Be Excellent To Each Other

Yes. I have a feeling that I'm duplicating at least one thread here, sorry, but I'm quite merrily pissed up (rare for me), and damnit, I have a mission. A mission to try and convince people to buy Cars, and other such games that you'd otherwise pass by. Not forgotten, simply unpopular, unknown, but maybe quite new.

Such as WARTECH (Wikipedia link), for the Xbox 360.

It's fucking awesome, and only £7.99 in Gamestation, new - so surely much cheaper elsewhere. Everyone go buy it now.

It's a one-on-one schmup-em-up. Sort of like Virtua On, but in (mostly) top-down 2D. 3D grafix in a 2D stylee. The gimmick is, you don't fight each other with blows (missus). No, it's all about creating a bullet hell for the other player.

I've played it briefly in two-player, and just now completed the story mode as one of the characters. It's perhaps a bit easy, but you can handicap yourself, and the choice of different characters (and sexy costumes) gives it legs.

I'd never have bought it, because it just looks like a rubbishy beat-em-up on the back. It's not, it's fucking superb. It's got beautiful anime artwork, a completely incomprehensible plot, and lots of amusingly translated stuff that is yelled at in Japanese. The graphics are lovely, the music is a gorgeous and entirely fitting thing that reminds me massively of recent Ridge Racer games (in fact, the menus are also v. similar). Also, Rez. It has ludicrously impressive special moves where you merge with a massive outer shell (of course different for each character) that are highly satisfying to use and to watch, but it IS possible to cope with the bullet hell onslaught, and very quickly you'll be slicing and dicing with attitude. There are also far more moves than there initially seems.

It's cheap and gorgeous and fun and I've never played anything like it. If you splashed down money on Ikaruga without even thinking, then you NEED to get this. If you just want something 'a bit different' and also cheap, get this. £8 in Gamestation, surely cheaper elsewhere.

IT HAS ONLINE PLAY.
IT WORKS PERFECTLY WITH THE HORI STICK.

It's >>>>>>>> Errrrr Defence Bores 2017, for example, and similarly cheap! Hoorah!

Phantom Crash (Xbox). Mr (sorry, Dr) Gaywood will be familiar with it, as it was his copy.

Basically, Genki, the makers of Tokyo Xtreme Racer - where you took a variety of cars and bolted a huge assortment of custom parts onto them before heading off into a testing ground to face off against computer oppponents- have taken the same concept and applied it to the long since dead mech battle genre.

So, you take a variety of mechs, and bolt a huge assortment of custom parts onto them, before heading off into a testing ground to face off against computer opponents.

Every day you can fight one battle, and at the end of each day the stock in each of the parts shops has changed... so if you really want a particular set of legs/wheels/hoverjets/rocket launchers, you'll have to hunt for it. Add to this a colourful collection of stickers, paintjobs and characters, one of the best soundtracks ever in a game, and you have an endlessly playable game.

Unfortunately, everyone ignored it, as at the same time, Mech Assault had just come out. Plus, it had one of those anime-style stories (albeit told entirely in cutscenes between battles that you could skip right past) that puts so many people off.



And yes, it is backwards compatible on the 360.

CUS, I like a lemon as much as the next man but I fucking hated Wartech. I paid £50 notes for it (well, via trade-ins) and it turned out to be incredibly thin and frustrating.

The controls are horrible, the graphics messy and the only bit of the game I didnt hate was the boss battle as that plays out like a standard shooter.

nah... Wartech isn't the one at all!

My two fave lemons are Two Worlds and Kingdom Under Fire. Both of which are much better than the reviews suggest.

I shall cautiously second the Wartech: Senko no Ronde recommendation. It's a very nice little game which I keep meaning to go back to, having only completed it with one of the characters and barely touched anything else in it. I am therefore unable to say that it's totally and utterly brilliant, but I enjoyed the few hours I put into it, and if I could only stop buying games I might eventually be able to go back and whore some more achievement points out of the bloody thing.

I'll also throw in my usual plea for anyone with a Wii and at least a partly functioning brain to go and buy Geometry Wars: Galaxies. Stupidly cheap, utterly magnificent - certainly well worth blowing that thick layer of dust off your respective Wii's for. Don't be tempted by the DS version instead - it's nice, but slows down to painful levels when there's more than about ten things on screen at once, leading to gargantuan (and ultimately boring) play sessions where you're almost hoping one of the plucky shapes will trundle through your all-encompassing fire and run into you.

HOSTILE WATERS

Despite sounding like an unfortunate bowel condition, it's actually awesome. Picture an RTS game. Now imagine instead of your team building bases and stuff, only the enemy does. Instead you're anchored off shore in a Carrier, with the ability to created a limited number (never more than 12) units with various abilities that you can insert various AIs with different personalities and temperaments. You can also control the unit yourself. You then have to basically bust the enemies base. The great thing is, it doesn't just automatically rebuild everything with unlimited cash. Sneak a stealth tank onto an island with power structures and take them out before you get spotted and the turrets stop firing. Disable their air production facilities and they're vulnerable to attack from the skies and so on.

Plus Warren Ellis wrote the story and Tom Baker narrates it.

Abomination.

Flawed and buggy the longer you played it, but I still get the urge to load it up and slaughter some yelling cultists with a well-aimed grenade even now. Great sound, thrilling music and some fun weapons and inventive, horrifying enemies (the BRAAAK cries of the Kindred when they spot you are etched forever into my mind) and a great sense of ever-increasing carnage and doom that you have to stop at all cost.

A real shame it was rushed out of the door - with the bugs and flabby bits fixed and tidied up, it could have been incredible, like Syndicate crossed with Aliens, X-COM, and something faintly disturbing like the Thing.

Is that a game called Abomination, or do you just not like Hostile Waters?

Metal Angel, why is a cat giving you orders?

This sounds rather like a newer Carrier Command, at least the way you've described it.

I recall your playing of this, yes. It never quite clicked with me although I did play a chunk of it, more than I did of Mechassault.

My favourite obscure game is The Fury for the Spectrum. I'm sure it was actually bobbins, and refuse to play it in an emulator today incase it is, but I have fond memories of playing this as a kid.

Mmm - nahhh, not quite... it's more like Zeewolf - the one-player co-op game. Or if you've never played Zeewolf, then perhaps Conqueror or Zarch/Virus. It's surprisingly not like Carrier Command, somehow, in my estimation.

It IS very good though, and I played the hell out of it when it first came out, wondering why nobody else was raving over it (though I think PC Gamer did, saying that). It gets a bit repetitive rather quickly, but that's about the worst *I* could say about it.


Indeed, according to Wikipedia its price dropped to a sixth of what it originally was, after its US launch. I haven't found the controls to be even slightly horrible! The graphics are lovely! I wasn't at all frustrated! Tsch. Thinness? Possibly - but there are several different characters to play through as, local and online multiplayer, and achievements to then go after. I wouldn't pay £50, but for £8 I think you'd be nuts not to.

Do you think if we ran at each other, Captain Kirk powerless to stop us, the universe would explode in a collision of matter and anit-matter?

My obscure fave is OTOGI (Xbox).

Beautiful visuals, excellent atmospheric audio and satisfying slashy smashy lightshow magic action. Levels can (and should) be smashed to fuck to find better weapons etc.

I'd love a 360 update of this.

Please.

loads more info here: http://uk.gamespot.com/xbox/action/otogi/index.html

Man I loved this game.

Wow, didn't think anyone else would remember it. I think it was the baffling nature of the wibbly mode that kept me coming back. It only ever seemed to give me a speed boost, I think, but I was sure you could make it do other things if you got the cross hair exactly centered or in one bit or something. I'd forgotten about the sniper.

Hostile Waters was always intended to be a modern reimagining of Carrier Command.

Sinister Agent: Abomination is arse. Sorry, but it is. While the idea is very appealing (it's a sort of I Am Legend setting, where a zombie-alien plague has ravaged the USA) it's both tedious and frustrating. Fighting dozens of virtually identical battles against boring AIs while you wait for your hopelessly slow scientists to finish research? I had enough of that in the X-Com games, thanks. And at least those were good. This is speaking as someone who has several times reinstalled the game with the same 'I'll give it a proper chance this time!' attitude only to erase it in disgust a few hours later. The same developers (Hothouse) also did Gangsters: Organised Crime, which was another game with a great premise and promising setup but was ultimately not that much fun.

CUS: Your SV (mech) in Phantom Crash is controlled by a 'CHiP' which is based on an animal... the size and shape of your targeting reticule is based on that animal's type of vision. Some are wide but not very tall, some are square, etc. The CHiP has a personality (a lot of the humour comes from the personality clashes between the CHiPs and their human owners) and also provides information during battle.

ooh The Fury! I remember that one. I loved the idea of it but was just never any good at playing it.