Super Mario World Vs Sonic The Hedgehog

The final blog, the end of an era, whether I continue with this or not is purely due to speculation. However, I will treat my readers to a comparison of two old-school classics. Take it for what you will, this is purely my opinion. If you have a problem with it....well...I don't really care, lol.

Super Mario World

Shigeru Miyamoto, known to many of you readers as GOD, he brought us household names such as Mario, Donkey Kong and Link. In the early 90's a revolution occurred, this revolution is know to many as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. With this console came a game that changed many individual's lives as we know it. This game was called Super Mario World. This game was the latest iteration of the world-famous 'Mario' series. This game had it all, multi-branching worlds, secret levels, secret characters....you name it, the game more than likely had it!

There's only one word that comes to mind when faced with the image of Mario dominating a gigantic smiling bullet...'YES!'

This game was the reason we had people rushing out to buy SNES consoles, the crisp graphics, beautiful music & sound and highly responsive controls & gameplay ensured that Nintendo had a winner on their hands. Even by today's standards, there hasn't been a game that has surpassed this level of perfection that Nintendo were able to achieve. The best parts in particular were the incorporation of Nintendo's then newest mascot, Yoshi, as well as being the biggest Mario game ever made to date. Since then Miyamoto has achieved all levels of amazement with the Mario releases on the Nintendo 64, Gamecube and Wii respectively, but none with the sense of wondrous adventure and the fact that such a simple premise could have a player keep coming back for more.

Sonic The Hedgehog

Hirokazu Yasuhara, responsible for designing a game which many viewed as the mascot of Sega, as well as Mario's rival in the early 90's 'Console Wars', had a surprisingly lackluster game released for the 16-bit Genesis/Megadrive console.

DISCLAIMER: What I am about to state here is nothing but fact.

Little known fact! Eggman was once known in the comic books and
original English translation as Dr Robotnik, the more you know eh?

What annoyed me the most about this game was the fact that many people went on about the powerful sound-processing chip that the console had to produce dynamic sound for the game. Being a musician myself, I pretty much debunked this rumor as complete bullshit due the the fact that the sounds were nothing but incoherent bleeps and bloops which made me feel like I was playing a game on the Atari 2600! On top of that, the controls were incredibly unresponsive and the level design made me feel like I was a test subject for somebody's sick joke of a rom-hack. The level design made no sense, loops were thrown in there just for the hell of it and the bonuses consisted of players having to find methods of collecting emeralds that bore no significance to the game whatsoever. I'm sorry Sega, you lost me almost 20 years ago, and your game has a lot to say for itself when I recall the Master System version being far more enjoyable and memorable...

The Winner, and undisputed champion of Carlos Vs The Vidya:

Super Mario World.

Silent Hill: Homecoming Vs Resident Evil 5

So it's been a long week as I've been moving home and looking for work, lol. Here's this week's games!

Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne (Nocturne)

This series is better known for the Persona titles, which is still comparatively underground when you compare it to say, Final Fantasy. Nocturne was released by Atlus for the PS2, the story of the game pits the player in Post-Apocalyptic Tokyo in which they are thrust into a war between multiple factions are they are given a choice to side with a faction or ultimately destroy everything. The game itself breathes new life into the tired old concept of turn-based combat as well as putting a deliciously dark spin on the usual JRPG narrative by not only providing choices to the player which ultimately determine how the game will end, but by more adult themes being prevalent in the experience.

Inter-franchise character development FTW!

What I personally loved about the game was the interweaving of the audiovisual experience by way of the music as well as the press-turn battle system in which the battle turns in your favor by taking advantage of the enemy's elemental weaknesses. The other pluses the game includes are the minimalistic visual style, which ensures that even though the game is polygonal, it will age a lot better than a game that had cutting edge visuals for it's time but which are now almost painful to look at e.g. FFVII. Fantastic work Atlus, bring on SMT 4!

Rogue Galaxy

Developed by Level 5, which received high acclaim for Dark Cloud and Dark Chronicle, this game came as a surprise to many RPG fans and also garnered mixed reactions. Unfortunately, over a long time period, I have come to see this game as one of the most disappointing games ever made. The story follows Jaster Rogue, a young man on a Desert planet with aspirations to become a Space Pirate and the people he meets on the way. Everything about this game appealed to me upon reading the package alone:

• Over 100 hours of incredibly varied gameplay

• Journey through space, exploring huge, detailed worlds

• Use hundreds of customizable weapons in real time combat

And at this very moment, the sounds of 10'000 Mary-Sue Jack Sparrow fangirls thighs quivering deafened the universe.

Now for all intensive purposes, RG delivers on these promises. Unfortunately, there was no incentive for me to go beyond 30 hours of gameplay as the items you received that varied the gameplay were only planet specific, so for example, you'd find yourself navigating laser-beam platforms in the first area of the game, but nowhere else. The other shortcoming for the game 'which I felt was a fatal flaw', was the fact that story was just far too predictable, even for your standard 'good vs evil' JRPG, the fact that the game was virtually flawless on every other aspect just served to sadden me more, as it was all for naught. Jaster's journey, in my eyes, ended before it could begin.

The Winner:

Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne

Ryu Ga Gotoku (Yakuza) Vs Hybrid Heaven

In this week's edition of Carlos vs The Vidya: Two games made by two of Japan's most popular developers! Let's take a look...

Ryu Ga Gotoku (Yakuza)

Released by Sega for the PS2, Yakuza is a 3-rd person adventure game which has been said by many players, a spiritual sequel to Sega's previous Adventure franchise, Shenmue. The game itself takes place in the Japanese underworld, involving street gangs, drug trafficking, the sex trade and of course, the Yakuza. Our hero is Kazuma Kiryu, who willingly takes the fall for his best friend for killing their boss. After coming out of Prison, Kazuma is left putting together the pieces of the last 10 years to find out what happened to his friends.

This game even makes shopping for groceries look good!

Sega is one of the biggest names in Japanese gaming, and it's easy to see why this game has rapidly attained the same level of fame as Square-Enix's 'Dragon Quest'. The gameplay itself is a very deep beat-em-up affair with slight RPG elements such a building up skills and a multitude of sidequests which range from dating hostess girls to winning a game of Mahjong, the presentation, atmosphere and ambience work exceedingly well in telling the story of a hardened Yakuza on his quest for answers and subsequent revenge. As one of Japan's current most popular franchises, this lives up to the hype.

Hybrid Heaven

This game was released by Konami, another highly acclaimed Japanese developer famous for their Silent Hill, Metal Gear and Bemani franchises. What this game had going for it were the epic trailers of a fight scene followed by a man jumping over a ledge that were playing at gaming conventions in the late 90's, therefore sparking discussion on the further untapped potential of the Nintendo 64 as well as helping the masses of optimistic fanboys feel better for Nintendo continuing to make games on cartridges.

Not quite what you were expecting now, was it!?

Unfortunately in Hybrid Heaven's case, it was all a lie, as it turns out the trailer that was shown was CGI footage that the N64 would never be able to handle in real-time. And the game itself is hugely underwhelming. The combat was a mixture of real-time movement combined with menu-based combat choices which involved the player picking what side they were using (left or right), the height of the attack (high, middle or low) and the type of attack (punch, kick or grab). Everything else was conveyed by a clunky control scheme and messy camera angles. At the end of the day the only redeeming feature is if you're a 'Metal Gear' junkie as the main character, Johnny Slater, is a recurring joke character in the MGS series.

Thank you Konami, for realising the error of your ways and for keeping quiet about this abomination of a title.

Winner: Yakuza

Cold Fear vs Peter Jackson's King Kong

How's it going? I'm Carlos and this will be my blog over the next few weeks in which I will try my best to entertain via a blogging medium in which I will write about games I like (and don't like!).

Cold Fear

Developed by French Studio, Darkworks. Apart from a few cosmetic bugs, Cold Fear is a very functional and satisfyingly terrifying venture into the rapidly-growing survival horror genre. Our hero, Jack, is an ordinary Coast Guard who decides to respond to a distress signal near his boat. What he finds is a little less than ordinary. This is a classic example of a call to adventure as the protagonist is taken out of the ordinary world and into something much more surreal, without the option to turn back.

Use your fist, and not your mouth!

The antagonists in Cold Fear are both human and monster, with the player given only one option: kill or be killed. The classic 'Hero's Journey' formula is applied very lavishly with no characters receiving more attention than the other apart from the Hero and the Villain. The only problems I had with this game was the fact that in some rooms there were obvious mistakes, such as Jack's character model being completely devoid of any facial mapping. The other being the control system that I had to get used to, although in retrospect it proved useful to me as later survival horror titles adopted a very similar control scheme. Very underrated game.

Peter Jackson's King Kong (PJKG)

Developed and published by another French developer, Ubisoft, PJKG is yet another classic example of the 'Hero's Journey' but just simply thrown into a hastily made film tie-in for a quick buck. The game ambitiously attempts to merge classic 3-d platform gameplay with a serious 1^st person shooter, what happens is that they put too many things in place that the game engine can't actually handle, so the player suffers from the results, which is criminal amounts of frame-rate dropping combined with horrible collision detection.

WARNING: Stills do not reflect how bad the game actually is.

The platforming gameplay is also reduced to a series of quick-time events in which the player has to simply mash a button to continue on with the next phase of the area, whereas the first person sequences involved the player shooting at dinosaurs at a maximum frame-rate of about 30-fps (I took the liberty of running this through an emulator). What I felt personally were the worst aspects of the game were the fact that it had to sell itself on extra content that wasn't already going to be on a DVD release of the movie itself, if a game has to market itself on 'Extra Jack Black outtakes', then in my humble opinion it seriously makes me question the developer's faith in the product itself. Avoid like the plague

The Winner:

Cold Fear