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People who don't think this guy is bang on correct can fuck right off. Andy Schatz sorts out the wildlife Awwww! Cliffski's latest set to hit the e-shelves! |
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Nikolas the Great and Lovely, Musical Jedi from CGEmpire land and our co-game makificator on The Forgotten Element, has entered a high-octane debatathon with some prima-donna “grumpy designer”, who clearly has issues of many kinds, on this CGEmpire thread.
Interesting and rather funny heated debate. We’re all off over there right now to hide behind Nik and shake our fist going “yeah!!!!” in faux bravado. Why not join us?
Popularity: 4% [?]
Cast your mind back to that magical time in the mid to late eighties. No, I don’t mean literally, that’d be impossible, obviously.
Okay, not in some paranormal psychic way either, that’d be silly! And no, I’m not speaking of some literal magic, as we all know magic only existed until 1892…
Look, do you want to hear this story or not? Geez!
Okay, so back in the late eighties… Was it the late eighties? I can’t remember.
Scratch this, let’s start again.
So I was about 6 years old… Yes, this story is about me, but could easily be a story about you. (That’s a much better way to start the story. It gives us a kind of connection right off the bat—if, of course, it could be a story about you, and completely different stuff didn’t happen to you, in which case I’ve probably just smashed your suspension of disbelief)
Anyway, I remember it was a time when a little pale-skinned Lemmy would beaver away on his Sinclair Spectrum day and night. Gauntlet? Remember that? Saboteur. That was ace. Etc. See? I’m getting all nostalgic now!
Now the thing is, back then it was generally seen as some gross abnormality for a kid to spend more time prodding at rubber keys and making little arrangements out of those little moisture absorbing packets of granules atop their black and white TV to try and get the fucking vertical hold to sort its life out, than to go out in the sunshine and poke at dog crap with a stick. To put it simply, I was a bit of a geek.
“Oh, why isn’t playing computer games cool?!” I used to cry in vain as I tried to negotiate my little frog across a busy road. “Why does it seem like I am one of the only people in the world who likes computer games?” I cursed as I tried to negotiate Horace across a busy road.
It’s at this point, if this story was ever filmed, that we would probably do some swanky swish cut to the modern day, and the viewer would probably see some underlying symbolism or subtext, or maybe it would be printed on the screen Frasier style if it were written in American, I don’t know. And that is this (the subtext, that is): Careful what you wish for.
And now we’re at the nub of the matter. No, a Chav didn’t literally break into my house in the middle of the night and lift my copy of Fallout 2 to afford some smack, but he might as well have done.
See, when games were primarily targeted at pasty-faced geeks, I kinda liked a lot of them. But something terrible has happened in the past decade or so. We geeks have been supplanted as the main target audience of computer games (I mean VIDEO games right?) instead being offered interactive entertainment treats such as Shooty Shooty Kill Kill 6 and Quest for the Kill Your Face In With a Gun: Part Deux.
If it were just the violent angle that wouldn’t be too bad, but please don’t piss about with the actual gameplay! It was fine how it was! Not content with beating us up for liking nerdy games when we were kids, Charvers have now got a step further and muscled in on our guilty pastime, leaving us with the straggler
What started me off this rant? A few things actually, the first main offender I remember being an awesmoe game on my Amiga called…
UFO: Enemy Unknown
(or XCOM: UFO Defence)
Turn based squad tactics, and it was totally ace.
The decline of the XCOM franchise cannot be described with words, and the only possible way to get the this tragic fall from grace across aptly is with the Britnometer system shown below:
Yup.
What happened then? Some publisher guy sat in a board room somewhere said something to the effect of: “XCOM was great! Really great. Except, why can’t all the little people run around AT THE SAME TIME?” You bloody Fraggle, look what you’ve done! That’s one of the main reasons it WAS great!
Well, it’s not his fault, really. He wants money in his pocket, he wants huge profits, as they always have. Sad fact is that the original fans of the original XCOM game are outnumbered to Chavs by like 10 to 1. He’s going after the biggest demographic. And the biggest demographic want “everything to move at once”, so that’s what they get!
Of course it sucked, but we could have told him that. Probably made more money though!
Next came, perhaps the greatest game I’ve ever played in my life. Quite a contemporary title that made me stand up and go “the game industry may not be irrevocably stuffed after all!” – The legendary
Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind!
I won’t go into all the details of why Morrowind is not only the best RPG game ever, but in my opinion the best game ever, but rest assured it is, as ruled by the Grand Council of Correctness in Geneva for 5 years running. It has its faults, sure, some glaring ones. But the good bits are so good that the problems seem completely inconsequential, and do in fact seem like unavoidable side-effects that come with making such an ambitious and immense game.
The Elder Scrolls series just get BETTER AND BETTER! What could be next?
Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
…that’s what.
Okay, I won’t be too harsh on Oblivion, as it was actually a pretty damn good game, in its own right. But the problem is they catered for the mainstream again. No Chav’s gonna play Morrowind, that’s for darn sure! It addressed all the problems in Morrowind, at the cost of 90% of what made Morrowind good in the first place!!! Oblivion is a fraction of the size of Morrowind due to the now commercially compulsory recorded speech instead of written text. All RPG dice rolls have been removed from the system in favour of FPS style combat. A Chav doesn’t want to swing at a rat and miss, regardless of how shit he is with a sword. The list goes on. I’ll leave Oblivion there though as I’m coming to the game that sent me into this psychopathic rant:
Fallout Tactics
Could have been great!
Fallout 1 and 2 were awesome. I am, if you hadn’t guessed already, a big fan of turn-based strategy games. I like real-time stuff too, I do like some FPS games, platformers, fighting games, and of course adventure games, but there’s something really cool for me about games where it’s not about how fast you can click, how well you know hotkeys, or how quick your reactions are (not to mention the fact that I’m allergic to adrenaline). I like games where it’s all about what you do, not how fast you can do it, or how well you’ve developed complimentary automatic muscular responses by playing it for 200+ hours.
The Fallout battle system is like UFO x 10. It’s great fun! Imagine the horror when it transpired that Fallout Tactics had become… wait for it… REAL-TIME!
Beep beep! The Britnometer’s going crazy on this one!
Okay, so Fallout Tactics has been out a few years, so I’m kind of late on this rant. I’d already written off the single player years ago on account of it not really being the RPG Fallout 1 or 2 were.
Since then, it has been gathering dust at my parent’s house, but now I’m all internetted up, I saw it on a shelf and I thought I’d bring it home and give it a crack online. Fallout multiplayer?? Must be good, right? Wrong!
To be fair, unlike the evil XCOM people, they have kept in the turn-based option for all those fan’s of the actual series.
The problem is that again, for every fan of the original Fallout games, there are ten Chavs finishing GTA San Andreas and wondering what they should play next. Guess what? Pretty much EVERYONE who plays online all play in real-time, which pretty much means having a bunch of characters running about like nutters on speed dying horribly every five seconds. It’s been turned into Quake!
Fallout TACTICS you say?
It’s coming up to my third day of trying to find someone to play turn-based with online, and still to no avail. Gutted. I did have a brief play when a mate visited, turn-based naturally, as he is of a similar mind as myself. It was frickin’ awesmoe! Well done 14 Degrees East. But why couldn’t you have had the bottle just to stick to that? Money. Target Demographics. Chavhandling. That’s what.
Don’t get me started on that other Fallout game…
So who do I really blame for all this? At the end of the day?
Sony.
They created the “Playstation generation” and done gone buggered it all up.
Boo!
Popularity: 14% [?]
Boo hoo! It’s happened again! Those irony-lovin’ Americans failed to buy into the Click the Spot mania that’s sweeping the globe. WHAT IS WRONG WITH IT? IT’S BRILLIANT, CAN’T YOU SEE THAT?
Click the Spot has been blammed! Within 10 minutes of posting on Newgrounds, it’s been sodding blammed! Our masterpiece, our life’s work, discarded like some piece of rubbish (or “trash”, as THEY would probably call it)
Apparently Click the Spot, and I quote, “sucks!” and “doesn’t even deserve the small amount of data it takes up on the entire internet!” - HOW CAN THAT BE TRUE? The game that was voted #37 on the BAFTA nominated BBC series “Top 100 Most Awesmoe Games EVAH!”. BAH!
If you are one of the miniscule proportion of the population over the big pond - Read Canadian, South American, or otherwise extremely unfortunate and miserable, that is able to appreciate the concept of irony or satire, then please please get in touch and tell us about your feeling of isolation on that big ol’ continent.
Bah! We shoulda just done something about Steve Irwin.
(incidently we think Steve Irwin was great)
We’ll give you another chance to play this world changing game, but please go through the following checklist to make sure you do not agree with any of the points before doing so, or you may be sadly disappointed by the shear awesmoeness of Click the Spot.
Did you agree with any of these statements? Beware! Check your birth certificate. You MAY be American.
If not, then congratulations. You’re ready for the AWESOME AUDIO VISUAL FEST that is… Click the Spot!
Popularity: 3% [?]
I have a dream… Not a Martin Luther King style dream where everything’s going to be lovely - but a dream of terror, murder, intrigue, and pop-culture references. You see, I read these articles about dream theory where if your teeth fall out you’re stressing about money or something. And flying means something too - okay, so I haven’t read these articles thoroughly, but I am aware of their existence. And I got thinking… I don’t recall ever having a dream about flying, or teeth, or falling, or any of these other bog-standard dreamy type subjects. I want to know what my dream means.
Imagine, if you will, a field on a beautiful summer’s day. The sky’s blue, there are cows grazing peacefully, and somewhere up above a flock of seagulls are debating what the large terrifying spaceship crashing through the atmosphere with thunderous menace is doing. It’s invading Earth, obviously, and as it lands a door slides open and legions of Daleks march (well, sort of slide) out. They shoot the seagulls and vaporise the cows. Everybody runs screaming in terror through the streets (yeah, we’re now in a city - you know how these things happen in dreams) and lots of people are dying horribly. Somewhere in the crowd stands my primary school geography teacher. She has the face of an angel. Well, the face of an angel who’s face is contorted into a panic-stricken mess of absolute horror, of course. Daleks surround her and she is captured and taken aboard the spaceship which is clearly too big to fit into the street in which it’s parked (this happens a lot in dreams too).
There is only one thing I can do… I must sneak aboard the spaceship and rescue my geography teacher. I stop briefly to consider how it worked in Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. which this is cleary a bastardisation of, then run with a totally misguided sense of urgency up the ramp onto the ship.
On board, all is deathly quiet. We’re now speeding through space for some reason, the lights are all flickering and there are no Daleks anywhere to be seen. But there is an eerie noise that makes my skin go all pimply. Spooky huh? I creep around the corridors of the ship sweating openly from every pore on my body hoping to find my geography teacher. I round a corner and suddenly… There is a 50ft high green blob-monster in my path! It wobbles towards me and I turn and run (this is much more scary in my dream than it might sound here). I can hear it’s evil squelching motion as it chases me. I quickly dive into the male toilets (that they’d obviously have on a Dalek spaceship infested with huge green blob-monsters, right?) and lock the door to protect myself. I calm down, and start breathing more regularly. Everything’s going to be all right, I just need to find my geography teacher and get out. Then I look up. In the cubicle with me (don’t ask me how it fits) is the 50ft high blob-monster and it’s gaping razor-sharp teeth filled mouth-of-doom opens in front of me like a black hole tearing apart the Universe. I wake up.
So, dream psychologists. What’s that mean then? It’s been playing on my mind since I was about 9, and I’d like some closure please.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Oh. My. Word.
Myself and Lemmy like nothing more than clicking the “next blog” button at the top of the page and reading what inane drivel other people blog about. Imagine our surprise when we stumble upon Madonna’s Personal Blog!!! Or is it? No it’s clearly not, it’s quite clearly some piss-take by some guy with nothing better to write. “What gave it away?”, I hear you cry? Well, it was a toughie but I think it was possibly the post entitled “A horse named Mariah” which went on to say “I’m so sick of that Mariah Carey cow. She thinks she can sell more records than me! Does she not realize that I’m the biggest selling female in history WORLDWIDE?”. Or maybe it was the incessant plugging of Botox(tm). Or possibly, it was the post about everything she does is a work of art with this as its example:
Look! The poo’s in the shape of an ‘M’!
So, we’ve established that it’s a piss-take. Now here’s the utterly unfathomable bit… People seem to think that it’s real. They seem to think that they are actually posting comments on the actual Madonna’s actual blog. A free blog at that, with a free stat counter on it.
Good old Lou. What a nice dribbling idiot he must be. “Happy Birthday Madonna! I wish I could kiss you, unfortunately I can’t. However, I made a tribute to you in my blog to celebrate your birthday”, he comments while sipping his supper through a straw.
See the blog HERE!
Yours, ever faithful
Desmond Tutu
Popularity: 5% [?]
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