Christmas Wii U Time

Christmas has come and past. In that duration of family time spent eating food, drinking booze, and playing the greatest game of dice to steal my other cousin's presents! I had a real go of spending some time on my youngest cousin's Wii U console that he received from his Mum.

He got himself three games, Nintendo Land, New Super Mario Bros U, and ZombieU. First things first, as expected, after reading a billion articles about it from launch day, my cousin was whining about the big update that was required to start the system, however we were all occupied trying to help my Aunt out with the cooking that it wasn't so much of a problem, in fact we took the controller stand into the kitchen and sat the game pad on the kitchen counter so that we could glance at it to see so far it got to updating. This took about 30 mins or so, a crazy amount of time for a console update, but it was fortunate that at the time we were busy, so it wasn't a huge issue for us.

After doing the preparation on the cooking, the Wii U was waiting for us, and we popped New Super Mario Bros U into the system, and well, it's New Super Mario Bros, but it's in HD, finally. It was fun playing it with my cousins at the time, but it really is just the same game as the three games before it, which is kinda bad considering that between 1985 and 2007, almost every other Mario game was different to the next (OK OK, I know that the Japanese Super Mario Bros 2 was just a harder version of Mario1, but in the west we didn't see it until the SNES days). Since 2007 and the present, there's only been one original Mario game, Super Mario Land 3D. Which is pretty sad to be honest since I would love to see an Original Mario title for the Wii U in the same way that Mario 64 got me when I was 13. Still, I have to remember that the Game Cube and the Wii wasn't released with a real Mario game, and even if this is simply a game play clone of another Mario game, it's still a Mario game that got released with the system. The one thing I did get to check out was the ability to play the game on the GamePad, out the room where the Wii U was set up. This was kinda cool as I took it downstairs and could still play the game, the reception was pretty good, though there was a part of the kitchen and dining room that we couldn't get reception in, but in the living room it was loud, clear and responsive. From spending that little bit of time actually playing a game on the GamePad, I got to see the video quality. As I expected, it's not super duper HD like what you'd get on an HDTV, but it's what I'd like to call "Watching an HD video on Youtube" quality. There's a little bit of artifaction, and a tiny bit of colour bleed, but you'd have to be one of those lonely fools at your Christmas College Alumni dinners who's complaining about how one method of video encoding is better than the other, and before you say it, no it wasn't me, I was trying to toxicate myself with alcohol. All that being said, about being able to play on the pad is pretty cool, but it's not really worth the £300 price tag!

Zombie U, or what little I played of it, as my cousins kept stopping me when I attempted to play the single player campaign, so all that I got to play was the multiplayer game. I knew that the game itself was a single player affair, but to my cousins they use the typical Xbox 360 logic of "If game = FPS, then FPS has multiplayer mode like every other FPS". Which in this case it doesn't, the multiplayer on Zombie is a bit tacked on, a bit like what they did with Bioshock 2, but this multiplayer is a little different than your typical FPS death match or capture the flag, well, those modes are on there, but the difference is that player 2 uses the gamepad to populate the map with zombies. Each zombie is worth an amount of virus which you slowly earn back, or gain quickly if your zombies hurt the player 1. There are 3 different zombies to start with, the guard, as it's describes, it stand in a place and only attacks when the player approaches it. The Hunter, a Zombie that will keep on chasing after the player, and a grunt, which you use in the capture the flag mode so that Player 2 on the gamepad earns flags. To be honest, being player 2 on this is a little better then playing as the guy in the game, for starters you're really slow, and you can't keep the run button held down because your character will run out of breath. As my cousins played this together, one cousin would scream that he has to press a button to pick boxes up from the ground to get ammo and stuff and wishes it played more like a Call of Duty... Again, I'd hate to think that these fools though that it was a Left 4 Dead game, at least I'm more informed about this game than they are. The only way I could really give an opinion about this game was if I had a chance to play the single player game, as it's simply an FPS version of Dark Souls set in London, infected with zombies. Sounds great, but we HAD to play together, and the system wasn't mine fortunately, I'm not paying £300 for one of these.

The there's Nintendo Land, where I barely had a chance to play it, all I got to play was a mini game where once you collect coins from one game, you put it into a pachinko like machine where you play what I can only describe as 8-bit Peggle! You shoot a coin as if it's a pachinko ball bearing, and you have to put a coin in each of the holes at the bottom. The idea being you can't land a coin in the same hole, you have to get a coin in each hole to than earn a question mark block that places an item in the Nintendo Land park.

In conclusion, it's a little better actually having more time to play with the system, but I will still agree, even when they announced it, the price is too damn high. I mean sure there's a controller with a screen in it. But with the games that came out and the long updates, it's not worth the £300 price tag. The Wii U just feels like it was rushed to make it out before Christmas. The beauty about the original Wii was that it was cheap, had descent games at launch, despite no Mario game, at least there was a Zelda game, and it was a lot more "involved" than the Wii U. The system itself feels more like a system concentrated around the single player experience rather than the multiplayer, even though the modes were there, my cousins and I really wanted to use the Gamepad rather than look at the screen, which was pretty dull. In essence, the Wii-U needs to grow a bit before it'll become popular. It needs more games and more media exposure before it'll have the same kind of popularity that the system before had, and hopefully as it's now on par with the 360 and PS3, hopefully people won't find it has an excuse to throw poorly developed games on to it, I'm looking at you Ubisoft! Even if you did make ZombieU, you released all those terrible pet games on the Wii, so I'm keeping a good damn eye on you!

Review for Motocross Maniacs on the GameBoy

One game I freaking loved on the GameBoy as a kid was a motocross racing game called Motocross Maniacs, developed by Konami and published by Ultra. I originally had this game on a pirated cart that my Grandparents got for me on holiday to Lanzarotti. It came with four games on one cartridge, with a label on it that says “Game Carpridge”! The four games were Doctor Mario, Klax, Battle City and Motocross Maniacs. When I was younger I had played Excite Bike as it was in a collection of video games at my local Youth Club, the same place where I got to play an NES and Super Mario Bros for the first time, and I wasn't good at Excite Bike at all. But what's interesting with the Motocross Maniacs was that it was a clone of Excite bike, but made it more exciting as you would pull off insane tricks and go through loop the loops with turbo nitros. I sold the four in one cart to a pawn shop when I was a Teen, as I wanted to get a copy of Wetrix on the N64, what a crazy decision that was! Later on I bought a copy on eBay and relived an awesome unloved GameBoy Classic!

You could treat this game as a plagiarisation of Excite Bike, it feels very much like the game, to a certain extent it even copies game play mechanics in the Commodore 64 game, Kik-Start. The game is side scrolling, and you accelerate to the right, and you press left and right on the Dpad to lean back and forth. Oh yes! Even Trials have taken this concept, but where this game is at least a little to Excite Bike, Kik-Start and Trials is as I said above, there's Nitro! Now OK there's a Turbo boost in Excite Bike, but the nitro in this game is different. Rather than a constant thrust, it's a sudden burst of speed, and you'll use this on ramps (almost) all the time, and unlike Excite Bike, the Nitros are limited in Motocross Maniacs. 

Unlike Excite Bike, but more like Trials and Kik-Start, the game doesn't have lanes, rather it's a strictly side view on a single lane. There are three game play modes, Solo, Vs Computer and Vs 2-Player. Solo is simply a single player affair whereby you need to finish 2 laps of a track within a qualifying time, Vs Computer is a race between you a computer controlled racer, in order to win each track you need to beat the computer. And Vs 2-Player is simply the two player mode where you would use a link cable between you and a buddy and race each other.

As I said above, what makes this different to Excite Bike are the crazy loops and platforms you have to go through and over. If you want to get through those loops you'll need nitro, but again you'll need to keep an eye on your nitro counter on the bottom right of the screen in case you start to run out, but most loops will have power ups to extend your nitro and time, so they're still worth doing. Later on in the game, you'll have much more complicated loops and platforms, many of these have been used in Trails, most of these you might have to use your nitro two or three times to get around. So you'll really have to economise on those nitros in later levels.

What makes this game different to the other games are power ups. There are six power ups that you can collect in this game, each power up is simply a letter. N For Nitro, pick this up to earn an extra nitro boost, S for Speed, this will allow you to push up your gears to get extra speed, but if you fall over you'll lose it. R for Radius Tires, this allows you to handle ramps better, and again if you lose it if you crash. T for Time, earn extra time in the game, I forgot to mention that not only do you have a qualifying time, but there's a timer where if it hits zero it's game over, grabbing "T"'s will increase the time you have in the level. J for Jet, this allows you to use nitros to keep yourself air born, but you'll still have to keep an eye on the nitros that you are using up. And finally there's a power up with no letter as it's invisible, but there are 3 "Mini Maniacs" that you can collect in each stage, and they're achieved by performing flips off certain ramps with good timing.

The music in the game might sound a little off for a stunt racing game, but it's really catchy. It's hard to describe how good the music is without actually playing it, so here's a Youtube video!

The game itself is a bit of an unloved classic in my book, for a GameBoy game it's one of the better early GameBoy games that should be in everyone's collection. If you enjoyed Excite Bike, Kik-Start and/or Trials, this is a game you should hunt for and play it. It's well worth finding a copy!

Personal Opinion: Console gaming now...

OK, I'll admit, I've been pretty bad at keeping up with this blog, so I'm going to write this up, my opinion on the current state of console gaming...

Recently, well I say "Recently", over the year, I've hardly touched any of my consoles; sure people use the classic "Hur hur! my Wii collects dust" quote to sound like everyone else. But for me, all three of my current generation consoles are sitting around not doing a lot. I might go and check what the latest downloadable game is, but with this thing called "The Internet" and "Other people doing it for you", you can use open up a web browser on your PC and look it up. Plus with downloadable games on Steam out beating the likes of retail prices on current console games, the price of PC components dropping in price (OK, OK, I know about the stupid Hard drive Indonesian flooding thing that happened last year and the prices haven't dropped since after the shortage, blah blah blah) and the shire amount of promoted indie games; PC gaming is just that much more attractive to me than console gaming. Let me elaborate!

Nintendo Wii:

Great game...  But it was the only great game this year for the Wii

Apart from the new Rhythm Heaven game, nothing has really come out, I mean sure La Mulana FINALLY came out on WiiWare, but that got busted when 3 weeks later it got released on GOG, and since then I haven't touched the Wii since I went stupid and bought the same damn game on the PC through GOG. Now it's understandable that Nintendo hasn't done much with the Wii this year due to the release of the WiiU in November. But what a well to knock out a format that made you print money! Sure, half the internet bashed the Wii with the typical "It's underpowered wah wah wah"", "The online sucks wah wah wah"", "I hate motion controls wah, wah, wah!"; but in my honest opinion, I liked what the Wii offered, even if every other company tried to make their own pathetic version of Wii Sports, there was a good amount of games on the system. But now with the Wii U out with hardly any worth while games on launch and with a silly price tag, Nintendo has kinda stubbed it's little toe on the door frame this year, not to mention releasing four "New" Super Mario Bros games, all which have similar game play mechanics, in six years. They're re-using Mario like how Activision is pumping out a new Call of Duty each year!

Sure there might be new online content, challenges and levels, it's still pretty much the same game it was on the DS.

Microsoft XBox 360:

My PC brings all the games to the yard, damn right it's better than yours...

Like to spend money on a service that already exists on other systems where it's free!?!?!?!  Sure you do! You're an Xbox Live Gold account owner, and you are totally oblivious to the fact that people playing games online on the PC don't have to pay a thing...     ...well unless it's an MMO. Still! As silly morons pull out $50 a year to play Call of Duty and Halo 4 (Seriously now, Halo 4! talk about sticking to a "TRILOGY!"), I can play Left 4 Dead, Dark Souls, Portal 2, Serious Sam 3, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Dead Island, Earth Defence Force, and good ol' Killing Floor! (...oh dang, that's not on 360 is it now?) for no additional fee, and the online experience is pretty descent. Non of this "Super Lag" that Live bozos think PC gaming is like. But apart from things such as online gaming, the hilarity of the 360 is simply the fact that about 75% of it's games will get it's way on the PC, and the likelihood is that it'll be cheaper on the PC too.

OK, OK, the prices are barely any different here, but the PC version is still cheaper!

Plus, my PC's specification kicks the 360 in the balls big time. We all need to remember that the 360 was released back in 2005, seven years a go! The system only has 512 Mega Bytes of RAM for crying out loud! My PC has 8 Giga Bytes of RAM. Now sure I spent about £600+ on my PC, which is 3 times the price of an XBox 360, but after paying £40 a year over the course of seven years, if you had XBox live since it's launch, you would've invested the same amount of dough that could've been spent on a descent PC that could a lot more than what a 360 do, I mean come on, it took seven years to actually get Internet Explorer on the 360, and you need to use Kinect, sorry I'm going to laugh full heartedly to myself...

Then again, this year for my 360 wasn't totally dead, at least I played a game on it that hasn't got a PC release, Red Dead Redemption. My friend gave this game to me a couple of Christmases a go and I wasn't interested in it, however just like with Hotline Miami and Fallout 3, I would discover that Red Dead Redemption is a pretty good game. But still, if it did have a PC release like L.A. Noire did, I might have picked up the PC edition of the game.

Sony PlayStation 3:

OK, I'll admit, this has some recent love from me as there's a small community of people on the GameGavel forums setting up online games of Worms Revolution on the PS3. This year, I have purchased games for the PS3, but most of these felt like expensive short thrills rather than engaging entertainment. For example I got Catherine, a great puzzle game that I was waiting for ages as it got released this year in Europe, but it was released last year in the US. I purchased Street X Tekken too, and had the same experience, a game I really wanted to get, to find that I would barely play it. Hopefully with Worm Revolution, and playing it with the folks at GameGavel might spark an interest in playing more PS3 games, but looking at what's coming for the PS3 and nothing interests me, apart from the undated "The Last Guardian"...

You have no idea how much I want this game!

As a big fan of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, the Last Guardian is the next game in the series, featuring a huge monster that appears to be friendly to you, together you avoid guards who are trying to find you and put you back into the temples prison. As exciting as it might be, the game has been in hiatus for a stupidly long time, and a lot of the team behind the development of the game have either retired or quit, which isn't a good sign! Seriously though, to have such a big title like this slip would be bad for Sony and Team ICO. I don't know the details, politics and reasons for such a long delay, as this game was first shown back in 2009. But with it's release in question, it's pretty damn sour and makes me wonder if Sony understands what they're doing.

OH WELL! LET'S DUPLICATE SUPER SMASH BROS!

Trolololololololololololo!  ...urgh...

So there you have it. I ranted enough for this evening...

I'll make sure the next blog is a review, heh!

What made this Nintendo fan-boy broaden his horizons?

As a kid in the nineties, Super Mario was my hero, and Nintendo is where you played Mario games. My first experience with Sega and Sonic wasn't a great one as I thought it was too fast and too hard for my 7 year old mind. So through out the nineties I was a big supporter and fan of Nintendo, disliking Sega, and eventually disliking Sony due to the PlayStation's “slow” loading discs. But by the turn of the Millennium, my tastes in video games were going to grow a lot, but how did this once Nintendo Fan boy buy himself a PlayStation in 2001 you ask?!

Dance Dance Revolution and Dancing Stage...

Yup, it's a little embarrassing to admit it, but when I went to the Millennium Dome in London back in 1999, there was a tiny arcade inside, and one of the few machines inside, with a couple of Pinball machines and crane games was a Dancing Stage. For those outside Europe, Dancing Stage was the name to Dance Dance Revolution in Europe, no idea why, hunting on Google and Wikipedia didn't give any results either, but regardless to the name change, it was the same game by Konami with a couple of licensed tracks thrown in. I popped in a £1 coin and began to play the game. As to anyone playing a dance machine for the first time, I was terrible at it, but at least I got to my third and final round before failing. There was a lady in this tiny booth watching me play the game. And when I had finished she walked out and pulled out a plush toy from one of the crane games and had told me that I was the only person who had gotten to the third round since the Millennium Dome was opened. I was kinda chuffed, accepted the toy, and began to think on how to could get that game home.

That's where it struck me. The only Nintendo versions of Dancing Stage and Dance Dance Revolution were only available in Japan, there was a version on Game Boy Color that came with a mini platform you mounted on top on the portable as you make your fingers do the dancing. I thought that was pretty silly (I say that when most people think stomping your feat on pink and blue glass panels is silly!), there was an actual version of DDR on the N64 in Japan, but it was the Disney Rave Mix, Disney “Rave” Mix? I'd hate to see what happens to Mickey when dropping Es at a rave. In the mean while, I was waiting to go on holiday to the coast to scour the piers and arcades for actual Dance Machines. The waiting and hoping that a version of DDR and Dancing Stage could appear on the N64, Dancing Stage Euro Mix got released in 2001 for the PlayStation. At that point I thought to myself, I can't play DDR on the N64, I gotta go and get myself one of those “Slow Loading” PlayStations. At the time the PS2 was reaching it's first year in Europe, and I didn't care for it then, I wanted to see how cheap I could get a PlayStation 1 just so I could get my DDR fix. Before Christmas of 2001, I managed to buy an original PlayStation 1, not the PSOne, from a bloke at a Market/Car Boot sale for £40 (I still regret paying that price for a second-hand PlayStation) and got myself a copy of Dancing Stage Euro Mix and a dance mat from GAME. So I got what I wanted, a system that I got my DDR fix from. But as time slowly moved on, I would return to the same car boot sale for other PlayStation games that might grab my interest.

Someone bought this for £94.90!? Ouch...

Going with the Rhythm game theme, Europe got Beat Mania, think DJ Hero before DJ Hero existed, and was made by Konami, the same people who made Dancing Stage and DDR. It was a pack that came with a poorly made turn table controller that broke on me. I handed it back to the bloke at the car boot and demanded a refund, but he refused; at around the same time I noticed that GAME were selling off copies of Beat Mania to clear space in their warehouses for a fiver a piece, I bought one, then handed over the one I bought from the Car Boot Sale inside the box that I got from GAME to get my money back.

And into more Rhythm Games, I got a copy of Vib Ribbon. Now this is an interesting game as it never got a US release. Developed by Nana Onsha, the same team behind Parappa the Rapper. Vib Ribbon was a simple game whereby you jump over obstacles of different shapes generated from the sound being made from your music CDs. There are 8 different obstacles, each obstacle had to be jumped over in a different way by pressing a different button on the PlayStation controller; some required you to press two buttons at once. Think of this game like a Canabalt or Temple Run; you play as a wire frame bunny rabbit character who is running to the right (or the left depending on the camera angle) and you jump over holes and walls, it's a rhythm version of an endless runner game, except it's not really endless as the level would end at the end of the track.

Something a little different from Rhythm games, Final Fantasy IX. Before I got the PlayStation, I owned the PC version of Final Fantasy VII, and loved the crap out of it. There was a version of Final Fantasy VIII for the PC, but I didn't know where to find a copy, and Final Fantasy IX never had a PC release. But with my own PlayStation, and a WH Smith £10 book voucher, I got myself a copy of Final Fantasy IX. For the time I had it I enjoyed it, though I didn't beat it, and by the time the GameCube came out, I traded it in for a copy of Super Smash Bros Melee at a local small Games Shop that I would eventually hate big time.

After this revelation in gaming, this Nintendo Fan Boy was fan boy no more, my taste in games were broaden, and soon after picked myself up a DreamCast, and used eBay and Car Boot sales to pick up other consoles such as the Master System, a Mega Drive, and later on pick up a TurboGrafx and an Atari 2600.

So yeah, DDR made me like other systems, Let's dance!

Dont ask me why exercising anthropomorphic rabbits and Cotton Eye Joe have in common...  Only Konami knows! lol!

Review for Hotline Miami on PC.

OK, sometimes there's a game that I glance at, slightly ignore it, buy it on the cheap, and discover that it's the best thing since sliced bread, the last time I experienced anything like this was with Bethesda’s Fallout 3. I had no real interest in the game, and I bought it after seeing a cheap deal on Cheap Ass Gamer, and after leaving it in shrink wrap after a day or two, I put it into my 360 and was spell bound by it's awesomeness! Fast forward to the present day, the Steam Black Friday deals come up, and I purchase Hotline Miami on a whim as it was cheap; you can't beat cheap right? Well technically free is better than cheap, but I'm losing the point here. A few weeks after leaving Hotline Miami in my Steam list, curiosity began to kick in and I double click the game to run it, and POW was I in for a surprise.

The game began with a title screen in Cyrillic and I wasn't even sure if I was even playing Hotline Miami; it doesn't help when you cant read Cyrillic. But as the game began, you get thrown into a typical tutorial where it teaches you how to knock out, kill, and shoot your enemies, the agents in white suits. But after the tutorial, you're thrown into the game and realise why you needed the tutorial, because you're going to die, over and over again. Not just because you're not quite used to the controls, but because you have to self teach yourself the techniques and strategies of each level. Fortunately there are unlimited lives, and this is good thing, because I once died twenty five times in one level over the space of ten minutes, and that's the beauty of this game, no matter how many times I died in this game, I was never once frustrated, I always felt that the reason for why I died was due to making a bad move, not knowing what was up next and/or not timing things right. But in the same ways that Super Ghouls and Ghosts masochistically makes you want to play the game again even though you miserably failed, Hotline Miami does the same thing, you just WANT to beat the level, so you'll do it over and over again, planning out new routes, thinking about how to take out your enemies and what weapons to use. Even though this game is a top down action shooter that feels like what would happen if the original Grand Theft Auto played like Smash TV, but the game has a nice balance of stealth, and strategy too without it being too much of the other. It's not overly stealth-like on the lines of Metal Gear Solid or Hitman, and it doesn't use too much strategy like XCOM or Red Alert; you can pretty much treat the game like a full-on action game, but without knowing what's coming up next you're bound to get killed, so a little strategy and timing will help a lot on getting through those levels that you're so damn eager to beat!

The graphics are very reminiscent of the original Grand Theft Auto. Everything is seen in a top down look, and there's plenty of pixelated blood on the floor when you smite your enemies with a lead pipe or a machine gun. However unlike GTA, you don't drive. Each level is a building whereby your object is (nearly) the same in every level; kill everyone. Killing in this game isn't just a case of going on a shooting spree, you have a variety of weapons of both melee and fire arms. Melee weapons ranging from knifes to katanas and firearms ranging from a basic un-silenced hand gun to an over kill Scorpion Sub Machine gun. But it's all to do with how you kill off each white suit claded enemy is where the real game play comes in. The game features a scoring system similar to the likes of Devil May Cry and Bullet Storm where by putting variation to your kills you score you bigger points rather than doing the same thing over and over again. This is where strategy kicks in, you look at the screen and see the enemies in each room and think about how you can pick them off to earn more points so you can unlock new weapons in the game. For example in one level, you might kick a door down that's near an enemy, which makes him fall over, you pick up the knife he was carrying, pick him up and slice his neck with it. Walk into the next with said knife and throw it towards the next victim and take his shot gun, then put some holes in the chest of the next two or three enemies, this will grab attention as it makes noise, so time to grab that semi automatic off floor and hide behind the door and pump some lead into the unfortunate fools who creep into the room and create a pile of bodies in middle of the room and so on. You could just knife everyone, but by doing the example above will give you more points than just knifing everyone.

The next cool feature is the masks, the character you play, simply called “Jacket”, due to his high school prep jacket that he likes to wear, has a selection of rubber masks that he wears over his face in each level. Each mask is a face of an animal, and each animal mask gives Jacket a perk. You start with a Chicken mask, named Richard (of course, got to have a name for each mask you know), which doesn't give you a perk, but as you beat each level, you earn a new mask such as Rasmus the Owl mask that gives you hints for secrets in each level, or Tony the Tiger that allows you to cause instant kills by punching enemies with your bare fists, my favourite mask by the way! You select a mask before you enter a level, hiding Jacket's identity, not that Jacket really has an identity, sometimes you can see his face as he becomes un-masked from a death, but the sprites are not that well detailed anyway, but you get the gist. Experimenting with the masks will help you find out which mask you like better, though you can't change masks after getting yourself killed in a level. You can only select a mask as you begin a level, not after each time you restart a level, which does give the game an element of challenge as you try to figure out how to beat a level with a certain mask, though I have found myself having to quit the level and starting it again to use a different mask that takes away the challenge a bit, then again removing the quit option would make the game suck from a user interface side of things. The only issues I found with the gameplay was the slight problem with point blanc shooting. When I was early in the game, I found this weird little bug where I would try to shoot a guy with my shot gun, to find out I shot the guy behind him, as if there was a magic gap between the point of my shot gun, and the spray of the shell. The guy in front of me killed me off with a lead pipe. From this point on I decided that point blanc shooting was a terrible idea in this game and that for close range combat I would only use melee weapons.

As controls are concerned, a game that has twin stick like game play works amazingly well with the keyboard and mouse. The problem I've had with other PC twin stick shooters is that their mouse and keyboard controls aren't really that great. But what makes Hotline Miami good is the fact that Jacket is (nearly) in the middle of the screen at all times. There are times where Jacket might be a bit off from the centre of the screen, but never enough to make the aiming with a mouse a chore like on PomPom's Mutant Storm. The Game does provide support for the 360 controller, though there are issues if you don't have the latest drivers for it, but when it works it works, but I found out that as much as the 360 controller is fine, I still preferred the mouse and keyboard controls, but I can see how people might prefer to use a 360 pad if they're more in tuned with console gaming.

The sound track in this game is simply awesome! It has an 80s action film feel to it from a collection of different artists such as Sun Araw, M.O.O.N. , Jasper Byrne, El Huervo and many others that make up a great selection of tunes that give the game it's gritty, “over exposed film” feel, it's as if it feels like a 70s Grindhouse movie, but based in the 80s, and it totally fits into it's ultra violent theme. You can listen to the awesome sound track free on SoundCloud. https://soundcloud.com/devolverdigital/sets/hotline-miami-official

The story itself is minimalist, yet feels like the kind of plot you get from the likes of Fight Club. As you go through each level, you sometimes come across other mask wearing characters that ask you questions about why you go out killing, and it then turns into a quest to find out why you're doing the killing sprees that the person on the phone is asking you to do. There's even a scene where you find yourself in an out of body experience where you see yourself in a hospital bed in a coma. The story is very mysterious, trippy, and not told very well, but leaves you asking questions that you so want to ask Jonatan Söderström, the developer of the game, all the juicy details about the plot that’s missing from the game.

To conclude, I loved this game a lot! Out of all the games I got this year, this game that got released fairly late in the year is by far my favourite. Compared with games such as Dark Souls, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and The Walking Dead, this proves that a low budget indie game can become more impressive and enjoyable than mainstream games. As I repeat to other people on forums and Youtube videos, indie developers will bring a spark into the games industry that will make games a lot more interesting than seeing yearly sequels to Call of Duty and sports games. It's time for the video game lovers to show how games should be made rather than men in business suits!

You can purchase Hotline Miami on Steam or GOG.com for around $10/£7.