Banjo-Kazooie: Not quite the classic I was led to believe it was.

So, after over twenty hours, numerous obscenities and a little bit of gamer rage over a major instance of arbitrary injustice, I have finally beaten Banjo-Kazooie. The overall impression? If I'm honest, a little bit of disappointment, a little bit of relief. I may have been expecting a bit much. Banjo has been lauded from most corners of games journalism and the internet as a classic, and I'm sorry, but it just isn't. It may have been a shining example of the genre when it first dropped fifteen years ago, but today, not so much.

An admission: I never played Banjo-Kazooie when it first arrived. I was a PlayStation owner for most of the late nineties, and by the time I finally got my paws on an N64, prices for Banjo had gone through the roof. I eventually got the game with a free download code when it was released for XBLA a couple of years ago. But, shamefully, I let it languish in the depths of the hard drive until I began living out of boxes a week or two ago, having packed almost everything I own for a move that has wound up being delayed. So with no physical games to play, I began to plumb said depths of  hard drive and play some of my XBLA backlog.

After polishing off the thoroughly satisfying Alan Wake's American Nightmare, Banjo was next on the list, and I dove into it with gusto. The first two thirds of the game were a lot of fun, but at about the point of Rusty Bucket Bay, the game started to become a slog. Eventually I got to the point where the only reason I was continuing was to not let the hours invested up to that point go to waste. Banjo-Kazooie, for the most part, is a good game but it's held back from greatness by a couple of regrettable flaws.

I liked

The art direction: As I've said before, the quality of a game's art will directly affect how well it ages. Banjo-Kazooie is fifteen years old, and it looks it. But that is not to the game's detriment. It's bold, chunky and colourful, and remains very easy on the eye, despite the well documented texturing problems of its original platform. The game world is coherent and absolutely everything looks like it belongs there.

The personality: Everything has a face. Everything. From the witches broom, to the cauldrons scattered around Grunty's Lair, to the vegetables hopping around spiral mountain. On top of that, each world has it's own unique cast, each with it's own unique voice and personality. It gives the whole game a whimsical, storybook feel that makes it a pleasure to spend time with.

The first two thirds: Banjo-Kazooie began as a very enjoyable game, and was balanced just nicely enough that its flaws didn't get in the way of the fun. Sadly, upon arriving at Rusty Bucket Bay, that all changed. The difficulty suddenly spiked, and the controls, camera and collision detection just couldn't give the accuracy that the higher difficulty required. Where once the game was challenging, now it was needlessly difficult and the fun just drained away.

I disliked

The camera: Let's get this out of the way first. The camera is bloody awful. Yes, the game was developed in the nineties, but it's bad even when compared to other games of that vintage. The main problem is the alarming regularity with which it gets stuck on the scenery. Or it will swap sides at random, inopportune moments, causing poor Banjo to fall to his death. Added to this is the fact that the camera seems to have a minimum amount that it will pan at the touch of the right stick. This meant that I couldn't pan the camera the tiny bit that was needed to make sure the perspective was right for some of the more difficult jumps later in the game.

The loose controls: In and of itself, this wouldn't be a problem. There are plenty of games out there that have loose controls that feel great, and for the most part, Banjo-Kazooie is one of them. However, later levels need a level of precision that the controls just aren't able to give, which makes already difficult levels even harder.

The iffy collision detection: Again, not much of a problem until the later stages of the game. But by then it combines with the bad camera and overly loose controls to infuriating and maddening effect. I lost count of the times Banjo fell to his death because of a deadly combination of a dodgy edge and a slightly less than perfect jump.

The collectibles: One hundred jigsaw pieces, nine hundred musical notes, forty five Jinjoes, red feathers, gold feathers, mumbo tokens, eggs, caterpillars. Need I say more?

Being dumped on the ground floor of Grunty's lair after loading: Would it really have been so hard to just start the game from the last floor I was on? Traipsing through the castle every time I started the game was an exercise in needless frustration.

The quiz at the end: Arbitrary and annoying. It should not take three hours to cross a room that it would take five seconds to cover if there wasn't a boardgame in the way. The idea in itself isn't a bad one. But instant death on certain squares if you get a question wrong is just bad design. After over thirty retries I almost put the game down and deleted it.

Despite all the ranting though, and the fact that the last three levels were the kind drudgery that would make even Sisyphus feel sorry for you, for the most part, I still enjoyed my time with Banjo-Kazooie. It was whimsical and nice, even when it was testing my patience to the very limit. It wasn't the classic game I was looking for, but I'm glad I played it. It's sort of a badge of honour to say you hundred-percented Banjo Kazooie, and now that I know why, I'm proud to wear it.

I shall now be spending a bit of time with Beyond Good and Evil HD before starting Banjo-Tooie. Hopefully Rare will have tightened things up a bit for the sequel.

Call me Ishmael.

Not quite what I'm on about, but it fits the analogy quite nicely.

I've done it! I have harpooned my white whale. Although unlike in the famous novel from which the expression is taken, I have survived to tell the tale.

The gaming Moby-Dick to my Ahab is an incongruous one. A classic MegaCD game, purchased eighteen years ago from a bargain bucket in a ratty Cash Converters. It's hailed as a classic now, and fetches mega money on eBay if it's in good condition. You might know it as Sonic CD.

Over the years, although I cherish owning it, I've come to love and hate Sonic CD in equal measure. It's become a symbol of both my early good taste, and my complete inadequacy at certain kinds of game. I love it for its great soundtrack, its opening cinematic, its time travel mechanic. I even love it for giving us Amy Rose and its retina scorching special stages. I hate it for one infuriating, annoying, impassable level. Stardust Speedway Act 3. Or as those who haven't played Sonic CD know it, the level where you race Metallix.

How on earth is it possible that I became stuck on that one level for eighteen years? I don't know. The difficulty was extreme. The idea is that you race Metallix through the level to Amy, while all the time, you are chased by Robotnik in the Egg-O-Matic who is sweeping the ground behind you with some kind of terrifying beam weapon. Touch it and you die. Lose to Metallix and get shut out of the safe area at the end of the level, you die. Get too far ahead of Metallix and he chases you down with a charge attack. If you get hit by it, you lose not only rings, but valuable momentum. Then you get hit by the beam and die. On top of all of that, there are a whole slew of momentum killing obstacles and spikes, which, surprise surprise, make it really easy for you to die. I've played that level again and again, sometimes losing by just tenths of a second. I bashed my head against it from the time I bought the game until my parents bought me my PlayStation the following Christmas.

Over the following years, nostalgia, and a sense of burning injustice at the state of the universe led to a cycle of me periodically breaking out my MegaCD and trying my luck on Stardust Speedway Act 3. And every time, my patience would slowly get ground away until the only alternative to throwing my MegaCD over a motorway bridge was putting it away and trying my hardest to calm down. The cycle continued until I gave up altogether, and let go of all hope of ever getting to the end of the game sometime around 2008. My MegaCD remains boxed up, with that incomplete save, laughing at me from the top of my wardrobe.

"But," I hear you ask, "how on earth did you finish it, if  your save is still incomplete?" The answer of course is a re-release.

Sonic CD popped up on XBLA, and like an idiot, I downloaded the demo on release day. I liked how they'd updated it, but still kept the game underneath intact. It was widescreen, a couple of slowdown bugs had been fixed but those were really the only differences. Continuing to be an idiot, I bought it, thinking that perhaps the game had been rebalanced, and that this time around, things would be different.

A few hours later I got to Stardust Speedway Act 3. Things were no different. Moby-Sonic breached the waves with alarming aggression, sailed gracefully through the air and crashed down through the rigging of the ship of my hopes and dreams, smashing it to matchwood.

Sonic CD had defeated me again, and went back to being left in the vaults unplayed.

This was a state of affairs that continued until last week. I'd found myself bereft of games after packing everything up ready for my move. All that is left to play is what is inside my 360. And pretty much the only uncompleted full game in it was, you guessed it, Sonic CD. Faced with this unfortunate reality, I resolved that once and for all, that I would beat this goddamned game if it killed me. Cue two hours of furious, swear filled retries of the same two minute level. I lost count of the amount of times I ran out of lives, loaded my save and kept going. Which was something which was impossible on the MegaCD version. If you ran out of lives, your save took you back to the first act of the zone. In the end, after two hours of total, complete and utter failure I got lucky. A mistimed jump became one of those fortunate accidents that eventually become the stuff of legend. The number of pixels between me and my metallic nemesis as I passed the finish line could have been counted on one hand. But it didn't matter. I actually cheered, out loud, as eighteen years worth of failure and anguish poured out of me. I'm not sure it's actually possible to put a measure on the elation of that moment.

I had vanquished my white whale, and went on to complete the game on the same night. The final boss was curiously easy. I beat it at the first attempt. However happy I may have been though, the game still had the last laugh. I didn't have all of the timestones, and had to watch Dr. Robotnik fly away with them in the ending cinematic.

As far as I was concerned though, that didn't matter. The timestones could wait. I'd just beaten a game after eighteen years of trying.

Dreams can come true.

Well, this beats smack talk and shooting.

Another blogpost and another excuse for it being late.

I've been too busy playing games. Specifically one game. Magic the Gathering 2013. In a surprise twist of fate, Magic 2013 has turned out to have been one of the best free downloads I've ever been fortunate enough to come across. Say what you want about the age of the games Microsoft's Games for Gold programme, (and some of the games have been old) this old game was totally worth it. Not for the gameplay though, but for the experience of playing it with some of the friends for whom it happens have moved to abodes that are far from my own.

We took up Magic just after we finished college in 2002. It suddenly strikes me that that was ten years ago, but I digress. We played as often as we could whilst various members of the group worked rubbish jobs or slogged their way through university and enjoyed the whole thing an awful lot. We even went as far as holding a booster party, and at one point I spent upwards of fifty pounds in a futile attempt to build an unbeatable deck of the Bringers of the Five Dawns. Eventually though, people got better jobs, or finished university and moved away. The cards went back in the Half Life 2 Limited Edition tin and were broken out once in a blue moon out of nostalgia.

That all changed about six months ago with a random Magic based post on Facebook from a far flung friend with whom I had effectively lost contact. I commented on her post and eventually we wound up playing Magic over Skype while having a right old catch up at the same time. I lost miserably, but the experience was fantastic. I'd not only renewed a dormant friendship, but had also sparked my long dormant interest in Magic back to life. After then I played a few games more locally with friends and the spark remained. We weren't playing obsessively, but it was good fun all the same.

Then September rolled around and Magic 2013 came up as a free download. I contacted some of my old Magic playing friends to attempt to coax them out of card gaming retirement and we all downloaded it out of curiosity to see what it was like.

I have never had a better time playing online with friends as I have playing Magic 2013.

With everybody being apart and doing their own things now, getting us all together in one room can often be something akin to herding cats, but Magic 2013 has given us a way to spend some meaningful time together and just catch up without having to pull everyone into one room. The game itself is almost secondary. Without the high intensity environment of our usual go-to multiplayer games like Project Gotham 4 or Left 4 Dead, we've actually got time to chat with each other like civilised people, rather than calling bullshit on a dodgy overtake every five seconds. One session was enough to convince us that this was the best thing online since the invention of the mute button and we just kept playing. We're up to two nights a week now and have gotten to the point that we're considering spending money on expansion sets to switch things up a bit. The conversation is great, and the competition helps to add a little bit of spice to the sauce.

I even managed to convince my Skype Magic playing friend to get in on the action. She bought a gold subscription specifically to download the game and on Tuesday we spent the best part of five hours just playing and chatting. It's what online gaming should be all about; getting your mates together and chewing the fat like you were ten years old, sat on the floor in your parents' living room. Which is basically why I got the 360 in the first place. It's become my favourite way of keeping in touch with my friends.

Magic online is absolutely worth the price of entry, even though it's not free anymore. Skype is good, but it's only one to one. If you're a long way from home and you want to spend time with a group of friends without hopping on a train or a plane, there really is no better way of doing that than with an evening session of Magic.

Trust me on this.

What's To Cry About?

This post was supposed to go out last week, but I made the mistake of starting Ninja Theory's Devil May Cry reboot while I was at my girlfriend's house. I played for a few hours but didn't complete it, so my lady wouldn't let me take it home. She was too engrossed in the story and wanted to see how it ended, which, I think, says a lot about Ninja Theory's skill as storytellers. I returned to her house last weekend and together, on the grey Sunday afternoon, we polished off the rest of the game. It was a great shared experience. My girlfriend loves Devil May Cry, but by her own admission, doesn't do well with games of that level of intensity. So I played, she watched and we both got to share and discuss what turned out to be a pretty good coming of age story. It was nice.

But what about the game?

I have a theory. Odd numbered DmC games are the good ones. Even numbered ones less so. DmC 1 was incredible. DmC 2 was, for intangible reasons that I can't quite explain, a bit bland. DmC 3 brought back the swagger and the fun. DmC 4, with it's backtracking and Metal Gear 2 style character switch, was for me personally, a bit of a miss. It felt like the beginnings of a decent into self parody. My hopes weren't high for the fifth and it turns out that neither were those of Capcom, who decided to reboot the series. The news raised the ire of the series' vocal fanboys, who promptly went into meltdown when the mugshot of the new Dante was released. He was young, skinny, had a black eye and horror of horrors, black hair! The internet erupted into cries of 'emo kid'.

The reality is nothing of the sort. Arrogant, unflappable, sardonic and giving absolutely zero shits about what you think about him, the new Dante's personality is every inch the equal to that of the old. What really the sets him off though, is the updated wardrobe and the way he holds himself. He's rougher round the edges than the old Dante and has a sort of predatory swagger about the way he walks. The cumulative effect of all this takes Dante from preening J-Rock idol, to grimy punk rocker. He's a triumph of character writing, design and animation. And he couldn't be further from being an emo kid.

Of course, Ninja Theory are renowned masters of character creation and animation, but with DmC, under the guidance of Capcom, they've taken it to a whole new level. Dante is absolutely believable as a person. He is beautifully animated, from his facial expressions, to his walk, to that little stagger at the end of a 3-hit Rebellion combo that makes the sword look just slightly too heavy for him and gives away his untutored fighting style. But all this nuance isn't just reserved for Dante. Every single member of the main cast is given the same treatment, and have been modelled and animated just as beautifully.

I've got to give out a special mention for Kat too, a rare gaming supporting actress who isn't just there as a glamorous accessory or love interest. While she isn't a fighter, she's a capable guide to limbo, a witch and a hacker, and is instrumental to Dante's growth as a character. While she shows some leg, she's sensibly dressed in shorts and a hoodie, no less than what a typical twenty something would wear in the summer. She's pretty without being eroticised, and that's really refreshing.

The world of Limbo City has been lavished with just as much attention as the game's cast. And it's gorgeous. With so many games having a colour palette that seems to be made of primarily grey and brown, looking at DmC is a revelation. As befits a game so obviously themed around demon slaying, the main colour of Limbo City is red. Lots and lots of red. The whole game is filled with colour, the opening few levels especially. The aforementioned reds dominate, but have to battle hard for screen space with the yellows and oranges. They bathe some of the most imaginative levels I've seen in some time, including, and not limited to, a theme park that tries it's hardest to kill you, the upside down world in the reflection on a river, a place full of 24 hour news channel graphics and a psychedelic Rez inspired nightclub gauntlet. Everywhere you go, the levels deform in real time, they twist and wrench and stretch as death threats project on to walls while Mundus sends his minions to take you out. The whole thing is a visual treat.

Of course all of this would be worth nothing if the combat system wasn't up to scratch, and thankfully it's more than good enough. It's as simple or as complex as you want it to be. Accessible and deep at the same time. It's all based around a few select button inputs, but since you can switch between three different melee weapons and your guns on the fly, even when you're mid combo, it never feels shallow. Different weapons have different moves from the same inputs, and such is the ease of changing, that you'll find yourself pulling off savage multi hit combos using each weapon two or even three times. It's not as complex as Bayonetta, but on the flipside of that, you can create a satisfying amount of carnage without having to learn ten or fifteen different sets of button inputs.

I've loved playing the new DmC. So much so that I'm on my second playthrough. And thankfully, it's proved that my theory on the odd numbered games is right. It's stellar in nearly every aspect. Only the slightly low default difficulty and the occasionally grating hardcore thrash metal and neurofunk soundtrack let it down, and even then, it's not a deal breaker. I ramped the difficulty level up to Nephilim at about the halfway point and soundtrack eventually began to grow on me. DmC is the final piece of this generation's holy trinity of brawlers. It sits proudly alongside Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising as a shining example of the genre. You should play it, even if you're one of the fans who swore to never touch it after the release of the mugshot. Feel free to criticise it, but do it through the lens of having played it first. Otherwise, you don't know what you're talking about, and you're doing yourself a grave disservice by wilfully missing out on a genuinely great game just because of a preconceived notion of what the lead character should look like.

Devil May Cry as a series had started to get stale by the fourth entry, and when a franchise goes stale, it dies. While the concept is timeless, the aesthetic was based on a dated idea of Cool, and it just wasn't anymore. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman. Devil May Cry had to change or die, and Capcom made a decision.

I think they made the right one.

Gotta Catch 'em All

We all know the Wii U isn't doing so well at the moment. Something which is mainly down to Nintendo launching its latest hardware without an entry of any of their major franchises. There have already been a lot of column inches dedicated to that issue, so I'm not going to add to them. What the Wii U needs is a killer app. Something that couldn't be done on any other console. So why not give the fans what they want and start work on the much requested Pokémon MMO? It would be a guaranteed system seller, especially if a copy was bundled in at the point of sale.

The Wii U is uniquely suited as a platform to a console MMO, with the GamePad adding DS functionality to the living room, the touch screen makes not just juggling menus, but in game communication much simpler than it would be on the PS3 for instance. Nintendo are also blessed with ownership of the Pokémon franchise, one of the most successful names in the business, and a set of games whose single player mechanics would translate very easily into an MMO. Combining the two would effectively be a licence to print money. So without further ado, I present my own hypothetical Pokémon Universe design document.

At its most basic level, the Pokémon MMO should contain every one of the regions that have appeared across the series' history, and all 649 Pokémon that would appear in those regions. Some Pokémon would have specific habitats just like real world animals, to encourage worldwide travel to Catch 'em All.

Getting into the game starts with character creation. Pick your gender and assemble your avatar from a variety of options to create a character that looks like you would if you'd stepped through the screen into the Pokémon anime. Obviously there should be a wealth of basic options, with new outfits unlockable as you work through the game as a mark of progression.

Now, we can't all come from Pallet Town because it would cause horrible congestion in the early stages of the game. So while creating a character, one of the options that needs to be picked is that of your hometown. You could choose any town from any region, from Cinnabar Island to Cerulean City in Kanto for instance. Whatever takes your fancy. Once the game begins, you find yourself in your hometown with instructions to get to the nearest post office to collect your Pokédex, freshly delivered from Prof. Oak's Mail Order Pokédex Co.

With your Pokédex in your backpack, the next task would be to take your pick of one of three starters from the local Pokémon centre. Starters depend on the region of the world your hometown is in. Hoenn starters would be different from Johto starters for instance. Once you have your first Pokémon, and a stash of pokeballs helpfully given to you by Nurse Joy to help get you started, you can venture out into the wide world and begin your journey to become a Pokémon master.

Wild Pokémon levels would not be able to steadily climb upwards as you get further away from your hometown like they do in the portable games because of the fact that every town in Pokémon Universe can be somebody's hometown. As a result, out on the field there would be no random battles. Wild Pokémon levels would be widely variable to account for trainers of greatly different strengths being in the area, having travelled from all over the world. You can pick your battles as levels will be shown hovering above any wild Pokémon you see.

Of course, the real meat of any Pokémon game is battling other trainers, and again, this being an MMO, trainer strengths would not be able to steadily increase as the player progresses like they do in the core titles. To help level the playing field, every trainer is assigned to a division based upon the average level of the Pokémon in your squad by the Pokémon League. New trainers start in the lowest division and climb to a higher one each time they defeat a gym leader from the division that they are ranked in. Out in the field, you can offer to battle anybody, but the trainer in the lower division can chose to decline a battle if he or she wants. This should help avoid the new trainers being constantly demolished by old hands.

The aim of the game is still to beat each region's gym leaders and take on the regional elite four, with the goal of defeating each region's elite four to become a world Pokémon champion. Each gym will have a leader for each division, and players can join a monthly divisional tournament to reign as gym leader for a certain division. Since gym leaders only use one type of Pokémon, tournaments will also have a type restriction. Once you have been a gym leader for the lv50+ division, you can enter a monthly elite four tournament. The winner of that tournament is the elite four champion, with the four runners up assigned as the regional elite four. A tournament of elite four champions could be open to determine the champion of champions.

Elsewhere there should be plenty of side quests. You could go fossil hunting and try to resurrect yourself an Aerodactyl. You could choose to join Team Rocket. NPCs in towns would offer story based quests, often based around stories from the Pokémon anime. There would, of course, be trading, breeding, and versions of the many mini games that have appeared throughout the franchise history. There would be a stadium for those players who just wanted to battle or for those who just fancy spectating on a huge rumble. You could go hunting for legendary Pokémon. There would obviously be more than one of each, this being an MMO, but would still be super rare. Perhaps you need a special pokeball to be able to catch them, only available after defeating a regional elite four. A major sidequest would be photography, using the GamePad as a camera a la Pokémon snap, creating pictures that could be shared in a gallery or in the MiiVerse. You could even ride larger Pokémon as mounts, like a less conventional version of the famous Pokémon bicycle. The possibilities are wide and varied.

Obviously there are one or two hurdles that would need to be overcome. Voice chat and moderation would be the biggest of these, especially with Nintendo's obvious need to keep things safe for the kids. Although it's not insurmountable. Perhaps Nintendo could lock voice chat to people who have shared friend codes, with communication with others in the vein of Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast, through certain text phrases and a set of symbols.

A Pokémon MMO would work, and most importantly, would sell a boatload of Wii Us. We'd all like to see one, and perhaps, if we're lucky, we might even get one. Do it for the fans Nintendo. We'd play the hell out of it. Bring us the Pokémon MMO and wipe away the debt.

PS. Mr Iwata, if you see this and would like to use it. I'd like 1% commission on the profits please!

Wiped Out

It has just come to my attention via Twitter (thanks @AmiNakajima) that it has been a year since the closure of Studio Liverpool and the hopefully impermanent death of WipeOut. I personally think that ending the WipeOut franchise and laying off the staff of Studio Liverpool was one of the worst decisions Sony ever made. However, this post is an excuse for me to get misty eyed, not lambast Sony on a corporate decision.

Wipeout 2097 is, for me at least, the game that started it all. The moment where games ceased to be just toys and became something more. It was January 1997 I was in year 8 at school. I was over at a friend's house for the first time since Christmas. He'd got a  PlayStation and told me that it had arrived with something amazing. It was exciting. We both had MegaDrives and we initially connected over a love of Sonic 2.

I had a MegaCD too. Dad got it just after the PlayStation was first released because he thought it was pretty much the same thing. Up until that point, the most technically advanced game I'd ever played was Thunderhawk, which was and still is awesome and you should play it.

Anyway, back to WipeOut. My friend fired up his new PlayStation and I heard that famous Bwoaaaarr-tinkle for the very first time, then the swoosh-ting of the PlayStation logo. All of a sudden, there was FMV. Full screen FMV! Not in a tiny window like on my MegaCD. There was a weird cat thing, a sweep over a racetrack then BOOM. Two racing ships flew though an explosion and an utterly banging song dropped in. I still remember the size of my grin and how wide my eyes were. This was like nothing I'd seen or heard before. Hitherto unknown synapses were firing in my brain.

That song... It did strange things to my twelve year old mind.

The main menu slammed into the screen to the sound of another explosion. Loops of Fury by the Chemical Brothers played in the background. My friend wasted no time, before I knew it there was a strangely shaped pad in my hands, I was on the startline of Talon's Reach and I could hear the distinctive wailing guitar line of Firestarter by the Prodigy. I was struck by how effortlessly cool this all was, and by how I shouldn't really be listening to what I was listening to. There was a bit of a moral panic surrounding the Prodigy at the time. They were a dangerous band, my mom was up in arms about them, it just made everything feel even cooler.

My first race went badly. I remember it being almost uncontrolably fast. I bounced off walls and got left in the dust by the other ships. At the same time I was still in the throes of that 'this is the most amazing thing in the history of ever' feeling. The speed was the most exhilarating thing I'd ever experienced, the graphics far and away the best I'd ever seen, the ships felt like they really were floating, the weapons hit hard, and the music was incredible.

All this from one race at vector class. I was impressionable and easily amazed at that age.

I was hooked. We passed the pad around for about three hours, right up until the moment my dad came to get me. In time, I gradually began to master the handling and we managed to get up to the heady heights of venom class. Dad bought me home buzzing and I told him I wanted, nay, needed a PlayStation. We weren't that well off when I was a kid. I got a PlayStation with WipeOut 2097 the following Christmas. My parents had been saving for it all year.

There were other games, but none had the effect that WipeOut had on me. My nacent musical taste formed around it, I discovered new artists with each instalment and gained a love of music that I retain to this day. It introduced me to The Designer's Republic and the concept of graphic design, leading to two years at college as a fairly rubbish art student trying and failing to replicate the game's minimalist aesthetic. Zone mode taught me about the buzz that only extreme speed can give, and along with Road Rash, is one of the main reasons I own a sports motorcycle that is far to fast for my own good. Most importantly though, and I've said this earlier, WipeOut showed me that games can be far more than just fancy toys. They have their own culture around them. WipeOut bought my loyalty to the PlayStation brand and shaped the way I play games.

I owned a PS1 because of 2097. I still play Wip3Out sporadically. Even though I never actually got Fusion, I still bought my PS2 because the demo I played of it blew my mind. I bought a PSP because of Pure, then bought Pulse on release day. And even though circumstance meant I got an 360 to stay in touch with my gaming mates more easily when they moved away, I still created a PSN account, got WipeOut HD and Fury on my housemate's PS3, then wound up playing on his console more than he actually did. The only reason I didn't buy a Vita after thirty seconds of 2048 is because I couldn't afford it at that very moment. It made me very sad.

WipeOut is PlayStation. The PS4 will have a huge gap in it's library without it. I'd have a huge gap in my life without it. Maybe I'd even be a slightly different person, such is that one game's influence upon me. Hopefully the WipeOut franchise doesn't stay gone for long.

And now, something a little different.

I return! From a week's holiday on the Jurassic Coast. And I return with an urge to try something a little different. Not too different though, this is a games blog after all, although this post will perhaps stretch the definition a little. Outside of playing games all the time, I'm a big music fan, and I'm beginning to find myself owning a couple of videogame OSTs. Before I started the blog, I'd always wanted to try writing an album review, and here I find myself with an opportunity.

I'm a big fan of Bastion. Its beautiful art style, story, soundtrack and narrator come together to create a game with a unique bluesy atmosphere. An atmosphere that manages to overcome the title's slightly repetitive dungeon crawler gameplay. It's a game that it's just enjoyable to spend time with, whilst you have a story told to you by a man with a voice so smooth, it feels like he's having sex with your ears while wearing a condom made of the finest blue velvet.

The greatest contribution to the feel of Bastion is made by its unique soundtrack. I liked it so much that I asked for the album for Christmas.

Open the beautifully adorned case and slide the CD out of its sleeve, into the stereo and touch Play. The CD spins up and the hollow sound of someone playing the blues on an acoustic guitar in the background spills from the speakers. After a couple of chords, you are greeted by the honeyed tones of Logan Cunninghan as Rucks on Get Used To It. He delivers a short monologue on how 'the folks of Caelondia could really carry a tune' then the strumming drops away and the track cuts to the breathless minute and a bit of strumming, hammer-ons and pull-offs of A Proper Story.

If Get Used To It and A Proper Story serve as the introduction to the album, it is the third track, In Case of Trouble that really sets the tone of the rest of the disc. It begins with a lone guitar playing a mellowed variation of a prominent guitar lick from the previous track. The song begins to build as the sound of a Cello swells in to accompany the guitar, and before you know it, composer Darren Korb has layered in strings and a complex yet sympathetically programmed beat that sounds for everything like it was pounded out on wood blocks.

That wood block beat is an early pointer at the instrumental range of this album. Either Korb is an outrageously talented multi instrumentalist, or he is a fabulously talented synth programmer. I suspect it's actually a combination of both, and while the core of most of the songs is based around guitar, the sheer number of other instruments in use, as well as the various guitar effects and tunings, merits comment. There are hazy opium den sitars over a reverb drenched blues lead, backed by something that sounds for everything like a harpsichord on The Sole Regret. On Slinger's Song a banjo played with a slide teases out a riff over a spaghetti western guitar accompaniment and subtle pulsing bass. Elsewhere, there are furiously played strings, Indian tabla drums, wailing overdriven guitars and something that sounds suspiciously like a harp. And that's just for starters. There are all manner of sounds on here from instruments I couldn't hope to name. It's hard to believe this is all the work of one man recording in his flat.

I would go as far to say that it is this sheer sonic diversity is what makes this album a compelling listen in its own right, not just as a good videogame OST. It's endlessly interesting.

 

Of course, any discussion of the Bastion OST wouldn't be complete without mention of it's twin centrepieces, Build That Wall and Mother, I'm here. A pair of ballads as stripped back as it is possible to be, just a lone voice and a guitar. They are sung from the perspective of two characters in the game, one, a folk song about the differences between the two peoples of Caelondia, the other, the voice of an outcast yearning to return home. The two songs are beautiful, and as good as anything by any mainstream artist.

 

One final mention goes to The Pantheon, a good old fashioned blues number with Logan Cunningham's buttery voiced Rucks on lead vocals. It's a fantastically strong way to close out the album, with Rucks sounding almost like a gravellier Chris Rea.

 

I love this album, and would heartily recommend it to any music fan be they gamer or no. Every track has something different to offer and you notice more and more with repeated listens. Buy the game, play it through and soak in its world. Then buy the album and let its sounds take you back there.

 

Three thumbs up.