Affectionate Diary

Because Affectionate Diary is commited to bringing you cutting edge videogame news from around the world, here’s a run down of the greatest things the show had to offer.

Best Fighting Game Anecdote

Journalist - “Did you see Mortal Kombat? It’s looking good! Much better than any of the recent Mortal Kombats! It’s a real return to original roots of the series.”
Affectionate Diary - “Sweet! How does it play?”
Journalist - “Oh, I don’t know. We didn’t get to play it. It seems you hit a launch button and then you can press anything you want a few times and then do your finishing move.”
Yeah, just like the original Mortal Kombat. We actually went to the Warner Bros stand to check out the video. It looked shit. Just like the original Mortal Kombat! Or, if you prefer, like every Mortal Kombat game ever made.

Best 3DS Disparagement

Journo - “Yeah, I mean, it is 3D, but it’s just 3D, you know?”
AD - “BUT NO GLASSES!”
Journo - “Yeah, but it’s not like when the shark comes out in Back To The Future 2, is it?
No, that’s right. It’s 3D, not holographic projection YOU FUCKING MORON.

Best 3DS Demo

Nintendo Promo Bod - “This is the Metal Gear Solid demo.”
AD - “FUCKING GIVE ME PILOTWINGS OR I’LL TEAR YOUR FUCKING COCK OFF.”
Nintendo Promo Bod switches programs.
AD - *furious masturbation*

Best Steak House

STK in Hollywood. Also, any Mortons.

Most Interesting Game That Was Both Amazing And Also Disappointing And I Couldn’t Explain Why

Space Invaders Infinity Gene on XBLA. I mean, it was basically amazing, but they really need to fill the screen with more shit, because my TV is fucking massive and worth a hundred iPhone screens. So I want a hundred times as many bullets on screen.

Game Of The Show

Busy Scissors on the Wii. It’s hairdressing brought to life via a series of simplistic mini games. The actual haircuts are technically incorrect, but the whole design process was overseen by Redken. Which shows how fucking moronic that brand is. AND they did live hairdressing! AT E3! ON THE SHOW FLOOR! Credit where it’s due, that’s exceptionally brave when you consider that 90 percent of attendees were struggling with basic hygiene, let alone making style choices beyond “this t-shirt has a logo of a product I enjoyed, please be aware that I enjoyed it.” Day one for this mother fucker, for sure.

Hottest/Sluttiest/Horniest Booth Babes Of The Show

The Game Crush girls, who as far as I could tell simply walked around in not much clothing flirting with as many guys as possible. Presumably so they could sell live cam feeds of themselves later on while they played Halo 3 with disgusting, desperate, sweaty men. I only took the asian one’s number to show them I’m immune to their pathetic marketing ploys. Paying for asians doesn’t even count as prostitutism unless they have penises. And even then, if they roughly resemble a woman it’s game on.

Greatest Thing Of All Time

The 3DS.

I discovered something last night while building my Lagiacrus armour (one more horn to go!) You probably already know there’s two types of shield bash, one from unsheathed with the + button and one from a hop forward in block that you can follow up with a shield bash that can combo straight into a horizontal poke. And then there’s the counter.

The counter blocks one hit as long as you haven’t struck out with it yet. I thought it was a charged move, like the Great Sword’s charge or the Hammer’s charge, but it’s not. Well, it maybe is, but it’s also a kind of stance that you can block from while charging. If you get hit once during the block then you immediately come out of it into a vertical poke. Which means no block stun and the start of a new attack run. I only figured it out as I was finishing up, but I think it means that as long as your weapon is sheathed you can run into a monster about to roar and go immediately into block>counter, block the roar and instead of being pushed back you’re poking it in the face. Which makes the Lance SUPER aggressive, and not just the tank class it was before.

Need more testing! Hopefully tonight. I *LOVE* the Lance, and not just because it’s basically a massive cock you carry around on your back.

You are probably using your weapon in the wrong way, on the wrong part. That’s because you’re a fucking idiot. I’m not, I’m ace. Here’s how to be less shit.

DISCLAIMER - most of this theory is top line and uses damage calculations based on the PSP rules. Which I’m presuming are the same. There are some changes to how much different weapons do on different hits (Hammer’s double blow from partial charge on the run is massively reduced) but if you already know your way around the hammer you don’t need this. You just need to play.

Hammer
This weapon is The Business. Ace damage output, can dizzy monsters and is pretty easy to use. No block, you need to be handy with rolling. Focus on attacking the head, the complete head and only the head. Your role in the group is to dizzy the monster so that everyone can get free hits in. Feel free to abuse the fully-charged overhead pound all the time, as long as you’re on the head. If you smash other hunters away then that’s their own damn fault. They shouldn’t be near the head when there’s a hammer user. Unless they’re also a hammer user, I guess.

If the monster’s down then switch to using the basic triple pound. Don’t ever use the big spinning thing, it’s proper rubbish except for dealing elemental damage to a breakable part of a monster that requires elemental damage to be broken. Otherwise, you’re doing no damage for AGES. And don’t use the fully charged overhead pound anywhere other than on the monster’s head, because then you’re smashing away other hunters with no justification.

Great Sword
OI! STOP THE FUCKING UPSWING IN CLOSE! Don’t flail around, run in and do an unsheathe attack, maybe follow up if there’s time and then roll cancel into safety. If you are flailing (by switching between either of the buttons or both buttons together, never doing the same move twice in a row) then you should be using overheads and side swings on the tails until they’re off, and then you stay behind and nip at the legs. And you have LOADS of range, but get a bonus for hitting with the exact centre of the sword. So er on the side of caution and keep back and stop knocking other hunters all over the fucking shop, you massive cunt.

All three swings have roughly the same damage, and three consecutive swings has roughly the same damage as a fully charged hit, but a full charged hit will not knock anyone else away. You need a pretty good understanding of how the monster moves to use the charge, though, and now that Rathian and Rathalos no longer land reliably I’d say be wary of this one except on dizzied or sleeping monsters. Doing a full charge on a sleeping monster is ace because of the 4x damage bonus.

When you’re not hitting the monster you are putting your sword away so that you can run around quickly. You can instant block from sheathed so you’ve no reason to ever be hit by anything ever again. Especially Diablos’ crazy dive attack.

When building Great Swords ignore the element and focus on raw damage and sharpness. Affinity is nice, but can be fixed with skills in a variety of ways, so really sharpness and raw is king.

There’s also a new side swipe and wild charge, but ignore them for now.

Lance
The weapon of kings. You get in close and you stay in close. You have a tiny hit box on your strikes so you should never be trouble for other hunters. Upwards stab does more damage than a long ways stab but covers less ground, so you really do need to stay in close. The unsheathe attack does even more damage than an upwards poke, so when you’re not stabbing you should be sheathing to get back your mobility and to deal more damage when you get back in. While doing the counter strike you seem to be able to block, though I think not everything. I’d test it, but that would mean getting hit. I never get hit.

The lance is an odd one. It deals either slicing or blunt damage depending on where you’re striking. It chooses the best damage type, basically, but doesn’t ever deal dizzying blows like the hammer. Which is a shame. But if it could, it would be massively imba, so I’ll let it slide.

A lance player should really be filling in the gaps in the group. He can reach all the breakable bits and do so without knocking everyone away. He stays in close and so is always the first man on the scene, so he needs to know if there’s a hammer player coming in for the head, or a sword and shield guy about the dive in on the tail. They get priority because they have one clear role. The lancer doesn’t, so often the lancer should be on the wings/arms/claws/body. Depending.

Lances are also pretty decent at dealing elemental damage and status damage, so take that into account when building something.

Sword and Shield
YOU ARE SUPPORT. You can use items without putting your weapon away (Lifepowder, Flutes, Antidotes and Potions with the Wide Area ability) so you should be prioritising that above DPS. You can do ok damage as long as you match the element to the monster’s weakness and you can inflict poison, sleep and paralysis statuses faster than anyone else, but you also commit to a physical area for AGES and during that time you stop anyone else from attacking that’s near you. So what I’m saying is, fuck off. Or, because you’re so mobile, use the jumping attack to get in first and then slash and roll away before the cavalry arrive to do real damage. Unless the team needs a poison status, obviously. Then everyone makes room for you, because you’re the daddy.

Long Sword
You do BARE DAMAGE. You also have range and the bonus for hitting with the middle of the sword. You can also, if precise, deal all this damage in a narrow line without hassling your fellow hunters. Please be precise! Though if you’re not I guess that’s *kind of* alright since you’re doing so much damage, but your team could be doing more. And you’re on the tail till it comes off, and then you’re on the legs and body. You should be building spirit meter with constant aggression, and then when it’s full rinsing the spirit combo with the shoulder button. That then builds a second level of charge that never seems to drop, and your sword will glow and look REALLY FUCKING COOL. Your spirit combos will push everyone away, but since you’re doing the most damage that’s probably fine. Fuck ‘em. And let’s face it, if you’re on Long Sword you don’t give a fuck about them anyway.

That’s the thing about using the Long Sword - it’s primarily associated with dicks. Like Paladin class in WoW, you’re doomed to a lifetime of abuse and stigmatisation. If you’re cool with that (and dicks usually are) then go for it.

Switch Axe
I have NO IDEA. I’ve not played it even once. What I have noticed, though, is that switch axe players get in close and do massive swings that cause EVERY OTHER HUNTER to be interrupted. Yeah, thanks. So this weapon can fuck off. For now. Until I learn how to make it sing in a way that works in a group and then it’s on like Tron.

Bowguns
LOL

I have genuinely tried to write reviews for all of the following, but in a feat of procastrination, I have spectacularly failed to finish any of them. Instead, here’s a roundup!

Borderlands:

As if you got a gold-standard AAA cinematic action FPS and had all the bullshit stripped out and replaced with gleeful proceduralism and a million guns. Pretty much the best FPS in the last five years, Borderlands offers a stripped-down hybrid of two things that really should have borne such fruitful offspring A LONG TIME before late 2009. Although skewed too heavily in support of its MMO aspirations, Borderlands offsets its frugal concessions to player customisation, or highly specific player builds, with raw fun in abundance and, as already mentioned, enough guns to make you piss raw happiness for hours at a time. Sadly, in the post-completion afterglow, the criminal lack of dress-up options and a decent stealth spec leaves you feeling like you’ve been grubbily exploited, but you fucking loved it, you fucking cheap whore. 21

Mass Effect 2:

In a world where no Sci-Fi trope is out of bounds and where everything feels clumsily bolted to everything else (including the kissing), it’s heartening to know that your hard-spent cash has at least bought you the option to have sexual relations with more NPCs than ever before in a tawdry, imaginatively-derelict lumbering clusterfuck of confused RPG and 3rd-person shooter mechanics set in the most tiresome multi-humanoid Sci-Fi universe ever designed. Excelling in stylistic and design mediocrity, Mass Effect 2 is a grand celebration of near-obscene linearity masked by much the same vague gesture at open-universe spacefaring as its prequel. In reality, Mass Effect has become Resident Evil, in the sense that it does many things in exactly the worst way you could have possibly imagined. It’s immensely confusing, then, that I feel mildly compelled to play it properly. The list of player interaction howlers is as long as the stupendous inconsistencies and idiocies that plague the Mass Effect universe, yet the action has enough punch to drive you forward and the vague gestures at RPG progression are just enough to keep going. Really, all I care about is the Captain’s Cabin, where I get some room to dress up and customise a place I can call home. The moral here is that I will do just about fucking anything in a game if it gets me a dress-up option or a choice of pet for my persistent lesbian space marine with a completely random moral code.

Mass Effect 2 is like a Kinder egg where the toy is really quite cool, but the white chocolate is mustard gas mixed with open-heart surgery and the milk chocolate is rabies and child pornography with a party-political manifesto. In some alternate reality, I’m actually frothing at the gash over Mass Effect 2, as it’s a stoically rigid game of astronomical wonder, with immense tech trees and huge weapon selections, rocks a trillion different hats and hangs together with the effortless grace that a misty-eyed amalgam of Damocles, Hired Guns and Elite could spontaneously create. Fuck KOTOR. Seriously. 21

Infinite Space:

Should only be played on a DS that isn’t on the verge of having a screen hinge break. Even though it makes almost no sense and despite having the funnest spaceship equipping screens ever, its lack of Elite-level commodity trading strikes a chasm along my heart. That said, I fancy the spacemilf so fucking much, I did have a full and intractable breakdown when my DS’s right-hand hinge finally broke, making the top screen ropey as fuck. Certainly ropey enough that I can’t possibly risk playing it on the tube, which is the only place I’d play Infinite Space anyway. Surely some iPhone cocksucker can remake this relatively fun space fighting game with load of that Elite shit and coin it the fuck in? On second thoughts, make it Android and low-spec. 21

Just Cause 2:

There’s a lot to be said for sprinkling your delicious world with freeplay objectives aplenty, and even more to be said for making them all the same, enforcing a shit player character on me and not giving me any dress-up options at all. What I actually say is ‘FUUUUUUUCCCKKKKK’, over and over, because if Just Cause 2 had dumped its imbecilic pretensions and gone truly player-centred , or maybe asked what would be brilliant fun inside its brilliant tech, we might have had the greatest terrorist-cum-tourist thrillseeker simulation of all time. Please pay A LOT MORE attention to Saint’s Row 2, Just Cause 3. You can do more activities at the average Centreparcs resort, FFS - and they don’t even have helipads. A common thought I had while playing Just Cause 2, either when blowing stuff up or traveling somewhere, was: “why aren’t I earning some XP for this shit?”. I guess after Prototype fucked that right up, everyone else has been to fucking pussy to really go for it. I can only hope that Saints Row 3 remembers why Saints Row 2 was so fucking awesome. My abiding memory of Just Cause 2 is that the dude looks like Lewis Hamilton in the loading screen, but a cross between Clive Owen and Ian McShane in-game. Harrowing. 21

Splinter Cell Conviction:

I can’t even get started writing about this. Such is the bile I want to spill. If it wasn’t for Afterburner Climax, murders would have happened. 21

I have to say, the lack of lock-on in Monster Hunter is really starting to irk me. I mean, it’s ABSOLUTELY STANDARD for all videogames to feature a lock-on! ESPECIALLY if the camera allows you to see your character. How on earth does anyone play a videogame in which they have to manually track their targets? I mean, sure, you’d want to turn the lock-on off if you were hoping to target any part of a HUGE monster other than its centre. I probably only want to hit specific parts of the monster maybe 95 per cent of the time. And I’m certainly not accustomed to using the right stick to track the camera in a videogame. Because lock-on is always the standard.

I tell you what else - it’s fucking stupid that after I mash the button for like two seconds the game keeps me in attack animation for another two seconds. Why would the game think I was queuing up attacks just because I hit the button maybe 20 or 30 times? Can’t it psychically tell which moves I’m going for?

Basically, any deviation from the control system in my head is a mistake. Because people shouldn’t have to learn anything when they play a new game, they should just be able to smash buttons and get loads of bacon.

Seriously, Capcom needs to sort this shit out.

First Assassin’s Creed II champions Downs Syndrome, then Heavy Rain champions rampant nervous twitching. Now Super Street Fighter IV champions rape.

It’s time to oil up!

Anyone who thinks videogames aren’t maturing clearly can’t see the wood for the trees.

If there’s one thing that Bayonetta was missing, it was enough monsters and opportunities for epic, escalating battles where I get to slaughter vast amounts of cunts with astonishing style and panache.
 
 Let’s get one thing straight – basing yourself on a mishmash of God Hand and Devil May Cry while having amazing tits and ass is an excellent starting point, but I was hoping for a little bit more than a brilliant combat system dropped into a steadfastly average 3rd-person adventure (albeit one slightly elevated by the batshit mental storyline, but not to any significant degree). Imagine my outright horror and consternation that Bayonetta insisted on doing nothing else other than its starting premise of simple mashup between the two, with some Ninja Gaiden on top.
 
This is something of a let-down. Despite the colossal, towering amazingness that Bayonetta’s fighting system represents, it’s somewhat astounding – and, I believe, a total crime – that you don’t fight through swathes of idiots for 90% of the time you spend playing and end up with endgame KO counts in the tens of thousands. Instead, there were these unfinished bits where I had to WALK AROUND and do NO FIGHTING WHATSOEVER. All these empty corridors CLEARLY needed a bit more filler than ‘walk up staircase for 30 seconds’ or ‘wander around some streets’, ‘jump through some remedial platform challenge hoops’ and ‘wait for cutscene to finish’. Basically, a nice implementation of classical crowd melee mechanics would have been nice.
 
YES YOU CUNTS. Stop braying about Bayonetta’s stellar qualities for one second and consider it as some smack in the face to Ninja Gaiden, only with less monsters to fight. It’s all in there – the pointless cutscenes, the pointless adventuring, the ULTRA FUCKING SICK SWORD WORK (only you don’t get the same awesome options for on-landing powerup with the charge attacks, as far as I can tell). What could have been THE VERY BEST GAME OF ALL TIME APART FROM VIRTUA FIGHTER is instead a really good game of sporadic fighting and too many boss fights with two nostalgia nods that went on for far too long. It’s a bit of shame, considering it has the (perhaps) best fighting system ever invented. For me, this separation of combat into delineated instances when each level could have been full to the brim with ever-respawning, currency-generating, XP-giving sword-fodder is a criminally missed opportunity to merge three gaming templates into one shining, unified triumph that shames all before it. As it stands, it only shames Devil May Cry. NOW, I know I’m being a classic cunt by having a go at Bayonetta for not living up to my mad dreams of what it could have been, so if you really want me to review the game for what it is rather than what it isn’t, then take this: it isn’t as good as God Hand and it isn’t as good as Ninja Gaiden 2. There. I said it.
 
Bayonetta is, like, totally fucking hot, but I didn’t get to play with her enough. I couldn’t really dress her up properly, nor could I really customise how I used her to anywhere near the degree I could customise Gene. Looking back at what I have to plough through on a harder difficulty level, or what I need to do to unlock Jeanne, leaves me with a massive sense of resignation. It’s going to be a plodding affair where all I’m doing is not looking forward to the next boss fight, as it’ll be a bit harder and probably more of a fucking grind. The density of combat is pissily thin compared to Ninja Gaiden 2’s onlsaught of removable limb challenges and, well, it leaves me thinking if such a reliance on boss fighting as focal climaxes wasn’t so much necessity of the game’s outmoded concept, but more another ham-fisted attempt to associate itself with a PROPER ART GAME like Shadow Of The Colossus. Then again, you can always get properly enraged by thinking that this somewhat lacklustre structure has more to do with taking on the rhythm of lumbering set-piece snorefests like God Of War, where spectacle and asset movements are seemingly considered more important than deep-ass stylish technical endurance fighting.

It’s really, really hard to write all of this because Bayonetta is so totally fucking hot but, y’know, it’s true. It’s as much a victim of its AAA aspirations as it is a true contender for such a status and, well, it’s bullshit. Can’t we just have a special edition that’s nothing but fighting all the fucking time with no big, dull boss fights? Or do I have to unlock that?

21

Man! This game is so good. The best way to summarise it would be Mario Kart with a tweaked version of Outrun’s handling and better power-ups. Or Outrun on circuits instead of point-to-point, but set in the ultra-colourful world of Sega when Sega was amazing. Or even it’s F-Zero GX with Outrun’s handling and Mario Kart’s power-ups that aren’t broken. You already know from those sentences whether or not this is the greatest game of all time. You don’t NEED to read a fucking review to know that this game is the game you’ve been waiting for, you can tell from the screenshots. But you have doubt in your heart. I don’t blame you. New Sega is a dangerous beast, and one that we can’t trust unreservedly. But you can trust me, which is why I’m going to show you some FUCKING SHIT games journalism and reassure you that you’re right, you do need this game.

Eurogamer’s Dan Whitehead, a long-standing enemy of truth, justice and joy, gave the game 6 out of 10. He opens with this sentiment -
“it has produced something that lives almost completely in Nintendo’s shadow, copying the Mario Kart template, pasting SEGA stuff over the top and doing almost nothing to move the core ideas forwards.”

So what? Who gives a fuck? It’s a fucking KART RACING GAME WITH SEGA CHARACTERS. If I was looking for progression I’d be ‘playing’ miserable pieces of shit like Heavy Rain. Not every movie should be marked down for not being in French with subtitles. Unless you’re dead inside. What else?

“With the game’s focus firmly on how well you can curve around bends sideways, tracks are either incredibly easy or frustratingly hard depending on how well they accommodate this feature.”
Read that as “there are some tracks that are easy and some that are hard”. Thanks for that.

“Those based on Super Monkey Ball are pure hatred, full of short right-angled corners that jab awkwardly at handling designed to resist the handbrake turn.”
What handbrake turn? There is literally no handbrake in this game. And the Monkey Ball levels are some of the most exciting tracks in the game. If you’re drifting and you LET GO OF THE ACCELERATOR but continue to drift, you drift round those corners with ease, building up boost. Then you can release the boost to realign yourself violently and hopefully slide into the next corner sideways at the speed of Apollo 12 exiting the Earth’s gravity. They’re fucking excellent. The easier tracks seem a little pedestrian when you do understand the drifting, but then you realise they’re really about trying to maintain drift state for as long as possible both entering and exiting the straights and it’s all good again. Someone else mentioned how the right angled corners are a nightmare, I wish I could remember where I read that. LET GO OF THE FUCKING ACCELERATOR YOU CUNTS. Use the speed boosts to change your cornering angles.

“Everything else is much as you’d expect.”
WICKED.

“the ideas get spread too thin and the tracks all tend to favour too many random obstacles over truly ingenious design”
I really couldn’t disagree with this more. There’s nothing on the track that you’re not warned about. Anything about to impact has a shadow marking its entry point, and anything already on the course can be seen from the distance. They’re there to force you to change your racing line on the fly, which you can do because the game warns you, not because they’re random.

And then he goes on about how terrible the missions are, as if you have to play them to enjoy the racing. You don’t. You can ignore them forever.

And the power ups are basically reskins of the Mario Kart ones, but improved versions. There’s no blue shell and the green shell equivalent gets you a slight advantage, not an outright victory from half a lap out. They’re a tweak to a working formula and a succesful tweak at that. To be fair, most people acknowledged this, so my anger is merely Code Orange on this.

This game is incredible, and it flopped at retail. Piece of shit reviews like this one are partly to blame for you being afraid to buy this, because you were afraid that Sumo fucked it up. They didn’t. It’s fucking incredible. Anyone who marks this game down for not being forward thinking or unoriginal has an agenda. That agenda is to show the rest of the world how much they know about games and how they demand that the games they play should be sophisticated and elegant and inventive, but really, sometimes it’s more than enough for your screen to beat your face in with every colour in existence at once and have Akira do handstands on top of a Ferrari while 20ft in the air. Sometimes it’s just totally fucking excellent that a game is simply brilliantly executed. And joyous. And worthy of your money. If you cackle with glee when you’re doing something, then that’s already The Greatest Thing Ever. And Sonic And Sega All-Stars Racing is definitely The Greatest Thing Ever.

I pretty much hate Street Fighter III: Third Strike. Well, I don’t really hate it, I hate the environment that surrounds it. I hate the elitism it engenders and I hate the wall it’s created between the good players and the really good players. Or even just the average players and the good players. It’s tiering brought to its absolute peak, and I don’t mean the characters. I mean the players. It’s too precise, too technical. A player that is 3 per cent better than another player will beat that player almost every time. I hate that. But I do love Makoto.

To be standing at middle distance from Makoto is to know fear. It’s to instinctively block, because you know that Hayate is coming. Sure, in 3S you might have already caught the flow of your opponent and have the parry at the right time, or the option parry in your moves, but what do you do in SFIV? I’ll tell you what you do - you shit yourself. Or block. I guess blocking or jumping vertically or backwards is all good. But you probably don’t poke, because that Hayate is going to FUCK YOUR SHIT UP. Is her flow even going to be the same as 3S? If you’re telling me that the connecting Hayate starts a 50/50 guessing game that can end up in the same game again, holy shit. That’s too much for me. If you’re telling me that they have to jump or eat the Karakusa command grab, and then eat ANYTHING I WANT, I don’t even know how to respond.

The Greatest Game Of All Time just got The Greatest (2D) Character Of All Time.

All I need is Lion Rafale in there and it’s ON.

First we had a load of Downs Syndrome sufferers populate Assassin’s Creed II, then Heavy Rain cast people with severe facial twitches who couldn’t talk in any fashion other than monotone. This is surely the next step in the games industry’s quest for equality and innovation. And it would be great! You know exactly what the motion controls would be for each event on the Wii, and finally we’d get to see Sonic in a wheel chair. Who hasn’t wished someone would break his spine in the last decade? Mario is already borderline retarded, so you wouldn’t even need to do much to him.

Hoh-ho!