Zombies – Page 6

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – April 2016

Late March’s descent into Zeldamania continues. Mostly because I’ve been devoting roughly 95% of my gaming time to Hyrule Warriors again. Which is, you know, not really Zelda, but it looks the part.

This month also saw the release of the new Star Fox games. One of which is a very traditional Star Fox game which people hate because of the controls. And the other is a Star Fox game in name only which people are in love with because of the controls. Wacky!

~ Game Over ~

Hyrule Warriors Legends (3DS) – I completed the story, including all the optional stages. But the adventure maps… they just never end. I mean, I guess they do, but there is so much content smooshed into this game that it’s hard to imagine ever clearing it all.

Resident Evil Revelations (PC) – Guys, I’m gonna spoil it for you: the first revelation is that there are two identical boats. The second revelation is that there’s a third identical boat, which had sunk a year before the game’s events, and a man has been living in it the whole time. This game’s plot is bananas. And I love it that much more because of it.

Resident Evil Revelations 2 – Episode 1 (PC) – Been putting this one off for a while, despite hearing that it’s quite good. And I agree! Not totally on board with the flashlight mechanics, but everything else is just swell. I am frothing in anticipation of the rest of the game.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – April 2016

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – March 2016

If February was defined by Pokémania, then March was defined by… also Pokémania (and to a lesser extent, Zelda mania). Eh, what can I say? I really love Pokémon, and there’s been a lot going on with the franchise these days.

~ Game Over ~

Pokémon Yellow Version (GB) – Playing through this one again was a very welcome blast of nostalgia, and also a little frustration at trying to remember how the mechanics used to work back in Gen 1. Running the game with a team of monsters I’d usually never use was a great way to make it feel fresh again. Hooray for Flareon!

Splatoon (WiiU) – Finally bothered to just hone my focus and complete the single-player mode. It was an absolute blast, and the final boss was something else entirely. I’m seriously hoping that they release another campaign some day, even if it’s just a little eShop title.

Jett Rocket II: The Wrath of Taikai (3DS) – Replayed the game in “mirror world” mode, which I guess is just the same levels you already played but reversed? While I may not be as hype for it as I was when it originally released, I still think it’s a solid little platformer.

Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (GC) – I was testing out some Gamecube games to see which save files on my giant memory card had been corrupted, and popped in Mega Man Anniversary Collection. The save was still good, and somehow I ended up playing through this one. I mean, just one story path as Bass, but that’s still a cleared game, right?

New Super Mario Bros 2 (3DS) – I’ve been wanting to replay this for months now, but always had some other major 3DS game on the go. With Paper Jam and Pokémon Yellow done and dusted, there was no longer any reason not to jump into it. The twist is that this time I played about half the game in co-op mode, which is super fun.

Shovel Knight (3DS) – Do I really need to justify another Shovel Knight run to you? I think I’ve made it pretty clear already that it’s my favourite game.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – March 2016

Forgotten Film Round-up #1

I’ve decided that my current “thing” is going to be browsing through my movie collection and watching any that I haven’t watched before. You may scoff at the idea that I might buy a product and then never use it, but I’m both very materialistic and busy. Well, “busy.” The idea here is that I’m going to write a thing after every so many movies and then fire off a couple paragraphs about each.

Anyway, I’m sure this won’t last for long. We all know that I have a habit of abandoning projects really quickly. But at least I’ll get one or two articles out of it.

This batch comes from a Midnight Horror collection, the likes of which you will find in the $5 garbage DVD bin at Wal-Mart. It contains a whopping eight films, and as you may have already guessed, they’re pretty much trash as far as cinema goes. Let’s take a closer look at a handful of them, shall we?

#1 – Decadent Evil

Firstly, let’s assume that I didn’t choose this one to start with because it’s pretty close to Resident Evil. (It’s also known as Decadent Evil Dead in the UK, which is just.. ugh.) Also, assume that I wasn’t growling “Decadent Eee-vil” and then giggling to myself constantly between the time when I chose to watch the movie and when I actually sat down to watch it.

Decadent Evil is 67 minutes long. That includes the intro and ending credits. I’d wager that the actual film portion is roughly 50 minutes. This is good for me, as my attention span dwindles by the day.

This film is about vampires. Specifically, a trio of lady vampires that live in a gaudy LA mansion and work as strippers. They also have a little pet lizard-man, Marvin, which they refer to as a homunculus and keep in a birdcage. The head vampire is nearing the milestone of having sucked the blood of 10,000 humans, which will apparently make her an invincible Vampire Queen. Sure, why not? At least she doesn’t get magical sparkle powers.

But then a vampire hunter shows up and, with the “help” of the youngest vampire and her boyfriend, locates and defeats the boss vampire. He dies during the process, but ends up turning her into a homunculus. The final scene is of Marvin porking her in the cage while she makes a noise that sounds an awful lot like “Ow. Ow. Ow. Ow Ow.”

While not egregiously terrible, Decadent Evil is not a good movie. Even the nudity is shoddy.

#2 – Meridian

This seemed to be the most boob-filled flick of the bunch, based on the description on the back of the case, so it got second billing. In that regard, I was not disappointed. There was ample boobage on display indeed.

Please note that this film has the subtitle “Kiss of the Beast” on occasion. This was not one of those occasions.

The movie’s protagonist is Catherine, who moves into a castle in Italy because reasons. Her friend comes to visit and invites a bunch of carnies over and then the carnies drug and rape the both of ’em. Whoops. Also the one that has his way with Catherine is a were-sasquatch. Double whoops!

I don’t know how it turns out because I fell asleep shortly after that point. I do know that there was a ghost of a dead girl, the were-sasquatch was cursed and also knew about a secret passage in the castle that led to Hell apparently, and… Yeah, that’s all I got from the few moments that I drifted back into consciousness.

Meridian, at least what I saw of it, is a much better movie than Decadent Evil. I guess it must have had some people who knew anything about making movies on staff. Sherilyn Fenn is the main character, and she’s a… known actress. It’s still not one I would recommend, because the plot was super dumb, but I could see someone defending it as a decent movie.

Confession: I did go back and watch the rest… It turns out that were-sasquatch was also a ghost. With an evil twin. And the trick to breaking were-sasquatch’s sasquatch-ghost curse was to have him murder said evil twin. If it weren’t so slow and romantic, this could have really been an awesomely stupid movie. As it is, it’s just stupid.

#3 – Backwoods Bloodbath – Curse of the Black Hodag

Where the heck do I even start with this one? Let’s start with the fact that this film is amateur-hour in every way. The story follows the same plot beats as every other slasher, the actors are mediocre at best, and the camerawork is all over the place. I suppose the gore is okay.

One might assume that the director had a glut of red corn syrup, and said to his friends “Welp, I guess we’d better make a slasher movie.”

As the story so often goes, a group of teens goes into the woods for a weekend getaway. Despite a token warning from a local hillbilly, they press on and are subsequently picked off one-by-one by a forest monster. The twist is that in addition to the monster, one of the teens is also a psychopathic killer. So I guess that’s unique. It’s normally only one of the two.

The monster is a big let down. Called a Hodag, the “beast” is really just a dude dressed all in black with predator dreadlocks. It’s given a little backstory about how it has evolved over the years into the shape of its prey (which is people), but that’s still just a lame handwaving for not being able to come up with some decent creature effects. It’s especially disappointing when you find out what a Hodag is actually supposed to look like.

At least the Hodag’s story is kind of neat. The locals are used to a couple people going missing every year, as the Hodag will kill a few folks and store their bodies away for the winter (like the nagging grasshopper). But it just so happens that now, it’s killing at an alarming frequency because it’s got a baby on the way. It’s eating for two now! How sweet! Better than just killing because it’s a mindless monster, at any rate.

Just so that we can tie this one into the common thread of “how’s the nudity?”, I feel obligated to mention that during one of the sex scenes, there is a still, close-up shot of a single breast for about five seconds. The editing in this film is baffling. Also the Hodag keeps one of the girls tied up and alive in his lair, but by the time she is found, it has chopped off her breasts. That’s… not a thing I’ve ever seen before. Backwoods Bloodbath goes to some really strange places.

I can’t in good faith recommend this to anyone. It’s not even amusingly terrible. It’s just terrible. The one saving grace for me is that I was playing Chibi-Robo! Zip-Lash throughout, so it didn’t really feel like I’d wasted those 90 minutes.

#4 – Zombie Dearest

The last one on today’s lineup, as absolutely the best. By a long shot. A really, really long shot.

I have no idea why this was billed as a horror film, or why anybody suggests that it is scary in the least. Because it is not. The last three minutes of the film might be construed as somewhat frightening, but even then, that’s being pretty generous.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I’ve become so desensitized to zombies that I cannot fathom how anyone could see them as something frightening.

Anyway, this movie is totally a comedy. Like, it’s not hilarious or anything, but it made me laugh out loud a few times. And, of course, I was laughing with this movie. If I chuckled while watching the other three, I definitely would have been laughing at them.

Zombie Dearest tells the story of a couple, Gus and Deborah, who are going through some severe marital difficulties. They end up moving out to an old family home in the country, and Gus digs up a dead body while trying to replace his septic tank. By some manner of Zombie Wang Magic (yes, it’s a thing), the body comes to life and starts following Gus’s orders.

The zombie, Quinto, puts even more strain on Gus and Deborah’s relationship at first, but eventually they patch things up and grow closer than ever when they decide that they need to re-kill Quinto.

Things do take a turn for the worse near the end, but unlike every other zombie comedy ever, it doesn’t dip into bleak, depressing territory in the third act and forget that it’s supposed to be funny. No, it hangs onto its somewhat humorous tone until it absolutely must push the plot to its climax. But it quickly invokes Zombie Wang Magic a second time to undo the damage and give the characters their (presumably) happy ending.

I am fully willing to put myself out there and suggest that Zombie Dearest is actually a good movie. It’s not a life-altering film, but I was entertained and impressed but it. It may be due to the fact that I was expecting another 90 minutes of garbage, but there’s also a chance that it really is decent. Even if you’re fully burned-out on zombies, I’d heartily recommend watching it. (Fair warning: it’s got only a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.)

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – March 2015

Yeesh, it’s April already. Funny to think that as of today, I’ll have been a homeowner for exactly three years.

Fooled you! It’s actually May 1st that I took possession of my house.

That… that was terrible. Let’s just get onto the video game stuff.

~ Now Playing ~

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (3DS) – As much as I love Smash Bros, I have to say that if I were restricted to one single game for the rest of my days, it’d be a MonHun game. Preferably this one.

Majora’s Mask 3D (3DS) – If I had to choose only one Zelda to play forever? It’d be Wind Waker, but Majora is a very close second.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – March 2015

Monthend Video Game Wrap-Up – February 2015

February, February… I don’t really have any preamble for February. It certainly was a month.

I bought a New 3DS. That’s a thing that happened.

~ Now Playing ~

Super Smash Bros 4 (3DS/WiiU) – Duh. For the first time, I think I’ve actually spent more time this month playing the Wii U version. Sounds wacky, but Smash is really great on 3DS.

Hyrule Warriors (WiiU) – Thanks to the new DLC pack, this is back in the regular rotation.

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (3DS) – The cycle begins anew, and I couldn’t be happier.

Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (PSP) – My brother had to re-purchase this for his Vita, and started from the beginning. Helping him work back up to a decent rank was a nice warm-up for MH4.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D (3DS) – One of my favourite Zeldas, but with better graphics and a few of the wrinkles ironed out. Terrific.

Lufia: the Legend Returns (GBC) – I didn’t like it at first, then it got better, and now it’s just feeling like a slog. Starting to remember why I don’t play many RPGs any more.

Senran Kagura Burst (3DS) – The shallowest, most action-heavy title on my 3DS. Great for when you just want to kick a bunch of butt without any thought or effort. Also I’m not terribly opposed to all the jiggly bits. The exploding clothes are a bit much, though.

Moero! Nekketsu Rhythm Damashii: Osu! Tatake! Ouendan 2 (DS) – Music is what brought me out of my post-separation slump. This is what put the wheels in motion. Mostly I just played “Bambina” and “Countdown” over and over.

Rock Band 2 (360) – Rocked out a little bit. Why did I bother adding this?

Pokémon Shuffle (3DS) – Freemium match-em-up. Now with Squirtles and Kangaskhans!

~ Game Over ~

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (3DS) – Like the movie it’s based on, it’s surprisingly not a massive pile of garbage. Not great, but enjoyable. Much better than Magic Pockets’ last TMNT game, anyway.

Elite Beat Agents (DS) – Eventually I was Ouendan’d out, and moved into something a little more North American. Played obsessively for a week until I was able to be “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” on Sweatin’ difficulty. These games are so fun, I would really love to see another sequel…

Resident Evil HD Remaster (360) – Still a good one. Just a few tweaks away from being my ideal RE experience. Like, get rid of the crimson heads and busywork “puzzles” and it’s golden.

The Full List

You didn’t ask for it, but I know you’re curious. So here’s the complete list of video games I own that I’ve never played. This is not including re-releases that I haven’t played, but have played the original release (because there are lots of those too). Nor does it include games that I have played for at least one minute.

Prepare yourself, you are about to stare directly into the depths of my sickness.

Continue reading The Full List

On Mushroom Men and Checkpoints

I played The Last Of Us last month. I noted in the Monthend Wrap-Up that I wasn’t overly fond of it. That’s really only half the story though. Or maybe about a third of it. Because there’s a lot to like about the game! It’s just that the parts I didn’t like were so aggravating that it soured my opinion of the entire experience, which is completely opposite of how I usually roll.

Normally I’m able to overlook rough patches in games or movies or what-have-you and come out enjoying the product on the whole. I think it’s a good philosophy, as it lets me enjoy more things, and I spent less time sounding like a douchey nerd, complaining about stupid little things in an otherwise likeable product.

Like I said before, there are plenty of things about The Last Of Us that I liked. The story, for instance. At first glance, it’s just another stupid zombie game. But then you notice that the more dangerous zombies have mushrooms growing out of their heads. That’s… unusual? Because they are not affected by some silly man-made chemical or evil space-dust. These zombies are people who have been parasitized by cordyceps fungus. Which is a real Goddamn thing. Only in real life it doesn’t affect humans. Just bugs and possibly plants. I don’t know, I didn’t research it enough. But it’s spooky because it’s real and not totally outside the spectrum of plausibility. This is possibly the finest excuse for zombies that anyone has ever come up with.

The characters are also quite likeable. Joel, maybe not so much. He’s a gruff badass who eventually learns to open his heart, which is the stockingest character there is. Ellie, on the other hand, is his 14-year-old companion, and she is effing great. Yes, she’s an obnoxious teenager, but she’s a lovable kind of obnoxious teenager. Not the most original character either, but she’s written very well, and it’s a shame any time the two get split up. The only reason that I didn’t write off Joel completely is because they play off each other perfectly. A lot of the secondary characters are great too, even though they only stick around for a couple hours each.

The Last Of Us features some very nice stealth-based gameplay. Many encounters can be won by sneaking around all quiet-like and dispatching your enemies (with a good old fashioned choke) one by one. Sometimes you can even sneak your way through an area without killing anyone. And there are plenty of options for when you do want to kill people. You can throw trash around to distract them, or bonk them on the head with a bottle to stun them while you rush up to finish them off. Maybe you just want to lay down a home-made bomb as a trap, or toss a smoke bomb to cover your escape. It’s all quite wonderful, and if the entire game was just these stealth sections, I’d be over the moon.

But it’s not. Every once in a while, the game forces you into a shootout. If you mess up at being sneaky, you’re going to have to reset or finish the encounter with bullets. Sometimes you’ll just be automatically thrust into a firefight with bandits, or the zombies will just inexplicably know that you’re there and rush you all at once. Even worse, is when you meticulously clear out an area with stealth kills, and then trip an invisible event trigger that spawns a dozen enemies in that exact same area that you then have to fight with guns and fists. Those ones are the absolute worst, and they very nearly ruined the entire game for me.

In the early game at least, you have two options when you’re forced to fight zombies. You can try to melee them. This is a waste of time, because while you’re wailing away on one zombie (who will take 4-5 punches to kill), his six or seven friends are tearing you a new one. There are melee weapons laying about here and there, but they’re only a little more effective than your fists, and even then they’re only good for a handful of attacks before they break. Eventually you’ll have home-made bombs, too, but they’re much more useful to lay as traps while you’re in a stealth combat sequence.

Guns are a bit of a wash, too. Not only is it incredibly hard to aim (you can upgrade your aim wiggle, but it costs a small fortune in upgrade pills), but the zombies are brilliant at dodging about as they race towards you. They can’t tell the difference between your flashlight and natural light, but they’re incredibly adept at juking around to dodge your bullets. Yeah, sure. That’s a bit of a stretch there, guys. You don’t get very many bullets either, but that’s a feature that I can live with, and even sort of appreciate, having spent so much of my teen years with Resident Evil games.

There’s apparently a DLC pack for the game that includes the “Grounded” difficulty, which not only makes enemies stronger, but removes the HUD and your ability to sense nearby enemies, and slims the amount of scavengable resources down to the bare minimum. I won’t pay for this mode, but I have to assume that it’s literally impossible. A lack of bullets will be worse than ever since trying to shoot anything in this game is already a major pain, and melee combat is almost completely useless on the normal difficulty. I can imagine that you’ll play up until the first time you come upon a forced zombie fight, and then the game is over because there’s no way to win. It’s a terrible joke from the developers, and you have to pay them to suffer it.

So I guess that what I’m getting at is that I’d like for The Last Of Us to be more like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. In fact, it’s already an awful lot like Shattered Memories, but I’d love it to pieces if it traded in all the shooty sections for running away and stealth times. It would flip my opinion of the game right around, and I’d start to understand why it’s been almost universally praised. As it is though, it’s just another humdrum third-person shooter with a really great story and occasionally a really fun gameplay sequence.

Year of N64 – July – Gauntlet Legends

Unlike the last few Year of N64 games, Gauntlet Legends is one that I spent a ton of time with back in my youth. Or, at least I think that I did. Having played it through again, I’m not sure if it is quite as much of a timesink as I remembered it being.

Gauntlet Legends is essentially a reboot of the Gauntlet franchise long before reboots were a thing. The previous game, Gauntlet III: The Final Quest, came out in 1991, and Legends hit the arcades in 1998. The N64 port didn’t show up until the next year. I’ve only ever dabbled in “classic” Gauntlet games, so I don’t know how much Legends changes the formula, but it brought the franchise into the world of polygons, so that’s a big enough leap for me.

If you’ve never played Gauntlet anything, you’re missing out on a fairly entertaining multiplayer arcade experience. The game has you set up a character from a small roster of classes, then sends you on your way through a couple dozen stages, where you will collect cash and slaughter countless numbers of monsters. The goal of the game is more or less to survive and make your way to the end of each stage, but Gauntlet offers a little more than that.

Enter the “dreaded” RPG elements. You choose your character class, give them a name, and then they gain experience and level up as you play. Level ups increase your stats, and when you hit certain milestones, your character will gain special upgrades, like fancier weapons and a familiar that tags along and adds to your firepower. Each player also has their own inventory for stockpiling items, and can spend their accumulated gold on either items or stat boosts. Items can be useful, but I found that their true value was just selling them at the store so that I could buy the stat boosts instead.

The stages come in four colourful flavours: the mountain, the castle, the town, and the ice domain. Defeating the bosses of each world will unlock a pseudo-final stage in the cathedral, and when you beat that, you unlock the battlefield world. Finally, you will descend into the very depths of the underworld for the final showdown.

So there’s a fairly good variety of levels on display here. Even stages within the same world vary greatly, rather than simply having one default look and a handful of different layouts for example, the mountain world has you start at the lush base of the mountain, then as you ascend, it becomes more barren and rocky. Eventually you find your way inside and have to work your way through a cave, culminating in a stage that takes place on a set of rocky platforms and catwalks suspended above a massive pool of lava.

The stage layouts are usually fairly good too. Almost all of them have twists and turns everywhere, but the critical path is usually not too difficult to follow. It wasn’t until the ice world that the levels started to get annoyingly complex and I found myself wishing that they were about half as long. Most of the stages are huge, and the amount of enemies that populate them is staggering; it’s a wonder that this game didn’t cause the Nintendo 64 to simply melt down. As it is though, there’s not even very much lag considering how many moving objects can end up on screen at once.

While most of the items you find during your adventure are power-ups of varying effectiveness, there are three important collectibles that you need to keep your eyes open for. There are plenty of hints to their locations, but actually sussing them out can sometimes be a hassle. Obelisks are scattered around the first three worlds, and you need to find all of them in one world to unlock the next. There are a total of thirteen Rune Stones to find, and without them all, you can’t enter the final showdown.

Lastly are the boss weapons, one in each of the four main worlds. These are not strictly necessary to complete the game, but they give you a slight advantage in the boss fights. And if you’re playing solo (as I did), you need all the advantages you can find. The bosses are brutal, and when they’re focusing all of their attacks on you, the fights generally just boil down to whose HP depletes first. They aren’t fun, and a solo player will have to grind his or her butt off before they even stand a chance against a boss. This stands in stark contrast to the regular stages, where you’ll generally never have to grind levels to progress.

The final boss, however, is a bit of an exception. You have to fight him twice, and the first time, he is just as bad as the rest. It’s a very difficult fight, but he drops four superweapons when he’s defeated. If you keep one of those weapons until your second fight with him, using it will make the final battle exceedingly easy. If you don’t, it’s basically impossible to win alone. I wanted to do it the normal way at first, so I leveled up to 90 and maxed out my defense stat through the shop. Still I died. So I used the cheap way, because nuts to that.

I should mention that grinding up to level 90 did not take very long. I burned through this game in a week, and it didn’t really seem to overstay its welcome. I remember having maxed out several characters back in the day, and I suppose that it would have been much less tedious because I was actually able to play with other people. I wanted to do this playthrough with my wife, but the fact of the matter is that the control sticks on my spare N64 controllers are almost completely limp, and I really didn’t care enough to buy a new one or attempt a repair.

So there you have it. It’s not a very deep experience, but I still have a pretty strong appreciation for Gauntlet Legends. So much so, that I kind of want to track down a copy of the incredibly buggy sequel (expansion?), Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, to give that a quick playthough. I also sort of want to try out the oft-maligned Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, but it seems to be so different that it might not be worth the investment. Anyway, Gauntlet Legends was a bunch of fun while it lasted, and I can only imagine that it would go down even smoother with a friend or three to share it with.

Year of N64 – June – DOOM 64

My frame of reference for the DOOM series (I’m just going to capitalize the D from now on) exists in a time somewhere between 1994 and 2000. Doom II was one of the few full-version computer games we had back then that I was keenly interested in, and I played it was the only one. Of course, at some point, my taste for Doom and similar games (Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem 3D, etc) waned and I moved on to newer, fancier computer games.

Doom 64 doesn’t have the greatest reputation. It’s not particularly hated or anything, but the internet’s collective opinion is that the original games are better. In the interest of finding out for sure, I made sure to play through the entirety of the Xbox port of Doom so that I could have more than faded memories to make a comparison to.

The original Doom is fantastic. It’s a simplistic game that doesn’t even let you look along the vertical axis, but it felt much more satisfying to play than most modern first-person shooters. The first two chapters are breezy fun, the third dials it up to push your abilities, and the fourth (an add-on scenario) is simply there to beat you into the ground. What’s most remarkable is that Doom feels really great to play with a controller, as opposed to the keyboard controls (sans-mouse) that I was shackled to in my youth.

Having completed the entirety of Doom for the very first time, and having enjoyed roughly 95% of it (there are some really cheap traps later on), I was riding high and expecting Doom 64 to be a similar experience.

But then it turns out that Doom 64 is poop from a butt.

My very first mistake was playing on a difficulty level that was too much for me. I had chosen “Hurt Me Plenty” on Doom, which is the default setting and equates to what the “Normal” setting would be in other games. Doom 64 phrases it differently, where the equivalent is “I Own Doom.” Sure, it’s the default difficulty, and also a statement of fact. Why would I choose any other setting?

Assuming that it is, in fact, the average difficulty setting, Doom 64 is a brutal game. I was killed twice before I was able to finish the first stage. Secret doors containing monsters open silently behind you. The Average Joe Zombie has a very accurate shot. Rooms are filled with up to eight monsters.

None of this is helped by that fact that playing similar games on an Xbox 360 controller and then an N64 controller is like going from a fork to chopsticks. I figured that all my N64 playing over the last few months would have eased me into the controller, but it turned out to be a massive source of woes for me. I blame it entirely no having used the vastly superior 360 controller immediately beforehand, and it really shows how difficult it can be to adapt to different controllers.

I need to make it very clear though, that Doom 64 lets you customize your controls any damn way you like. Every function is remappable, and you can make changes to your control scheme at any point. It’s a really handy feature, as the default control setup is kinda weird. The only downside is that custom setups aren’t saved, and you have to remap all your buttons each time you power on.

The next big gripe about Doom 64 is the general atmosphere. the graphics, for one, are much darker and more bland than in the PC games. This is to accommodate a generally more horror-focused aesthetic. Doom has always been “scary” in that it incorporates monsters and gore, but the first two PC games were more about stright-up action than trying to frighten you. Doom 64 has this all backwards. The PC games have interesting, colourful visuals, while Doom 64 is awash in browns and grays.

I do appreciate that the team tried to make the graphics more detailed (which they are!), but they killed a lot of the character in the sprites by removing most of their colours.

The sound design has also gone entirely to pot. Doom’s characteristic heavy metal MIDIs have been replaced with subdues, spooky ambiance tracks. This is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. More importantly though, the monsters barely make any sounds unless they’re attacking you. Being able to hear monsters lurking about was a very important part of Doom; you would usually know when a monster was lurking about by the hisses and growls echoing through the halls. Now, pretty much every encounter is a surprise, and monsters will be able to sneak up behind you with no problem at all.

So after having painfully made my way through one and a half stages, I quit, took a week-long breather, and started up again on the next rung down the difficulty ladder, “Bring It On!”

Let me also take an aside here to mention that Doom 64 does not save your game. It uses passwords, which is kinda bonkers. The nice thing is that the passwords save your state (health, armor, guns/ammo) as well as which level you’re on, which is nice. If they only saved your level, it would be a massive pain in the hiney to tackle later levels with only a pistol. No saving is still a big pain though, as mid-stage saves saved me a lot of time when going through the original game. Having to restart a level from the beginning after each death is a little disheartening. I hate sounding like a spoiled brat, but that’s what I am.

Not everything about Doom 64 is bad, though. I really like a lot of the level designs, they feel a lot bigger and more ambitious than in the older games. I suppose that stands to reason though. It’s not like a lot of games get smaller and humbler with each sequel. It’s really just too bad that the designers didn’t seem to have many good ideas for traps. It seems like they decided early on that having enemies appear out of thin air behind you was going to be their bread and butter. Still, the actual architecture of the stages is usually impressive, and I enjoyed navigating and solving them.

Doom 64 features the usual Doom weaponry, including Doom II’s super (double-barreled) shotgun and the totally sweet double chainsaw. It also has a new weapon that’s unique to only this game: the Unmaker. It’s an alien-tech laser gun, which doesn’t seem all that impressive at first. However, if you take the trouble to find the secret stages, each one contains a collectible artifact that adds to the Unmaker’s power. The first one speeds up its fire rate, and the second and third give it double and triple beams respectively. Even if you only find the one artifact, the sped-up Unmaker is a pretty awesome gun, burning through even Barons of Hell like a hot knife through butter. It’s pretty great.

The monsters in Doom 64 may at fist appear to be new, but really, they’re mostly your old favourites with fancy makeovers. Some are pretty familiar, like the standard zombies and the pinkies, but you probably won’t recognize Doom 64’s imp as an imp until you’re already choking down fireballs. Cacodemons and pain elementals have likewise gotten new sprites that barely resemble their older incarnations. The one new monster is barely new at all. Nightmare imps are just translucent blue imps, with purple fireballs that fly quite a bit faster than the standard imp’s. Doom 64 does have a unique final boss, the Mother Demon. She’s ugly and can tear you apart in record time (that also works the other way around with a powered-up Unmaker), but she looks pretty dumb. Kinda like a big, fleshy bug, if you ask me.

In the end, Doom 64 is caught in a weird place. On one hand, I really like a lot of the levels. On the other hand, pretty much everything else is different in a bad way. It’s reminiscent of Doom, but it doesn’t really feel like Doom, if that makes any sense at all. There really isn’t any reason to play Doom 64. Regardless of whether you’re looking to play a Doom game or an N64 shooter, there are a handful of better choices out there. Even if you’re intent on playing through the entire Doom canon, you might be better off trying one of the fan-made PC ports. Poor Doom 64 just isn’t quite the game it should be.

Filler time: Articles for grown-ups

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me: I’m a child living an adult’s life. I appreciate a lot of things that people my age aren’t supposed to, if advertising and demographics have anything to say about it. Marketing is all a big load of crap, anyway.

I guess the point is that I don’t have any ideas in my head at the moment, and I don’t have the gumption to type up the weekly Dark Souls entry. Wait, no, that’s what I wasn’t supposed to say. I’m supposed to make it seem like I’m doing something inspired.

Anyway, I type about a lot of goofy things that are emblematic of childhood. Cartoons, Nintendo games, candy. If you scroll up from the bottom of the article list, you’ll see that it takes a long time to get to anything very grown-uppy. Or at least, that’s my interpretation of it. So that’s why today, I’m going to link you to a small selection of old articles that stand out as somewhat more mature among the sea of childish crap that I’ve written.

28 Days Later (2003) – The first movie I ever reviewed, and it’s a scaaary one. Probably because it’s one of the first (if not the actual first) movies with fast zombies. So it turns a kind of slow, tense staple into something much more fierce and immediately frightening. Please note that I have not watched this movie since then.

Catherine (2011) – Undoubtedly a truly mature game, as it deals with many very grown-up themes. Also there are boobies and monsters, but the heart of the game is literally about growing up, accepting responsibility, and figuring out what you want to do with your life.

Chicken Wings (2005) – Chicken wings are undoubtedly a fun finger food, which is pretty child-like, However, wings are most prominent where? Bars, that’s where. Kids don’t go to bars. They’re also one of the staple foods of sports-watching, or so I’ve been told, and sports-watching is a pretty grown-up kind of thing.

Mate1.com Hates You (2006) – To date, still the most popular thing I’ve ever published, if fan e-mails are anything to go by. Mate1.com, if you’re not already aware, is an online dating website. Those are most definitely not for children. It’s not really for anybody, as far as this article is concerned.

Remembering the Cottage (2007) – Yeah, it’s an article entirely about childhood memories, but that in and of itself makes it kinda grown-up, right? I mean, kids don’t reminisce. You have to be old and at least a little world-weary before you really understand nostalgia. Some might say that I’m not old enough to say something like that, but I respectfully have no comment.

True Crime: Streets of LA (2003) – The first video game that I wrote about that earned an M rating from the ESRB. I guess that’s all I really have to say about that. I haven’t written about a lot of games that feature non-laser guns.