Score Tables, Rainbow Cakes and some PS2 Games

Hi guys, Dim here. I recently got home for Easter holidays and my sister Maddy showed me a photo of something from a recent birthday party she went to. This is so awesome:

A James the Zebra cake! My sister has a friend called Rosie who is a massive fan of the James games….so her friends made her a cake with him on! Its so strange to think that this goes on without me knowing. And so close to home, too! Tom and I have been aware of Rosie for a good long time, she manages to get some of the top scores!

Well, she’d probably have more top scores but most of our hi-score tables end up looking something like this:

Whats going on here then? Somehow a whole bunch of people have managed to get 2147483647 points….This is from our game Solarsaurs, where its only really possible to get tens of thousands of points at most. It tends to happen after a while, either people find a way to cheat or they just hack the hi-score table, or something! It’s quite annoying, actually. Do other people find this happens on their games? I remember the first instance of it was people getting “0 seconds” on the time trial from the first James game. If people want to find ways to cheat at our games then we’re honoured, really. But this one is just silly!

Oh, and in response to Johns‘s mildly contraversial post about Super Mario Bros 2 as the best game ever made, I can’t resist offering my own opinions. Here are some of my absolute favourites:

(NOTE: I’m not including FFVII and Ocarina of Time in this list. I do consider them 2 of the best games of all time, but a lot of people do so I’m not going to offer my own thoughts.)

SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS

This game is breathtaking. Honestly. It delivers all the emotions you thought you’d never feel from a game. It’s innovative, exciting, a lot of fun and it even has lots of replay value. But it can’t be described as just”good graphics, good sound” etc. Its more than that. Its one of the most satisfyingly simple concepts ever conceived. Just 16 bosses, a boy with a sword and a horse named Agro. No towns, no side quests, nothing. The horse’s animations stands out especially – its lightyears ahead Epona in any Zelda game.

RESIDENT EVIL 4

I’ve been a Resi fan for a while but I held off playing this one until the Wii version came around. I saw the new camera and the new focus on action and I thought “psh, that looks stupid. It won’t be scary.” Well, I finally played this and I felt like a fool. Its simply incredible. It delivers so many different environments and atmospheres I don’t know how they packed it all in. The game was marketed by showing the village environment at the start, but little did I know that was just the tip of the very large iceberg.

METAL GEAR SOLID 3

Some people didn’t like MGS2 because it had too much talking, etc. MGS3 fixes everything that was wrong with MGS2, and then some….and then some more. Its so ambitious. The bosses, the story, the adaptive music, the characters, everything about this game is grand in proportion and perfectly realised. The ending is really just the most exciting ending in any game ever. If I had to pick one reason why this game stands out, its the boss battle with the ancient sniper, “The End.” that “boss” is just 2 men hunting and tracking each other around the forest, and it was one of the most intense experiences I found on the PS2.

SILENT HILL 2

Another PS2 game!? Yeah, well, screw nostalgia. I happen to be just about the biggest Silent Hill fan you’ll ever meet, but very few people will argue with SH2. It really is just storytelling perfection. Most games “have” a story. But Silent Hill 2 IS a story. It has a wonderful plot twist and it’s quite honestly one of the most chilling games I’ve ever seen. This is a game that knows less is more, silence can be used as effectively as sound, and if you’re going to have a character driven story – character development is pretty important. I actually think SH3 is scarier but this one is the overall best.