Things that I just did that I have opinions on

Okay, so I just downloaded and played the demo of Brutal Legend, the second game by Double Fine Productions with the first being Psychonauts, so I already had pretty high expectations. Unfortunately the demo is only about 5 minutes long. And amazingly it is still freaking excellent in that little time. It has that hilarious, obscure, random humour and charm that is so rare now, because so many are so scared of shying away from proven genres and titles.

Double Fine have a history of releasing truly unique, interesting fun games that throw away any mainstream bullshit that ruins a lot of titles just trying to appeal to a few more people (I know that sounds wrong as they still only have 1 actual game, but they have mini games and comics as well!). More developers should take example from them and actually put some real effort into their work. For example, a decent story, decent writing, decent characters! Either the industry has just become incredibly fucking lazy, or they are really undervaluing/underestimating their consumer base. Oh hey, everyone loves World War 2, let's bring out a World War 2 game, and ours if different because we've got a wisecracking soldier, and a tortured soldier and a confident leader soldier, and Nazis! And everything is fucking brown.

I assume it's because they think people want "realism" but I'm not playing games to be real, they're supposed to take you away from reality. No one cares that you have some dust clouds that look more like real dust clouds when your characters are copy pasted from every cliched stereotype already produced. No one cares that your faces look and act like real people up close when on screen they're all so tiny and pass by so quickly that you can't make them out anyway. No one cares that those leaves move around pretty realistically when you're driving past at 50 miles an hour. We've reached a stage now where good graphics should be standard with any game, especially when there have been titles with shit graphics that are still incredible experiences. It's not about realism, it's about style. They shouldn't be able to get away with making rubbish.

Then again, we still buy their shit, so we only have ourselves to blame.

The other demo I just played was for WET, which I thought was going to be crap. Just another game who's selling point is that you're looking at the backside of some ridiculously attractive woman the whole game.

And this is true.

However! I actually found this a lot of fun. It's a really interesting blend of spaghetti western Hong Kong action cinema in a modern urban setting. Just full of over the top, stylised acrobatic violence bullet-time insanity that I thought had reached it's fun limit, and then burst into a crazy comic book noir tri-colour rage, which then goes into a Matrix inspired highway car chase where you start wall running off moving trucks and back flipping over exploding cars.

Was this realistic? No.
Was it fun? Yes.
Do you see where this is headed?

Probably not, this rant is getting a bit tired now. Anyway, the demo was a lot of fun with a main character who's level of baddassery is close to the Starbuck marker and the snippets they show make the other assassins out there look very interesting. For example: Some kind of cowboy renaissance-France musketeer. A blind albino woman called the Scorpion, which I can only assume is because she holds her dual sub machine guns above her head (not with her tail).

This game basically looks like Kill Bill meets John Woos Stranglehold, which is pretty great.

You know, if you're into that kind of thing.



Tune in next time where I start my list of "Things that annoy/amuse me" which I was going to do as a whole list, but I might make into a few longer installments. Just to really stretch out the little material that I have. Let's hope it doesn't rip.