When I think of crossover games, I think of Marvel vs Capcom. This game was pretty awesome. The cartoon-ness of the characters and the insanity of special moves worked really well together. When Capcom and SNK did games, damn they were sweet. Again, the King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, Darkstalkers and Streetfighter worlds blended perfectly. In these were a great balance of good guys and bad guys.

When I heard of the next MK game coming out I was a little less than excited. The last time it was revealed that they would add new styles of fighting, they took out fatalities and replaced it with the kreate a fatality system. With Mortal Kombat 8, I don’t know what to think. Oh actually, pure disgust pretty much sums it up. Crossing over franchises can be a great thing if done well. Crossing over the harpoon wielding, flaming skull-having, vengence machine from hell, Scorpion with say The Dark Knight, is NOT a good crossover. DC is not a good match for MK. I will admit I have never read a lot of comics and always preferred cartoons, after all if a picture tells 1000 words, then 25 frames per second must tell 25000 words. In the cartoons and movies, Batman does kick ass, but relies on cars, building edges and bat-branded tools to win. Scorpion relies on pure violence. The fact that DC actually convinced Midway to take out the fatalities so no one can dismember or bloody up Batman or…. ech, “Aquaman”, just tells me that their characters weren’t made to deal with the MK brand of aggression. So, they are essentially making a 3d fighter, with random characters, that isn’t Mortal Kombat. *slow clap*

Midway staff are mentioning a ‘whole new fighting system’. Looking back, hey have changed it every game since MK2, and even then, there were subtle changes for example, crouching punches, air throws and adding more fatalities. MK3 played the same, added a run button and a pile of other finishing moves. MK4 was essentially a 2D fighter in a 3D world, kinda like that Streetfighter game. MK5 was the big change up adding styles, weapons and really bringing 3D into it. 6 and Armageddon, well they arent too far apart. The funny thing is, Armageddon’s main appeal was to be able to play 60+ characters and the Fatality system(which flopped badly). Instead of learning from their mistakes Midway are throwing in a bunch of other “famous” characters and taking out the only thing that set it apart from other games of its time.

Midway, harden the fuck up.

A couple of days ago I saw that the first Grand Theft Auto 4 review got a perfect 10 from the Official Xbox 360 Magazine. I can’t help but feel the urge to retch in an attempt to vomit the contents of my stomach onto my monitor to cover such a pathetic concept. Im sure there can be a billion reasons why, and hey it might have happened before. But I am pretty unimpressed by this kind of gesture. To get a perfect 10 the game can have nothing wrong. Nothing at all. The sound has to be perfect, not repetitive, controls, PERFECT, visuals, PERFECT, it has to be able to be entertaining until the end of time and have NO bugs. For a game to get this before it’s released to the public is just BS.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure the game is great. I’ve even bitten the bullet and decided to get it, but I am also positive it won’t hold my attention for too long, and I can’t see myself playing more than the bare minumum of the single player game. I am very interested to see how this will go once GTA4 is released to the public. Will the fans give it the same 10 score, or will there be brooding, cynical assholes like me SEARCHING for flaws in the game. I hope the latter, because I will be on here bitching about every single thing wrong with the game once in my possession.

Apart from making me angry, the review got me thinking, exactly how many games do you know that actually live up to the hype? Im not talking games that you hadn’t heard about, but were quite pleased with in the end, I mean games that got big publicity and were actually that damn good. Here is a quick list of 5 games I can say had justifiable hype put behind them(the list is just what I think, if you think of others, feel free to add):

• Super Mario Brothers 3 - Announced in the movie “The Wiz” starring Fred Savage. Having a movie as the official release was just incredible. The game wasn’t shown properly and if I remember the sound and level was screwy, and what happened didn’t make sense, but the damage was done. People everywhere flipped out, and rightly so. This game was just awesome. Especially after the lesser of the NES trilogy in SMB2, the 3rd game went back to real side scrolling roots and added some excellent ideas.
• Mortal Kombat - How could it not make this list? Sold as the most violent fighting game around, Mortal Kombat pretty much shaped all things to come. Heaps of games tried to outdo MK in violence and ‘death moves’ were popping up everywhere in games, but in the end, Mortal Kombat is still going, where Killer Instinct, Primal Rage and others fell. Although the later games are almost better forgotten, the first 3 games are always on high rotation on my systems.
• Street Fighter 2 - Another game that was just awesome in it’s time. The main competition in arcades was this or Mortal Kombat. Where MK was bloody and simple, SF2 offered a more complex fighting system. If you really understood the moves(and glitches) it was just an amazing game. To this day people perfect glitch fighting and even with the disadvantage of having an abomination of a live action movie with it, the next Street Fighter game is soon to be released and people are itching to get to it.
• God of War - I have only played this game through once and it was one of the most fun games I have ever played. I was promised blood, glory and women and I was not let down. Kratos had some very imaginitive moves, AWESOME finishing moves and boss battles, and puzzles that were difficult enough to slow you down, but not enough to make your heartbeat slow down. The added feature that it was based around Greek mythology was just the icing on the cake for this geek.
• World of Warcraft - There isnt really a lot to say about this. Warcraft was an awesome game. Warcraft 2 - Tides of Darkness, again, AWESOME game. Warcraft 3 I was a bit meh about(meh enough to complete all the campaigns though). I have a level 70 warrior, I have had an excessive amount of other characters and I still play very casually. The thing with this game, it was hyped to a ridiculous level and is still in gamespot’s top ten list after however many years. 5 million people can’t be wrong…. can they?

So there we have it. I know there has got to be more out there, but I’m tired.

I’ve never really played any of the Grand Theft Auto games apart from the first one. We all know I hate sandbox games and I think it took me only a couple of times to fail a mission and have to drive all the way back to the start to get sick of GTA 3. My sandbox hate aside, I just found the games pretty boring. GTA4 was going to pass me by and I couldn’t care less. Then, out of nowhere, the chopper came in….

I had an email newsletter come in linking to an article describing the multiplayer features of GTA4. I skimmed over with slight interest till I hit the line: “Even though the Rockstar team had been instructed to go easy on us during our first game, one of the team members couldn’t resist jumping in a helicopter, chasing us down a street, and using the rotor blades to send us hurtling through the air to our death.”. That, my friends, is fucking awesome. Being a fighting/action game fan, I’m always looking for creativity in the carnage, and that really jumped out at me. Im sure you can do similar things in other games, but my mates arent dying to pre-order other games. The rest of the multiplayer options sound great too, having team based games is always awesome, and team missions would be just great. Another thing that got my interest was the racing mode. Essentially a race, but using the usual array of GTA weaponry. Then it hit me why my heart was racing, blood pumping and adrenaline causing foam to start building in my mouth. The multi-player options arent Grand Theft Auto.

The racing screams of classics like Road Rash and the deathmatches were reminiscent of Twisted Metal. These 2 franchises were the only racing games I really played till I had a PS2, well other than Enduro and Dodge ‘Em. Weapons and crashes always make things more interesting. Luckily, it also reveals that you need to play barely any of the single player game to get access to the multiplayer game. So in theory, I will be buying GTA4, to play old school racing games. Who knows? Maybe I will play through the single player game too. PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT.

I downloaded this the other day from the PSN from reviews by friends saying it was alright. To recommend a beat-em-up or a fighting game to me is pretty hard. I know what I like in fighting games and it has to be damn good for me to give it a thumbs up. Think God of War 1 & 2. I have flagged off games like God Hand(actually I didn’t mind it, I just didnt have time to get through it), Heavenly Sword, Assassin’s Creed and Devil May Cry 4(to some extent). So, yes, I am a hard man to please. Not to say there arent elements of the latter games that I didn’t like, it just wasn’t enough to make me think ‘damn that was awesome’.

The Condemned 2 demo he;d my attention for around 6 minutes. For a beat em up game, the controls were very clunky and not well thought out. Very few games use the R3(clicking joystick) at all, let alone use it for an action like a kick. Combine this with the fact that the same joystick is the one you use for viewing means that a failed kick can either not strike, or move your view, or move the view then strike at the empty spot. In fast paced combat this would be a huge problem till you developed the right sensitivity. Luckily, the gameplay is some of the slowest I have seen for this kind of game. Within the first area I fought 4 guys. 4…. And they weren’t even together. I appreciate that you are meant to feel the atmosphere of the game, but thats damn slow for a beat em up. The punches and combos don’t connect as you would expect and the entire feel is that of a FPS when you run out of ammo.

There are weapons and whatnot to increase the violence of the attacks, but I only managed to get a pipe in the beginning, and after swinging wildly and connecting(not on the person but they seemed to fall over anyway) I lost interest in looking for more. For a game where the character moves around at a walking pace, the enemies are pretty fast, and the darkness of the game makes some ground roaming critters quite hard to kill. Im sure there are more ways to kill things, better things to kill them with and in general heaps more to the game, but it is NOT a beat up em. It’s a first person shooter, where you only have melee weapons, you need stealth and tactics like say, Manhunt. For FPS fans this game would be quite awesome, if you are expecting a nice beat em up, maybe its best to look elsewhere. For me, there is a slim chance I will play this again, and an even slimmer chance I will change my mind. 2 Stars.