Mr Davison's Gaming etc. Blog

Let’s see if I even get to 10. It’s been a pretty good year for music, though, and some of these album deserve a lot of attention.

No particular order. Spotify and youtube links provided.

Real Estate – Days – At it’s heart, this is a pretty simple album. It’s not meant to challenge you or anything like that. What it is, however, is an encapsulation of Autumnal feelings. You can see the tracks drift from the end of summer towards the cold, sparse winter; staying warm and cosy. They don’t rely on muddiness like they have before. Here, they sound clear and crisp, and as a result the best they ever have. The best thing to do is just close your eyes, soak in the atmosphere, and walk through the leafy forest in your mind. Here is my favourite track, Green Aisles.

The Beach Boys – The SMiLE Sessions – An album Beach Boys fans have only been waiting 40 years for, this is the long lost SMiLE, as close to complete as we’ll ever see it.  Me? I wasn’t waiting for it at all (I only got into this band a year or so ago, thanks to a certain Monotone Tim), but it delivered on the promises it made, I feel. It’s obvious that Brian Wilson was on the way to a perfect pop-psych album here, but not everything is meant to be. As you should expect, the harmonies and voices are beautiful, the instrumentation is detailed and clever, and the writing is excellent. Anything past the first disc is indulgent and for big fans of the band / music production geeks only, so be warned, but delve in if you’re feeling intrigued.  If you weren’t a fan, this is hardly going to convert you. If you were, you will be even more now. Here’s my favourite part, Wonderful.

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues – The Fleet Foxes, led by Robin Pecknold, have made beautiful folk rock since their inception, and this album brings it just a little closer to perfection. Pecknold’s voice is beautiful, and when backed by driving percussion or a solitary acoustic guitar, it makes for good listening. This album tries more things, like a genuine instrumental track, which builds well, keeps pace and feels grand without losing that homely quality of folk instrumentation. There’s also a long multipart track which tells an interesting self-contained story, as well as a crazy jazz breakdown. As a whole, it just feels more dynamic, more spacious than before. This is my favourite part, Montezuma.

Explosions In The Sky – Take Care, Take Care, Take Care – Explosions In The Sky have, for me, been at the pinnacle of post-rock with Sigur Ros for as long as it has existed. They pile so much raw emotion into a guitar riff, into a drum pattern. The pain, suffering and joy are all tangible. Quiet to loud is a trick they use better than almost anyone else. In Human Qualities, there is 7 minutes of calm, quiet, soft acoustics. After about 5 minutes, tension starts to build. The room slowly fills with the sounds of explosions, until it finally crescendos into the most satifying roar, a sudden release of the held back energy in the rest of the track. It still gives me shivers. That said, this is my favourite track, Last Known Surroundings

James Blake – James Blake – Dubstep has been a long discussed thing this year. On one end of the discussion, the things you’d hear on the radio past 7pm, the likes of deadmau5, skrillex and other associated artists, now not-so-affectionally known as ‘brostep’, full of the WUBWUB that most people probably associate the genre with. James Blake has been the spark of the other side of the argument. In this self-titled, he has created reserved, soulful yet undoubtedly cold and electronic music, which is being dubbed ‘post-dubstep’. It’s become a trend, with artists like SBTRKT trying to roll with in. None of them match the simple beauty and masterful silence of this one, though. A prime example is Lindisfarne

The Field – Looping State Of Mind – The album title is ridiculously appropriate. Alex Wilner’s method of microsampling feels like it is uniquely his, but you could argue his sound never changes. On the basis of this album, I’m not sure I’d want it to anyway. While he has added some new things – real instruments and legible voices – he has mainly stayed the same as his last few releases. It is music to get lost in, to be relaxed by, to drift away from the world in. On the lowest level, basic trance music. On the highest, a collection of gorgeous sounds. Is This Power

Thundercat – The Golden Age of Apocalypse - Kind of like an elongated jam session, this album has a feeling of fluidity and messing around which permeates the whole thing. While mainly a jazz record in spirit, it ranges from electronic to soul to traditional instrumentation, which some breezy and upbeat numbers as well as more methodical and technical ones. In all, it keeps experimenting and surprising, and that is probably its greatest strength. This is It really doesn’t matter to you.

Panda Bear – Tomboy – Noah Lennox, part of Animal Collective, has blown me away once before with Person Pitch. Tomboy doesn’t quite do it again, but it’s close. His echoey, multi-layered voice draws you in initially, and then the sounds build around it. I’ve seen the songs described as hymnal, and I can see why. I really disagree with some of the remastering decisions on this album compared to the 7′ versions of these songs, but it can be overlooked. The instrumentation is fairly sample heavy, but it fills the space and wraps you up in the middle. Scheherazade is my favourite part.

The Joy Formidable – The Big Roar – An album and a band that’s flew under the radar despite supporting the likes of the Foo Fighters on their latest tour and having an undeniably stadium sound. It has to be said, that not usually a sound I like that much, but TJF do it very well indeed. The energy is apparent the whole way through, even when the album gets quiet it is just waiting to pounce on you. Ritzy’s voice has enough strength to carry the loud, buzzy guitar riffs and the piped in reverb and feedback adds an extra layer. This is Whirring.

Erm, is that 10? Oh, it’s 9? Well I can’t think of anything else, so there you go. (If a 10th comes to mind, I’ll add it in.) Happy listening!

The title to this one is pretty self-explanatory, no? It’s a wrestling game. It features Japanese Pro Wrestlers. As wrestling games go, it’s pretty good.

It has the standard things you’d expect of a wrestling game. A health bar, punching and kicking, grabs with timing-based reversals, victory by pinfall (which you have to mash out of). Every character has their real-life finishing move which can be executed when the opponent is low on life. The motion capture for these is pretty realistic. There’s a decent amount of moves for each character, the controls are responsive enough and the character models are fairly good for the Saturn.

One of the more unique features of the game is the ability to break bones by concentrating moves on a certain area (or just repeating the same one over and over). This does extra damage to the fatigue gauge.

One of the main draws of this game for me was the addition of 2 characters from Virtua Fighter, Wolf and Jeffrey. Of course, these 2 are grapplers, with Wolf being a Pro Wrestler and Jeffrey a practitioner of Pankration (ancient greek wrestling. How you can still study this, I do not know. He mainly just smashes things and says ‘I WIIIN’). Their addition is welcome,  but doesn’t add all that much other than a marketing angle.

It is generally quite simulation focused compared to the wrestling games of the time (WWF Warzone, WWF In Your House) but still entertaining enough. Well worth picking up if you like wrestling, as it’s not hard to find, nor is it expensive.

I am going to go through my Saturn collection 1 by 1 (list is here), making a short writeup of each one. I’m probably going for the top, so except Japanese, A to be where I start. This will be a long set of short posts, most likely. Each article will be linked to in the collection list for easy access and such.

If you like that idea, good, stick around. If not, I have Best of Year crap to do, and some other stuff. Hoping to get writing again. Sayonara for now.

For a start, the games visual style is pretty pulp, pretty gritty action movie/graphic novel. It’s also smoothly animated with an appropriate soundtrack. But hang on, this is a sidescrolling brawler, those aren’t the things that matter.

I find it plays pretty well. At first, it seems very shallow, but as it gets harder, it makes you think twice about just mashing X over and over again. There is combo potential, which is always something I love (in fact, corner juggling was one of the main reasons I loved Castle Crashers…) and a selection of weapons, all which add variety. You always have your shanks, a ‘heavy weapon’ and a gun, and the 3 can be chained together. Different weapons offer different opportunities, as some are better at crowd control, some better at 1-on-1 and so on. Other than this distinction though, It feels in your best interests to stick with the default loadout (chainsaw, pistol) for most of the game, which is kind of disappointing.

The enemies and scenery are nothing new, except for the more…seedy bosses. This guy is…yeah… Small cannon fodder enemies, large unjugglable enemies and dogs are what you will be seeing a lot of. As usual in videogames, the dogs are annoying.

Certainly not for everyone’s tastes, I’m sure, but for anyone who likes old sidescrolling beat-em-ups, fighting games or Tarantino movies, I can easily recommend this.

I just felt like doing this, not sure why, so let’s begin. (If I decide to write a full review of any of these things, they will call back to this post. It’s gonna be a mix of games and music, probably.)

Brink: An interesting take on TF2, but currently pretty broken.

Mortal Kombat (9): Tournament worthy, it is not, but as a fun fighter to chill out with, it works.

Yakuza 4: Extremely Japanese with possibly too much content, but a real contender for ‘feels like Shenmue’, which is one of the highest praises I can give.

Test Drive Unlimited 2: Thoroughly competent at what it does, but its presentation is dry and uninspiring which bleeds into the general experience.

Trouble Witches NEO!: A decent pretender to Deathsmiles, borrowing the witch theme from that game, as well as features from Fantasy Zone and doujin shootemups.

Bangai-O HD: Brutally difficult, but intensely satisfying to beat.

Panda Bear – Tomboy: More of the same lush sounds from Noah, but some odd production choices.

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues: A masterstroke of indie-ish folk.

Comments welcome as always, pertaining to my reviews or writing one-sentence reviews itself.

Now I love the Virtua Tennis series. LOVE it. Could easily be in my top 10 of all time. That may be alarming to some of you ‘HARDCOAR GAYMERZZZ’ but I appreciate solid and addictive gameplay, and actually follow the sport.

So naturally, when I heard about Virtua Tennis 4 I was pretty excited, especially after VT2009 which had… some major issues, mainly game-sullying glitches.  I wouldn’t say this new game is a complete overhaul, but it certainly is different.

The first main addition is the super shot. By playing in the parameters of the play style of your tennis player, you gain meter to your concentration gauge. When it is full, you can unleash a more powerful and accurate shot than usual. It’s a one use thing until you rebuild the meter. It adds another layer of strategy to the proceedings, which is welcomed on what has always been a pretty arcade-y experience.

Second is the completely changed World Tour mode. First of all, you don’t level up your character, just unlock potential play styles for them. This is a good thing as it helps control character balance, which was occasionally a problem online in Virtua Tennis 3. Second of all, the repetitive calendar system is gone. Instead, you literally travel the world on what could only be described as a giant board game. You must try to gain stars while staying fit and making money by travelling to squares using the cards you get given at the start of each turn. This means there’s a little of a luck element, but also a little of a planning element to figuring out where you want to go and how. It’s split up into 4 seasons, each one ending at one of the 4 grand slams, plus a bonus end of year season if you perform well through the tour. It’s a refreshing change that is fast paced and fun,  although frustrating in the fact that you can never go backwards, so mistakes stay with you. There are even injury squares on the board where you will lose stars or time or money, which should be avoided whenever possible. It’s took them a while to fix the World Tour mode from its stagnant form in iterations 2 and 3, but it has been executed correctly.

The online hasn’t changed much, and still consists of ranked and player match options. Minigames that are part of the world tour can also be played online via the player match option.

Speaking of minigames, all of the minigames are new. Gone are bowling and walls of bouncy blocks and all that sort of thing. In are football free kicks, matches with retractable walls and wind, coin collecting and poker. While I would have preferred to see some of the old minigames again, these new ones are all entertaining.

All in all, this probably won’t win many new fans, and will be scoffed at by the type of person who just ignores sports games offhand, but for those of us who love the series, this is another great game.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this game is pretty good fun. It’s an XBLA/PSN title called Lara Croft – Guardian f Light. One of its main selling points was it’s co-op campaign. I’m sure it works smoothly in offline mode. The multiplayer level design works well and forces co-operation to complete every challenge room (rooms marked in red that contain a puzzle which must be solved to unlock an upgrade), traverse environmental hazards and effectively take on bosses. The controls are fairly natural, using twin stick control to make life easier. The isometric viewing angle can be disorientating at first but you quickly get used to it. It’s a pretty fresh little twist on the standard Tomb Raider formula.

But in online mode? Erm, it has a few issues…

Here’s some glitches I encountered in a 90 minute session with Shaun:

Visual collision detection was pretty much useless, as objects had a habit of teleporting. Occasionally, you simply had to guess and hope you were right. For example, there is a section when there is a spiked ball on a pole, that is rotating around its central lever. The idea is to either get around it or blow it off with your usefully unlimited supply of remote bombs. In singleplayer, this would be simple to time. However, in online multiplayer, the process was akin to chasing a fly around a room, as the ball suddenly zoomed off to a new location entirely every time you approached it. We just put this down to lag, though, and shrugged it off.

One thing that is less explainable by this, however, is load times topping a minute. While I think it’s very clever that the continue option is far more detailed than you’d expect for an online experience, it’s nullified by the fact you could quite often get back to where you were in the time it takes to load your previous state!

To top it off, we had a complete desync. This would be fine, but the networking hadn’t seemed to notice. I was perpetually trapped on a loading screen while my partner was jettisoned to the next level without me, unable to complete it due to the co-op campaign flat out requiring 2 people for puzzles. I’m not annoyed that it desynced, that’s a pretty standard thing to happen, but the fact that it didn’t actually notice is kind of unacceptable.

So please, play it offline, enjoy co-op, enjoy the single player game, it plays well. Just… be careful taking it online.

Justin Wong already went through the seven stages of grief with Marvel 3. First, he felt it was stupidly easy. Then, he thought it was amazing. Then, he found it dumb again. Now he’s winning tournaments. I feel a little like I went under the same loop. I love the game, but I also have a bunch of niggling doubts about it.

Anyway, the game is fairly bare-bones in it’s production, with nary a Survival or Time Attack mode in sight. All you get is Arcade, Training, Mission and Versus. The others are self-explanatory, but Mission is much like Street Fighter 4′s Trial mode. It’s a teaching tool, essentially, showing you some basic to advanced things that any given character can do.

As such, this is a not a game for someone without friends/Xbox Live/PSN. The bulk of the game, as with any fighting game, is the multiplayer element. It’s still disappointing that there’s seems to be a noticeable lack of content: Super Street Fighter 4 was the same, but that was also a cut price title, where this one isn’t.

At first glance, and indeed for the first few hours you play, the game is easy. Most combos are damaging and can be done from the same basic chains for every character. This is an initial layer of accessability that makes the game fast-paced and entertaining as soon as you pick it up. But after a while, you start to notice the nuances, the quirks, the subtleties. Basic combos are all well and good but to maximise your damage you want to style on people, pretty much. This requires dexterity and, well, practice. You might get away with mashing away on Xbox Live (in fact, I know you will. There’s a lot of obvious newcomers to the genre jumping on this game and just leaving themselves open to being picked apart… Not that I haven’t been picked apart myself, mind you.), but if your friends are anything like mine, you’ll need to practice hard to keep up with them.

I’m kinda struggling to get past the surface layer of this game. At least that’s how I feel. I feel like I’m missing something right now, and the only option is to try and dig deeper until the point where it clicks and I’m playing better and having more fun. Right now, I’m in some kind of Purgatory with it, not sure where I’m going to be going with it. I don’t currently feel like it lives up to it’s predecessor, but that game took a few years to be fully realised by the community. This may well be the same. I can only hope so.

Modern Fruit machines, with their complex feature boards, try to make it look like you’re influencing the game completely. The reality is clear that you’re not. It wins when it wants to win, it hurts you when it doesn’t feel like messing up its percentages.

Each machine (by law) shows a win percentage. However, that win percentage is abstracted to thousands of pounds, so it’s easy to make a logical fallacy by saying ‘If I put £10 in and it says 80%, I should always get at least £8 back’. This is far too narrow of a sample range for it to ever balance out properly.

One of the major problems that has caused the decline of such machines is that the legal bottom percentage is now 70%. At this rate, most machines don’t pay out nearly enough to keep a person hooked. It’s better for short-terms profit margins, but doesn’t play any kind of long-term strategy.

Onto the games themselves. Some are very simple and just roll wins in, but I find they have little entertainment value, and after all that is why I play these machines. I’m not looking to make a quick buck, I’m looking to have some fun, and am willing to pay for it, while sometimes getting my money back. The ones that amuse me [they are amusements after all] are ones with really long feature trails and many ways to win (or lose). They dangle many carrots, but almost always to the point where you keep pushing and they turn into a large stick that smacks you across the face. This is where knowing your (and the machine’s) limits comes in handy. You will start to see patterns in the way it plays, because the programming is NOT random. If you get used to a pattern, you know when it’s going to kill you, and can abuse that knowledge to go as far as it wants to. However, you also need to be aware of the pattern breaking. This could mean 2 things: You start to lose earlier, or it’s going to roll in something big.

Before you think it, I’m not deluding myself into thinking there are patterns that break machines, especially not in the days where abused bugs are actively logged by the machine’s computer, sent to the manufacturer, and chipped out with a programming fix. If you find something strange, feel free to use it, but don’t expect it to last long either. They’re actually quite fascinating from a programming perspective, as they act psuedo-randomly, but they’re always controlled.

Bottom line is: Luck is all that’s important. Happy gaming!