By GamerChris (Sorry for a lack of What’s So Wrong With…Again…)
Welcome to part 5 of the Badly Drawn Penguins retrospective! Here are more strips from the earlier days, with a bit of self-reference and more gaming strips. Let’s check it out…Enjoy.
Warning: After the jump 56k Modems might die. You have been warned. Read More…
By GamerChris
(Misses the old days)
Nintendo fanboy that I am, I actually grew up playing on the Sega Mega Drive (Or Sega Genesis for those of you who have a console named after some rock band or the first book of the Bible…) Ever since I can remember the Mega Drive has been in my house (My dad used me as an excuse to get a games console it seems…Before I could actually play the dang thing)
In the beginning we only had one game which had it’s home permanently inside the console- Sonic The Hedgehog. For a long time I sat there and watched my dad play through the game non-stop (Something he would later do with Super Mario Bros which he once took a day off work just to complete) Until one day I decided it was my turn.
On Christmas Day, 1996, while my family were in the kitchen I flipped the on switch of my Sega Mega Drive and started playing through Green Hill Zone. The game was amazing. The speed, the colours, the characters, it was just a whole new world. Then he came.
Dr. Robotnik (Fuck Eggman, it’s Robotnik) arrived with is pain in the ass pendulum ball and I repeated the patterns I learnt from watching my dad, bouncing Sonic off the top of him and moving from one side of the screen to another until he was finally defeated. I was overjoyed and instantly rushed to my dad to rave about my triumph. The gamer in GamerChris was born.
(This is where it all began.)
As the years past I expanded my Mega Drive collection from this local run electronics store which sold games on the side as they mainly dealt with televisions. Whenever my dad would drive me there to buy a new game I would press my face up against the glass where the cartridges were sold, either choosing games based on their funny sounding names (DeCapAttack) or my familiarity with certain fictional characters (Quackshot Starring Donald Duck) Then I saw the cart. I had found Sonic The Hedgehog 2. Read More…
A few months ago, I finished Grand Theft Auto IV. Overall, I really enjoyed the experience. It probably is the game I have played the most on my 360. I never followed the hype or promotion of this game, and initially, I really wasn’t planning on buying it. I ended up purchasing it though, just to rekindle the old memories I had of raising hell in Grand Theft Auto III . I never finished GTA III, so I thought I’d do the same with IV. Do a couple missions here and there, throw in some codes, and for the rest of the time I’d just go insane, sandbox style.
My original intent eventually subsided. With Grand Theft Auto IV, I really became more interested in actually finishing and playing out the story, then just raising cane like I did in the previous Grand Theft Auto games. Rockstar definitely put out some effort into improving this franchise. Not only did they shift focus to the story and the missions, but they also polished up, added, and removed different game mechanics and elements to make the game much more enjoyable. Although Grand Theft Auto IV was definitely a step up both technologically and in depth from the other games in the series, it is still not without it’s faults.
Grand Theft Auto IV gave me great hope for the interactive future of stealing cars, killing people, and picking up sluts. I’d love to see this franchise improve and possibly even fairly earn that 10 spot from mass game reviews. I doubt that anyone at Rockstar will ever read this, but as for Grand Theft Auto V and the future of this series, here is what I’m hoping for.
The Problem:
This is in response to something somebody said to me in response to me bitching about Yoda & Vader. He said I was expecting too much out of Soul Calibur/Fighting Games. Well, I don’t see why people AREN’T expecting too much out of this genre. It needs to get with the times. Arcade style fighting games are great, when you’re in an Arcade! Crushing an AI isn’t anything spectacular to get excited about, and so you’re pretty much purchasing a fighting game in order to play it multiplayer. Before the dawn of wi-fi you were pretty much required to find a friend IRL to play fighting games against. Some people had these friends who enjoyed fighting games, other people didn’t, or other people eventually were so good at the fighting games that their friends didn’t want to play them anymore.
Anywho… what I’m trying to get at here is the following:
Fighting games have so much potential that hasn’t been tapped. They have decent plots and amazing stories when you get deep down into it. However, most of what we’ve seen up until now is a character bio in a manual and then a few screenshots of the character’s ending after you defeat the final boss/opponent. So, you look at me and you say “Hey Link, fighting games don’t need a plot, they just need to be fun.” So, I say to you “Look at the FPS genre and look at how it improved. Bioshock, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, etc.” Nowadays do you think people would settle for a generic shooter that said “Okay, so you’re this guy, and you’re in a first person view, and you have a gun, and there are aliens, kill the aliens.” and that was the entire game? Oh wait… that’s Halo. ::dodges the incoming tomatoes:: But, seriously, even Halo has a plot and a franchise of books and movies planned around it, it has depth if you look for it.
So, what’s the solution to this supposed problem with the fighting genre? Story Modes with… STORY. I want character specific cutscenes before and after my battles, maybe even during them! I want branching plots/choices for each character. I want a cool spin-off game that DOESN’T suck. I want a sweet extra mode built into the fighting game that has some sort depth.
Now, a lot of this currently exists, and I’ll try and give a few examples of what I mean, and how these are all steps in the right direction for fighting games.
Read More…
