Posts Tagged ‘video games’

Donkey Kong: jump barrel, jump barrel, jump monkey.

Last weekend, someone said to me – while, I might add, they were sitting in my living room, on my sofa – that video games had no story.

I’m a calm and collected kind of guy. I respect the fact that other people have opinions that are nearly as valid as my own. So it was only when this person went on to say the following that I was forced to beat them to death with their leg.

“Look at the typical video game story,” this person said, “There’s nothing to it. I mean… what’s the story in Donkey Kong? Jump barrel, jump barrel, jump monkey.”

Donkey Kong. Which was first released in 1981, back when Willy Gates was allegedly telling us 640k was plenty for everyone and when people in the UK were starting to wonder whether or not Thatcherism was a good idea. Donkey Kong: a groundbreaking game in many ways, not least for introducing Mario and the concept of characterisation to gaming. Donkey Kong: not a fantastic story. Not in 1981. They didn’t have room for a story.

It’s a bit like saying, “Sci-fi films have rubbish special effects. Look at Logan’s Run.” Jump barrel, jump barrel, jump monkey indeed.

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Tekken 6: great game that Namco wants you to hate

I’ve been playing Tekken since 1999. Since Tekken 3, basically.

I got very good at Tekken 3. At university, my friend and I got so good that all our other friends refused to play us. With the lack of external competition, we focussed on beating each other. We played with the fight timer off, and rounds got longer and longer and longer. When we figured out reversals… we had at least a couple of fights that lasted ten minutes or more, because neither of us could get in a good hit.

After that, Tekken Tag and Tekken 4 passed. I played them a bit, liked them. My friend didn’t so much, and it wasn’t until Tekken 5 turned up that we began regularly playing again.

Tekken 5 was a good game – a great game, even. Except for one aspect: Jinpachi. The final boss from hell. Mostly human, he had a mouth where his stomach should be that shot giant unblockable fireballs. Cheap, overpowered and painfully frustrating. I beat him once with each character to get all the endings, and then never faced him again. He wasn’t any fun.

You’d think Namco would learn. You’d think, after all the complaining about Jinpachi and about Seth from Street Fighter 4 (a Doctor Manhatten lookalike that makes Jinpachi look like the Star Wars kid), Namco would think: people don’t enjoy this.

Maybe they did think that. Maybe they want us to hate Tekken 6.

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I was meant to write a blog post today, but I didn’t. I started one, but I didn’t finish it. It was going to be about the really annoying boss in the new Tekken game. I hate him.

I didn’t finish the post because I was playing Tekken last night. Sorry. I might write it later this week. Maybe tomorrow, but I doubt it because I want to play Tekken some more.

For now, here’s a video. Watch to find out why I usually unplug my headset if I’m online with the Xbox.

Update: I finally wrote the Tekken article. Read it here…

El futuro del journalismo: copio y pasto!

I have, as we all know, great respect for journalists. In the UK, journalism is a singularly snobby and inbred profession, filled with cantankerous buffoons who earn too much money for too much opinion, which ensures we receive nothing but the highest quality of reporting and commentary.

The internet has proved a massive boon for these bastions of bollocks, as now all they have to do is cut and paste any old twaddle and suddenly they have a news story, such as this famous little gem that appeared in several of the London freebies and the Private Eye last month. Fact checking? Pah! Fact checking is for pussies.

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Art by Suuqin

The new Nintendo Wii Sports Resort was the month’s best-seller game compare to other video game sales were falling. I guess what’s best/special about the Wii console would be the way of interaction rather than just sitting down.

Desert Bus 2008 – the inspirational dumbasses for our own special dumbasses

The guys who started all this – this blog with no purpose, let alone clearly defined mission statement – are a bunch of dumbasses.

And then there are those folks who inspired the guys.

In November 2008, back in the old wild west days of the internet, we found this website where these guys were streaming video of themselves playing a video game – they were driving a virtual bus through a never changing CGI landscape of pus-coloured sand and black tarmac. Eight hours of straight road, through this crappily rendered desert, for … charity? Yes. “Some people will do anything for money,” we said. And so began the collision and division of cells, the joyous process of our brains going tick-tick-tick-DING!

“I have an idea,” one of us said. The others promptly picked the idea up and ran away with it, and put out a hit on that first fellow. That first guy, well he’s buried out there in an unmarked grave, in that cemetery that Kate looks at all day long. She looks at it sometimes and smiles. He’s left a beautiful legacy behind.

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