Game. Set. Match. Mr Thunderhead

Courtesy of Shinobi from the Retro Gamer forums I've decided today I'm going to head back to gaming for a while and a look at Sega Superstars Tennis. This to me was partly a game released 10 years too late. Growing up in primary school the big debate was always Sega Vs Nintendo a war which ultimately with the arrival of a third party Sony led to a resounding defeat for Sega withdrawing them from hardware and only focussing on software. Nintendo for their sins had became experts at prostituting their intellectual properties and while Sega made good games right up to the Dreamcast era Nintendo essentially could rely on sales of self developed franchises like Zelda and Mario, the latter of which starred in spin-off games of a variety of types, most successful being the Mario Kart series (many a gap between scenes has been killed playing wirelessly on the DS version to this day!) although the little plumber has also enjoyed stints on the golf course, football pitch, medical profession and tennis court.

Sega have finally caught on and now unleashed the Superstars series first with a substandard mocap game using the eyetoy for PS2. Released now with the rise of these kind of mini-game fests maybe it would've been a bigger success. This was the follow up taking Sega superstars onto the tennis court. As a game it does exactly what you would expect from it. Lots of cartoony graphics played out in game themed locales for a quick game of tennis - on default settings a match can be over in under a minute - with a selection of mini-games for longevity.

As far as playing it goes, the control system was over elaborate. Move by using the left stick with X for a standard shot, and [] for a slice. However lobs and dropshots are played by using a quick combo of the two others leaving the two other buttons unused while your superstars special ability unlocked with the top shoulder buttons. I can't work out why it was done this way, I suspect it was essentially laziness in programming a slightly different control scheme compared to the Wii version over the other consoles. It's not a major problem and I'm sure you could change the controller settings if you wanted, it's just a strange design choice.

Being tennis though it's straight forward to play with you hitting it back and forth against an opponent until one of you misses it for a point, yadayadayada. Also included are mini games though, my favourite of which based on House of the Dead (named Curiens mansion due to a ban in Germany!) involving knocking waves of zombies unconscious with tennis balls, it might sound childish but hitting them in the midsection and hearing a groan is good for a giggle akin to hitting bystanders on a Tiger Woods game and watching them hop in frustration. The mini-games add to longevity alongside Superstars mode which combines standard matches and mini-games into unlock various other stages and courts. Though like a lot of sport games, its best played multiplayer, it keeps her indoors quiet as Amy the Hedgehog from Sonic smashes a serve straight past the awesome Gilius Thunderhead from Golden Axe.

Thing is, I think Sega in typical fashion missed a current generation trick. Downloadable content. Out of the box there are 16 characters on 10 courts yet these don't really mix too well, for example you have Alex Kidd and the almighty Gilius (notice who my fave character would be...) as playable players but no court for them and courts for House of the Dead or Outrun but no characters to play on them, while Sonic is typically represented by two courts and 5 characters. In my view a DLC pack of a doubles team (e.g. Ax Battler and Tyris Flare from Golden Axe) with a court (and associated music) tied in wouldn't be a bad idea (price dependent) and since their are so many franchises untouched they could have a supply that depending on content prices would keep a steady group of fans content and add longevity. I challenge thee to find someone who could resist the chance to smash tennis balls at Toejam and Earl?

Ultimately it's a solid game and worth around 7/10. Playing on your own you won't get masses of playtime but with mates round it'll be a nice little game to play alongside drunken FIFA battles. Shame there were some missed opportunities with regards to adding a little more for fans. That said I'd have loved more DLC for Ultimate Mega Drive Collection too, more modern retro goodness please!

Just a mo - Supercharging my Prius

I hate Clarkson, I hate that little twerp Hammond, Mays' dislike of the other two makes him bearable and I have no interest in cars what-so-ever. So why on Earth do I enjoy the Gran Turismo games? Theoretically a real driving simulator would be absolute tripe to me and I'm certainly not going to have the patience for going through all the driving licence tests and why on Earth can I not just use that top notch Ferrari from the moment I turn on the game?

Thing is, I think that's just what makes it popular and why I've been coming back since the original. It's almost a career simulation with the aspect of a pretty good driving game thrown in (management mode if you want these days) and - to me - that's one of the better features of recent sports games to ply my trade as a footballer at Lincoln City and work my way to international goalscoring superstar hero. I'm not particularly car literate, I'm not going to play it and be able to analyse the slight differences that may get a little more out of it, but I can look at the numbers and work out how to get more out of those pixels to give it a boost. Until recently on the Football/Championship manager games you saw nothing but numbers and had to work out how to use them to your best. Stevenage Borough winning the champions League? Relatively straight forward with the right mind.

As a driving game, it's one I've never had a problem with, one of the complaints has often been the lack of visible damage but to be perfectly frank that does nothing to me. It could just be my style but when I'm playing I tend to drive in driver seat view as I find it easier to gauge turns and distances, so I'm not going to see it except for in a replay but rarely am I that excited by a race I need to sit there for another 10 minutes to see it all from a different angle.

In short, as a genre it's one I'm not particularly interested in and that's due to my lack of interest in the subject full-stop but as a game. I keep coming back, for some part I'd say it could be the obvious improvement curve, of course in races if I turn up in a Bugatti Veyron against some substandard family saloons I'll romp home but going from scraping bronze to gold passes on licence tests shows that your skills are improving. Other than that I think it's just a incredibly well polished, deep driving game that if you're only going to play one of them fills all holes. Though my hatred for Top Gear is enlarged by trying to manoeuvre camper vans around "Hammerhead" at high speed!

Oh yes and I get to drive a supercharged version of Bumblebee from Transformers, probably 'er indoors' favourite feature...

Splodge

Ah yes, "splodge" the unmistakeable sound of goblin making the mistake of getting too close to an ogre not quite as stupid as he looked at first glance. Yes Blood Bowl is supposed to be the most brutal of sports games and since getting the board game version in around 96/97 one of my favourite of all time. As far as sporting games go there's been nothing for me, subbuteo was fun in doses but ultimately it didn't matter in the long run. Being into strategy games there wasn't a system for long term play and you didn't develop any form of skills other than being a good flicker = victory (though I did grow an attachment to a player with a broken leg in a Villa shirt I called "Steve Froggatt" due to an injury I remembered him picking up). After this there was Totopoly which was a fun little horse racing game. Thing is as far as sporting games went, I'd rather load up Premier Manager than any board games.


So as I began to get into miniature wargaming I came across this one set in the Warhammer world. American football with the added brutality of orcs flattening goblins and assorted other fantasy creatures. Considerably cheaper than going out and spending in excess of £100 to have a reasonable sized "army" it became easier to collect and put together a team. As it now stands I've got all official teams (except Norse, the vikings would be prod buttock, did the minis have any resemblence of the actual team roster) now and took part in two Blood Bowls where the "New Skaven Ratriots" (ratmen) got a Desmond (2-2 w/l record) before "Da Reggae Boyz" (Orcs with some modeling putty dreadlocks in a Jamaican football kit) lost all four.


I did come across a Blood Bowl game for the PC around the time I got first into it. I played it briefly but in the end I was still happier getting the board game out so it ended up in the little second hand game shop in town (sadly, no longer with us) and was forgotten about. As the years progress though I continued to play the board version (the wench is currently undefeated, must stop playing matches with a severe disadvantage against her...) and though my competition days are gone (for now...) my collection still get good game time.


14 years later, after spotting a game called "Chaos League" and spotting the blatant rip-off that it was, I caught the news that the company behind it had received the rights to make the official game. I guess Games Workshop learnt from the past, they accepted a one-off payment for Blizzards game with similarities to the Warhammer universe, next thing you know Blizzard are a huge company and the name Warcraft is bigger than Warhammer, lost them millions. So last year it finally hit the shelves and at the end of the month it's updated to include every team from the board game (bar Chaos Dwarves but they don't exist anymore (not profitable enough))and seems a good time to write it up.


Sound - Like all sports games the commentary can be quite good, with the odd funny one liner but if you play any sport game for more than a couple of hours it does get a more than a little tiresome. Other sound effects are general sporty grunts (and snarls from various creatures) so not fantastic sound but it does create some form of atmosphere though in turn based game play if you're a square short of a touchdown the roar of the crowd goes on forever. Oh the anticipation of a touch down.


Graphics - the image above is from one of the opening sequences (each team has their own sequences which is a nice touch) so not quite in turn with gameplay. In game though it does have a decent look though by modern standards not perfect. It is quite good in that you can instantly recognise the positions of the players and how experienced they are and any mutations and the models do look similar to their miniature counterparts. Graphically it could probably be better but it works and is supposed to be about gameplay right?


Gameplay - It keeps the rules as of the "living rule book version 5" (updated to 6 in Legendary) so as far as the game goes, what works on the board game should work in the game. Sadly a couple of rules are bugged which makes things incredibly difficult to plan ahead, skills dedicated to fouling like Dirty Player or Sneaky Git don't quite work properly which means the goblin method of "counter-splodging" is made harder to implement. A cheaper version of the board game with a couple of rules that don't work right (judging from the 117 page topic on the "Claw mutation ruins games due to being overpowered" that's in the game already! Aims are simple, two halves of 8 turns to try and score more touchdowns than the other team.


Longevity - No two matches against the same team are ever the same anyway and you can always lose that match you should win due to bad dice rolling, you need the skill to make yourself less reliant on dice but every now and then you can't avoid seeing your players laid low as little buggers nip in to beat you 1-0. Add to this the campaign mode which allows you to create your own team from beginning to top and developing skills to (hopefully) make the top and win the Blood Bowl championship itself. With 9 teams (human, orcs, dwarves, lizardmen, skaven (Ratmen), goblins, Chaos (daemonic beasts) and wood or dark elves) you have 9 teams if running to a formula lineup but by tailoring your teams can have much more, not to mention that as skill rolls are random you're never certain to have exactly the same team. Adding in the other 11 teams from the end of October and you should have plenty of replayability.


Overall, I'm probably going to get a lot more out of it than the normal player due to enjoying the board game for so long. If you want a sports game with a bit more depth than FIFA or Madden but don't want the full depth of a purely management title it'll probably go down well with you. It was on the 360, but lost some of the online play meaning online tournaments and the like weren't available and legendary edition isn't going to be released on there for the time being. If you have a PC though give it a go, although for me it's near perfect probably worth a 7/10 for an outsider. Of course, now you've at least got the advantage of demos!

I bin dun workin' dem railways

I've got bugger all to really talk about so with the release of Civ 5 I'm going to comment on the divorce earner and time loser that strategy gaming genius Sid Meier is. Even if the only thing he ever went near were the aforementioned Civilization series he'd have accounted for millions of pounds to the biggest selling entertainment industry (well except "adult entertainment") and probably an equal amount for divorce settlements.


The key factor of these games is depth and replayability and he makes sure there's plenty of this. In Civ for example you move from a small settlement to hopefully head of the UN and winning the race to settle on another planet (after nuking Mahatma Gandhi's vast empire due to his xenophobic and agressive diplomatic policies this one's a bit of a wasteland now...) and no two games are ever alike. Plus as it's a long running game it leads to the disease "onemoreturnitis" and that "quick play" soon becomes several hours as you notice the time appears to be long gone. If you were to add up the time played even if you have relatively short runs it's not uncommon for people to have played the series for at least a month of their lives.


The recent bane of my existence has been Railroads. Anyone who's ever played a PC game will be familiar with "X Tycoon" well he's the man behind the first "tycoon" game which was Railroad Tycoon, as you'd expect it's about running railways and the series has got SOMETHING which draws you back again and again. For some, maybe it's the basic sandbox mode and the ability to create a "dream" railway and since it'd cost a fortune to have the full Hornby set designed this way it's far cheaper but to me that's not as fun. A game needs a challenge and to me that just is not it, where're the rivals?


What keeps me coming back is trying to get a "perfect" profitable and efficient mini-empire. Playing on and making Hitchin the business capital of the United Kingdom with all sorts of industry based around this little Hertfordshire town (meanwhile Manchester and Liverpool are certified as "a village") and trying to get it running so well that the rivals are unable to prevent my aquisitions and even funnier, financing my own businesses. Thing is, although it's played out in real time and so doesn't have the onset of "onemoreturnitis" as a plan comes into your mind and you spot that new profitable route and that target it becomes that little bit harder to pull yourself away until the goal is achieved. Then of course you have that next target, and the next, and the next and then, just as you're about to achieve your prime goal.... You're bought out, due to your obsession with that bottleneck outside the metropolis of Lands End you forgot to make sure once you started making big profits that you bought all the shares and some sneaky bugger (Brunell I'm looking at you...) has bought you out and you're seeing out your days as a.... well, depends how well you played but in my case I see "travelling circus freak" an awful lot...


As the man behind games like Civilization and (colonial Americaesque sim) Colonization I owe a lot to my interest in history to this man. I still remember handing in my first piece of homework in secondary school a 10 page document on the relationship between Cortez and Montezuma and it is purely due to the time spent on his games on boring weekends. Now Civ 5 is out I'm going to have to bite on that there thumb of mine not to buy it. I'd initially told myself the laptop wouldn't cope with it but now research shows it probably would I am somewhat relieved how skint I am, otherwise I might finally have drove the wench away with my inescent rambling and warmongering. "Bite that Convention on for size Geneva muahahahahahahaha"

Finish Him! Fatality!

On this day, the 24 August 1992, the arcade cabinet above for Mortal Kombat was released. Not too long after it received release on the home systems and like all things violent and computer gamey it was amid controversy. Basically it's a standard 2D fighter, two players punch and kick eachother until one of their characters is too injured to fight on, note the injury is purely the little bar at the top of the screen going red no matter how much you drag them across the room with a hook aside from the red pixels representing blood flying out with impact.

This is repeated until one player has won two rounds, I assume aside from the blood and gore this was the real sticking point for parents groups, was the special "Finish Him" moment in which you had one last move to finish them with. With a special combination of button presses and joystick waggling you had the option to rip someones head off including spinal column, rip out and show them their still beating heart and a host of other nasties. Of course, it was up to you to find this out and it wasn't in the manuals, this meant MOST fights ended purely with a last punch in the face, of course it wasn't going to stop the various parental groups campaigning. The trouble I got for getting "that horrible game" off a mate when I was 10, until my dad got home and tried it out with me finding nothing that bad! It's not the only time games have got much hype and complaining though...

Not particularly well known in the UK but a well known example of this case would be an old Atari 2600 title called "Custers Revenge". Assuming people know the story of "Custers Last Stand" where tribesmen surrounded and slaughtered American troops under our titular incompetent soldier you could be forgiven for assuming this would be a little game about shooting injuns... You'd be wrong, no the way Mr Custer gets his revenge is obvious. Tie an injun woman to a tree and then you must dodge a hail of arrows on the way over to rape her repeatedly. Developers Mystique clearly knew the buttons to press with the media and parental groups in 1982, previewing it with a womens rights and native american groups! Though the content saw it ultimately banned it has received a modern remake on the interwebs. Mystique specialised then in Adult games for the Atari and titles like Beat 'em and Eat 'em (players represent two nude women catching blobs of liquid dropping from a substantial male member) followed.

Of course, they're by no means isolated cases in this sort thing and recently there was a great deal of fuss made about a "Japanese Rape Simulator", which ultimately is actually a story about the girl getting revenge after being sexually assaulted in public. Of course, once again the developer knew exactly what they were doing with this project by making it so the game changed perspective, playing out the initial assault before switching roles. Ultimately though there's nothing special here but in both this and the Custers Revenge were both blamed for a spate of sexual assaults on women. Usually though, it's the violent games that get the real blame in these cases.

On the 27th February 2004 Stefan Pakeerah was murdered by his "friend" Warren Leblanc and the reason for this was painfully obvious... It could only be a game by controversial developer Rockstar (GTA series) entitled Manhunt which had been released in November 2003. The reliable source for this was the victims mother claiming that Warren had become adicted to the game and the outcry that the game could lead to this led to it being withdrawn from shelves in most high street retailers.

Manhunt was then banned in New Zealand (where posession is still deemed an offence), Australia, Germany and in Ontario, Canada became Adult Only, effectively banning it from most stores. Surprisingly the rest of North America pretty much ignored the hype and attention satisfied by leaving it's classification as 18 as per any other excessively violent game or movie. The thing that hurts me the most about Manhunt is that I had it, finished it and then resold it at the start of February, had I waited I could've made a small fortune in the illegal black market for games. Damn my stupidity!

The thing is, from Custer beyond Mortal Kombat, Manhunt and as recent as Red Dead Redemption (western game where there's a trophy/achievement for the old tie a damsel to the traintracks cliché) games for whatever reason seem to garner a worse reception than any other medium. While I don't see the enjoyment to be had out of sex games (and there's a reasonable amount amazingly) I can't believe that because someone sits at his Atari wriggling his joystick back and forth he's going to go out and gang rape a native american woman same as playing Manhunt didn't make me go out, hide in alleys and batter people to death with a baseball bat. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas had the perfect mix though, I could have consensual sex with a prostitute then beat her to death with a dildo. Pure perfection there!

Thing is, Mortal Kombat was just a standard Kung Fu film, Custers Revenge was numerous substandard porno films, Manhunt was torture porn (VERY similar to the SAW series which are flagrant rip offs), the GTA series is a cartoonisation of "gangster" culture. Ultimately they mean nothing except that - as former WCW and WWE creative boss Eric Bischoff said - "Controversy = Cash". People deliberately do these things and they know they'll get a rise out of it. Games are no more to blame for "loose morals" than films or books but people will never seem to accept that.

Damon Brown wrote a book entitled "Porn and Pong - How GTA, Tomb Raider and other sexy games changed out culture" which looks like it covers this in more detail and could be worth a read. I'm not searching for it on Play from the library though, how long will I last when purchasing anything with the "P" word in it's title?!