Moderator: JC Denton
by icycalm » 16 Jan 2008 21:34
by hiya » 23 Jan 2008 22:42
by icycalm » 23 Jan 2008 23:04
hiya wrote:Holy shit man, all three people banned here were banned because they defended themselves.
hiya wrote:I wish you luck in your happy little world!
hiya wrote:Is it because you enjoy the anonymity of the Internet?
by Flying Omelette » 23 Jan 2008 23:51

by Yellowman » 25 Jan 2008 01:34
by Flying Omelette » 25 Jan 2008 04:08

by icycalm » 25 Jan 2008 04:33
Edge wrote:a game that knows it’s a game and wants you to know that it knows you know.
Edge wrote:it is proof that games can love their roots and use the quality of being a ‘game’ to give form to their stories – and excel at it.
by MAXCHAIN » 25 Jan 2008 05:36
by Sear Me » 25 Jan 2008 10:31
by Flying Omelette » 25 Jan 2008 12:24
Sear Me wrote:I read the reviews by IGN, Gamespot and Gamespy and the funny thing is, they all find the same flaws that icycalm discussed in his review. But for some unfathomable reason, they say that the game is STILL good, because combat is "simplistic, but so fun and stylized that it often drew a crowd around our desks while we played during office hours, and it's as much fun to witness second hand as it is to actually play".
LOL

by icycalm » 25 Jan 2008 17:06
ignore this shit site New super mario bros 2/5 HAHAHA
it gets way better! look at all of the games he has reviewed! one of them that he gave 5 stars is a side scroller with lesbians!
The tone he has throughout the review lack the objectiveness and integrity that you would find elsewhere.
by CosMind » 26 Jan 2008 15:38
Sear Me wrote:I read the reviews by IGN, Gamespot and Gamespy and the funny thing is, they all find the same flaws that icycalm discussed in his review. But for some unfathomable reason, they say that the game is STILL good, because combat is "simplistic, but so fun and stylized that it often drew a crowd around our desks while we played during office hours, and it's as much fun to witness second hand as it is to actually play".
LOL
by icycalm » 26 Jan 2008 21:33
Pardon for the double post, but MY GOD. I paid a visit to insomnia to see what all the hoopla was about. Every game that should have recieved a four or five-star score got one's and two's. (case in point, No More Heroes.) Everything that recieved a four or five were games that I had not even heard about in all my years. Shame on you Kotaku, for including insomnia in Frankenreviews.
by Dale » 27 Jan 2008 02:11
by sarsamis » 02 Feb 2008 18:20
icycalm wrote:I am really curious to find out what people in this forum think of this game. If anyone picks it up I'd appreciate your impressions.
sarsamis wrote:If you’re at all interested in current gaming, you already have a pretty clear idea what this game’s about, so I won’t go into depth here, but the basics are as follows: You’re an otaku named Travis Touchdown who won a lightsaber (I don’t give a flying rat’s ass what non-copyrighted term they used. It’s a lightsaber) on an online auction and took on a job to kill an assassin in order to get some money for a video game or something. Well it turns out that there’s a ranking system in place for assassins and this dude Travis killed was #11. Holt shit, that means you’re now a top-ranked assassin! This of course means that his next order of business is to take out the 10 above him and become #1. And to make things even better, the woman giving you your missions is really hot, and Travis, who’s obviously a virgin, might actually score some pussy from her if he becomes #1! HOLY SHIT!!!
The one hitch in all of that is the fact that it costs money to have these matches scheduled, so you send a great deal of time doing random chores for freaky cult people and taking on random assassination missions, many of which involve trying to suppress a certain pizza chain from growing. This aspect of the game was likely included out of spite since Suda 51 hates you, a lot.
If you've somehow neglected to realize it by now, the game's goofy. Oh, and notice my use of the word "game" there. Yes, this is actually a video game! Far from the interactive student films Suda is known for.
So yeah, that’s the premise in a nutshell. Before going on to covering individual aspects of the game, and because I have no idea where else to throw in this little tid-bit, I’ll inform you of the fact that Suda 51’s inspiration for his protagonist came from imagining Johnny Knoxville wielding a lightsaber, which is amazing! Seriously, the world of gaming would be a far better place if more developers thought like that. Goichi Suda is a genius, plain and simple.
Combat is simplistic in the sense that it’s no Ninja Gaiden, DMC, GOD HAND, etc, but it’s not completely brain dead. Travis has a sizable number of moves at his disposal and there are counter systems in place. On top of all that, there are a few hidden techniques that are fun to discover, and quite rewarding to pull off. Some mastery of strategy is required, although unfortunately, the skill requirement seems to peak out on the 3rd boss fight in the game. It comes back a bit around the end, but if you beat the 8th rank boss fight, you’re set as far as skill mastery goes and shouldn’t have an overly difficult time with the game from then on.
Assuming that the lack of depth can be looked past, the only complaint I have with the combat would be that dodging often messes up the camera and can be incredibly disorientating at the worst possible times. Not related to the combat engine itself per se, it also irked me how the conventions of guard breaking, and the possibilities for wrestling moves performing said breaks yields, fall apart in boss fights because bosses don’t guard. They just happen to be invincible for seemingly no reason most of the time. Now there are coherent means of stunning and performing wrestling moves on bosses, but it varies a bit from boss to boss, and feels very different compared to your bouts with normal enemies.
Speaking of normal enemies, they’re pretty funny. They usually make no sense at all and do nothing to justify their presence in the levels, but no one in their right mind should give a damn about that. If anything, the nonsensical enemies just add to the charm of it all. If you’re a good person who has played GOD HAND, you’ll see the obvious influence its enemies had on those found in NMH. Never do they succeed in being as amusing as GOD HAND’s thugs, but you can tell there was some effort put in towards reaching that end.
The graphics weren’t nearly as distinctive feeling as those found in Killer 7, but I could still dig its aesthetic and found it visually pleasing. My complaints in said field come from how inexcusably shallow the game is at times. For instance, you can knock down telephone polls with your bike, but the cable’s they’re supposedly holding up remain in the air, completely unaffected. Santa Destroy as a whole just reeks of laziness, though the insides of some of the shops look decent enough, as well as Travis’ home. I just wish there was an option to inspect his various anime dolls. I also think it would have been more rewarding if the game’s first 50 collectables were action figures for his shelves as opposed to bland trading cards of wrestling masks.
And damn, can the M rating just be lifted to 18+ already? Being able to take a glimpse of Travis’ running gag of a porn collection he’s always being called about might’ve been nice. And perhaps with a slightly higher rating, the game could’ve been more honest about the recharge motion that's mandatory in order to refill the battery in your lightsaber. It tells you to swing it from side to side, but it accepts any motion, including the masturbatory one he’s obviously doing, and that you will end up doing anyways. I mean, come on.
Now coming to the game’s soundtrack, there were some tracks I really liked, and I don’t recall ever being displeased by what I was hearing, but I felt it was in some dire need of more variety. I think at least 50% of the game is spent hearing that main theme song from the trailer. The only positive thing I can saw in regards to that would be that it adds a sort of coherent, uniform feeling to the game, although that doesn’t quite justify the music repetition all together. A few more songs would have made it a great soundtrack. As it stands now, it’s a decent one.
With the core elements out of the way, I’ll comment a bit on the game’s writing. For the most part, the writing is good. It’s funny, the characters were almost all enjoyable, and the rants from your employers in particular do a great deal to soften the blow from the tedious labor sims. This game has an abundance of charm that you won’t forget anytime soon. And there are plenty of little weeaboo cultural references and Easter eggs spread throughout. If I were the kind of person who squeals when they’re immensely pleased, this game would have had me embarrassed to play around others. And I imagine a break during the Destroy Man session would have been necessary for the sake of calming down. I just wish that “shining armor and fine words” line had somehow found its way into the final release.
There’s really only one place where I felt the writing was bad. Trying my best not to spoil anything, I will tell you that it falls apart in the end. It really made no sense at that point and the plot twists that occurred had no relevance to anything preceding them. Of course, if you’re a fan of Suda51’s work (read: you fanwank Killer 7 a lot and maybe wiki’d his other games), you were probably expecting a certain level of incoherence, but this never succeeds in being anything but incoherent whereas his disregard for common sense in Killer 7 comes across with a certain wit to it all along with the possibility that it may all actually mean something, coupled with the utter hilarity that ensues as you try to figure out what that meanng may be, or if it's there at all. That’s well-crafted nonsense right there. That nonsense, at one point or another, made me think in ways that few other games ever had. It may have very well been bullshit, but if so, it was bullshit with enough depth put behind it to make it worth analyzing. NMH lacked this depth, so in response to the bullshit it fed me I said “oh, ok” and remembered Commander Andy of the Cosmos yelling “Cop out! Cop out! Cop out! (repeating more times than I care to type it out)” at the end of that one episode of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast you, the reader, probably don’t remember (but more power to you if you do). The relevance to that beloved scene obviously being that the game’s incoherent ending felt like a huge cop out. Old man Suda finished his game, realized it wasn’t weird enough, feared the backlash he’d get from angry internet dwellers along with the fact that he may lose some niche-cred for making something sensible, and decided to do some lazy, last-minute undermining of his game’s story.
In regards to the ending though, all this bitching’s solely story based. The boss battles in the end were pretty great. Protip: Be sure to buy the MKIII before entering the last stage, and when the time comes, select the “view real ending" option (I have no idea why you’d pick anything else). You’ll be pleased with the results. Just as you’ll generally be pleased with the experience you’ve just had by the time you’re done with it. It’s an undeniably fun, rewarding game, and one of the few really great reasons to own a Wii. I don’t feel like slapping a number rating on this, but if you insist on there being a fraction of some sort to sum up the last 1,500 or so words in this post:
Not quite perfect, but a damn good time/10
by icycalm » 02 Feb 2008 21:37
sarsamis wrote:If you’re at all interested in current gaming, you already have a pretty clear idea what this game’s about, so I won’t go into depth here, but the basics are as follows: You’re an otaku named Travis Touchdown who won a lightsaber (I don’t give a flying rat’s ass what non-copyrighted term they used. It’s a lightsaber) on an online auction and took on a job to kill an assassin in order to get some money for a video game or something. Well it turns out that there’s a ranking system in place for assassins and this dude Travis killed was #11. Holt shit, that means you’re now a top-ranked assassin! This of course means that his next order of business is to take out the 10 above him and become #1. And to make things even better, the woman giving you your missions is really hot, and Travis, who’s obviously a virgin, might actually score some pussy from her if he becomes #1! HOLY SHIT!!!
The one hitch in all of that is the fact that it costs money to have these matches scheduled, so you send a great deal of time doing random chores for freaky cult people and taking on random assassination missions, many of which involve trying to suppress a certain pizza chain from growing. This aspect of the game was likely included out of spite since Suda 51 hates you, a lot.
Before going on to covering individual aspects of the game, and because I have no idea where else to throw in this little tid-bit, I’ll inform you of the fact that Suda 51’s inspiration for his protagonist came from imagining Johnny Knoxville wielding a lightsaber, which is amazing! Seriously, the world of gaming would be a far better place if more developers thought like that. Goichi Suda is a genius, plain and simple.
I just wish there was an option to inspect his various anime dolls. I also think it would have been more rewarding if the game’s first 50 collectables were action figures for his shelves as opposed to bland trading cards of wrestling masks.
With the core elements out of the way, I’ll comment a bit on the game’s writing. For the most part, the writing is good. It’s funny, the characters were almost all enjoyable, and the rants from your employers in particular do a great deal to soften the blow from the tedious labor sims. This game has an abundance of charm that you won’t forget anytime soon. And there are plenty of little weeaboo cultural references and Easter eggs spread throughout. If I were the kind of person who squeals when they’re immensely pleased, this game would have had me embarrassed to play around others. And I imagine a break during the Destroy Man session would have been necessary for the sake of calming down. I just wish that “shining armor and fine words” line had somehow found its way into the final release.
There’s really only one place where I felt the writing was bad. Trying my best not to spoil anything, I will tell you that it falls apart in the end. It really made no sense at that point and the plot twists that occurred had no relevance to anything preceding them. Of course, if you’re a fan of Suda51’s work (read: you fanwank Killer 7 a lot and maybe wiki’d his other games), you were probably expecting a certain level of incoherence, but this never succeeds in being anything but incoherent whereas his disregard for common sense in Killer 7 comes across with a certain wit to it all along with the possibility that it may all actually mean something, coupled with the utter hilarity that ensues as you try to figure out what that meanng may be, or if it's there at all. That’s well-crafted nonsense right there. That nonsense, at one point or another, made me think in ways that few other games ever had. It may have very well been bullshit, but if so, it was bullshit with enough depth put behind it to make it worth analyzing. NMH lacked this depth, so in response to the bullshit it fed me I said “oh, ok” and remembered Commander Andy of the Cosmos yelling “Cop out! Cop out! Cop out! (repeating more times than I care to type it out)” at the end of that one episode of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast you, the reader, probably don’t remember (but more power to you if you do). The relevance to that beloved scene obviously being that the game’s incoherent ending felt like a huge cop out. Old man Suda finished his game, realized it wasn’t weird enough, feared the backlash he’d get from angry internet dwellers along with the fact that he may lose some niche-cred for making something sensible, and decided to do some lazy, last-minute undermining of his game’s story.
sarsamis wrote:So yeah, that’s the premise in a nutshell.
sarsamis wrote:Combat is simplistic in the sense that it’s no Ninja Gaiden, DMC, GOD HAND, etc, but it’s not completely brain dead. Travis has a sizable number of moves at his disposal and there are counter systems in place. On top of all that, there are a few hidden techniques that are fun to discover, and quite rewarding to pull off.
sarsamis wrote:Some mastery of strategy is required, although unfortunately, the skill requirement seems to peak out on the 3rd boss fight in the game.
sarsamis wrote:Protip: Be sure to buy the MKIII before entering the last stage, and when the time comes, select the “view real ending" option (I have no idea why you’d pick anything else). You’ll be pleased with the results.
sarsamis wrote:Not related to the combat engine itself per se, it also irked me how the conventions of guard breaking, and the possibilities for wrestling moves performing said breaks yields, fall apart in boss fights because bosses don’t guard. They just happen to be invincible for seemingly no reason most of the time. Now there are coherent means of stunning and performing wrestling moves on bosses, but it varies a bit from boss to boss, and feels very different compared to your bouts with normal enemies.
by sarsamis » 02 Feb 2008 23:33
icycalm wrote:
What are these "counter systems" and "hidden techniques"? Can you be a bit more vague in the only part of your review that really matters?
And for the record, I only found one counter system, and it is not necessary to use it. Which means it may as well not be there.
icycalm wrote:I thought the skill requirement peaked at the very first boss. The other bosses seemed easier. Up until the fifth or sixth boss fight at least (that's how far into the game I got before I gave up on it) there is absolutely no mastery required. Pretty much everyone I know seems to get there in the same amount of time.
icycalm wrote:sarsamis wrote:Protip: Be sure to buy the MKIII before entering the last stage, and when the time comes, select the “view real ending" option (I have no idea why you’d pick anything else). You’ll be pleased with the results.
This comment is just awful. Adds absolutely nothing to your criticisms and robs the player of the joy of discovering this little tidbit on his own.
by bullethell » 03 Feb 2008 16:34
by icycalm » 04 Feb 2008 14:45
Anyway, as far as No More Heroes warranting as much analysis as killer7... yes, but certainly not the same kind of analysis. As a matter of fact, I now think that the plot FAQ that I wrote was also the wrong kind of analysis for killer7. I'm in the process of writing an essay that treats the game from a more mature critical slant, and that essay's part of a larger body of work that I'm not at liberty to discuss much right now.
However, regarding Suda's work in general, I'd say there's always significance where two polar ideas/experiences are presented side-by-side without any real mediating explanation. I think that one of his stylistic tendencies is to juxtapose opposite elements in a way that modifies how you perceive one or the other, and this style is more marked because he doesn't go out of his way to stick an editorial in there saying, "Hey, what an abrupt transition from x-treme violence to pedantic afterschool jobs!"
That's where a lot of the energy from his games comes from, I think, but I'm a little too mentally invested in getting this damned killer7 essay done to think about No More Heroes very critically right now.
If I were to make blind suppositions, though, based off how NMH contrasts with killer7, this is what I'd say:
(1) NMH probably doesn't have a plot, and any signs indicating the presence of a plot are totally arbitrary.
(2) The organization of those signs, however, and the player's experiences that parallel that organization probably is significant.
killer7 has a plot, though I don't think the plot exists for its own sake (as it does in other narrative-driven games). NMH has no plot, and I'm pretty sure it wants you to know that.
