Backlog Assault: 'Splosion Man

In the last few years I've built up a pretty crazy gaming backlog. This year, I've decided it's high time I do something about it. Join me as I begin to regret more than ever all those impulse Steam buys and 99 cent PS2 bargains:

Title: 'Splosion Man
Platform: XBLA

Bought: 26 November 2010
From: Xbox Live Arcade
Price: 160 points
Beaten: 14 July 2010

Backloggery Dump:

• 20/06/11 - I'm up to level 3-10 now. Really enjoying it so far.
• 21/06/11 - Beat the last nine levels tonight. Cool game, bosses were a bit annoying though.

Thoughts:

A really solid, lengthy platformer, so much so that I feel slightly guilty for having paid so little for it. :D In it, you play as the titular 'Splosion Man, a mass of burning embers, whose only ability is to explode, which allows him to jump, bounce off walls and kill enemies. You can only explode three times in a row before needing to recharge though.This limitation, along with the rather excellent level design calls for some satisfyingly high-level platforming skill and ingenuity  to get through the game's fifty or so levels. The game does get quite difficult as you get further into it, but the levels are pretty well-checkpointed and deaths rarely feel unfair, which both help to keep frustration to a minimum.

On the other end of the rage-o-meter though are the handful of boss battles you run into at the end of each set of levels. The zoomed-out camera and the dark surroundings during these stages make it pretty hard to keep track of where you are, making it harder to avoid getting hit boss patterns you've yet to learn.Get hit once and you die, forcing you to replay the boss fight from the start - not fun, especially when you're doing it for the tenth or twelfth time.

Boss battles aside, the only other thing that really didn't do it for me here, despite how much it's been talked up, was the game's humour. Maybe I didn't give it a fair chance, but the bibble coming from both Splosion Man and the bosses immediately turned me off and It wasn't long until I headed to the options menu and issued gagging orders all round. The ending FMV and the credits songs are the parts that seem to draw the most praise though and frankly, all that stuff had me staring blankly at the screen and thinking "that's it?"; Tastes differ I guess. None of that stopped me from enjoying the game itself though, which I did quite a lot.

Site Updates

deviantArt isn't the only thing I've been beavering away at for the last couple of months; I've also found the time to add a few new bits and pieces to my web site, and by "new" I mean old crap I dug out of a zip file somewhere. (I do spoil you people.)

Mario 64 Wallpaper



First up is a revamped version of a Mario 64 WP I first put together in the Summer of 2000. Working only with images scanned in from the game's box and manual, the original ended up a bit on the rough side, despite the hours I must have poured into cleaning up that fucking logo. :D



I always liked the basic design though and a few weeks ago, thanks to Paint Shop Pro and two official renders I uh, borrowed from Boo Mansion and Super Mario Wiki, I was finally able to make the wallpaper I wanted to eleven years ago. Go, me!

Video Game History Slides



In 2003, I had to do a presentation for a communications class in college. Being a bit hazy on the pre-NES era of gaming, I decided to take that as my subject in an effort to broaden my gaming knowledge. I don't think the class were exactly enthralled by tales of the Odyssey and the awfulness of E.T., but I still managed to pass and I did actually learn a bit of video game history in the process.

The script I used on the day has been up on the archives page of the site for a few years, but I only got around to putting the slides up (in PDF form) a few days ago. They're nothing too extravagant (I wasn't exactly taking the class I made them for too seriously :D), but they do feature a damn sexy picture of Nolan Bushnell; surely worth a passing grade all on its own.

Pick-Ups 2008



Finally, I've bulked out the rather barebones features page with links to several amazing pieces of blog content from the last couple of years, as well as links to a trio of long, rambling Listal lists detailing my music, DVD and game purchases from 2008 - Lists that were meant to be a quick look back at the year in December, but ended up stretching out all the way until February....2011.:D

deviantArt Updates 23/08/11

Things have taken a decidedly strange turn this week with two trippy, holiday-themed deviations dropping into my gallery before we've even hit September. Trippin' on the Moon is a modified, negative version of Santa, a photo of a window-mounted Christmas decoration I took in 2008; After reducing it down into a wallpaper-sized image for my own use, I started screwing around with it and this is what I ended up with. Slightly more timely is Jack-o'-lantern Funtime, a set of four images derived from the same crappy jack-'o-lantern snaps as Evil Glow, available in both single and collage form.

deviantArt Updates 19/08/11

I'm a few days late posting about these, but better late than never I guess. First up this week we have Softly, another wallpaper, this time featuring some airbrush experimentation I did earlier in the year. There isn't much to it really, but I quite like the colours. Bloom is one of several cool images I made with the kaleidoscope effect in Paint Shop Pro in a continuing effort to find something to do with one of this week's scraps: Spooky Guy. Much like Spray Guy a few years ago, I finally conceded defeat in this endeavour and uploaded this little doodle as as it was on Friday. The second scrap I put up this week is 8-bit, an early version of the right side of Retro, which I uploaded a few weeks ago. While it didn't have the 8-bit computer game look I was going for at the time, I really liked the character I'd drawn for it and later incorporated it into Paint Doodles 2.

World Rally Fever Save File - Pro Cup Unlocked

Given that it's ten years since I bought it, I decided to dig out World Rally Fever again a few weeks ago and have a go at finally beating it. I managed to clear the rookie cup back in 2001, but never got any further. Playing it now, I can see that that's mainly because it's bloody hard.

I've got a bunch of videos recorded and a little bit of a write-up planned for later, but  having finally unlocked the pro cup within the last hour, I thought I'd upload a copy of my save file so anyone who wants to check out the final cup can do so without enduring the keyboard-flinging frustration this would otherwise involve.

Get your copy here, you filthy cheater (full instructions included).

Free Stuff: Freeware DOS Games Part 2

We covered ten of the freeware DOS games languishing on my hard drive last week, how about we cover another ten now?



The Adventures of Maddog Williams in the Dungeons of Duridian

A text adventure with graphics and a movable character on screen. Seems pretty promising from what I've played and it's definitely got a decent sense of humour. I guess sticky keys weren't around when they decided to map attack to the shift key though. :D



Electro Man

Another platformer starring a guy with a gun, a gun you can only fire while it has enough juice from the batteries you pick up. The graphics look really nice, but this doesn't look like the easiest of games to get through.



God of Thunder

A really enjoyable action/puzzle game from what I've played of it. As you might have guessed from the title, you play as Thor as he attempts to thwart Loki's naughty schemes by er, collecting gems and tossing hammers at small animals. Seems to be influenced quite a bit by the overhead Zelda games.



Heartlight PC

A puzzle platformer with some similarities to Dig Dug. Here you need to burrow through levels, collecting all the hearts while clearing spaces in such a way that you don't get crushed by falling rocks or block your own path with them. I love the sort of dark electronic soundtrack, even though it seems completely out of place here. :D



Heros I: The Sanguine Seven

A pretty rough-looking platformer with quite a grating soundtrack. The ability to choose from a set of seven different playable characters seems kind of neat, though I've never spent any serious time playing this and I don't think I really want to either.



Jetpack

A fun single-screen platformer that has you navigating ladders and flying around with a jetpack as you attempt to collect every gem in each level while avoiding being eviscerated by nasty robots.



Major Stryker

A vertically scrolling shooter from Apogee. Some pretty nice graphics, especially in the intro and I quite like the framing device they have going, even though it seems to be disguising the game's inability to run in fullscreen. I'm not terribly good at shooters, but the short distance you can see ahead of you here makes this extra hard, despite the fairly slow pace.



One Must Fall 2097

The game that alerted me to the existence of freeware DOS games in the first place. I've hardly even played this, but it seems like a fairly decent fighter. The music's certainly good though and I really like the anime-influenced presentation.



Overkill

Another vertically scrolling shooter, this time from Epic. Looks promising and it's certainly more playable than Major Stryker thanks to it's longer play field.

And that wraps it up for this instalment. More to come soon.

Getting the FMV to Play in Tomb Raider II

A few days ago I snagged the Sold-Out version of Tomb Raider II on eBay for the paltry sum of €3.68. Despite the seller randomly deciding to add "Antrim" to my address, today it dropped through my letterbox. Being an older Windows game I was expecting some problems running it on (the admittedly outdated itself) Windows XP SP3. The game itself I managed to get going easily enough by running it in compatibility mode for Windows 98. The problem was the FMVs, which all froze after playing for about a second.

As all members of the PC gaming master race know, getting the game running is half the fun, so pulling up Google, I proceeded to trawl through long abandoned forum topics and Tomb Raider fan sites looking for some solutions to my problem. After a while I came across and old freeware program Eidos apparently released called ESCAPEplay, a video player for their FMV file format at the time.

One forum poster had managed to get the FMVs playing after copying all the DLL files from ESCAPEplay's folder and pasting them into the Tomb Raider II folder. This sounded like it might be worth a try, though I suspected that only a few of the DLL files installed would actually be needed. Sure enough, Tomb Raider II's intro movie finally played after I copied the files to its directory and after a quick bit of experimentation I found that the only DLL file the game actually needed to play FMVs was winplay.dll

This isn't however a perfect solution to the problem; The intro still froze on me once and about half the time a Windows XP window appears around the video. Still, it's definitely better than nothing.



So, to sum up here's what you need to do:

1. Download ESCAPEplay.You can find it on Tomb Raider Hub here.
2. Open the ESCAPEplay zip file and unzip winplay.dll to the directory Tomb Raider II is installed in.

Remember, I'm running the Sold-Out version of the game on Windows XP Service Pack 3 . Depending on which version of the game you have and your hardware and software setup, your milage may vary with this method. Good luck!