GERARDAMO: Game of the Week 4

Alright, in honor of Groundhog's Day, I've picked Clock Tower, for the SNES/PC, as my game of the week this week. Okay... Groundhog's Day has nothing to do with Clock Tower at all. Clock Tower is a pointin-n-clickin, survival horror, good time. I haven't played many survival horror games that aren't Silent Hill 3, but Clock Tower is easily the most terrifying game I have ever played... Period. (Maybe it's just because most games on the SNES seemed to scare me, nothing against the SNES, it's just the way the graphics are.) 

You play as Jennifer, a poor orphan girl who nobody seems to love. You and your other girly friends are adopted by Mr. Barrows, who you never really meet. Kinda sketchy isn't it? You get sent away to his appropriately named Clock Tower. So, yeah, it's a point-and-click adventure. You click around to move, find clues, and not die. However, EVERYTHING in this game kills you. Not kidding. Walk up to a mirror, a hand pops out of it and strangles you. Oo! Pretty bird in a cage, walk  up to it, and it flies out if its cage and pecks you to death. So, the genre of this game pretty much defines the story. No, not point-and-click... Survival horror. Just, don't die. You'll come across a few antagonists who all want to kill you. The one you'll encounter most often is the Scissorman. He's a small, midgit looking man who you later learn is just a nine-year-old. He chases you around with a giant pair of scissors, and, you guessed it, he tries to kill you! Everyone tries to kill you!  Not much else to say about this game, but the video has commentary. I realize that it's kinda boring to watch because, well, there's nothing happening. But, this is the scariest I've played, because when you're the person playing, you have no idea what the hell is going to pop out and kill you. There were... 3 sequels, I think. The American versions have really different titles than the Japanese versions, so I'm still confused. There's also rumors that there will be a movie adaptation of this game, and I highly support any such thing, provided that it's actually a horror movie and not some torture porno. It definitely is one of the few games that could make good movies. (That and Indigo Prophecy)

Video by Couldagonemad88

I realize that these classic games aren't probably the most entertaining thing to read, but they aren't really meant to be informative reviews on what's good and bad about the game. Obviously, the games I choose are all going to be games that I enjoyed, and I'm not going to actually write a review about a 14-year-old game. Think of them more as reccomendations for games that I'd rather you people get your own opinions about since you may have missed them instead of me telling you that I really like them.

GERARDAMO: Game of the Week 3

Alright, this is kind of late. Actually, I'm not even posting this in the right week anymore. (But I actually editted the date I posted this so I could write my next game without looking like I did a double post) I was just going to skip this week entirely, but it's 10:30 in the morning, and society has broken the rule that is "Don't wake the Gerard before noon" by having the asshole next-door start revving up his truck, only to realize that his penis is still the same size anyway. So I write this from bed as I'm still trying to wake up.

I had trouble thinking of a game this week, mostly because instead of playing any old games this week, I clocked in about... 30 hours of IIDX (Google it, YouTube it, whatever. It's FUN, but also too new for me to use as a game of the week.) Do you know what it is now? Good. So I was in a techno-y, trance kind of mood this week, so I've decided to highlight Rez by Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Rez was originally released on the Dreamcast. It's the strange combination between arcade shooter and music game. The entire game is made up of vector graphics (Again, if you don't know what I'm talking about, Wikipedia can also be your friend.) and it looks freaking awesome. Rez doesn't have much of a story, but none of my favorite classic games do, for that matter. Apparently, there's some big computer virus that... I don't know... Threatens to make everyone stop using PC's and ruin the world of computers as we know it or something... It's REALLY not important at all. 5 levels later you find out that the virus just wants to be loved, and I'm pretty sure there's some innuendo for sex in there somewhere.

Anyway, the actual gameplay in this is nothing short of an experience that I truly believe everyone needs to, well, experience. It moves like a typical rail-shooter, you know, move your camera around and shoot, that simple. However, you can lock on to up to 8 viruses and shoot them. Every level starts in an empty, black abyss with a bass drum quietly pulsing in the background. A few viruses fly by, and make for easy combos, and then some tiny box flies by. Shoot that box 8 times. The level will then start to develop. Nothing too much, maybe some cubes will appear in the environment, and a synthesizer will start humming something. You'll start to see more complex patterns of enemies. And you keep going on with this. Enemies fly by, shoot them. Box flies by, shoot it a lot. The level starts to become more detailed until you see vectorized architecture everywhere, and the background music transforms into an absorbing, thumping trance track. This game just sucks you in.

Of course, what would any rail shooter be without things shooting back at you? Most of the viruses do, and since you're not invincible, it will do damage. If you get hit, you level down. You'll go from an almost human looking thing to a less looking human thing to a less looking human thing etc. to a sphere, and then you die. But there is hope! You can level up, too. Viruses drop powerups, and if you collect enough of them, you can level up back to your human form, until your human-type thing reaches a state of enlightenment and becomes a pulsing amoeba of trancely awesome.

That's it really. The game is stupid simple. You don't play Rez for the challenge, you play it for the experience. Interesting note of trivia. When Rez was released for the PS2 in Japan, it came with a USB device called a Trance Vibrator. It was an oval-y shaped piece of plastic that, as the name suggests, vibrated. It had stronger vibrations than the DualShock2 did, and it was designed so it could be held on to, put in your pocket, or my favorite (In terms of where this trivia is going!), sat on. Yes, they advertised that you could sit on it. So, once you had your Trance Vibrator wherever you wanted it, it would pulse along to the music, pulling you into the game even more. However, vibration feels good, and you don't think I would have said Vibrator that many times just because it tickles my lips to say it, do you? Yes, as you would have expected, there were several reports of Trance Vibrators being used as... Well... You know... OTHER vibrators.

Rez is available on the Dreamcast and the PS2. In 2008, it was re-released on XBLA as Rez HD, with super shiny awesome new HD graphics! It still remains my favorite and most played Live Arcade game to this day (That's right SoulCalibur, maybe you should have given your XBLA port a better widescreen, instead of a Windows 3.1 wallpaper border!), and I HIGHLY reccomend, no, DEMAND that you stay on your couch and make the best 10 dollar purchase you can ever make, or at least just get the demo. You have no excuses anymore as to why you can't play this game.

This video is from Rez HD. Video by cktg

GERARDAMO: Game of the Week 2

My game of the week this week is probably one of the most addictive games I've ever played. It's No One Can Stop Mr. Domino for the PlayStation. The game's protagonist is (GASP!) Mr. Domino... Or Ms. Domino, or a small variety of other dominos. The point of the game is to... Well... Lay dominoes. You run around on a two-and-a-half D plane laying down a trail of dominoes in order to trigger switches, that will activate somewhere else on the stage, and they can keep your chain going if you set it up right. The switches start out as little things, like making a stack of dice fall down or just raising up a little tiny slope, to bigger things, like triggering a roller coaster or summoning a tank. It's not as easy as it sounds though. You have a limited number of dominoes, so you can't just lay them down wherever you feel. You have to use them sparingly if you want to set up a chain ranging across the level. You do get your dominoes back, though, after you knock some over. (You knock them over in some hot domino-on-domino action. Well... Mr. Domino just runs into your dominoes and knocks them over.) You have a time limit as well. Overtime, your domino gradually fades to black and slows down. (You'd think turning black would make him run faster, wouldn't you?) This game has very simple gameplay that's easy to learn and difficult to master. The balance between action and puzzling is absolutely perfect, but hard for me to explain, so I'll have YouTube do it instead. As with most of my favorite games, this game has a very strong Japanese personality that doesn't appear to have been translated... At all. (The menus have been translated, but this game is obviously VERY Japanese.) 

Video by WTFOMGMyNameDoesntFi

This game has great music too. I would have put up another video that came with the music, but this was the only one I could find.

GERARDAMO on: Sonic Unleashed

Wait, what? GERARDAMO does reviews on new games? Damn right I do, I just seldom play them. Now, I realize that this game has been out for a small while now, but most of the other reviews I've seen for this game simply write this game off as another Sonic game, and therefore bad. Well, it is a bad game, probably because it is a new Sonic game. But, where all of these other reviews couldn't find anything decent in this game, there were parts of Sonic Unleashed where I couldn't help but turn into a grinning doofus from the plain, simple fun the game offered. Well... For the 1/3 of the game that was fun anyway.

The game is split into 3 different parts: daytime levels, nighttime levels, and looking around for the levels. The daytime levels are reminiscent of the Sega Genesis trilogy, but it also innovates on that classic game play by... well... Being new. There are also 3D sections that play like the Sonic Adventure series, just a lot faster. Sometimes it can be too fast. Your little blue blur will be running along, and suddenly, he'll disappear, and a few seconds later, you'll have realized you fell in a hole, but it will have been too late. Minus 1 life. Speaking of lives, I've noticed that many people are complaining about the life system, calling the game out for using a trail-and-error system. I say, isn't this what games used to do anyway? Have gamers really gotten so bad at games that don't involve shooting down squads of terrorists and dropping the fag-bomb over Xbox LIVE that they resort to throwing hissy fits when a game is too hard and punishes you by making you start over because you just plain fucking suck? That's just sad. Yes, it's frustrating when you die, but learn from that mistake and TRY GETTING PAST THE OBSTACLE SOME OTHER WAY. Anyway, yeah. 2D part is very fun. The transitions between 2D and 3D are fantastic, and there are times when they will be combined, feeling very reminiscent of NiGHTS into dreams... (Which is quite possibly Sega's greatest game ever.) 

Unfortunately, some moron on Sonic Team decided that Sonic needed to take a break from all that running... A loooooooong break. So, they decided that Sonic should turn into a werewolf, a stretchy werewolf, a stretchy werewolf in a bad beat 'em up platformer. Well, it's not that bad. If it weren't in a Sonic game, it probably would have went over very well. It has a rather deep combat system to prevent the monotony that comes from most beat 'em ups with the regular "PRESS A OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND HE DEAD NOW YAY" gameplay. But... It's Sonic. For one thing, he's a hedgehog, not a werewolf. For another, nobody wants to play a slow Sonic game... Nobody. Get it right, Sega. 

So, that's another 1/3 of the game. Wait, Gerard, that's only 2/3, you suck at math. No I don't. The other 1/3 simply consists of trying to find the damn level you want to play. This is not enjoyable at all. I don't want to get rewarded for playing a game simply by getting to actually play it. It can take upwards of half an hour to actually find the level you're supposed to play, and because of that, I could only stomach about 4 hours of this game before I quit. You go around trying to find some towns person to talk to, and they might tell you where the level  is, or they might just try to sell you a hot dog, or ice cream, or mushrooms, which would probably be a good investment and make this part of the game stomachable. 

So, when the majority of gameplay in a game is bad, yes, it's a bad game. It's sad, because the part that Sega got right is fun. Really fun. Really really really really really fucking fun. Sega did take a step in the right direction, and I have high hopes for the next Sonic game they might be releasing (When's the last time that happened?) After all, they did develop an entirely new engine for this game, I doubt they would use it for one game. Hopefully, Sega will learn from these mistakes. They're so close to fixing a problem that they shouldn't have had in the first place, but as an avid Sega fanboy, I'm not going to give up on Sonic. No, Sonic 2006 is still a terrible game that I'll never, EVER play, but it looks like Sega is starting to finally get things right. It's just a shame that if they had just shortened Sonic Unleashed and removed all of the shit that didn't belong in it, it would have been a perfect game.