Tech Support 2.0: Konami hates PC gamers

Previously on Encompassing Everything:  Robyn's iPod falls to a mysterious bug which reduced it to only being useable as a door-stop or paperweight. 

The iPod has now been replaced with a shiny new one, with about 20 gigabytes less in memory because Apple doesn't make the 140gig version anymore, the idiots. This may seem like a strange measure, but to those who do not own iPods (about 2 in 500 people) , it's a hell of a lot better than getting it repaired by Apple because like everything else they do, it costs way more than it's worth.

Anyhoo, I have another technological gripe, this time against the gaming industry. To be more specific, Konami and Valve.

              

                  

Possibly my two favourite developers of fine digital distractions,  Valve and Konami  have teamed up recently to unleash Silent Hill Homecoming, the latest instalment of the Silent Hill franchise, upon the world through Valve's online PC game provider widget, Steam. Or at least, they've tried to.

Now, I bloody love Silent Hill, me, and I've thrown more cash at this series of games than I'd sometimes care to think about.  So hearing that Konami wouldn't be porting Silent Hill 5 to PCs gutted me immensely and made me wish I'd asked for  a PS3 or an Xbox 360 instead of a new bass guitar at Christmas.  Obviously I wasn't the only one feeling bruised, because Konami soon announced that they would be releasing the game through Steam at the same times as the console versions in September 2008. Yay! I suddenly had a reason to save my money up.

But September came and went; no Silent Hill. Then Konami announced that the PC and console versions would be delayed for Europe and would be released in November. Ah well, it happens eh? November passed as well. Then this bombshell was dropped; no Silent Hill 5 for Steam users in Europe until February 27th, for no reason at all. What?

Now it's February, and it's a day since the game was supposed to be out. Not a single piece of news on Steam or anywhere else about why it still hasn't been released, while the rest of the world has had this game for 5 months. Talk about unfair. I've been taunted by the Internet for living in The Netherlands through countless screenshots, reviews and playthroughs for the game which, try as I might, I just can't buy. I even downloaded a illegal Russian version of it, in the hope that it would work, but the damn thing had no sound and was terribly buggy. I am really beginning to think that I may never get to play the game at all.

Please Konami, get your bloody act together and give all of us PC owning Silent Hill fans some joy.

Valve, I will only forgive you if Left 4 Dead, which is waiting to be played even as I write this, is as good as everyone says.

Wii Hate You

I sense I'm about to make a substantial amount of people very angry...

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, my name is Clockwork Monkey and I am here to tell you that the Nintendo Wii is the worst games console ever.


I'll give you a few minutes to let that sink in.

...

Now you've hopefully stopped sharpening your pitchforks, I will explain myself. The Nintendo franchise has been around for ages now, and in it's bid to forever remain number 1 in the hearts of every human being under the age of 13, it's come out with some pretty gimmicky stuff in it's time; the DS with it's dual-screen fiasco, the Gameboy, the Game & Watch (going way back to 1980), Pokemon... the list goes on. Nintendo is THE company for gimmicks, it seems. However, no gimmick is bigger than the Wii, with its anaemic TV remote.

At the time of the Wii's release, it was hailed as one of the most innovative consoles of recent times. This was probably only because those journalists and critics responsible for giving awards such as this to the Wii all fancy themselves as the next student at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. The "Wiimote" is all very well if you want to wave your arms around like a orang-utan in a disco, but when used as a controller for, say, a platformer (Super Mario Chimney Sweep being a likely title) it has to be turned on it's side, and this makes for a altogether cripple-tastic gaming experience.

At the moment I have been charged with babysitting a Wii for my school Youth Club, and back when I first brought it home I was genuinely excited about playing it, as this was probably the closest I would ever get to owning a next-gen console without ram raiding my local Dixons. It came with 3 games that each posses what I can best describe as a "limited" style of gameplay- your average wavy stick party games like tennis or golf, which are fun to play with a crowd of friends in various stages of drunkenness, but you end up feeling like a friendless twat if you're playing them by yourself. In a last-ditch attempt at getting some use out of the thing, I wandered over to my local Videoland to try and rent some decent games that didn't involve pretending you were Harry Potter. The choice of games were very limited, ranging from "Generic Wavy Stick Adventure Fun Time 2" to "Generic Super Mario Platformer 145". So I walked away with Super Paper Mario for the Wii and Metal Gear Solid 3 for the PS2.

Now, I'll be honest here; I enjoyed Super Paper Mario much more than MGS3, but then Mario doesn't have a irritatingly gravelly voice and the reflexes of a two-legged spider. However, going back to my earlier complaint about the Wiimote, I ended up with severely mangled hands after about 2 hours of gameplay. There were attempts to include the wavy stick method by making it so that in order to reveal hidden doors and whatnot you had to wave the Wiimote around madly so you could get a sort of flash-light effect. That was about it for the so-called "usefulness" of the Wiimote. As for as I'm concerned there might as well have been a standard controller because the Wiimote didn't really work.

Now, I can hear people screaming already "Ah, but what about other games? The Wiimote is useful for those!". The Wiimote itself is useful for little more than waving about, as I have said before. Nintendo, in a attempt to squeeze more money out of the consumer has made add-ons for the 'mote, like plastic guitars or tennis rackets into which the Wiimote is slotted. I can see why this happened if you imagine what it would be like to play Guitar Hero with just a Wiimote. The fact is, the Wiimote is a pointless invention designed to be as edgy and original as possible, when in reality you could play any game just as well with a Ps2 controller and good-old God of War-style button mashing sequences. It'd be a lot cheaper and you'd be less likely to develop tennis-elbow.

In terms of the games available for the Wii, it goes without saying that most of the games include already-existing franchises (Legend of Zelda and Mario, I'm looking at you). It has already been said by many people that Mario should be left to retire, and I have to agree. Nintendo has been milking this franchise for many many years while not giving much thought to what other exciting and original games they could come up with, making the video game business as a whole even more stagnant and predictable than it already is. All you have to do is google a list of Wii games and you will see that a lot of them are recurring titles.
Perhaps the main reason for the domination of Nintendo-created titles is because few but the most childish games actually have the ability to implement and use the Wii for anything other than puzzle games or party games. Nintendo claimed that by releasing the Wii they would attract a wider audience of gamers. Perhaps if their perception of a gamer was something a little more than a pre-teen, and if they hadn't made the possibilities of the Wii so limited to everyone but themselves, they would be able to achieve this.

So, the Wii. A good console if you enjoy playing the same type of games while waving a white stick around and crippling yourself, but not much good for anything else. I myself will return to the charms of good old-fashioned PC gaming as soon as I find which box it's in.