I’m going through and adding some of the funky features that used to grace the site before the Big Death of January ‘10. There’s now a link that you can click to share a post you like on Facebook (which I encourage you to do, as much as you darn well please) and I’ve also slapped my gamercard on here.
If you want to add me on LIVE by all means please do – but only if you intend to actually have an online gaming session at some point. I mostly play L4D2 online (not a fan of Halo or MW2 – yes such people do exist!) so if you’re a zombie killer then add away (PM me to let me know that you found my gamertag on here so I know where you found me!)
What else? That’s it for now. Hoping to add the ‘About the Author’ box back (which will be viewable at the bottom of each permalink page for a post) along with a Java chat room, a ’share to Twitter’ plugin and some other shizzle.
Any ideas, leave a comment…
The Mana Bar – as mentioned in our interview with the lovely Guy Blomberg of Australian Gamer – finally has an opening date, so those of you in Queensland, make note:
20th March 2010
No tickets required, first come first serve on entry (which is free, by the way – as is the gaming) and entry will be granted to those who are well dressed and up for a good night of gaming and drinking.
You can visit the Mana Bar’s website at www.manabar.com.au for address and more details!
In Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, half the fun of playing the game at all is venturing online and playing the game with real live people instead of the AI bots that are more likely to shoot at a wall than the hunter currently lashing your health away with its deadly talons.
Campaign games are fun for this very reason alone. It makes the experience much more real, much more intense – you never know if you’re going to have to leave a man behind, a feat not really optional with the AI bots, since they will always linger by you and never be forced to run off to the chopper because a Tank and a Jockey are in tow.
The problem I have with Left 4 Dead 2 is the Scavenge and Versus modes. I may be alone in thinking this, but playing as the Infected just isn’t that fun. Your health bar is ridiculously low, and since you can choose where to spawn, you can quite easily pick the wrong spot and either go running into the sharp end of an axe, or just find the wrong spot entirely and find yourself wandering around with nothing much to do.
It’s most likely because I’m not very good at playing the infected. When it comes to playing the survivors, Single Player mode exists pretty much as a practice run, so you get to know the levels, the characters and the outlay without having to worry about an angry teammate yelling at you for turning the wrong corner or opening that door with the fire behind it in Dead Center.
With the Infected, you have to just instantly know the kind of infected you’re playing and how to deal with them. I was chuffed when I got my first go at playing the charger, only to find that I couldn’t see where the hell I was going because of that big old arm of his and went running off in the wrong direction.
Or perhaps that’s just me. Either way, the game felt like it was constantly over too quickly and I never felt that I had the chance to ‘get into it’ properly and really enjoy it.
This interview was thankfully saved before GoG broke down, so I thought I would post it again here for those who may not have seen it. Thanks again to Yug for this interview, it’s appreciated!
1. Whose idea was it to start Australian Gamer?
Yug: Pretty sure it was mine actually, although there’s no way anything would have happened if Matt wasn’t keen. I remember we were pissed off that Dance Dance Revolution kept getting delayed in Australia, and I found the domain name AustralianGamer.com was available … which was better than the other name we were interested in registering – mattandyug.com
2. How important, as reviewers, do you feel it is to play, complete and review a game on the day of release?
Yug: Personally? Not at all. In fact, after having experienced the pressure of playing a game to a review deadline, I can’t imagine a worse way to genuinely critique a game.
3. If you have to spend 10 years locked in a room with one game only, what game would it be and why?
Yug: 10 years is a long time – can it be an online game? If not, I’d probably say Starcraft (one of my most favourite games of all time, plus you can spend ages creating your own levels and scenarios).
4. With such stringent censorship laws in Australia placed on violent or ‘offensive’ video games, do you sometimes find it difficult to review such a game to its full potential?
Yug: The crazy thing is usually the deciding factor isn’t even a big issue. Like in Fallout 3 – renaming the drug. If the merits of a game are based purely on its shock value, then the game was in trouble regardless of the censorship. That said, the difference in atmosphere between the Left 4 Dead 2 the Australian and US version is huge because of the censorship – but at the end of the day, we are AUSTRALIAN Gamer, and will review the Australian version of the game with the censorship issue firmly in mind.
5. For those who aren’t aware – tell us a bit about your games bar The Mana Bar – what should people expect when it opens?
Yug: The Mana Bar is the first dedicated next gen console video game bar in the world. Go there, have some drinks, play guitar hero or the latest games that have just been released. It’s run by myself, Yahtzee of Zero Puncutation fame, Pras from Sega Creative Assembly, and Shay who actually has the experience in running bars. We’ll be opening in February 2010 in Brisbane, Australia.
6. Where do you see Australian Gamer being in five years time?
Yug: Personally I’m pretty happy with it these days, I think we provide something unique and different enough that people enjoy it. I think we’ll always strive for more content and news, and I’d like to see some of the rest of the team start to get the exposure, opportunities and recognition that Matt and I have.
7. AG fans will be highly aware that Yahtzee Croshaw is a good friend and part-time Podcaster on AG – how did you come to meet Yahtzee?
Yug: We actually interviewed him for AustralianGamer.com way back when, but I didn’t actually meet him until I went to a THQ Studio Australia ‘industry party’. His housemate worked there, and my girlfriend worked there, and they both brought each of us along respectively. I don’t think we really became good mates though until I took him out to the nightclubs a few weeks later and we got horribly drunk – the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
8. Have you ever done a Podcast stone cold sober? ;o)
Yug: Yes … I think … I mean yes. I prefer at least one or two drinks first though – especially if it’s a live podcast 
10. And finally, if you had the option of destroying every copy of a game, which one would it be?
Yug: World of Warcraft. Just so Matt would shut the fuck up about it.
You’ve probably noticed the Q&A with Graham Stark of Loading Ready Run/Unskippable on the website. The interview with Guy Blomberg of Australian Gamer/Game Damage/Mana Bar will be up in a couple of days (we managed to save it! Phew!) and with any luck we’ll get a few questions answered by the infamous Geoff of Achievement Hunter – yeah, you know the guy. I’m sure anyone with an XBox and access to YouTube knows the guy by now.
Gamesound, our music reviews by Lee Chrimes should be making an appearance shortly and guest reviewer Ian Austin should be back any minute now dropping F-Bombs on games that deserve to die. I hear he’s been playing Avatar. Marvellous.
Keep your eyes peeled and I’ll keep you posted!
Dear Peter Molyneux,
On behalf of everyone who was pulled up in the hype of Fable I and II and then let down by clunky movement, a character with laughable anatomical proportions, a pathetic excuse for a moral choice system, boring and repetitive battles, far-too-easy levelling up and cashing in systems… I could go on.
Oh, but I enjoyed Fable II. Especially the ‘ghost CO-OP’ thing and the online integration. They were great fun, thanks for thinking of those of us who have friends. But you lost my vote for gaming president of the universe when you ended an apparently ‘epic’ game with a god damned quicktime event.
I mean… really?
So now I feel that the natural course of things is to move onto the topic of Project Natal. Let me make one thing clear, when people come home and play on the Wii, with a Wii-mote connected to a tennis racket or golf club peripheral, one can immerse themself (to an extent) into the game and feel a twang of joy when they make a stellar drop-shot against Federa, winning the match hands down.
What we don’t do, Mr. Molyneux, is come home from a long day at work with the sole intention of playing a $200 game of charades. Nobody wants to play the latest Left 4 Dead add-on holding their hands up and squeezing an imaginary trigger, or whopping an invisible cricket bat around.
You talk about relating, Mr. Molyneux… have you ever met a fan of gaming? We like our controllers. We like our buttons. We like pulling off combos with the buttons on those controllers.
… I won’t even go into what could happen if you release Natal for Dead or Alive. Jesus.
Yours respectfully,
R.
Infamous for his dry humour and video sketches with endings that make you pull a neck muscle laughing, Graham Stark has been part of the Loading Ready Run and Unskippable teams for quite some time, and is doing rather well for himself.
Rachel managed to drag him away from the camera long enough to ask him some questions.
1. Unskippable looks great fun to make – did you ever think it’d take off the way it did?
Unskippable is a ton of fun to make! We certainly never thought it would become as popular as it is. In fact, we almost didn’t enter it in the Escapist’s film festival. Due to the nature of comedy, and especially of something like Unskippable where we have to go over the jokes again and again to refine them, by the time you finish it, the jokes aren’t funny to you anymore.
We didn’t think our original entry was good enough, because we’d been working on it so much. As a comedian, you have to trust your past self and move forward with the knowledge that the joke WAS funny, and it WILL be funny to other people, even though you’re sick of it.
We’re thrilled we decided to enter it after all.
2. How did the idea of a weekly video sketch on Loading Ready Run come about and how did you manage to find willing actors?
Paul and I had the idea years ago because, being the movie and comedy buffs we are, we’d made some amateur videos together and had a blast doing it, so we decided to make more of them and put them online. It’s important that this was before YouTube and “video on the net” was a relatively new idea, meaning we had to figure out a bunch of problem that nobody had encountered yet.
The “willing actors” were just our friends. Initially everyone helped out in a strictly “hey, can you be in this video I’m doing” capacity, but we’ve really solidified into a committed crew over the last seven years. We’ve all been friends for so long that it almost feels more like hanging out with friends, than actual work. Almost!
3. How did the idea of ENN on the Escapist come about?
We had been speaking to Russ Pitts, Editor-in-Chief of the Escapist, about ideas for new series, and Kathleen and I had been discussing a comedy-news program focussing on gaming. Then, with Paul and Jeremy, we developed the series with Russ into what it became.
Comparisons to other shows have been made, but more than anything the inspiration was a Canadian comedy-news program called This Hour Has 22 Minutes. They mixed mockery of real stories with wholly fabricated ones in a way that we really like.
4. You seem to have a wide array of videos and projects going out weekly online. Do you find it tough to meet the deadlines?
It can be, but we’ve been doing this for so long that we’ve gotten pretty good it. It’s really more the planning ahead of time that can be a challenge.
Ultimately, a lot of the deadline aspect falls to me, since I do the editing, which is the last step in production. After doing this for seven years, I’ve refined my workflow and I’m pretty quick. Which isn’t to say there aren’t still very, very late nights but now that this is my job, I’ve got more time to commit to it.
More than that, we’ve all really stepped up in terms of organization and planning in a way that… to be frank, we used to totally fail at. In all our time we’ve never missed a single week, but sometimes we were cutting it exceedingly close.
5. For those who don’t know, Paul Sanders is your partner in crime in Unskippable – how did you come to meet him?
Paul and I have actually known each longer other than any other LRR crewmember. We originally met in a Grade 4/5 split class in elementary school (he’s a year older than I am) and we got along really well. He ended up moving to a different school, but we kept in touch and years later we made an animated short for my high school’s film festival. After that, it took a couple years, but LRR just happened.
6. What are your plans for the future of online video sketches? Are you considering perhaps going toward television?
We’d like to do more videos, if you can believe it! Now that we’re licensing our weekly content as well, there’s opportunity for more people to put more of their time into the videos. Watch for more!
When we first started we thought that TV was our inevitable goal, but as we’ve grown as comedians and artists so to has the internet as a medium and we’re pretty happy where we are. We’ve managed to find in The Escapist, a website that really values creative content, and—shockingly—pays for it. For the time being, we are committed to the internet.
7. Do you have a favourite video game at the moment?
Well, I just (like, yesterday) picked up Bioshock 2 and that is proving to be a wonderful return to the world of the first game.Recently though I’ve been playing Shadow Complex for the XBLA, which, speaking as a fan of Metroid, is a fantastically made throwback to that style of game.
I also just beat Bayonetta a game that was marketed in such a way that I dismissed it out of hand as titillation and nothing else. Let me tell you, I was wrong. That game is a ton of fun, and hilarious. It knows it ridiculous, and plays that up. It’s a supremely well-refined action game.
8. Who do you think is the most well-rounded video game character ever made?
The comedian in me wants to say Kirby. Or Vectorman, in his own way. Both very well-rounded.
I’m sorry, that was a terrible joke.
That’s a tough question, especially since no matter my answer, someone is going to disagree with me. Everyone has different definitions of good character.
On one hand there’s characters like Balthier or Ashe from FFXII, both of whom surprised me with the depth of their characterization, considering it was a Final Fantasy game. On the other hand, and despite the series’ convoluted plot, Solid Snake from the Metal Gear games is an incredibly deep character, especially if you’ve played MGS4. I urge every fan of the series to play that game asap, if only because it actually explains everything.
I’m also going to take this as a chance to highly recommend Persona 4 as the most original, creative and fun RPG I’ve played in a long time. The characters (excepting your blank-slate PC) are amazingly well fleshed out, and the whole game is written phenomenally well. It’s like playing a genuinely funny, well-written anime. And I mean that in a good way!
9. Story is important depending on what kind of game you’re playing but the other two are chicken and egg to me.
Character design (and moreover, design in general) is hugely important to me, but playability is just as important. You can have great design with terrible gameplay and vice versa, but without both, the game is still crap.
Design draws me in, gameplay keeps me there.
10. If you could destroy one video game for all eternity, which one would it be?
Now that really is a tough call. Over the course of doing Unskippable we’ve done some fantastic games, but we’ve seen some of the absolute dregs as well.
Most recently, I think I’d have to go with either XBlades or Bullet Witch for the XBox 360. They both combine the same faults: Far too much time and attention spent creating a female main character who was clearly designed entirely for sex appeal (and failed, btw), and not enough was paid to making a game that wasn’t a massive pile of fetid awfulness.
They both, easily, rank as the worst games I’ve ever played, from design, to gameplay, to their mere intent.
There are so many games today that implement some kind of moral choice system into basic gameplay. Games like Fable I and II, Dragon Age and Mass Effect 1 and 2 are the most noteworthy of candidates for such gameplay.
You’ve all seen how it works. You get a conversation or a physical decision you have to make and you can either take the nice route that will earn you goodwill points, the evil route that will learn you, well, evil points and the neutral route that will either earn you a bit of both or not do much of anything.
This is great, though anyone who has played any of the above games will have to admit that at least once they’ve chosen to be a complete and utter arse for the sake of simply seeing what happens. Sometimes it makes the people around you fear you and run around in a rather comic fashion (a la Fable), sometimes it doesn’t do much, but it will simply implement a different conversation (a la Mass Effect) or sometimes, in the best example of a moral choice system I’ve ever seen, members can actually leave your team for good, potentially changing the main storyline (a la Dragon Age).
Of course one thing I will never understand, something I perhaps will always cringe at both Peter Moleyneux and Bioware for, is the evil = ugly stance. In Mass Effect 2, choosing more Renegade conversation options will make your scars more prominent and will generally just make you look a bit hungover.
And here is where I get to my point: they’re entirely useless for the most part (Dragon Age excepted), these systems. I don’t know about other games, but when I make a bad moral choice, I want it to have ramifications on the plot, on my character’s outcome. I don’t want my character to be too vile to look at because I chose to turn away instead of help, but mysteriously have an entire team of faithful subjects willing to attend to my every whim.
In Fable II, I decided to play the evil route, by killing anything and everything in sight. I had horns, people fled in fear and children wept and the mere sight of me. However, deciding I was bored of all the screaming, I decided to adopt the moral route. You know what it took? One sizeable donation to a homeless guy sitting on a bridge. Within seconds, my good and purity bars had rocketed, I had a halo over my head and the same people, afraid only moments before, were lavishing me with compliments.
This really took me out of the game and made me wonder what the point of that was.
Whilst it’s quite enjoyable to play both Paragon and Renegade roles in Mass Effect 2, what makes the ‘visual’ consequences of the moral choice system so useless in my book, is that for a certain amount of minerals you can simply buy a machine that gets installed in the Medical Bay that will remove your scars permanently, and no amount of Renegade conversation or actions will ever bring them back. It’s pricey, but if you ‘grind’ for minerals when you’ve got a minute, you’ll have enough in no time.
For years the console war has been going on, mainly between Microsoft’s XBox and Sony’s Playstation franchises. Nintendo’s Wii/DS doesn’t really factor in here because, apart from the odd game, Nintendo has always aimed towards the more casual gamer. At the moment it seems to be the XBox – v – Playstation when it comes to ‘proper’ games that take a real gamer to finish them on Expert with a blindfold. Whilst drunk.
The unexpected winner so far in the last few months is – surprisingly – the PC! Okay so it’s not a console, but there are alot of my favourite games purchased only recently (Dragon Age: Origins, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 and Mass Effect 2 to name a handful) that seem to be PC games that are adapted for console play.
Of course shooter games are always going to be better for the PC, for the fluidity of the mouse/aim controls, but lately it seems as though these games are only designed for consoles as an afterthought. Entire layouts of the game are changed, playability becomes more limited on a console, aiming is less accurate and slower, animations have to be toned down because the console can’t handle it… repeat ad nauseam.
Of course you have to have a pretty nifty PC for any decent game to work nowadays (Left 4 Dead 2 alone takes up a whopping 7 GB of hard drive space), but you ask any FPS gamer (even of the old original Half Life game) what they think of the PC version compared to the console version and you may be there a while because he won’t be able to stop laughing out of irritatingly smug joy.
Although I wouldn’t personally brand Left 4 Dead as a ’survival horror’ game in the sense that Silent Hill or the original Alone in the Dark games are survival horror, I’d be lying if I said more than once I haven’t jumped so much I nearly knocked my tea over when I’ve turned a corner to find that I’ve just stuck my foot half a metre up a witch’s behind. If I’ve been lucky enough to run away unscathed my poor cup of tea is placed in further jeopardy when I spin around to see a Hunter trying to remove my intestines from their rightful place.
All that in mind, I have lately found myself laughing at one or two of the characters that make it impossible to immerse myself in the atmosphere. I’m not talking in a ‘wow check Ellis out he’s got some messed up stories’ funny, but unintentionally funny. Some might say it is a ‘bad’ kind of funny, but I’m not so sure!
Bill is like an Alzheimer’s patient who was unfortunate enough to find a gun on his way out of the nursing home. He hates Helicopters. He hates vampires. Zombies, he hasn’t yet voiced an opinion on. Louis is like a squirrel on crystal meth (if it came in pill form, of course) and Francis is so butch that it makes me wonder if the developers meant to design him like a giant penis with a beard. There’s just no way anything else could contain so much testosterone.
Sadly Zoey to date remains giggle-free, until you throw her off a building and listen to her ridiculous screams as she plummets to a survivor-flavoured mush on the ground. But perhaps that’s just me.
But this is what I love about Left 4 Dead. It’s gory, shocking and if any of the thousands of online players were thrown into this situation, it’s be downright horrific but Valve certainly knows when to place their tongue firmly in cheek and give the fans just the slightest of winks.