Namco Capcom?

I'd like to make it clear from the outset that the contents of this post are wild fantasising on my part.

I recently read in Edge 236 that Namco Bandai is pondering how it can up it's sales in the West.  How about a merger with / takeover of Capcom?

The two are currently on good terms, apparently, since they are working on Tekken X Street Fighter.  This seems an acknowledgement by Bandai that Street Fighter has more international appeal and can help Tekken reach a wider audience.  Marvel vs Capcom has obvious western appeal and the Resident Evil and Dead Rising franchises are well established shooters, something Bandai lacks.  (I'm aware of Time Crisis, Dead to Rights and Inversion but these are not names which come to easily to mind.  I seached "Namco Bandai Shooter" to refresh my memory.)

What does Capcom get out of the deal.  Well, with Bandai's financial muscle behind it's projects it can provide developers with the recources to get games right first time.  There might be no more Off the Records and Resident Evil could polish up a tarnished reputation.  In a world where EA and Activision exist it could benefit both developers to be part of a bigger animal, both when it comes to developement and promotion.

All unfounded speculation, of course, but why not?

Slightly Mad

I have recently acquired Alice, Madness Returns for the PS3 but decided to first play the American McGee's Alice which comes with it free as an unlockable download.

Alice is guided through the game by the Cheshire Cat and it is not clear that his intentions are all benign, but I have not got too far yet so it's hard to say.  The most common enemies are Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee like guards and flying banshee type creatures which perhaps are supposed to look like the Queen of Hearts and injure Alice by screaming at her.

The Guards come in two varieties.  The red ones are more dangerous and can throw playing cards as well as swinging a pole-arm.  The black ones don't seem to have a projectile weapon.

When you kill an enemy they leave behind a red shape floating just off the ground which heals Alice when she runs though it and restores some of the blue essence which helps her fight.  There are plenty of places in the game world where there is no floor, only a falling away to nothingness, and when a banshee dies while above such an area the life giving blob it leaves behind might not be accessible.  The potency of the deposit depends on how powerful the enemy is and banshees are pretty useful so it is worthwhile to try to kill them while they are over some floor.

Alice has got four types of weapon up to the point I've played to.  She starts with a basic knife then gets some throwable playing cards of her own, a hockey stick that deals out electric shocks and then some dice which open a portal to the nether world from which a demon emerges and takes on Alice's enemies.  If the dice is thrown while there are no enemies around the demon turns on Alice.  Both the cards and the dice use up the blue stuff.

Fighting the Banshees using melee weapons is tough and requires a lot of co-ordination.  As they can fly Alice often has to jump to hit them and sometimes cannot reach them at all.  Factor in their habit of flying suddenly off the screen and the fact that Alice has to be in the right place and properly orientated and then time her swing accurately and it is getting very difficult.  The best way to take on more than one is to concentrate on killing one with the cards then Alice can fetch the deposit it leaves behind, thus powering up her health and blue stuff for the next kill.  The Demons are quite useful against the banshees and the fact they can fly is a big help.

The original Alice stories are pretty sinister in there own right and I don't think it is an intrinsically brilliant leap to make this game, but there are some things here which are good and original and worth seeing and the insane children do freak me out a bit.
This game has frustrated me often but only because I've been a bit useless.  At one point I emerged (Alice emerged) into an area with only a tiny bit of health left and was quickly attacked and killed by guards.  This was repeated several times.  There is quite a lot of having to jump accurately from one place to another and I don't find this thrilling, but there are challenging fights and interesting areas to explore and I would definitely suggest anyone buying Alice: Madness Returns at least trys this game.

Nothing Dirty

Why Colin McRae Dirt has a 12+ rating is a mystery.  It seems like good clean fun.

I have great loyalty to CMR 2005 (see an earlier entry) but I have to be honest and admit that there are some aspects of this successor which are better.

One is that if you want to just drive and have fun, you can.  In the earlier game not doing your homework by setting up the car properly would often lead to disaster.  Here, you can get away with the default settings and why not?  If you are into all that garage stuff  there are many components on the car that you can adjust.



I'm Winning - Hooray!

 I made the mistake of playing through the whole of the career mode at Rookie difficulty.  It is so laughably easy that it is impossible to fail to progress.  The idea was that I would unlock all the races.  I thought: I've paid for the game, why shouldn't I have access to them all.

I wasn't too far in when I got bored of the uncompetative nature of the game but felt compelled to carry on.  I thought it might get harder as I went up the career pyramid but it really didn't.




Trucks.

It's a fun game, though, with a great variety of events and vehicles so I whole heartedly recomend it.  It is not ideal for rally purists like the earlier Colin McRae games - it is harder to get the cars to slide at the corners and the co-driver calls have a lot more mistakes - but I still recommend it whole heatedly, but stay away from the easiest difficulty as you don't need it even if you are as generally useless as me.

Racedriver Grid has now arrived in the post so there is more excitement to come.

Rayman's an Original

I've been trying out Rayman Advance on the GBA SP.  It is one of two games featured on Rayman 10th Anniversary, the other being Rayman 3.

The first and most striking thing about the game are the rich colours of the opening area.  It is a forest setting and and the greens and blues of the environment tell us immediately that love has gone into making this game.

Rayman himself is also noteworthy.  This is the first of his games I've played and I never expected him to be so big.  He takes up more than 1/3 of the height of the screen, making him much bigger than any of the platform characters I've previously written about.



Rayman in his element.

 Rayman starts the game with 6 lives and 4 pips (that's what I'm calling them, anyway).  If he walks into a tortoise or other type of bad guy he loses a pip.  When he's lost all 4 he loses a life and returns to the start of that section.  At several stages he has to jump over water and if he falls short and drowns he loses a whole life.

Rayman is no Sonic.  He lopes along at his own pace and the main danger is in lack of precision in jumping, not in running into a hazard that was on you before you knew it.  Nevertheless I managed to kill him off frequently.  It is because of the low speed nature of his adventures that Rayman can afford to loom so large on the screen.

The game works.  It is generous with incompetents like me (allowing you to start up again on the level you finally died off at with all 6 lives intact) and is the most engaging of the 3 GBA platformers I've written about so far.

Despite that I think I will be neglecting Rayman for a while as I got Colin McRae Dirt for the PS3 through the post today.  More on that subject soon.

Need a Bit More Speed

NFS Hot Purstuit has had it's claws in me recently.  I was doing pretty well last night and managed to get a gold medal in 2 races which had previously eluded me.

I was having a great run in the pursuit race called Blacklisted (I think).  Even though there are only 4 competitors in this one I haven't got even a bronze in it yet as I keep failing to finish due to getting wrecked or busted.

Last night it was going well though.  I was leading and close to the end, there were no police ahead of me and no sign of the helicopter.  Suddenly, out of the darkness, there was a spike strip in the road which I didn't have time to avoid.  Okay the chopper could have dropped it and then disappeared but it doesn't sound too likely.  To compound the injustice I was busted!  I hadn't run over one spike strip or been hit by an emp up to that point.  I might have had a couple of crashes but the damage wasn't critical.

It's a great game for the most part, though, so I'm not really complaining - I don't think.

One small criticism I have is that the previews and time trials, which are not the most exciting runs, seem to be generally a bit more difficult than the races.  As a result I find myself going back over all the contests I'm yet to score a gold medal in and the races get filtered out leaving rather a high proportion of these against the clock events still to be successfully completed.

Let's face it though, nothing will put me off going back and trying again.