Sonic Generations

Sonic Generations came out in the United Kingdom on Friday, and since it falls into the category of being either a Sonic Game,  GTA Game, or 12 years in the making, I’m going to do a review, like those ones I used to do in them there olden days on the FileFront.

So, the famous blue blur is 20 years old. Makes me feel younger in a way, since Sonic is the first thing I really remember about being a child, it feels like it’s my 20th birthday too. Meh, who am I kidding? I’m turning into an old fart. Sonic, on the other hand, is looking better than ever, and this title is the final return to full form that has been building now for the past few years.

The turn-around for Sonic came in 2008′s Sonic Unleashed. Moving away from pointlessly complicated storylines, overbearing new characters and glitch-filled gameplay, Unleashed showed us that Sonic could be cool again. It introduced the new standard Sonic gameplay which has been carried through to Sonic Colours, and now Sonic Generations:  apart from that nasty ware-hog business, Unleashed was amazing.

Then came Colours, taking the Unleashed daytime formula and making it even better – with levels designed around an interplanetary theme park, we saw a return to the crazy, colourful level styles of the original Sonic games. Not to mention Wisps, those guys are so cute.

Now we have Sonic Generations – which is the good, the bad, and the rather ugly outings  of the past 20 years rolled into one. On paper this sounds worrying, so, does the game correct the past 10 years of Sonic mistakes?

The answer is, sort of.

The storyline for this game is almost entirely absent, there is a vague plot that runs through the game about the “Time Eater” and whatnot, but there are 12 cutscenes in the entire game, and most of them are short and inconsequential.  In a way I’m a bit disappointed by this, since Sonic Colours had a fairly okay plot, that progressed the story and had lots of humor in it. There is humor in this game too, but there’s so little done in the cutscenes and they’re so few that, really, they feel out of place even being there at all.

The levels themselves are largely great. You play through one level from every major Sonic game, both as “Classic” Sonic (the cute round one) and “Modern” Sonic (The tall retarded one) – Classic plays pretty much 1:1 as he did in Sonic 1 through Sonic & Knuckles, while Modern plays as he did largely in Unleashed, with a few minor tweaks. The actual level designs are largely faithful to the originals with one or two little new bits thrown in, but overall, nothing substantially new here.

There are two main reasons to play this game;

1: Playing classic Sonic levels in awesome 2.5D
2: Playing Dreamcast & Sonic 06 levels with gameplay that isn’t totally fucked.

The further you get into the game, the more recycled things seem to become, with obvious reasons. Playing the classic levels was a total joy and you feel like these levels  have the most effort put into them. The Dreamcast era levels feel like they’ve been upgraded but, since the original versions where 3D already, you can’t help but feel it’s the same stuff presented in a much nicer way. The modern era levels, apart from Crisis City (it was nice to play this one in a less broken way, shame though, just shows Sonic 06 could have been decent) – just feel like harder versions of levels I’ve already played.

A nice touch is the fact that you can unlock music tracks to use in different levels – including remastered and remixed tracks from classic Sonic games. This adds some nice little touches, for example, playing Speed Highway as Classic Sonic with Starlight Zone as the music does feel like you’re playing the latter instead. There’s a few other nice matches in there, i.e. playing Toxic Caves from Sonic Spinball over Chemical Plant or Marble Zone over Crisis City. There’s also a ton of artwork to unlock which is quite a cool thing to have, as it spans the entire 20 year history of Sonic.

Each level comprises of one main act and five side mission acts for each Sonic. There are also rival battles between Metal Sonic, Shadow and Silver. We also have the Red Ring hunt returning from Sonic Colours – but despite all this, I am afraid this game is far, far too short. This game takes, roughly, from putting the disc in to completing everything the game has to offer, one weekend. Compared to Sonic Colours, this game falls completely flat in this department.

Infact, if you removed the nostalgia element from this game, it would be a rather poor outing when compared to Colours, which had far more to see and do. Each level in Colours had it’s own set of red rings to collect, and each level had 6 full acts and a boss to complete. The side acts in Generations are normally quite short, mission based and take place in the same level as Act 1, unlike colours where each act was completely unique and mostly of a decent size. Colours also had the Sonic Simulator for even more fun.

The bosses in this game are also stupendously easy to defeat, even on “hard” mode. The final boss was hard, but only because I was expecting something harder and was trying to figure out what I had to do – imagine my surprise where the aim of the final boss is to just boost, and thats it. Infact it’s completely fucking appalling, and that isn’t a phrase I should be using for this game.

The Good;

• Great graphics and music
• Great levels to play
• Gameplay is spot on in main levels

Tbe Bad;

• Storyline isn’t very in-depth
• Cut scenes are rather badly rendered
• Game is very short, takes no time at all to 100% it

The Ugly;

• Shockingly easy boss battles
• No real love or attention to the menu system compared to colours
• Online play is rather basic and suffering from the usual leaderboard hacking rendering it worthless.

Yeah, it’d be unfair for me to say I’m totally disappointed in this game, it does bring joy to the 5 year old who played the Classics, and the 15 year old who had a Dreamcast, and it brings some closure to the disturbed 20 year old who was forced to suffer through Bestiality and Silver the Hedgehog a couple years back. I’d be lying, however, if I said I didn’t expect more. This game is over far too soon, it leaves you wanting for more. God, I hope there’s more. I hope there’s some cracking DLC levels coming out for this in the future.

Sadly, however, I doubt this will be the case. Shame.

Duke Nukem Forever Dissapointing

It’s been 12 years in the making, but finally, after all these years, Duke Nukem Forever has released to Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. I picked up a copy of the game on Saturday afternoon, and after a few days of play, I can’t escape the conclusion that this game has some disappointing downfalls.

Lets focus on the positives first. The game is incredibly interactive, Duke can interact with almost any item in the environment, often with hilarious consequences. This isn’t just a gimmick, using items boosts your overall “Ego” (Duke has ego instead of a health bar) – the game starts off teaching you how to piss in a urinal and draw on a whiteboard (start as you mean to go on, that’s what I always say. This is the level we’re working on here, folks).

Duke’s one liners are as classic as ever. All the classic lines are there, but a lot of new material is in there too, keeping funny. That’s about all the positives I can think of, though. The rest of the characters in this game are dull, lifeless and boring. They also have a tendency to look in one fixed direction when talking rather than facing the player. The non-playable characters in this game feel like they’ve been through several engine changes, a lot of them seem retextured several times. In fact, a lot of the textures in this game seem poor by modern standards, you can’t help but notice how pixelated and grainy they can be. Weather this is intentional or not for the “retro” feel, I don’t know.

The storyline isn’t exactly a classic either. Okay, I wasn’t expecting much in this department, but the storyline is neither engaging nor particularly funny. Duke’s lines are the only real source of humor, but the setting, situations and characters merely exist for the sake of it. In many ways this makes the game feel like it was born out of the 90′s (which it was) – games have moved on a lot since then, and this feels different from any game you’d expect to pick up these days.

For anyone looking for a classic style First Person Shooter, this game will be worth getting. It’s been a while since a decent FPS that was simple and fun to play like this was created, and the old mentality of levels that have small puzzles of where to go next and what to do next are something that you seldom get in games these days, which seem to increasingly play themselves with set pieces and cut scenes.  What this games does is bring nostalga value, and that isn’t a bad thing.

There’s one unforgivable sin, however, one that this game cannot and will not be allowed to live down – the loading times. When you look at games like Fallout, you see a game where you have massive scale environments and activity with minimum loading screens and loading time – this is the complete opposite. Levels are relatively short and loading times between them excessively long. This would be forgivable if it wasn’t for the fact that, every time you die, the entire level loads again. When you’re on a high difficulty setting, this means you can spend 30 seconds playing and 75 seconds waiting for a load. This is frustrating beyond belief.  There is no need in this day and age for a game to reload the entire level for a checkpoint.

All in all then, this game does not even remotely live up to the hype. It never could, but it falls a lot further flat than I ever expected it would do. As a famous reviewer once said, “Duke Nukem Forever is going to have to cure at least two different types of cancer to live up to the hype after all these years.” – crying shame. If only it were 1999.

Day 17 of the great PSN outage.

First of all I would just like to point out that, according to Google AdSense’s terms and conditions, I am not allowed to make any requests for clickthroughs on the above advertisements. As such, I will not make any such request, and won’t even mention the subject.

It’s been 17 days since PlayStation 3 users across the globe were sent into the dark ages, and reports have been circulating that several of their users have now reverted into a pre-historic state. Run down estates such as Clifton and The Valley have decended into war, as those who can’t afford to pay for a proper service struggle to find anything to do except stab each other and burn cars.

Few lucky enough to afford £5.99 a month have upgraded to a proper gaming network. Unfortunately this price is beyond that which the average PS3 user can afford, and as such I’m launching a new charity, “Live for Live”, to help get those suffering onto Xbox Live.

Please donate just £1 a month to help a starving and frightened young poor person onto Xbox Live. Your donation will provide;

• Clean servers for a child for an entire year, free of hackers.
• A reliable and functional online experience.
• The comfort that their online service will always be waiting for them when they get home.
• An online store that won’t loose their credit card details.
• Sanctuary from pointless law-suits, illegal data mining and privacy breaches.
• Access to a network run by a company that isn’t entirely incompetent.
• A gift bag and monthly letters from your adopted gamer.

You can make so much difference to a person’s life just by donating toward’s the Live for Live donation campaign. Thank you.

Pre-Rumble Ramble – Fat Wrestlers Rule

Much is made these days of America’s problem with butter. Didn’t know they had a problem with butter? They do. And bacon, and fudge and sandwiches that replace bread with cheese-filled sausage patties. It’s a broken record in the media and we all get it. But let’s not overlook all the good that fat has done for America. For instance, fat keeps you warm. If I ever get abducted by dark forces and dumped in the deep Arctic with Keira Knightley, I am going to be sledding to safety on her frozen carcass after a single day. Not only does fat ensure Americans will outlive Hollywood starlets and sometimes deflect errant slaps, it also entertains us. John Candy, John Belushi, John Goodman (the Holy John Trinity) have shown that big is hilarious. And in the WWE, big means athletic. Fat means nimble. Elephantine means competitive. Yes, the wrestling world is the last, best place for the criminally obese to rise to stardom and even be heroes. Heroes with boobies. Let’s take a look at some of the best athletes ever trained by numerous hams.

1. Kamala

Billed as the Ugandan Giant, Kamala’s real name was James Harris and he was from Mississippi, which is sometimes mistaken for Uganda by Kentuckians. Part of his gimmick included eating live chickens or, as you might expect, holding a chicken, waiting for the camera to cut away, then spitting feathers out. The idea of a giant African cannibal (or whatever the hell) who weighs around 400lbs is clearly awesome because this sentence can’t be ended in a logical fashion so here comes the period. On the bright side, James is still around and he writes music now, according to Wikipedia.

2. Yokozuna

Yokozuna is a real title for sumo wrestlers when they prove to be the most immovable of immovable objects. Because racial sensitivity is very high in the WWE’s list of proprieties, like Kamala, Yokozuna portrayed someone he wasn’t. In this case, he was a Samoan named Rodney pretending to be a Japanese sumo wrestler. All you really need is black hair, a giant diaper and a hell of a lot of body to fill that diaper and you qualify as honorary Japanese, it’s in their constitution. Anyway, Yokozuna is often credited as being the fattest wrestler ever, weighing in at around 600lbs. Do you know what else weighs 600lbs? 6 Keira Knightleys.

3. Mabel/Viscera/Big Daddy V

Look at that bosom. Holy crap. Big Daddy V, aka guy with a terrible name, has spent a lot of his wrestling career wearing parachutes and other billowy fabrics because he is pretty spherical, with the exception of those taters. Dude carries his weight poorly. He has gone in and out of the WWE under a number of different nicknames but pretty much the same cup size. His awesomeness was cemented, however, when he took up The World’s Biggest Love Machine gimmick and tried to do Trish Stratus, which is offputting yet somehow fantastic.

4. Earthquake John Tenta

Tenta had one of the best debuts in wrestling history. The camera kept “accidentally’ panning across this really huge guy in the audience during the broadcast, until the time came when Hulk Hogan, in a display of bravado inspired by his desire to forget he was married to a leather bound CHUD (I assume) asked for anyone at all in the audience to come sit on his back while he did push ups. Any volunteer at all. A little girl pointed to the innocent-looking fat guy on the end of the aisle. How could this go wrong or be staged? Long story short, Earthquake totally sat on Hulk Hogan, like a lot. Because when you’re that big, sitting is actually an offensive maneuver.

5. Rikishi Solafa Fatu

Sometimes known as Rikishi, he was a big Samoan dude. The only thing I know about the Samoan people, as a matter of fact, is that they breed wicked huge wrestlers. What you need to know about this particular wrestler is that his uniform, for quite a while, consisted of a thong up his ass that facilitated his very athletic signature move the “Stink Face.” Yeah, he just rubbed his giant ass on people’s faces.

6. Giant Haystacks

This one’s a bit of a classic but worth mentioning because there are few land animals in North America that are bigger than this man used to be. Giant Haystacks, another wrestler victimized by terribly terrible nicknames, looked like every Deliverance nightmare you ever had. He was nearly 7 feet tall, nearly 700lbs, bearded and used a rope as a belt. Fun Fact – dude didn’t need a belt. Rumor has it he ate 3lbs of bacon and a dozen eggs for breakfast every day. I tried that once and shit an oil slick for the next three days.

7. Happy Humphrey

Another blast from the past, Humphrey used to wrestle back when the world was all in black and white and men wore hats just because. And why was he so happy? Hard to say, he weighed 800lbs. Obviously I never saw this guy wrestle but I find it hard to believe he did more than simply exist in the ring. Word has it Humphrey was discovered on a farm and made his debut by wrestling a bear for half an hour. I appreciate how none of what I just said sounds even remotely real, but it’s still the story we’re supposed to believe. In his prime, it’s said he would eat 15 chickens in a single sitting.

8. King Kong Bundy

An icon and one-time guest star on Married with Children for no other reason than the word “Bundy”, King Kong Bundy was the fat guy when wrestling rose to prominence and a generation realized for the first time that a fat man in a unitard could be seen as more than a neighborhood sex offender.

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9. Tugboat

Also known as Typhoon, Tugboat also had a brief stint as The Shockmaster, known for being one of the awesomest gimmicks ever because it was unintentionally butchered by Tugboat when, during his debut, he tripped and fell on his ass. A fat guy falling down? Priceless.

10. Abdullah the Butcher

It’s said that Abdullah the Butcher was raised in the Sudan and was batshit insane and that’s almost true. He was raised in Windsor, Ontario and his real name is Larry. Windsor, for those who don’t know, is Detroit of Canada, so like Detroit of America, only with beaver traps and drunker hobos. With a skull full of grooves that may or may not have been surgically implemented, Abdullah is famous for being insanely hardcore and for having what has to be a pair of K cups. He also owns a BBQ in Atlanta. Tasty!

11. Bastion Booger

While none of these men are particularly attractive, Bastion Booger wins an award for looking like a Gorg from Fraggle Rock. Arguably if your name is Bastion Booger odds are your gimmick isn’t going to be that of a suave lady’s man, but damn, look at that guy. And his Barbarella-meets-seatbelts outfit wasn’t helping either. However, if not for Bastion Booger, where would Larry the Cable Guy be today?

12. The Big Show

Big Show suffers the same condition as the awesomest wrestler of all time, Andre the Giant, acromegaly, though he has had surgery to stop the condition from progressing any further. However, thanks to its effects, the man is pretty much a giant at over 7 feet tall and about 480lbs. The most notable moment of his career, however, involved a guest appearance on Conan O’Brien in which he, along with Tom Selleck, were scared into a pale-knuckled panic by elderly sex educator Sue Johansson as she strapped the Accommodator, a chin-mounted dildo, to her face, on live TV. Can a giant cry? Yes he can.