Onelargeprawn » Site Announcements

Resident Evil Revelations Giveaway: We Have a Winner!

Fayyaad — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:53:56 +0000

Thank you for all the awesome entries in our Resident Evil: Revelations giveaway competition! We saw some very creepy stories indeed (read them here), and it seems that the score is pretty much tied between Resident Evil and Silent Hill being the creepier game (with a couple of chimes in for Dead Space, and one…ahem…interesting call for Hannah Montana: the Movie: The Game. Seriously…why would you voluntarily play that?)

To be completely fair to the people who didn’t enter a scary story, we’ve assigned every valid entry a number, and the assigned every entry with a story with a second number (bonus chance! Yay!) and our winner is…

Congratulations! We’ll be in touch to get the address to which we must send ~~zombies~~ your prize.

Thank you to everyone who entered (without you, dear readers and commenters, we’d have no reason to run competitions!), and thank you once again to PrincessPeachSA and Nintendo South Africa for sponsoring the prize. We only wish we had a consolation prize to give to what we felt was the best story, but maybe next time!

Competition Time! Win Resident Evil Revelations for 3DS!

Fayyaad — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:37:24 +0000

NOTE: THIS COMPETITION IS CLOSED.

I know how everyone loves free stuff, and this time around, courtesy of the wonderful people at Nintendo (thank you PrincessPeachZA!), we have a copy of Resident Evil Revelations for 3DS to give away. “How do I enter?” I hear you clamouring. Good thing you asked, because I was about to tell you! All you have to do is answer the following question in the comments section below:

What is your favourite horror video game?

Yep! It’s that easy! Since it’s coming up Valentine’s Day however, we’re going to be extra nice, and give you a chance at a second entry! You’re going to have to do a liiiiittle bit of extra work for the second entry, however.

All we need from you is for you to tell us the scariest thing that happened to you. Or failing that, you scariest story. Good luck! We’re all counting on you!

The competition ends in a week, on February the 8th. Terms and conditions apply.

Happy Holidays!

prawn1 — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:57:12 +0000

As you read this, know that I have burned the pasta sauce (sugar and peanut butter saved it though) and have made salad for one. It’s the first time in nine years that I have been home alone for the holidays. The voices in my head seems to have taken a break too, so it’s been a rather sobering and lonely experience thus far. Enough of my self-pity though.

Dear reader, whether you’re on vacation or still at work, in the country or otherwise, I do hope that you have a fantastic time with your family and friends in the coming festive days. Whatever you do please be safe, because the world will be a less interesting place without you.

Happy holidays from your friends at Onelargeprawn blog :)

No related posts.

We Review: Dark Souls

GoDsGiMp — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:37:11 +0000

Hard, difficult, frustrating, troublesome, tough, problematic, arduous, herculean, vexing, trying, backbreaking, grueling, challenging, tricky, rough, rocky, baffling, fractious, and down-right embarrassing [Ed: You forgot 'soul crushingly infuriating']. These are all synonyms for Dark Souls. In the Oxford English dictionary under the word ‘difficult’, the definition simply says; ‘Dark Souls’. I have never played anything like it; it’s unique. At first I used all the above words and many unprintable ones to describe it, often at the top of my voice and sometimes through my teeth, hissing in frustration. But with time I gradually found other words for Dark Souls; reward, respect, learn, skill, elation, win, gratifying, gain, reach, advance, make headway, satisfying, enjoy, rise, and earn it! Find out how Dark Souls beat me down, tore me a new one, and then slowly built me back up and won me over… after the jump.

I enjoy RPG games. Ever since my first foray into the brilliance of Baldur’s Gate, I’ve been hooked. I love building up my character, choosing stats, finding the best kit, and succeeding. The important bit, of course, is ‘succeeding’. The problem is, in our busy day to day life, spending time playing games can often feel like a waste of time, most notably when you don’t succeed or move forward. Sure, it’s digital success, but most of the time it’s no less sweet than the real deal. I have even tried my hand at the most successful RPG of all time, World of Warcraft. I enjoyed it for a while, and then the repetitive grinding required for success lost my interest. Dark Souls, however, is a different kettle of demons.

The thing about kettles is that boiling water burns. In all probability the most frustratingly hard game I have ever played, Dark Souls dunks you into the deep end of the kettle, sits on the lid, and leaves you to burn. It’s definitely the hardest game I have played and yet kept playing! In Dark Souls you’re going to die, often and messily. You’re going to die when you least expect it. You’re going to die in one hit, in two, in a hail of arrows, crushed to death, bludgeoned to death, and many more creative ways. Sometimes you’ll die simply by falling off a cliff. You’re going to die in the first few minutes and you’re going to keep dying all the way through. In Dark Souls, death is inevitable, death is around every corner, and death is your friend. Yes I said it, your friend. You see, in Dark Souls, dying is part and parcel of the game. In some ways, without it you can’t move forward. Because through death you will eventually succeed, you will learn from your mistakes, and you will gain another step or two, until you die again…

Every time you die you’ll lose all your accumulated souls, and in Dark Souls, these are your currency and your experience points. You earn souls by killing your enemies and collecting soul-giving items. You trade souls to buy items at merchants, to upgrade your character statistics, and eventually you’ll need to hold onto thousands to level up. Fortunately, you can fight your way back to where you died and collect your lost souls from the bloodstained ground. If, by some dint of hard luck [Ed: or stupidity] you manage to die a second time before you collect, that’s just too bad. The first bloodstain is gone, along with your hard earned souls. You will be doing a lot of this, trust me.

One of the most interesting elements of Dark Souls is the interaction between players. In Dark Souls, you’re alone in your world, but your world is not alone. Every player’s world is a parallel dimension to every other, and Dark Souls’ developers, From Software, has included in their game a level of communication between these worlds. You can leave messages in your world which are visible on every world. Warn other players of impending danger, give helpful tips or… you can even deceive them, if that’s how you roll. These messages will help you every step of the way and it’s certainly one of the most interesting devices I have encountered in a game. And no, they are not scrawled in blood. In addition, you can eventually enter other players worlds, to help them defeat a difficult boss or to kill them for their souls. There’s no voice chat, not even text chat. You can’t join a friend’s game, you’ll be thrust alongside a random masochist like yourself, and you’ll die together!

Somehow this level of communication is enough. I found myself loving the dynamic of these messages and there is no denying their usefulness. I left a few myself; mostly the words “I can’t take this”. You can even learn from the bloodstained ground left by other players. Touch a bloodstain and you’ll see the last few moments of another player’s life: you’ll watch a ghostly image of them die at the hands of an enemy and you’ll learn from their death just as you learn from your own.

The game itself looks incredibly pretty. Being based on the equally hard and frustrating Demon Souls (reviewed on this site some time last year), the graphics aren’t new. But they’ve been polished and refined and they look good, especially with regard to the effects when you cast spells. The landscapes are more open than Demon Souls’, and there are some fantastic views. In other words, you get to die in some interesting, scenic, pretty places. I enjoyed the level designs, the long walkways along cliff sides and the inevitable slip to your doom. The open areas where large numbers of enemies can surround you and hack you to death and the small corridors where there’s no escape from the knives in front of you. The enemies are varied and many are fantastic to gaze upon, just as they slice you apart. Beating each different type of enemy will require different tactics, different weapons, and spells. Some are only vulnerable to slashing attacks, fire, or lightning. Some you can’t even touch before you’ve consumed an item. All these things and more you’ll be faced with and you’ll die and die and die… until you discover the key to their demise. It’s a good thing we didn’t have to learn like this at University. The student turnover would have been stupendous.

Masochism doesn’t come naturally to me; I skipped self-flagellation class in high school [Ed: You missed some fascinating lessons]. In the beginning, Dark Souls destroyed me. I decided to play as a class called ‘deprived’, because that class started with even stats across the board and I like choice (as evidenced by my review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution). Later on, I was doing some research, and discovered that I had chosen the most difficult class, reserved for seasoned players. Turns out I’m not a masochist; I’m a sucker for punishment. I pushed on with this class for days. I screamed, I shouted, I swore, I told myself that I wouldn’t pick up the control again. But I did. I tried another class; it was ever so slightly easier. But soon enough I was in the same position as before. A frustratingly difficult mini-boss had me stumped; I was dying repetitively and had nowhere else to go. Several hours later I finally ‘got it’. He swung twice left, once right and if I timed my parry perfectly I could score a vital hit. Success! This time the controller was thrown in the air not in frustration but in exaltation!

Here’s the rub. Success in Dark Souls really means something: you earn it in blood and sweat and broken controllers. You earn every single, hard-won yard, and when you finally break through a frustrating situation you will, like me, feel it to your core. It’s a heady experience. The corpse of the boss lay at my feet and I picked up the controller in my sweaty palms and, adrenaline pumping I resumed my journey.

Twenty feet onwards I died in a mass of skeletal blades, hacked into tiny pieces.

Dark Souls is not for everybody. I certainly did not think it was for me, but it grows on you like a rash [Ed: Or a bubo. In all seriousness, you do not want to find pictures. Don't say I didn't warn you]. You keep coming back for more agony, because when you do succeed, it feels great, wonderful, amazing, brilliant, exuberant, thrilling, fantastic, sensational, spec-freaking-tacular. My advice is thus: try it, and push yourself past your usual tolerance boundary. If after that you’re still not interested, go stick your hand in a boiling kettle and get it over with. If you’re still going, then I advise you stock up on expletives. You’re going to need them.

Score: 8.5 out of 10 prawns (Because it’s really really hard and made me feel like a beaten child)

Detailed information:

Publisher: From Software
Distributor: Megarom Games
RRP: R599 (PS3, Xbox 360)
Release Date: 04 October 2011
Age Rating: 16

We Review: Beat Hazard Ultra (PSN)

Fayyaad — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:58:29 +0000

Top-down shooters…who DOESN’T love them? Much in the same way that ghosts and pellets are the main dietary source for yellow blobs that only know one sound effect, shoot-’em-up games have been a staple of video gamers since before video gamers were called that. This particular genre been somewhat in decline in recent years, and I’ve become thoroughly sick of Geometry Wars and Super Stardust HD. So it was with pure pleasure and frisson that I picked up Beat Hazard Ultra. Find out just how much of a blast it is, after the hyperspace jump.

If I had to delve into the history of space shooters, or even shoot-em-up games (lovingly called “shmups” in gaming circles), we’d be here till the evil, bullet-spewing robotic cows zoom home, so for today’s review tax, you’re getting a short history of twin-stick shooters, also sometimes called “run-’n-gun” games. Inevitably, this short history is going to take a left turn at Geometry Wars Lane and Super Stardust HD Boulevard, but that left turn is about as inevitable as Japanese shmups are of being weird. And you should be grateful that I’m not going anywhere near Cho Aniki, because that’s a game that will make ANYONE feel uncomfortable. On the other hand, if a side-scrolling shooter ever needs reviewing…

Arguably, one of the earliest games in the twin-stick shooter genre was Nintendo’s Sheriff, released in video arcades back in 1979. Yes, twin-stick shooter games have been around longer than some [Ed: Most] of you have. The game was fairly simple, and the controls were pretty rudimentary by today’s standards. On the left was a joystick that moved the sheriff around, and on the right, an 8-way directional knob that you turned in the direction you wanted to shoot, and pushed down to fire. The game proved profitable and challenging enough that people kept coming back to try their hand at this novel way of playing.

The game that put twin-stick shooters in the front of everyone’s minds, however, was Robotron 2084. The “2084″ bit is deceptive, since the game actually appeared in video arcades in 1982. This time, the arcade cabinet really DID come with two joysticks on the control panel in front, and formed the control scheme that we know and love: left stick to move, right stick to fire. Many of the features that we today associate with twin-stick shooters first appeared in Robotron 2084: gameplay that was easy to get into but difficult to master; swarms of different kinds of enemies that acted differently; gameplay that started tame, but quickly degenerated into chaos…it all appeared here first. Robotron 2084 was revolutionary. Heck, this game is so important that even the Guinness Book of World Records hails it as one of the most important [Ed: Eleventh most important, in fact, but the point remains] arcade games in terms of “technical, creative, and cultural impact”. If this is not one impressive-as-hell achievement for a video game that’s about as old as the 3½-inch floppy disc drive, then I’m not sure I know what is.

Unbelievably, we’re still not at Geometry Wars, because in 1990, we were blessed with Smash TV, a two player twin-stick shooter set in a dystopian future where people watched extreme violence on TV for entertainment. [Ed: And this is different from our current state of events precisely how?] Two contestants—that’d be you and a friend armed with a mountain of coins to shove into the machine—would shoot down waves upon waves of enemies, all the while collecting power ups and money. Take away the cheesy premise, and you’re left with a lot of the same gameplay mechanics as every other twin-stick shooter. In 1991, Midway, the same fellows who eventually gave us Mortal Kombat, descended from the video game heavens and gifted us with Total Carnage, another two-player twin-stick shooter, this time with a warzone setting and a larger play area. It should become evident that a single thread holds Robotron 2084, Smash TV, and Total Carnage together: a man named Eugene Jarvis. It’s pretty much thanks to him that we have Beat Hazard Ultra—you DO recall that we’re reading a review, right?—in the first place. Since Total Carnage, there have been more than just a number of brilliant twin-stick shooters, including Geometry Wars (and that’s all the mention you’ll get of it), the brilliant I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1, Super Stardust HD, Dead Nation, and of course, the game under scrutiny: Beat Hazard Ultra. We’ve arrived at our destination! All passengers to alight here for the tour.

Beat Hazard Ultra, made by Cold Beam Games (in reality, one single person named Steve Hunt, which makes it quintuply impressive), is a twin-stick shooter with a bit of a difference. There are no predefined levels of play. No predefined enemy patterns. Heck, there’s not really a soundtrack, not in the strictest sense. Instead, the game uses your own music tracks as all of the above: soundtrack, enemy patterns, level layout, weapon power, everything. All of it is dynamically generated based on the track you’ve selected.

If you don’t have any music available, the game ships with a few tracks of its own, but I seriously suggest firing it up with your own music. One of the best things about the game is that the same track will produce the same result over and over, meaning that you can actually learn to play a song. Since you play for score, and because the effect from a single track of music is repeatable, you can go on to practise a single song to attain better and better scores. In the interest of performing a thorough review, I played the game with a number of different tracks and genres, including some spoken comedy tracks, to see how the game reacts. Hint: spoken comedy; not so great. In general terms, the harder the music rocks, the more exciting the game becomes, and the bigger and brighter your weapon systems become, dealing more damage to enemies. By the same token, however, enemies also become faster, more pumped, and fire more weapons at you. Bizarrely, the best track I played, which has since become my favourite level to play, is the William Tell Overture [Ed: Kids these days don't call it the Lone Ranger theme anymore? This is a sad loss]. Seriously, if you get this game, get this track from somewhere. It will make you grin from ear to ear. The way the music crescendos with the trumpets and horns is just pure excitement in music form, and Beat Hazard Ultra realizes this excitement almost perfectly. I’ve yet to try the 1812 Overture with its orchestral cannons, but I expect the results to be about the same.

One of the fun things that will keep you coming back to Beat Hazard Ultra, aside from the drive to better your own score, is the sheer number of unlockable perks that you get. Each time you play, your score is added to a tally. Play enough, score enough, and you’ll rank up, netting you a perk. You can then buy, upgrade, and equip the perk (up to eight of them) with money you’ve managed to acquire in-game. Working towards a visible goal always makes for that “one more go” kind of gameplay.

Beat Hazard Ultra boasts a range of play modes in addition to the single player single track mode. Survival mode plays your tracks one after the other, and sees how long you last, good if you’re up for a marathon session and want to just work towards high scores. Boss Rush mode pits you against nothing but bosses, one after the other. If you don’t feel like playing towards a score or worry about lives, and you want to see the full range of unlocked weapons and full range of enemies, you can play Chill Out mode. But wait! There’s more! The game also has local and online versus and co-op multiplayer. Online multiplayer matches songs that you and others have in common and plays levels with those songs only. Sadly, I was unable to play the online mode due to a lack of other people playing, but I hope that more people will be online as the game increases in popularity.

If you can’t tell from the screenshots here—and these screenshots really do the game no justice whatsoever—Beat Hazard Ultra is pure, mind-melting eye candy. The effects are bright and brilliant, and it’s precisely the kind of manic screen activity you want in a twin-stick shooter. If the effects get a bit much, you can tone it down a bit, which I think was a wise setting to include.

On the downside, I do wish the play area was bigger, with the screen either scrolling along or zooming in and out to show more, but this isn’t a major hassle. The game feels a little claustrophobic at times, especially with the larger bosses not giving you much wiggle room. Compound that with bunches of smaller enemies flying in, and things can get a little…frenetic. Mind you, this could also be seen as a challenge to overcome, but the edge of the play area probably needs to be slightly bigger, I feel [Ed: Or you could just not play that particular song. Just a thought]. Another tiny point is that I feel the enemies could have moved more in time to the music, but I’m not sure how possible this is without knowing ahead of time what songs will be played, or without limiting the number of songs.

At the end of things, Beat Hazard Ultra is a fun as hell game to play in short bursts at a time—extended session are almost guaranteed to give you a headache due to the insane effects. Like many such games, Beat Hazard Ultra works well as a ramp-up game to play before delving into something bigger, or as a chiller game where you need to kill some time without stressing too much about the mechanics. Because each level is just one song long, you’ll keep coming back to this game for just one more shot. You really can’t go too far wrong with a twin-stick shooter, and Beat Hazard Ultra ranks up there with the best of them. It’s a big, bright, and explosive game for an awesome price; how can you say no?

Score: 8.5 bright, brilliant special effects prawns out of 10

Detailed information:
Developer: Cold Beam Games
Release Date: September 2011
Platform: PSN
RRP: R65

Competition Time! Win a copy of Mercury Hg for Xbox 360!

Fayyaad — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:43:16 +0000

We haven’t had a nice, fun competition in a long time, have we? We underlings figured that, since Lord Prawn is not keeping too close an eye on things here at Prawn Central (himself being over in Sri Lanka at the moment), we’re going to bestow upon you, Our Awesome Readers, a prize: Mercury Hg for Xbox 360 (courtesy of UTV Ignition Games). That’s right! You can win yourself the very game that was just reviewed here! The caveat, of course, is that we’re going to require you to read the entertaining review! Nothing for nothing, as they say! So get reading. We’ll wait.

Done? Did you see the part about the banana? Good. Bananas always have such high comedic value, no matter where you stick them.

So, to win, all you have to do is this: leave a comment in this post telling us what your favourite element of the periodic table is, and why. Don’t comment your entries in the review’s post—it won’t be counted. The judges will pick the most creative answer, and award that lucky person a download code for Mercury Hg for Xbox 360! You can also help us spread the word of the competition by tweeting the following:

#OneLargePrawn is giving away #MercuryHg for Xbox360. I’m in to win! You can too! http://bit.ly/tKABch

After all, more readers means more competitions!

The standard rules apply: no active contributor to this site or their direct families allowed to enter, one entry per person, etc etc. Read the rules if you’re in any doubt. Now get cracking! You have until Wendesday 9 November, 2011!

We Review: Mercury Hg (PSN | XBLA)

Fayyaad — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 10:11:02 +0000

Mercury Hg (I know it’s tautological—you won’t believe the number of people who insisted on telling me this!) is the latest puzzle-slash-rolling platformer game in a series that started life as Archer Maclean’s Mercury on the PSP. Find out whether this game is completely Boron, a pain in the Arsenic, or pure, unadulterated Gold: after the Br…eak.

I’m not going to make this review any more painful in the pun department than I already have. I am oh so sorely temped; there are so many terrible puns one could make from the periodic table of elements alone, but, for the sake of your sanity, I’ll caesium.

Drat.

Let’s try that again. I know precisely what I’ll do with any further puns. I’ll barium. Gah…Let’s try that again!

Despite the desperately tinny attempts at being funny (did it again!), I’ve inadvertently given you an insight into what playing Mercury Hg is like. Don’t understand? Stick around for a few more paragraphs; I’ll elucidate for you. And no, for the less educated among you, “elucidate” isn’t on the periodic table of elements, even though I feel it should be. [Ed: Elucidate hydrochloride? Potassium elucidate?]

First, the mandatory history lesson, or as I call it: “the review tax”! Personally, I feel it’s important to understand where a game comes from; know thy foe, as they say. This time, we’re going to spin the time machine back to 1984, back when video arcades were still the best way to get your gaming fix, and when Atari was a household name in the same way that “Playstation” or “Xbox” is today. Let’s creep into one of those brightly coloured video arcades, shall we? There, the cabinet toward the middle. No, not the one with the joystick; we’re interested in the one with the track ball. Yep, that’s Marble Madness. Yes, I know, unusual controls, but it makes sense when you realize that you’re actually controlling a marble in this game, trying to navigate the obstacles and get to a bunch of tiles marked “GOAL”. In its day, Marble Madness was revolutionary, and the arcade cabinets were extremely profitable. Fast forward a year later, and we see a similar game called Gyroscope, this time for home computer systems. Another year, and we see Spindizzy, once again featuring the same isometric view, clean lines, and addictive gameplay. Forward to 1989, and we see a game called Cameltry. It’s the same sort of game, but this time we see only a 2D, side view of the game board; in other words, you rotate the screen to move the ball to the goal.

Let’s set the time machine for the turn of the millennium, shall we? Also, we’ll land outside a Japanese video arcade instead of one of the more familiar western ones. Yes, yes, I know you’ve not seen those machines before; they’re called Pachinko machines, but we’re not interested in them, except perhaps in the most tangential manner. No, look over there at the arcade machine with the banana-shaped joystick.

You can also stop laughing now, thank you very much. That’s where Marble Madness, Cameltry, and Mercury Hg overlap somewhat, in an overly cutesy game called Super Monkey Ball. The difference between Madness and Monkey Ball is that, instead of directly controlling the marble, you now control the platform it sits under. Yes, and this marble contains a monkey. Will you kindly focus on this game and leave the dratted monkeys alone? Yes, I know they’re cute. As I was saying, moving the control from the marble to the platform changed the nature of the challenge somewhat, and if anything, made for more frantic gameplay.

Fast forward five more years to 2005, and Archer Maclean’s Mercury had just been released on the PSP, to much acclaim. It took the marble-rolling aspect of Marble Madness, mixed it with the control scheme of Monkey Ball, and added a whole new puzzle twist to the mix. The blob of mercury behaved much as one expected a blob of metallic liquid to: it morphed, split up into component droplets, and rolled around the board with about as much reckless abandon as the liquid metal T-1000 from Terminator 2. It was amazing fun; I recall the first time I played it I couldn’t put the game down. The puzzle element is what really made the game come alive in a way that sickeningly cute monkeys could never do.

And so, finally, we ease back into the present (future?) to the latest instalment in the Mercury series. Assuming you never played the brilliant, original Mercury, Mercury Hg (which I’m assuming is another pun, this time on what Mercury Hg actually is: an HD version of the game. Get it? Hg? HD? Yes, it’s a scandium) sees you controlling the ground beneath a blob of mercury, racing through an obstacle-course-like level, collecting molecules, and trying to make it through the level with all the mercury intact. Along the way, you find things that make your blob different colours, spikes that split your blob into smaller blobs, switches that you can activate, and various other obstacles that make getting to the end intact somewhat a challenge. Attaining the end of each level awards you points towards unlocking the next set of levels, whereupon you rinse, and repeat. For 60 levels. On top of the main “Discovery” mode, there are also bonus levels, that task you with completing the levels with 100% of your blob. On top of that, there is also the “Challenge” mode, which has you completing a specified number of levels in a row, while fulfilling certain criteria. Some of these levels can be maddeningly difficult, and of course, you’re also up against a clock, so you can’t take your time.

The look of the game is bright and colourful, and delightfully eye-catching. Bear in mind that I had been playing Gears “I must have more brown” of War 3, so the colours are a lovely respite. The background in each level acts as a graphic equalizer of sorts, and thumps along to the music. The music that ships with the game is fairly forgettable, so it’s great that, from within the game, select some of your own music, and have the background thump along to that. I heartily recommend the Imperial March from Star Wars, by the way.

If you own the XBLA version of the game, you’re stuck with using the standard control scheme. If you want to add an extra layer of challenge, however, grab the PS3 version, which has support for the Sixaxis controller. Seems counter-intuitive, but the motion control actually makes the game more difficult, not less. It’s a heck of a lot of fun to play this way, though. And if you’re a trophy addict, there’s even a trophy just for trying the motion controls. Isn’t that nice?

Despite the fun of the original Mercury, this incarnation seems somewhat…less. The puzzles were never hard enough to stump me, and more emphasis seems to be placed on manual dexterity than cranium ability. Not that this is a bad thing, mind, but given where much of the fun of the original came from, it seems an odd omission. The game features—and features quite heavily—an online leaderboard, however, and this gives me a segue into my first few paragraphs: if you want to be near the top of the leaderboards, you’re going to have to play some levels over again and again and again and again…and then add perhaps another 200 agains for good measure. The game keeps a tally of your score, your time, and the number of attempts you’ve made at a level. When I last checked, the enterprising chap at the top of the boards made an average of around 200 attempts per boards. My main issue with the leaderboard, however, is that the game is forever hitting you over the head with it. At the end of each level, you have to go through three leaderboards just to get to the next stage. If your Internet connection is slow, or flaky, it can take a short while before you finally arrive at the next level. This can be a little on the frustrating side if you’re itching to move on and don’t particularly care about where you are ranked in the world. It would have been nice to either be able to turn this off, limit it to a single board, or limit it to friends only, making it a quicker transition between levels.

The issues with the game are reasonably minor, however, and Mercury Hg is perfectly suited as a chaser game for playing after a gruelling gaming session, or as a game to play when you need to just chill out and not think too hard. It’s not quite the worthy successor to the original Archer Maclean’s Mercury, but it’s still a good lot of fun, and you really can’t ask for more from a game than that.

Score: 8 mercury-free prawns out of 10

Detailed information:
Developer: Eiconic Games
Release Date: 17 September2011
Platform: PSN and XBLA
RRP: R45 (PSN) 400 points (Live)
Age rating: 3

We Review: Rocketbirds Hardboiled Chicken (PS3)

Fayyaad — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:30:07 +0000

ROCKETBIЯDS: Hardboiled Chicken is a new platform shooter game for the PS3, available for download only on the PSN. You can almost never go wrong with a good platform game, and platform shooters are even better. Even if the name of the game is actually pronounced “rocketbiyads”. [Ed: By the same token, smartass, your word "review" in the title image is supposed to be pronounced "reviesch", so it goes both ways.] Does Rocketbirds share the brilliance of other platform shooters? Hit the jump to find out.

I love platform games, and this is probably a throwback to my earliest days as a gamer. Some of my fondest memories were of playing games on my old BBC Model B and Commodore 64 machines. In fact, these two machines at the time were far superior to the IBM PCs of the day as far as games were concerned. The 4-colour CGA in my 8088 PC couldn’t compare to the 16 colours in my BBC. Still, I digress. [Ed: I don't think you know how to do anything BUT digress...] I think the best way to explain my feelings and impression of Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is to detail what happened when I fired it up.

Picture it: my lounge, early evening (it’s probably cleaner in your imagination than in reality, so imagine the odd kids’ toy lying here and there). I had a nice cup of tea in front of me, and a snack on a plate next to that. I was going to watch a nice little bit of TV to relax, but the show I was itching to watch hadn’t started up yet. I think to myself that I should be upgrading to a PVR so that I don’t have to sit and wait for TV shows to start. I’d just finished downloading Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken, though, so I figured: what the heck. I’ll take a quick look and maybe watch an intro video, or, if my show hadn’t started by then, maybe I’d play a little bit of the first level.

I missed my show. The tea went cold. The snack remained uneaten. A “quick look” had turned into a evening of chickeny mayhem and trigger happiness. I REALLY need to get a PVR.

After this, I went and did a bit of research into what Rocketbirds was all about. Turns out that Rocketbirds started as a Flash animation called “Welcome to Albatropolis” by Tan Sian Yue back in 2000. From there, it was made into a Flash-based game—called Rocketbirds Revolution—that was nominated as a triple finalist at the 2010 Independent Games Festival. Revolution was subsequently polished, expanded, renamed to Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken, and pushed onto the PSN, to fly or fall as it may.

That’s your history lesson over for this review. Let’s see what this game is about. Rocketbirds stars Hardboiled Chicken, allegedly the original “Cock of War”, a revolutionary who is trying to free Albatropolis from the evil, tyrannical rule of Putzki and his tyrannical penguin army. Obviously, this means putting a bullet through Putzki’s pengiuny head. Why couldn’t it have been a tyrannical duck? Are ducks just not seen as evil enough? One day I’d love to see a game starring a tyrannical duck. My pen name here has nothing to do with it. The opening cinematic, with awesome music by New World Revolution, brilliantly shows how Hardboiled lands himself in enemy territory, ready to overthrow the regime. At points between chapters, Hardboiled’s past comes through in a series of music-video like cinematics, showing how he ended up taking on the penguin regime.

It’s nice to see a species so often maligned in video games playing the role of the protagonist, and a species so often portrayed as “cute cuddly hug him squeeze him love him and name him George” playing the bad guys. I’m a huge fan of role reversals.

The game itself is a platform (cover-based) shooter with some puzzle elements later in the game, all taking place over succession of beautifully rendered screens. If that weren’t enough, there are even a few aerial dogfight levels, where Hardboiled dons a jetpack and takes to the skies to fire upon similarly airborne penguins. The game still retains much of the look and feel of its Flash roots, but the backgrounds are oh-so-gorgeous. Hardboiled himself eventually picks up a nice array of weapons with which to take down the penguin army, including a mind-control bug that allows you to wander around as an enemy penguin and open doors, operate lifts, kill penguins that Hardboiled cannot otherwise reach. Bear in mind that these are not cute, cuddly, lovable penguins. These are military penguins. With guns.

The platforming itself is great fun, with the possible exception of scenarios where deft and quick movement is required. Hardboiled takes a few steps to ramp up to a full run, and jumping can be a tricky. Nothing that can’t be overcome if you know Hardboiled’s limitations, but still a little frustrating, especially in timed levels where you’re trying to get from A to B quickly. The other incredibly minor issue I had was with seeing the edges of platforms against the backgrounds. I’m not sure if this is something to be put down to my colour-blindness or just the sheer amount of detail in the environment, so take this one with a little bit of chicken spice. Beyond this, there’s very little to fault Rocketbirds with: the game is otherwise responsive, and the puzzles are suitably frustrating enough to give you a bit of pause before you reach that wonderful “a-ha!” moment. The feel of the game is very Abe’s Oddysee mixed with Joe Blade mixed with Rush ‘n Attack.

If you manage to defeat the single-player campaign, there’s a separate co-op campaign that tasks you and a friend, this time as militant budgerigars, with rescuing the daughter of the general. The screens are similar, but the puzzle elements change, due to the co-op nature of the campaign. It’s awesome fun to be had with a friend. Sadly, co-op is limited to local play only, and not online. I’m finding this more a problem with PSN games than XBLA games, but I’ll save that argument for another article.

Overall, Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is brilliant fun to play, with one hell of an awesome soundtrack, and it’s surprisingly deep for a download-only title. Incidentally, am I alone in finding that smaller indie studios are starting to make better games than big, triple-A studios? Perhaps it’s a whole “too many cooks” thing, who knows. If you’re up for a fun platform-(cover-based)-shooter-puzzle game, consider giving Rocketbirds a go; if nothing else, you’ll have found a new appreciation for chickens. If my review doesn’t convice you, do yourself a favour and at least try the trial available on the PSN.

Forget Angry Birds. Chickens with jet packs are where it’s at now.

Score: 9 penguin-flavoured prawns out of 10

Detailed Information:

Developer: Ratloop Asia
Release date: 18 October 2011
Platform: PS3
RRP: R95 on PSN
Age Rating: 12

We Review: X-Men Destiny (PS3 | Xbox360 | Wii | NDS)

Fayyaad — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 07:53:53 +0000

Superhero games are one of those strange phenomena where things could be amazing, or they could be terrible. In the former category, for example, we have the wonderful Batman: Arkham Asylum. In the latter category, we have the infamous Superman 64, arguably the worst comic-to-video-game adaptation in existence. Superman 64 was so bad, in fact, that MTV Gamer’s 2.0 rated it the No. 1 worst game of 1999. I am fairly certain that the only game worse than Superman 64 is 1982′s E.T. The Extraterrestrial for the Atari 200 console, a game that was so bad that Atari actually buried the cartridges in a landfill in New Mexico (Wikipedia), and might actually have been responsible for the great Video Game Crash of 1983 (Wikipedia). Imagine how ridiculously unplayable a game must be to actually crash an entire market sector. Thankfully, X-Men Destiny is not as bad as Superman 64, and certainly not as terrible as E.T., as much as certain other reviewers would have you think that is the case. Is it any good at all, though? One brave reviewer, armed with nothing more than a video game controller and an iron constitution, ventured into the world of X-Men to find out.

I’m not going to delve into a much more of a history lesson than what you already got in the opening paragraph; I think you’ve suffered enough for one review. Let’s dig in, shall we? X-men Destiny ostensibly focuses on the concept of your chosen mutant character being in charge of their own destiny (I suspect that this might explain the “Destiny” part of the title, but it’s never a good idea to jump to conclusions). The game starts with a memorial rally for Professor X, who is allegedly dead, and a fellow by the name of Luis Reyes is trying to broker peace between humans and mutants. It becomes apparent (but not from the intro video) that human and mutant relations are at an all-time low, and things are incredibly volatile. The fun thing about volatile objects and situations is that they barely require much more than a son of a spark to all blow up go kaboom.

For the sake of plot, the rally is disrupted by statues falling over, buildings crashing, mayhem springing out of manholes, and disaster waving his big hairy fist at everyone. Remember when I mentioned “volatile” and “son of spark”? This rally disruption is pretty much the equivalent of dropping a frozen turkey into pot of boiling oil (the video is sideways, but the effect is no less spectacular for it). Since this is an X-Men story, it’s up to a mutant to save the day. You get to select one of three young people (two in the DS version) who have just suddenly developed mutant powers, out of the spandex-blue and with no provocation, beyond imminent destruction at a rally for, let’s face it, a Patrick Stewart look-alike. For the sake of choice, you not only have three possible heroes, but three (DS: two) possible powers to choose from, too. Such a thing cannot be mere coincidence. Three (two) heroes? Three (two) powers? They can’t seriously think we’d play the game through three (two) separate times, do they?

Apparently, they can seriously think so, for reasons I’ll go into later.

After you select a power, you’re led into an induction of how to use your new-found powers. At various points in the game, you are introduced to various members of the X-Men (now led by Cyclops) and the Brotherhood of Mutants (still led by Magneto. Seriously, he’s worse than the now-deceased Saparmurat Niyazov, dictator for life of Turkmenistan).

Since the Brotherhood faction, the X-Men faction, and the Purifier faction (those are the humans who are actively going out and hunting down mutants) are all out and about, having their own merry little three-way pitched battle in the streets of San Francisco, it’s up to your selected protagonist and their new button-mashing powers to get to the bottom of all this. What the story is, really, is an incredibly over-elaborate, shallow coming-of-age story wrapped up in the trappings of 70s technicolor lycra and given super-powers. At certain points in the story, you’re offered both choices of power and a choice of whether you’d like to join the X-Men on a mission or join the Brotherhood of Mutants in THEIR missions. This choice makes so little difference to the story, however, because all that you get is…an extra mission to play. Even if you decide to go full Brotherhood, you’ll still battle Magneto, and you’ll still get offered a choice in the end of which faction you want to join at the end. All your prior choices have no bearing on the story whatsoever.

So much for the plot. Let me get the worst of it over with, since there’s a lot of criticism to be levelled at this game. Aside from the shallow plot (confusing plot in the DS version–see, there ARE differences!), there’s also shallow gameplay. You can count the number of destructible elements in the game on far, far less than a single hand. The environment also suffers from invisible-wall syndrome; there are sections of the game that are impassible for no good discernible reason. For example, there’s a section near the end where you’re on top of a building ledge. In other places, you’ve been able to drop off the edges of ledges, but for whatever quarter-baked, demented reason, you’re unable to drop off the edge here. Yes, I know it’s not something a sane gamer would WANT to do, but this isn’t the only place that seems to be an open space surrounded by invisible impassible walls. Level design from the 80s, here we come! Speaking of 80s level design, the levels themselves are intensely linear. Not quite as linear as, say, Super Mario Bros., but still not much in the way of exploration to do.

The game also suffers from what I like to call Epic Mickey syndrome; the camera is one of the hidden antagonists. It’s not fun to have to fight with the camera as well as with the endless waves of goons that you have to go up against. This becomes more pronounced when fighting in close quarters, and you find yourself up against a wall. As well as that, the enemy targeting system is a little on the flaky side, and you can find yourself firing off attacks into space, leaving a swathe of untouched enemies behind you. This is good for the enemies. For you? Not quite as much.

Another aspect I found intensely annoying was the lack of ability to skip past cut scenes. If you are going to be forced to play a game through three times, the LEAST you could do would be to let me skip past bits of cinematic visual that I’d seen at LEAST once before; more if you happened to die a lot just after a scene but before the next automatic saving point. It’s minor, but can so quickly become a major point if you are playing this a lot. And if you want to get full value for money, you will be playing it a lot.

All of that, however, pales in comparison to the final point: the Wii version of the game looks better than the PS3/Xbox360 version! The Wii version goes for a cel-shaded look and feel, so the level of detail is forgiveable. The PS3 and Xbox360 versions, on the other hand, look more like an HD remake of a PS2 game, and that’s saying something for a next-gen game. the Nintendo DS version looks pretty much as you’d expect, but the control system is unsurprisingly unfriendly. Would this game have been more controllable on the 3DS? Possibly, but I doubt it.

On the other hand, the game isn’t so terrible that it’s completely unplayable. The camera problems are far better than Epic Mickey‘s, or even the one in Alice Madness Returns, so it’s also less likely to kill you if you manage to correct it quickly enough. The game has also been criticized for shallow, single-button battle, but mostly this isn’t quite the case. The game manages to mix a decent variety of buttons in battle, unless you’re playing the DS version. At this point, it should become clear that the DS version is definitely the worst of the four versions. One of the more fun aspects of the game is the X-genes that you can collect, of which there are four types, and over 70 in total. The four X-gene types are utility genes (passive abilities that are always working), attack genes that trigger on attack, defence genes that trigger on performing dodge moves, and suits. The genes are named for the mutant that has the power, so for example the Wolverine utility gene grants you health regeneration, while the Psylocke defence gene grants you the ability to phase through your enemies when you dodge. For the most part, the suits are cosmetic, but if you manage to somehow gain a full set of three X-genes for a single mutant, and equip them all, the related suit’s powers unlock as well. For example, get Wolverine’s suit, utility gene, attack gene, and defence gene, and suddenly the suit grants you all sorts of remarkable abilities that make the game much easier. Pity one of the powers you get isn’t “skip cut scene”. What this all means, though, is that you can quite easily customize your character to a surprising amount of depth, allowing you to play the way you feel most comfortable with. You prefer fire attacks? Okay! Equip Pyro’s X-gene and watch your enemies burn. You prefer to run rings around your foes? No problem, equip Quicksilver’s X-gene and off you go. How often does it happen that you collect a full set, however? Let’s just say that during the course of the first playthrough, I tallied about 30 X-genes in total (I wasn’t too intent on looking for them the first time around), and still didn’t have a matching set by the end of the game.

Another redeeming aspect of the game is the voices, and some of the most recognizable voices are in this game, including the voice of Nolan I-have-to-voice-every-game North, Steven Blum (who played Killer Croc in Arkham Asylum, Tank Dempsey in Call of Duty, and Garcia Hotsur in Shadows of the Damned), and Princess Kari Wahlgren (whose voice you might recognize as Princess Ashe from Final Fantasy XII, Princess Cisna from White Knight Chronicles, or Princess Elika from Prince of Persia).

A single playthrough of the game is, depending on how you see things, short; you can conceivably finish the game in just over five hours. Add another two or three if you play it at the highest difficulty. If you seriously intend on going through the game three times (or two if you’re playing it on the DS), you COULD stretch it to 15 or 20 hours, but that’s a heck of a lot of repetitive gameplay—and remember, you can’t skip the cut scenes! Three (or two) protagonists, two sets of choices, two possible endings. Bear in mind that this is what you face should you decide to play the game thoroughly. On the other hand, it’s great for people who who don’t have the time to devote to a game like, say for example, Oblivion, that can easily run you into well over 100 hours, and that’s without completing ALL the sidequests, or even touching the DLC campaigns. On the third hand (this IS a game about mutants, after all), it’s still a little too little for the price it’s going for.

To conclude this review, X-Men Destiny is not a terrible game, and certainly not something on the scale of E.T. terrible or even Superman 64 terrible. Having said that, it’s definitely no contender for Game of the Year. The sad thing is that this game had the potential to be as great as Batman: Arkham Asylum and it feels incomplete and rushed. It doesn’t even feel as if the QA guys did a thorough job, or else the invisible walls and skipless cut scenes wouldn’t have made it to the final product. The addition of a local multiplayer mode with a scoring mechanism attached would have made things interesting, though: at least the game would have had a redeeming social aspect. At worst, it’s simply a game that suffers from being a little too short, and a little too uninspiring. Which isn’t to say it’s not fun, because great pleasure can be had from beating the crap out of the enemies you face. But in the end, I doubt this game will be remembered for anything more than just an average take on what could have momentous.

Score: 5 prawns out of 10

Detailed information

Distributor: Megarom
Developer: Silicon Knights
Publisher: Activision
Release Date: 3 October 2011
RRP: R499 (PS3 and Xbox 360), R399 (Wii), R299 (DS)
Age rating: 16

We Review: Gears of War 3 (Xbox 360)

Fayyaad — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 16:06:00 +0000

“Brothers to the End”. That’s the tagline of the last instalment of the Gears of War trilogy. And yet, despite that fact, there are clearly some sisters in the game as well. That’s a large, misogynistic oversight there. Still, that can be forgiven if the game is any good. Ah, who am I kidding? You already KNOW the game is good; but do you want to know just HOW good? Find out after the jump.

Of COURSE I’m going to start with a short, yet hopefully amusing history lesson. This becomes important later, so you may as well pay attention. There will be a quiz afterwards. Gears of War crashed into gaming back in 2006 in a big way, and is fondly—and oh-so-wrongly—remembered as one of the first brilliant cover-based shooters. Except it wasn’t. Not even by a decade. To be fair, the previous number of years had seen the ascendancy of first-person shooter games—such as Halo—that emphasised agility over cover, and it had been a long while since we had seen a really decent cover-based combat game. Some of you will already be nodding your heads sagely and saying, “Yes, yes, we know…Kill.Switch“. Or even WinBack. Older gamers will be scorning those who recall Kill.Switch as an early cover-shooter, and thinking, “No, you younglings. Time Crisis. Back when we used to spend our money in video arcades!” An even smaller number of you are thinking, “Maybe Bonanza Bros?” One of you, probably you with the beard, the cognac in one hand, joystick-cane in the other, is more correctly thinking: “Space Invaders. 1978.” And even then, it may debatably go yet further back, to an obscure 1975 game.

Cover-based shooting has, of course, come a long way since 1978, but in 2006 it was such a rarely-used mechanic, that by the time Gears of War arrived, it had largely been ignored as a part of gaming. Which brings us neatly to 2006′s Gears of War. When the game arrived on the scene, it was an instant hit; the dark, gritty atmosphere, the impossibly huge muscle-bound characters, the multiplayer aspect, the dynamic cover-based system, all of it was praised. In fact, Gears fore-runner Cliff Bleszinski cites Kill.Switch, Bionic Commando, and Resident Evil as inspiration sources for the game. The game itself was a massive success, and spawned a sequel, surprisingly titled Gears of War 2. It must have taken the naming committee months to work that one out.

In the meantime, however, Gears of War became a franchise, and soon we saw graphic novels, toys, board games, and more importantly, books based on the game. The books were penned by author Karen Traviss, and the first book, Aspho Field, was both a prequel and a sequel to the first game, since events in the book took place both before and after the first Gears of War. The second book, called Jacinto’s Remnant, takes place almost immediately after the events of the second game, and the two sequels, Anvil Gate and Coalition’s End, take place just before the events of the game under scrutiny, Gears of War 3. The point of all this is that Traviss’ novels are considered canon, and after the publication of the books, Traviss was hired by Epic as head story writer for Gears 3. “What do you mean, ‘canon’?” I hear you yelling. Just this: if you haven’t read the books, don’t be confused about the confusing storyline in the main campaign. “But this means I’ll have to put down my controller and READ!” I hear you protest. Too bad. Suck it. Or live with the confusion. Right…let’s chainsaw this thing open and dig into the meat and guts of this review, shall we?

The events in Gears of War 3 take place two years after the end of Gears 2, and if you have not read the books, this is going to be one confusing ride. The government has collapsed, and it’s pretty much every man for himself. The familiar faces of Marcus, Dom, Cole, and Baird are still there, but they’re now joined by Anya (remember her as communications officer from the first two games? Yeah, she carries a gun now), Samantha (remember her from the books?), Jace (books), Clayton Carmine (another one of the Alphabetical Carmine Clones), and Dizzy (Gears 2). The squad now live on a ship of sorts (books) and the planet is beset by lambent stalks and polyps (books). Chairman Prescott, who has been missing for a while now (books), suddenly returns with news of Adam Fenix, Marcus’ father, who has somehow managed to find a way to stop the Locust horde, both lambent and non. So off they traipse to go find the man and rescue the world. Despite the fact that the world belonged to the Locust before Humans colonized the place, but that’s utterly beside the point. We’re here to kick Locust butt!

If you’ve played any of the previous games, you’ll find very little here that’s unfamiliar, and in my eyes that’s a good thing; why fix something that works perfectly well? The guns are mostly the same, the interface is the same, the controls are the same. Sequels shouldn’t make drastic changes without a really, really good reason. I’m looking at you, Mass Effect 2. The environments are even more lush and beautiful than before, and the chaps at Epic have done a wonderful job on the maps. I just wish they’d move off the brown end of the palette. It makes the entire game look poop-stained.

One of the best things that Gears 3 introduces to the series campaign is four-player co-up, either locally or via Xbox Live. That’s right! You, the lucky person with three friends of your very own will get to play this game with them! I honestly suggest you do it this way, because competent player AI is still a ways off, and there’s more fun to be had by playing the game with a bunch of friends (or random strangers you find on Live, if that’s more your style). Another addition is the ability to mark a target for your allies to concentrate their attacks on. This opens the game up for more tactical decisions than the simple “scream, aim, fire” approach of the prior games. In addition to the standard campaign mode, Gears 3 now also introduces an Arcade mode, which, everything else being identical, assigns a score to kills. If nothing else, it’s good for those who want to do the campaign better than all their friends.

I was quite pleased to see that whatever experience you gain in the campaign (either mode!) carries over to the multiplayer modes, and that you now have one persistent character profile that updates over the course of your Gears of War career. And mean it when I say “Gears of War“, and not just Gears 3. There are several unlockable items, for example, that you can only obtain by having played through Gears 1 and 2. It’s a pity that reading the books nets you get nothing more than sweet, smug satisfaction and a somewhat-clearer-than-mud understanding of the story.

Gears of War, of course, lives, breathes, eats, poops, and dies-from-overpoop on its multiplayer features, so I braved the harsh waters of online matchmaking to play with some random strangers on Live. Some of the same multiplayer modes from Gears 2 return (such as Annex renamed as King of the Hill, Wingman, and Execution), while dropping support for original King of the Hill and Guardian. Submission has been changed slightly and renamed Capture the Leader. Horde has been changed to include money to build fortifications to make it difficult for the enemy to get in, and you get money based on the kills you made. What makes this awesome is that a flat “scream, aim, fire” mode has been improved with the addition of some tactical decision-making. For example, you can build fortifications only between waves, and you’re left with the decision of whether to build new structures, fix existing structures, or save the money for later.

The exciting new addition, however, is Beast-mode, which can be thought of as a role-reverse Horde. In essence, you take the part of the Locust. You receive an allotment of money and a short amount of time in which to kill off the humans guarding the area. Each kill grants you a little more time. You can start out, for example, as a ticker and try to take out enemy fortifications, and then when you’re inevitably blown away in a flurry of locust-shot, you choose another Locust species to try killing humans with. The only limits, of course, being the aforementioned money and time. Beast is best played with friends–it can be devilishly difficult on your own, and I didn’t see any options for adding bots. With friends, however, it’s an awesome little mode, and a great addition to Gears multiplayer.

Overall, Gears of War 3 is a worthy ending for this trilogy, despite the fact that it relies a little too much on the multiplayer experience. It’s been an awesome ride throughout the series, and…well, you’d be an idiot not to find out how the story ends, wouldn’t you?

Score: 9 prawns out of 10

Detailed information:

Developer: Epic Games
Distributor: Microsoft
RRP: R599 (Xbox 360)
Release date: 20 September 2011
Age rating: 18

Going Home

prawn1 — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 11:49:34 +0000

Ayubowan. That means “hello” in the language of my people. It’s a goodbye from me however, for a short time, as I travel to the land of my birth. For the next two weeks, I’ll be trying to adjust to the oppressive weather and odd asian accents as I visit family on the island of Sri Lanka.

Here’s a map of my sure-to-be restless flights from Cape Town to Johannesburg to Doha, and finally to Colombo.

View Flight in a larger map.

I can’t be certain of Internet access there, so this blog may lay fallow in my absence, aside from the various game reviews that we are obliged to publish.

I may post occasionally to Twitter, so if you’d like to chat to me, direct your tweets to @onelargeprawn. If you were there in the beginning and still remain a loyalist, you can also say ayubowan to me on Google+.

Until next time my friends.

Onelargeprawn Goes to rAge 2011

Fayyaad — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:26:30 +0000

Good news, everyone! Most of you South African readers will probably be aware that rAge, the Southern African video game expo, is going to be happening this weekend. Happy for you, Onelargeprawn.co.za will be represented at rAge 2011. Well, not the Lord High Prawn himself, sadly for you fans of His Prawniness, but his loyal lackey. And we won’t have a stand, sadly (we’re simply not that big), but you will find me wandering around, taking notes, taking pictures, and taking an opportunity to meet any and all who are going to be at the Coca Cola Dome this Saturday. If you see someone on the show floor who looks a lot like this [ed: don't you mean precisely like this?]:

then come say hi, introduce yourself, and we can chat about…well…pretty much anything. Also, if I happened to have upset you with one of my reviews, please don’t hit me. I’m sure we can come to some agreement. Feel free, also, to follow me on Twitter, because I’ll be tweeting from the event (not that every other blogger in ZA won’t be, but anyhow!)

Hope to see you there!

Go Captain Cheadle!

Macross — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:11:15 +0000

I’m a big fan or Funny or Die as they always seem to have some real funny viral videos. Here’s the latest.

If you’re a child of the 80s, as I am, then you must remember “Captain Planet and the Planeteers”. It was an animated show that attempted to bring climate change and environmental awareness to youngsters. While it did wake kids up to recycling and caring for the planet, it wasn’t very cool and really, you hated the kids and the mullet-wearing Captain.

So when Funny or Die produced Don Cheadle as the new Captain (Cap, we’re assuming was a white guy), we knew it was going to be hilarious. Please be advised the sketch does contain salty language.

[via Funny or Die]

How Not to Pick a Fight

You Won’t Believe They’re 3D Portraits

prawn1 — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:20:12 +0000

Sometimes you should believe everything you read on the Internet. This is one of those times. David Moratilla Amago from Spain experiments with photo-realism in his series of 3D renderings. Using a combination of Photoshop, BodyPaint, and Maya, the artist creates amazing detailed close-up portraits, including the “fur” on the face of his pretty model and the veins in her sclera. Have a look at his 3D portraits after the jump.

Click the images to see them bigger. You’ll have to click the “expand” icon in the top right corner of the image to see the full resolution images.

See more of Amago’s work on his gallery.

[via Coolvibe]

Cowboys & Asians

prawn1 — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 10:12:50 +0000

You’ll remember Freddie Wong for his el33t VFX skills in Future First Person Shooter, First Person Mario, and many other videos (at the end of June, Wong posted his 100th video on YouTube!)

In his latest creation, he sends his geek cred into the stratosphere. Cowboys & Aliens director, Jon Favreau, invited Wong onto the universal set and provided all the resource to creates the video. Favreau appears in it and Wong gets to use the actual wrist gun worn by Daniel Craig, although he experiences an issue that constantly plagues gamers. Check out Cowboys & FreddieW below.

Cowboys & Aliens releases in the U.S. on July 29th. South African audiences will have wait until the film canisters cross the Atlantic ocean, the local release is only set for August 19th.

[via Wes Blackmore on Google+]

“Livin’ it Up” Challenge: On the Home Straight

prawn1 — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:30:18 +0000

If you were paying any attention (I have my doubts considering these harsh economic times), you’ll know that earlier on we suffered a little catastrophe in the special blogger version of the Livin’ it Up game. We rebuilt the property only to be visited by the seedier side of E.T.’s family. They made off with a half-pipe and a couple of flamingos. Weirdos.

The Livin’ it Up bloggers challenge pits Onelargeprawn against seven evil bloggers to win a covetable iPad. We’re currently in first place on the leaderboard, however, we’re trading blows for top spot with Justin Hartman, who you may know as the CEO of blog aggregator, Afrigator. If you’d like to help the under-~~dog~~prawn to win over the highly-paid suit, then you’ve come to the right place. We get a virtual $1000 for each person that we get to sign up for the game. Simply leave a comment below and we’ll invite you to the game. After you’ve registered for it, we’ll get the kickback. And don’t worry, you don’t have to play the game, unless you want to.

A big thanks to everyone who has chipped in this far. You’re the wind in our sails, the jam in our doughnuts, we love you guys and girls. This especially long blogger version of the Livin’ it Up challenge is nearing its end (July 24th) and fingers crossed Onelargeprawn will come out of it the victor. Huzzah!

“Livin’ it Up” Challenge: The Great Flood

prawn1 — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 07:32:14 +0000

Aaah, the trials of a home owner. If it isn’t a burst geyser, it’s the neighbourhood dogs that take poops outside your door. And if there is ever a moment to put a damper on one’s day, it’s a flood. Not a flood of biblical proportions mind you, only one that selectively washed away our house, garden, car, and pair of prized attack geese that we lovingly called Fish and Chips. I talk, of course, of our virtual possessions in the Livin’ it Up game.

The other day a calamitous flood claimed our possessions and we had to make a claim. The many years of TV mind control had impressed upon us the important of insurance and covering our assets adequately (I wear underwear almost everyday). With the settlement money in hand, rebuilding our life was a few clicks away (if only it was like that in real life). So yes, we’re back and we even had enough in the pot to buy two more attack geese, Salt and Peppa.

We’d obviously love to add more stuff to the property but wouldn’t you know it we’re running low on funds (again). If you have helped us out in the past two weeks, please accept our humble thanks, but if you’ve stumbled onto this post now, we sure could do with your assistance to top-up our bank balance. It won’t cost you more than a few minutes of your time – simply leave a comment below or pop a mail to helpuswin@onelargeprawn.co.za (no chancers please) and we’ll send you an invite to the Livin’ it Up game.

When you successfully register for the game, we will earn a handy $1,000 in virtual money to spend. After you’ve registered, you can play the game as well. At the end of each month for the next couple of months, the top scorer walks away with a different prize, be it a Wii, an LED TV, or a PS3. And towards the end of the year, one thoroughly dedicated winner will drive away in new BMW 320i.

“Livin’ it Up” Challenge: We Need Your Help!

prawn1 — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 12:17:38 +0000

We need help, yes we do! You may (or may not) have caught our first post on a special edition of Standard Bank’s “Livin’ it Up” challenge that pits Onelargeprawn against seven evil bloggers to win a covetable iPad. Livin’ it Up is an isometric life-simulation game where the player is given a wallet full of cash and an empty patch of land. By purchasing a house, a motor vehicle, and a host of garden ornaments, the player is awarded with points. With each purchase that is made, more points are awarded to the player. That is what we’re in dire need of and we’re hoping you, dear reader will be able to help us.

Our property is coming along quite nicely since the last week. It finally had some grass cover on it, and our prize pair of attack geese (Fish and Chips) are having a wonderful time pecking at passers-by. We’d obviously love to add more stuff to the property but we’re running low on funds. We need your assistance to top-up our bank balance, and it won’t cost you more than a few minutes of your time. If you’d like to help, leave a comment below or pop a mail to helpuswin@onelargeprawn.co.za and we’ll send you an invite to the “Livin’ it Up” game. When you successfully register for the game, we will earn a handy $1,000 in virtual money to spend. Our points tally will go up, and not only does it make us happy, it puts a smile on other faces too.

Big thanks go out to the people who have have signed up thus far, and thank you for reading this (and hopefully signing up as well).

“Livin’ it Up” in My Birthday Month

prawn1 — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:00:05 +0000

June. It’s an auspicious month. Some decades and nine months ago, two people did something unmentionable and out I popped. It is my birthday month. At home I have instituted a law wherein the occupants are obliged to be nice to me for the whole month, and not just on the day of my birth. It was not received well, let’s say Hosni Mubarak would have faced more of a warm welcome in Tahrir Square.

So, it is my birthday month and I think a bit of self-aggrandisement is in order. I would like an iPad, and considering there is no chance of it sauntering into my life, I have decided to go with the next best way that I know to acquire things: winning them. I have been invited to take part in a special Blogger’s Challenge that will pit me against seven other bloggers for the opportunity to win the covetable device. I’m Scott Pilgrim and they’re the evil exes. The battleground is a cutesy strategy game, and Ramona is the iPad. After the dust has settled, the blogger with the highest score will have won. So, what has this got to do with you? Well, dear readers, I shall require your help in overcoming the many obstacles in my path and claim the top prize. And if helping me out doesn’t make you feel good on the inside, there are superficial prizes for you to win because this challenge is also open to the public. Still interested? Good. Find out all the details after the jump.

OK, so the game in question may be fairly similar to a Facebook one that elicits such diverse reactions as unparalleled joy all the way down to the sounds of horrible retching. Created by Standard Bank, the Livin’ it Up game has you starting off with an empty patch of property and a wallet full of cash. With it, you can purchase a house and buy things to make it a home. You can buy all sorts of items from fuzzy dice, free-flow, and a ludicrously large spoiler for your car to different room upgrades; you also purchase security measures such as razor-wire and attack geese.

It seems that your property is situated at the corner of Realism lane and Disaster avenue. As such, it is not immune to the weather gods, and if there is anything advertising has drilled into your head all these years, it is that you should never be without insurance when a disaster strikes. Parents would be wise to let their children take a turn at this game. It will enlighten kids about the pangs of working life, and how squirreling away money for emergencies is always a good idea. If there is anything that will dispel their fluffy dreams of a tax-free life, it might well be this. Let’s keep it real.

You need to insure your belongings and by managing various everyday processes, you increase your points score in the game. At the end of each month for the next couple of months, the top scorer walks away with a different prize. In June the prize is a Nintendo Wii, a Sony Bravia 32” LED in July, a PS3 in August, and so on. Towards the end of the year, one thoroughly dedicated winner will drive away in new BMW 320i. If this sound like your kind of competition, then head to Livin’ it Up and get building!

But wait a moment. If you feel like helping me out in my quest to win the Blogger’s Challenge prize, leave a comment below and I’ll invite you. If you then register for the game from my referral e-mail, it shows that you care about me. Also it will result in valuable cash appearing in my account. ;)

A Break in Transmission

prawn1 — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 09:02:06 +0000

Thanks to the smattering of public holidays at this time, I’ve taken leave of my work (and my senses) and have decided to spend less time on the computer and more on doing things like going outside. We’ll resume our normal-ish transmission on the blog early next week. Until then, be cool and be safe.

A look at what happens when cartoons meet art.
It’s Portal Kombat, you monster.
A compilation of every single Mortal Kombat fatality.
Biggie meets The XX. Listen to it here.
Iron Man gets a Steampunk makeover.
Digital: A Love Story plays out in 80s style bulletin boards.
A is for Asteroids – a video game alphabet pattern.
Pixelated comic book superheroes.
Star Wars Episode V retold through the medium of icons.
Classic pin-ups and the models they were based on.