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I haven’t updated this blog for some time. This is partly because I’ve been working on several reviews for the past while. You can check them out on HubPages. There’s a review of Borderlands, Diablo II: Gold, and Dark Messiah – all retro reviews.
I’m also working on some other ones currently so I’ll hopefully have those published soon. Just a quick update here.
It wasn’t long ago that I was down at the local computer store and I went over to the game section. There were a few good, memorable games there, including GTA: San Andreas, which I played to death years ago.
But it was a copy of Borderlands that jumped out at me. And it was the Game Of The Year Edition too. What this is, is the full collection of Borderlands and the 4 DLC packs that were released in 2009 and 2010: The Zombie Island of Doctor Ned, Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, and Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution. Actually you get download tokens to get the DLC packs. A bit of a cheat. And yes, you still need to activate the game online before it’ll play.
I remember having an experience playing Borderlands a while back at a friend’s place, and liking it quite a bit. So I picked it up – for R99.
It might be a bit too young yet to be a classic in the truest form of the word (in my estimate about 10 years old at least), but it’s like they say: “It’s like Diablo – but with guns.”
It’s not uncommon for two or even several games, and even games and movies to share sound effects.
One of the first times I came across this sort of thing was back in the 1990’s. It was Duke Nukem 3D, and one of the more infamous enemies in the game caught my attention – the pig cop. Literally mutated police officers of the LAPD (or LARD in-game), they looked quite comical in their stocky build, but you wouldn’t mess with them all the same. They packed shotguns that could rip you a new one with a single blast up close.
They also made grunting noises one would almost certainly expect from pigs. The most telling sound effect was when a pig cop actually sighted you and let out a roar that has since been proven to belong to a cougar or something similar. I know this from hearing the same sound when watching documentaries and the animal channels on DSTV.
How coincidental it was then to play Quake, released later the same year, and see (or more accurately, hear) that the same sound effect was used – this time when one of the ogres with a chainsaw and a grenade launcher saw you. He too grunted and made a noise that made it easy to tell when he was around.
So imagine the horror I experienced as a young boy when I lived at home with my eldest brother. He also grunted a lot and made noises that reminded me so much of these two videogame characters. Especially when he was in the shower – he would roar and clear his throat loudly. I even had dreams that I was living with one of those ogres from Quake. One of those dreams involved going into the kitchen and being confronted by this ogre who then chopped me up into pieces with his chainsaw and served my head up on a plate with peas and carrots. I’m sure I’ve written about that before in the Keen Dreams ® series though…
*goes off to check*
Nope, hasn’t been published as far as I can tell, but I could have sworn I wrote about it. Anyway.
In any case, I think I know the common problem that these characters all share. It’s a deviated septum. My brother has it and makes all these grunting and throat clearing noises to this day that are most annoying, to be honest. He refuses to have surgery to have it fixed. Luckily it’s rather easy to get rid of the irritating grunting and carrying on with the pig cop and the ogre – just blow them to bits with a rocket launcher.
This has been yet another instalment in the weird and wacky series known as Random Madness ®. It didn’t make sense to you, and it wasn’t supposed to either. If you read it and shook your head – that’s good. That was the ultimate goal.
Apocalypso’s Atomic Arcade is my first ever blog.
After writing on HubPages for a few months, I went about learning the ins and outs of Blogger/Blogspot. AAA was a guinea pig of sorts where I tested things out. Every conceivable widget out there was added in to this blog, and I had nothing but copy and paste stories mainly from other gaming blogs and websites, before finally settling on writing more original content, which actually worked a bit more in my favour as it turns out.
AAA is a place where I can publish all my weird and wacky observations about games, gaming, and other such things. I’ll likely never shut it down as long as I live. Over the past while I’ve slowly been taking a look at my blog and getting rid of superfluous crap that isn’t needed and sort of starting from scratch; tidying things up a bit. I actually prefer going for a more minimalist approach nowadays to having a lot of space taken up by rubbish.
So maybe in the near future we’ll see an unpolluted AAA, near as can be to being new and fresh again.
Hopefully this year is going to be a good one. I need to give it my all. I’ve got various projects on the go – some have been dormant for a while and need to be resurrected, and others actually have yet to be brought to life finally. More and more websites out there beckon my attention as a self-proclaimed “online adventurer”; publisher; supposed freelancer.
I mean, after all, 2012 might be my last year to get all of this done, if the end-is-nigh predictions are anything to go by. It also just so happens as it is that January 24 is D-Day for this SOPA and PIPA business – whether it is put in to motion or not.
When Duke Nukem II came out in 1993 when 2D sidescrollers were being quickly replaced by pseudo-3D shooters like Doom, we saw Duke Nukem in a firing range taking shots at a target. This was a scene that was in homage to RoboCop so they say – a film and character not often associated with Duke Nukem along with all his other pop culture references and inspirations.
Joe Siegler did the voice for the character who uttered the phrase: “I’m back!” which is obviously a reference to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Duke Nukem’s name is often said to have been used in the first game and later changed to Duke Nukum later on after it was discovered that there was an action figure with the same name. But it was found out later that this character’s name was not trademarked and so Apogee went back to using the name Nukem instead.
But where did they get the name Nukem in the first place? RoboCop. If you’ve seen the film and watched through you’ve have noticed a scene where a TV commercial is seen, which depicts a family playing a modernised boardgame of sorts. This game turned out to be called “Nukem”. And the font used was similar to how it would appear in the early Duke Nukem games. Probably later, Duke was used because it’s not only a cool sounding name, but it rhymes with the surname too.
So this is just an interesting thing I thought I would bring to your attention. Hell, it could even be argued that Duke even looked a bit like Alex J. Murphy in the film. Maybe that’s why he started wearing the sunglasses.
I’ve been looking at all the brochures that come with the newspapers just lately, seeing as it’s Christmas soon. I also went online to view several retail websites, too. Why? to see all the games on offer, of course.
One thing caught my eye though: Diablo II Gold. In preparation for the release of Diablo III, Blizzard seems to have re-released a lot of their classics, but in some killer bundles. In addition to Diablo II, there’s StarCraft Gold and WarCraft III Gold – and these all come with the available expansions for said games.
Then it was off to the actual stores to take a look. At most places, such as Musica, CNA, and Look & Listen, I mainly spotted the expansion pack, Lords of Destruction, and the price was usually around R99.
Eventually I had to ask a salesperson if they had the Gold edition I was looking for in stock. It wasn’t even on the shelves. They’d been hiding copies in the back room. But I managed to get one for R99. And to think that on the shelves, they had either Diablo II or the expansion pack both going for the same price, separately. One wonders if they intentionally try to screw you over, sometimes. So instead of getting both for R198 and upwards, Diablo II Gold is at least half price.
Score. Now I’m going to play this old classic along with all the mods and unofficial expansions that have been made over the years. Like I always say, sometimes it pays to wait – in this case more than a decade.
In the latest issue of NAG magazine, I had a rare read of Miktar’s column. In addition to being a columnist and overseas correspondent (East coast of the USA), he is also a former moderator on the NAG Online forum – although was shunted out of the job, probably because he was a massive troll, according to some. It was bad for business.
But he brought up an interesting conversation piece. 2011 is chock full of anniversaries relating to video games. Landmark, revolutionary titles that paved the way for all the games you play today.
Let’s have a look at those he listed:
30th Anniversary: Ultima, Castle Wolfenstein, Frogger, Ms. Pacman
25th Anniversary: The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castelvania
20th Anniversary: Street Fighter II, Sonic the Hedgehog, Civilization
15th Anniversary: Resident Evil, Pokémon, Diablo, Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot
10th Anniversary: Grand Theft Auto III, Halo, Devil May Cry
The ones I care about most here are probably Castle Wolfenstein (without it we wouldn’t have had Wolf 3D, RTCW, and every other game that followed in that series); Frogger (played it a hell of a lot as a child); Street Fighter II (hailed as one of the best fighting games of all time – the measuring stick to which all other fighters to this day are compared); Sonic the Hedgehog (come on…); Resident Evil (made survival horror the popular genre that it is – or was, anyway); Tomb Raider (without it, you probably wouldn’t have Uncharted, maybe even Assassin’s Creed either); Crash Bandicoot (played this a lot as a kid, too); Grand Theft Auto III (one of the best games ever).
But suspiciously there were a few left off the list at some point. I think most of the games he mentioned were released in November or December (I know because I looked them up). So there was some sort of trend he was adhering to.
I’d add in Duke Nukem 3D. It’s the last truly great game in that series, which even DNF failed to topple this year. Released at a time when people still used the term “Doom Clone”, it proved that it wasn’t just another rip-off title – it was THE rip-off title; the undisputed king of rip-offs, taking “inspiration” from several films and other games, as well as pop culture. But it had enough going for it to make it pound for pound the best FPS I’ve played to date, honestly.
Quake wasn’t brought up either. Major oversight there. Also released in 1996 like DN3D, it was the first fully 3D FPS, and debuted the Quake engine. Without this engine, we might not have had every other id Tech engine released to date, and probably every other id game released to date, either. Every Doom, Quake, and even Wolfenstein title to follow used a version of the id Tech engine. Many, many games from other developers to date have used id Tech engines as well. You wouldn’t even have Call of Duty, seeing as all CoD games to date have used snippets of id Tech code in the engines that power them.
Final Doom. All right, so it was a glorified double expansion pack for Doom II: Hell on Earth – but what expansion packs at that!
The Plutonia Experiment was particularly challenging. Created by the Casali brothers, it made Doom and Doom II seem like child’s play for the most part. TNT: Evilution wasn’t that spectacular, but it did see one of the most beloved guys at id get hired – and that man is Tim Willits, who still serves as creative director at id today. He started off as just a mapper, and fan of the original games.
If anything, Final Doom showed that fans could make a decent game, filled with challenging maps and maybe tad innovation that impressed developers so much that they hired them and put them on the payroll. This trend has continued to this day, with modders and mappers being picked from the modding community and given jobs. You often see this with companies such as Valve – Valve is predominantly made of former modders.
So anyway, 2011: what a year – for new games and old!
