Time to go to bed

Ever since the days of being a child, the concept of staying up all night has always been a somewhat magical and slightly naughty sort of thing to do. I could count the times I've done it on one hand, including all the times I've been utterly drunk where it is usually sometime before 6am that I'll collapse. I suppose I should count the build up and birth of my two kids as well, but it might have been frowned upon if I just slept through it all.

One such time when I stayed up all night was playing Shenmue on the Dreamcast. Before the days of work & responsibilites, I was so engrossed in the game that I simply couldn't even contemplate sleep. Due to a slightly annoying (...but very sensible) in-game curfew the Ryo was forced to go home to bed at 11.30PM each night. However, you could delay this by playing an arcade or even search for a bar at one point in the game. These times were precious and brought a new magic to the game - Ryo Hazuki himself stayed up all night.

What made Shenmue was that the in-game clock was pretty slow. You had to literally wait real-time minutes for a bus that would arrive on time at a set time. You had to walk for ages to get anywhere - there were no cars to hop into or any kind of teleporting to get you from A-B. And you felt like you really were wasting hours playing Hang-On or the boxing game when you really should be being a bit more responsible and hunting the bloke who killed your father.

Shenmue is not the only game to have an in-game clock of course. Games like the GTA series and Oblivion have gradually changing day and night cycles where sunrises and sunsets can be watched with awe from the top of a mountain. But the one game that tops the lot is Super Hydlide on the Mega Drive.


It was difficult to love Super Hydlide. It looked horrible and was full of bugs and bad collision detection, but it did game time very well indeed. You could keep provisions on you - 2 at all time that if in possession you automatically ate at set times of the day. If you didn't have any provisions you could still go out adventuring but your health would quickly start to deplete in a representation of hunger. It brought about a genuinely shit-scary situation of where you realised you were miles away from the town, completely without provisions and you had to leg it back, avoiding the beasties, just to get some food before you died a horrible hungry death at tea time. Why don't more games not make you die from hunger?

On the Edge of Forgotten - 2 - Fighting Vipers

Not exactly an all time classic, but there was something rather special about Fighting Vipers on the Sega Saturn.

It was essentially a scaled down, more basic version of Virtua Fighter 2 with the differences that each character was armoured-up in some way and that the fighting arenas had walls. The characters themselves were fairly shit, but did include a rocker complete with guitar and a couple of pretty ladies... which is nice.

By smacking your opponent hard with a power move you would break off their layers of armour, making them more vunerable to damage. If that power move hits the opponent when their life is low and stood near a wall, the hit would smash the opponent through the wall in a blaze of destruction. It looked fucking ace, and was utterly humiliating for the loser.

The game was released in 1996, when I was aged 15. Needless to say, the prospect of beating up & smashing the armour off foxy character 'Candy' to leave her fighting in nothing more than her black pixelated underwear was too good to ignore. A bit pervy and wrong? Maybe, but at least it was more inventive than just flicking through the Kays catalogue in the search of material...

On the Edge of Forgotten - 1 - Dragon's Fury

On the Edge of Forgotton... every now and again something that my memory had seemingly kicked out for good will suddenly slam back into my mind and start off a whole flood of memories.

One such thing is an old Sega Mega Drive pinball game Dragon's Fury. I used to spend hours and hours playing this little gem despite having no interest whatsoever in traditional pinball tables.

Featuring a gothic theme with dragons, skulls, demons & loads of other funny looking things, this was like playing an adventure game with all sorts of bosses, secret bonuses & little mini games littered throughout to mess about with. The table design was outstanding, ball movement was very realistic, haunting rock music was superb & the high score chasing element made it utterly gripping. The more I think about it, the more I think it would make a great little addition to Xbox Live Arcade or PSN.

It makes me wonder why the pinball genre of videogames never really expanded more. Sonic Spinball was a bit duff but at least a decent concept, but I'm struggling to think of any other recent games that took the pinball table and expanded on it anywhere near to the degree of Dragon's Fury. Pretty much any licence could have extended into a pinball themed adventure game with bossess - from Star Wars to Halo, Transformers to Resident Evil.

Maybe things will come full circle and return. Or maybe there is a good reason why they dissapeared.

Return of the Bugs

Sometimes the best things are those that surprise you. That was certainly the case with Earth Defence Force 2017 on the Xbox 360 when it was released back in 2007.

Being presented with pretty dodgy box art and, in hindsight, two woefully unrepresentative images on the back, I mocked Earth Defence Force 2017 on the shelf for being a crappy low-budget me-too shooter without even watching a trailer or playing a demo. Shame on me.

Moving on 4 years, I can now think back and laugh about my poor judgement. I stumbled upon the trailer for the game on the Play.com website and it blew me away. The scale, the destruction - quite unlike any other game I'd ever seen. Got it & love it - simple to play & genuinely entertaining, and it still stands with its neck above the slurry of more popular yet bland first & third person shooters in the marketplace made with larger production budgets.

So the news that its sequel - EDF: Insect Armageddon - is on its way is superb news. July can't come quick enough.

Easy does it

On playing yet another frustratingly dull game on Fifa 11, struggling to score and finding myself going through the same routines, I questioned why I was bothering playing it at all, and turned off the Xbox.

As a dad of two and my Xbox now set up in the lounge (gone is the unsociable games room...) time on the old videogames is pretty short and precious, so sitting through yet another chore of a match isn't the best use of my time.

It was never like this in Fifa 10 was it? Scored goals for fun on that one, albeit fairly similar ones, but the boredom factor never kicked in. If it wasn't for the lure of curiousity and cheap supermarket retail prices of the latest update I'd still be playing Fifa 10. Obviously I could always go back to playing the old game, but there has to be a way of making Fifa 11 more... interesting.

Then it hits - the acceptance that, to be honest, I'm fairly shit at it. I'm playing on Professional level. I could just try Semi-Pro. That wouldn't be too bad would it?

One problem - I've grown up to believe that playing on Easy settings is cheating. Its a setting that is for wimps who just want to complete the game as quick as possible, just for the sake of saying they've completed it. Its for people who use walkthroughs rather then slugging it out and getting the satisfaction for a good job. Fuck it - I even put myself through hours upon hours of joypad-smashing frustration to the point I wanted to curl up and cry when fighting Alma, the pink boss, on Ninja Gaiden. But I did it eventually and it felt great. It's just wrong to put games on Easy...



But needs must - I'm nearly 30 and aren't trying to impress anyone here. Besides, I've done it before, having learnt how to play Virtua Racing, Daytona USA & Sega Rally using manual gears before realising its an utter ball-ache and reverting to automatic ever since the days of MSR on the Dreamcast.

Time to swallow my pride and play Fifa 11 on Semi-Pro. And fuck me - its amazing. Goals come easier & the fun comes flooding back. Its like playing Pro Evo 4 or Sensible Soccer in the old days. Headers crash in, I score more long range shots and life is good again.

Suddenly I'm going to piss this league and I don't give a shit that its on an easier setting. Balls to it, I'm enjoying it for once. Nothing wrong with that, is there?