Review: Beat Hazard Ultra

Say what you will about twin-stick shooters, but their popularity doesn't seem to be waning anytime soon. From arcade classics like Smash TV to more current fare such as Geometry Wars, people seem to like shooting at things is any direction, and the shmups that spawn from that desire are as popular as ever.

At least, that's what indie developer Cold Beam Games is hoping. Manned by a single programmer in his bedroom, the maker of Beat Hazard Ultra wants to give the familiar ground laid by Geometry Wars and its ilk a unique spin by way of allowing players to use their own music collection.

We're not talking mere customizable soundtracks, though. With Beat Hazard Ultra, the music also dictates how the game unfolds.

Beat Hazard Ultra (Mac, PC, PlayStation Network [reviewed])
Developer: Cold Beam Games
Publisher: Cold Beams Games
Released: October 19, 2011 (PSN), June 16, 2011 (Steam)
MSRP: $9.99 (PSN), $4.99 (Steam, after purchase of original Beat Hazard for $9.99)

Beat Hazard Ultra owes a lot to Geometry Wars. Gameplay is similar, with one analog stick for movement and the other for directional shooting, except that the geometric shapes are replaced by actual enemy ships. There's the same kind of frenetic spray of bullets and enemies on screen, only now, the chaos is controlled by the music. The game acts like a visualizer of your favorite PC music program, jumping and shining brightly as the music thumps and pulsates. Here, bullets and enemies are generated by the natural ebb and flow of the music you've chosen.

The original Beat Hazard was available on Xbox Live Indie Games for 400 MSP almost a year ago, and this title serves as an expansion on Steam and also as a brand new, standalone title on PSN. The game comes with a standard selection of indie rock and pseudo-techno tracks, all beat-heavy and bass-tastic. As the music builds, more ships are generated, and your tiny craft pumps out an amazing array of firepower. As enemies are destroyed, they often leave behind power-ups which increase your multiplier (which increase your firepower output), raise the volume of the song, and so on.

You collect monetary icons to purchase perks that grant you new weapons, lives, and more. Every time you pass a milestone in your cumulative score, you get to unlock another perk, which can then be purchased (and occasionally upgraded) from the Manage Perks screen. In addition to your stock shooter and smart bombs (mapped to the right trigger), you will unlock weapons such as the Ultra beam -- a quick, powerful blast that can decimate anything in its path -- or a shield to reflect enemy fire. The mini missiles are also formidable weapons, each mapped to one of the shoulder buttons or triggers.

All this may sound like standard fare, but what really makes Beat Hazard Ultra unique is how it is affected by your collection of tunes. Popping in a track by the Beatles is just as satisfying as a track by the Ramones, and dance-heavy garbage like Ke$ha and the Black Eyed Peas can generate a huge amount of enemies and fire power, making for frenetic and catchy gameplay.

The way the music rises and builds is taken into account -- enemies and even boss ships are generated based on how the music flows. This means that replaying the same song will generate the same ships, though the direction they fly in from might change. So if you see a giant snake boss when playing a track, chances are you'll see it again when you replay that track. You'll want a wide variety of tunes to mix up the action.

Visually, the game is decently detailed, though not necessarily spectacular. The ships vary in size and all look like some sort of of HD Galaga wannabes. However, this game is an epileptic's nightmare -- if ever a strobe warning were necessary for a game, Beat Hazard Ultra would be the one. Still, I guess it comes with the territory for a game that thrives on the rhythm of user-supplied audio.

There are four gameplay modes. There's Standard mode, where one song equals one game. Next is Survival mode, where a track list loops endlessly and you try to see how many waves of foes you can clear before falling. Boss Rush and Chill Out round out the set, the latter being a mode where you have unlimited lives and weapons to battle through an endless list of tunes (or at least as many as you have on your hard drive). Then there are selectable difficulty levels (for adding even more to the seizure-inducing visuals) as well as online multiplayer and leaderboards.

For a game made by one guy in his bedroom over the summer, Beat Hazard Ultra is an interesting treat. The controls are tight, the weapons are unique and varied, and the novelty of using your own songs gives you an endless library of levels and enemy variety. For shooter fans, it's a fun and unique entry in the catalog, perfect for quick sessions (one song length!) and marathon survival runs alike.

Review: Saints Row: The Third Dildo Baseball Bat

While we're all waiting for that hotly anticipated Saints Row: The Third review, it's easy to forget that Volition Inc. has something else coming to market -- the official Saints Row: The Third Dildo Baseball Bat. 

Fortunately, Destructoid got its hands on what may be the biggest consumer product this holiday season. We took it for a test drive and are proud to reveal this exclusive review! If you're buying any other combination of sports club and external arousal implement, you're definitely getting shafted!

Saints Row: The Third Dildo Baseball Bat 
Manufacturer: Volition Inc.
Publisher: THQ
Released: TBD 
MSRP: $624.99

Whether your trusty old baseball bat is ready for retirement or your tired and clammy dildo needs replacing, Volition Inc. has you covered with the Saints Row: The Third Dildo Baseball Bat. Built with durability and long-term use in mind, you'll be laughing at the savings whether you're smashing balls in the park with your son or smashing your vagina to pieces while watching The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn: Part 1!

Thanks to the smooth ergonomic design and carefully regulated coating of Polymer Rubber Substitute, the Saints Row Dildo Bat provides a level of comfort and flexibility hitherto unseen in any other baseball bat/artificial penis. I was impressed by just how good this feels to use. It's been intuitively designed so that even a novice can get to grips with it in seconds, featuring a very simple handle-based interface that should be familiar to most users. 

The handle itself has a particularly satisfying level of friction and comfort, thanks to the Scientific Flexi-Wrap applied to a rigid base of luxury wood. The contours improve grip ratio while the tactile-oriented neo matte finish keeps even the sweatiest of palms from slipping. 

Having a good handle on any baseball dick is paramount, as experts in the field will tell you 67% of the time. Unfortunately, most manufacturers focus only on the glamour portions of their devices and neglect this mundane-yet-crucial part of the experience. Volition went the extra mile on its piece and deserves applause in an industry that's far too quick to stampede toward the penis without taking care of the fundamentals.

Make no mistake, however -- Volition has not skimped on the detail.

Putting its legendary creative sensibilities to fantastic use with an artisan level of design. The testicles feature hand-crafted creases to create that "just-like-real-sac" feeling that consumers have come to demand over the years, with a central groove to neatly define each individual bollock. These medically accurate representations of authentic gonads will delight even the most discerning of fans, making this a perfect gift for those who believe that the devil is in the details. 

The elegant detailing continues up through the device's premium shaft, featuring a prominent central vein that many fans will recognize from seeing pictures of actual penises in their day-to-day lives. The entire package is complimented by a sleek and aerodynamic glans situated at the distal end of the corpora cavernosa. While it is unfortunate that a complimentary meatus has been excluded from the final product, the Dildo Bat nonetheless features a beautifully designed crown, shaped to please and providing a significant amount of heft in the finished article, so you can really hit those home runs!

All told, it's given me a great amount of pleasure to be able to review the Dildo Bat for you. However, there are of course a few negative aspects that must be addressed. Firstly, the smell -- it stinks like Laffy Taffy. While this won't be a problem for customers exclusively utilizing the item as a sporting implement, those who wish to make full use of its features may feel put off by the overwhelming aroma of goof-themed boiled sugar in something they intend to place within one of several personal openings. 

The color is also a boner of contention. While I personally appreciate the purple tone, one does occasionally think of Grimace's throbbing plonker while studying it for too long. I don't need to tell you that overt sexual thoughts concerning a McDonald's villain-turned-mascot have been a bit of a controversial issue in North America -- especially lately -- and this could be a huge dealbreaker for some users. 

Despite these setbacks, the Saints Row: The Third Dildo Baseball Bat is still one of the most flexible and worthwhile investments a family could make. Thanks to its versatile application at work and home, the Dildo Bat is a brilliant investment that finally puts an end to the need to replace ordinary baseball bats and sex toys -- often considered one of the greatest causes of financial strain in the West. 

In short, this is a highly recommended piece, and one that you should definitely pass up on. It should be available in Walmart, Target and Toys R Us in the near future, so keep a look out!

Review: Dungeon Siege III: Treasures of the Sun

For all its faults, Dungeon Siege III was something that I immensely enjoyed to button-mash my way through on my own. The camera annoyances found in co-op were not really an issue while playing solo, although the AI's tendency to just leave you for dead more than made up for it.

Treasures of the Sun, the first big DLC expansion, doesn't just add a good amount of new content to the hack & slash-a-ton, but also gives players a number of new tools to make their lives a lot easier on the whole.

Dungeon Siege III: Treasure of the Sun (PC, Xbox 360 [Reviewed], PS3)
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher: Square Enix
Released: October 26, 2011
MSRP: $9.99, 800 Microsoft Points

Given that Dungeon Siege III more or less made you run a linear line from locale to locale, Treasures of the Sun fits right in with its new Aranoi Desert environment. If you have already finished the game before, you can just load up the Endgame autosave and get to Aranoi from a new path on the Causeway Hub that would normally lead you to the Chapterhouse and the final battle. If you haven't finished it, you'll be able to access it via the same Causeway Hub after you regain control of the Grand Chapterhouse and complete the Spire levels.

You won't be able to just jump into the DLC from the start of the game and for good reason; it can be damn hard! The last time I played Dungeon Siege III was sometime in July and of course I had completely forgotten Reinhart's (my main) 3x3 array of abilities. Since the game was also still set on Hardcore from the campaign playthrough, suffice it to say that I died horrible at the hands of the most meager of skeletons that you first encounter on the Aranoi wasteland. After familiarizing yourself with the controls and remembering how to play Dungeon Siege III, though, it quickly becomes second nature again.

As DLC goes, Treasures of the Sun will give you plenty of meat to dive into. There's a good five hours or more worth of sieging dungeons in here -- at least if you listen to the conversations -- and as Dungeon Siege III goes it's actually rather good. The Aranoi Desert environment itself can be compared to one of the larger campaign areas in terms of scope, with plenty of sidequests, cave systems, temples and dungeons to crawl through.

The main game may not be one that is remembered fondly because of its story, but Treasures of the Sun offers a surprisingly much better story than you'd expect. Now that the goal is no longer to just go through the motions to gather allies against Jeyne Kassinder, there's somewhat of a lull in the storyline to allow you to explore other parts of the Dungeon Siege universe. In this case, it sheds some more light on the background of the Azunai religion and a lost temple where former Azunites have turned to heresy.

Some twists should offer some good fun for Dungeon Siege fans and there is plenty of lore to go around and to help you delve into the wider universe. Compared to the regular game with its snippets of unrelated information here and there, I found it refreshing to read so much lore focused on the single topic of the Agallan giants' adoption of the Azunite religion, what happened to Ehb's patron saint Hiram, and the subsequent heresy that has tainted Aranoi. Of course, if you ignore all of that there's still some plenty of the regular hack & slash experience to go around.

In Aranoi you'll come across three shrines that will each unlock a new ultimate ability. These powers will consume all your power orbs and the more orbs you have the stronger the effect will be. Hathra'unok's Embrace gives you an instant super heal, Xeria's Wrath gives you a large area-of-effect damage explosion, and Elisheva's Shield offers a very nice barrier for those harder fights. The caveat is that you can only wield one of these super powers at the same time, although you can swap them around at the Aranoi shrines as long as you have unlocked them.

However, these powers are activated by clicking and holding the thumbsticks, which can lead to some frustration. Since clicking the right thumbstick also changes the camera perspective on the controller, you'll find yourself changing the camera to its useless up-close position instead of giving you an instant heal when you are down to double digits of health. Because you can already heal yourself with every character anyway and most characters have some sort of protection ability as well, the area-of-attack ultimate is the one you'll want. Once fully powered by the five power orbs you can now wield, it can even wipe the floor with the majority of a boss form's health.

By the time you're in Aranoi, your character should be powerful enough to fill these power orbs quickly enough, so as long as you remember to use the ultimate ability it will make playing through the game on Hardcore a lot less frustrating in the later stages. Aranoi also provides you with a special shrine to respec all of your character's abilities and talents for 20,000 gold -- easily gathered within an hour -- which is an option that should've been in the main game in the first place, but it's still nice to have.

The final big addition Treasures of the Sun offers is Essences. An Essence is an item (it doesn't take up a slot in the inventory) that you can use to enchant any piece of equipment with one of five statistics; Chaos: Vampire (drain life), Doom (extra damage with critical hits), Retribution (counter damage), Stagger (stun on attack), and Warding (stun on being attacked). Larger foes will sometimes drop an Essence, but you can also randomly gain one by transmuting an expensive piece of equipment that contains one of these five statistics.

You can't overpower an item too much, as you can't enchant an item with a new Essence if that item already has six different kinds of other stats, but your main weapon will still benefit a lot from consistently adding the same types of Essences. However, adding an Essence will bankrupt you in no time due to the high cost of enchanting, so it's not likely to break the game in the areas before the DLC. I did encounter Essence drops in the final stage of the regular game, so it seems this system permeates all of Dungeon Siege III as long as you own the DLC.

This new Essence system makes it a bit more interesting to go through the entire game with a new character, and the option to respec when you reach Aranoi means you no longer have to be afraid you'll mess up your build for the end of the game. If you had trouble with the final boss, a side trip to Aranoi will provide you with enough XP to gain a few levels, with Level 35 now being the new level cap. Some new and super powerful legendary weapons you can find for each of your four characters are also certain to help you out in the late game -- especially if you enchant them with all your Essences.

If you didn't care much for Dungeon Siege III in the first place, Treasures of the Sun is not going to change your mind. It doesn't offer anything mind-blowing that magically turns Dungeon Siege III into a masterpiece. But if you thought it was great or even just alright game, this DLC offers a pretty neat package with additional features and some new powers to toy with. The story is far more interesting than anything Dungeon Siege III had to offer, even if most of it is easily overlooked in favor of just mashing those buttons. One choice at the end of the game hints at a larger impact beyond the storyline of Dungeon Siege III, which makes you wonder if Obsidian has plans for a future title that will be affected by this choice.

Treasures of the Sun is definitely one for the fans and it offers plenty of new content with its new locale, while simultaneously giving you a new reason to play through the full game again. If Dungeon Siege III was not quite Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance but similar enough for you to enjoy, then Treasures of the Sun is best compared to Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast; it's a well-shaped and mostly unrelated side-story that offers more of the same fun in a slightly tighter jacket.