Best Trailer Ever

Bionic Commando Rearmed came out a few years back. I didn't buy it, and from all reports it was rubbish.

That said, if you click the play button, you'll witness the most absorbing, spine tingling, mind blowing trailer a game has ever had. Slick as fuck.

Game Industry Insults

Overheard at work:

"Your moms colission shape is so large that she's unable to pass through doorways"
"Your moms colission shape is so large that pedestrian NPC's are pushed off the pavement into oncoming traffic"

etcetera.

RESIDENT EVIL 2

When I was about 12 my dad had to work away a lot, darting all about the country in the week, and would only be home to play Mario Kart or Goldeneye or whatever was on our play list at the weekends. I was his most trusted gaming informant and would make sure to get N64 magazine hot of the press and give him a rundown of current gaming affairs every Friday.

In 1999, there was only one game I was excited for: Resident Evil 2. I’d said Resident Evil 2 so many times that year that the words didn’t make sense to me anymore. I didn’t care that I was 6 years too young for it, I’d played Resident Evil 1 at John Barnard’s house, and if it was ok for him to have it, it was good for me. Mom wasn’t impressed, but who cares, she was the bad guy, I knew Dad was game.

Every month I’d riffle through N64 magazine’s pages to the release date list. If it was May, RE2’s release date was May, then when it came to June, it said June, and so on. I would send my poor parents down town hourly to check if Game had Resident Evil 2, and every time, they would say game says its out next month. This went on for about 6 months. Then, in one issue of N64 magazine it read:

“THE SUN HAS GOT HIS HAT ON. HIP HIP HIP HOORAY. THE SUN HAS GOT HIS HAT ON, RESIDENT EVIL 2 ON N64 TODAY”

It was hardly fucking subtle, and pretty odd, but these words were written in huge bold caps in front of a field of sunflowers (which I hate more than Guybrush hates porcelain) in a full colour 2 Page ad. Mom, get on the phone to Game. It’s time.

“well spit it out woman, do they have it or not?” I said, or something to that effect while mom nervously enquired on the phone. Idiot kept calling asking if they had it for the Nintendo. The Nintendo’s a company not a console for fucks sake!

“They’ve got it, finally, but it’s out of stock” she said, and removed her self from the room. My heart sank and I turned to Dad. This was not to be the weekend where we blew zombies heads off.

So, like every Monday, he left for another exotic destination, Stoke it was this time, and my parting words were “check if they’ve got it in Stoke dad”. He smiled, and I knew I could trust him. With that, he was off.

Friday could not come soon enough. No amount of Pokemon card swapping, Tazo stacking, or Pog pinging could quench my thirst for the blood of the zombie scum of Raccoon City. I dashed home, burst through the door feet first, past Mom, to whom I payed no attention, let my school bag whip round me like a hula hoop to the floor, and was greeted to my Dads sorry eyes.

“Sorry mate, they didn’t have it”

All of the girls in my life rolled into one have never broken my heart as much as that sentence. I took a deep breath, understood that he’d tried his best and put on a brave face, because well, we’d still got some of the gold ratings on pilotwings to get.

I dragged my bag across the floor like Eyeore on a bad day and It thunked with misery against each of the stairs as I climbed up to my room.

My head was hung so low that I didn’t immediately work out why there was a roll of yellow and black warning tape on the floor outside my bedroom door.

But then, that was it, and I slowly began to look up.

My doorway was webbed with black and yellow warning tape from floor to ceiling like something out of a nightmare. In the centre of the was a tightly wrapped Game bag, and a massive note with huge crooked letters that simply read:

DO NOT ENTER - BEWARE – RESIDENT EVIL 2

VVVVVV - The Review

Vee Six Time's curtain rises to reveal the dashing Captain Viridian’s cyan silhouette heroically posed on the edge of space. Veteran space explorer and leader of the finest goddamn crew in the Teletext galaxy, The Captain is all about kicking ass and taking names. The ship suddenly starts violently shaking, and Dr Violet takes a lingering ominous stare at The Captain, her life, nay, the entire crew’s life is in danger. “Evacuate!” Cries The Captain, as he watches the hunk of purple pixels that he’s called home for many years start to crumble out into the dark vacuum of space, he takes one deep breath, steps into the teleporter and prays for his life.

The first time I laid eyes on Captain Viridian’s crew, I fell in love with them all, so when I watched him emerge from the teleporter alone, my heart broke for the little guy. I immediately made a pact with The Captain to find every last one of these adorable little rainbow drop coloured bastards even if it killed him. Which it did.


There's no fucking about in this game. The second you step out of the teleporter, it's all up to you. The controls are so simple. You tap any button to flip the gravity, and use the D-pad to move, that's it. In a few seconds you're gymnastically ping ponging from floor to ceiling showing off the captains anti gravity legs, hopping and dropping over trivial V shaped spikes to rescue your cuddly crew members. 

To reach the crew member you have to dart through a fuckton of challenge rooms. Each room takes up the screen entirely, and can take between just a second, free from even a sniff of death, and others can leave you wondering if they're even possible. In later levels you treat platforms like hot plates, Jumping from pinhead sized platform to platform barely gracing the floor with your feet. There are also bottomless pits which loop you around the screen, rooms that chase you along, labyrinths, enemies, the works. Also, each of these bitesized challenge room has it's own fantastically thought out name, which would seem like a waste of time to any AAA developer, but it doubles over the games charm.


In total, Captain Viridian died 1536 times saving his crew and yet it was a joy. The whole time that you're playing you feel jacked up with golden syrup, high as a kite off the cheery chiptune anthems and kaliedascope visuals. The stick figure characters only open their 5 pixel mouths to utter the funniest lines, talking to each other about the way they look in great detail, even though there is no great detail. You can collect pointless trinkets along the way, or listen to broadcasts from your ship. It's charming, it's cute, It's so full of character, so flat and yet so 3 dimensional with it's hilarious chatter, that VVVVVV is for me, completely infallible. It's the only game that I can say that in the past few years has crushed and lifted my heart at the tap of a button.

There is a great feeling when playing VVVVVV though, which amounts to more than it's gameplay. It's a portal to your youth. It's the sort of game you’d play from the end of school until the room is dark, your eyes wide open and the image burned to your retina. It’s the screaming, wailing, kicking, fizzy drink guzzling kid that you used to be, that carries on against all rational advice, never stopping until you throw up. It bounces off the walls, snap crackle and popping out at you in it's simplistic 3D. It’s an unstoppable classroom giggle which is sweeter, harder and more colourful than an entire jar of jolly ranchers. It was once said that Ocarina of Time is the War and Peace of videogames, well VVVVVV is the Sherbert dip dab, or if you're American it’s coke and mentos that are begging to be mixed together.


Buying this game for £7 on 3DS (£3 on steam) was like swapping a Charmander for a shiny Charizard, so nick it before someone realises it's too cheap. It may be short, but it's creator Terry Cavannah has proved, it's not the size that matters, but what you do with it that counts.


Captain Viridian, I salute you.

Hulk Out

As annoying as they are, maybe PC gamers are right. If console gamers are so obsessed with graphics and power, why the hell are we bothering with consoles at all? I mean, I don’t want to have to rob a bank to afford the hardware that is going to run Crysis, rob a shop maybe, but that’s besides the point. Consoles may be, like your mother, cheap and cheerful, but I think we’re excited about them for the same reason we’re excited about watching people pulling planes with their teeth, or smashing their head through tens of blocks of concrete. It’s all about what they can do with the little they have. Story of my life.

For a Wii Game

Wii gamers are all about making do. When they say ‘it’s not about the graphics’ they’re bloody right, because it can’t be. It’s two gamecubes duct taped together, it’s ten Sega Saturns melted down into 1, whatever way you spin it, it’s shit.

 [Mario's Rim-Lit adventure]

When Super Mario Galaxy came out it put a spell on me. PC gamers were probably spluttering with laughter all over their energy drink coated keyboards, quipping “welcome to 1997 Nintendo”, while I stood there convinced this was the most beautiful game ever. And it was… For a Wii Game. That sentence is a phenomenon, it’s a reflex. But I also think it’s (and for many other reasons) why the Wii does so well. It’s nice to be surprised. On the reverse, the demise of more powerful consoles like PS3 and PSP can be partly be attributed to being all mouth and no trousers.

Rest In PSP

You didn’t buy a PSP. If you did, you didn’t play it you scoundrel. Don’t worry, we’re all hypocritical bastards. We all demand the next console generation, teasing these naïve, vulnerable console companies with our excited E3 reactions to their tech demo’s of billion-poly rotating heads, only to stand them when they put a handheld supercomputer on the shelves at Game (for those of you who don’t know, Game used to be a British videogame retailer that American Corporation EA Games killed off). PSP was a failure. It was 3 times more powerful and not much more expensive than the DS. It could play PS2 games. The butt-fuck ugly DS was sticking to 2D, terrified of sticking stripping off to bare It’s N64 under body and stick it’s toe into the 3d water. But we loved it. Metroid Prime hunters? A fuzzy, crunchy looking shooter which I had to strap a ‘shoe’ to my thumb to play which made my DS almost bursting into flames to render. all while Coded Arms and SOCOM were a walk in the park on PSP.

How could I get excited about the PSP, if I already know what it’s capable of? I saw what the PS2 could do, so where’s the surprise? In a way, it was too powerful for it’s on good.

[PSP's tearjerkingly awesome announcement at E3. My favourite trailer of all time. As a Nintendo fanboy, I didn't want to believe my eyes]

Portable gaming’s woeful lack of power has always been exciting to me. I wasn’t even a twinkle in my dads eye in the early 80’s so I missed all of the 4 coloured 2D shit on Spectrums, and Commodores and others consoles that they released weekly. Those were the golden years, the Space Race toward 3D, so for me handhelds were the chance to see that all again.

Home consoles are established and predicable now, but handhelds are still where we like to mess about, hack, homebrew. I bought utter pieces of shit and got really lost in tech demo games in the Gameboy years. I frothed at the mouth about Alone in The Dark on Gameboy colour; 3d Characters in ‘beautifully’ rendered 2D backgrounds. Mode 7 racing game GT Advance, which I even told my peers at the time ‘Mom, look! Gran Turismo on Gameboy! Look Mom, oh you don’t even care”. 

GBA’s Back Track was an absolute piece-of-shit Doom clone with one environment style rolled out to 10 shitty levels. The world and its enemies popped up a whopping 3 feet from your face, shot you and wandered back out into the darkness. Hard done by this, I’d spend hours fondling my way around walls to find my bearings for a chance to shoot them in the disgusting cardboard cut-out face. Shit game, great tech.

 [Top Left: Alone In the Dark GBC, Bottom Left: GT Advance, Centre: V Rally 3, Top Right: The unreleased Resident Evil 2 Advance, Bottom Right: Metroid Prime Hunters DS]

By the end of the GBA’s life I was obsessed with the Raylight’s Blue Roses engine, Gameboys’ shot at 3D. Wing Commander and resident Resident Evil 2 could be squeezed from this dying handheld, one was panned, the other was canned, and in the end V Rally 3 was the only solid game to release using this tech, and I cried tears of joy revelling in it’s ability to draw a road 3 feet infront and 3 feet behind my car, all which I could watch from both interior and exterior views of my car. There didn’t need to be a next console, just more of this, and when 3^rd party launch titles such as Ridge Racer hit DS, all of this pushing felt wasted.

Vita, you may be powerful but don’t show us what the PS3 already has.

First In, Last Out

There’s 2 kinds of titles you remember. Launch Titles and End Titles and most of the greats fall into these categories. Launch titles like Halo, Mario 64, Metal Gear Solid, Wii Sports (you heard) and End Titles like Resident Evil 4, Shadow of The Colossus. We’re keen to be surprised by a huge jump between hardware, and in the end, the mastery of it.

Predictably, Shadow Of The Colossus is my favourite game ever. It’s easy to angrily ask why because It’s old, and a bit pretentious, But I had so many first’s with her. My first faked High Dynamic lighting, my first levels-that-had-levels-in-them-that-moved-around-and-I-moved-on, My first Motion Blur, and my first beautiful 2D to 3D environment streaming. Its old hat, but I remember reading this tome on how Team Ico had created tech to fake every aspect of what next gen consoles would one day have and carelessly waste.

[A real holy-fucking-shit moment for videogames]

It’s the game engine that you have to admire, but is rarely touted unless you’re Gears of War or Battlefield 3. Tech programmers have a saying “If life gives you lemons, squeeze as much CPU buffer out of them and reduce the draw calls”. A couple of years ago I sat across from two ancient bedroom programmer types that did real game development, like, made an entire game, boxed it and sold it themselves. They’d spout some really programmer anecdotes. “well, I don’t mean to speak boastfully, but on the spectrum, I managed to get a sprite that used 4 colours”… “four you say? Try six!”, and they’ll probably be annoyed just reading  the inaccuracy of this. One time I heard how one chap managed to squeeze a 4 disk game onto 3 disks to save the publisher literally millions, where as a game designer I get to piss those savings up the wall.

You can own a supercar but it’s going nowhere without the best engine you can buy, and as developers I think it’s important to be the Ayerton Senna’s of these machines and push them to their limits if we want our games to be truly, lastingly memorable.

Memoires of a Gamer

I took my first intoxicating whiff of videogames at the young age of six. Up until then, all I really knew about games was hearsay, and I'd only dabbled in bubble bobble once. I gamed socially but in moderation, and after a tough week of school, I'd break out some breakout just to relax.


This all changed on christmas day 1992, when I found myself desperately clawing my way into a small parcel. I tore back the paper, cracked open the box, and placed my nose in the groove of a brand new cartridge. I drew in the sweet silicone fumes and collapsed in ecstasy. This was the real deal, enough 'Blue Hedgehog' to kill a man.


Oh yeah, of course, It was a real roller coaster at the start, because everyone was doing it. People we're trading stories about it in broad daylight, taking the centre stage on lunch breaks to tell of their of hellish bottomless pits in a staggering metropolis, and hundred foot high robots that they swore blind were out to kill them. Things were simple, and for a long time, I was happy with Sonic on it's own, but the jealousy began to set in and I began to want so much more. Kids began making brash claims of driving ferrari's 'super duper' fast with beautiful women, telling of bloody fist fights and fatalities, and most interestingly about Blaze Fielding's red cocktails dress, and a unique method for ingesting apples.


I've been hooked on games ever since. Sure, I've had my sober times where the effects have worn off, and I've slammed the door in Sonic the Hedgehog's face, promising never to return time and time again, only to come crawling back to his promises, all while admiring what a simple life it would be with Mario and Mario alone. Come and go as they do in my life, games are what shape my existence.


I work for a game company, so they games were the focus of my entire education and extra curricular activities. Now that they're my full time job, they pay for my house, my food, my 4am amazon purchases. Not to forget MEGATELLY™ who I will discuss in future.

Up until last year, they were my driving license (points are so different in real life), and they're still pilot license, my License to Kill, and my Goldeneye. 

I owe to videogames my posture of Silent Hill creature, the colourful language of Duke Nukem, the short term memory of a Sega Saturn, hundreds, if not thousands of videogame similes, and most of all, the short term memory of a Sega Saturn.

E3 2008 was the best wingman I've ever had. He set me up on a date with a jaw-dropping American girl, bought us tickets to a concert and paid for all of our drinks. That was a real high.


Why does any of this matter to you lot, and why fuck should you read this blog? I mean, you're probably only reading this because I told you too anyway (Steve, Kate, Mom), and it's not like I'm writing anything you're missing out on on Kotaku, which you already check 8 - 10 times a day.


That said, I can't really give you a good reason, and to be honest, if there was anyone reading, I'd have to keep this up, which is a bit of a commitment really, and shit that I make up on the spot is often forgotten in conversation. I mean, what with wikipedia nowadays, I'll be brought to justice every time I say material instead of materia or by accident or something, so I'll leave it at this: If I do ever write another post, I'll be telling you some touching personal stories (not personal touching stories, this isn't Tumblr folks!) about my experiences with games, and I'll throw in my unique and frustrating angle on current games that you love just to get a rise out of you.


Or if it goes really badly, I'll just post a fuck tonne of cat pictures.