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> Games you missed at the time, but want to revisit

Exactly.  Cut scenes are arse, and I honestly can't remember one game that involved me enough to give a crap.  Unskippable cut scenes should be punishable by death.

Oh yeah, wait, I can can.  The Darkness.  Fucking ace main character, I genuinely enjoyed the little loading vignettes. 

You smell like one etc.  Heh, no.  I can understand that you're saying, and agree.  But!  For me, it's all about diversity.  On my phone I have a playlist of songs that are all three minutes or less in length, and all straight to point, snappy, punchy, no fucking about.  I also have one full of sprawling ambient, proggy stuff that sometimes can take five minutes or more to even really establish a key.  Sometimes, such as if I am just trying to get from A to B, I'll put on the first playlist, and get properly pumped up, and can hear at least once song before arriving.  Other times, I want to sprawl, have something pleasant on but also be able to not have to focus.  Perhaps I'm tired, maybe I'm doing something else...

It's a shame that you don't have your Xbox 360 any more Marc.  As far as this board goes, several of us have been trying to best scores at Decimation X, a quite hardcore, fun, Space Invaders+++ game that couldn't be any more pared down if it tried.  Some other folk here, almost wholly different people, have been playing through Mass Effect 2, ruminating on the plot, in what is a dialogue-heavy, very verbose sci-fi story that basically wants you to make choices and influence the outcome.  The two couldn't be any more different.  But just as I've got time for a compilation of speedy little punk songs and another one full of twenty minute sagas, for me, I can see the appeal for the different types of games too.

The thing is though, I know this isn't for everyone.  But what does annoy me is if someone is totally against one or the other "just because".  Now, you've spoken your mind on why you strongly favour short-sharp-shock style games, quite clearly, and I respect that.  Likewise, if someone were to totally lay into those quickie arcade blasts that require a challenge, whilst proclaiming that they only like say, Final Fantasy, I'd hope they'd have a strong argument.

But the two aren't SO different in one respect.  The grind.  Died at a bullet-hell shmup?  Try again.  And again.  Do it, get better, try again.  Likewise in a JRPG you're expected to keep repeating the same basic battles over and over again until your stats are good enough.  In a very 'meta' kind of way, you're effectively training someone else to win an intense fast and brutal battle.  Imagine if there was a JRPG where you had to go around besting metaphors for shmups until finally you are "good enough" to go take on the end boss of [some really hard bullet hell shmup that you'd know better than I would].  That'd be... a bit interesting, maybe.

You know what though?  I can't stand Final Fantasy personally, and whilst I really love to *try* at bullet-hell shmups, I'm fairly crap at them.  The game I have played most in MAME for example is Armed Police Batrider, but I'm crap at it, and no matter how many times I've tried it, I haven't noticeably improved.

Left between the games I dislike and the games that dislike me, I'm left with those games in the middle.  The ones that aren't just overlong cut-scene marathons like Metal Gear Solid, but aren't minimalistic and brutal shmups.  The stuff like Call of Duty where you get a fair amount of cut-scenes and plot, but also need to be *really* fucking fast in your reactions and accuracy (at least on a harder difficulty setting).  They aren't all just story, but they also give me a comfortable 'buffer'.

I expect that as gaming becomes ever more 'casual' then there will be even more divergence until you are chatting over a headset with someone you just befriended on Facebook whilst playing Mafia Wars together, on a console.  And this will be the 'typical' game.  Give it 4 years.  But when that happens, I *strongly* believe that there will be a counter-culture, providing exactly the sort of minimalist arcade thrills you're after.

Again, I point at Xbox Live.  The last few games I bought were all less then a pound each, and either ferociously challenging bullet-hell shooters or like 'Run Away', give you just one life and just expect you to get good.  So, have heart Marc!  Retail might become a cold and depressing place, but there will always be good games being produced, you just might have to look elsewhere than the mainstream.  After all, when has the mainstream ever been any barometer of taste

Sorry for the rambling length! :S

Agreed 100%.

I've waxed lyrical about The Darkness before, but it genuinely had me interested.  The bits where


stand out in particular.  In fact I'm tempted to play it through again soon, which I never, ever do.

Apropos to the discussion, these mentions of The Darkness reminded me that I still have this on my shelf, unopened from when I bought it in a Two-For-Allright-Money offer in Argos with another game.

You really should mate.  Really.

It has one of the most innovative achievements I've yet seen in a game.  To very mildly spoil it:


Hey, if there are few of us with it, we could perhaps play it in multiplayer some time.  That's something I've yet to try.

I'd love to.  As far as I can tell it was a bit buggy and laggy, but I'd be more than willing to spend an evening with it.

There's just one for me which is the knife-fight against Krauser in Resi 4 simply because it was the first lengthy cut scene I can think of that actually managed to really involve me as a player. If you stopped gaming, put down the pad and expected to just sit there and watch, you died.

How's that for cultivating addictive gaming?

Speaking of which, I'd like to revisit Resi 5. I'm mad on Resident Evil, me.

I loved the Darkness. It was genuinely interesting, the way they took a comic book and made a game out of it. For less interesting reworkings of comic books, look no further than Watchmen.

The spoiler you mentioned was a definite standout moment, CUS. In fact, all of the spoilers you mentioned were amazing moments. It's a shame that not many people picked this up, it deserved way more success that it earned.

I can't remember any other game with moments like this one.

Yep.  If, ten years ago, you had said "One day the consoles of the future will host a Watchmen game", I would perhaps never have said "Ooo, awesome, is it going to be just like Double Dragon but with the occasional bit of switch-pulling?  I do hope so!"

To be fair, it's actually not really that bad as far as walk-along beat-em-ups go.  But it's a shocking, terrible waste of the license.  I bet even Ocean could have done a better conversion.  Even Darkman was a better game-of-the-film than Watchmen.

Yup.  I think it was at least partly a case of a bad demo.  I know I tried the demo and hated it, I wasn't going to pick it up.  But when RowanWolf came back from town with it as a game she'd picked up because it was cheap I thought, well, I'll give it a go.  And I'm jolly glad I did as it's one of my favourite games on the platform, if not ever.  I'd never read the comic either, I approached it blind, merely reading the unlockable comics in the game.  I am tempted to try and get hold of a trade of it at some point though, if such a thing exists.

I had the choice of buying Resi 5, or picking 4 back up for Cube and replaying that.  I opted for 4.  Looking at 5 gives me an odd feeling, like maybe this is where I and he series part way.

Actually, that's a bit dramatic, as I've never really been a mad Resi fan anyways.  Thought the original was a classic.  2 was more of the same.  The Nemesis thingy is 3 annoyed the piss out of me.  The baddies in CV annoyed me.  ReMake and Zero were ace though.

I have never played a Resident Evil game, though I have seen people playing the first one often enough, and have once seen a mate playing through the 4th one.  Up until you were on a boat.

Furthermore, I have at some point owned I think every one of them (not including the spin-offs like Survivor and Outbreak), except for RE0 (and even then, I'm not sure, maybe I did), and still have RE2, RE3 and RE:CZ just over to my left, for the Dreamcast.  No, I don't know why this is either.

I played RE:DC on the PS for all of 5 minutes; I gave up because I reasoned 'I am playing a highly-trained combat fellow with a knife and a gun. How do I not feel able to take down one shambling chuckle-head? Balls to this!'. I found the balance of control vs. threat a lot better in RE4.

The only other RE game I did play was The Umbrella Chronicles though: it was sort of all right.

Everyone should play 1 on Cube or Wii.  It still looks almost impossibly beautiful, combine that with the pure tension created by the fixed camera and sparse lighting and it goes a long way to compensate for the obtuse and backward gameplay.  Which I think is still basically Dizzy with guns.

I "like" this.

I am a HUGE resi fan though. I think my favourite still has to be 3 - I played that game TO DEATH. And Nemesis scared the crap out of me every time he appeared, as unlike Tyrant from 1 and Birkin from 2, he could appear randomly - you never knew where he was going to be. You'd open a door, hear that orchestra stab and "STAAAARRS...", immediately shit yourself, panic and usually run right into him. Priceless.

He was scary like that right up until you played the Mercenaries game, and unlocked infinite ammo for all weapons. Then he was a pussycat.

4 was amazing, mind - proof positive that rebooting a franchise is possible. And then they released 5; proof positive that sometimes, co-op play is NOT the way forward.

So I'm right in not bothering then?

Absolutely. You know how in 4, the worst parts of the game are you escorting Ashley, and how they're (for the most part) mercifully short?

Well. 5 is basically that, for the WHOLE GAME. Oh, and the inventory system is crap too, I much prefer 4's briefcase.

And to top it all off, they got rid of the merchant! He was awesome. "Ah! I'll buy it at a HIGH price!" Class.

...they got rid of the merchant? So how do you upgrade your guns? Er. I may be a big Resident Evil fan but... hmm... 5 doesn't sound very good at all.

I forget the site, possibly 64 something or other, but there was a most amusing video of some guy loitering around shops dressed as the Merchant, and repeating the dialogue to unsuspecting shoppers, that were, quite understandably, weirded out.  Most amusing.