Ho Hum. It’s raining outside, you’ve just polished your array of skull drinking cups, nobody wants to go down the tavern with you, and all the princesses in the neighbourhood think you’re a total jerk. Nothing for it but to don the old armour and go on a crusading rampage, save up a load of money looted from the corpses of your fallen foes and buy a huge army with it, falling upon the next hapless nation like a tsunami of barbed steel, to smell the blood of a your vanquished adversaries, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
This has got to be some form of copyright violation. Imagine if Halo was orange juice. This is Sunny Delight. I should think it’s horrible and tasteless and not like it at all. But I actually did. It might be tedious, it might be one paced. It might have a near identical progression of levels, no variation in enemies, and a plot, characters, weapons and generally everything else lifted wholesale from another game, but it reminded me of Gauntlet, and that is enough. Play it, disagree with me, and go back to www.1980s-games.com and play some more ripped off arcade emulations. I particularly recommend Black Tiger, for what would be a hideously frustrating experience were it not for the fact that credits are free these days. I remember putting two weeks pocket money in to the RoboCop arcade machine, and getting killed by the third incarnation of ED-209, the last phase of the last boss. Bastards. Speaking of which – I still need more robots for my top trumps game. Suggestions in the comments please; we already have Johnny 5, ED-209 and some frightening real-doll type android in a french maid’s outfit…
Cause, um, I heard there’s like, monsters down there or something?
The blank look you’re giving me is probably due to the fact that you didn’t grow up in the UK during the 1980′s, and have no idea who Berk is, or of the whereabouts of my dinner, OR what Globbits are. This may go some way to rectifying this lacuna in your knowledge.
Right. So Now you should be over the joke, and fully prepared to play a little adventure game. You have to use your imagination a bit, but there are some nice touches – good banter in the item shop, some good bosses and little in jokes. Here it is… the epic D&D adventure that is Monsters Den. There’s no facility for deleting old save games, so if you want to start a new campaign, keep a slot free.
Clear Vision puts you behind the lens of yet another high powered gun, popping the heads of the subjectively naughty. I’ve never been one of the alarmists who think that violence in movies and sex on TV are ruining the minds of the nation, but there does seem to be an inordinate amount of self righteous stick-figure glee collected around consequence-free death. Are we so pent up that this kind of hedonism is a release for us? Time for a jog around the block… +Continue Reading
Yeah. Sorry about that. Sometimes the puns just happen by themselves.
Anyway, the game’s pretty good – it’s a slowly animated card-battle game; don’t pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ve noticed you looking wistfully at the Live Action Roleplay messageboards, you don’t need to pretend to me… At least with this you can be nerdy all by yourself and no-one else ever needs to know. It can be our little secret. Just like the dodgy embed frame. Shhhhh.
Double the game for your money this April Fool’s Day, two games based on roughly the same premise; aliens come to visit. They take over our minds and bodies, and for some reason embark on a massive bloody killing spree. Presumably this is some kind of inter-stellar tourist package holiday; five nights in the Sol system, all the blood you can spill, and an economy class ride home on next week’s Vogon freighter back to Sirius. I feel an epic space-exile backstory coming on…
If you had been born in Japan, this would be your national sport. Standing in front of an arcade machine rhythmically slapping buttons faster and faster until you look like Neo on speed.
Of course your parents wouldn’t understand it, and would wonder why you couldn’t just put electric eels down your pants and see who could hang from their nostrils the longest, like they used to in the good old days. Theirs is a country where waterboarding is considered an amusing pastime and televised for the amusement of the masses. Bless their little silken kimonos.
Something for everyone here – you get to control a hugely betentacled undersea monster, and decide whether to feed plump little boys to the sharks or give them a hug and a balloon and send them back home. Will you crush humanity, make some new friends, or just have a nosebleed? Whatever the case you’ve got to appreciate the artistry of this lovely little 8-bit style gem.
3D Paradise Paintball is the latest development in gaming via SNS. It has been presented by the Chinese company Cmune who develop games and applications for social networks. 3D Paradise Paintball has been listed in the top 5 Apple Widgets and the company have been awarded ‘Start-up of the day’ by Microsoft.
The game itself is a first person shoot ‘em up. It surprised me in many ways as being much more advanced than I had expected. The 3D rendering, map sizes and designs rival those of early millenium top-end development releases of the same genre, which, in my opinion, is already a triumph for a free online based and hosted game.
I was also impressed by the loading time, I was expecting to have to download a series of random plug-ins and watch a progress bar for the next 30 minutes, but even this ‘hunk of junk’ desktop of mine was in-game within 3 minutes.
All this mechanical and technical effort is let down slightly be some actual game play issues. The rather strange avatars leave something to be desired and I found it difficult to differentiate between friendlies and enemies at a glance.
The absolute, most important aspect of an FPS, for me, is the hitbox activity, which unfortunately seemed almost non existent. I mean, every time I actually managed to hit another player, I would decrease their health by the same value where ever the shot landed (apart from maybe the head, its quite difficult to tell where you hit). On another occasion I wasted several shots trying to ‘pwn’ this ‘n00b’ that was running away from me, despite my cross-hair landing perfectly in the guy’s back for at least 10 shots, I failed every attempt. Years of gaming experience would suggest to try shooting slightly ahead of the character to account for ‘bullet time’ but this too was without success. Truth is, I just couldn’t work out (bearing in mind I only had the chance to play for a short while) where, how and what affects the hit-boxes. But hey, its not like its trying to be Call of Duty or CS:S is it.
Overall, 3D Paradise Paintball is years ahead of it’s ‘Flash’ game competition and will only improve on their next project. I have every confidence that the Cmune team will be big news in years to come. Good job guys.
How appropriate for this website is this game? It features both bunnies and inappropriate amounts of violence, death and other jollity. Buy guns, upgrades and generally pimp yourself out in the face of a long-eared, twitchy nosed apocalypse.
