Konami 88

It's Konami, in 1988... No really, it is.

Following from the success of Track and Field and Hyper Olympics, Konami came back in 1988 with the originally named, Konami '88. 88 minutes of pure Konami goodness... No it's just Track and Field with a graphical overhaul and was released in 1988. Having said that however, it's quite the overhaul and makes for an entertaining game.

So many toys!

For those in the know, you can skip this paragraph. For those that don't, Konami '88 hails from the world of "Wiggle Joystick" controls. You wiggle the joystick (or tap buttons) to build up speed and then hit an action button to determine a function whether it's the angle of jump in Long Jump, or the angle of throw in Javelin, or passing on the baton in the relay. As such, there's a multitude of various events including 100m Dash, Long Jump, 400m Relay, Skeet Shooting, Archery, 110m Hurdles, Javelin, and a replay of the 400m Relay as a final event of the round.

I prefer the original Track N Field

Each round in Konami '88 has a qualifying quota, in that you must get at least that time/distance/score in order to progress to the next event. Getting further/faster/higher gives you more points in case you're in competition with other players or playing for the big score. As such, the game gets harder if you beat every round by starting over and raising the bar (sometimes literally) and having the player require a higher amount of points, faster time, long distance etc.

Celebrate, with your multi-ethinic rainbow of groupies!

Timing is key in Konami '88, whether it's hitting the takeoff and getting the angle for the jumps, or the throws, or the hand over in the relay, or even the loosening off a bow from the string, timing is essential to getting a good score but even consistent timing will not guarantee things. There's more than a few niggling issues with the game.

Similar events to earlier games, just boosted up the graphics a bit

In particular, the run up and take off for the high jump isn't clear because of the game's insistence on using sprite transformation in a pseudo-3D manner, which results in over complicating issues. Archery is a bitch if only because your very first shot will be a range finder as you'll have no idea when to time the shot based upon the almost utter random cross wind and while the game also forces that 45 degrees is optimum for most events, around 25 degrees is your best shot in Archery for Konami '88. The worst is that the controls for the Skeet Shooting do not match up with any other control in the game and the buttons will force you to quickly forget and form new muscle memories just for this one event.

Regardless, it's wiggle joystick and hit buttons.

The game is certainly a huge improvement over Track 'n' Field and Hyper Sports though, the game is a lot more friendly to users, it has clearer objectives and uses of controls (except in Skeet Shooting...) and while it showcases a higher bit level of graphics, makes use of the potential with clear, colourful and clever use of sprites. What it falls short on, is that the game doesn't really convey distance and speed all that well with the rate of change in sizes during the additional scenes. It's a minor point really but the game does stand well as a competitive game assuming both players have a rudimentary grasp of control and timing.

It's like Darts, you're not really an athlete.

Sounds within Konami '88 are quite crisp, while the synthesised voices are a little easier to understand compared to the original and are a markedly nice nod back to the original/source of the series. The music however is few and far between and little of value to really comment upon, it serves its purpose and moves onto the next event with little to no issue or memorable composition while actual events are silent save for the effects and to be honest, it needs to be in order to prevent players reacting to the rhythm of the music rather than the pace of the game.

....oops

With all said and done on Konami '88, I find that it's a worthy game for a play around but there's something missing in its delivery that the original has, whether the pace or the overall presentation is up for debate but on its own it is an OK game but nothing truly wonderful that sets it aside within its own series.

Quake - recap (Happy birthday to bloggie)

Enter... It awaits you. The blood is a nice touch.

If I had to look back on the all games I've played, reviewed and seen over the years, the one I'd say that was the biggest influence on everything, is Quake. While I have reviewed it before, I feel that for the 1 year anniversary, I'd revisit it.

Gibs, not quite ludicrous however, that belongs to Rise of the Triad.

One word, "Quake", most of which is summarised just by that titular word. From Id software comes one of the biggest and most influential titles ever to grace the gaming world. Looking at it today, it's a brown coloured, ugly looking polygonal shooter without the need for reloading or fancy things like regenerating health. It's fast paced, it's dirty, it's brutal, it's Quake. Yes I know you shouldn't use a word to describe itself but it's still Quake and it's Quake to do so.

If the cyberdemon didn't teach you to strafe, this guy will.

At the bare bones, it's a first person shooter that went almost fully polygonal and is a massive step up from games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D where we're using actual 3D maps and worlds to be created rather than the 5D Space of some engines of the 2D shooters. Plot wise it's about as basic as it gets, ID wasn't really known for enthralling in that regard. Mankind invents teleporters, something else hacks into teleports, monsters arrive, shit goes down, you're all that's left and now you're going to fix it. Basically it's DOOM but the monsters aren't quite demons... Even if some of them are based on the HP Lovecraft mythos.

Ogres... Why the chainsaw and grenades though?

The game is split into 4 chapters branching off from a main hub, each chapter consisting of multiple levels with a particular battle at the end. Though the game cheats out of this one, as chapter one has a boss that requires a specific puzzle to be solved to defeat them, the other levels feature no such other bosses, but rather battles against slightly tougher enemies than one would normally encounter or a run through a gauntlet of lots of enemies with little chance to recover or recuperate items and weapons.

It begins... after one enemy and a secret.

Quake runs a fairly standard affair regarding weaponry. You have an axe for when you're out of ammo or don't want to spend any ammo killing something. A shotgun that has little spread and acts more like a pistol/sniper with minor damage. Double barrel shotgun carried over from Doom2s days which stops most minor enemies but gets shrugged off by larger ones. A nail gun that acts like a projectile based machinegun, quad nail gun for even more nails being fire faster, a grenade launcher for those that like their explosives to bounce off walls and pull off trick shots with grenades that either explode when they hit an enemy or a few seconds after being fired. A rocket launcher for those that like grenades to be a lot more direct and finally the Lightning Gun that fires a short range stream of electricity and butchers most enemies in seconds. Hint: Do NOT use it underwater, or even near water, you won't survive unless invincible.... but then neither will anything else.

There's some very interesting architecture in this game. AND Low gravity.

Monsters are a varied sort of melee and projectile based enemies. Some will fly and float, others will pounce and claw, some chainsaw and lob grenades (called ogres... go figure). Later monsters are magic wielding knights, huge behemothic monsters that throw lightning bolts and spidery creatures that hurl uncannily-homing projectiles that explode. While there's also blobs that blow up on death, laser toting marines, dogs and if it's not the enemies trying to kill you, it's the levels with a multitude of traps from spikes, pits, crushers, lava, acid or just trying to drown you like a sack of kittens. Minus the sack... and kittens.

And "psych" in 3... 2... 1...

The single player only goes so far though. Quake, while having a fast paced single-player mode, was made more famous by the multiplayer and with that, some of the most frantic, almost arcade-fast, death matches, team matches and co-op play for the time. Modems, networks and the internet soon after it was released brought about Quake as THE online death match game to play and thanks to additional software like Quake Spy and Quake World, online gaming caught like wildfire and the game ascended into fame.

He never stood a chance.

Death match works on the principle that every player gets a shotgun and some shells and they're shoved into a map for either a set amount of time or until someone gets X number of kills. Depending upon the map would depend upon the tactics, some had all the weapons, some featured tower-like layouts, some were huge sprawling areas for open combat and others were claustrophobic nightmares with traps for the unwary. Rocket jumping, grenade hopping (though coined earlier by games like Marathon) and learning maps by sound (i.e. hearing when and where items were picked up could indicate where another player was in the game, bringing about people not picking up every item to make others THINK they were elsewhere, then ambush those planning an ambush... We got rather sneaky!) were advances made for the more tactical player. Or it's a race for the rocket launcher and quad damage.

Remember, this was groundbreaking stuff in the post-doom era.

Quake however really took off when the game began to be modded by other players. While not a unique concept, mods had been created by many other games and in multiple ways ranging from changing all the enemies to look like cocks to the more advanced things like Total Conversions where only the original game engine was the same and even then the physics and style of the game was drastically different. For an example, think Doom and Aliens TC for an idea, or go further with Action Doom and such changes. Quake had itself an army of modifications that ranged from the bonus content of add-ons like Quake mission packs, the more high brow mods like Quess (Quake done as a chess game in the style almost of battle chess), Flight Sims with players fighting it out in planes and helicopters, Rally Quake for those that liked driving with guns, bonus models and skins, playing through quake as a monster rather than the usual human and the list really does keep on going.

Say it with me now, STRAFE!

It spawned a new wave of bedroom coders and modifiers that took to it like a duck to water and later development companies took the original engine and boosted it to the point that it became Half Life. Online communities sprang up around quake and around even individual modifications took on feverous fan bases that decried others and touted their own personal favourites as the best thing since, well.. Quake.

Dark, moody and atmospheric. Also very, very, brown.

But while it spawned mods and inspired generations of engines to be developed, it also fronted the art (and it's a fine art if you can do this unassisted) of Speed Running. Quake done Quick being one of the first, biggest and best examples of taking a game and trying to find the fastest route you'll possibly imagine (and many you won't until you see these videos) in setting personal targets of fastest times, killing everything, all secrets, in hardest modes and so on until you've so many different ways of doing a game quickly that it becomes about as complicated as judging scores in the para-olympics for handicap specification and setting. Take the fastest first level done on the hardest difficulty and you're looking at less time than most people take just picking their first difficulty setting. 25 seconds and it's getting faster and more chaotic from there onwards. A combination of grenade hops, rocket jumps (and descents to fall faster), strafe jumping and using enemies as a catapult when they strike, brings a game beaten from start to finish in less time than some people take to beat the first level.

Go ahead, enter...

In closing, bow down, thank it profusely and be glad that a game like this helped catapult forward and shape the gaming world as we know it today (before bullshit like regenerating health, slow pace-controlled levels and mad things like PLOT get involved) and remember that even now.

The Dopefish still lives.

P.S: From here on, I shall be posting to the blog only once a week so that I can continue work on a rather lovely website, 30+ Gamer where I have been posting mostly about arcade games and will continue to do so. So hopefully, I'll see you there for more Bod related articles, particularly ones on being disappointed but, as already said on the front page, it's fairly expected.

Minecraft

(Note: Ignoring the use of mods in this review as the near unlimited potential they bring would result in this review being a tome of impossible proportions. Go get the mods yourself and test them you lazy gits)

Cast your mind back up to 100 years ago, maybe a little bit longer and recall if you can of an innocent time, a time of putting brightly coloured bricks together on top of each other and seeing your imagined construct in the worst possible combination of bricks and pieces and claiming "it's a gun" when it looks more like the mutual union of a cow and pig, in the same way that cars crashing together at 100mph can be considered a "union" of cars. That was Lego, you made most of it and your imagination took the rest of it to higher levels of realisation for you, just you, and certainly not anyone else that saw what you'd made.

Minecraft is effectively, a 3D world of Lego with some extras tacked on such as having to go out and dig up your Lego bricks, combining different bricks together to make more things and killing things to get their bricks and such. Though I'm really underselling this one on an overly tortured metaphor that should have been put to rest after the first sentence, instead of trailing on for another 2 paragraphs.

For a definition of the game, try "Wide Open Sandbox Game" with the words "Wide Open" being wider and open than the legs of the Whore of Babylon. This game is huge, potentially. You're given the basic tour of duty in a tutorial (if you want it) before a world is generated around your starting point (or a specific amount of world on platforms where the memory size of the game is a limitation. From here you're expected to begin a life of collection blocks from various biomes (grass, mushroom, desert etc) and combine them in inventive ways to be able to go on and develop better blocks, weapons, tools and engineering machinery to be able to continue living in the world that generates while you move around.

The game's scope is enormous, reaching in size to be whatever the available hard disk is on PCs and in some cases has been calculated to be 5-6 times bigger than the Earth, you'll never be running short on the basic blocks. Where in you can find and locate all manner of blocks from wood to earth, rocks and stone to lava, rare metals and precious stones all of which lead to the crafting and manufacturing of swords, armour, picks, shovels, explosives, hoes, ladders, rail tracks, cakes, and a whole plethora of other things involved in ways that most people will likely ignore. But that's all depending upon how the player wishes to play.

You could be the intrepid explorer digging through caves and valleys, seeking underground lost civilisations and looting them (Whether It Belongs In A Museum or not) you could become a farmer of crops or livestock, managing your various animals and breeding them together to farm them for meat, leather, wool and so on. Create huge monuments for yourself (Most people go for a castle since it involves a lot of rocks and not much else, but then again the giant erupting golden breast mountain with lava sounds appealing, next to another one of the same size just to REALLY make other players sit up and take notice). Create monorails of train tracks with functional switching stations using the railroad blocks and plenty more.

You could also just run around killing monsters and get to the point of killing the "Boss" known as the Enderdragon and "beating" the game before returning to the world to continue being whatever it was you were being in the first place.

This huge scope is also the game's downfall depending upon the player. You NEED to set yourself a goal and make your own way towards it, you cannot rely on the game for it as it's about as open a world you can imagine in that YOU and YOUR actions are the ONLY guiding forces in the game (Until some prick joins the game and blows up your pixel-art of Custer's Last Stand, pervert), so the limit of the game aside from the various obstacles in the way, are your own imagination and understanding.

You could even build electrical circuits using Binary Logic for gates and from there (in theory at least, I've not seen it myself) build far more complicated structures up to basic rudimentary computer processors. Taking a look around other games and maps, it's possible to see some people making reproductions of famous land marks, spaceships from sci-fi films and shows in full detail, faithful reproductions of various vehicles made from plans and schematics. Some people even go so far as to build "Adventures" for others to engage in that sets up some of the more hazardous problems in the game for players to navigate, much akin to the Raiders of the Lost Ark introduction sequence.

It's entirely down to the player to decide what their objective is, how they wish to go about it and what they intend to do once they've done it. For your standard player that's hooked on FPS where you absolutely must run from A to B, stare at some special effects and then beat the level, this game is not likely to appeal to that player. This game is definitely one for those that like to be more creative, for those that enjoy seeing something tested and performed and then ultimately, succeed, before using it in a more creative fashion (fully functional drawbridges, pumping stations that generate blocks etc) budding construction artists or those seeking the idea of doing something nobody else has done before.

Before you realise it, or if you watch someone else and particularly the younger players at that, they'll be setting up rudimentary scaffolding around the structure they're creating because if they fall off whatever they're building at the time, they'll pancake on the ground, so now they're thinking along multiple lines of whether or not to build something, how to stay alive while building and the last challenge, how to get back down again without biting the big one. (Assuming of course they're not in creative mode and just fly back down again).

It's fun, it's huge, it's not going to appeal to everyone and there'll be a clear divide between the two that will play this and those that vehemently refuse to do so.