BitSnark

This morning THQ announced the discontinuation of two of it’s franchises, namely Juiced and Stuntman. This primarily is due to the franchises not performing as they were expected.

Wow, people who are interested in gaming probably won’t give a rats whereas those who really aren’t will probably mourn the loss shortly, before moving on to buy Random Generic Street Racing Game 5.

Nice one THQ, leave the shops with more shelf space for games that actually validate the medium and make gaming enjoyable.

Devil May Cry 4 (XB360) Demo Impressions

Upon starting up the demo proper, you are greeted with two ‘missions’, each of which are essentially a taste of the game at two different stages. Firstly, you have Extermination which is a ten minute timed mission which takes in near enough a whole level from the game and then you have Execution, which seemingly takes place later on in the game and thrusts you straight into a boss battle with a huge fire creature.

Starting off, I took a crack at the Extermination mission which allowed me to see pretty much how the fundamentals of the game would hold up. To all previous Devil May Cry players, the format remains assuredly similar. The character that you play here, Nero, plays and feels just like Dante from the previous games in that pretty much all the stylishly OTT moves you could do in the previous games you can do here.

With Nero’s arsenal you can knock enemies up in the air with your blade, charge up your gun (just one this time), rev up your sword for increased damage, juggle your enemies in mid-air, throw enemies around and so on and so forth. Nero also has a taunt that he can perform, though its usefulness escapes me as it’s not used to improve your ranking score any and simply gets you punished. Speaking of which, like previous games, points and ranking are awarded based on how well you chain together different moves whilst keeping your enemies in a world of hurt. The better rank you achieve, the more red orbs you receive to upgrade your arsenal of weaponry and demonic powers.

In this demo however, the upgrade system didn’t appear to be in place which makes sense in one respect due to the fact that Nero already appears to be suitably powered up to begin with.

The much talked about ‘Demon Arm’ that would appear to form the basis of Nero’s character actually offers very little in terms of gameplay from what we see in the demo. The arm purely exists as an augmentation to Nero’s set of abilities with its current usefulness limited to simply throwing enemies or doubling up as a grappling hook to swing from one location to another.

While the Extermination mission didn’t put up much of a fight, the Execution mission with the boss battle did however, with the series’ trademark difficulty level making a reappearance and punishing you for not making split-second evasions and making the most out of every combo.

Graphically the game is a splendour, particularly in the Extermination mission which takes in old castle architecture, an old town and a group of shipping docks. In particular, the level of artistic detail prevalent in the architecture of the buildings unashamedly betrays the artists Western European inspirations and shows some of the most beautiful environments yet witnessed on the XBOX 360.

In further regard to the aesthetics of the game, textures are very clean with no discernable break up with dynamic shadowing, complex lighting and a rock solid 60 Frames Per Second being the order of the day here. Truly if you want to show off Devil May Cry 4 to your friends on your shiny HD set, the Extermination mission is the one to show as it is by far the most graphically appealing of the two missions, with the Execution boss battle mission being set in a rather dull snowy tundra with a burnt out village being the only real deviation in terms of setting. That said, the boss looks quite impressive in terms of movement and graphical trickery (check out the fire on him) but all in all he provides a mild highlight for what stands as a mediocre looking level.

All in all, I was impressed by the demo but not overly awed by it. I knew what to expect – that being a more shiny, polished Devil May Cry experience and that’s exactly what I got – so no complaints there, however I hope that the gulf in quality between the two parts of the demo, aren’t in any way indicative of the level of consistency for the rest of the game.

Oh and yes, Nero, is an arrogant git, just like Dante, so get ready for more silly surfer dude come backs if you didn’t already get your fill from Devil May Cry 3.

Reply with your impressions people.

Yup, headline says it all really. Don’t forget, download and reply to my inital impressions tomorrow.

Yup, all in that order 🙂

A quick reminder to those who haven’t already – get your rear ends onto the marketplace and claim your free XBLA game – Undertow. Haven’t even played the trial yet myself, but heck its FREE – so get downloading.

If you’re wondering why MS is being so generous, its because of the sizeable downtime that Live had over the Christmas period, preventing many little Timmy’s from playing their newly gifted CoD4’s and Halo 3’s online.

Oh and be quick with the download, it stops being free after Sunday.

With all the ‘will they, won’t they’ discussions that seem to permate the subject, not to mention the constant rumour mongering, I wonder if a lot of people would actually dedicate that much time to the game if it ever got released.

I mean truthfully, most of us who want the game have played the damn thing to death, and while it’s almost certainly better than the train wreck that was Perfect Dark Zero, would it be enough to tear us away from the mutilplayer delights of Halo 3 and Call Of Duty 4?

While I have many friends who would buy the game if it became available and spend about a week buggering around with prox mines on the Facility multiplayer level, I also know that given a week most of them would get bored with it and move on. The single player campaign is different kettle of fish however. From my perspective I cant bear to look at it as I have been through it countless times on every difficulty level, and achievements be damned I wouldn’t be doing it again.

Ergh, I dunno if I am being too cynical here but now that we’re close to something actually happening with this (Rare having the finished code but waiting for cross-publisher approval) I find myself caring less then I did when it was just a pipe dream.

Thoughts?

Cowboy Bebop TV Series

Genre: Sci-fi Space Adventure Drama
Director: Shinichiro Watanabe
Distributor: Bandai Entertainment
Duration: 25 minutes approx per episode with 26 episodes total
Production Creation: 1998

Plot Synopsis

The year is 2071 and mankind has given himself wings with which to reach out into space. Just as on earth, crime and the lawless flourish in space and where there’s wrongdoing, there’s money to be paid to sort it out. It’s in this vein we find the roaming spaceship known as the Bebop to be the home of mysterious ex-mafia member Spike Spiegel and former policeman Jet Black. Two unlikely characters that have a formed an alliance, a bounty hunting alliance, to track down and capture to whatever ends necessary, their bounty so that they can continue to finance their operation.

Joined by the dangerous femme-fatale with a mysterious past Faye Valentine, Data dog Ein and hyperactive teenage computer genius Ed, bounty hunting has never been more complicated… But who would want it any other way?

The Review

Hyped, loved, adored and generally praised by otaku everywhere, Cowboy Bebop could quite easily be summed up as the anime event of the late nineties. For those of you who have been living on another planet for the last five years and haven’t heard of Cowboy Bebop, let me just say that it’s one of the freshest and finest anime shows to come out of Japan not just recently, but period.

It’s main draw as a show certainly is it’s super cool and ultra stylish demeanour that extends to every aspect of it’s production. Everything about it just seems so suave and fresh, from the stylised jazz music soundtrack through to the striking character designs and artwork, there are few anime shows that are as downright cool as Cowboy Bebop. Obviously shallow factors such as being ‘cool’ and stylish aren’t enough to make an anime great or even watchable, and because of this Cowboy Bebop brings far more than just this to the table to make it one of my favourite shows of all time.

To start with, it has a clique of characters that are varied, deep and interesting to watch and develop. Chief among these characters is mysterious bounty hunter Spike, who besides being your typical drifter type, has a past that is convoluted to say the least. Although Spike comes across as a remarkably laid back and some would say ‘chilled’ individual, he is still a master of the Jeet Kune Do fighting style and is almost one with his firearms. As you can probably tell, he is one tough customer. At the same time however, he often finds himself in more scrapes than he can handle and its usually at this point that his bounty hunting associate Jet Black, decides to lend a helping hand.

The relationship that the two have is interesting to say the least as it kinda reminded me of those old buddy cop movies that always used to be on TV. Nevertheless, such a tried dynamic works well with these two as they play off of each other really well and get each other into some interesting situations. Jet is also a deeply developed character, being a former cop discharged under dubious circumstances, his past is gradually explained throughout the course of the series. Being perfectly reasoned and down-to-business, he is the perfect yin to Spike’s yang. Enter Faye Valentine, the sexy (not to mention debt ridden) femme fatale, who succeeds in disrupting their relative harmony and in doing so introduces a real wild card into the equation. Faye is impulsive, devious and calculating and while she may be all of those things, we later learn that she is also quite vulnerable and somewhat insecure, not to mention a constant supply of fan service…..

Ahem, moving on I could go on all day about how well developed the other characters are too, such as the nihilistic Vicious and the hyperactive Ed, but at the risk of revealing any more about them let me just say that they are the most entertaining and diverse ensemble cast that I have seen in an anime to date.

Speaking of entertaining, the storyline fits that bill too. Being a mixture of superb episodic plotlines and a larger background story that begins to get established fairly early on, Cowboy Bebop excels here as well. Thankfully, many of the episodes that don’t tie in directly with the main storyline are pertinent to many of the characters as such episodes serve to develop their backgrounds further, such as Ed meeting her father in one episode.

Overall the tone of the show tends to be serious. There is often a lot fighting, space combat and darker moments. The darker moments often come about when Spike’s past is given focus in the show, along with his mysterious connection with the cold blooded killer, Vicious. That said, the show does have its fair share of lighter moments too (often at Spike’s expense) which balances everything out nicely, but primarily this is a serious, extremely cool (darn it, there I go again) show.

Well i’ve been harping on about it for long enough now, so let me tell you what makes this show so coo….. um, dapper. As good as the plot and characters are in Cowboy Bebop, (and if you don’t know already, they are darn good), Cowboy Bebop wouldn’t be quite as well known or as successful as it is today if it didn’t carry with it such a sense of style. Notably, the jazz infused soundtrack playing in the background contributes largely to the stylish atmosphere that pervades throughout, as does the innumerable amounts of cool noir-esque scenes (complete with muted colour), character posing and stylish action scenes.

Compounding this sense of style, you will find that the show is packed with both illicit and explicit references to various aspects of music, movie and art culture. One reference in particular that stays in my mind, is when Spike gives a line where he describes the best way to defeat your opponent is to ‘be able to flow like water’, – a philosophical quote taken directly from martial arts master Bruce Lee, who also happens to be the pioneer of the Jeet Kune Do martial art that Spike practices. Some might say that the inclusion of such references are superfluous, personally I think it just reinforces what is already an immeasurably stylish and charismatic show and helps to put Cowboy Bebop in a league of it’s own.

Cowboy Bebop’s artwork is exceptionally well produced. The backgrounds are realised to a high level of detail, while the character designs maintain a suave, almost sleek look to their features and clothing that really encapsulate the stylish feel of the show. Combining awesome CG visuals with traditional cel drawn techniques, Cowboy Bebop’s animation remains a step above just about any other any anime production out there, managing to be fluid, smooth with never an awkward movement or jerky frame in sight.

Cowboy Bebop’s sublime visual aesthetics are further complimented by the simply awesome soundtrack that’s on offer here. Again succeeding in tying in nicely with the cool atmosphere of the show, Yoko Kanno lends her incomparable talents to the creation of the soundtrack, which is a series of accomplished jazz melodies sometimes in hybrid with more contemporary overtones. Simply sublime.

I truly would hate to see the size of the production bill for this series.

With all this positivity, surely there’s at least one flaw with Cowboy Bebop? It’s flaw is that as with many great things in life, it ends, and with the exception of the recently released Cowboy Bebop movie which takes place during the course of the TV series, the show will not continue. Although by no fault of it’s own design, i’m just bummed out that my favourite show won’t get any kind of continuation. Still, would a sequel have done the stellar original any justice?

Ultimately, this is a series that does so many things right. It’s cool, stylish, full of character and has a great plotline. It would be easy to be forever heaping praise upon Cowboy Bebop, but I guess this review has to end some time. Don’t do yourself the disservice of being the only person who actually hasn’t seen it.

Ratings Summary

Animation: A
Art: A-
Music: A+
Content: A+

Overall: A+

Review by: John-Paul Jones

Suitability for children

There is a fair amount of the claret spilt throughout the course of the show, mild profanity and whole load of Faye orientated fan service. Only really suitable for those aged 15+ then.

If you liked this why not try…

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie – Bandai Entertainment
Outlaw Star – Pioneer Animation

In a news tidbit thats either going to be labelled totally cool or totally dumb, Namco Bandai showed a new trailer of Soul Calibur IV depicting Darth Vader and Yoda as secret characters at CES.

Apparently, it will be a similar situation to Soul Calibur II whereby each format (PS3&360) will have a character exclusive to their respective machine – 360 owners get the wise green turd whereas PS3 owners get the hard breathing armored goth. While i’m sure the ironic colour coordination of those two characters to their respective consoles didn’t escape Lucasarts when they brokered the deal, logic instead seems to have, I mean the trailer depicts Mitsurugi blocking a lightsaber strike with his sword.

A lightsaber would cut through a sodding piece of metal any day of the week, anyways, with pedantic Star Wars fanboy hat firmly taken off, I can see how this will be kinda cool (just to see their endings will be worth a chuckle in all probability) but I can also see how sales of the PS3 SKU would be bigger as everyone thinks Darth Vader is cooler right?

Right?

Linkage below for the trailer if you lot want to take a look:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/29550.html

In what has to be a hellish announcement for HD-DVD owners and relief for everyobody else, Warner has finally announced that they will be solely supporting the Blu-Ray format from May this year.

To be brutally honest, I am sick and tired of having to choose between two formats, of which there is little superficial difference, with shows and movies that I enjoy being released on one and not the other. Esepcially now that Warner has jumped on board, this means that the previously annnouced Appleseed: Ex Machina will now be heading to the Blu-Ray format, along with the Matrix sequels too.

This is now officially awesome, as I dont now have to justify a £100 purchase, for just four or five films that I thought would never make it to Blu-Ray in the first place.

With Warner now backing Blu-Ray, I can only hope that brings us closer to having a single HD format in the market and that other HD-DVD ‘die hards’ switch to Blu-Ray too, as the current format ‘war’ isn’t benefitting anyone.

Review – PSN Game – Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection Online (PS3)

From the launch of the original Playstation through to this latest downloadable only title, Namco’s Tekken series has been present on every piece of Sony gaming hardware. However, while the hardware may have evolved, the series arguably has only received incremental improvements and adjustments since the leap that Tekken 2 provided over its predecessor.

In terms of just the fighting mechanics, Tekken 5: DR is the pinnacle of the Tekken IP. The finely honed fighting engine from the original Tekken 5 game, is present here, yet tightened up even more and more precisely balanced than ever before. Tekken 5 vets who plough into the title, will notice that the timings for many of their characters moves have been altered and extra moves and have been afforded to many of the fighters that are present.

Also being a conversion of the Tekken 5: DR arcade game, this home conversion brings with it not just Armor King and Eddy Gordo as separate characters but also two newcomers, Lili, a spoilt rich kid who employs a deadly variation of ballet as her fighting style, and the scarred mute Russian soldier Dragunov, who specialises in the brutal fighting style of Sambo. Thankfully, both of the characters are just as balanced as the older characters in the game and bring new styles to the table, which in a game where the styles have been very similar and predictable for the last ten years, is a good thing indeed.

Currently, for all the lucky PS3 owners out there Tekken 5: DR provides the most compelling reason yet to plonk down some cash at the Playstation Store. For just £14.99, the game is an absolute steal, with the Ghost and Ranking modes lasting a long time, especially with all the extra costumes and clothing that can be unlocked for each of the combatants. There are however a couple of problems with this downloadable title.

Firstly, there is no story mode, so wave goodbye to character prologues, epilogues and cool CG endings. Secondly, (and more crucially to the gameplay) the much touted online mode suffers from jarring lag issues that make it unresponsive at best and downright unplayable when its at its worst.

Still, it’s hard to grumble considering that £14.99 gets you all the fighters (including the extremely silly powerful end boss Jinpachi as a playable character exclusive to the PS3 version), a massively exhaustive Ghost collectable mode and of course the versus mode for endless multiplayer fun with willing friends. In addition, Tekken 5: DR for the PS3 has joined the HD era, so you crank it up to 1080p and enjoy the razor sharp visuals while you are pummelling away, even though doing so exposes the age of some of the textures, but otherwise its still a very nice game to look at.

All in all, Tekken 5: DR represents a great buy for both fans of the Tekken series and also beat-em up lovers in general. Even given the games relative aforementioned failings, the game resolutely retains the essence of Tekken, which is the great fighting mechanics and awesome versus mode. Go on, splash out while it’s still £14.99, there are many, many worse things to spend that kind of money on.

Overall Score: 8.5

Review – Gears Of War (XB360)

Few games have the kind of hyperbole and weight of expectation behind it that Gears does. I mean, hell, this is the game that is meant to make, to define a console and also the game which will debut Epic’s brand new spanky Unreal Engine 3. It’s as much the poster boy for Epic’s new tech as it is the XBOX 360 in much the same way the original Halo was back in 2001/2002, and as such there are a lot of folk out there who want to see if it stands up to scrutiny now that it’s finished and out there.

Aside from a few minor niggles, Gears comes off admirably as perhaps the finest third person action adventure we have seen in recent times, with both an astounding, if a little short single player campaign and an extremely robust multiplayer mode. The single player campaign revolves around a loosely knit story going something like this: Man has pretty much depleted every natural resource on the planet Sera, a planet not too dissimilar from our own, until they stumble across a renewable energy source called Imulsion. Of course man being man, this triggers much struggle and conflict until a mysterious race called the Locust Horde, boil up from the Earth’s crust and begin wreaking havoc on the populace at large.

So there you have it, your classic humans vs. monsters premise, and rather than add any over dramatic weight to the storyline or indeed any of the characters, the plot and the charcaters that feature in them are unapologetically cookie-cutter to the extreme. You control Marcus Fenix, a true man’s man, gruff, scarred up, loud and up for some serious ultra-violence. Marcus and his gang of ultra macho misfits are basically Gears equivalent of the marines from James Cameron’s Aliens film, dumb, gruff and ready to blast anything that moves.

Thankfully, Gears’ campaign mode triumphs not in it’s story or characters but quite simply in the robust game mechanics that it has and the sense of epic scale it gives during its many frantic battles. The gameplay in Gears is set in the third person and follows a cover and shoot based approach, whereby as the enemy approach you need to find cover where you can fire and manoeuvre from. Whilst in cover there are a number of moves that are available to you such as blind firing, leaning over walls, jumping over cover, diving out of cover or performing SWAT moves to get you from one piece of cover to the next. On the first two difficulty levels staying out of cover for extended periods doesn’t really the punish the player a huge amount, try this on the appropriately named ‘Insane’ difficulty level however, and prepare to find yourself severely punished for just being out of cover more than a couple of seconds.

All of this interaction with cover is triggered by the ‘A’ button which pretty much does everything in this game. Besides all the aforementioned cover interaction, the A button makes you evasively roll, dive and also when depressed, makes your character go into a ‘Roadie Run’ whereby you holster your weapon close to your stomach and basically do a commando sprint, complete with a nice graphical effect whereby the view is concaved slightly and you get a nice shaky ‘war cam’ look. This is all well and good but it presents a problem because when you are roadie running, you tend to get stuck to various pieces of cover that you really don’t want to, because the system sees that you are pressing A and assumes that you want be behind whatever cover you are running past. More often than not this isn’t an issue, but sometimes it can cost you your life when you are trying to dash past an enemy, but then you end up behind cover with them.

Whilst the cover and shoot mechanic my initially appear to lend itself to uninspiring and perhaps even pedestrian gameplay situations, Gears spices things up sufficiently in the campaign with a number of cool, well thought out missions that the feeling of repetition is the last thing to compromise your enjoyment of the game. Even the mechanic of just reloading itself, is deeper than one would originally perceive due to the ‘Active Reload’ system. This works with a bar with a white sweet spot, and as you reload using the right bumper button, you need to get the reload pointer in that sweet spot for an optimum reload with more powerful ammo. Failure to do this results in reloading taking twice as long and potentially leaving you vulnerable. As such I feel this stands as a nice little innovation to help polish the veneer of what could otherwise be a very repetitive combat system.

Besides the long pitched cover battles with automatic weaponary and sniper rifles, Gears revels in it’s ultra violent nature with a number of gleefully nasty weaponry. The basic Shotgun for example, will quite happily sunder a foe’s body in many different directions if they are unlucky enough to take a blast at close range, creating a mess of squelchy body parts that can be kicked around the ground in the aftermath. The Hammer of Dawn is the next weapon on the list – a hugely powerful satellite laser that can be used only where there is clear sky, and is basically a pillar of light that is dragged around by an infra red laser marker which basically turns anything it touches into gooey chunks. And finally, my personal favourite, the chainsaw. Built onto the underside of the ‘Lancer’ weapon that Marcus and his gang have, you hold ‘B’ to rev up this thing for roughly two seconds and then depress the right trigger to bury it into the anatomy of whoever is unfortunate enough to be in front of you at the time. Cue the most satisfying moment in videogame history, where there is a disturbing sense of resistance as the chainsaw gets stuck in parts of your victim before fully splitting them asunder, scattering their anatomy across the camera. I’m not sure if it’s the noise of the motor or just the carnage it causes, but using the chainsaw never gets old.

Gears biggest asset remains in it’s aesthetics. Gears is quite simply a staggering visual achievement. The European influenced architecture looks so vivid, vibrant and detailed thanks to the extremely high quality of textures and HDR lighting which are used throughout. Everything looks polished to the absolute nines, from the character models (check out the skin on both the locust and the humans), to the explosions, fire, water and particle effects, Gears Of War is quite simply the best looking game I have seen to date, and amply demonstrates Epic’s much touted Unreal Engine 3 technology as a great piece of middleware tech. Even the sound, stands out as being truly exceptional with a stirring epic score, great sound effects and of course lots of testosterone charged macho voice acting.

Another of Gears’ biggest assets is it’s multiplayer and in particular just how thoroughly robust and comprehensive it is. Gears offers two players the chance to tackle the main campaign in co-op mode, either over split screen, system link or XBOX Live, with little degradation to visual quality in split screen and a pleasingly lag free experience over XBOX Live. Even better, the way the co-op mechanic works is by utilising a drop-in/drop-out system, whereby a human player can take the role of the other character at any point during any mission in the campaign. For those with a competitive streak Gears caters you too, with a number of different game types. What game types you have on offer for competitive play over split screen, system link or Xbox Live, are Warzone, Assassination or Execution.

Warzone is basically your run-of-the-mill team deathmatch mode whereby teams of opposing COG (marine) and Locust Horde players face off until the other team is dead and then move onto the next round, with the team having the most rounds won, winning the game. In Assassination, each team has a captain and the game is over as soon as that captain is killed, with the player holding the lowest score becoming the captain in the next round. Thus this creates an interesting need for strategic play to keep the captain alive. Interestingly, only the captain can pick up the larger weapons such as the torque bow or the longshot rocket launcher, but they can drop them for other players to use too making the captain a weapon carrier as well as a protectable objective. And finally, in Execution, the idea is similar to Warzone where each team has to destroy members of the other team, the difference lies in the way this is achieved. In this gametype unless a team member is eviscerated by a chainsaw or by a shotgun blast, they now have to be put out of their misery with an execution resulting in a particularly horrific curb stomp. If this execution is not done in time, the player may revive themselves by tapping ‘A’ or be revived by a fellow player in a very similar manner to how another player would revive their partner in co-op mode.

If it wasn’t for the quality of Gears’ multiplayer maps, the gameplay modes would get old quick, as truth be told there simply isn’t enough variety between just three different modes. Nevertheless, the tight design of the maps, along with the promise of additional maps (two of which have arrived as of writing) and the robust, tactical nature of the cover and shoot gameplay, ensure that Gears will be top of Xbox Live user lists for a good while to come yet.

Gears of War is simply a fantastically well thought out shooter, that strips bare what people expect from third person shooters and builds from the ground up a staggeringly epic display of what we should expect from this genre in the Next-Generation. Minor niggles aside, Epic have created a game that is more than just a standard bearer for new technology and graphical benchmarks but one whose role is equally important in it’s reinvigoration of a genre.

Overall Score: 9.2