Generic yet Zany Usage of the Number Three to Indicate a Third Year Celebration

Much like the title, most everything I could possibly say would be the same generic rehashing of everything I've said in the past. "Oh, wow! Three years!" Maybe I'm just cynical and realistic about my tiny little corner of the internet where I can muse on games I both like and dislike. Whatever....

I've spent the last week or so trying to come up with something I can talk about for my three year anniversary post, and essentially, I've come up with squat. I've completed four games since the beginning of the year and an additional four since the last anniversary. What the hell kind of gamer am I? For one thing, a gamer that has become distracted by many other things. Point is, there's no point in talking about past games beaten. As far as current games, despite last years list, pretty much all of those games have fallen off the radar and for the past few weeks I've only been focusing on two games: We ♥ Katamari and Final Fantasy II (that's II, not IV!!), so pointless to discuss any of that.

I thought, maybe for something really different I'll say a little something about each console/handheld I own. But then, I feel there's really nothing more to say than what's already been said by countless others. The only difference would be all the hatred I'd spew forth in regards to the Nintendo 64 - although over the past couple of years, a lot of that has finally, finally subdued.

I also thought about talking about current gen games that I enjoy since, well, I pretty much never talk about those. However, other than Dragon Age II (discounting Wii titles), I don't think I've played any others to the end, or even through to the halfway point. By the way, the only reason Dragon Age II is not on this blog is because I feel to finish it properly I need to do a run through with each character and I've yet to do any of the DLC content.

On second thought, I think I will talk about current gen games and how much I hate the direction gaming has gone, starting with DLC. I cannot express enough how much I despise the concept of DLC. I understand why people like it, the obvious reasons why it benefits a company to make DLC, and in theory, even to me, it sounds like a wonderful prospect. "Ooh, you mean I can play this game I love even more with additional map packs, quests etc.? Wonderful!" But really, it's not wonderful. It's bullshit. I miss the days of a finished game is a finished game - knowing that everything this game has to offer is right in front of me from day one. I understand that I'm in the minority on this subject and that DLC is totally optional, but as someone with a near OCD-like meticulous knack for having to experience everything a game has to offer, it becomes an unbearable annoyance. Forget the already exhaustive characteristics of having to play a game multiple times when applicable and I'm not talking about various difficulty settings. Dragon Age II is a good example of this as is another game I was playing for a while before I grew weary of it: Epic Mickey. Actually, the main reason I stopped playing that game is that I learned there was one particular point in the game that you would need to play through three times just to get whatever the hell it is you collect in that game - yea, it's been so long, I've forgotten - some sort of badges, if I recall correctly. I can understand playing through the game twice because of how the game works, but a third time? Why? Just to collect a fucking badge? Forget it.

It's senseless padding like that to elongate a game's lifespan that annoys the piss out of me, and in a way, DLC is no different except that you're having to pay for the extra padding. Ok, not all DLC is like that. There is some worthwhile DLC out there that plays as an actual expansion, but a vast majority of it is just useless money-grubbing bullshit. I know saying some DLC's acceptable comes off as completely hypocritical given my original stance, so you know what? If I had things my way, there'd be no more DLC. What's done is done - when a game hits the shelves, it's a finished product.

Oh! And to add an addendum to that: when a game hits the shelves, it better as hell be a finished product; not a fucking beta that will be updated by a long assortment of patches. Much like it's ruined everything else it's touched, so has the constant connectivity of a vast interweb network destroyed gaming. Developers appear to have fallen prey to the idea that thanks to live connections between developers and gamers, games can be pushed out into the masses before thorough QA is completed because, after all, the technology to send patch after patch after patch of bugfixes is wholly acceptable. But what's worse is that so many gamers just accept it. Yea, I can only imagine the PC community retorting, "Buck up!" as us console gamers have always been on the back foot all these years anyway, but it's no better a response. It's the same damnable acceptance that's helping pave the way for shitty policies used by gaming companies that PC gamers and developers helped build.

Guess I'm just an old fogey when it comes to gaming. I'll admit it. There's a whole lot more besides these two "conveniences" of modern gaming that either angers or depresses me. Maybe I'll get to some more of them in the next anniversary post as I doubt I'll have anything larger than a small handful of games beaten by then to account for anything worthwhile list-wise. Knowing what's in store for the future of gaming only makes things look all the more grim. I know a lot of people are excited and, hey, that's great. Me, I see the golden age of gaming coming to a close. Honestly, I would love to see another "crash" happen so the industry can be straightened out. Will it happen? Don't know, but there's always hope.


...well, that or I can always "Buck up!"

GEN - TechnoCop

Haiku-Review:

drug deals, hostages...
what pedestrian crimes. wait....
baby being crushed!?

Additional Comments:

No words....

Seriously, there are no words for what I saw flash on screen as I drove into the Golden Apartments on York Street. The call's gone out and I'm responding to a 151 - baby being crushed? Think about that - a baby is being crushed. A baby is being crushed! Good god! Somewhere out there some demented fuckup is crushing babies. But more worrying is that somewhere out there a game developer has run out of ideas regarding usable crimes: hostages, drugs etc., and had a light bulb flicker when it came to baby being crushed. I don't know; maybe this is a common problem in a hard luck, dystopian future.

Honestly, I think I should just call the commentary on TechnoCop. Need anything else be said? Is there really anything worth saying beyond the dark and twisted promotion of baby crushing? Sadly, yes. As if with enthusiastic anticipation, the amount of bellyaching this game has to offer is simply astounding. But here's the catch: typically, I find myself drawn to bad games. There's a certain appeal about them - maybe a sort of ugly duckling syndrome. The obvious downside to this bizarre obsession is having to tackle games that are truly awful. And that's exactly what TechnoCop is - a truly awful mess of a game. Though I have to wonder if this nightmare is yet another result of porting a computer game to a console, or was it always this bad. Hearing the Day's mention the game in passing on one of their episodes of Co-Optitude as a "great" Amiga entry certainly confounded the situation. Huh.

Although it takes some serious imagination, I can envision potential here. Unfortunately, the game falls flat on its face and shamelessly wallows in a fetid pool of failure and frustration. What really makes it stick out as an interesting case though is that the game is split into two wholly different styles of gameplay and Razorsoft miraculously botched them both beyond belief.  TechnoCop is a combination driver, in the vein of Roadblasters, and platformer, to me most closely resembling Flashback. I'm on the fence over which portion of the game works better, if at all.

Technically, the driving sequences probably outshine the platforming areas, but sadly they are boring, irksome, and at times questionable. It's been a long time since I really sat down and played a screen-in racing game - the likes of Rad Racer, OutRun etc. The driving sequences in The Adventures of Bayou Billy may have been the last of that style that I've played in some time, and those are pretty rough and tumble themselves. Point is, I'm a little sketchy on how the physics normally work in those games since it's been a number of years, but I found myself fighting the "turn right to go left / turn left to go right" mechanics in TechnoCop. This very well may be the case in other racing games of the type, so I could be speaking out of my ass, but it's never felt so prevalent as it here. Add in a half dozen semis trying to shove you into the trees and steering is damn near hopeless. Never mind that the car's gun turret is positioned asymmetrically and its defenses are useless against some truck stop punker angrily beating away at the roof with his bare fists. Seriously, why is this so damaging, yet I can rub up against three rigs simultaneously over the course of 26 miles without even a scratch? And why can I only remove that bionic armed mutant by casually crashing into the trees? I guess there's always a nuke, but I'm not going to waste a nuke willy-nilly.

Outshines? Eh...maybe not. Those driving sequences are likely some of the worst driving sequences I've ever experienced in a game. So maybe the platforming is the real hero here. After all, it makes up the greater bulk of the game; not just design-wise, but the amount of action and exploration that takes place. Wait...am I even playing the same game? Where am I? I cannot comprehend the design choices in this game at all. One minute we're barreling down a country road, guns a blazing and then suddenly were working our way through a labyrinth of inner city projects. I parked my car in a fucking field on the side of some highway that appears to run endlessly through miles upon miles of nothing. Where the hell did this run down tenement block come from? It doesn't exist! Oh, but it does, and the transition is such a bizarre, jerky juxtaposition of environments that it belittles the overall concept of the game. It literally feels like I'm playing two completely different, and wholly unrelated games. Couldn't the developers have at least used a city background in the driving sequences? Maybe replace all of the trees with streetlamps? For example, in The Adventures of Bayou Billy, which utilizes three distinct styles of gameplay, one could argue the same dilemma in its I-10 driving stage as presented here in TechnoCop, except that when you finish said stage in that game a representation of New Orleans appears in the background offering proper continuity between the stagnant marshlands of Billy's home and the streets of...ok, I'll be nice and keep my personal feelings out of it, eh...New Orleans. I guess Razorsoft hoped for a suspension of disbelief on the player's part. I prefer to think of it as laziness on their part. I guess detailing the gruesome deaths of the criminal presence was far more important.

Enough of the aesthetics and all-around nominal plot-based pitfalls; what little hope TechnoCop desperately clung to was clearly for naught after fighting my way through floor after floor of men of ill repute. Instantly, Flashback came to mind based on the protagonist's basic moveset, but similar to my ladder issues in Faxanadu, I let the idea sink in too much for my own good. Time and time again I was infuriated over not being able to duck and roll. I think that one ability alone would have helped the overall feel of the platforming areas. Otherwise, it felt so rigid, almost restricting when forced to duck to take aim and then try and advance. I went through the game nearly three times to the end, not including numerous practice runs on the first seven or eight stages, and still never got a proper handle on quickly ducking then standing again to proceed. Such a little thing became a monumental battle throughout.

Also, hitboxes make no sense. I've played numerous games with bad hitboxes, but I've never had a hitbox frustrate me as much as the ones found here. Damage is confusing and unreliable under all circumstances. Times when I swore I successfully dodged a hit - nope, damaged. Other times I miraculously escaped by the skin of my teeth - don't know how, but I'll take it. Talking about unreliable, dynamite is the most unpredictable device in the game. Why is there dynamite replenishing my health? I'm chalking that one up to a grievous error and/or an all out dickish implementation solely to fuck with the player's head. It's the fucking timer in Where's Waldo all over again. And I swear I saw a knife pass through a wall, but my bullets sure can't. This game is an exercise in programming anarchy. Honestly, as terrible as the driving sequences are, this blatant defiance of basic video game principle is what allows it to be marginally better than the platforming in my view.

Yet there's so much more awry in the platforming. For one, the timer seems to be some arbitrary number pulled out of thin air. In some levels it's barely enough time to do...well, anything. I thought the timer was unforgivable in some of the Spy vs. Spy levels, but here it's just stupid. At the same time, however, there's some levels that have such an absurd abundance of time that I could have run two or three levels on its timer alone. Whatever the criteria for the timer is, it's not working. Sure, I managed it, but those questionable levels typically finished with the timer at 00:01, and I had to fight like hell just to ensure that. You absolutely have to know the building's layout if you hope to have any sort of a chance in those tightly timed levels.

Another annoyance relates to jumping. To me, if a platformer balks jumping, it's all over. TechnoCop's jumping is simply atrocious and to add to the frustration are sequences of pits that don't seem to align to the character's jump distance properly. Well, they do, but it takes some solid effort to jump at the perfect moment thus pushing it into the realms of pixel-perfect jumping. Pixel-perfect jumping is always a drag, but I probably wouldn't mind it at much here if it weren't for some of those super short timers forcing you to press your luck on a set of successive jumps typically ending in utter disappointment, and very likely, death.

I could go on and on, but given all the problems so far, what's the point? TechnoCop is easily one of the worst games I've ever played. In fact, I billed the game as the second worst game I've ever played to a couple friends of mine. I just don't see anything toppling Where's Waldo from that prized step. But what really rubs salt in the wound - if the game wasn't bad enough - is that we're treated to a soundtrack of silence. That's right, other than than the opening titles, which sounds akin to some uninspired rock chops saturated with a nails-on-a-chalkboard melody, and the end screen, which is a lot better than the opening track but still nothing to write home about, there is no music to be found. Instead we get to bask in the droning 16-bit engine depression of the driving sequences and clump clump clump of the heaviest boots in the world during the platforming. If this was done for purposes of mood immersion, it failed. Rather, I suspect, it was done out of laziness. If they at least went the route that Flashback went and added minute bursts of suspense - short 3 to 5 second clips of eeriness - that would have gone a long way to help exemplify mood if that's indeed what they were shooting for. But then, why should I expect any sort of effort given how the rest of the game is presented?

Nano-Win:

Holy crap, a win!?  It's not really a win, but it made me chuckle...probably out of pity. I love that the game has a cheat mode and then acknowledges the use of the cheat mode at the end of the game by snidely calling you out on it.

Sure thing, dicks. Your game sucked anyways.

Still, as torturous as the game was, I had to reach the end legitimately. What a worthless ending.... Should have just called it after the cheat-filled run.

Rating: 0.5 pointlessly awarded hydraulic wheel rams out of 5*

Seriously, do they do anything!?