Volume
4, Issue 9 - September 2005 |
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Also Featuring: Michael, Mike Kazwell, Richard Franzen, Zac Patterson, David, feyza, and Denny Delk |
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The September issue of GameCola invariably ends up being the most rushed issue we put out all year. People don't always have time for playing and writing about games when they're busy moving out of home and into their fabulous dormitories, and attending their first weeks of classes. For some reason, Sid Meier's Pirates! just gets lost in the shuffle when you're busy spending more cash on textbooks than you made total at your summer job, and trying to figure out how, exactly, you ended up in Principles of Biology when you're a journalism major.
But that doesn't mean we've forgotten about you; it just means that more of us are typing this on the day of the deadline than usual. Since I am writing this on the day of the deadline (just about a first for me, actually), and since I've barely had any time this month to think about video games, let alone play them, here are some absolutely SHOCKING statistics that will undoubtedly fill my self-assigned wordcount:
DID YOU KNOW THAT...
... the average GameCola review rating is a
6.4?
... the average GameCola review rating for a Zelda game is a 6.2?
... the average GameCola review rating for a Final Fantasy game is a 7.5?
... the average GameCola review rating for a Mickey Mouse game is a 9.3?
DID YOU KNOW THAT...
... the highest GameCola rating EVER was a 9.72
for Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals?
... the lowest GameCola rating EVER was a 1.1 for Midnight Raiders?
DID YOU KNOW THAT...
... Matt Gardner's average review rating is a
7.2?
... Paul Franzen's average review rating is a 5.0?
... Zack Huffman's average review rating is a 3.4?
DID YOU KNOW THAT...
... we have reviewed a grand total of 43 RPGs?
... we have reviewed a grand total of six sports games?
DID YOU KNOW THAT...
... on average, a GameCola staff member sticks around for 13 months?
DID YOU KNOW THAT...
... 26% of all GameCola staff members have been
female?
... 11.1% of all GameCola staff members have been named "Matt?"
... 11.1% of all GameCola staff members haven't been from the United States?
... 48.1% of all GameCola staff members have been from South Jersey?
DID YOU KNOW THAT...
... on average, 4.4 people vote in Free Stuff
for Feedback each month?
... on average. 7.3 people download TestGame.exe each month?
... on average, 9.2 people vote in the monthly poll each month?
... on average, 11.5 people vote in the Gates of Life poll each month?
Okay, I think I'm done now.
See you next month!
Love,
Paul Franzen
Editor-in-Chief
e-mail: pfranzen@gamecola.net
II. 
Letters.
My favorite part of GameCola this month was the review of "The Adventures of Willy Beamish". I've never heard of that game before, but now I want to play it. But I can't because I don't have a Sega CD. Oh well.
- Michael
- You sure can! It's also available for the PC, though be wary; it doesn't
work on some new computers, as I discovered a few weeks ago.
It's gotta be your Dear Readers comments.... I can honestly say I sympathise with how you felt about Out Of This World.... it was depressing the amount of times you died.
Plus the fact you kept reminding us of (which is a good thing) that people are in an uproar over polygon characters having consensual sex, when just the other day, I was running around in GTA beating up nanna's and running over police officers.... it's a straaaange world we live in.....
- Matt Wright
I liked the part where you spelled Sony as
Sonly in the Untold Legends Review.
Please let me win those Spice Girls Videos, it would give me such joy. They
would go well with the awful CDs I won a couple of months ago.
(I hope I made some sort of grammatical/spelling mistake making this email
ironic.)
- Mike Kazwell
honestly, I just skim through the whole thing looking to see if my name is mentioned. But I will correct you on one thing- GM and F do not have a monopoly on the auto market as indicated in "Carbonated News" Our mutual fund lost about $40 million dollars betting that they did have a monopoly.
- Richard Franzen
- Introducing GameCola's own Matt Wright!:
Well, first of all, thanks for the feedback for my little section. It's always good to get a response, good or bad : ). With regards to what you've pointed out, I don't pay attention in the slightest to the stock markets, or watch Bloomberg or any of that crap; I just know Ford and GM (Holden in Australia) are pretty damn massive companies. That's why I used them as examples.
I wouldn't advise anyone to take any advice (regarding business, stocks, or otherwise) from GameCola, as you might end up losing a fair wad of cash :). I mean, if you took my last article seriously about the N-Gage being a threat to the Game Boy, and went out and bought a whole heap of N-Gage shares.... you'd feel a little silly right about now wouldn't ya? : )
Seriously though, more feedback!!! It's good to hear what people think about our little rants and raves : ).
- Matteous
GameCola Disclaimer: Neither GameCola nor its staff offer legal, tax, financial, or accounting advice. Please consult with your own advisors regarding your particular situation you cheapass monkeys : ).
Because everyone needs 4 Spice Girls VHS cassettes
to add to their priceless collections of decade-old video tapes.
Regarding Taboo: The Sixth Sense [in Captain Eric's Super Thumb Feature
Presentation], "after it does the reading.. well that's
it, the end, scr00 j00r question" made me ROFL for a while.
I like this zine. You guys win at life.
- Zac Patterson
Can staff win? Please? :P I liked 0wning the Competition =)
- Kevin Leacock
- They sure can, though it sure is lame to vote for YOUR OWN ARTICLE.
my favorite part of the issue is how sam evert called zack huffman a liar and is now going to get her ass kicked, huff style.
- Terrence Atkins
This is my first time coming on this
- David
ich bin vol der fan von smack down ich weis alles über smack down und ich habe es den anderen erzählt jezzt sagen die anderen immer wir kenen smack down besser darum bin ich sehr traurig.
- feyza
Artwork.
As promised last month to Digital Championship Wrestling fans:
Paul Franzen, dancing with midgets.
- Eric Regan
TestGame.Exe Fanart.
- Paul Franzen
GameCola Fanfiction.
Paul was drowsing quietly at the desk in front of his computer. The screen set off a soft glow that made his face a pale blue color, and his eyes were mere slivers between his soft eyelashes. It was far past midnight.
From beyond his door, he could vaguely hear the sounds of drunken partying in
the hallway. Clearly, Friday nights were not meant to be quiet nights at College Park. Paul sighed. All he wanted to do was finish what he was working on and get to sleep.
"Gosh darnit. Why can't people frickin' GO TO SLEEP OUT THERE. GameCola isn't going to get itself up!" he muttered to himself.
It was the night of the GameCola deadline. Paul had everything all ready, but he wasn't about to give in and go to sleep before it was up and online. He knew he'd get hell tomorrow from his faithful readers if the shiny new issue of GameCola wasn't there waiting for them when they woke up at 5:00 on Saturday morning.
Paul scrolled idly through the articles he had yet to finalize. Yup, there was Stu's review. And Eric's Super thumb thing. And all of Matt's stuff...
"Oh ****," said Paul.
"Where the **** is Gates of Life?"
Paul was dismayed! How had he not noticed earlier that this crucial bit of GameCola was missing from his good buddy Matt's submission?!
Paul threw a stapler across the room in a sudden burst of anger. It was 2:58 AM! Two minutes before his self-appointed deadline, and he was frickin' missing his favorite part of all!
There was only one thing to do.
Paul pushed his chair back and got to his feet, stretching broadly as he did so, sending the muscles across his back rippling powerfully.
Paul knew what he had to do. He was going to get his Gates of Life if he had to walk up to Matt and force it out of him.
Fortunately for him, Matt lived a mere two yards from his door. Convenient how things like that work, them being friends and living in the same apartment and all.
Paul felt a strange tingling in his stomach as he thought of those living arrangements, as usual, but he put that down to plain nerves. It wasn't easy, even for the Supreme Ruler and Ultimate Head of GameCola, to face down Matt Gardner and come away again unscathed.
But his mind was set.
Paul opened his bedroom door and stepped out into the hallway of their four-person flat. There were various beer cans and other remnants of the
others scattered around their living area. Paul and Matt stayed in their rooms mostly, coming out every once
in a while to play video games. The two Normal College Boys who co-existed with them were rarely seen, but the evidence of their residence was clear as Paul crossed the living area and headed straight for his best friend's room.
Taking a deep breath and pausing for a moment to allow the sudden inexplicable butterflies in his stomach to settle, Paul knocked on Matt's door.
There was no answer for a moment, and Paul was about ready to knock again when he heard a voice.
"Yeah? Who's there?"
It was Matt.
Paul let out a sigh of relief. He'd been afraid the other boy/man would be asleep already. And then he'd never get what he came for.
Which, as we all know, was Gates of Life. Nothing more.
"It's Paul," Paul said to the cold, hard door.
After another moment of tense waiting (Paul tried in vain to loosen his tensed muscles, and he couldn't help thinking that at least he would be looking buff and masculine [he hoped]) the door opened.
`"Hey Paul, what's up?" It was Matt. His eyes were slightly red from lack of sleep, and the familiar sounds of World of Warcraft were
emanating from the background.
"Hey man," Paul was crazy impressed with how normal his voice sounded. "I was just wondering, what ever happened to Gates of Life? It wasn't in the batch of stuff you gave me earlier today."
Matt furrowed his brow. "That's weird. I totally put it in there. Well, come on in, and I'll just get it ready again."
Paul took a step into the room. "Wouldn't it be easier for you to just send it to me? I'm online, you know." He saw Matt go over to his computer and minimize WoW as well as a few other screens that Paul couldn't quite catch.
"Naw, it'll only take a minute."
It was then that Paul noticed somethign very strange.
Matt was behaving very... oddly.
He wasn't joking, or laughing, or making remarks about how Paul was only getting to all this now when he's always the one harping at Matt to get things in way ahead of time.
Paul was slightly worried by this, and at first just put it down to the fact that it was now 3:01 AM (by his watch) and Matt was clearly absorbed in whatever was going on in WoW right now.
But when Matt turned back to Paul to say, "Do you want this in Word, or what?" Paul realized with a sudden shock that what he had taken to be exhaustion in Matt's red-rimmed eyes, was in fact... tears.
Paul nearly fell over in disbelief.
His mind was immediately full of conflicting ideas for what to do next! He wanted to leave the room and give him some privacy, to ask what was wrong, to cross the room and hug him, to do other things to take Matt's mind off of whatever was making him upset—Paul hurriedly buried this last thought. It would get him nowhere, he knew, for he'd traveled that road many times before, and he feared that soon he'd be the one with tears in his eyes.
"Hey. Paul."
Paul shook his head a little, and blushed.
"Haha, sorry man," he said. "Yeah, Word would be great."
Matt turned back to his computer screen, and with a few clicks of his mouse, had
The Gates of Life file up and ready. He transferred it with the ease of many years of practice onto a floppy disk. (Mmm, Paul thought, old methods of file transfer sure do make my blood boil.)
The boy/man got up from his chair again and turned to Paul, handing him the disk with the promised feature on it.
For a brief moment, their fingers made contact, and Paul's breath caught in his throat.
But then it was over, and Matt was turning back to his computer, and saying, "Well, good luck, man. Tell me if you need anything else."
Paul turned to leave, feeling slightly disheartened, until his eyes happened to fall on his friend's computer screen.
As Matt was shuffling things around, opening and closing windows, Paul saw the briefest flash of a title containing his name. And then another one.
And a picture of him—of Paul, standing next to Matt in a place he didn't recognize. Both of them were smiling broadly, and Paul thought he saw their hands clasped together tightly.
But then it was all over.
Paul left the room, walked back across the hall, and entered his abode.
He flopped onto his bed, all thoughts of GameCola and Gates of Life chased away for a moment.
He lay there for a few minutes, staring up blankly, a smile flitting across his face.
And a question in his mind.
He whispered it to the darkness, with hope in his husky voice:
"Could it be?"
- The Lizo
Epilogue: Two days after the writing of this fanfic, Matt was late with The Gates of Life. I think you can tell what happened from there.
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This is your place to shine, readers! Send us just about anything, and chances are we'll paste it in here. Letters, artwork, poetry, photographs, comic strips, fanfiction—anything you can think of, you send it to us, and we'll put it in an upcoming issue. Sound good? e-mail - submissions@gamecola.net |
III. 
For those wondering how our ratings system works, it'd be a good idea to read this before moving ahead to our reviews.
Our crack review squad* has chosen the five attributes that we feel determine the overall quality of a video game, which are:
Fun - the overall enjoyment experienced while playing a video game,
Audio - the music and sound effects of a video game,
Controls - the physical means by which a video game is played,
Visuals - the graphical aesthetics of a video game, and
Replay Value - a video game's worth in playing after completion.
Other attributes such as gameplay, story, difficulty, and concept are not individually rated, as they can all be worked into one or more of the above categories.
Each attribute is rated with a numerical value ranging from 0 to 10, with 0 being the absolute rock-bottom, epitome of all awfulness, five being average (which is important to remember; many gaming publications use a 5/10 to mean "bad", but here it means "neither good nor bad"), and 10 being perfect (which should, theoretically, never be used; there is no absolute perfect in this industry). The individual scores are then averaged together, which results in an overall rating of a video game's quality.
The attributes themselves are rated in comparison with those of video games from the same genre and console as the one being reviewed. For example, the audio rating of Uncle Worm for the TI-83 Plus Graphing Calculator would be 5 instead of the presumed 0 for having no sound, because it is average of games for that console to have no sound. In the same light, an RPG that a gamer would want to complete only once would have a Replay Value of 5, while that of an RPG with incentive for multiple plays (such as alternate endings) would rate higher. One final example, to make sure we're all on the same page: The attributes of Dragon Warrior, an NES RPG, would be rated in comparison with those of (among others) Final Fantasy, an NES RPG, but not with Metroid, an NES action title, or Kingdom Hearts, a PS2 RPG.
Got it? Now you can go ahead and see what we have to say this month.
*Paul Franzen was the only member of the crack review squad involved in creating the GameCola ratings system.
Click here to peruse an archive of the games we've reviewed and the scores we've given them.
(Please note: GameCola welcomes
its readers to send in their reviews of any games we've yet to cover.
Please keep in mind, however, that we do not currently review PC titles, and as
such, we will be unable to publish any PC game reviews that you send us.
Thanks!)
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Genre:
The war between the states. Brother against
Brother. The battle to end
slavery. If ever there was a formative conflict in U.S. history, it's the Civil War. Heck, down here in Georgia, I have neighbors who
still insist that the South won the war, or at least should have.
Oddly, not everyone is familiar with the Civil War, or as my racist
neighbor calls it, the War of Northern Aggression. Luckily, Nintendo is here to teach us all about the Civil War in a terribly non-innovative,
short game called North and South.
In North & South, not only are you given the option of playing
as the Union or the Confederacy, you are also able
choose which year of the war in which you start, as well as choosing options like bad
weather, help from the UK, and whether or not you have to worry about Native Americans, (you know, those people that your history course would cover
more extensively if they had white skin.)
The only difference between each year in which you choose to
begin is the amount of captured territory and the number of armies that each side
has. Since there's only a total of 25 territories, and you start with between
two and four armies, it makes for a very short game. Anyone who plays North
& South and takes more than six turns to win, or worse yet
anyone who actually loses, is most likely not a human, but an evil, yet devastatingly brain-damaged orangutan, who should probably stay away
from my Nintendo Entertainment System.
The extent of gameplay comes down three modes of play. One is the
large map where you move your armies, and choose whether or not to attack an army form the other side.
Then there's the battle scene, where you have to switch between cannons, horse-back, and armed soldiers on foot
when attacking your rivals. This mode is pretty easy to get the hang of, and becomes boring after only a few tries. The
third and final mode of gameplay is a side-scroller that you enter whenever you either invade or defend a fort
or money train. Basically, if you're invading you must get to the end of the level before time runs out. If you're defending, you have to keep
your opponent form getting to the end before the time runs out. This mode is the closing thing to difficult that North & South has to offer, so it makes sense that neither invading nor defending is
necessary for winning the game.
Infogrames wasted very little time trying to implement much sound for
the game. All you get is a variety of a beeps to simulate such actions of firing a gun and dieing, as well as short midi renditions of
"Yankee Doodle" and the "Dixie" song, whose actual name I can't be bothered to look up.
Even if you happen to be high, drunk or a combination of the two,
North & South really isn't a game that will hold your interest for longer than a commercial break, which
incidentally, is about how long it took me to write this review.
Now I'm sure some of you are thinking, well at least the two of you who
are actually reading this, that I didn't put much effort into this review. And the fact of the matter is, I didn't. But that's because I
wanted to reflect the amount of effort that was put into making North & South.
Nintendo:
North & South |
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Fun |
Audio |
Controls |
Visuals |
Replay
Value |
Overall:
2.4
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| 1 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 1 | |
Platform: Sega Genesis
Genre:
Strategy
# of Players: 1
ESRB Rating: N/A
US Release:
May 1994
Developer: Synergistic Studios
Publisher: Mindscape
Well, there's one thing that can be said about Super Battleship: it encourages kids to get away from their video game consoles. That's not because Super Battleship is a particularly bad game, though; it's because, much like Checkers for the Intellivision, this game somehow doesn't offer a two-player mode. If you wanna start up a rousing game of Battleship with your best buddy, you're better off buying a copy of the actual board game. The only reason you'd play this over the original is if you didn't have anyone else to play with.
If you're talking about the classic, non-Super version, that is. There's another version too, one that is actually considered the real version of Super Battleship. Naturally, this version is a turn-based strategy game.
Because nothing says Battleship like a turn-based strategy game.
In this mode, you
and the computer take turns sailing around a large body of water trying to get
the upper hand and
ultimately decimate one another. On your turns you can either
move forward a few spaces, or, if you're close enough, you can attack. When you
attack you teleport from your overworld screen to a first-person view from
within your ship, and you fire your cannons and your rockets and your torpedoes
and whathaveyou at your opponent until either one of you is sunk or one of you
quits.
You can also choose to skip your turn, but when you choose to skip your turn you don't actually skip your turn, as you might (for some reason) assume. You actually move one space in whatever direction you're facing. This was probably done to add realism. After all, in a real naval battle you can't just tell your ship to ignore the waves and sit in this particular spot for a few turns. Just like how in a real naval battle, every ship sits quietly and waits its turn to move or attack.
Also if you want, while playing you can check the map as a whole and see that there aren't any enemies besides the ones right next to you, you can get information on your fleet like who's captaining each ship and how much damage each ship has taken, and you can also click the options button. The options button, as inexplicably as many things in this game, takes you to the game's main menu.
There are various merchants sailing around while you're doing battle with your enemy. I haven't yet figured out why. I think they might just be there to distract you, because I haven't found that killing them adds or detracts points from your total score. (This might be because there is no total score, per se.)
If you take too long on your turn, your turn just ends with no warning. There's no timer, or anything to indicate that you must make your decision within a set time limit. You just forfeit your turn without even knowing it. There's also no easily-accessible pause button—you have to traverse multiple menus in order to locate it. The start button, of course, serves only to cancel whatever action you're trying to perform. All of this adds up to a game that is not good for playing while you're firing off instant messages to your beloved.
The actual action
of the game—the fierce struggle between ship and ship to see who can get the
other blown up the quickest-—is surprisingly frantic. You may even find
yourself, dare I say, getting into it! However, you'll probably get right out of
it whenever you try to switch weapons, and see that by the time the game
registers that you were trying to switch weapons and actually allows you to
switch weapons, your opponent has already sunk your ship and in fact won the
battle, and is now lounging on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean sipping a cool
drink and being fanned by several scantily-clad ladies.
There are four different missions in this Super Battleship mode, most of which can be easily beaten within five minutes on your first try. The other one can take upwards of seven minutes. Or, if you're me and not terribly "good" at video games, you won't ever beat it because you can't figure out why one big ship can absolutely destroy four tiny ships, even after each of the tiny ships has fired five torpedoes right at the big ship. If you figure it out, drop me a line.
Once you've completed all four missions (psh, yeah right!), you can go back and play the classic mode a few more times. There are four different difficulties to choose from, though as they each have names like "lieutenant" and "admiral" instead of "very easy" and "way the heck too hard," I couldn't tell you what any of them actually mean. Other than that, classic mode is all you'd expect, save for one thing-—you fire three shots on each turn instead of one. A minor point, I know, but a minor point worth noting.
The graphics of Super Battleship are slightly more than what you'd expect from a game called "Super Battleship." They're a lot less than you'd expect from a typical Sega Genesis game, though. The sea, for example, is represented by a solid expanse of blue, as though someone just clicked the paint bucket option on Photoshop and called it a day. The ships actually look like the plastic figurines from the board game though, so that's pretty cool. It would've been a nice touch to add little red pegs to each ship after taking damage, but we've already established that this game was aiming for a good amount of realism.
Audio-wise, the game seems silent. Which is weird, because there actually are a few background tunes. What music does exist is appropriately nautical, but there's definitely something missing from the soundtrack.
After all of this, you might think there's nary a reason to play this game again after you've already beaten it. In fact, you are wrong. There's nary a reason to play this game in the first place. But if you are the sort of person to really get into this game and not care that the pause button is hidden and the need to change weapons means certain death, you'll be delighted to know that the game does have some form of replay value: the enemies change their strategies.. They don't do the same thing every time you play, even if you're doing the same thing. I've only witnessed this once, but that means it exists in some form at least.
Super Battleship
just isn't particularly good. But it is what it is. You don't buy a game called
"Super Battleship" and expect greatness. If you bought Super
Battleship and you expected more than you got, it's YOU who has the problem,
man, not Super Battleship. Clearly, the game was just destined to be mediocre.
Sega
Genesis:
Super Battleship |
|||||
Fun |
Audio |
Controls |
Visuals |
Replay
Value |
Overall:
2.4
|
| 2.5 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 3.5 | |
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Genre:
Role-Playing
# of Players: 1
ESRB Rating: N/A
US Release:
October 1994
Developer: Interplay
Publisher: Interplay
There aren't very many good video games based on The Lord of the Rings series, or even The Hobbit, for that matter. In fact, most of them suck pretty savagely. That being said, this game is not one of the two decent ones.
The best part of this game is probably the music which, unlike the rest of the game, is actually quite entertaining. And no, it's not the same music that's in the Lord of the Rings movies.
The game looks more like an NES game than a super NES one, but at least its pretty easy to control your ugly looking self.
Okay, down to the important stuff. This game should not be played by anyone who isn't a big fan of the Lord of the Rings. The only way you can conceivably get enjoyment out of this game is to be such a person. This game does not have much of anything going for it to make it any bit entertaining other than the fact that it sort of follows the storyline of the books. Even if you are a fan, it still is not very fun to play. You can poke at things and die and try to figure out where to go without people telling you but that's about it. As a result, there is no replay value to be had here. I did not even want to play through this game one time, let alone replay it.
This game is simply a poor
attempt to get people to buy a game by sticking the Lord of the Rings name on
it, and there are not very many redeeming features. The only reason to ever get
this game is if you are a collector who must have all Lord of the Rings things,
and even then it's a stupid idea. Thumbs down!
Super
Nintendo:
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings - Volume
1 |
|||||
Fun |
Audio |
Controls |
Visuals |
Replay
Value |
Overall:
3.6
|
| 2 | 7 | 6.5 | 2.5 | 0 | |
Platform: Nintendo 64
Genre:
In the Beginning, there was
Doom. And it was good. Since then, the SNES, PlayStation, 32X, Jaguar, Saturn, GBA, and even the 3D0 have all had Doom ported to them. Any Doom connoisseur can probably appreciate any of these ports on some level, but none could deny the plain fact that they are not, nor do they strive to be, anything but straight ports of the original games. Sure, “Doom Custom Playstation Edition” brought us a few new levels, some ambient background audio and colored lighting (which wasn’t so exciting by that time), and the 32X version gave us a glimpse of what Doom might have been were it designed by incompetent, low-IQ monkeys (or maybe not, but I had to take that cheap shot), but it was still more of the same.
Enter Doom 64, the Doom that was finally something new. Maybe this was partly a result of circumstance, (since the Nintendo 64 hardware wouldn’t have done such a great job of making Doom look like Doom in the first place), but in any case the result was something that any Doomer could appreciate. We now have 32 completely new and exclusive levels to blast through and revamped graphics to memorize frame by frame.
Complaining about Doom’s (and by extension Doom 64’s) simplicity is moot. Whiners who try to compare it to
GoldenEye and the like are wasting their breath. Someone who 
knows what to appreciate in Doom has nothing to complain about in Doom 64, as the gameplay (thankfully) has not only been kept intact, but enhanced in almost all the right places.
Doom has a story, but it’s not the game’s strong point. You’d do just as well to make your own up. Doom 64 continues along a similar plotline to the previous sequels. “You thought you killed all the demons, but you didn’t, so go do it again.” Doom isn’t about a gripping story or intricate puzzles or memorable personalities; it’s about action. It’s the kind of game that we won’t be able to play when we get old and dulled. Remember Space Invaders? Who was the main character? What was the most shocking plot twist? Which point in the game would you define as the most puzzling?
In Doom, you fight, and then you fight more. You fight a wide variety of monsters, each with his own strengths and vulnerabilities. You also have a vast range of weapons at your disposal, each fitting a certain situation (in my opinion, Doom’s weapon balance has yet to be matched). Learning how to exploit the monsters’ weaknesses and the weapons’ diversity to build on-the-spot tactics for taking out a room of enemies is what the gameplay of Doom is made of. There are color-coded keys and doors, elevators, stairs, timing puzzles, exploding barrels and many other similar additions to make things interesting, but the high-point of doom has always been killing and getting out alive. We Doom enthusiasts have a lust for high levels of difficulty and know (one wishes for a more forceful verb, such as “to have scratched into one’s mind”) more than anything the single rule of Doom action: “keep moving and keep shooting.” Charming levels like “Even Simpler” prove that Doom 64 keeps the tradition alive, and that the main focus of Doom is still combat.
Getting back to my original point, let’s examine the most obvious instance of newness in Doom 64—its look. The greatest graphical feature built into the N64 is its anti-aliasing. For the uninitiated, anti-aliasing is a process by which pixels are added in-between a game’s normally rendered pixels. The new pixels are a color “blended” of the two bordering pixels. The result is the appearance of a higher resolution, and many would say that it “blurs” or “smears” textures in this process. A good example of the result is (in a game with few textures in this case) Mario’s red cap against a blue sky in Mario 64. The normally jagged lines will now appear smoother. Midway has done a wonderful job with Doom 64 of utilizing this graphical feature (much better than with Doom 64’s sister game, Hexen 64). The end result is something that (in some instances) almost looks like the “Killer Instinct Arcade Board in a Box” graphics that Nintendo originally tried to hype the “Ultra 64”'s as being. But make no mistake; while these graphics do make good use of the hardware’s strengths, they aren’t “N64-ish”. Doom 64 is dark and moody, and full of textures that actually look good anti-aliased because they were designed to be that way.
The sprites are a similar feat, having that 3D-rendered look while actually being 2D (think Mario Kart 64 or Killer Instinct Gold). They also do a good job of working with the anti-aliasing, rather than getting “smeared” by it. The enemies and objects have all been redone. From the tiny ammo clip to the fearsome Cyberdemon, every single sprite in this entire game has been re-rendered in glorious CGI fashion. The looks themselves have been significantly altered as well, so that each enemy has just enough resemblance to the original to give away who it is, but not so much as to make it a rehash.
What all this amounts to is a darker and creepier Doom. The color is schematically a dark blue through most of the game, and the skies and walls as well stay in the range of brown to purple most of the time. Candles and torches light the way through most of the dark areas, and if you pay attention you can see a nice, OpenGL style “glow” of light on the
walls (giving them a smooth, marble effect) based on which angle you are viewing them from, ala Quake 64.
As much as I like the soundtracks to the original Doom games, I don’t think that music of that type really capitalizes on the potentially scary atmosphere of the Doom franchise. With Doom 64, Midway wisely chose to lift the ambient soundtrack straight out of
PlayStation Doom, right down to the individual tracks. Luckily, the ambience translates perfectly into the N64’s MIDI-style audio architecture. Comprised mainly of moans, screams, clicks, gears, usually tempo-less and bass instruments and even screaming children, Doom 64’s “music” isn’t exactly melodic. Fortunately, it fits right in with the claustrophobic hallways and fire-and-brimstone inspired locales of Doom. I recommend playing this game in a dark room with the sound up for the maximum atmospheric effect.
The sounds themselves were taken directly from the Playstation version as well. As original as the graphics are, so are the sounds identical. And the
PlayStation’s sounds were very similar to the original Doom sounds to begin with, so there’s not much new here. I suppose there was no reason to mess with a good thing, especially with so much monster rendering to do. Pump-action shotguns, hissing denizens of hell, and sliding space-station doors are all right on the money. I’ve never been to hell, but I would bet money that if any popular media comes close to sounding like it, Doom does.
Nothing has been altered for Doom 64’s controls. You have nine buttons, a directional pad and a control stick to move in four directions, strafe left or right, fire your weapon, activate doors and switches, access an overhead map of the level, and switch between weapons. The controls are fully customizable (hurrah!), so the choices are as great as your imagination. Taking the time to get used to the N64 control stick is worth the precision you gain by mastering it. All the buttons respond perfectly with no lag, and every move you’ve learned in any other port of Doom will work here with just a few minutes practice. (Allow me a quick note on the control stick. You will probably have trouble running exactly as fast with the control stick fully pressed as you can with the d-pad. An easy remedy to this minor setback is to push very slightly downward on your control stick (just enough so the character doesn’t move), and to reset the stick’s neutral position by holding R+L and pressing start. Your speed will increase just the right amount, but you won’t crawl forward automatically when you release the stick.)
All in all, Doom’s controls are solid and get the job done while taking full advantage of the controller’s strong points.
So at the end of the day, is Doom 64 really Doom, or is it just a knock-off that tries but doesn’t live up to its predecessor? Well, Doom 64 is definitely true to its heritage, and in spite of the temptations to change Doom’s core to appease a more modern FPS audience, Midway has shown it’s faith in the original Doom by keeping everything important intact while buffing up a few spots worth buffing and adding a few new treats worth adding. So what exactly is different here?
Following are some of the more glaring differences.
The engine for Doom 64 is highly advanced compared to that
of the original Doom. It is more or less the Quake 64 engine, though I think the Doom 64 color palette is much more flattering to it here. First, this engine has fully implemented 3D. Whereas in traditional Doom one object or sector couldn’t occupy the same X and Y space as another at a different height, in Doom 64 objects, enemies, and bridges can all pass over and under each other. Either because of limitations to this or to remain true to Doom style, Midway opted to reserve this feature
rather than exploit it, but it is fully functional and adds to the gameplay in several instances, and especially in letting you jump over enemies’ heads for a quick escape. Additionally, the lighting system has been dramatically improved upon. Now we can have colored light, simulated “shining” of light on walls and even pits with pitch-black bottoms and fully lit ceilings (a particular achievement to those of you familiar with the original Doom’s lighting). The pulsing and flashing lights are all more dynamic and realistic than ever, and the sprites all flicker along in real time. The water can now have double textures to give it more depth. The skies now have two levels as well. There is a “static” part of the sky for things such as mountain ranges, and another level for clouds that scroll. As if that weren’t enough, the dark, purple sky in some levels flickers in sync with crashes of thunder.
The new levels themselves are gold. I have played hundreds of Doom levels, and I praise Doom 64’s as some of the best I’ve ever seen. Thematically consistent, livable yet challenging, and technically flawless, they stand up even to id’s own masterpieces.
Also worthy of note is an elaborate scripting system that is very similar to that of Hexen. Now the designers are free to lead the player around in more interesting ways. For example, killing an enemy can now trigger anything, from the appearance of a sought-after key to… another enemy! Items can appear and disappear in set patterns, or move out of reach just when you thought you had them. The player can access a monitor and see into another room via a “security camera”. Darts fly from a wall as you approach it. Lost Souls have now become twice as fast, and twice as hard to deal with. The entire screen shakes when you fire the chaingun. (This is probably what the designers of force-feedback were trying to articulate, but this more simple approach works even better in my opinion.) You can even find kooky messages from the designers if you look. The list goes on and on...
In spite of all this, there are a few beloved enemies missing, but a new weapon and a new final boss make up for the loss. All things said, it’s Doom enough to be called Doom, and different enough to be called new. The balance between new and old is just right.
I don’t personally think Doom will ever get boring as long as there are new levels to play. The gameplay balance is just too brilliant. Doom 64 meets every standard that goes along with a name as prestigious as Doom, and it deserves its place among the originals of this classic franchise. On the other hand, while at no point is it questionable whether this is really Doom or not, Doom 64 packs enough originality that Midway can be proud of their “non-port” as a game apart from it’s cousins, a stand-alone masterpiece of pure action gaming, and one of the best third-party reasons to own a Nintendo 64.
Nintendo
64:
Doom 64 |
|||||
Fun |
Audio |
Controls |
Visuals |
Replay
Value |
Overall:
9.2
|
| 10 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | |
Platform: Nintendo GameCube
Genre:
Simulation
# of Players: 1-4
ESRB Rating: E for Everyone
US Release:
September 2002
Developer: Nintendo EAD
Publisher: Nintendo
It’s hard to be bored in Animal Crossing. This game relies on its many gameplay options to keep gamers interested, and it works pretty well. From the moment you move into the town, you’re presented with a myriad of tasks that you can accomplish. There are very few things that you are required to do—mostly the game is about picking and choosing the tasks and activities that appeal to you.
There are certainly many activities to choose from. You could spend your days and nights fishing for the elusive Coelacanth, or you can chase insects with your net and try to catch them all (there are a lot). You can dig around town looking for fossils, from ammonites to t-rex bones. And what to do with all this stuff? You can keep it in your house, which will soon be very full, or you can sell it for cold, hard cash, which you can then use to upgrade your house even further.
Look for new clothes. Design umbrellas and wallpaper. Chat with your neighbors. Plant and chop down trees to achieve the perfect balance. Run errands for your neighbors. Really, this game presents you with so many things to do, you will invariably feel somewhat overwhelmed. Of course, some of it will feel old after a while. I definitely got sick of running around town looking for someone’s glasses or game or whatever. But there’s so much cool stuff to collect, including a virtual NES and a collection of old games to play, that you’ll likely find yourself spending a lot of time running errands in the hopes that something cool comes up.
One of the most interesting features of this game is the random events that take place. Some nights you might find a sailor washed up on shore. There’s a bunch of festivals to attend, and they are linked to the internal calendar and clock of the
GameCube. The game takes place in real time, with day and night cycles to mix things up, and seasons that bring different insects and fish. Many holidays that we observe in the real world are translated into the game. All in all, the seasonal cycle is a nice feature to mix up the activities and scenery.
If you happen to have other people in your family who play the game, you can avail yourself of another important feature of the game. Up to four people can share a town on one memory card, and while they can’t play at the same time, you can leave messages and items for people while you play. In addition, you can “travel” to towns on other memory cards, which is handy for acquiring fruit that doesn’t grow in your town, or just to look for items that haven’t appeared on your memory card. In addition, if you visit, the animals in that town will start talking about you and referring to you in conversations with whoever plays. It’s a neat feature, and makes the town feel that much more “alive”. There’s also a password system that allows you to trade with anyone, anywhere. Very cool.
The graphics are very basic. Animal Crossing was originally intended for the N64, and the graphics were not updated much for the transition to
GameCube. Textures are simple and the characters are very geometric. Still, the style works, and the colors are vibrant, which helps the overall appeal. The sound fares better. The chirps of insects and other ambient noises are quite well done, and the music is reasonably varied. Some of the instruments sound kind of off, though—they could definitely have put a bit more effort into some of them.
Overall, the game’s main draw is its addictiveness and varied activities. This is a game that you will likely spend a lot of time with. Animal Crossing is a sure bet for anyone who enjoys simulation games or just wasting a lot of time.
Nintendo
GameCube:
Animal Crossing |
|||||
Fun |
Audio |
Controls |
Visuals |
Replay
Value |
Overall:
7.4
|
| 9 | 6.5 | 7.5 | 4.5 | 9.5 | |
Platform: Microsoft Xbox
Genre:
All right, let’s get this out of the way: Halo is, for some reason or another, one of the most controversial video games ever made. It boils down to the fact that
at its core, it's a first-person shooter. The only reason people love it/hate it is because they’re either in love with the Xbox, or they own
Macintoshes and PS2s and want everybody involved with it to burn in hell. I love the shit out of it, and if you’re a Microsoft-hating Sony, Nintendo or PC fanboy, consider this: Grow up. Just because your precious Bungie left Mac development behind to switch to PC and then to Xbox,
that doesn’t make them the devil. It makes them not poor.
I’ll tell you, there’s one defining reason that I know this game is
spectacular. My friend Braden used to hate first-person shooters. HATED them. I tried everything on the planet to get him to like or even consider them, but nope. No dice. So, cut to 2001. His step-father buys an Xbox and Halo and
Braden goes over
to their house to play it. I call him on his cell sometime later. The transcript goes as follows:
(Phone Rings): “Halo?”
Travis: “Hey man, I—did you just say Hello or Halo?”
Braden: “I said ‘Halo’ because I’m playing Halo.”
Travis: “You’re a liar. You’re not playing Halo.”
Braden: “Yes I am. Steve bought an Xbox and now I’m playing Halo. As a matter of fact, I’m on my second run through right now.”
Travis: “But…but you didn’t even seem excited about the Xbox! I’m the one who was excited! It’s the Dreamcast all over again!”
Braden: “Yeah. I remember that. I called you just so you could hear me playing Sonic Adventure over the phone. Remember that? Remember how you started sobbing? Because I had Sonic? Huh? Remember that? Do you? About how I didn’t even want a Dreamcast and I did it just to piss you off?”
Halo... ahhh, Halo. Where to begin? I love this game to death. I ditched work and went over there and we sat in the back room
playing Halo, stopping only (and I mean ONLY) to smoke. We didn't break to eat, to leave,
or to piss on each other if we caught fire.
Now, Halo's gotten some slack from crybaby bitches in the past. I'm obviously not a system hater as I own a GameCube and an Xbox, but Jesus H. Christ just SHUT THE FUCK UP IF YOU DON'T LIKE A GAME! Guess what? I hate Splinter Cell, but it's won awards all over the place and a lot of people seem to like it. Goody for them. You don't see me in forums going, "Dude! Halo rules and Hitman 2 sucks because I'm terrible at it!" That's basically the gist of their rants. I firmly believe a number of these jackasses haven't ever played the game, because really, if you hate Halo that much are you going to go buy an Xbox? Didn't think so.
Anyway, for a launch game Halo is absolutely amazing. The graphics
are killer, the game is quick, with great multiplayer, and most importantly it's
fucking fun as hell to play. I love FPS games anyway, and this one just blows the lid off of everything before or after it. What was it about Halo? I mean, we’d all seen FPS before, but there was something about it that just rang ‘sweet’. For once, we could look some PC gamers in the face and say, “You know, mouse/keyboard combinations are pretty cool, but consider this: the PC gaming scene still sucks balls.” Unless you love Railroad Tycoon Ticket Taker 16, Warcraft 7 or Civilization 54, you’re just not going to have enough options. PC Gamers can be good people. I know; I’ve met some. But there’s also smug, arrogant shitfucks that think the only good game is one that requires a dozen patches just to play the damn thing in the first place. I admit I felt a little evil happiness when their beloved Marathon developers were bought up by “the man” and thus apparently ruined forever.
Yet I digress. I’m certainly not here to pick on PC gamers. It’s just that, for once, everything that seemed to be going wrong with a game (see: Apocalypse or Daikatana) ending up working nearly perfectly in the end. Everything clicked. From a strategy game through however many more builds came along, Halo did two things perfectly: 1)
It saved Microsoft’s motherfucking ass with the Xbox by delivering a killer app and 2)
It really, truly brought first-person shooting to the mainstream (yeah, yeah all you
GoldenEye freaks can put your hands down now, we know that one was one of the firsts).
With Halo, we have to look at the bigger picture. It gave us intelligent soldiers to fight along-side. It gave us enemies that learned, communicated, reacted. It gave us this beautiful world to play inside or out in, vehicles, little touches like a dead body twitching and firing off one last shot into the ground in their death throes. It gave us co-op play (four times through and counting!), but most of all it convinced my first-person shooter hating friend that first-person shooters don’t, in fact, have to suck. Just wait until I get to Halo 2. It’s even better. This, along with Eternal Darkness, comes as close to a perfect score as I’ve ever given. It’s just that good. Oh, and good goddamn luck on the legendary setting.
Xbox:
Halo - Combat Evolved |
|||||
Fun |
Audio |
Controls |
Visuals |
Replay
Value |
Overall:
9.7
|
| 10 | 9.5 | 10 | 9 | 10 | |
Platform: Microsoft Xbox
Genre:
It’s only recently that I’ve been exposed to games that contain bad language. Actually, come to think of it, the first game with swearing I played was the recently banned (in Australia, at least) GTA: San Andreas, so you can imagine how surprised I was with the amount of profanities in that! Then I thought, well, if they can swear in movies, music etc., why should video games be any different?
It all comes back to the myth that only impressionable young children play
video games. I mean, what’s to stop little
Johnny going out and buying something with foul language, or
with graphic violence? If kids really want this sort of stuff, they’ll get their brother or someone else to buy it for them should they encounter difficulties. And I mean, I’ve read stuff
that pales in comparison to the violence, sex and swearing in video games (I’m looking at YOU, Irvine
Welsh. Love your stuff by the way!), and reading encourages imagination. It’s up to the parent to supervise and lay down the rules on what their children can and can’t play/read/watch, not some do-goody organization run by a bunch of lemons who wouldn’t know fun if it smacked them on the ass with a
welder's torch.
What has all this got to do with my review, I hear you cry? Well, correct me if I’m wrong (which I probably am), but swearing in video games has been around for quite a while now. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty damn sure it was Rare, in conjunction with Nintendo, who created the first foul-mouthed video game character. Nintendo? Not only condoning, but releasing a game with curse words? Had the world gone mad?!
Quite simply, no. Conker’s Bad Fur Day was released for the Nintendo 64 back in 2001, not long before the 64 was due to be superseded by the oh-so-sexy GameCube. It was a massive success with the main draw being its charismatic, drunken, violent, foul-mouthed, piss-funny main character, Conker. It pushed the 64 to its limits pretty much with the huge amount of speech, beautiful (back then) textures, and enormous areas to explore.
Nowadays, Rare isn’t working with Nintendo for one reason or another, which is why we’re seeing Perfect Dark advertised for the Xbox 360. This came as quite a large chunk of bad news, as Rare were responsible for some of the greatest games I for one have ever played. Though there seems something good has come of it. Conker has been given a makeover.
Now, let’s just get one thing clear straight away: Live and Reloaded is definitely NOT a straightforward port of the original N64 game. They didn’t just pretty up the graphics and release it. Sure, there are a lot of elements retained in this version (characters, missions etc) but there’s sooooo much more added to
it! They even take the piss out of this fact in the opening couple of minutes, where Conker has to dispose of a gargoyle blocking his path. You try to smash him in the head with a heavy object, which worked in the original
version. When it doesn’t work in the Xbox version, Conker looks at you and says something along the lines of “The designers reassured me there wouldn’t be anything different about this game, what a crock of sh*t…”
This game, like the N64 version, is completely massive. There are sooo many different missions with sooo many side-quests and mini-missions to complete. Whether you’re blasting the heads off zombie squirrels, trying to ram a cow with the squits (that’s diarrhea to those who don’t know), or running around a warzone trying to stay alive, it’s pretty unlikely that the average gamer is going to find absolutely every secret contained within. And the (very) good thing about each level is, you never seem to get bored. Every challenge presented is fresh and entertaining. Something that’s missing in a lot of games today.
The visuals in this game are very, very, very pretty. Everything is clearly defined, and there are some amazing effects used throughout. Everything from shockwaves being sent through the playing area to disgustingly beautiful reflections off a big ball of poo you’ve got to roll around. (Yes, poo.) Rare clearly put a hell of a lot of effort into utilizing the power the Xbox presents them, and it came off. I’m pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that this game has received a reward for technical excellence (don’t quote me though) and I think it’s got a lot more awards coming myself.
The sound is also an achievement, with a huge amount of speech, beautiful music that doesn’t grind on the ears after hearing it the fiftieth time, and some horribly accurate sound effects. For example, the aforementioned ball of poo. Now I don’t know what it sounds like to roll an enormous ball of fecal matter uphill, but it sounded pretty much like I expected.
When it comes to controlling the disgusting little bastard, most of the time, it’s a breeze. There’s a few occasions where the camera doesn’t position itself conveniently (but that’s very rarely, and it happens in most games anyway!!). Other than that little niggle, the controls are easy to use, and explained quite thoroughly in the opening “training level.”
Once you’ve played it through, you’ll most probably want to play it again, as completing it once unlocks the swearing, meaning instead of bleeping out the swears, and using *!$#@& characters in the speech bubbles, you get to hear and see the whole thing in its foul-mouthed full! I’m pretty damn sure you’d play it again anyway, just for the fun it provides. There’s also a multiplayer section which, as far as I’ve seen, consists of death match style competition, but, alas, my second controller is wrecked so I haven’t been able to explore it properly.
Basically, if you love mindless violence, profane language, and toilet humor, mixed in with gorgeous graphics, beautiful aural (no, not oral), and an insane amount of fun things to do, you could do a lot worse than to play with this little squirrel.
Xbox:
Conker - Live & Reloaded |
|||||
Fun |
Audio |
Controls |
Visuals |
Replay
Value |
Overall:
9.02
|
| 9.5 | 9.1 | 8.8 | 9.4 | 8.3 | |
With Denny Delk, voice actor
August 16th, 2005
Got milk?
Seriously, I know it's not strictly video game related, but Denny Delk is the "Got Milk?" guy. The guy who, at the end of all those legendary commercials, questioned our dairy habits.
And that's not all you'd know him from! Denny Delk portrayed Murray the Talking Skull in the Monkey Island series, King Otar Fenris III in King's Quest VII, Hoagie and all the various tentacles in Day of the Tentacle, the narrator in Rogue Squadron 2 and 3, Wicket in the Ewoks animated series, and loads upon loads of other characters you can read about at IMDB.
A few weeks ago, Denny was kind enough to let me bug him about adventure games, LucasArts, the voice actors' strike I could've sworn existed, and much more. Check out what he had to say, homedawgs!:
GameCola: How did you get started in voice acting? Had you always wanted to be a voice actor?
Denny Delk: I was working in radio, which led to work as a voice over person in commercials, then branching out. I was contacted to do LucasArts' first talking game, and have been doing it since then. I had always wanted to be an attorney.
GC: How do you find out about voice acting jobs? Do the game companies come to you, or do you come to the companies?
DD: The companies let it be known that they are looking for performers, and I’m given the chance to audition.
GC: How do you prepare for a voice acting role? How, exactly, do get in the mindset of a talking skull, or a time-traveling rocker, or a tentacle bent on world domination? Where do you find your inspiration? How do you possibly have so many different voices in you?
DD: Most of my voices come from listening to people around me. I’ve always been something of a mimic. And getting into the mindset of a character is fun, in that even a tentacle bent on world domination thinks that the domination is a good thing, at least for him, so you gotta go with that.
GC: You’ve said that Murray the Talking Skull wasn’t intended to be as comical a character as you portrayed him. What was the original Murray like?
DD: The producers weren’t sure what Murray was. We were casting around for a voice and attitude, and I asked what kind of power he had, and they said that he had none. How frustrating for Murray. So I just made him loud and frustrated. We’ve all known people like that.
GC: Since they were both well-known for their adventure titles, and since you've worked on adventure titles for both companies, compare working with Sierra to working with LucasArts.
DD: I haven’t worked for Sierra for quite a while. Don’t know what they’re like these days. But Lucas has always been kind of like a family. You get to know the people (engineers, programmers, beta testers) and I’ve always looked forward to dropping in to work with them. I hope it will happen more often, now that they’ve moved to the Presidio in San Francisco. Electronic Arts is similar in its collegial atmosphere.
GC: You’ve performed in a number of Star Wars video games. Do you have an affinity for the series, or are those just the jobs that keep getting offered to you?
DD: I really enjoyed the movies, and the games, especially the games where you pilot the ships, require a lot of concatenation, which requires a pretty steady performance. For whatever reason, I’m good at that. So I’ve been lucky to do a number of Star Wars games.
GC: Were you going to be involved in the new Sam & Max game? Can you offer any insight as to why it was canceled?
DD: I was not on the list for the new Sam and Max game. The new producer didn’t realize I had been on the original. So I really don’t know why they decided not to do it. I hope they change their minds. The first one was wonderful fun.
GC: What do you think it would take to resurrect the adventure game genre?
DD: Adventure games require some patience and commitment. I think that these days, too many people suffer from short attention spans. The shooter games are still popular, but the time to play a good adventure game just seems to be evaporating.
GC: In prior interviews you haven’t expressed much of an interest in adventure games, and you’ve mentioned that you’re not much of a gamer. Do you actually like adventure games, or do you just like voicing them?
DD: I play games from time to time, but I don’t consider myself a gamer like some of the folks I know who play every day for hours at a time. I guess that’s why I don’t play a lot of adventure games, just because I haven’t the time to devote to them. But I enjoy the time I do spend playing.
GC: Have you ever regretted taking on a voice acting job? Or, not taking on a voice acting job?
DD: Never regretted taking a job. There are some that you are prouder of than others. And I haven’t been offered a game job that I haven’t taken. I have turned down commercials. Mostly political ones.
GC: As the president of the San Francisco Branch of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, can you shed a little light on the recent voice actors’ strike? Were you involved? How do you feel about it? Are you happy with the results of the strike?
DD: Well, let’s start by saying that there was no strike. I was involved with the negotiation as the lead AFTRA negotiator. We (AFTRA) settled our contract with the producers in June, if my memory serves. Screen Actors Guild settled near the end of July with the same agreement. I was pleased that the actors will enjoy a substantial increase in pay and that there was no strike. More work for actors, more money for actors, better games for gamers. Sounds like a win-win-win to me.
GC: Do you think it is justified for publishers to spend loads of money on a celebrity to do voice work rather that someone the public might not have heard of? Do the celebrity voices rake in more cash?
DD: Publishers get to spend their money the way they want. I don’t think celebrities sell games, but I’m not in the position to tell producers not to hire the celebs. And in reality, the celebs usually can’t do the work that a good voice person can. The art to doing voice work is to be able to convey emotion with just your voice. These celebs are used to using their voices and their bodies and their faces. I can raise an eyebrow with my voice. Most celebrities can’t. But if you’re a celebrity, you can tell the producers that you’ll only work for 200 thousand dollars. Then, if the producer thinks its worth that amount of money, the celebrity has a bit of extra mad money.
GC: Do you feel that voice actors deserve a cut of the profits of the games they work on?
DD: I would like to see a way to reward those people who voice very popular games, assuming that their efforts went into making that game popular. That’s part of what the recent negotiations were about. The trick is, how to create a formula that results in the additional reward for a good game, but doesn’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg (the producer). As performers, we have achieved that kind of payout in every other area of our work. I hope we’ll get there.
GC: A few weeks ago you said that you’d be getting a backstage tour of the new LucasArts games headquarters in San Francisco. How did it go? Is there anything you can report to us? Any new adventure games on the horizon, like a Monkey Island 5?
DD: Didn’t get the chance to see what new games are on the boards, but the new campus is incredible. I believe that parts will be open to the public when they get all settled. The park like atmosphere is beautiful to walk about, and we had a discussion about whether the statue of Yoda at the entrance was life sized, or, like the statue of John Wayne at the Orange county airport, was it a bit bigger to give it a monumental feel.
GC: Many apologies, but I’ve got to ask it: How exactly did you become the "Got Milk?" guy?
DD: I was very lucky to get that. The people at Goodby Silverstein and Partners have been incredibly good to me over the years. In fact, one of the spots I did for them for E-bay just won a Clio award, a Mercury award and a Palm d’ Or (I think that’s right) at the Cannes advertising festival.
The story: The first ad they did was the Aaron Burr spot, in which the guy in the Aaron Burr museum is listening to the radio while eating lunch, and the radio announcer says that they’ll call a number at random to see if the person knows who was in the famous duel with Alexander Hamilton. The guy in the museum is the one who gets called, and can’t speak because of the peanut butter sandwich in his mouth, and no milk in the carton. I did the voice of the radio announcer, as a top 40 DJ. For some reason, they wanted to do a different kind of announcer, so they called me back in to do an FM DJ. And while we were there, we did the “Got Milk?” tags. They called back to get yet another kind of announcer, but I wasn’t available. So I lost the DJ voice, but got the tag.
GC: Besides the "Got Milk?" ads, are there any other commercials we’d know you from?
DD. Depends on where you live. I’ve done Hellman’s in the east, Toro mowers in the midwest and Toyota in Northern California, just to name a few.
GC: If I looked inside your video game system of choice right now, what would I find?
DD: Right now its a car racing game, and I’m not even sure which one. Just some mindless twitch game that I was playing while listening to a radio discussion.
GC: What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?
DD: Nothing on the boards right now. You know of any auditions?
GC: Are there any goals you’d like to pursue in your life besides voice acting?
DD: I’ve got lots of irons in the fire. My latest interest in in putting up my own web log. I find blogging very interesting. I tend to be a bit irreverent and sarcastic, so my observations would probably run that way. Less a point of view than just popping balloons. Oh, and I’d like to be the greatest swordsman in all of France.
GC: Any advice for someone wishing to make it as a voice actor?
DD: It is hard to get into, so don’t give up your day job. The technology is running away too. It used to be that your voice and a little luck was what you needed. Now you better have a fast computer, a good microphone, the latest sound editing software and an ISDN codec. And for those folks who want to go to a school or take classes to do voice overs—fine, but don’t become a class junky. At some point, go out and do it and stop taking classes.
GC: What’s the biggest problem plaguing the video game industry today?
DD: Probably staying ahead of the technology. It is changing so quickly. We’re not far way from the merger of games and movies. I can see the day when we’ll be able to essentially direct the movie and its outcome the way we play a game. And how often are gamers/viewer going to be willing to pay to upgrade their systems? Money, money money money.
GC: What’s the most important lesson that life’s taught you?
DD: That unlike on the computer, there is no “undo”. Whatever you have done, its over. You move forward from where you are. Stop regretting and make the most of what’s to come.
If you'd like to learn more about Denny Delk,
listen to some of his voice acting samples or get in touch with him yourself,
check out his website!
You asked for it, and boy, did you ever get it! Terrence Atkins is here drawing the keywords YOU Googled to discover GameCola.
mario touches peach's lips
pictures of people turning down the volume
sonic the hedgehog stories with burping
christy hemme is very sexy she can have fun in a paper bag
it's/a/small/world hidden/messages
Chapter Twenty-Six
Enrique: It’s on like Donkey Kong, fool.
Render: I’m going to stab you in the eye.
Enrique: Holy crap, you just stabbed out my eye!
Render: I told you that's what I was going to do, you newbie.
Enrique: d00d, apparently you don't remember how I took on a giant singing sea bear by myself, and completely 0wned Dugo, the so called super sword fighter from the beginning of the series. I'm going to moo your ass off if you don't give me back my eye.
Render: I'm gonna eat your friggin eye, fool.
Narrator: Eeeeewwww, he ate it.
Render: Ugh... uhh... *vomit*
Narrator&Rivers&Jonathan: Ewww...
Enrique: !!
Render: Unh... ugh...
Enrique: Bastard!!
Render: That was such a bad idea... *vomit*
Enrique: d00d, stop that!
Render: *dry heave*
Narrator: Stop doing my job.
Enrique: Stop vomiting on my chewed up eyeball goo!
Narrator: At this point Enrique was getting a little steamed, so he brought back his super powers that haven't been mentioned for a good number of installments. There was a flash of pink light, and Captain Thomas "7-Eye" Render VI of Trelenodora found himself in a strange place.
*THERE*
Render: Hmm... Seems he banished me to the Plane of Eternal Assholery.
Narrator: How do you know that? There's absolutely nothing around here that would indicate that this is anything other than a normal weird looking place with shiny flooring.
Render: What about that guy?
Narrator: Who?
Narrator (Plane of Eternal Assholery): Me! Muahahahahahahahahaha!
Narrator: Screw you all.
Narrator (Plane of Eternal Assholery): And so the pathetic normal narrator left in shame! Muahahahahahahaha!
Render: So...
Narrator (Plane of Eternal Assholery): Hey dude... come here...
Render: ...what?
Narrator (Plane of Eternal Assholery): *FART* HAHAHA.
Render: ...
Narrator (Plane of Eternal Assholery): I so got you I SO GOT YOU!!
Render: I'm coming for your other eye, Enrique.
*BACK*
Narrator: Well I left that sumbitch with that asshat in the plane of whatever the hell it was. I'm so sick of his crap.
Enrique: Me too man, me too.
Rivers&Jonathan: ...
Narrator: Rivers and Jonathan know that they couldn't stand his crap, either. They also fully realize that a trio is so much cooler than a foursome.
Rivers: Oh, Ok... if that's how it is...
Jonathan: We do need a leader, though...
Enrique: I am the new leader.
Rivers: Woah woah woah, I've been in the series WAY longer than you have! I should be leader!
*THERE*
Render: Hey Rivers, what's up?
Rivers: Not too much, I pissed off Enrique.
Render: Yea, I figured.
Rivers: Who's the dead guy?
Render: Narrator (Plane of Eternal Assholery)
Rivers: Oh? Then who's gonna narrate for us here?
Render: Not sure, I guess we'll have to do it ourselves. It's not that hard, anyway.
Rivers: *narrates* wow, you're right!
Render: Yep. Maybe you should narrate us a way out of here with your new found powers.
Rivers: Nah.
Render: Why not?
Rivers: Too much effort.
Render: Ah.
???: You boys looking for a way out?
Rivers: Another question mark person!!
Render: Wooo!!
Question Mark Girl: What?
Rivers: And it's a girl!
Render: Wooo!!
QM Girl: What the hell is wrong with you people?
Render: Soo how do we get out of here?
QM Girl: Simple. All you have to do is jump into this portal...
Render: SCREW YOU!!
Rivers: Owned!
QM Girl: What?
Render: Not doing it.
QM Girl: Fine, I'll lead you to the stairs.
Render: Sounds good to me.
Rivers: Sure, let's go.
*BACK*
Jonathan: So let me get this straight... Narrator is now part of our power trio?
Enrique: Yes.
Jonathan: And you're the leader?
Enrique: Correct.
Jonathan: And I'm supposed to be okay with this?
Enrique: Unless you want to be banished to the Plane of Eternal Assholery, yes.
Jonathan: Whatever.
Narrator: So, fearless leader, what's the first thing on our agenda?
Which Gate Do You Choose?
Eye for an Eye
Enrique: We have to go after our former leader. I'm not leaving any loose ends.
Remember Us?
Enrique: I'm going to make sure there's no one left to challenge my power. We're going after Barin and his crew.
Reclaiming the n00b
Enrique: You know, that n00b bastard never did thank me for creating him. Or maybe he did and I just don't remember. Either way, it's time to pay him a visit.
The Island Nation
Enrique: I need a kingdom. Narrator, find me an island nation to take over.
Wow! I did sooooo much stuff with testgame this month!
And now that I’ve given you that favorable first impression, let’s move on to the more truthful items on the agenda. I did not, in fact, do much with TestGame this month. However—and please feel free to insert some modesty here if you will—I’m darn proud of what I did do.
The new features that this month introduces are so amazing, so mind-blowing, so completely and utterly beautiful, that, well—just go try it out, will you?
To make sure that you, the reader, are getting the most out of your testgame.exe experience (and to make sure nobody gets mad at me for killing them without fair warning), I have taken the liberty of writing up a comprehensive list of ways in which Paul can die. This now amounts to a grand total of two, as follows:
**WARNING: Do not perform these actions and expect to live. Thank you.**
Way 1 == Use the blue stone on Paul.
Way 2 (**new**) == Use the sunglasses on the new character in the screen west of the crossroads.
And if I may, it’s time for a shameless promotion (as if this feature were about anything else)! Official testgame.exe merchandise may now be purchased at http://www.cafepress.com/testgame. I bought my shirt yesterday. And before you ask, yes, I do know that I’m a dork.
So yeah, on to the important part of this article:
TestGame
v.5
(no extra programs needed to run this file)
Things to do/new features of note:
Another way Paul can die (see comprehensive list above). I rather like the way I set up this new death option. Feel free to let me know what you think about it. Also, this is totally the best part of the game so far. If you disagree, then you are a silly person (kidding). But really, I’m in love with this death scene, and you have no idea how many lonely hours/days I spent on it. :)
Try playing around with the sunglasses. I’m quite happy with this little added animation, myself.
Actual fleshed out character #3 (no more sketchy outlines, thank goodness).
Some more work done on the newest screen. Note the sky in particular.
Upcoming tasks for Lizo:
More voice acting. Sorry I was lazy about it this month. Or rather, other people were lazy, and I was not motivational. ;)
Make the new death option more realistic. Yes, I do realize that this should be able to happen as the result of more than one action, but as has been previously stated, I am lazy.
Same old, same old. There’s at least one more character, a
nice cutscene, and two more screens in the works. (Yeah, like that
will ever happen).
All the graphics, design, and dialogue are by Lizo. Paul is voiced (appropriately) by Paul Franzen. Overly Dramatic and Poorly British Girl is voiced by Lizo.
Adventure Game Studio (the program used to create this game) can be downloaded at
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/.
- Elizabeth "Lizo" Medina-Gray
Greetings all! Welcome to the newest edition of the most entertaining and fast-paced review action this side of ANYTHING! This month I shall be discussing five games that I found in a deep dark hole in Maryland whilst on one of my many many traveling adventures, because well frankly I am just that exciting. So everyone, READ ON! And be enlightened.
Sigma Star (GBA)
If you're like me, you may have thought the era of some great shooting-stuff-with-ships games, such as
Zero Wing and the like, were long dead. But like me, you would be WRONG!
Sigma Star brings back the beloved genre and mixes it with
everyone's favorite gimmick, the level system! Now, levels dont really do much.
In this game, they just make you a bit stronger and take a bit more damage. The one thing about this game that really will keep you playing, besides the "old school" feel, is the
wonderful customization that you can do to your ships weaponry. You can customize the directions, bullets and impact types
with almost 30 different data of each of those types. While many of the possibilities
are kinda of useless, there are still a load of them that are very useful and can give you a few options even at the highest levels.
Besides the jet-blasting levels there is also a pretty intriguing story and some ground level destruction thrown in. However that is just filler to get you
to you next super explosion!
Captain Eric's Super Thumbs Say... Thumbs Up
Growlanser 3 (PS2)
With some great storylines and some spiffy battle engines it is not hard to see
why this series was deserving of a third title. The movement and travel is a lot like other RPGs,
where a mini version of your main character strolls around the gigantic map and
is randomly thrown into battle with the vicious denizens that are blocking him from
the ultimate goal, whatever that may be. The battles are a lot like strategy RPG battles, save
for the lack the grid. Your characters can walk all over the battlefield and
perform other actions that take up time in your battle cycle. Once it's done, rinse and repeat until all the enemies
have gone, kersplat. Different characters will join you in your quest, and the unique interactions and decisions
you can make with these characters really add a whole nother fun and interesting twist to the already snazzy
story.
Captain Eric's Super Thumbs Say.. Thumbs Up
Unlimited SaGa (PS2)
So, are you in the mood for one kick-ass epic adventure? An RPG that will let you save the world and feel SUPREME power??
Well you might want to skip this game, because it may provide all of that, but you
probably have a better chance of ending up at your local asylum than getting
there. Now the classic turn-based RPGs have been around for ages so I guess you can't fault
a company for trying to add some new blood and ideas into the genre. Unfortunately,
whatever they were smoking when they came up with the ideas of this game just wasn't
exactly the right stuff. Walking around the world has been replaced with some sorta of board
gameish transportation style that will sometimes see you being attacked and facing off
against the baddies, or sometimes trying to outsmart some traps. Towns have been replaced with
menus of what you wish to do. Hit points? You have those, but how much they actually
matter never became apparent in my adventures. On the other hand, healing does seem to be a big problem so it is
probably not a bad thing. But in the end this game is just too weird and might have been better off sticking to what is
actually playable.
Captain Eric's Super Thumbs Say.. Thumbs Down
Rygar (PS2)
Now back on the good ol' NES Rygar was one of my favorite games,
which I rented like five times in a row. So I had some expectations for this game that
realistically I did not think were going to be met. However when I started playing this game,
I was quite pleased with the gameplay and feel of it. Now since the time of Rygar
a lot about video games has vastly improved, yet this game still maintains the old game's platformy feel while also providing great new aspects
and customizations that make sure the game doesn't feel out-dated at all. It's a pretty straight-forward game where you
beat the baddies with your swinging shield and complete the various tasks at hand, getting power ups and new skills
as you advance, such as new shields with different ranges as well as new jumps and slides and all of those fun
things. At the very least, it should keep you having fun.
Captain Eric's Super Thumbs Says... Thumbs Up
Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories (GBA)
I must admit playing an action RPG game that includes some of Disney's
most famous cartoons wasn't that appealing to me. However I played this game anyway, and well it really was
just that, just even less fun than it sounds. Now there are a lot of actionish
RPGs around nowadays, where you level up and such. It's not that hard to make enjoyable slicing stuff up and gaining power good times for
all, right? Well this game somehow manages to complicate that basic formula. First off your weapon of choice
is.. a key, a giant one, but still, a key. Who is fearing the almighty power of a KEY?
And not any key, some maaagical special key that has to be used with cards and numbers to effectively bash stuff.
So these cards are a major part of your actions in both the ways of magic and bashing,
which is really a bit annoying. Throw in the fact that your spells consist of summoning
Disney cartoons and it's just not a game I could really get into.
Captain Eric's Super Thumbs Says... Thumbs Down
Magic: The Gathering (TCG/CCG)
This is one of the most high quality multiplayer games that I have found in
a while. Few games can really match the head-to-head action that this game provides.
One of the best features is that there is no dealing with mundane and foolish AI.
Only top quality enemies for you! And the customization is unbelievable! So many different spells and
weaponry and characters too choose from; it is really quite something special. But that is not the end, no not at all.
The game also features some of the best strategy that you could ask for in a game.
Captain Eric's Super Thumbs Says.. Thumbs UP
Well, I would like to thank you all for reading yet another edition,
because I know it more than met your already lofty standards as the greatest article in the history of articles; so you just keep coming back
and I shall keep on delivering! Until next time behold, the power of THUMB.
IX. 
After sitting through ninety minutes of shit,
Mortal Kombat left us with a cliffhanger, letting us know that the movie we had just
watched had all been for naught. The good guys would have to fight the bad guys all over again, only this time the movie would even worse.
Not even Christopher Lambert would lower himself to appear in this
movie. Meanwhile, we got to see Shao Kahn without his mask. What do we get underneath the skull?
A guy who most likely jerks off to old National Geographic magazines.
Although there is fighting, the fighting still sucks. I'm not convinced
that any of the movie's fight choreographers actually knew any kung fu, though I'm sure they've at least seen a few other movies that contained
fighting. A lot of the moves from the game are included in the movie, but aside from some of the cool fatalities, most of them are pretty
generic. Just normal punches and kicks.
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
incorporates all of the dramatic emotion of a thirteen year-old Goth kid's shitty poem that he worked on
for all of ten minutes before posting it on the internet. When Lui Kang cries out in his dream for his dead brother, Kung Lao, you can't help
but think, "damn, he's got big hair."
This movie attempts to incorporate characters from both
Mortal Kombat 2 and 3, meaning that there are way too many characters. Characters are introduced just long
enough to be defeated in a fight. The end result is a feeling of randomness for almost every fight in the movie.
It also means that most of the fights fail to last much longer than a minute or two, but that's
okay, since neither of the actors knew very many kung fu moves.
As the movie reaches its climax, we get to experience some important
life lessons, such as metal arms are not as strong as flesh arms, and the people who made
Mortal Kombat: Annihilation have some serious head injuries that need immediate care.
Movie Quality: Do you ever get that feeling first thing in the morning, like you can
tell someone in the world has just died a horrible death? It's an
indescribably, uneasy feeling of despair that will continue to plague for months
after you see this movie.
Faithfulness to the Game: For a game that got a lot of attention for its gore content, the movie
had so little gore that it was almost insulting. One thing that I do remember about the game is that I enjoyed playing it. As for the movie,
it drove me to stab the guy at Hollywood Video who actually allowed me to rent this. After
showing the movie to the cops, I actually got a reward.
Paul: Hello everyone, and welcome once again to Digital Championship Wrestling, live from the GameCola Arena! I'm Paul Franzen, and with me this eve is Eric "I think I just set a world record for dying" Regan, and we are ready, absolutely ready, to provide you with some of the most entertaining pro-wrestling this Internet has to offer.
Eric: Not just the Internet Paul, the world! THE WORLD!
Paul: But is the world ready for tonight's main event? I submit that they might not be, Eric!
Eric: Nice, Paul. Anymore lines from comics who steal my last name you would care to use?
Eric: But you ARE correct! This shall be one LEGENDARY night here at DCW.
Paul: And why might that be, Enrique?
Eric: Because! TONIGHT
! It the unveiling on the first DCW.. INFERNO match.Eric: With fire and EVERYTHING!!!
Paul: My God, an inferno match?! You don't mean the type of match where the only way you win is to set your opponent on fire... DO YOU??
Eric: YES I DO INDEED, PAUL.
Paul: Land sakes! Who could we possibly have signed for this match? What two souls could possibly be brave enough? WHO IN THE GAMING WORLD COULD POSSIBLY WRESTLE WITH SUCH STIPULATIONS?!
Eric: Well you know when you think of INFERNO, only two GRAND, EPIC and POWERFUL names come to mind.
Eric: That's right! Peach and Zelda.
Paul: ...
Paul: You're joking.
Paul: Now Eric, tell us them who's really in tonight's main event!
Eric: Joking? How could that possibly be construed as a JOKE?! No other video game all-stars could possibly been considered for this match!
Paul: They're girls.
Paul: I think that about says it all, really. No need to elaborate.
Paul: So! Who is REALLY FIGHTING TONIGHT GODDAMMIT.
Eric: Tsk tsk. A bit sexist, aren't we Mr. Franzen?
Eric: If they aren't in this battle EXTRAVAGANZA, please explain to me why they are making their way down to the ring, RIGHT NOW.
Paul: Well.. I.. if you're trying to pull a fast one on me Eric, so help me God, I'll replace you with Headbanger Mosh! I'll do it!
Eric: Pfft, Mosh can never match my verbal excellence. Perhaps you should pay better attention to what you let get booked on your show!
Paul: Whatever man, let's just get this match started with. Oh look, there's our new senior official, Pete Gas!
Eric: It's so nice to finally see someone move up in this company. *sniffles* I'M TOUCHED.
Paul: Well, he wouldn't have moved up if we didn't have to fire Tatanka. The nerve of him to appear on WWE television while under DCW contract! The absolute nerve!
Eric: Yes, you sure can pick them, can't you Paul?
Eric: Well it looks like the match is about to start! Look at those flames flare up.
Paul: Whew, I can feel the heat from here! Imagine what it must feel like in the ring for our two divas!
Eric: They preferred to be called Princesses Paul, and after seeing the intensity glaring in their eyes, i think we should oblige them.
Paul: I'm not so sure that's intensity; I think Peach just wants to bake Mario a cake or something.
Eric: Oooh burn. I sure hope they can't hear you Paul. Or that may just be a Kidney Pie. A Franzen Kidney Pie
Eric: AND THERE IS THE BELL! It's go time. my friends.
Paul: Flames are leaping from all the turnbuckles, and our ring ropes are ablaze! I sure hope someone's going to pay for all of this.
Eric: You know that someone is you, don't you?
Paul: The two princesses are locking horns! Zelda tries to push Peach down to the mat, Peach tries to push down Zelda... I don't think either's getting any sort of advantage!
Eric: Wait it seems like Peach has grabbed a hold of Zelda's shoulders, and the two are spinning around wildly!
Paul: Round and around and around they go! I'm getting dizzy just watching them, Eric!
Eric: And Peach lets go and Zelda goes flying! RIGHT for the ropes too, this may not be pretty.. but wait! Zelda plants her feet and flips onto her hands.. a mule kick right to Peach's face! OH MY.
Paul: Can you believe the athleticism of these two dames? I never would've seen that coming, personally. Peach is stumbling backward towards the flaming ropes; she'd better be careful!
Eric: Indeed she should! One more step back and she could be a flambé.
Paul: She's stopped, mere centimeters from the flames! Shaking the cobwebs out now, but I've gotta wonder what Zelda's got in mind now.
Eric: Zelda looks as if she is about to set up another stunning feat of athleticism.. but wait! Within the blink of an eye Peach has rapidly charged Zelda, planting her elbow firmly in Zelda's gut!
Paul: Zelda's hunched over, and Peach is wrapping her arm around the elven maiden's head! AND SHE DROPS! DDT, face-first onto the canvas.
Eric: THAT is going to sting!! Peach is celebrating wildly as Zelda lays motionless on the canvas; that is not very sporting.
Paul: No it's not, and I'm sure that's gonna cost her! Showboating never ends well in the WWE, at least
Eric: Zelda's eyes have suddenly popped open! She is grabbing Peach's ankle... and oh my... Zelda has just locked in an anklelock!
Paul: How did she do that?? As soon as she grabbed Peaches ankle the Mushroom Kingdom princess fell right down to the mat, and boy, does Zelda ever have that move on tight.
Eric: Yes she does Paul, and unfortunately, I don't think getting to the ropes will be of much help tonight!
Paul: Oh man, good point! How on earth is Peach gonna get out of this move before Zelda breaks her friggin' ankle right off?!
Eric: It might take a miracle! Because by the sound of that scream I am not sure how much longer she can stay conscience!
Paul: Folks, I think this match is just about over, it's only a matter of time before Peach passes... wait... wait... do you see what she's doing?? Eric, Peach is... I'm not even sure WHAT she's doing! She appears to be arching her back and turning herself over! Zelda still has the anklelock in, but Zelda is reaching back, grabbing Zelda's middle, pulling herself back towards PEACH'S ankle!
Eric: A DOUBLE anklelock?!
Eric: I have never seen this before!
Paul: Me either Eric, but it's happening LIVE on DCW! How is Peach so flexible??
Eric: Well, she must have been in the castle with the good aerobic equipment. No wonder it took so long to find her!
Eric: Now both contestants are on the ground, opponent's ankle in hand and rolling around on the canvas, teetering ever close to those dreaded flames!
Paul: Can you imagine the pain both of them must be going through?? People usually submit to that move within SECONDS, and here these girls have been lasting minutes!
Eric: I have never witnessed such endurance Paul,;it is a truly remarkable sight! But still, someone is going to break first.
Paul: But who will it be? Both of these women are so determined, they're both showing such tenacity; it's as if they'd rather die than submit to the other!
Eric: It sure seems that way Paul.. but what is that.. what just happened!? They both seem to be free of each others death grip!
Paul: ..what?? How?? They were both SOLIDLY locked in!
Eric: It seems that their fierce struggles took a lot out of both of them and they could not keep it up. Both combatants are staggering, trying to get back up!
Paul: Looks like they're both back up now, and we are back to square one! Two maidens in the middle of the ring, just trying to set fire to one another.
Eric: A noble quest indeed!
Eric: It looks like a lick of flame has impeded Peach's vision! She is covering her eyes, and this could be just the opening Zelda needs.
Paul: While Peach is blinded Zelda is sneaking up behind her, all stealth-like. Reaching her arms up, and Zelda has applied a full-nelson to Peach! Let's see if you can break this masterlock, Princess!
Eric: Zelda is violently shaking her! I dont think Peach has much of a chance now.
Eric: But wait.. Zelda is slowly backing up as she applies the pressure... she isn't paying any attention to the flames!
Paul: Zelda, be careful!! You're about to get burned!
Eric: Oh no! THERE SHE GOES!
Eric: Her dress has gone ablaze.
Paul: Her dress has burned right off, and Zelda has been inadvertently stripped down t her undies! But look Eric, look! SHE hasn't been burned yet! She tossed Peach to the ground and she's running away from the flames before she catches blaze herself!
Eric: But she cannot escape the mayhem Paul! Look, a spark has begun to engulf her dress as well.
Paul: Who's, Zelda's?? Her dress has already burnt to a crisp man, keep up!
Eric: No man, Peach you FOOL! Are you not watching?!
Paul: Sorry, my eyes are distracted at the moment... but boy are they ever distracted even more now! Peach's dress is gone too!
Eric: It's pure INSANITY, Paul! You'd think it was one of those lame- ass bra and panties matches.
Paul: We really should get somebody out there to help them cover up.
Eric: No Paul! There still has been no winner declared and these GLADIATORS are not going to stop until its over.
Paul: No, but at the moment they seem a lot more concerned with not exposing themselves to the world than they are with winning this matchup!
Eric: Blasphemy! They are warriors and their only goal is winning! Just LOOK at that superkick peach just planted on Zelda; that isn't the action of a quitter, Paul!
Paul: Neither is this! Zelda's still on the ground from that kick but she's diving right at Peach's legs, taking the mushroom princess down too! Now Zelda's getting back to HER feet and picking Peach up by the ankles.
Paul: You know what? I think she's going for that move from No Mercy—"The Big Swing."
Eric: That could spell the end for the Mushroom Kingdom!
Paul: Zelda's let go of Peach in an attempt to send her hurtling towards the flames, but Peach has wrapped her legs around Zelda and performed a modified hurricanrana!
Paul: But this once again leaves both divas on the ground.
Paul: Zelda is crawling, crawling towards Peach, and she's grabbed the princess by the face.
Eric: Is that... the Crippler Crossface!?
Paul: I don't think it is, Eric!
Paul: Zelda is pulling Peach by the face to the flames!
Eric: Ehh I don't know if that is such a great idea Paul; she is getting a bit to close herself!
Paul: I think she knows what she's doing, man!
Eric: I sure hope!
Paul: Zelda has reached her destination: the flaming turnbuckle. And she's putting Peach's face right into the fire!
Eric: Oooh, that is going to leave a mark!
Eric: That's it, this match is OVER.
Paul: A nigh-on anticlimactic ending to one of the most vicious matches DCW has ever seen, I'd say!
Eric: iI was as savage as they come; that is for sure.
Paul: After that epic encounter, all we're left with is two partially nude princess, one whose head is not unlike the head of a used match.
Eric: Let's just hope Nintendo doesn't send any lawsuits our way.
Paul: We hope you all enjoyed tonight's edition of Digital Championship Wrestling, and we'll see you again next month!
- Paul Franzen and Eric Regan
I'm sure you've all heard of surround
sound (perhaps some of you even have it), and I'm sure you know of its uses regarding watching movies
and how absolutely awesome it can affect a movie's audio. What if you applied the concept to video games, as opposed to just movies & TV? Imagine
this:
You are walking down a hallway, waiting for someone to make a move, so you can make your kill. You see nothing, it's almost pitch black in the
hallway and you can see next to nothing. You hear the slightest sound behind you to the left and you spin around and fire 3 shots into
darkness. You make a kill.
Now, make the hallway virtual, put yourself behind a controller. Yet the sound you hear still comes from the left, behind you. With surround
consisting of five to seven speakers, plus a subwoofer, you could have the ability to hear in all possible directions.
The trick is getting the game manufacturers to support 5- or 7-channel
surround sound. Nonetheless, surround could enhance any gaming experience, even with other types of games. In racing games, you could
hear which direction a car was approaching from; perhaps what you were approaching; or even where you are in relation to the announcer. In
RPG-style games, perhaps you could hear someone shouting your name from a certain direction and you have to try to find them.
There are tons of possibilities with surround-sound enhanced games, and
with surround sound becoming more common in the average household every day, I think we can start expecting to see it appear in more and
more games. (Hell, 90% of the DVDs you buy today have the ability to output to surround sound already, why not
games?)
XII
The Ramblings About a
Movie I'm Watching Instead of Doing My Work Which Has Pictures of Some of My
Wall Scrolls Instead of Any Pictures of the
Movie of the Month.
This month's ...of the Month
Maybe they shouldn't let young children speak in movies.
Maybe they should stop making movies that don't have Jennifer Lopez in them.
Man, what a fine piece of acting. Maid in Manhattan won an Academy Award for
something, didn't it? Screenplay? Well I'm done talking about that. Here's the
thing: I've been short on ideas for this feature since the second issue, give
or take a few. I'll ask Captain Eric what to write about, give me a second. He
said something about "That one is" and "I think it is,
actually." But seriously, this article is about WALL SCROLLS. GameCola
statistics say that 9/10 of GameCola readers own at least one wall scroll, and
8/10 of those 9/10 display it in their bedroom. More interesting still, 6.5/10
of the 8/10 of the original 9/10 have a wall scroll of a scantily clad anime
woman. Shocking. This is the point: When did Fear Factor start having naked
guys all over the place? Oooh wait that one's a woman. Man the host looks
horny. I will admit, those blurry spots were hot. I'm also boiling water. I'm
sort of distracted. There's an overall theme here. Although readers like Zack
Patterson would like to, you cannot submit any requests to Terrence Atkins.
You can, however, submit of the Month requests to me. Who knows, I may not
even ignore you. Actually, I will ignore you. Don't send me anything. Wall
scrolls rock.
Congratulations to last month's contest winner, Michael, whose favorite part of the last issue was Travis Combs' review of The Adventures of Willy Beamish. We hope you enjoy your Spice Girls videos, Michael!
Remember gamefans, all you have to do is tell us what your favorite part of the current issue was. After that, you'll be entered into a drawing with whoever else enters, and a winner will be selected at random.
The prize this month?
Clarissa Explains it All: Boys
From the back of this thrilling novel:
Love happens. But what is it? That's what I've been trying to figure out. Believe me, it's not easy. Take boys, for instance. When did last year's dweeb turn into this year's coolest dude? Why can't we stop looking at that boy we always overlooked? Suddenly Sam, my best friend in high school is in love. With Elise Quackenbush. And he's turned me into his matchmaker! There goes my best friend. Take my advice: never get in the middle of a hot romance. For more on this—and everything about boys—turn this book over and dig in!
So, there you are, then! Tell us what your favorite part of the issue was, and you too could own one of our fabulous prizes!
- Graphical Artwork by Eric Regan
Entire contents © 2005 by Paul Franzen. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyrights reserved herein, reproductions of GameCola in any manner, whether in whole or in part, without express written permission, is strictly prohibited. All submissions including, but not limited to, artwork, text, photographs, and videos become property of Paul Franzen. All trademarks and copyrights are property of their respective owners. All products and characters are property of their respective trademark and copyright owners. Copyright in all screenshots is owned by their respective companies.
GameCola readily welcomes product information for all video games. Such materials should be addressed to: GameCola, 3 Deer Trail, Tabernacle, NJ, 08088.
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