Scott Morris'
Bastion of Truth

Within around four minutes of loading up Tekken 5 on your PS2, at least assuming you skip the traditional impressively rendered and entirely pointless intro sequence’s attempt to graft a semblance of storyline onto a genre that really doesn’t need it, you will meet with the inescapable, title case demanding thought that, “This Is Certainly More Tekken“.

Not that “More Tekken” is necessarily a terrible thing, but I can’t help but wonder exactly who was hanging on tenterhooks for another minorly updated revision of Namco’s long running, bafflingly popular pugilist simulator. ‘Popular’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘best’ and it’d be a brave man who nails their colours to the Tekken mast for the latter. It retains the usual spit ‘n’ polish the series normally has lavished upon it, with the exception of the rough-around-the-edges Tekken Tag Tournament, and carries out the usual incremental upgrade threat of being slightly prettier, slightly shinier and a few more characters slapped into the box.

If I’m going to have the nerve to call this a review, I suppose I’d better at least mention the game mechanics. You select a character and punch, kick and throw an opponent character in a vaguely unsatisfying way while trying to ignore the silly translucent explosions of colour that accompany every hit to mask the fact that it still doesn’t look like characters are making contact even after umpteen years of development. If you hurt your opponent more than they hurt you, you win and go on to the next round. Repeat this often enough and you win. (more…)

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Perhaps the only frustration in owning a Gameboy Advance is the number of ports released for the system. Indeed, it’s something I’ve felt compelled to comment on every time I’m moved to write about Ninty’s little baby. While most of the ports are simply conversions of the similarly powered SNES or Megadrive, jaws dropped and sanities were questioned after a port of PC/PS2/XBOX Max Payne was announced. How could the nifty but far less powerful GBA cope with Remedy’s hi-caliber bullet-time shooty shooty bang bangs?

The answer was to turn the game into an isometric shooter, a forced third person perspective that’s been happily utilised since the ZX Spectrum was a jumpin’ and a jivin’ around with Batman. After falling out of favour for a while it seems to be enjoying a mini revival of late, also used in the recent resoundingly average GBA version of Terminator 3. While the developers Mobius have managed to achieve level layouts that are at time scarily reminiscent of the original PC versions, they’re ultimately hamstrung and defeated by a sheer lack of horsepower.

Unsurprisingly taking the same plotline as the original version, the broad details concern undercover cop Max Payne avenging his murdered wife and child by infiltrating the local Mafia outfit, cracking the case of new designer drug Valkyr with extreme prejudice. Seeing as I’ve already regurgitated the storyline in excruciating detail in my previous review I think I’ll spare those gory details this time through, but rest assured that despite a trimming to fit the cartridge space the story is as noir-riffic and enjoyable as the previous versions. (more…)

Alert citizens will be aware of my oft-plugged other website, theOneliner.com. It has a rarely visited, less frequently posted on, dead-by-any-metric forum contained within it. Never used, so no-one ever joins. No surprise there. But, a week or so back a new member named Pochtalyon appears in the members list, but doesn’t post.

Eventually, being an extraordinarily nosy sort, I do a spot of GoogleStalking. Woah! 243000 results! A percentage a sliver off 100 of them being members list showing him/her/it joining forums between the 9th and 12th of September (-ish).

I’m a little weirded out by this. Anyone have a reasonable explaination for something like this? My current favourites would be script kiddies testing some hAXXpl0it, some setup for a 411 scam or David Icke’s oft-warned Reptilian Illuminati New World Order preparing to plug us into the Matrix.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Sega are clearly a rather thrifty company, certainly if their use of the House of the Dead 2 assets are anything to go by, Having saved a boatload of cash by hiring some of the most lackadaisical and unintentionally hilarious voice actor for the game proper, further funds were raised from the arcade, Dreamcast and PC versions, with it even showing up as a bonus in the Xbox House of the Dead 3. All fair game, although using the game as a basis for a touch typing game, The Typing of the Dead was an inspired if abstract move. With this zombie killing pinball game, I think they’ve pushed the name as far as it can go.

Thankfully Sega have graced the Gameboy Advance with a rather decent little pinball game in so doing, three tables full of shambling monsters along with the more common spring loaded flippers and bumpers. Rather reminiscent of ye olde Megadrive pinballer Dragon’s Fury, Pinball of the Dead provides a stiff challenge, multiple subtables, three main tables and many of the sound clips we’ve come to know and cherish so to my perverse pleasure I can also ’suffer like G did?’.

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If anyone had a right to exhume Miami Vice from its oh-so-very Eighties grave, it was Michael Mann. While the thought of this hardly filled my heart with joy and bitter personal experience has taught us that this is not a year to hope for greatness in films, his track record alone was cause for mild optimism. I mean, it’s Michael Mann, right?

The identity of the style is never in doubt, this looks every inch the Mann film. The rest of it seems more in line with what you’d expect of Michael Bay. Leaving aside Colin Farrell’s ludicrous hair choices, the pressing problems with Vice comes from a script that’s either spending as much time trying to be as obfusticated as possible, throwing around baffling law enforcement lingo for little purpose, or succumbing to a sort of attention deficit disorder.

Plot strands are followed for a while, then ignored, sometimes briefly nodded to later on, more often not. With Crockett and Tubbs initially out to find the source of a leak in a multi-disciplinary task force, this is narrowed down to ’someone’ from ‘everyone’ by the end of the film, which has meandered off into infiltrating a drug baron’s outfit and Crockett having an affair with said baron’s woman, all the while stopping frequently to show lovely, pretty, interminably dull shots of powerboats skipping over the waves or jets banking against a cloudy sky, with the audience sitting wondering exactly when the pace is about to pick up.

Sadly that’s left to the final ten minutes, and by the time lead salads start flying I’d forgotten who or what I was supposed to be caring about. There’s never any of the tension and foreboding that was built up so effectively in Collateral, or any number of previous Mann films, and while it’s never less than a competent film it’s never anything more than that ether.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Every once in a while, a game comes along that’s revolutionary. Despite being little more than an advance on the Dune series on a superficial level at least, Command and Conquer was one of those games. Bringing realtime strategy to millions and engrossing them in the battles between the GDI and NOD forces. After Westwood’s absorption into the EA collective, expansion of the franchise into other gaming realms seemed inevitable and the concept of a first person shooter set in this now firmly established gaming world didn’t seem like a bad one. Panned and ignored on its initial release, the game is proving to be one of the more successful budget titles of recent times. Rightfully so, as while it’s not without a number of significant flaws there are enough points of interest to make it worth a fiver of even the casual FPS fans cash.

Set sometime in the seemingly eternal wars between terrorists and the coalition of the willing, you step into the combat boots of the GDI’s most dangerous commando, codenamed Renegade. As good an excuse as any for some one man vs everyone else killing. There’s the usual forgettable linking device of a plot, something about a kidnapped scientist and tiberium research and mutants. Mutants with guns. Needless to say, they must be stopped.

In doing so, you’ll have to traverse the game’s unique selling point - some of the biggest maps seen to this day in a first person shooter accompanied by a near unheard of phenomenon - load times that are to all intents and purposes negligible. Anyone who’s had the unfortunate experience of trekking through the especially awful Postal 2 and it’s quarter hour waits round every corner will appreciate this concept. Perhaps the downside of this is the occasional long slog through mostly empty terrain, but this still a novel experience an that’s not something to be taken lightly in this day and age. Critics would point to the mildly sparse texturing and occasionally basic geometry of the buildings entered as huge flaws, which i always thought a tad churlish. In truth, it’s not that bad and as far as I can see it’s not far off state of the art, at least on it’s 2000 release.

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This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Since the engine’s inclusion in a Matrix-aping section of the 3DMark benchmark, gamers everywhere were drooling for a game to be based on it. It took approximately forever, but when it arrived few were disappointed. You may think the bullet-time feature little more than a gimmick but it’s effective and enjoyable with a solid plot to link the action. Beautifully presented, Max Payne is an absorbing bullet fest from beginning to it’s unfortunately all too soon end.

About four years in the making, this third person shooter is notable in that it delivers one of the most cinematic gaming experiences yet seen. Unlike Metal Gear Solid 2, merely taking the approach of having a thumb-twiddling gamer sit through cut-scene after cut-scene, Max Payne feels like you’re in the middle of a cross between Se7en and Hard Boiled. Level transitions and important in-game plot points are relayed in the form of a mock-graphic novel, with grandiosely overblown prose and a suitably gravely voice over provided by Mr. Payne himself (voiced by James McCaffrey with story and screenplay writer Sam Lake providing the body). The developers go for a pulp fiction dime novel feel to the story and it’s certainly absorbing and atmospheric, which makes it possible to invest far more emotion in the character than some nameless action figure normally seen in this type of game. (more…)

The good thing, and I suppose there had to be one good thing about it, to come from the latest collection of words from Republican pitbull Ann Coulter is that the first chapter pretty much gives you the completeness of what follows it. After an hour or so all liberals have been accused of Nazi experimentation on foetuses, actively supporting terrorists, the murder of millions of children, hating religion, hating science, racism and wishing to destroy democracy. Man, these liberals must be assholes!

Well, they would be if any of this was presented with any credibility whatsoever, but that’s never been Coulter’s style, instead favouring her distinctive blend of misrepresented statements, selective reporting and sheer baffling lunacy of arguing a point from a statement that seems to bear little to no relation to said statement. If you were looking to deconstruct her arguments you’d have to brave some very large jumps of logic and cognitive sidesteps.

Except there’s little point undertaking such a feat. Coulter sells on the simple rationale that she’s ‘controversial’, relying on being just credible enough to get folks on the other side of the fence upset enough to rant and rave in response, creating some sort of cascading feedback loop of noise, bluster and publicity. Which sells more books, etc, etc.

I’ve no clear idea who’s supposed to be buying this book. The lunatic fringe of the far right may well lap it up, as after all the only opinions worth buying are those you share. It’s too intellectually bankrupt to convince anyone in the middle ground to her side, with it’s bizarre alternate worldview where the bible gives mankind a direct instruction to stripmine Alaska, global warming is a plot by environmentalist democratic science-hating scientists to bring down the oil companies that are the true pillars of American patriotism and where “card carrying member of the ACLU” is in some way an insult. After all, what true American would want to defend civil liberties when you could instead hand over all personal responsibility to The Decider, G.W.B.?

I’m very disappointed in this book, as I often like to become enraged enough to shout at great length at inanimate objects. Thing of it is, Godless tries so very, very hard to be so very, very outrageous that after perhaps half an hour the cumulative nuttiness of what she’s saying becomes a numbing boredom of ad hominem personal attacks and supposed explanations of liberal systems that are, for want of a better phrase, completely hatstand.

There’s a lot of things wrong with this here country in which what I live. Britain, that is. However, things like this makes exceedingly glad I live on the sane side of the pond. Whatever the failings of political discourse in this nation, I’m convinced if a Brit released this it would find itself filed under ‘Comedy’, or ‘The Daily Mail’. Same thing, really. That this is something that is taken seriously by many American folks lies somewhere between mildly terrifying and extremely terrifying. To all of my sensible American comrades, of which I think there’s about four left in the nation, you have my sympathies. Don’t let the crazy psycho loons grind you down, nil hatstand carborundum and all that.

This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com

Eeugh. Mortal Kombat games have been at absolute best mediocre, and hadn’t managed to reach those dizzying heights with its 2-D incarnations of late. Even so, this is a particularly awful translation that seems to have been either rushed out the door without playtesting or programmed by someone who hasn’t played a fighting game before.

The basic formula has remained unchanged for years, with you taking control of a warrior to go up against the domination schemes of some evil entity, normally Shao Khan. For the purposes of this review, lets pretend that the recent Mortal Kombat : Deadly Alliance doesn’t exist, on the basis that that’s actually a pretty decent game but I’ve no inclination to go into the differences at the moment.

MK:Advance is one of the earlier titles, but we’ve seen that the machine can ably pull off SNES translations so this shouldn’t have been an impossible job to pull off. This is essentially a version of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, which instantly limits it’s appeal. MK always worked best as a simple, uncomplicated fighter and reached it’s peak with Mortal Kombat 2, in my opinion anyway (and it’s a not uncommon one). The versions of MK3, and eventually MK Trilogy tried bolting on various additions like a ‘Run’ button and combos that required seven hands to attempt, making the whole thing seem even more clumsy and unwieldy than it already was in stark contrast with the balanced simplicity of its eternal rival Street Fighter 2, which was a damn sight easier to control yet still allowed for complex combos.

So if it wasn’t enough of a handicap to be based on one of the lesser versions, codemonkeys Virtucraft did themselves no additional favours by utterly breaking the game in conversion. It’s actively unplayable. I’ll get round to the bugs in a moment, but even if these weren’t there you still could not get any slight element of joy from this mess. I like to delude myself I’m decent at 2D fighters. After all, I’ve been playing the damn things for years. I started this baby up in its default normal difficulty and decided to have a quick blast on the shorter, novice tree of opponents to warm up. A computer controlled Scorpion quickly boxed me into a corner and panelled me to death in ten seconds.
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It’s rather a strange thing that Russell Hoban happens to be from Pennsylvania, and even stranger that he’s seventy five. Not that there’s anything wrong with either, you understand, just that on reading his earlier novel Fremder and especially Mr Rhino-Clacton’s Offer it has the, I dunno, cadence, tone and dialogue my internal monologue can’t help but read with a young English accent, in the same way that a Christopher Brookmyer novel stridently demands to be intoned in as broad a Scots accent as you can muster.

All of which is very far away indeed from relevancy, so allow me to veer suddenly back on to the track I’d intended to start on in the first place. This is, to briefly sum up, another Faustian pact-type of thing, with a man broken by the break-up of his relationship with his soul-mate, Seraphina. Difficult to have much sympathy with the fella, as not only did his day job rely on telemarketing, a job rapidly reaching lawyer-esque levels of hatredicity, but said break-up was caused by his repeated slipping of the johnston to his female clients. Finding himself fired after being slightly too honest about the usefulness of the self-help systems he’s hawking, he descends into an alcoholic haze of self destruction. It’s here, passed out on the floor of a London tube station that Mr Rhino-Clacton finds Jonathan Fitch and makes that intriguing titular offer.

For a cool million squids, R-C, as he is never referred to as, will buy Fitch’s death. A year will be allotted for Fitch to enjoy his riches, after which at some unknown juncture he will be iced. I seem to have left out the sodomizing, but that shows up somewhere round about here too. Everyone always forgets about the sodomy, don’t you find? Anyway, part of the big R.C.meister’s thang is getting off on the anticipation of death, displaying much of the oddness you’d expect of someone who would make such a deal, hanging around the fringes of Jonathon’s life. This prompts something of a return to normalcy for Fitch, attempting to patch things up with Seraphina and consulting a no-nonsense psychic (no, really) while realising that he doesn’t want to die after all, contrary to the black moods that prompted such a deal to be made.

Mr Rhino-Clacton’s Offer is written with a similar, grandified and beautiful style as my previous Hoban ‘experience’ Fremder, although this is far more accessible to your typical barely literate idiot such as myself. It’s a fascinating little book to read, prompting a few morbid though trains on the value of life and control of destiny, and if there’s a flaw to the book it’s only that ‘little’ word of the previous sentence. It would be nice to have more of this, as in a certain sense it seems to end rather suddenly just as soon as it really starts to pick up, and end in a disappointingly Deus Ex Machina fashion as well. Still, life isn’t all nice little packages and sunshine, and in any case Mr Rhino-Clacton’s Offer is great fun while it lasts.