Right folks, the new Gamewank feed lives here:

“http://www.jamietrinca.co.uk/gamewank_eps/GW_feed.xml”

Please update your podcatchers!

iTunes instuctions here:

Go to Advanced>>Subscribe to Podcast

Paste “http://www.jamietrinca.co.uk/gamewank_eps/GW_feed.xml” (without the quotes, obviously) into the URL box and click OK.

A new show will appear in your podcast library called “Gamewank_New” – this is the proper feed from now on.

Unfortunately the iTunes store is a bit more complicated to update which requires manually editing our old feed, something which Jellycast keeps hidden from its users. I’m in contact with them hoping it can get sorted but for the time being we’re stuck with the iTunes store pointing to an inaccessible host.

If you guys know anyone who subscribes to Gamewank please let them know about the change. We will keep the old feed active for a while to give people a chance to update. We’ve built up quite a community and we’re pretty desperate not to shatter it during this process!

Thanks,

Jim n’ Prick

At Gamewank, we pride ourselves on our crap prizes, so we’re very proud to be offering a tenner that only works on the internet and one of Ric’s cock drawings. To be fair, it would look lovely framed. The cock drawing’s rubbish though.

What you have to do

As inspired by the response to our “Master Chief Fitbaw” ramble a few episodes ago, we’re looking for people to come up with game boxes or screenshots for ridiculous “x Fitbaw” videogames.

Imagine something like Final Fantasy Fitbaw or Left4Dead 5-a-side, some utterly incomprehensible marriage of any videogame, series or genre with football and send us your mock ups. Entries will feature in the second ever piece of Gamewank video content in which the winner will be decided by us.

You can send your images to us via the Facebook page, tweet them to @gamewank_jim, @laslo_panaflex or @KrystalSim with the hashtag #photofitbaw, or by good ol’ fashioned email to photofitbaw@gamewank.com.

Have your entries in by the 30th of September and we’ll announce the winner shortly after!

“Nah, no way”

I have no idea how you managed it, but we’re finalists in the Games Broadcast/Podcast category of the 2011 Games Media Awards. Richie and I would like to express a heartfelt “cheers bawbags!” to all those who listen and took the time to nominate.

It’s really amazing to us, to think that people enjoy our show enough to respond to what was, let’s be honest, a half-joking call to punt our name forward. By that I mean we seriously decided to try and get nominated but we were never serious about entertaining the possibility.

So, when we found out via twitter this morning that somehow you guys had pulled it off, we could scarcely believe it. We’re absolutely shitting our pants with glee up here.

 Thank you, you guys are absolutely amazing. We might not be the most prolific podcast (anyone who follows us on twitter will probably know why) but we love making it and we know people really respond to that.

Controversy, really?

Unfortunately, though, it appears we’ve inadvertently stepped on some toes. I don’t want to name names or risk putting any more weight on said tootsies, but there was a bit of a backlash about us, and few others in the same category, on Twitter.

Generally the response was congratulatory and positive, but there was more than one suggestion this morning that we didn’t deserve to be on the list, because we’re unknowns, we haven’t put much content up in 2011 (a fair cop) and that the name of our show is childish, among other reasons. Some, representing established, professional outlets with huge followings, were miffed that they had perhaps been snubbed while people like us had managed to worm our way into the nominations. I can’t blame any of them for that reaction, but having a go at us in the process isn’t entirely fair, is it? These were open nominations, there isn’t a single entry on the list that doesn’t deserve to be there. You guys nominated us, presumably, because you like what we do. I thought that was the point?

We were doing this for a bit of fun. That’s all. There was no intention to annoy anyone or undermine the good work of people for whom games media is their livelihood.

I hope this small controversy – a storm in a teacup, really – fizzles out, and that people can just be happy for the finalists. We’d like to wish everyone the best of luck in October!

More Gamewank

We’ll get back to the monthly schedule in the next couple of weeks, which will include a show from the Eurogamer Expo in London. Well, maybe not from the actual show floor but we’ll certainly be attending with our podcast hats on.

Cheers again folks!

- Jim

Metroid Other M is the fruits of a collaboration of Ninja Gaiden developers “Team Ninja” and original Metroid developers, Nintendo’s R&D1, who haven’t made a Metroid game since Zero Mission on the Gameboy Advance. It’s possibly one of the most ambitious Wii games to date.

One of the main selling points of the game is its mixture of game modes, as if various iterations of the series have been merged. It’s presented as a 3^rd person platformer/shooter with the ability to switch to a first person POV at any point by pointing the wiimote at the screen.  It’s a function that on a technical level, seems to work perfectly, the transition between both modes is smooth and seemless.

As for the overall look of the game, we are treated to the standard science fiction space station setting with a number of outdoor environments mixed in, while the design ideas aren’t particularly new, they have been executed rather nicely. It’s the old axiom of the Wii packing a hefty visual punch despite its minimal capabilities next to its mighty counterparts.

Interestingly, an attempt to give each environment some kind of context within the plot has been made, y’know, instead of doing the Star Trek thing of throwing a fucking Ice Planet in for the hell of it.  The Space Station in which the game is set is a research outpost, we discover that on this research outpost there are a number of creatures from different planets with varying environments, they are being experimented on for reasons that become clear later on in the story. So throughout the station each environment is created using…basically big assed holodecks…you know what a holodeck is…right?

Okay, so it wasn’t a hugely impressive method of tying it into the story, but the fact that it was considered was enough for me to raise an eyebrow.

The Metroid series has a specific gameplay model, one that has existed from the first title – one large area that becomes more accessible with every power up achieved. The games often left the player to their own devices as to figuring out where they were to go.  This caused 1 – a feeling of exploration and an illusion of freedom and 2 – the player to sometimes get utterly lost. In Other M, Samus is guided all of the way through the game by a commanding officer. It’s a funny one, because when you look at the structure of previous Metroid titles, there’s only really one path that can be taken through each game, but making the player find that path for themselves is what creates a strong feeling of exploration, in removing this element, you become more aware of the path you are taking.

Power ups appear as dots on the map every time you defeat enemies nearby, this brings some searching into the mix by making you look for items, something that the pace of the game caused me to forget to do, until the game became a bit harder later on.

Not that these changes are any kind of major problem, there’s a strong focus on action and the game pelts along at a fair pace, frankly the exploration would have slowed the game to a pace that would not have suited this new style.

Combat has also developed in a few new ways.  The game is played with a single lone Wiimote, held sideways, NES style, leaving fewer buttons than usual to play with.  This creates quite a streamlined combat experience, an auto aim feature takes precise aiming out of the picture entirely, which can make your average corridor fodder a little monotonous. Thankfully the reason for these decisions is to create a different combat style, you see the game is filled with numerous minibosses, and large creatures that aren’t taken out with the standard point, shoot and move model. You’ll find yourself taking time on a lot of enemy encounters, with combinations of shooting and the new melee features, or switching to first person mode to identify specific weaknesses, so while the combat is basic in some places, it requires much attention and effort in others.

What can be a pain and will often have you screaming at the television is the fact that missiles can only be fired in First Person mode and when you’re in that mode, you cannot move from the spot you’re on…it makes for some hellishly tricky boss battles.

The First person mode is integrated really well, it’s used in combat situations and also for investigation, a very basic form of the scanning mechanism used in the Prime series has been implemented here to help find power ups, passages and triggers to progress the gameplay.  There is one way the first person mode is used that bugged the tits off me. 3, maybe 4 times in the game, the action stops and forces you into first person and wont progress until you find the necessary object in the scene to trigger the next sequence. These objects are usually tiny and usually result in you wildly waving the cursor around the screen until you find something, it doesn’t ruin the overall experience, but it’s really annoying when it happens.

In what seems like a natural progression in an increased focus on Samus’s character from the last few games, Other M goes all out with its story.  The initial basic plot sees Samus investigating a space station where the entire staff seems to have disappeared, while there she meets some of her old Galactic Federation buddies, including commanding officer Adam Malkovich (remember? From Metroid Fusion?).  Samus decides to co-operate and deactivates most of her weapons for safety reasons, switching each one on as it becomes necessary, creating a new reason for her having minimal firepower at the beginning of the game. Mind you, when you see Samus climbing up a volcano, without heat shielding, watching her health bar drop, your suspension of disbelief is somewhat harder to hold on to.

The story itself is excellent, I found myself genuinely not knowing where some plot elements where going until I reached the end and I was deeply impressed in the way that Ridley was brought back into the action. Unfortunately the script was a bit mince, I’m not sure if it was a translation thing or what, but I found myself listening to long flat monologues from Samus as she explained vast amounts of exposition with her slightly rubbish voice.

But by the end I felt quite satisfied with the story, I was satisfied with the twists and I was impressed in the way it lead me towards some fully expected video game story clichés, before completely double bluffing me and throwing in something unexpected.

It is worth mentioning that I enjoyed the story as a fan, as someone who appreciated the reference to the Manga and the fully rendered flashbacks of Metroid 2 and Super Metroid. As a fan it was great to see consequences of the events from the previous games, both on the character of Samus and on the plot in general. As a fan there are some genuinely interesting story moments…but I strongly doubt it’s going to hold the average newcomer’s interest.

For the first 3 quarters of the game, the story isn’t a huge part of it, but for the last few hours it just goes absolutely nuts, we’re talking numerous cut scenes of up to 7 minutes in length. The production value of these cut scenes are utterly amazing, but if you’re only in it for the game, they’re just going to bug you.

Overall, I loved Metroid Other M, it wasn’t what I had come to expect from the Metroid series, but then, why would I want to play the same game forever?  It’s a fast paced more action orientated experience and I reckon it’ll take some Metroid fans by surprise, although I’m not sure how many newcomers it will bring to the franchise. It’s not inaccessible on the gameplay level, but the plot would just leave Metroid noobs a little on the excluded side.

It’ll be interesting to see where the series evolves from here, but I for one, can’t wait to see what happens next.

Of course, these people aren’t what makes up the majority of gaming culture, the average gamer is the creature we’re talking about! I’d have needed normal gamers to talk about why they love gaming so much, what it means to them, what they get out of it, the levels on which they appreciate a decent game.

It could have been pretty good. But a mixture of fear, laziness and a general lack of ideas that could string the bloody thing together without infringing any copyright laws caused the idea to fizzle out.

But a few nights ago in a london pub, a conversation with my aunt reminded me why i wanted to do it in the first place. She wasn’t on any kind of attack, she’s a highly intelligent woman and she’s only in her thirties, she really was just trying to get her head around the idea. “But why do you play games Richard?”, “When i watch a movie it gives me something to think about and discuss, you can’t have that with games can you?” and the clincher “But what about real people Richard?”…

Preconceptions, that’s what pissed me off and inspired the film idea in the first place, this idea that gaming is a purely Trivial Pursuit, that there’s nothing there, nothing thought provoking in the slightest.

It’s difficult to remember that a lot of people think like that, when your looking at the culture from the inside, it all feels quite normal. When you surround yourself with other gamers, it’s easy to forget how the outside is looking at you and your own. I still get looked at as a child by some people when i talk about gaming. It fucks me off.

So i got the idea back into my head, like really, I keep thinking about it. But I was still having difficulty trying to come up with the format, until it hit me today – TIE IT TO GAMEWANK!

Now it’s not gonna be like “the guys from gamewank do a documentary”, I don’t want us to come across as having this inflated sense of self importance (well no more than we have already). It’s more like “two humble gaming podcasters take a lookat gaming culture and what makes it tick”. I figured it could be presented by myself and Jamie, meeting various people and interviewing them. Maybe try to squeeze in the odd little relevent sketch.

Also, i don’t want you to get the wrong idea from this blog entry, i don’t want it to be “look at us, we gamers are fucking better than you, you naive bunch of cunts!”. I want it to be a balanced look at things, with the only real agenda being an attempt to deflate preconcieved notions of gamers.

Now, to be honest, I don’t really expect to really convert any major numbers, as far as causes go, it’s a little weak. But I’d love to just present gaming culture in a positive light-

- this is where you come in.

I’m looking for gamers who have stories to tell about how gaming affects them, people who want to articulate their own opinions and feelings on video games. I’d also like to talk to artists/musicians/filmmakers or anybody that looks at video games as a source of inspiration. Game modders, game devs, anyone who thinks they may have something to contribute.

I’ll also be hitting up all the fellow podcasters too.

Now don’t expect anything massive from this, it’ll literally be me, jamie, a bus pass and a borrowed Sony Z1E. But i reckon we could achieve something pretty special!

Get in touch through feedback@gamewank.com

Lots of Love

Richie

But hey, it’s a warm evening, there’s shit all else to do, I’m blasting Dennis Law Jr from my broken speakers and I’m feeling mildly creative this evening.

So I bought myself a PSP recently, and one of the first things I got for it was Final Fantasy VII, a game that is now 12 years old. Not that it should bother me, but it got me thinking about old games. I know it’s a cliché, but why should the age of a game come into the decision to play it or not? It really shouldn’t, but I fear it still does.

Let’s look at movies for a second. In the days of old, the only place you could really see a movie was at the cinema, then it was gone. No fancy VHS tapes in those days. So people simply moved on, only ever seeing there favourite movies a couple of times if they were lucky. Then a similar phenomenon occurred with television. The BBC have lost zillions of cultural artifacts because of their policy at the time of wiping stock after it had been transmitted (such is the dipshittery of the past).

For a while we were seeing a similar thing with games. Many gamers were not seeing the point in looking backwards to games that they had initially loved, moving on generation by generation to higher detail levels and sharper edges.

With television, a phenomenon occurred that saved many of the doomed cultural artefacts, that force of nature we have affectionately labelled “The Geeks”. Well, I say “We”, I mean someone else, I’m clearly experiencing that particular phenomenon from a first person perspective.

The nerds did all they could to preserve their favourite programmes, they tracked down and bought film reels sold to foreign TV stations, they saved offcuts of film that never made it past the censors, they stole the tapes, they filmed their TV screens with a super 8 camera, hell they even wired tape recorders to the speaker coils in their televisions in order to get an audio copy of a show! Beautiful levels of devotion to a medium that wasn’t taken seriously enough at the time yet is now established as a fully fledged art form!

Once again history repeats itself. I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I made the move to the first Playstation, I found it a little difficult to let go of my mega drive so I never did, and why should I have? A lot of the games I played on that machine held a lot of good times for me, so I kept a tight grip on it that has scarcely loosened to this day. I did notice that people around me were putting their old consoles in their attics, or selling them on! You fools! You callous bastards!

A few years after this, more and more people started to feel the same way. What did they do? They turned to the domain of the geek – the internet. Just like the army of television fans that make up the Doctor Who Restoration Team, the sweaty, nerdy masses set about archiving what would become quite important cultural artefacts in the form of roms, and built some impressive emulators to run them.

Technically it was piracy, but when the alternative is touring every charity and second hand shop in the land for a cartridge, or paying excessive amounts on ebay for something that isn’t even produced any more, any argument that emulators were making a dent in the gaming industry are flat out idiotic and misguided. But I digress.

Of course, what started as a fairly obscure pursuit has now become a common pastime. Retro games are now everywhere in the digital realm, and roms have been commercialised by the very people who fought against the practice – with  Nintendo’s virtual console, you can now purchase 27k rom file of a game you loved from your childhood for just £3 (sure it’s a bit of a rip off, but that’s not the point). The phenomenon has now reached the stage where there are full on but quite faithful remakes of classic games on XBLA or PSN. Games like Bionic Commando: Rearmed, not just a re-release of a 20 year old title, but a complete ground-up redux with a proper development budget and everything. Retro gaming is big business now, not a bad result for a gaming renaissance movement instigated by small internet communities!

Now I can play Final Fantasy VII and experience what was an important moment in gaming history without digging out my PS1 or paying £20-30 over the odds for a used copy of the game. It’s an exciting development in the ever evolving gaming medium and culture, and just like with television, people are starting to look back with interest and realise that older titles represent specific eras of gaming. Eras that many people want to relive and many new gamers want to learn about for the first time and it’s all thanks to the geeks.

Maybe as the significance of video games continues to become more universally accepted, older games will become as accessible as older movies. I hope so.

After all, could you imagine getting into films and then never watching Jaws? Back to the Future? Planet of the Apes?! Star Wars?!!?

Inconceivable!

Incidentally, if you want to listen to listen to Dennis Law Jr through broken speakers – buy a Marantz SR4400, give it 3 years, then go to this site – they’re really rather good

http://www.myspace.com/dennislawjr

So anyway, Jade Empire was one of the few Bioware titles I’ve never played and I figured… screw it, the release schedule is pretty dry right now and it’s bound to be a good 20 or so hours worth of awesome. And I was right. I’m about 2 thirds of the way through it if the internet is to be believed, and damn, I’m kicking myself for never buying this before.

The combat system is a bit, well, basic. It’s button mashing, and there are no items to use or anything like that. So in terms of its hacking and slashing, it’s nowhere near top drawer.

But, the story… simplistic as it is, is beautifully told and technically well presented. Every minute of this game is a joy to behold. It’s rather heavy on procrastination,  every area being stuffed to the gills with sidequests and other distractions from the main plotline. But doing them never feels like a chore, as is the case with so many western RPGs. They’re smaller, fleshed out little stories that compliment the overarcing quest, sometimes subtly and thematically, sometimes directly. This is how an RPG should be structured.

Visually, it’s bloody gorgeous.  I’m not exaggerating when I say it still holds up well against current gen titles. You can tell it’s an Xbox 1 game, but it’s a very lovely looking one.

Anyway, um, I have to go and do work and stuff.

He came up with this soup analogy, which I’ll focus on for my summary (I’m paraphrasing, and I’ll attempt to labour the point as much as he did):

“If I’m delivered a bowl of soup in a restaurant that sells soup (probably other things too, like chilli beef or bacon sandwiches, but let’s assume I’m just having the soup as a main or perhaps a starter), I know what that soup tastes like on the first spoonful (depending on the size of the spoon, it may not need to be filled – 3/4 of a dessert spoon, for example, would provide an adequate sample).

So I take my first sip of the soup, and it tastes like dog shit (I may specify a breed and/or diet later). I don’t need to eat the entire bowl of the shit flavoured soup before I’m qualified to warn people not to eat it, because it tastes all shitty.

Why would I eat the rest of the soup? Why do I need to?”

And so on.

Here’s the thing. Videogames (post Space Invaders at least) are in no way analogous to bowls of soup. Soup is constant. Soup barely changes its flavour from the first sup to the last. It’s soup. Either the ingredients have been chosen and prepared into a pleasing diffusion, or they haven’t.

Videogames, however, can and often do change throughout the experience. The first 2 hours of Assassin’s Creed? Awesome. The fifteen in the middle? Horrid. Repetitive. The last 30 mins? Vaguely interesting.

Another oft-touted argument, this time from the other side of the debate, compares videogames to movies – a much more apt comparison, I’m sure everyone would agree. It’s obvious. Both are visual mediums, they usually employ broadly similar narrative structures, they’re relatively new and in their formative years were considered sub-art; unworthy of the attention lavished on proper art like poetry or theatre. While film shook this attitude off a long time ago, gaming is still subject to such derision.

If Jonathan Ross or Roger Ebert only watched half a film, most would quite rightly consider them unqualified to review it. The same applies to videogames, surely?

But…

I think that argument is far too extreme in the other direction.

What about reviewing a TV series then?

There are many many TV shows I dislike. Same goes for everyone. I can’t stand Stargate: SG1. I feel perfectly justified in saying so, based on the few episodes I’ve endured. I don’t have to watch ALL TEN SEASONS just so I can say “nah it was shite” with a degree of authority… but by the same token, if I hadn’t at least seen one episode or two, deciding it’s shit would be pretty silly and assumptive on my part.

Which brings me, finally, to my point. Sorry for rambling. As much as I hate to adopt the middle ground (my god do I hate fence sitting), it seems to me that you don’t need to complete a game in order to review it. You just need to have played enough. Enough to get a feel for the tone, the essence of it. Maybe half way, 2 thirds, something like that. A geed few hours worth anyway.  I’ve read some reviews of games I’ve completed, and been pretty convinced that the so called professional game journalist writing it barely made it through the first training level, which is ridiculous, but I wouldn’t dismiss someone’s opinion outright if they’d only played, say, 10 hours worth..

I usually try and make a point of completing at least the story mode of a given title before writing my review. But I’ll admit it here and now, sometimes I don’t. Whether it’s because I’m pushed for time, or I simply feel I’ve played enough and have no desire to continue (very rare), it happens.

…anyway, all I’ve gone and done is come full circle and agreed, ultimately, with the Sarcastic Gamer article. It’s just that I really REALLY had to say something about how fucking retarded that soup analogy is.

wooblebooble

- Jim