Irritating Stick’s box art badness is legendary. Its artwork basically comprises of three things 1) the word ‘irritating’ 2) the word ‘stick’, and 3) a first person picture of a Gundam Robot waving a baton around. The game is based on Japanese game show that asks contestants to pull a stick through a metal maze without letting that stick become irritated – very similar to those carnival games thingies you see at…um…carnivals.
Zelda’s Adventure is an atrociously bad game. In fact, it’s so bad that if anybody asks us what that peculiar top-down Zelda game thing was on the Philips CDi we’ll simply answer with ’a cancelled Russian pilot for the ITV television show Knightmare’.
Here is the voyeuristic advert for the show; a remarkable picture of an open window with some sinister incandescent light thrown in for good measure. Uninspired stuff!
Exhibit A) A great television show
Exhibit B) A naff videogame
So I finally got to see The Dark Knight at the weekend. I was staggered at how impressive it was. That television spot I keep seeing is completely correct…as far as fantastical stories about men in bat costumes fighting megalomaniac clowns go; it really was ‘an intelligent crime drama’.
The film is brilliantly written, and although in places it does feel a little clunky, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan should be commended for punching out an impressively fleshed out script, boasting a mindbending amount of plot detours, characters and set-pieces, and then tying everything together in a coherent package.
By the way, those coming away unsatisfied by the film not really digging into the origin of The Joker (not a problem for me as I actually kind of dug how the Joker was inexplicably introduced into the picture, and the boyish, yet calculating, reboot Nolan had written for the character) should check out Alan Moore’s excellent graphic novel, A Killing Joke.
A flashy looking portable Megadrive is being released by Blaze and comes pre-loaded with 20 classic Megadrive games. Inside the machine you’re getting Sonic and Knuckles, Shinobi, Decap Attack, Flicky, Sonic Spinball and Jewel Master (which we really should get around to playing).
Most, if not all, of the early SMS game boxes were blessed with the type of half-arsed imagery that made you want to pull out a felt tip pen and finish the job yourself, but Sega would take laziness to all sorts of new levels with the box designs for their Sega Card series.
Now imagine how drab the world of packaging would be if everything was packaged in this way. Tins of beans with images of hands holding tins of beans, teabags plastered with pictures of hands holding teabags, yoghurt boxes with….well, you get the idea.
Can you please tell me when it was that the evolution of roadways has ever been a mystery? You know that thing you drive to and from work on everyday, hardly the worlds best kept secret.
Also, why have you split the thing over three episodes? Surely the history of the motorway isn’t that rich, unless of course you’re kicking things off with the Romans, in which case you can ignore that previous question.
Crappy controls and infuriating camera, but regardless I still enjoy this game. I’m going to avoid sounding like a complete asshole, blathering about how enchanting and fragile the game looks and how it’s probably pushing some kind of envelope under the door of the Tate Modern gallery, because, if I’m completely honest, I like this game for three reasons: that dingly dangly music that plays when you sit on the save couch, its simplicity (in narrative, gameplay and the way it builds a relationship with the player – through action not cut-scenes) and its pace. Perfectly manageable portions of puzzle action and surprisingly little backtracking – even though ironically, in the penultimate level, you learn that you’ve been running round in a giant castle-shaped circle for seven hours – means ICO is a real charmer, and those niggling flaws soon become lost inside its labyrinthine levels.
Essentially, the game’s story involves freeing and pulling a member of Kings Of Leon around a vast castle, and protecting her from shadows of gorillas and spiders. If these mysterious black apparitions, which have been dispatched by a fierce witch-like deity, capture your companion she will be whisked away and dragged through a hole in the floor. If this happens your character, a small Viking boy named ICO, is given a small window of opportunity to reach her and pull her to safety. The fragile band member is pretty useless though, she can open doors and hold hands and that’s about it, so you’ll continually find yourself running, pulling levers and jumping precarious gaps in order to guide her to safety.
She’s high maintenance and is the most bone-idle videogame character you’re ever likely to come across; the perfect virtual incarnation of an egotistical superstar, with you playing a horned publicist wiping their batty with a plank of wood.
Every relationship that occurs in this game essentially develops in real-time, and while the game is relatively short – it holds about 6-8 hours worth of gameplay – there’s a real sense of reward and satisfaction found from finishing the game.
Sadly, due to limited release and poor responses from the US and Japan, the game is pretty hard to come by now, with copies on eBay fetching some pretty princely sums. Should you come by a copy though I urge you to pick it up, having replayed it this month it’s lost none of its charm, a timeless classic if ever I’ve replayed one.
Finally got to see this film this weekend after hearing 30 or so people since its release say something to the tune of ‘the ending is disappointing’ (I’m wildly paraphrasing here). Anyway, I will now be adding my name to this facebook group. The film on the whole was great; a tense cat-and-mouse thriller where Tommy Lee Jones acts like his brain is slowly being eaten away by a parasite. Sadly, it proves quite grating after a while seeing every shot of Jones talking complete gibberish and theorising about waves and old age. The other two characters, however, the older brother from the Goonies and Frankenstein’s monster are quite brilliant, also there was a swimming dog that gets shot about 20 minutes into the picture (not sure who he/she was but they played their part well). Sadly though, the great culminates into an unsatisfying finale that leaves a taste of rat’s back in your mouth (I’m wildly over-exaggerating here). Overall, 3/5 Stars.
