Awesome Super Street Fighter IV theme remixes

Wow. I’ve been reading-up on the new Street Fighter religiously but up until now I haven’t heard any mention of the remixed music. EventHubs have just posted links to remixed theme tunes and they’re bloody excellent.

Favourite at the moment has to be Dudley’s, which reaches new levels of cheese for 90′s dance music.

The need to skip losing segments

It’s been said that video games as a whole have gotten easier as time has progressed. Back in the late 80′s/early 90′s games were typically harder than they are today. Game developers have since realised that making games that last forever doesn’t make a lot of financial sense. People’s lives are possibly busier these days too with less free time and more pressure and stress, so the gaming experience has evolved into a more forgiving beast. This is not always the case however.

There is an increasing trend towards game developers releasing revamps of old classic titles and with those revamps traditional difficulty levels are also making a comeback.

Take Mega Man Powered Up on the PSP for instance. A great reissue of a classic game, but boy is it hard in places. Bastard-hard I’d say. I’m currently trying to work through Cutman’s challenge mode:

I find myself at a stage in life where my patience for games that annoy or over-challenge me for no reason is practically zero. I won’t put myself through the pain. It’s not like back when I was a kid where a single game would have to last me months (as games were expensive) and I’d play it to death regardless. These days games are probably a lot cheaper in real terms (plus I’m an adult now and don’t have to rely on my parents to shell out for them). If a game pisses me off it’ll likely find itself at the bottom of a large pile of unfinished titles that may/may not have their sequels bought and I’ll just play something else.

I’m all for adding challenge to a game and I’m sure that striking the right balance between difficulty and reward is very hard, but one thing that increasingly annoys me are elaborate losing screens. For example, if you lose during one of the challenges on Powered Up you have to wait about 7 seconds while some chirpy fucking tune rings out along with the bouncy “FAILED” message in huge font, and during this time you can’t skip straight to having another go – you have to endure the rub-it-in shower of shit ceremony. It looks like Super Street Fighter IV is falling into the same trap, with finishing ultra move animations that can last 10-15 seconds – time the losing player has to spend having his/her defeat rubbed in his/her face rather than getting back to enjoying the game.

Maybe it’s integral to the professional rounding of a title that a game producer insists on the losing screen keeping with the flow of other interstitial segments, but I think there should be a way to skip these. I’m not saying an immediate cut-off after a player loses should be the default, as this would initially appear shoddy (like if a film suddenly ended and had no credits at the end). However, an option to quickly get back in the saddle should be selectable somewhere – it’d help reduce frustration levels and probably encourage end users to think more favourably of a title.

So come on developers; ensure the start button always enables a player to get straight back to the action if he/she wants to. Don’t make them sit powerless through the misery of defeat (even if you have spent a lot of time and effort making it look lovely).

A new PS3 slim user’s review

“Last Christmas I gave you my heart, but the very next day you gave it away”. This Christmas, I didn’t give anyone my heart, but I did give Sony some of my cashola in exchange for a PS3 slim and collection of games (nice Alan Partridge-style link huh?). I’d been holding off buying one for ages (years in fact), but I knew I’d have to get one at some point if only to play God Of War 3.

So…as a longtime happy Xbox 360 owner, what did I think (I hear you not ask)? Well, the machine is good but things are as I thought they were before buying the console; the 360 is a better gaming machine.

Impressions of the machine itself are favourable. It’s a solidly-built machine and features everything and more I’d reasonably want from an entertainment machine (Blu Ray, wireless, etc). However, since I got the console it’s crashed twice in the middle of games. I thought Microsoft had the reputation for “screens of death”, but my 360 has never crashed in the middle of a game. It did RROD however so I’m not elevating the technical build of the 360 above the PS3. However, it’s important to note that Nintendo consistently builds its consoles it a bulletproof fashion, so both Sony and Microsoft have something to learn from the Big N there.

iPlayer on the PS3 deserves a special mention. The dedicated menu option in the XMB might be little more than a browser bookmark but the performance of iPlayer on the console is excellent (well done BBC and the Glow team).

The games on the PS3 are good, although there’s nothing I would be crying myself to sleep every night for not being able to play on Sony’s machine (yet). Wipeout HD/Fury is very good, Uncharted is very very good (really enjoying the adventure, story and characters), but the other shooters I got with the console aren’t doing anything for me right now. Christmas Day was largely spent testing out the Blu Ray performance of the machine, and I was pleased with the sharpness boost the format provides over DVD.

So, all-in-all, I’m happy with my PS3 but if faced with choosing a games machine it’d still be a no-contest decision in favour of the 360. Most my friends own one (even cisnky folded like a pack of cards and bought one ), the online’s better and the multiplatform ports are consistently better. I don’t feel sorry for Sony at this stage as they’ve made a series of really bad/insulting decisions in the gaming industry of late (initial PS3 pricing, PSP Go pricing, PSP Go download game pricing, late release of PSN games to European customers, etc), but I do hope 2010 is a good year for them as I know they can produce gaming excellence when they have to.

Ninja Five-O

I’ve neglected to write any blog posts for a while as I’ve been busy feeding my brain, but during my travels recently I’ve been playing and replaying Ninja Five-O on my Gameboy Micro. This game (released as “Ninja Cop” in England) is in my opinion the best ever side-scrolling ninja game ever, and from reading user opinions on the web it seems that 99% of the people who play it agree.

It’s a big shame these days that marketing budgets and geared towards gaming sequels and mainstream “sure-thing” titles, as with a little more recognition games like Ninja Five-O could’ve sold well enough to lead Konami to make a sequel. As it stands however, if you’ve the opportunity I’d highly recommend playing the game.