Team America puts it best: (paraphrased cuz I don't remember exactly how it went)
Hans Blix- "Mr. Il, I was supposed to be allowed to inspect your palace today, but your guards won't let me enter certain areas."
Kim Jong-Il- "Hans, Hans, Hans! We've been through this a dozen times. I don't have any weapons of mass destruction, OK Hans?"
Hans Blix- "Then let me look around, so I can ease the UN's collective mind. I'm sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me in, or else."
Kim Jong-Il- "...Or else what?"
Hans Blix- "Or else we will be very angry with you... and we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are."
What did the UN do when 10 of it's members died in a car bombing in Algeria recently? Nothing. An Al Qaeda grouped claimed it their attack, but the UN is too pussy call them out, probably because they care more about the Arab nations getting pissed off.
The UN are straight pussies.
Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon called the worst attack on the UN since 2003 "an abjectly, cowardly strike".
Come on, announce that you're gonna hunt their asses down. Ol' Georgewoulda said "We're gonna hunt them down and bring them to justice."
The UN Staff Union on Monday reiterated its demand for a global security review of all UN premises, and pressed for "a full and independent investigation to determine why adequate security was not in place" at Algiers, including whether there were any warnings before the attack.
Full investigation on why security wasn't good enough? If someone wants to bomb you they'll do it again if with your new, improved security and then you'll have another meeting to discuss why that security wasn't good enough. UN needs to send some troops and get those ass holes.
"Those who target innocent civilians in this way commit an unspeakable crime," he said. "Terrorism is never justifiable, on any grounds... It hurts all nations - large and small, rich and poor. It takes its toll on human beings of every age and income, culture and religion."
Another thingy: Look UN fans, your representative just said the T-word. I guess you have to believe in terrorism now.
Recoil
Developed by Zipper Interactive
Published by Westwood Studios (EA)
Released in 1999
Review written 1/12/2008
Recoil, by Zipper Interactive, which was an independent studio at the time but is now a wholly owned Sony subsidiary, is a PC vehicular action game where you control a very fast moving tank. The game's simple plot involves your character's conciousness being taken forward in time by a small group of rebels who are trying to defeat the evil computer system, the Network, which has taken over the world in their time. They have hacked in to the Battle Force Tank (BFT), the Network's latest and greatest weapon system, and given you control of it remotely. With the BFT you are tasked with saving the world from the Network. The story is told with live-action videos between each chapter. They are are quite strange and different, as there is a lot of corruption and snow in the picture, the picture keeps getting cut off, and the actors are sometimes hard to hear and seem disjointed. It makes things make little sense, but it does fit the theme of rebels trying to break through heavy jamming and fits the game's plot. The story is quite easily ignored, however, and really doesn't matter much. It serves as a decent enough excuse for the action and the videos are entertaining. In addition to the single player campaign, Recoil has LAN, modem, direct IP, and internet (via Westwood Chat) multiplayer options. It's too bad that there is no splitscreen because the multiplayer game is as great as the single player and it adds a lot to the short long single player campaign.
For their time, Recoil has quite good graphics. The game consistently impresses technically and everything looks great. As the game focuses on vehicles and environments and not people, the game's graphics have withstood the test of time quite well. Everything looks great, the environments are varied, and the weapon effects are particularly spectacular, with plenty of flashy explosions and lights. The game has a good and somewhat unique graphical style that is shown through both the ingame graphics themselves and the style of the menus and cutscenes. The game's sound and music is good too, though that is simply good, not truly exceptional. Even so, the soundtrack fits the game well and is well done. There is one technical issue to note, though. On newer computers the game has varied performance; on some machines it can be hard to get running properly, and it does have some bugs. This is probably part of why it died off online -- many people were simply not able to play it anymore. If it runs or can be gotten to run on your system, however, it is worth the effort.
The game's controls are simple, but may take a little while to get used to. The game controls like a third-person vehicular shooter with standard mouse and keyboard controls, but the difference here is that you control the BFT's movement (driving forward and backward and turning) with the keyboard while the camera, and thus the gunsight, is controlled with the mouse. The camera does autocenter behind the BFT, but if you move the mouse around you are fully able to turn turret of the tank (and thus the camera) around so you can drive in one direction and shoot in another. When combined with the great speed that the tanks drive at and the game's low gravity that sends you flying into the air with the slightest bump like something out of a SF Rush game, it is a somewhat unique experience. The controls work great and let you both move very quickly and precisely shoot your targets, and just driving around or shooting at things is exciting.
In addition to the original tank form, as you progress through the game you gain the ability to transform the BFT into three new forms, including a boat, a hovercraft, and a submarine. These transformations aren't as useful as they may sound, however, as most of the time you just use those other forms in the specific places they are needed -- the submarine for underwater tunnels, the boat for crossing water, the hovercraft for going over lava or water -- and use the tank the rest of the time.
More useful, however, are the weapons your tank is armed with. Indeed, in many ways the game's focal point is its variety of weapons. In Recoil there are 18 weapons, with a weaker and stronger weapon mapped to each of the number keys from 1 to 9. The weapons are quite varied and interesting, ranging from your basic slow white (twin) gun and stronger red gunshots to bombs, rockets, mines, missiles, homing missiles, and even a mini-nuke. You start out with only a few weapons, but quickly amass a large and impressive arsenal. Some of the weapons are pretty fun to use and get quite powerful. The enemies are armed with the same kinds of weapons you are, and most of the time when you destroy an enemy they will drop a powerup that will either heal your health or will give you a refill of some of whatever weapon type it is that they use.
While the missions are large, well designed, and take some time to get through, and have plenty of large areas, alternate paths, and a variety of types of enemy vehicles that will try to oppose you, there are, unfortunately, only six of them. Each one has a very different theme and setting, from a forested beach to a burning lava mountain to a broken city, a Venice-like city of canals, and finally a large futuristic indoor installation. Each mission is broken up into several objectives you must accomplish, and before the mission you are given a voiced briefing detailing the details of each objective and where it is on a map of the level. Once in game you are sent transmissions as you achieve each one telling you where to go next and what is going on in the story. Missions may have four to six objectives to accomplish, and sometimes you can do them out of order in some of the more open, less linear levels. Also extending things are the staticky live action cutscenes in between levels. Even so, completing the game will not take long. The game's short length is its main drawback.
One aspect of why the single player missions work so well is is the game's great level design, which in addition to the elements mentioned above includes many destructible elements such as trees, cranes, barrels, or pillars, hidden areas to find your way to, for instance by blasting part of a platform and creating a ramp you can then jump off to an upper level, and plenty of room to drive around. To make getting lost in the large levels harder, the game has an automap on the HUD which marks your current mission objective's location on it. As a result it is hard to get lost, though sometimes it may be somewhat unclear about what exactly you are supposed to do, as the game does throw simple puzzles at you sometimes to keep things interesting. Figuring out those puzzles is a fun part of the game and they are well done, though when you are stuck on something you might not think that of course. For instance, sometimes you may need to find a somewhat hidden switch to shoot or blast a beam while it is crossing between two electrified pillars Assisting you here is the fact that, when you can shoot something, your target sight changes color from red to green so you always know when you are facing something that may be affected by your weapons. This will, for instance, let you know which bridge parts can be destroyed and when shooting at the thing won't break it anymore. Recoil makes blowing things up easy!
When the game first came out, helping to make up for the sadly short campaign was a fantastic multiplayer mode. All of them require multiple computers and multiple copies of the game, however, so actually playing them in this day and age might be difficult. While Westwood Chat, the online service, actually is still operational thanks to a group of fans that took over the Westwood Chat servers for the purpose of maintaining Command & Conquer/Red Alert online play who never removed Recoil's room in the service, no one ever actually is playing in that room so the fact that it still exists is somewhat elementary. In the rare occasion that a multiplayer Recoil game does happen, however, it is a lot of fun. The game has a nice variety of maps, with six to eight maps available for multiplayer use. One is a racing mode map which isn't as good, but the rest of the maps are for standard deathmatch or teams. While they are based off of the tilesets of the single player levels, the multiplayer levels are new levels and not just direct copies of the single-player levels. They are all just as well designed as the single player levels. The city level was particularly great, with plenty of jumps and destructible elements and places to hide in both high and low. While people were still playing it online Recoil was a really good multiplayer game. I don't know what game would be quite like this today.
In conclusion, Recoil is a very good third-person vehicular action game with great single player and great multiplayer. Every element of the game, from graphics to weapons to vehicles to level design, is very well thought out and well designed. It was an impressive effort from Zipper Interactive and showed how well they could do the genre, an impression solidified by their next work, MechWarrior 3, which was perhaps the last great PC mech sim. It is truly too bad that Zipper got bought by Sony and has been turning out nothing but SOCOM games for years now; I would have loved to have seen a Recoil 2. It's unfortunate that it will probably never happen.
Gameplay - 9/10
Graphics - 9/10
Sound - 8/10
Single Player - 9/10
Multi Player - 9/10
Other/Value - 10/10
Overall - 91% (not an average) While Recoil has aged, is short, and is sadly unplayable in multiplayer now, it is still a very good game.
Mohawk & Headphone Jack, for SNES, from Black Pearl, is a very, VERY strange game. This is one of the games I got this summer... a NeoGAF thread (about 2d platformers with Mario Galaxy-style gravity effects) got me to write most of this (though I've improved the writeup now), but it deserves to be here too because of how strange this game is. :loopy:
Seriously, I don't know if any other platformer fits that label any more perfectly... Mohawk & Headphone Jack is a very strange game. One the one hand it is a traditional platformer with plenty of jumping, attacking enemies, and collecting items. On the other hand it is unbelievably, ridiculously confusing, strange, and unique. Despite having a built-in detailed level map you can access from the pause menu, It's easily one of the most disorienting games ever made... if this sounds strange, it won't for long. :rolling:
To be short, M&HJ is done in 100% Mode 7. Instead of simply running through the levels, the levels rotate around you depending on the floor surface you are standing on and, if you jump, its size (and thus gravity). Your character stays standing upright, in the middle of the screen, while the level rotates or spins around you as you run and jump along the often curving paths. Levels are enclosed spaces -- there is a "floor" all around the edge of the level, with many obstacles and walls and small platforms and other things filling the inside of the level. You can't run around every corner, as 90 degree (or more) corners or edges are barriers you cannot run along. You can only run around more shallow curves. You will also jump through (and land on the top of, normal platformer style) thin platforms; you will only attach to the underside of larger, round or oval blocks of land. Every one of these surfaces you can run along has its own gravity that depends on its size, so that when you're on a floor and jump up and there is a platform (with a floor surface facing you -- a small round platform, for instance) at some point you'll get caught by that platform's gravity and the screen will flip around and you'll be on the platform, looking up at the floor you just jumped from (because remember, unlike something like MetalStorm for the NES (action/platformer with gravity flipping which causes you to attach to either the ceiling of floor), here your character always stays right-side-up while the level flips around behind you...). This gets very confusing very fast.
To compound the issue, you can run really, really fast. In fact, the characters in this game rival Sonic for his speed. There are very few enemies in the game and no instant-death pits, but because of your speed the enemies that there are can be tough to avoid because when you're running at full speed there's no way you'll see them before they hit you... the best solution is to attack constantly while you are running, because when you press the attack button you transform into a rolling spike-ball form, so you can attack while moving. Then you just either hope you run into the enemies or memorize their locations. Most of them are easy, but later on some harder ones you can't just run into but have to jump on or over show up, forcing you to be more cautious or die.
You complete the level by collecting 100 CDs and then finding the level exit. There are a lot of CDs so that part isn't hard... it's finding the exit that can be. Collecting special giant CDs unlocks additional music tracks. THe game does have a password save system so that you don't have to start over each time, thankfully, though of course you only get new passwords at the end of each level. Oh yes, the characters. Mohawk and Headphone Jack are these really strange guys made of putty or Play-Doh or Jello or something like that. They have naked, featureless (except for their faces and the hair on their heads and the headphones they always wear) yellow bodies which can change shape. They can squeeze through very narrow tubes by turning flat, they attack by turning into a rolling spiked wheel, using a Bomb causes your character to explode into little yellow bits which bounce around the screen for a while,damaging or destroying anything on it, before you reform where you were, some special powerups add things like a wheel on the bottom of the sprite instead of legs or wings instead of arms...
Most importantly, though, is that map on the menu screen. While you can complete level one without it, once you know it a bit at least, without that map the game would be IMPOSSIBLE. You just get so totally disoriented so quickly that it's ridiculous... it's a very interesting and unique game, but it's also almost unplayable in a way.
Perhaps oddly, despite the speed and strangeness, at times the game feels boring. Evemies do not respawn so that even if you get hit, if you kill the enemy in question until you die or get game over at least they'll stay dead (I don't remember offhand for sure if enemies respawn upon death, but I think they do). It is also true that there are no instant-death pits and few enemies, so you do spend a lot of time just running around and hitting spike (attack), though later on of course tougher enemies show up who require more strategy. Level one is a bit tame, really... level two is where the game really starts to get crazy. Level one does have its moments, though, particularly when you accidentally jump too high at the end of the level and find yourself back at the start with nothing to do but run through the stage again it's annoying (he almost does it at the end of the video... made me nervous for a moment...), but overall the first level isn't too bad. Level two gets weirder... the game introduces transit tubes (the things your guys squish into and speed through), warps that send you to some other location on the map (so the map is of only limited help, as it's not easy to identify the warp points or where they will send you on the zoomed-out Mode 7 map you scroll around), flames that hurt you badly (but that you need to get past anyway, of course), a giant double infinite figure-eight loop... but yes, you spend a lot of time running around lost or watching the screen spin in circles. It allows you to run so fast that as soon as you jump on a small platform and start moving if you accidentally tap jump you have NO IDEA where you'll end up...yeah, 'weird and unique' here definitely also comes along with 'frustrating and disorienting'. Even so, it's a quite interesting game, that's for sure. I gave up on trying to beat it after a couple of levels, but it's pretty interesting. And what's wrong with playing a game where you're not in danger of being killed every two seconds, really? Well, unless you do what the game lets you and unthinkingly run around, that is... then you'll die fast just from running into enemies. :)
Despite the flaws, Mohawk & Headphone Jack is worth the experience, for sure, if just because of its uniqueness. It's just so totally weird and different that it should be seen. It's kind of too bad that it was totally unknown at the time of its release... It came out in 1995 and vanished immediately. Finding almost any information about it online is very difficult. I do remember an article about it in Nintendo Power back in 1995 around its release, but that's it... There is a decent video review of the game on Youtube, though. The voiceover isn't that great, but the video shows the game nicely (though he spends a really long time in a bonus room near the beginning. Really once you've run around that sphere and picked up the few items there you're supposed to warp back, not float around in space for like a minuite. :))... or rather, it shows how weird it is. It's kind of amazing a game this bizarre actually got published, in a way... they certainly showed what you can do with Mode 7, though, and the gravity effects are quite interesting.
Watch the video. It must be seen!
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Also, it would seem that they are doing the "console exclusive thing again. Vader on PS3, Yoda on 360, and squat for Wii. (Fact is, companies are really not interested in the massive overhauls they'd need to do to the games on those platforms to get them to play on the Wii.)
Remember when I suggested that EVERY world should be featured in the Kingdom Hearts series at least once, from like every fictional thing ever devised? I seem to recall someone fervently shouting in a mad pitch that there's no way George Lucas would just do something like that. Well, doesn't seem so crazy now does it?
Because I have PH now so that thread is outdated. :)
Yesterday
--
Sunset Riders (Genesis)
ESWAT - City Under Siege (Genesis)
Space Invaders (SNES)
Dead Or Alive (PSX)
Yoshi's Island DS (DS)
$15 for the first four, $11 for Yoshi's Island DS.
Today (from a place I hadn't been in before...)
--
Redjack: Revenge of the Brethren (PC CD) (complete, in box, sealed)
Descent: Freespace (PC DVD version) (disc only)
Claw (PC DVD version) (disc and case only)
PowerSlide (PC CD) (disc and case only)
$25 for all four. The place had a few more good (PC) games -- complete in box: RoboSport (Maxis), HardBall 5, X-COM: Terror from the Deep, and MetalTech: EarthSiege, and others (including boxed versions of X-Wing (floppy version) and Rebel Assault II, but I have those games already... from collections and not original boxes, but I have them...), and disc/case only: SimIsle, SoulBringer, Heroes Chronicles (forget which one of them), Amazon Trail II, and a couple of others, but I just got a few.
