a port when they changed nearly everything? Why would they EVEN change anything? It’s easy to just translate a game and do nothing else to it. Maybe the Super Nintendo wouldn’t be able to handle the cinematics/dialogue but why did they put so much effort into making everything else shitty? It’s mind-boggling. Well, it’s not like Dracula X was a terrible game but the game it’s supposedly ported from makes it look like a concept model. It’s like if Super Mario Brothers 3 was “ported” and you ended up with Super Mario Brothers. It just removed a whole other dimension for no reason.

From top to bottom: Dracula X, Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, Symphony of the Night

Whatever happened to consistency?