Tag: joe danger

#oneaday Day 76: The Alternative Video Game BAFTAs

So the BAFTA Video Games Awards happened. Last night, in fact. And while the nominations were fairly predictable, there was a relatively pleasing spread of different titles that actually won. In fact, I did a lovely writeup over at GamePro that you should probably go read.

But enough of that. Those awards are all very conventional. So I thought I’d come up with some of my own. Without further ado, I present the Alternative Video Game BAFTAs.

Most Opportunities To Go To The Toilet In A Video Game

Winner: Heavy Rain, where despite the fact there is no logical reason for you to make your characters go to the toilet, you find yourself doing so anyway.

Honourable mention: The Sims 3, which only didn’t win because it didn’t come out in 2010, unless you count the console version, which I don’t, except when putting it in as an Honourable Mention.

Game No-One Had Heard Of When I Played But Now Most People Have Heard Of

Winner: Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, one of the most charming games I played last year, promptly got very excited about and some months later everyone else seemed to discover.

Game That Has Been On My Shelf The Longest, Unopened

Winner: Resident Evil 4 on PlayStation 2, which I’m not sure counts any more because I started playing it last night.

Former Winner: Final Fantasy XII.

The “MMO That Isn’t Boring” Award

Winner: DC Universe Online, which I am aware came out in January of this year, not last year, but these are my awards, so my rules.

Game Most Likely To Make You Feel Uncomfortable If Someone Walks In On You Playing It

Winner: Deathsmiles, for reasons that are well-documented.

Runner-Up: Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale. “That looks shit and cheesy and their voices are really annoying and my God that music!” “No, but it’s really funny! Seriously!” “Shut up. I’m going to go and play Starcraft.”

Honourable Mention: Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, the most summery game in the Universe. I know it didn’t come out last year, but I still play it in the summertime because it’s like being on holiday with improbably-proportioned women who like jetskiing. I have an Achievement and everything.

Sadomasochism Award

Winner: Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, a game which enjoys kicking you in the balls so much that it’s enough to put most people off within a matter of minutes. I, on the other hand, have sunk over 20 hours into it and have just started playing it again.

The “I Love You But You Make Me Angry” Award

Winner: Mass Effect 2, for being a magnificent game that I finished before all the DLC came out and considered going back to just to play the extra stuff but then decided to wait for the “definitive” PS3 version, which then has some extra DLC announced for it, too. STOP IT. STOP MAKING THAT GAME. YOU FINISHED IT. MAKE THE SEQUEL. AND DON’T FUCK IT UP OR RUSH IT OR POST REVIEWS FOR IT ON METACRITIC.

The Game I Keep Forgetting Exists But Is Actually Really Good

Winner: Frozen Synapse, a wonderfully inventive take on the competitive shooter that is turn-based and play-by-email. And awesome.

The Game I Got Best At While I Was Really Totally Off My Face On Expensive Cider

Winner: Joe Danger, a game which my friend Sam and I started playing early in the evening, got drunk and accidentally played for over 3 hours. Highlight of the night was when I discovered how to get massive scores while Sam was in the toilet, meaning that when he came back my average score was roughly 1,000 times more than when he left.

Best Game

Winner: Deadly Premonition. No further explanation required.

Best Video Game Podcast

Winner: The Squadron of Shame SquadCast. Of course.

The Alternative BAFTA Fellowship

Winner: @SpaceDrakeCF from Carpe Fulgur for the magnificent localisation job on Recettear. We’re talking a translation of Phoenix Wright quality here. Not only that, but he was consistently entertaining to follow during GDC and provided some excellent “liveblogs” of the sessions he attended.

#oneaday, Day 189: Keeping Score

I used to hate maths lessons when I was younger. I mean pure, unbridled hatred; we’re talking full on teenage strops here. Not at school, obviously—that would be bad and wrong of course, and would have done enormous damage to my “he’s a good kid” reputation, something which was only really damaged once when I punched a bully in the face in front of the headteacher (it was justified… well, not the headteacher bit)—but… what was I saying? Oh right, maths and strops. No, maths homework used to piss me off enormously. I never used to see the point of it. Particularly the more esoteric, abstract side of things. When was I ever going to need to measure a triangle? (I know, now.) When was I ever going to need to “solve” an algebraic equation with no numbers in it? (I’m still a little stumped on this one.) What the fuck is a logarithm? (I still don’t know; that’s one thing we never did at GCSE, and I gave up at A-level.)

But as much as anyone may hate maths, those little beasts, the numbers, creep into anything and everything we do. And sometimes they provide enormous amounts of entertainment.

Last night my soon-to-be-married friend Sam came by to drink some obscenely strong cider and play some video games. I casually suggested we try out Joe Danger on the PS3, as I’d downloaded it a while back and hadn’t done much with it, and Sam likes those impossibly-difficult physics-based motorcycle games that are all over the Internet. So we did, fueled by aforementioned obscenely strong cider.

Very quickly, we discovered Joe Danger‘s appeal. Racking up ridiculous scores. Much like the Tony Hawk’s series that once was, the joy in Joe Danger comes from stringing tricks together to get a huge score with a huge multiplier. Sam successfully managed to score about 3 million on one level and was justifiably pleased with this. Then I remembered something about the controls, and had a go at the same level. I scored 76 million. Sam was coming back from the kitchen with another bottle of cider while I was in the process of acquiring this score.

“What the— how did you do that?” he exclaimed.

I shared the secret. And thus began three hours of playing about four levels in Joe Danger in an attempt to beat the scores of my PSN friends—something we did admirably well, beating most of my nearest rivals by a factor of at least ten and, in one case, a factor of 100.

It brought back memories of the great Geometry Wars 2 conflicts of some time back… man, those were brutal.

Sam commented that he hadn’t really held an appreciation for the value of game scores prior to that moment. Of course, they’d always been there, and they were always a good indicator of progress. But Joe Danger—something about the way you rack up points in that game is spectacularly and enormously satisfying. And addictive. We looked at the clock having thought we’d only been playing for a short while. And it was well after midnight. Okay, the obscenely strong cider may have helped with the time kompression somehow. But it’s testament to the addictive quality of Joe Danger as a game that it kept us entertained and occupied—at many times, taking over 75 attempts at a level to do it without fucking something up—for a long time.

So, once you download Joe Danger, all I’m gonna say is “shoulder buttons”. Enjoy.