Plusses and Minuses: Silent Hill Homecoming

Massouken on October 6th, 2008

When was the last time you played a game that intentionally tried to get into your head and turn your puppy dog dreams into nightmares about hell hounds rending flesh from the bones of babies? And no, Mega Man 9 doesn’t count. It’s probably been a while; horror games are few and far between now. However, the Silent Hill series has long been the prime destination for gamers intent on getting grossed out. Where else would you go for disturbing sexual metaphors mixed with some grotesque displays of the human anatomy? Well, besides the local free clinic.

Silent Hill Homecoming has shambled into stores, leaving a trail of blood and bile in its wake. Will this latest entry make gamers shit their pants out of fear, or buyer’s remorse?

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Hobo Harry’s Modern Game Review: Tetris for Gameboy

Hobo Harry on September 24th, 2008

Bless it be thy saints, alleluia! Today the lord used his special lord magic to grant me a day without tears. Dumpster diving for breakfast I found this Tetris god:

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Plusses & Minuses Debuts: Unreal Tournament III

Massouken on July 14th, 2008

No, please don’t ever attempt to group us in with the journalistic scholars idiots over at the legitimate gaming review sites, but that doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to chime in on a game’s positives and negatives every Monday, right? Right! Welcome to Plusses & Minuses, your weekly assault on whatever game we feel needs it badly.

I’m not an Unreal Tournament gamer. I’ve played one title in the past, and wasn’t too impressed. While I see the attraction of a fast-paced, hyperactive, gory shooter chock full of guns that shoot pure lightning up your opponents’ asses and instantaneously turn them into smoldering skeletons, UT3 is basically the same run-and-gun, hope-you-shoot-someone-before-they-shoot-you game play we’ve been enduring since Quake. Sure, the space marines are less likely to pass a steroids test and the explosions are…er, explosionier, but if you’ve been playing PC-based first person shooters since the 90s, you won’t be surprised with what UT3 has to offer.

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This Is Either A Donkey Konga Review Or An Alternate Method Of Anger Management For Girls Who Drink Too Much Gin

Scarlene on March 6th, 2008

This game completely changed my life. I went from smashing out store front windows, random people’s faces, binge drinking through life and throwing up on people’s couches, to just being drunk and hilarious. How? Donkey Konga, that’s how, you dumb yatch.  The object of the game is to completely smash the shit out of some giant plastic bongos and if you happen to do it in rhythm, you win. I’m dead serious. You just sit there hitting shit. That’s it. In fact, you’re allowed and encouraged to do so.  It’s like heaven wrapped itself in Nintendo packaging and brought itself to my doorstep.

I think every bar in the land should have this game. Get people all cranked up on Sparks or Red Bull vodkas and let them take all their pent up aggression out on inanimate objects instead of each other. Donkey Konga is good for people from all walks of life. Frat boys, abuse victims turned porn stars, your white trash grandfather that’s a little itchy with the switch, and anyone who’s ever felt oppressed or frustrated for whatever excuse they have for being a shitty person this week. Buy it instead of spending money on tissue boxes, doilies and sending flowers to yourself. I highly recommend and will also school your ass in said game.

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Sour Mix (Drunken Sailor Edition)

B Miggs on March 5th, 2008

I shouldn’t have done that eighth round of Jager.

It always seems like a great idea until I wake up in a strange place hugging a stray cat and using hard plastic game boxes as pillows. My first play through of TLoZ:PSM (DS) left me shaking and irritated, which isn’t something I can really blame on the game, per say. It’s because I’m an alcoholic. Anywhoo, the game is fucking cool, especially when you’re playing it in a taxi at 9AM with one hand holding the stylus and the other covering your eye so you don’t puke. It’s your run of the mill rupee-fest where some shifty pirate prick takes all the credit for your hard work (like when somebody snatches your barfly after you’ve spent the whole night getting her liquored up.) This guy is a bit more deranged in the sense that he’s constantly filling your character with L.I.T.’s even though you don’t look a day over 8 years old. When the screen gets blurry just as you’re sinking your anchor to grab some needless ship part, you’ll want to snap the neck off of your Heineken and jab it into anything with a pulse.

Conclusion: Gametastic! Mosty because it turns the DS microphone into a breathalizer where you have to blow a 0.2 BAC just to access your save file. The “avoid getting seasick” mini games were a challenge, although i’m not even sure if they really existed or not.

Fuck it, last night was a business write-off anyway. Read on

Having “No More Heroes” Is Better Than Having No More Herpes

agent b on March 3rd, 2008

Something miraculous happened about an hour into “No More Heroes,” the janky yet beautifully orchestrated new action title from director Suda 51. I stopped giving a fuck about the technically messy bits and realized they meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. See, for all its shortcomings, No More Heroes made me stop worrying about its seemingly empty sandbox overworld, constant scenic pop-in, and bipolar framerate (which sometimes dipped into the single digits). I just didn’t care. Why? Because when it really gets moving, the game exudes so much style, so much cool, that none of that shit mattered.

(pussy-whipped assassin slash otaku nerd protagonist Travis Touchdown gets gritty)

Packed to the rim with 80’s video game fan service, “Heroes” doesn’t just break gaming’s 4^th wall, it gets drunk with your girlfriend and fucks her through it while you’re at home hosting a LAN party. Then it brushes off the asbestos and dashes back into the wild before you even realize wassup.

Do not steal or even rent this masterpiece. Suda deserves your cash. The last thing I want to see is him meandering around his hometown, picking up garbage, mowing lawns and knuckling up coconut trees (just a sample of the game’s hilarious mini-games) to collect enough dough to pay his rent because you assholes didn’t support a fantastic, wildly original video game when it was right under your noses. It carries the type of swagger and humor of a good independent art house film. Hopefully, it can some how, some day help cut a path to getting video games respected as a legitimate art form, one katana beamed, blood fountain spewing doubter at a time.

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