World of Goo Review

When I first heard about this weird little game called World of Goo, I was skeptical. "Yeah, you build bridges. What else?" was what I generally said in response to someone who told me I should play it. I would just tune them out after that. Then I watched an episode of Co-op (http://www.area5.tv/) where they featured World of Goo. After only a few minutes, I was foaming at the mouth.
I soon realized what all these people were raving about when I started playing it. You start out easy, just building a little tower up to the Pipe of Freedom, as I like to call it. Eventually, you have many different species of goo balls that can float, burn, drool, cling to objects, and even survive sharp spikes. The levels are incredibly clever and I'm wowed every couple minutes. Some of them are a bit hard to figure out with no real indicator of how to finish them, though. I found myself occasionally looking at walkthroughs on some of the especially tough levels. One cool thing in the game is the World of Goo factory, which is basically a place for you to build massive goo structures to your heart's content with all the extra goo balls you've accumulated. It shows where other players have got, and you can try and beat their structure in height.

One of the best parts of the game is its charm. It constantly kids itself and the gaming industry, using such devices as the hilarious "Sign Painter", who is probably inspired by GLaDOS from Portal, and a ingenious loading screen with messages like "Swapping time and space..." and "Debating games as art..". The music is also top-notch, with a soundtrack that sounds both epic and Danny Elfman-esque. It fits the mood of the game perfectly. The graphics, while 2-D, are great too. The art style is very unique, with the goo balls and the main gameplay objects popping out from the background. The creative juices of the two game creators ooze from every pore of this game.

SPOILER SECTION (SKIP DOWN A BIT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS IN THE STORY):

Here are my succinct impressions of World of Goo from chapter to chapter:

Chapter One:

What a cool little game. Fun bridge building. Cool ending!

Chapter Two:

Cool new gameplay elements, those are some fat, ugly balls of goo! Two levels are incredibly frustrating, though. Now I'm doing more than build bridges.

Chapter Three:

What an interesting new mechanic: light fuses with goo balls! Two levels are incredibly frustrating, though.

Chapter Four:

WOW. Just WOW. They turned the game upside down. Instead of just putting goo balls together, you can shoot them! The creators also modified the art style and it looks even cooler. Look out Google! Here comes MOM (to understand this you really have to play the game)!

Epilogue:

This is HARD. The first level, especially. The others are pretty cool, but the last level is the easiest in the game. That's for lazy people like me. Nice ending.

A little piece about my scoring scale:

My scoring scale is pretty random. It's basically whatever words best describe the game. For example, Bioshock might be "Almost perfect", while Imagine Babyz might be "Not sophisticated enough for babyz". Let me know how you like it!

World of Goo Score: Pretty Freakin' Awesome!

Pros: Charming, smart gameplay, great music

Cons: Some levels too frustrating and some solutions a bit too unorthodox.

Flashbang TV Episode One: Freshman Effort

(insert word that implies unveiling here)! Above is the first episode of Flashbang TV, a show/podcast that hopefully will have many episodes to come. The first episode is pretty rudimentary and amateur, but my computer was also bogged down when I recorded this. Below is the description of the episode the way it will be with future episodes:

This (insert random time period here)'s episode is a video of me playing one of my favorite games: Audiosurf. The song I'm playing here is "The Hand That Feeds" by Nine Inch Nails. Enjoy!

Super-Secret-Special-Funtastic Preview of an Upcoming Something

It might be something about...
World of Goo!

UPDATE: Screw World of Goo (I have to beat it before I can write about it)! Check out the site soon for Audiosurf videos (handmade)!

Site Redesign

As you can see, I've just redesigned the site. The new site is a homage to one of my favorite games of all time, Warcraft 3. Thanks a lot to the creators of this template. I'll be adding some more stuff to the site soon. Read on!

Well now you can't take Rock Band seriously anymore

Some of next week's Rock Band DLC aren't your typical rock songs. In fact, some of the songs in this new pack have no rock (likely no real band either) in them. Behold, Spongebob Squarepants! Yeah, I know. Like you, I just threw up in my mouth. But seriously, who doesn't want "I Can't Keep My Eyes Off of You", "Best Day Ever", and of course, the sensation that's sweeping the nation, "Where's Gary?"! Man, oh man. The next thing you know, we'll be seeing Sesame Street in Rock Band Junior Edition.

-My sweet MS paint skills at work.

Source: http://www.1up.com/

Full Story: http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3173473

I Can Do Backflips Too

As you can see, I have started to incorporate news into my blog. Why? Because I like following the news despite some flaws in gaming news coverage (listen to Rebel FM podcast episode 12). I am not hoping to correct those flaws, in fact, I'm not concerned about every single tiny detail of the story. I'm just concerned about my reaction and the gaming community's reaction to the news. Most of my stories will come from 1up.com's news coverage, because I don't get out of the house much and am too lazy to fly across the country to PAX, E3, or GDC. I will credit the source in all of my blog posts and post a link to the full, in-depth story most of the time. My goal is for this site to have casual news coverage for people who care enough to read it, and links to the real story for the people who care for more complete news coverage. Now that I'm done telling you to go to a different site besides mine (don't), have a news-filled day folks (don't expect me to report on it)!

Square Enix Officially Aquires Eidos

If you wanted an epic Tomb Raider RPG, you'll be in heaven right now.

Source: www.1up.com
Full Story: www.1up.com

OnLive reveals a "Cloud Gaming" Service

At GDC this week, the company OnLive revealed a gaming service that streams games to your PC or Mac that run at 60 fps with no hiccups no matter your hardware specs. Personally, I am really psyched for this because I've sort of stopped gaming on my PC because all of the new games are too graphically intensive for my computer to handle. All you need is a 1.5 megabytes-per-second internet connection for standard definition (480p) and a 5.0 megabytes-per-second for HD (720p). The games run through OnLive's servers, so you could be playing them on just about anything. Many publishers have also jumped on the bandwagon, including Atari, Eidos, Codemasters, Electronic Arts, Epic, Take-Two, THQ, and Ubisoft. I'm sure that retailers are going to be a bit pissed about this, but this is definitely the future of gaming. Expect a beta sometime during the summer and a full launch around winter.

-Hopefully I'll be playing this in about a half a year.

Source: www.1up.com
Full Story: www.1up.com

Burnout Bikes

Why are the Burnout Paradise Bikes so awesome? Let me tell you. First of all, Burnout is an incredible game. I've had it for more than a month now, and logged over 30 hours into it. It is technically my first racing game, as I've not played much of any other racer. It is one of my favorite games of all time, and the epitome of an arcade racing game. Also, no game has better crashes. Sometimes, the slow-motion crashes can get tedious, but they're so awesomely destructive that the devil in me doesn't mind one bit. The speed in the game is also over the top. The first time I activated the boost on one of the fastest cars in the game, the Watson V16 Revenge, I couldn't comprehend how fast I was going. I had to squint at the screen to make sure there weren't any cars in the distance that I would hit in a matter of seconds.

The bikes are a different matter altogether. They're even faster than the cars (they would probably go into zero-g if they had boosts) and blow by traffic. The obvious drawback is that if you hit anything at any good speed, you will crash. Since the bikes are smaller, they don't have as much trouble navigating traffic. They way to unlock the two bikes in the game that are locked at the start is by playing through the 38 Burning Routes and Midnight Routes. These are races against the clock to get to one of the eight finish lines in the game world, along with some special checkpoint-style races. So far, I've completed about 20 events and they've been pretty easy. I can't wait to finish them. In fact, I'm going to stop this post right now and play some Burnout. That's all for now, folks!

Welcome

Hello and welcome to Flashbang, a blog about video games and some random off topic stuff that I'm interested in. I've been an avid gamer since a ripe ten years of age. I hope you'll find my writing insightful and maybe, just maybe, worth raving about (or maybe not). Anyway, that's all for now, folks.