April Musings

I was planning on making some elaborate April Fools gag for you last night but was too lazy. Sorry. I had a nice range of ideas including some fake World of Starcraft screenshots that cannibalised pics from that Blizzard Ghost game. Looked nice too. I might finish them off when I get a mo along with a cool logo I made. I would probably do a lot more drawing if I had the time and add a dash of colour now I own a massive A3 Wacom that takes up most of my desk. Speaking of Blizzard, I spotted a job posting for a Production Artist to work over at their Velizy HQ. Whilst I am not in a position to uproot the family and head off to France it would still be a corking job working on those Blizzard brands. Imagine sorting out the material for the next Diablo game and all the while you're getting paid in diamonds and gold since their megabucks merger with Activision!
Byron B*llocks
Getting a little tired of this ratings nonsense now. The best way anyone is going to protect children from inappropriate material is to cull all retarded parents BEFORE they have kids. No ratings system or retail fines will keep future versions of Manhunt from little Timmy if mummy is too busy arranging hair appointments or daddy just wants to impress on the days he has custody.

Eurogamers FTW!

That stellar shirt emporium you might have heard me mention in past posts has been updated today. Not just with some fine new garments but also with a spiffing new page to promote our official Eurogamer collection! I've been a fan of Eurogamer for a few years now and when I got chatting to some of the folks over there we discussed the possibility of doing some cool tees for the site. Well, a ton of emails later and here we are! The selection features some popular graphics and catchphrases from the Eurogamers community and anyone familiar with the site will recognise them straight away. If you don't then you'd better head over there and see what you're missing out on. Along with a top mix of gaming reviews, features, videos etc it also has regular contributions from my old colleague Richardo Leadbetter.

Lazy month for blogging…

Yeah I know. Not much new post action this month. Been away for a few family things and a ton of work meant I had little to no time to throw some Harrod mirth your way. Service will resume during April hopefully! I have fished out a few tat titbits for you from the attic. A few scans of some old Emap rags with which to regale your senses. A little tale or two from the GameFan period that will surely dazzle your imagination. Maybe some new games to talk about as I have nothing going since I knocked Frontlines: Fuel of War out the park. Actually, I need to finish The Club. Which reminds me. I read an interview in last weeks MCV with the agency responsible for the creative behind The Club. Some chap was boasting about the critical acclaim their work was receiving. Right. What a crock. Good packaging sells products and The Club didn't sell. If you're an FPS and you don't sell on the 360 then you're either a diabolical game or the marketing money was spent on drugs and booze. Since I own the game and it's fairly decent I can only surmise that the 'critically acclaimed creative' was another cynical agency attempt to produce something arty so they can get themselves a Nike campaign.

The Golden Age

Right up to the moment I started at Emap, everything I knew about gaming was learnt from the arcades. My coin-op career spanned from the 80s labor club classics like Pong and Space Invaders, right through to the 90s Soho test center tournaments involving Street Fighter and Tekken. I worked at a local arcade when I was still as school and got to play pretty much every major release on free credits once the place was locked up for the night. The king of the arcades in those days is unreservedly Capcom. They were so consistent in quality and so perfect in execution. Monster hits like Ghosts 'n Goblins, Trojan, Black Magic, Forgotten Worlds, Section Z and others sucked down so much of my time. So it was news from the recent Capcom Digital Day event that got me very excited. I knew that they had plans to reinvent some of these classics and bring them back for XBLA but just how they would turn out was still unclear. Well, general opinions from some respected journos would suggest that Capcom have done good! Commando! 1942! Bionic Commando: Rearmed! Whilst not my first choice out of Capcom's extensive library they're still all classics and the updated versions put on show are apparently awesome. Better stock up on the points for summer methinks.

Lost and found

On the final stretch of Lost Odyssey and it's been a cracking game. I have the choice now to finish off Gongora or try to complete the last lot of side quests to get a few more achievements. I'll be honest and say it's a lot of work for the small amount it would add to my Gamerscore. Frontlines and Condemned 2 are calling!
Love it longtime
Like most people I look forward to the usual blockbuster movies that come out each year. With two Marvel obsessed kids I have been following the progress of the Iron Man and Hulk films that are both due this summer. Sadly they both appear to be slightly too 'mature' for my lads so I'll need to placate them with some overpriced merchandise so they don't get too upset. It's very annoying though because the kind of kids that would take an Iron Man lunch box to school are likely to be too young to watch the movie. Go figure. Imagine if the games industry did the same? Manhunt rucksack and pencil case anyone?
Don't Workshop
Did a trawl of my bookmarks the other day and I came across some unusual stories about Games Workshop suffering from massive financial woes. A little more digging and they seem to be in a right old state. Job losses, closing stores, shutting down Black Industries and making a desperate bid to sell to new overseas markets to stem the blood loss. I always wondered how those GW stores made any money operating solely to push their own product rather than stocking other stuff and attracting more customers. It wil be interesting to see if the make it through the year…

Check out my massive Tats!

During 2004 Computec Media UK was swallowed whole by the corporate evil known as Future Publishing. I probably spent a grand total of three days in their offices before I realised that I would rather be cleaning Satan's ringpiece with my teeth than working for them. So, packing my bags and heading off into the sunset, I looked for freelance gigs and one of the first was to develop a PlayStation magazine concept. Apart from it being jolly good fun and well paid I also managed to secure one of the greatest pieces of junk tat in the history of gaming. The PSX could be described as an early PS3 that was born hideously disabled and dumped in a binbag outside a hospital somewhere. A lot of it's features managed to end up on the PSP and PS3, like the menus and icons for various media functions, so Sony salvaged something from the trainwreck. Otherwise the DESR-5000 was a bigger white brick than a red-ringed 360 could ever hope to be.
Photographed by Mark Pierce

Chainsaw battles!

I got a noticeable twinge of excitement at the announcement for Gears of War 2 at the GDC conference held last week. You won't get what I mean if you don't play games to any degree of seriousness. You won't get what I mean if your idea of gaming is sitting with Grandma swinging your Wii wand around like the Elephant Man in zero gravity. Despite it's criticisms I really enjoyed the spectacle of Gears of War. The macho future war theme and insane visuals had me hooked and the multiplayer was the first decent Live game I had really persisted with. Though you had to keep your fingers crossed that you'd get a good group of players and not the Yankee pre-schooler obsessed with mothers and criminal acts associated with said mothers. That aside, roll on November!
World's Greatest RPG?
Probably not but Lost Odyssey is right up there with some of the best and I've played a fair few. What's so good about it? For me the key feature that really stands out is the 'acting'. Sounds odd but there is a level of drama between the characters that I really haven't seen before in a JRPG. There are so many standout moments that switch from hilarious banter involving Jansen, a lecharous magic user who tries to score with every woman he lays eyes upon, to some powerful emotional moments as the hero Kiam struggles to regain his memory and find out what happened to his family. Brilliant stuff. Every other aspect of the game is top notch quality though Mistwalker have played safe with a familiar feel to game mechanics, battles etc. Still, it's got me hooked and comes highly recommended if RPGs are your 'bag'.
As simple as ABC
All the usual suspects posted their circulation figures last week. It made for amusing reading as one would expect. The clown princes of publishing, namely Price and Butt, did the expected showboating despite the fact that everyone else can see the actual figures are a shambles. Anyone can who can make a song and dance over mags that sell under 20k would have given Day-Lewis a run for his money. To top it all off was the debut ABC for the latest incarnation of the Official PlayStation rag. Oh dear…

Stuff and Nonsense

Digging through the archives of last year collecting images from finished work for the website. I always plan to do these things after each job but I don't and it makes finding the right pictures much harder. The example above is work I did on a Rogue Galaxy guide for a US client. Worked on a strategy guide and a sales support brochure to 'educate' the US specialist press about the joys the game allegedly offers. Close to 400 pages. All Rogue Galaxy. Well, lets just say the project started out a lot of fun but ended up a nightmare.
Devil Won't Die
Beaten the game twice and only managed 200 achievement points. Capcom want you to work hard to get all of these beauties. It's not become a chore… yet. Great gameplay and fantastic cut scenes keep the game playable even after multiple viewings. Which are inevitable if you're trying for S ranking on each stage. The game does have some painful moments though. The camera can be a particular target for a Harrod insult or two especially during some of the Secret Missions. Secret Mission 11 with the destruction of two statues using the Pandora weapon was a pad smashing moment for sure. One other awful decision that Capcom put into the game was the increase in costs for skills and items. When you have just a few things left, you'll buy one of skills and the remaining abilities get a 30% increase in their cost! WTF! Who sat down and thought that one up! Mining Proud Orbs are like all other farming techniques. Utterly tedious!
Caught in their Webb
New series of Mitchell and Webb this Thursday. I am a recent convert after catching an episode of the first series and then promptly got my grubbies on the Peep Show collection. Now this is proper sketch book material, not that tripe Little Britain.

Tears of Joy!

DMC 4 arrived and what a beauty! First 30 minutes was fantastic stuff though not much actual gameplay admittedly! The battle between the two leads was superbly orchestrated and I am looking forward to sinking some decent time into this much later tonight!
Update: Wow, what a blast! My thumbs are killing me doing these stylish combos while I work on the S rankings. Playing on Devil Hunter mode right now and have managed two S and two A rankings for the first four stages. Oddly enough, getting the red orbs is trickier than my time/style scores. Got to smash more chairs I guess!

World of Harrod…

…is a busy one. Lots of things on right now and not enough time as always. There used to be a day when I would sit around the rented apartments I frequented during my Emap years and be bored senseless. Now if I have anything less than 50 things to do at once then it's worthy of a Columbo-style investigation to see whats gone wrong. Here is the lowdown on a few things:
• Gaming: Devil May Cry 4 due any day now from Play. Reviews have been slightly disappointing but it's one of those games that, if it's your thing then review scores don't matter. Actually, review scores really don't matter! Also looking for a cheap copy of The Club and there are some good deals going so I might pick that up this week too. The Lost Odessey is another in my sights. Blue Dragon was pure JRPG and Mistwalker's latest looks set to continue in that vein. Play-Asia doing a nice deal on the Japanese version which also has full English voice-overs and menus! Oh joy!
• Tees: Got some nice designs in progress including concepts based on Dreamcast, Neo Geo and 16-Bit gaming in general. Also some ideas for Gears of War, CoD4 and Devil May Cry are moving forward. Takes a while to develop as we need to be careful not to infringe anyones copyrights whilst still retaining the feel and style of the theme in question. Plus, if we would not wear it ourselves then it doesn't get through the approval process!
• New Ideas: Working on something new with some chums of mine and developing ideas for another new strand for the business. This has bigger potential in the future should it actually get legs and run. Cannot say too much right now as you would expect. In fact I'd better shut up already!
• Tat: I have unearthed a few bits of Tat for you all and once I have some pics then I'll post them here. Will be giving the attic a comprehensive sorting out in the next few weeks and I am fully expecting to discover a veritable treasure trove of classic Tattle.