Recently in Opinion Category

When the original No More Heroes came out I was so excited I drove all the way to upstate New York just to buy a copy before it was available in Canada. When I got home I popped that sucker in and spent the next 3 days touring around Santa Destroy having the time of my life. Sure the game had it's many flaws, but it was steeped in character. A true Suda51 game, through and through. Naturally a property this hot deserves a sequel and sure enough, they made one. It's just, unfortunately, a bit of a disappointment.

What I'm Diggin'

Controls
Motion controls are still some of the best and most fitting the console has to offer, but now you can play with a classic controller as well. Personally I feel it takes away from the experience, but a lot of people requested the option and it's nice to see Grasshopper Manufacture follow through. Presumably this is the control scheme used by Heroes' Paradise and it works well.

The opening cinematic
It's fantastic, does a great job of setting the plot, without wasting time recapping, and hooks you with it's plot of vicious revenge. There's just enough information there to get a new player up to speed without boring an old player to tears. And yes, there is a shit-ton of blood.

Ranking Battles are Free
The biggest complaint I had about the first game was the ridiculous amount of side missions one had to go through in order to earn enough money to start a ranked fight. For Desperate Struggle the battles are now free and the money you earn from side missions goes towards powering up Travis and buying new and exciting Beam Katanas.

Retro Side Missions
Speaking of lame designs ditched for the sequel, motion based mini-games are out. Perhaps it's owed to the new Classic Controls option, but all side missions are now 8-bit arcade rips offs. Each contains multiple levels of play and are generally a lot of fun.

Bizzore Jerry 5
An anime inspired SHMUP replacement for Pure White Glastonbury; Bizzore Jerry 5 feels like Shikigamai no Shiro 3's opening stage, only with very simple, yet traditional bullet patterns. Well worth the time to play.

What's Gone Wrong

The Characters
Dear god, what did they do to the fucking characters. All of Suda51's games have been about whacky and intriguing characters, even Michigan, yet here they feel hollow and empty. Every assassin in the first game was fleshed out with a rich back-story, an amusing introduction cut-scene and a funny, or serious, end of battle cut scene, usually with some additional dialog. Here you get a paltry cut-scene that barely gives you any details and a death scene that's basically just a killing blow. No. 25 is only memorable for the line, "You're going to battle me with all your Hos?", and the rank 24 assassin doesn't even have a real introduction or finish. The series biggest strength is now it's weakest asset and I couldn't be more disappointed. Hopefully this will change in later level

Menu Based Movement
While some player's were annoyed by the original's open world, I personally loved the idea. Granted it was just a hub level, but it was a hub level that made Santa Destroy feel like a real, albeit fucked up, place. Now that's gone, replaced with a cheap menu system. It's not even a creative play on an old over-world map design, it's just a plain menu simple menu that warps you from place to place. It would've been nice if this was added as a feature in addition to a newly fleshed out free-roaming world, but alas that's not the case.

So that's it. Two hours in, four bosses down, ranked 24th and although I had a lot of good to say; the con's out weight the pros. I went in with high hopes, but what I loved the most about the original appears to be heavily neutered. Maybe that will change in time.

For more on No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle check out Multiplayer Chat #106

So lately I've been playing Operation Darkness, a tactics RPG by Success Corp. set during World War II. For the most part the game has been fun, but there's one stupid little repeated mission requirement that's just driving me crazy. You see the game requires that certain story characters survive each battle and while that's a perfectly normal objective, it should become moot when it's revealed one of your team mates is a god damn necromancer. That's right, you have a character that can bring people back from the dead, but if any one important dies the mission ends anyways. It's a not like there's any logical reason why you could resuscitate them. I mean if your necromancer dies, fine, everyone will stay dead, but as long as he's alive it just makes no sense. It's a stupid, frustrating, arbitrary design call that should never have been made. And when you add this idiocy to a gameplay system that forces hour long missions you get more profanity than I've needed since the NES days. Too bad I'm not smart enough to quit. Expect a full review in the coming days.

For those of you who aren't familiar with our brothers across the pond, the Flag of St. George is the Official flag of the Kingdom of England. Though it was largely supplanted by the Union Flag following the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the flag is still a strong symbol of England and one that has, as of late, has been re-adopted by England football and rugby fans.

National pride is something that has been waning around the first world lately and I think it needs to stop. That's why I'm so pissed that when young Ben Smith of Melksham, Wiltshire, decided to cover up the new speakers in the back of his Vauxhall Corsa with the Flag of St. George, he was threatened with a £30 fine. Not a fine for improperly displaying the Flag, that's something I'd support, but because according to the local Police Service, flying the Flag of St. George is racist. What the Hell?

Apparently flying the flag is offensive to immigrants, thought the constable failed to explain how. PC Dave Cooper of Melksham, when questioned, stated he could not confirm or deny the incident as Ben had been originally pulled over spot check and therefore not logged. He continued on to state, "It all depends on the context. If they are going past a lot of Polish people, for instance, and abusing them, then we possibly would ask them to take the flag down." Excuse me Dave, but if someone was going around abusing the Polish wouldn't the logical solution be to stop them from abusing the polish? How does the Flag even factor in to that hypothesis?

So I'm browsing around Digg this morning and i find a curious post, "Prom... ya Digg?". Turns out this kid is really likes a girl who's just found Digg and is trying to ask her to the prom. So he diggs a picture of himself with a sign asking her to the prom. A sweet gesture and one i commend him for, but there's just one problem, he needs Diggs or she'll never see it.

By great stroke of idiocracy the poor guy goes and posts the picture on tinypic thus sealing his inevitable fate. You see the web works like this:

• Guy posts picture on tinypic and diggs it, begging people to help him out.
• Diggers, being great community minded folks, help a brother out.
• Story gets Dugg and makes the homepage.
• The Digg Effect happens and tinypic removes the picture for consuming too much bandwidth

Unless she caught it at the moment of equilibrium, this poor guy is SOL.