Top 10 why the hells

10. Why the hell is there not a straight up Mad Max licensed cover based shooter/vehicular combat game? Is Fallout now "our" official Mad Max? Watched The Road Warrior the other day and god damn. There's material to spare, shall we say. Age of Max. Yeah.

9. Why the hell are there still Wii games that don't use pointer support throughout all menus? Seeing stick-controlled keyboards now is like being spat in the face.

8. Why the hell isn't Games for Windows Live integrated 100% with Live Messenger? Why does it have to live in its own separate application? GFWL has no chance of survival as long as its being perceived as addon bloatware; if it was an integral part of Windows that might make it less of a god damn pain to deal with. The service itself works. It just got beat viciously with the frontend ugly stick.

7. Why the hell do i pay full price for XBL Gold in Europe when i get only a slice of the feature set?

6. Why the hell hasnt Persona 4 been ported to the Wii? Actually, why aren't more JRPGs being ported/made for the Wii? Anything menu-driven was born to roll on that box, and it's not like it's a small market share. Digging out my PS2 to play Persona felt so unnecessary.

5. Why the hell isn't there 360 backwards compatibility for Oddworld Stranger's wrath? If there is ONE system on my shelf i feel i shouldn't have to hook up again it's my xbox classic. When Call of Cthulhu is backwards compatible, what's the deal? Is it a Riddick kind of problem where they hacked the hell out of the system to the extent where it isn't really standards compliant?

4. Why the hell have nobody managed to make a good straight up hardcore action game set in the Warhammer 40k universe? Playing Gears of war 2 keeps making me think about Terminator space marines

3. Why the hell are game-specced laptops still popular? Why did i keep buying them? Jesus.

2. Why the hell aren't Lucasarts pushing out old adventure games like crazy for the Wii? Or Steam? It's good to see Revolution try the water, but for Lucasarts this is a straight up dosbox nobrainer. I will happily buy a Monkey island 1-3 pack for 30 bucks to this day if performance and compatibility is guaranteed. Why are they not doing asset updates / rereleases of games like Grim Fandango? Mature, well written, deep stories are rarer now than ever, and they're sitting on a hoard of them.

1. Why the hell isn't Chu Chu Rocket on XBLA, Wiiware and PSN yet? Best competitive game ever. Also the most violent, if you're in the same room as whoever you just sent the cats on.


Whoever did the menus for Resi 5...

...needs to be fired. Asap. It's bizarre to have such a through-and-through polished and next gen experience tarnished by this bumbling infantile 1998 bullshit. Not even just the inventory, the menus between missions where you manage and buy/sell stuff, it's all apocalyptically bad, and it's especially obvious in co-op, where they shift and move around like crazy as two players try to use them properly. Too many "Are you sure?" prompts, button legends that don't match the context you're in, HIDDEN buttons they don't tell you about in-game, it's just plain BAD. My dad's homemade website makes more sense than these things.

The aiming is fine, and it looks cool. Whatever if i can't strafe while i do this. What bothers me is when i can't pick something up without DESTROYING (?!) a single round of pistol ammo that's taking up a slot, or that i can't, when requested by my partner to trade over some ammo, simply push a button to do so without having to go into the menus.

Arggh i wish they could just patch this fixed, because i'm having so much fun with the game otherwise!


Random music gear rant: The Akai MPD24 is ASSSssSss

Just a friendly warning. I was using the m-audio Triggerfinger for a long while before the constant MIDI driver dropouts were cockblocking me for live shows. Picked up the Akai MPD24 on a recommendation. Let it be said that every time i hook this thing up i am blown away by how utterly rotten it is. Fucking piece of junk, transmits poly aftertouch on every pad. AFTERTOUCH? Show me a sequencer that lets you map that to anything of value. Please?

What a fucking mess of a unit. Filled with useless features. It's like they had no idea what market they were gunning for. No wonder Justice keep it unplugged during their live shows 


Bioshock gaiden

The more i think about it the more "done" Bioshock is. That game's good ending really wrapped it up nice and pretty for me. What i was hoping when there was talk of sequels was something like Shock 2, which really just took the few elements of Shock 1 that were integral to that experience and transposed it to a new setting, adding enough new to it to make it seem fresh again. A simple return to rapture feels like a copout to me.

What really IS Bioshock when the Ryan thread is finished? That game was intensely personal. Take that away and i'm not sure what we're left with. I just know it's not as appealing to me.

Fingers crossed


Persona 4 first impressions

So the Persona 4 videos on here made me want to check the game out for myself. Got a US import (us Europeans are so screwed), and have been playing for the past 3 hours. Which puts me right past the point where the actual game bit starts ;-P

I really, really like the way this game looks. The menus are super crazy sharp, the transitions, everything is just pure class. It's funny to be wowed by menus i guess, but it says a lot about how cheap a frontend games can get away with these days. Anything beyond a vertical or horizontal column of options on a dimmed background seems to be too much effort. Weirdly, i thought it was fun just to open the system menu in P4 and watch the transitions (colored bars layering to form the UI).

Frankly, as passè as it is to compare .jp games to western games in terms of visual fidelity, i think it's pretty obvious that japan have the artform nailed as far as 2d goes. No wonder they're sticking to that; They're sickeningly good at it, down to such subtle things as color palette selection. It really puts the visual oomph of games like Gears 2 in a different light, if not just a different perspective. It's engineers versus artists all over again.

Going to savor this one. It's a great game to chill out with over a cup of tea after making my thumbs bleed at SF4 or repeatedly overheating my laptop with Dawn of war 2.


Warming up to the evil of SF4

Being a obsessive compulsive completist, i've been gritting my teeth through the experience of sucking at Street fighter 4, to the point where i now feel like i genuinely suck less. And that is pretty awesome in itself.

I guess i've become used to being cuddled by games. SF4 does not at any moment make you feel cool unless you make an effort to that end; This is as far from a button masher as you can get. Spending hours trying to perfect guile's low light kick-light punch-medium punch-flash kick combo is an exercise i wouldn't normally call fun. And it really isn't. What is fun is landing it in a fight.

This balance between ardous, painful practise of systems that sometimes feel difficult just to spite you, and the glorious sensation of actually learning a new skill and successfully applying it, is what i guess is what keeps people coming back again and again. But it's also, i expect, a huge detractor for beginners; I at least knew how to play Guile alright beforehand. Coming into this not even really knowing how a charge move works and how you can charge midair or mid-move, and meeting this brick wall of a game that assumes you DO know, it has got to be a profoundly painful experience.

I'm having a lot of fun mastering Guile. Even learning to enjoy pulling off his super after i realized cancelling out of a flash kick into it is actually easier than pulling it off clean.
I had an awesome match against an E.Honda player who would consistently try to jump in to start combos, who i would simply airthrow the hell back down again and again. It put the fear in him so obviously it totally broke his style, and it was awesome to watch him try to revert back to moves he hadn't practised. That's what SF is about really; competition and fucked up psychology. I'm loving it. Though i really need a fightpad.


Guile's mother fucking super

Makes me want to kill babies.

What a bullshit movement to do on the 360 stick. 90% of the times it turns into a flashkick, and the remaining 10% feel like complete accidents.
This shit is making me ill.


New DJ Ungelvrål track! Woop DS-10!

Crappy title, and i hit the 100bar length max, so the ending kinda blows. Psychedelic electro bleep boings. Lots of modulation and panning


DS-10 Stuff

I think the DS-10 is getting a really bad rep for the wrong reasons now. I personally was really disappointed by the unit, mostly because of how impressive the tech is and how fail the interface is. But it still hasnt left my DS since i got it, and i still use it for putting down sketches, which it utterly excels at. I've made more actual music on the DS-10 than i have in any sequencer in a while now. Sometimes working with strict limitations brings out the best of you.


It helps that DS-10 patches are moved pretty seamlessly over to VSTis like Arguru's Voyager and come out nearly identical, albeit sounding BETTER. Which is sometimes not what you want, but nothing a little downsampling can't fix. You can literally just line up the knobs in the same angles, and bam you're good to go. This is a quick sketch ported directly from the ds-10 to Voyager running in Renoise.

Going to be putting up some vids soon on YouTube of some of the "hacks" you can do on the DS-10, such as using the way the song mode interpolates patches from pattern to pattern for faking extra patterns, faking stereo delay using volume and pan, and some simple patch tricks like automating the pitch of osc1 and 2 independently to get a polyphony of 4 synths going in a track. It's pretty fun stuff to mess about with when commuting for sure :)