The more things stay the same

Master Rahool would look good in a Hawaiian Shirt

Some people think Video Games have come a long way over the few decades they've been around, and its irrefutable, games have gotten more imaginative and clever as time has come and gone. Some things, though, simply remain the same and you don't notice it until you look a bit deeper.

Take Battle Hunter. Its an extremely simple game, literally a board game for your console with a handful of plot points to serve as motivators.  It was fun, if a little tedious and dished out a poor serving of ass whooping unless you were particularly levelled and equipped, but fun none the less.  The gameplay was straight forward, bringing player from Battlefield to Hub and back again for no more reason than to find better gear and earn some dosh along the way.

Doesn't that sound familiar to a Space Shooter that was released about a year ago?  Funny that.

So here I am looking at it and wondering what the bloody difference there is between Destiny and some of the games of the '90s and early '00s and I'm finding it difficult to nail it down aside from the obvious things of "It's 3D and HD."

Frankly, Destiny could easily be recreated as an Indie game.  Get some Pixel Art in there and make it a side-scrolling shooter.  Keep all the same aspects to it and let the players go hogwild.  Then just add Flavour to taste and you're good as gold.

You can keep the Tower, just drop it down to a series of Menu options.  Frankly, it'd make the game more personable, making you feel like you actually have some sort of relationship with the NPCs of the Tower.  Because right now, Zavala is the Head of the FBI from Fringe, Cayde and Ikora are Captain and First Mate of the Firefly Serenity, and Banshee was great in Gears of War and Adventure Time.

To be fair, the DLC's have taken steps in that direction.  Cayde is still... well Nathan Fillon, but hey, I like him.  I'll keep him.

Destiny however, is getting pretty stale.  The marketing is, and probably always will be, a flagrant method of extortion, while the game may expand out and up it still comes back to being a repetitive grind for new gear in the end.

Video Game Junk

The other day I was trying to get music onto my Xbox by trying to find blank discs to burn the music on to copy them onto the HDD (Which didn't work out, you have to rip them from an Audio Disc, not MP3 Disc) but as I was searching around, I found an old Playstation disc. I had a look at the front of it and saw the title "The Hunter" on it.

There was only one game I could think of that this could be. It was a shitty little game that my friends and I played back when we were Teens. We found the game at the local Video 2000, hired it and played it until we could understand the game. Then we put it back and somewhere along the line, probably a year or two later, I found it again and picked it up permenantly.

I don't know why though. By a shitty game, I mean it's cheap and nasty. You play a Relic Hunter, who runs around a randomly generated Grid filled with 3 other Relic Hunters and boxes and flags. Then you're dealt cards from a stack of about 100 cards which provide one of a few bonuses when used, such as a Movement Bonus, an Attack Bonus, A defence bonus, offer a trap, or whatever.

Then you try and find one particular Relic which you've been hired to grab, and then you run for the exit. Which can be difficult because your movement is determined by a D6 and your movement bonus. You determine that by points you allocate when you make your character and each time you level up.

That's all it is. Oh, and if you run out of cards in the deck, the Dungeon Monster comes out and tries to kill you.

If I could turn it into a board game, I probably would, but for now I think I'll leave it for my Playstation.