A close friend and I went into ASDA one night after a cheap game.  God bless late night digital entertainment shopping.  We ended up coming home with a game with a name not too far from Awesome Bass Fishing Tournament.  It turned out to be far from that.  We watched the awkward player models gesticulate like Data from Star Trek in all manner of fishing movements.  With an abysmal soundtrack to boot.  The fish were static, lobotomised and had very little interaction with the choice of tackle, situation and cast.

Oh well, I thought.  Sega Bass Fishing was great.  So maybe one day I’ll upgrade.  Now I co-own a Wii, and having a cheap gaming store nearby, I bought Big Catch Bass Fishing for twenty quid.

It’s the same bloody game.  Re-packaged and untouched, in all it’s persistent and consistently bad glory.  I sat down today and had a good old go.

My generic male character is angular and frustrating to look at.  As you handle the Remote and Nunchuck, he fits about the far-too-steady boat.  Flicking back the rod with any gesture, then epileptically flicking it back around.  Oh yes, the tutorial outlined three (yes, count ‘em) casting options.  Two side casts and an overhead.  These and up at the same place and change nothing toward the nature of the tackle in the water.

So, I’ve got this spinner in the water which can magically pass through rocks and weeds, and the type of which seems to have no difference on the fish.  As long as the bass sees it, it doesn’t matter if it’s a frog, spinner or pencil, they all react the same.  The chirpy female narrator slurs optimistic nothings in your ear like “Come on!” and “Jesus, you paid ten quid for this!”.  The fish invariably will completely ignore your tackle or go for it, but only in one brief, stilted attack, often ruined by a rock or weed that confuses the blocky aquatic bastards.

When you finally get a fish on, the battle between man and boredom should end and the digital representation of pulling in a slimy beast will ensue.  After all, this is what the Wii was created for.  Good ol’ interactive gaming where I can beat Wario about the head with a broom, lead Carnby to numerous and frustrating deaths (see Alone In The Dark) and play tennis with limbless, ethereal monsters.  In true fashion, Big Catch manages to make the most exciting part of fishing so dull.  You feel like part of a production line in a callisthenics factory.  Move this and that way and then you might get to see some truly awful animation concerning your granite mugged digital self hauling an unmoving green plank onto the boat and depositing it in a drawer.

I’ve been waiting rabidly for Spore since I first saw blurry videos on You Tube three years ago.  The specks of green buggering around in primordial ooze, eating each other and evolving using adaptive design seemed too good to be true.  And it is.  The whole thing feels like The Sims designed by biologists, with the same irritating, curvy menus system and tone.  I wanted full on evolution.  Spiky amoebas plunging proboscises into each other, draining each other of DNA and leaving despairing sacs to die in the ooze.  Instead I get googly eyes and none-too-subtle film references that make me want to choke, de-evolve the ridiculous creature I’ve painstakingly developed and kick my computer in.  I will be honest, however, I have enjoyed the game so far.  Far lower my expectations should have been, hmm.  Not unlike an old favourite, Alone In The Dark.  I am currently attempting to switch which hand my lighter is in so I can use it in conjunction with a fire extinguisher, thus enabling the exciting and incredibly versatile environment system that the game developers boast.  How incredibly wrong they are and have been.  So full of good ideas, but executed with the efficiency of a drunk on an escalator.

 
The creatures you create in Spore are agitatingly cartoonish.  They chirrup and beep when you give them new arms or a beak.  Which, incidentally, you find in the thicket or in a pile of bones, making no sense and completely ruining the central theme of evolution and adaptation.  Why, I’ve found a new flagella!  Fantastic!  Where’s the inefficient offspring who get turned to paste by the local feral tribe?  Why can I breed and change my creature at any moment?  It makes me detached to the point of not even caring what my creature looks like because I can whip the arms off if I want more for a particular trip to kill an enemy.  If my design is crap, I want to be killed off, game over.  I’m playing Spore on a computer over 4 years old, so I understand that the sea should not be a purple plain that flickers and jitters in the distance, but I get the gist.  I have put it to rest until I can play it on a better system and judge it more fairly.

 
In addition to this disappointment, do not see the film Into The Wild.  A few genuinely touching moments in a swamp of angst, teenage preening and ideological pseudo-philosophising.  Hirsch is like Pacey from Dawson’s Creek, crossed with Jack Black.  One moment crying about his parents, the next, bouncing off the walls about how he is escaping.  Romantic melodrama at its worst.  The titles felt like MTV, the narration was maudlin and there was a disgusting moment where Hirsch breaks the fourth wall and I wanted to kick the DVD from the room.  A shame, as the story is truly intriguing and the film is shot effectively.  For shame, Penn.

Batman Begins annoyed me.  It was the whole Oriental training-loneliness-montage.  The representation of Bruce Wayne’s new found gritty angst.  And Christian Bale’s chewy lisp.  The film also had a lot of those creeping-up-from-the-past moments of clarity that usually ended in Batman wincing, crying or a mixture of the two.  Like emotional Maoam.  The mob-based story was a bit mobby, Cillian Murphy’s face resembles a cherub that’s been sent to kill me in my sleep and the twist at the end made foolish light of Liam Neeson’s cruise through the film.  Still, an enjoyable film, but it was po-faced and not far off Mr. bloody Freeze in fun-terms.  I’m glad then that The Dark Knight was a lot better.  Christian Bale still does his grunty lisp.  Heath Ledger steals the show with his bizarre voice which is somewhere between Pee Wee Herman and Richard Nixon.  The Scarecrow is dropped and my face is safe from being slashed by the cherub murderer.  In my sleep.  And all in all, it was a lot more enjoyable.  The almost over-powering post-9/11, terrorist-cell thing going on culminated in a rather hamfisted shot of Batman chewing his fist over a very ground-zero-esque bit of debris.  But I shan’t nit-pick.  Roll on the next one.

It was nice to see a good piece of writing.  Gives me optimism for the next few hours as I finish my MA.  For, my birthday and MA handin coincide on Friday.  I am trying desperately to not buy myself a month of WoW as a present.  Weakness.

As my MA draws to a close, I reflect.  In truth, I’m only reflecting upon how much better Space 1999 was over UFO.  Space 1999 was obviously a huge influence on games like Halo, whereas UFO looks like a 60’s corporate training film for the extraterrestrial future.  Talking of games like Halo, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has turned out to be a highly enjoyable Wii romp.  With a storyline set just before the events of Metroid 2: Return of Samus, the number incontinent designers have found a comfortable balance between frighteningly easy and ridiculously satisfying.  Where in Alone In The Dark I bash the A button out of sheer fury, Metroid has the air of R-Type or any other scrolling shooter, alongside the best use of the Wii remote I have ever experienced.  Bra-fecking-vo.

 
Talking of Alone In The Dark, it recently autosaved while I was stuck in a wall.  I was not only stuck in a wall (in a urinal I may add), but an incredibly poorly designed monster was also continually beating me to a welcome end.  A flailing, wrinkled, tanned stack of poorly defined polygons.  And a urinal.  Tut tut.

A review by Rachael Clegg for Clash magazine of Holifair Festival.  Zapoppin’s very first review.  And we gained an exclaimation mark.  Hangers on.  Still.