Nostalgia Hit: Timesplitters: Future Perfect

Pretty much Riddick.

I have often been of the opinion that the current games industry needs to be introduced to the term ‘the sky’s the limit’. No, let me put that more bluntly…

I think that the current games industry needs to be brought out to a baseball pitch, bent over by burly college students, and paddled with a particularly solid looking bat to the tune of ‘no more mister nice guy’ by Alice Cooper à la Dazed and Confused. On that bat would be the words ‘the sky’s the limit’, and, after a due amount of paddling, those exact words should also be imprinted onto the games industry’s buttocks, so that sitting down would be considerably painful for the next month.And, above all, the wielder of that bat should be none other than Timesplitters: Future Perfect.

In comparison to the modern gaming landscape, filled as it is with generic military shooters, remakes of generic military shooters, and (God help us) sports games, the land of Timesplitters was a world were next to anything could happen.

The game itself dealt with the titular timesplitters, an evil race of mutant creatures whose bulging biceps and menacing grimaces could put even Marcus Fenix to shame. Okay, sounds generic enough. But wait, here’s the catch. Said ‘splitters could also jump through time, and in doing so attempted to wipe out human race during various time periods in a bid for world domination.

You, the bald space marine Sergeant Cortez (the gaming precursor of Riddick; seriously, they’re both bald, ripped, and have weird goggle things) had travel back in time to destroy these creatures before their creation and save the world. What this meant in terms of the game itself is that its setting had nearly limitless potential, something it made good on with flying colours. In one section of the game, you’d be charging through a castle in the ‘20s with a steampunk machine-gun in hand and a pipe-smoking Colonel Blimp by your side, and in the next you’d be sleuthing through an evil genius’s layer with a 60’s swinger in a tight-fitting dress (seriously, don’t ask).

The gameplay itself was largely of the run-and-gun vibe, though in the story mode things got varied up from time to time; at one point you’d make your way through a haunted, zombie infested mansion (a level, that, back in the day, managed to work faster than a vindaloo-flavoured laxative in soiling my kegs) armed with a good ol’ double barrel, whilst a few chapters latter you’d be piloting a six-story robot blasting everything around you to ash.

Throughout the entire game (which included an arcade mode, a challenge mode, and a map maker mode), however, was an overarching sense of tongue-in-cheek humour that many a CoD or Battlefield game should take note of, so that you could be in the ridiculous situation of shooting cyborg monkeys with a harpoon gun, something that I personally hold as the absolute benchmark of any game, period.

All in all, if you own a PS2 and fancy an anarchic, humorous and above all fun game to kill some time, then Timesplitters is definitely for you.

 

 

James Dyson 

The Console Wars: Generation Six

As we approach the release of the PS4 and the Xbox One, we prepare to truly enter next era of console gaming. But the history of console gaming goes back decades, 40 years of history. Wars, alliances, betrayals, and the rise and fall of many companies. Exeposé  Games sets out on a journey of great historical importance, charting each generation of…The Console Wars.

The sixth generation of consoles began in 1998 with Sega. After losing out massively to the PlayStation and N64, Sega released their new console, the Dreamcast, on 27th November 1998.

It was a pioneer in many regards, being the first console to render full frames and the first to have a built-in modem and Internet supporting online play for the rising online sector.

The console got a slow start. Sega had discontinued the Saturn ready for the Dreamcast. But this led to people going elsewhere for a console.

The console also came out too early for the software, with only one title, Virtua Fighter 3, available at launch. It resulted in the Dreamcast being less popular than its predecessors, though the release of Sonic Adventure a few weeks later gave it a boost. When it release through September to November 1999 in the rest of the world, it was a different story.

It released with 17 launch titles and, in the US, had the most successful launch in history to that point. Sega was once again a force to be reckoned with.

A year later, however, Sony launched the PS2, and the Dreamcast’s sales plummeted. The PS2 was a ramping-up of the PlayStation’s hardware, matching the Dreamcast in quality. It was also backwards compatible and, more importantly, had the function of playing DVDs along with games.

PS2 wasn’t only a console it was a multimedia platform. The market swarmed to the PS2’s launch, and it made $250 million on day one, doubling the record set by the Dreamcast.

It was the final nail in the coffin. Though the console had been doing well, Sega was having major problems. Fallings out with EA were reducing the available game library, and the company had already been haemorrhaging money before the release of the PS2. Unable to compete with the PS2, and more competitors on the way, Sega left the console market entirely on the on 30th of March 2001. They discontinued the Dreamcast and became a third-party developer. The story of Sega’s consoles didn’t end there though.

In November 2001, two more consoles released to the market: Nintendo’s GameCube, and Microsoft’s Xbox.

The GameCube, having released in September in Japan, was Nintendo’s first disc-based console. It was a large improvement in terms of hardware and could also connect to Nintendo handheld, the Gameboy Advance, via a link cable. The consoles controller was also a move forward. It took many points from the Dualshock, namely its dual thumbsticks, but made its own changes by flipping the placement of the d-pad and left thumbstick. It released with 15 launch titles to promising sales, though nowhere near the PS2.

The Xbox, meanwhile, was something of a dark horse. It was created by Microsoft, a US-based company. A US console hadn’t been a true major player on the market since the Atari 7800, and hadn’t been a dominant once since the 1983 crash. Microsoft weren’t going in blind though, they had spent the late 1990s working with another company’s console research: Sega and the Dreamcast.

This showed in the Xbox’s design. The Xbox had a built-in modem, and much of the layout of its controller, with the A, B, X, Y buttons on the left along with a lower thumbstick, and the reverse d-pad – thumbstick layout used by both the Dreamcast and GameCube.

Sega representatives regarded the Xbox as the spiritual successor to its consoles, which showed when games received successors or sequels, such as Jet Set Radio, on the console. It also added improvements which were used by Sony, such as media player capabilities.

The Xbox released on 15th November 2001, with multiple launch titles, to huge success. During the generation the Xbox would come to beat Nintendo in terms of sales. The Xbox’s success can most likely be pinpointed to two areas: Xbox Live, and Halo.

A year after the release Microsoft enabled its key innovation: its dedicated online service, Xbox Live. Whilst Sega and (after launch) Sony, both had online capabilities, they didn’t have the dedicated servers of Xbox Live.

It was an innovation, a costly one at that,due to its subscription service. It could have been a turnoff, but instead became one of the driving forces for the console, and knocked its competitors down a step or two.

Another reason was the popularity of its game library. Exclusives like Forza rivalled Gran Turismo, while backing from third-party companies like EA gave them a vast library of games.

Then there was the flagship: Halo. The first title had been a launch game, and had shattered software records.

The sequel, Halo 2 did something that would have been impossible in previous years.

Its launch made it the fastest grossing release in entertainment history. Not gaming, entertainment.

Halo 2’s multiplayer was the flagship of Xbox Live, having more gaming hours than any other game, along with the flagship of online console gaming and the FPS genre in general. The Xbox’s online power was an area that even the PS2 couldn’t beat it in.

The Sixth Console War was more a foregone conclusion than anything, though.

The PS2’s sales dwarfed all others, becoming the best selling console in history, at 155 million. Nintendo had weathered again, selling 22 million GameCubes. Sega had fallen, but its legacy continued with Microsoft and the Xbox. Like the Dreamcast though, its innovation had been costly, and the console made a loss overall. Regardless, with Xbox Live and Halo, the Xbox became the number 2 console of the generation, selling 24 million and breaking Japan’s complete stranglehold on the market. The market also had another surprise: with massive success of the PS2, the Halo games and Xbox Live, the gaming market had truly gone mainstream.

The next console war was to be the largest yet, one that no-one wouldn’t know about. It would be total war, and Microsoft prepared to make the first move.

 

Check in tomorrow for the full history of The Seventh Console War…

 

Luke Pilchowski

 

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New Friends, New Rivals: Let the games begin!

Can you really game on your student budget? Rosie Howard shares her tips

Gaming during your first year can be, unfortunately, limited. Unless you are lucky enough to own your own console and television, many people are forced to leave their gaming days behind them. Even the games themselves are ridiculously expensive, as a £45 spend on one item does not fit well into a student budget.

Image credit: playstation.com

Playing console or PC games at university can also sometimes invoke the idea of people playing single player or online games for hours at a time, often on their own. But I think that gaming can be one of the most social pastimes at university, and can be achievable whilst not paying a small fortune.

Nearly everyone has had some experience of gaming during his or her lives (even if at first they don’t admit it).Even though I see myself as being slightly old fashioned when it comes to gaming (for example, I have never played Halo, let alone Call of Duty), I was surprised at how many people had had experience playing the same games as I did when they were growing up. Just mention the words Spyro or Crash Bandicoot in a conversation and more people than you think will join in, even to the point of starting a lengthy discussion on how Spyro was never the same when he moved to PS2. And though I am yet to meet anyone else who played Croc, or Sheep, Dog, Wolf, I am still holding out hope.

So, if you do want to bring gaming to University, but can’t bring your newest console, then it could be a good idea to bring an older console. In my case, the first console to enter our corridor was a PS2 connected to a square, SD TV: very nostalgic. We could therefore only play either PS or PS2 games, and it was amazing to see how many games people still owned, with hoarders, like me, still own every game they ever bought for that console, even if they don’t actually have the console any more. We had great fun revisiting games we hadn’t played in years, which were still enjoyable and challenging, whilst feeling fresh compared to modern games. Our top games included: Worms, a great strategy, multiplayer game which soon gets very competitive; Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup, a game which everyone seemed to remember playing, another great multiplayer game that gets hugely competitive (though I would advise not skipping the tutorial); and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, a game that a lot of my friends remembered, back from when film tie-in games could still be good.

Image credit: harrypotter.wikia.com

Between a group of people, you should be able to produce a huge number of classic games which have been sitting in the back of a cupboard just waiting for an excuse to be played again. It’s gaming on a student budget, avoiding you having to buy the newest games in order to get a gaming fix.

Gaming is something that can be continued and enjoyed at university and, in my opinion, is not something to necessarily be done alone. It will surprise you how quickly a rainy Exeter day can go by with everyone trying to get past level two of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. If anything, it helped remind us that maybe we were better at gaming when we were younger.

 

Rosie Howard

Best Games I Never Finished: Okami

Throughout my ‘long’ gaming career, there have been very few games I have completed to 100%, and even more that I never got close to finishing.

I am going to go through some of these classic games and consider whether it was the game itself or my incompetence that led to a dead end!

Out of all the games I’ve ever played, Okami still stands out as being one of the most stylistically stunning.

The game is based around Japanese myth, legend and folklore. The artistry is inspired by ‘sumi-e’ or Japanese woodblock art, creating a truly unique visual style. It received huge critical acclaim upon release, but unfortunately, this was not reflected in sales.

Thankfully Okami has been re-released on both the PS3 (via the PlayStation Network) and the Wii, so hopefully the game will receive the recognition that it deserves.

The game starts with possibly one of the longest opening cut scenes ever created, lasting nearly 15 minutes. It tells the story of the demon Orochi being destroyed 100 years previous to the game’s events, only to be reawakened in the present to wreak havoc on the land.

Obviously this backstory is slightly more complex than this, but this gives you the gist of what happens.

In order to defeat this demon, the sun goddess Amaterasu possesses the statue of the white wolf Shiranui, who helped defeat Orochi previously. This results in the playable character Okami Amaterasu. Ammy, as he soon becomes known, has the goal to rid the world of the darkness that has encased it and ultimately destroy the demon Orochi.

Throughout the game there are series of puzzles, quests, and battles to be completed; which unlocks more of the map as you progress.

Aside from this you are still able to roam the world freely, choosing additional missions to complete which gain you money and ‘blessings’, which are essentially skill points that help you upgrade Ammy’s health and so on.

What makes this game truly unique is the addition of the ‘celestial brush’. A feature that allows you to pause the game, open a canvas overlaying the screen and use a brush to draw patterns that then cause an effect, or a ‘miracle’, in the game.

For example, by drawing a straight line, you create a slash that can be used to defeat demon henchmen or cut down trees and barriers. As you progress you can unlock new patterns to perform new actions.

Overall, this game is great. It’s really refreshing and focuses heavily on aesthetics, as well as creating a really fun and unique gameplay experience.

So why didn’t I finish this game?

In all honesty, it’s because I couldn’t find the next quest. I would run around the world, speak to every character who was there and nothing would happen. They would either tell me I had already helped them or talk about some tree they noticed. I would keep going back to the game, playing for hours and still progress nowhere.

It then got to a point where I couldn’t remember the last thing I did so a walkthrough was pointless, and starting again felt demoralising.

I am hoping that this is a glitch in my save game that can be resolved, and at least if its bad weather this summer I have something to keep me entertained.

It’s a game worth checking out if you haven’t heard of it already, it will definitely be a refreshing surprise.

 

Rosie Howard