E.T. the Sub-Terrestrial

Indeed, indeed, indeed – finally the movie looks like it’s nearly upon us. And I think they’re going to nail it as it looks like they’re hanging off the back of it a story about the demise of the video game industry itself in the mid-80’s. And who doesn’t love a bit of video game-tabulous documentarytastification?

Well. E.T. I suppose. He’s probably hanging his weird turdy-nose head in shame. Well, maybe in shame. Or hanging it because it’s ridiculously oversized for his tiny neck. But either way, he’s bricking it about the release of this shame-umentary. He’d probably going to pull another sickie and go hole up in his special see-through tent or something. And totally forget to water his plant so it nearly dies, just like that other time. (That’s what happened right?)

What a loser. Let’s bury him! Let’s bury him in the desert for being such a failure!

Oh.

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A metaphorically wilting plant, yesterday. Metaphor for our readership numbers, that is. Ashasha, I joke of course. We don’t have a readership. More like a reader-boat. Oh-ho-ho – or a reader-dinghy. Hehehehe. Damn, there goes the rest of them…
Posted in Retro | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Edmond Pangs of Guilt

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I mean, good job Edmond Pang. Nice graphics and retro-synth music backing for your little video here. But rootin-tootin Jeebus, if you’re going to spend days creating something then surely you’d find five minutes for a quick spelling and grammar check? Benefits of playing video game? Hand-eye coordinate?

Oh Edmond.

Posted in Retro, video | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Breaking: Universes collide as actual Teri Hatcher/gaming link is discovered!

It’s been months in coming… nay, years even. But the wait has been worth it. And if this proves one thing more than anything else, it’s that nobody, NOBODY, deters the Grig when our Spider-senses are tingling telling us there’s a scoop just around the corner, no matter how many blind alleys we have to meander down in getting there. Yep. This is big time baby.

Terlois

My mission in bridging the gap between Hatcher and games was verging on becoming obsessive, scary even, especially for any passing average off the street Joe Packer, but finally, Teri Hatcher and gaming have come together in a glorious unison of intergalactic melding. All you need to do… is take a deep breath, and expand the article.

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Well, here she is. Lois herself rendered in glorious PS1-o-vision from the game of the Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies. Obviously, the game sucks. But! Finally, the connection has been made! After serious man hours of Internet-graftery, even to the point where the minimal comic worth such a discovery would have for our humble Greadership would have long since evaporated, I finally breached the divide!

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She looks mighty fine, huh? Yeah, she’s sporting the mid-recovery-Lois-wrecker-of-a-haircut, but still. If anything, I guess this answers the age old question of what would happen if you cross bread a human with a Virtua Fighter 1 character. I can live with it to be fair. I mean, even those pit girls from Virtua Racing looked ok from a certain distance. Hmm… lovely cereal box women. Moving on.

Funnily enough, I actually wondered if she would be in this game, but never found anything on it until now. Even more annoyingly, I actually own this piece of crap but it sucked so bad I never endured more than a few fleeting minutes with it to get any kind of distance in the story to unearth the Hatch-meister. ‘Twas right under my nose the whole time!

Question is now, do I endure the game to see her in the polygonal flesh? Well, I have just started a play through of Chrono Cross, one of the most revered JRPG’s of the 32-bit era. Do I really put it on the back burner for this tripe?

1

Well am I a writer for Grig Orig, or am I a writer for Grig Orig? When Grig has become a synonym for quality and journalistic integrity that leaves no stone unturned… darn right I did! Leg’s go on a journey, my Grigglings…

2

Oh no. It’s by EA. I’m playing an EA game. I’M PLAYING AN EA GAME! I’ll hand my Grig Orig credentials in at the door on my way out.

3

Why am I doing this to myself? This is not going to end well. By the way, hope you like my lack of ability to capture screenshots with anything other than my clapped out iPhone4.

4

Does anyone know how far in Teri Hatcher is? I’ve been playing for about thirty seconds and I’m already bored. This is gonna be a slog. I probably should also explain that my camera lens has cello tape over it in order to hold the phone together. Gives it all that added look of extreme crapness you’d associate with my articles. Yep. My tech’s in a fine state.

5

Y’know, I thought I’d played this game, but I think that must’ve been The World Is Not Enough. EA have actually made some effort to stretch the screen for our PAL TV’s. Not fully though, so still screw PAL 50hz buh, and still screw EA.

6

I can’t pick up that gun that’s right in front of me as it’s slightly outside of the permitted walking area. It’s one of those games. Good.

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Along with the obligatory getting stuck on invisible walls, overly twitchy analogue control, and generally appalling gameplay of course. For example, the battle I had to endure to walk through this gap in the fence took a good while and plenty of controller wrangling before the game permitted me to do so. Sheesh… freakin’ what a crock it is.

7

Right, enough of the buh. Level 2. Let’s get Hatchering! Nice plane, huh? Wait… I’m still pre-opening credits in the movie! Oh no…

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Ok, so I pressed on and about three minutes later, level 2 was done. Clearly quality over quantity. Ahem. I stole a plane and was greeted with movie footage. Not that you can tell from how bad this shot is. But I can vouch for the fact that it’s a plane flying out of an explosion. And it looks great. Ahem again.

8

It’s MC Brosno. Hopefully he’s not going to sing the opening theme. From his vocal ‘performance’ in Mama Mia, ’twill not be pleasurable to the ears. And please don’t question why I saw that movie. Lucy told me I’d love it. How well she knows me…

10

Ok, finally, we get the dancing women. Thankfully this is back from a time before women’s lib had gone off the deep end and we were still allowed to look at women, unlike the beginning of Casino Royale. You pigs.

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Ok, level 3 and… hello! We could be getting somewhere! Isn’t this where Bond has a li’l reacquaintance with Teri?

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Yes! Paris was her name in the movie! I can smell that hatch just around the corner! That sounds wrong. Anyhoo…

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Where is she? Must be around somewhere. Are you all still with me? We’re having a good time, right?

13

What kind of tip is this? This makes Grig Towers seem habitable, even though it violates every health and safety policy known to man. The design is quite similar though. Except we have pictures of Lucy Verasamy. Grig wins again.

Vera1

Verasamy there, laughing fresh off the latest Grig article. Flippin’ loves it! Wait… what’s that up ahead?

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Yes! YEEEEEEEEES! We made it boys!

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Here she blows! I used the sniper rifle to get a full body shot but was careful not to aim at her just incase she got scared and started laying little polygonal poo’s all over the show and making a right mess.

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Press ‘O’ to talk, it says. You know I’m gonna, but… oh man, this is all so sudden! What am I going to say?! Think of a compliment, quick! Er… um…

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Oh. It’s just reenacting their exchange from the movie. Except more crap, and without the real voice actors. Teri kinda almost sounds English. Da grig?

17

Bosh! Pierce takes a swift right to the cheek as Teri gives him the what for. This is surely double standards though. It’s fine for a woman to hit a dude who’s saved the world a gazillion times, yet when Bond uses a lady as a human shield in Goldfinger, they cut it out. The grig is the world comin’ ta…?

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Bit of rearview panning action for that real cinematic-feel. Hmm. Shall I? Why, I couldn’t possibly…

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BOO-TAY!!! Well I couldn’t come all this way for nothing. That’s some of the best use of about 4-5 polygons that I ever did see! I’m of course talking about those incredibly well-rendered steps.

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Uh oh. Her hubby’s turning up. This could get awkward… for him when I tell him I blocked the bog on my way up and a big queue was forming outside. Pwned.

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Oh, I’m being lead away. Hope a bog-wash isn’t in order for my crimes. Not even the Goodyear Blimp trick’s gonna get me out of this one. See ya Lois.

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And it’s lights out, all out, as in the blink of an eye, Bond’s knocked out cold, and more importantly, I never have to play this game ever again.

Well, there you have it. Finally the Grig came good…ish. But of course, no article of Hatcher-shaped proportions should end without a quick delve into her most recent Twitter splutterings.

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Teri: Roughing it.

Here, having heard that the boys from Grig Orig were going to call round her house for tea and crumpets, Hatcher fled to the woods and constructed herself a shack in which to take shelter. She was out there all of about five minutes before we found her, whimpering alone, the lifestyle change clearly not agreeing with her usual celebrity pamperings. Plus the lack of plug sockets to power the Megadrive and copy of Street Fighter 2 she had stashed inside after grabbing her dearest possessions before fleeing left her feeling more than just a little deflated. Don’t be too hard on yourself Teri, other than the power flaw, it was a lovely piece of accommodation.

Good night Gri-enna! That didn’t work. Good.

Posted in General | 3 Comments

Well, The World Is Just Full of Surprises…

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Retro. The Final Frontier.

These are the voyages of the Starship Griggerprise. Her continuing mission to explore very well known old worlds, to seek out old games, and old civilisations, and to boldly go where millions have gone before.

And yet, there are still surprises. Because even though I guarantee you I lived through the 90s I completely overlooked this little number. I’ve merrily gone through the last decade thinking that’s SEGA’s first foray into 3rd party development was post-Dreamcast when they rolled out the back catalogue onto every unsuspecting platform known to man.

But back in ’99 (just like back in ’99, huh slick? I was in junior high, DICK HEAD! (And yes I know he doesn’t say ’99. It was poetic license. Asha.)) anyway, back in ’99, Sega release this Pocket Adventure version of Sonic onto the Neo Geo Pocket. And apparently it was a bit of a gem – an adaptation of Sonic 2 (still, in my view, the best one they made) but with different bosses and, it would seem, some adapted graphics. It pulled on some rave reviews – though perhaps not surprising as there were precious few other decent titles out there for SNK’s little device.

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Some screen grabs, yesterday.

Interestingly, you might have thought this came about from some kind of affiliation between Sega and their Japanese brethren over at SNK. But actually, it was developed by Yuji Naka of Sonic Team fame who, by the time of its 1999 release, was working for Sega of America – having left Japan in a hissy fit before being snapped up by the Yankee outpost who offered more freedom (and ambitions for Sonic 2…) So who knows – but I guess outside of the heated rivalry between Sega and Nintendo there was a lot more willingness to work together. After all, it was only a few years previously that Sega had teamed up with Sony – albeit abortively – so what’s one more lazy hookup in the slutty night out that is SEGA’s latter years?

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Sonikku za Hejjihoggu Poketto Adobenchā, yesterday. Which sounds suspiciously like someone on Wikipedia just saying the name in a Japanese accent rather than actually translating it. But hell, who are we to question the Internet?!
Posted in General | 2 Comments

And yet more from EA!

Well, another day, another crime from everyones favourite tyrannical games company. For indeed, just when you couldn’t imagine EA sinking to any deeper lows, wait for this one!

The demos for FIFA 14 and UFC have landed on the Xbox One market place… for only £3.99 each!

Yes. I said the demo. For money.

Whether this is a mistake or not is yet to be discovered, but it seems to be worldwide with Australia also being asked the admission fee just to try these crappy games.

No doubt EA will be backtracking on this ASAP, but for now we’ll chalk another misdemeanour up on their excessive list of offences.

Oh that phone and tablet future they got in store for us is sure gonna be rosy…

Posted in General | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

3DS and Vita to become EA-free gaming sanctuaries – world rejoices!

Whilest many may put an element of the demise of the Dreamcast down to the lack of support from EA thus starving the machine of several (wrongly) revered franchises, I look at things differently.

Dreamcast is a machine that doesn’t have one EA game. How can you get better than that?

Vita3DS3DS and Vita: Win

In much the same way, it looks as though 3DS and Vita are going to become a li’l shy when it comes to EA’s buh-ware as they take their shovels and umpteen sacks of their finest manure over to the glistening lights of phone/tablet town to soak its streets in a diarrhitic ocean of their trademark excrement.

For indeed, in a recent interview with Gamesindustry International, Peter Moore, EA slave, decreed from his shackles the following:

‘We were supportive of both of those platforms (3DS/Vita), but then you’ve got finite resources and you’ve got teams that say, ‘We really think that two or three years from now, these are the platforms that people are going to be consuming games on.’ And you look at the quality of what you can do on phones and tablets… Sometimes strategy is not about what you do but what you don’t do, and you have to make some hard calls when you’ve got only so many people. To my point, we’ve got to be planning for FY 17 and 18. Do you think the Vita and 3DS are going to be around in some shape or fashion by then on a scale level?’

Roughly translated – there’s gold in them hills!

Them hills being the phone and tablet markets, by the by.

Well, EA certainly tapped the ‘quality of what you can do on phones and tablets’ in their most recent microtransaction rip-off fest, Dungeon Keeper – a game so panned for its low down dirty milking schemery that EA actually attempted to distance themselves from it… while leaving it unchanged on the iOS and Android stores of course.

And thus the list of offences grow, and while many see the bowing out of EA as a negative that increasingly is spelling the demise of gaming devices as we’ve known and loved them for many many years, at least in 2020 you won’t have to trawl hopefully through the gazillion unwanted titles lining charity shop shelves looking for the one good game lost in a sea of FIFA’s or one of their other annual sporting spewings.

Me? I fully plan on downgrading to my old Nokia and looking into investing in a 3DS and Vita now the coast is clear.

‘Til next time.

Posted in General | 4 Comments

#Wishlist

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So, with the Mega CD in place, it’s time to build the library. And actually , the main CD beauts are already in the eBay saved searches, so it’s the Mega Drive list I need to craft.

Some are obvious of course – but remembering the awesome but not obvious list of beauts is the real challenge. A two second starter list below. Suggestions?

Toejam and Earl
EA Hockey
Desert Strike
Sonic 2

Posted in Sega | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Oh oh…

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eBay is a dangerous place.

Posted in General | 10 Comments

3DS? More like Speedy Mess… Ashasha

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So you crazy kids… she’s here! The first new console in a year… And well done to the eBay seller lady who beat her own postage estimate by three days to ensure it got to me before the weekend.

I’m 1 hour into owning the 3DS and my eyes are already screwed, I’m already feeling diabetic from the sweetness of Nintendo’s UI, and I’ve already set a beard Mii character despite actually being at work… Love it!

Now I dunno if we can link up internet-wise on anything (Lartens) but if we can then shout!

Posted in 3DS, bedgell | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Closure…

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Yes, nearly five years after downloading it, I’ve FINALLY COMPLETED BRAID!!

Wooooooohooooo!!

The final two puzzle pieces seemed honestly beyond me last time I picked up a pad to play Jonathan Blow’s indie classic. And happy though I was back then to take my time and often simply to bask in its serenity, listening to the warm melodies and lost in its oiled canvasses for hours to ponder the puzzles, I could never quite find a way through and for months just came away defeated.

Until now! And yes, while it does feel like some kind of closure to bank those 60GP, I still feel a slight loss. I haven’t unravelled the mystery of the game itself – its surreal tones, dark echoes, and glimpsed truth are saying something I can’t quite grasp. Another run through some time? Maybe so.

In the meantime, here’s Andy Samberg high-fiving a leopard – which I think captures both messages in this piece.

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Andy Samberg high-fiving a leopard, yesterday. At least, we think it’s a leopard. It has spots? Anybody want to venture a guess? Answers on a postcard, please.
Posted in bedgell, XBox 360 | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments