I was at a housewarming party on friday, and we had a lot of fun playing an old classic Pinball machine from 1976! It was Elton John’s Captain Fantastic! Haha..
First round we played I actually won, but I guess that was just beginner’s luck because every game after that I lost.. =(
I took some pictures of this beautiful machine: ^^
Or “Bally Capt. Fantastic”, look how silly Elton John was ^___^ I was player 2 ^_^ 43.180 point, however people later got up to around 70.000.. but I was proud since I had never even played on a real Pinball machine before. It was completely different from the pinballs on video games..and much harder! “Feel them bumpers” and “Buzz them buzzers champ” ^_^
And tonight I’ve been finishing a game that I started a looong time ago with my friend Becky. It was Borderlands for Xbox 360, we had already finished the story mode and taken every achievement in the game except the two last ones for the final expansion pack. These were not hard in particular, however they take a long time to finish. It’s the Underdome expansion, and it’s basically just about killing off hordes of enemies. Each stage takes about 2-3 hours, and there was a total of 6 of them.. We only had two left, but never really took the time to finish them until today, so JIPPIE! Today we have maxed out the achievements for Borderlands (amazingly awesome game btw) ^_^
Borderlands massacre .. hehe
Somebody told me that Pac-Land had been an original arcade, preceding even Super Mario and being one of the first side scrolling platform games made. This got me curious, so I went on wikipedia and gained knew knowledge about the game, the story and ALSO the gameplay!
Apparently when you reach the end of stage 3 (Fairy-Land) you have a fairy in your hat which Pac-Man gives to the Fairy Queen and receives Magic Boots in return that can make him jump repeatedly.. this is definitely NOT obvious in the game, there isn’t even a slight animation of anything out of the ordinary happening. Therefore I never made it any further than stage 4, where there’s immediately a giant gap I couldn’t get passed.
Now being able to jump more than once changes everything, I beat that stage in the first try! But then there’s more stages with the same objective, reach Fairy Land, get boots, go back, but they have a higher difficulty level.. so I got stuck on stage 5, where you have once again the ability to only jump ones and there’s a gap that just cannot be crossed.. I give up and this is officially an annoying, frustrating and therefore SHITTY game >_<
Here’s a video of how you get passed the first gap at least, and you get a glimpse of stage 5 ;D It’s also in better quality recording than the last Pac-Land video, but the graphics of the game still suck!! Enjoy!
As most gamers know, it’s become a yearly tradition to celebrate Winter-een-mas, from January 25th to Janury 31st each year. For those of you who don’t know what Winter-een-mas is, here’s the wikipedia explanation: “The annual week long celebration of video games and the people that play them. Winter-een-mas is a holiday that takes place every year from January 25 to 31, but is also commonly celebrated for a month. The entire month of January constitutes the Winter-een-mas season, very similar to the “Christmas season”, where people begin to gear up for the holiday, and get into the spirit of things. The holiday was started by the fictional character Ethan in webcomic Ctrl-Alt-Del by Tim Buckley. Its stated goal is to “celebrate the joy of video gaming“. Many gaming stores, such as EB Games, celebrate the holiday.”
Here’s the origins:
So how are you going to celebrate Winter-een-mas? I myself will go back and play som all time favorite games, try out some new ones and on saturday join a bunch of friends for a gaming weekend where everybody is set to finish a game of their own choice.
Continuing on the theme of games based on movies, here’s a review of Die Hard Trilogy for Sega Saturn!
As the title suggests, all three movies are in the game. You get to choose which of the films you want to play (after way too many loading screens…) so I started with the first one.
First of all I was amazed at how AWFUL the graphics were, then again I’m used to either Xbox 360, or the 8- & 16-bit 2D games, so I always get surprised seeing the stages of graphical evolvement in-between there… I’ve played quite a lot of Dreamcast, but this is just before that, where CD was the shit and they put real footage and films into the games to make them look “better”, but it was just awful.. Even the N64 games looks better o_O they at least mainly stayed with the ‘cartoony’ graphics instead of trying to make it look ‘real’.
I also got really annoyed by the controls, it was stiff and really hard to move the dude around, and there was no aim, you just kind of pointed and shot.. however after I while you get into it, and all the violence just starts getting entertaining. All of a sudden I realized I was enjoying the game, and I made it to stage two, but then I died, and after dying you’re game over (!). One life, no continues. That’s die hard.. I guess it’s realistic though, but still, this is supposed to be a game!
So basically the game is about shooting down bad guys and saving hostages and you have to advance through the different floors of the building. But I went straight onto the second movie…
Now this movie had a totally different game style! Instead of third person you go into first person and you can’t steer the camera. You just get on the camera ride through the airport and try to aim and shoot at the… baddies.. (sometimes russian, sometimes german..) WHOOPS! Still you have to try to save hostages that are being guarded by bad guys, however I tend to keep killing them off.. unintentionally of course ;D
It’s quite brutal at times…
Just look at that skeleton flying towards me!! =D
This game never gives you any instructions.. there was a ticking number that kept occurring during this stage and it said “SAFE”.. Safe what? Is there a safe being broken into at the airport? How do I stop it? I can’t go past the camera angles that the game gives me, so I just kept popping bad guys. The “SAFE” timer usually just counted to zero and nothing happened. But like the fourth time it appeared I was game over after it finished counting.. o_O I don’t know why, so I went on to the next movie instead.
In this game you can just forget everything you’ve learned in the previous two, cause this is once again a whole new type of game. It’s a racing game!
You just get put in a car and have to drive down a linear road, without instructions.. I just stepped on it and tried to make it to the end of the road (cause I figured there must be something I’m heading towards..) as fast as I could, and I didn’t make it…. I had 3 tries here (instead of the previous one-miss-and-you’re-Game-Over type of attitude the previous two movies had), but I still wasn’t close to making it.. even though I didn’t crash or anything in at least one of the tries.. I don’t get it!!!
Shitty shitty game! This just pissed me off! I started liking the first movie, but then the game just thought “Oh yeah? you like this? well fuck you, then we’ll make you play completely different!”
Another reoccurring thing in this game was explosions… everywhere.. all the time.. they just blew shit up.. I guess it’s a “reference” to the movie? I dunno..
Woah, what does that last one remind you of? yikes… O_o but Sega didn’t know at the time :/
So anyway, here’s a movie I put together of the gameplay through the three movies of Die Hard Trilogy on Sega Saturn, check it out ^_^
AVGN made a review of another Die Hard game, it’s worth watching =) It’s Die Hard for NES.
Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES) had it’s glory days in the 80’s. Back then game developers sometimes had trouble coming up with new exciting game ideas, so they started making games from popular movies! You would think that this sounds like a great idea, if it’s a great movie with a great story why wouldn’t people wanna buy it and play it to relive those special moments they remember so dearly from the movie screen? Well a lot of people did buy them, and probably got disappointed seeing their favorite actors pixelated in a little blurry dot on the screen with horrible controls, sloppy programming and generally poor reenactments of the original plot/story or scenes. These games were made as a way for the movie and game companies to milk a few extra bucks out of a successful blockbuster film.
This doesn’t mean that all movie themed games are bad, there’s also a lot of examples of games based on movies that are in fact quite brilliant, sometimes even more enjoyable than the movie itself! Like Aladin for Sega Mega Drive (or Genesis), or most of the Batman games across all platforms.
But from my experience, the majority of games based on movies are horrendous experiences. Even back in the Atari age some movies made it into the gaming scene.. such as E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.. there are no words of describing how BAD this game is. I might try to show you sometime in another post. Some other really bad movie themed games have been reviewed amazingly by AVGN (Angry Video Game Nerd) such as Independence Day, Rambo, Terminator and all the Spielberg games. Visit the links to watch his movies.
Still today most big movies get turned into a game, and there are more shitty ones than good ones in my opinion.. Like the Golden Compass.. horrible >_< The control’s are worthless, and it’s frustrating. Even though it was super cheap (I guess they figured out quite quickly how shitty this game was) it still wasn’t worth the money..
I was surfing around and found some youtube movies and forum talk about a NES game that was based on the old 80’s series Full House, they called the game Full House Tournament Fighter, and it took some surfing around before I realized it was a spoof, the game never existed. Though it wouldn’t have surprised me if it did! This made me think about some big 80’s movies and what they would have looked like if they were made into NES games. Here’s my ideas: Imagine if they would have made The Shining into a NES title, wouldn’t that have been awesome?? That’s a movie themed game I would definitely have gotten. You would start off playing as the Kid, avoiding ghosts like the twins and other supernatural things trying to survive and at the end change to play as Jack and try to hunt down your family with an axe through the maze. That would have been amazing and original!!
Another awesome NES game would have been the Poltergeist! They could have made a supernatural-looking environment where the game plays out in the world where they have taken the little girl, and the goal would be to have the girl find her way back to the light and her family in a platforming adventure kind of style. Just imagine! =D That would have been a scary and different game! With references to the movie, a great soundtrack and some cutscenes it would have been awesome!! “They’re here..”
Now here’s some examples of games that would have been awful if they ever would have been converted to the NES!
Thank god they never made this, however so many other shitty games were made based on movies that one more wouldn’t really have made a difference..
Awful…
Or this:
Yikes!
Now I’m off to edit some gaming clips of my next review. Feel free to comment if you have any other fun ideas of games based of movies never made, or opinions about some movie games I didn’t mention ^_^
Tonight I started trying out all my new Sega Saturn games. The first one was Lemmings 3D. I like Lemmings, the old ones for Sega Mega Drive (a.k.a. Genesis), so I figured this couldn’t go wrong. Lemmings, in 3D!! Just the thought of it was blowing my mind.. how disappointed was I…
This game was the biggest WTF-experience for me this year, how they were even allowed to release this kind of shit eludes me.. The graphics are horrible, however I guess they were restricted by the capacity of the Saturn, but I mean, there are better looking games for that console. The controls are indescribable, nothing makes sense and no matter what you are trying to press nothing happens that advances the gameplay. I just moved around the camera angle for 30 minutes and could hardly get that to work in my favor..
Why did they even try to make Lemmings anything other than a 2-D side-scroller, this is what works best for this type of game, why change something that was already good? They could have just enhanced the graphics and maybe added some quirky extra actions with the evolved Saturn controller that had more buttons?
Well just watch this video I made of the gameplay and you will understand why this game sucks ass…
Retro Video Gaming 
