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There’s no doubt that MANOS: The Hands Of Fate is one of the worst movies ever released. Now, FreakZone Games, developer of the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) Adventures have made a loving (?) tribute to this horror disaster in the form of MANOS: The Hands of Fate- Director’s Cut. The question though, is the game as bad as the movie it pays homage to, or is it worth your time?
MANOS is a 2d action game in a deliberately retro fashion. It harkens back to the days of the NES. Many games from those days are remembered as absolute classics, and recapturing that retro feeling in a fresh new gam eis always a fun experience. Unfortunately, The Hands Of Fate manages to capture the good and the bad from the olden days. The story of the game is as simple as the movie. You, your wife and daughter and family dog find yourselves stranded in the desert after your car breaks down. The Valley Lodge is nearby and you go to find help. Nonsensical events follow, much like the movie. By no means is it a bad plot. It makes more sense than the original Kirby games. And it certainly matches the movie it’s based on.
Gameplay is simple, boiling down to running, jumping and shooting. Controls are a bit floaty. I was never certain if it was because of a deliberate design choice to capture the feeling of old NES games, or if it was simply floaty for no real reason. Either way, I found myself cursing the controls many, many, many times as I fell to my death after only slightly holding the opposite direction I was traveling. Or missing a jump because I didn’t hold down the jump button for the exact millisecond length of time demanded. Or simply getting run over by an enemy because the game ate a command input and I didn’t shoot my gun in time. Accompanying this imprecision in control is a grain effect that is turned on by default.
While this effect was probably intended to add atmosphere, it instead is practically crippling to your ability to see what is coming, particularly in one early auto scrolling level that takes place in complete darkness across multiple pits with disappearing blocks and enemies that cannot be seen until they are right in your face. Fortunately, this effect can be turned off in the game’s main menu. If you play MANOS, I highly recommend disabling the grain effect before you start the game. Aside from hindering your ability to play the game, I also found it giving me a severe headache after a few minutes.
On the positive side, MANOS has many things I remember fondly from the old NES days. Levels are pattern based, meaning that learning a level and the routes of the enemies within the level can allow you to flex your muscles and absolutely destroy a stage. Exploration is rewarded, as it will often uncover Hands Of Fate which will increase your life bar permanently. And, as an added bonus health pickups are plentiful along with shiny gems and coins which increase your score. Or rather, health pickups are plentiful on normal difficulty. On harder modes the game is nowhere near as generous. And on Nightmare difficulty, you better bring your A game. This is NES Hard at its most punishing worst. Also welcome is the addition of the shotgun pickup. While a more powerful weapon is welcome in it’s own right, MANOS also challenges you to play pixel perfect as taking damage will downgrade you back to your lowly pistol. Its a simple yet effective way of rewarding precision gameplay. Even more welcome are generous checkpoints. If you ever played an NES game, you’ll know why this is a big deal/
One of the few unreserved compliments I have for this game are it’s art style and music. The visuals are clearly modern, as no NES every sported a color palette this varied. The characters, levels and backgrounds are all crisp and unique. Sprites move with a sense of life and character, and its often fun to just watch one of the zombies march across the screen. Likewise, the music fits the camp horror theme well.
MANOS: The Hands Of Fate- Director’s Cut is a strange game. An homage to one of the worst movies ever made, it contains some of the things I hated most about NES games. There are things that I appreciate in it’s design. And I had the odd moments of enjoyment while playing it. But the numerous cheap deaths I suffered, including the dozens in the plane section where you are pitted against what amounts to two bosses at once with only one hit between you and death were more than sufficient to make it hard to summon up the will to press on with the game. Retro visuals are charming, but marred by a hideous grain effect that is turned on from the start. And, in the end the good just didn’t outweigh the bad. There are great ideas here. Its just to bad that like the movie it plays homage to, MANOS: The Hands of Fate – Director’s Cut is inconsistent, irritating and not all that enjoyable in the end.
Final Score: 4.5/10
UPDATE: Final Score 6.5/10 due to patch fixes. Please watch the video review for more details.
Ouya’s idea of open platform gaming was a lovely one, appealing to a few but it never really took off the ground. It didn’t help that the launch problems for the Android machine included sticking controller buttons, lag and an interface that really wasn’t appealing.
Fortunately CEO Julie Uhrman managed to keep it afloat long enough to find a buyer for her company, in the form of Razer who are most often known for their range of utensils and other computer related accessories they sell – headphones most notable among those.
.@Razer Can’t wait to see what you do. Take care of my incredible team and community…I know you will.
She’s now leaving the company, while Razer are making use of Ouya’s software assets and has hired on the technical and development staff of the smaller company. However the console and controller will not be making the jump over to Razer.
It remains to be seen how Razer intend to utilise their new acquisition and its staff to their advantage.
Earlier today news emerged from some corner of the Internet that Blizzard, them of World of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft and Hearthstone fame, had supposedly registered a new trademark – Council of Glades. The Internet immediately went into cross-referencing it against every bit of game lore Blizzard had.
The news came out of MMO Champion and showed off a document registering the trademark with New Zealand’s IP office on the 25th, covering all devices a game could be made for as well as online game and news that would tie into Battle.net. With a big event in Gamescom coming up soon, it seemed we knew something we could expect to see…
… Or not. As someone pointed out over Twitter later on: it’s fake.
@Elvinelol Its a fake. The Client Reference number is the one for Warlords of Draenor and should be different
That’s disappointing, but with Gamescom still to come it does mean we can once again get back to wondering just what new wonders it’ll bring (likely to see more HS Grand Tournament cards revealed).
Game publishing giant Valve has apologised for a flaw in its Steam digital distribution platform that saw numerous accounts hijacked last week, blaming a software bug for the issue.
Valve’s Steam platform is one of the most popular distribution services around, largely thanks to its required use for the company’s own games and heavily-discounted sale prices several times a year. With millions of users, though, it’s a prime target for ne’er-do-wells – and a bug in the platform allowed many accounts to be hijacked by said wrong’uns over the last week, thanks to what Valve is claiming was a software bug.
‘On July 25th we learned of a Steam bug that could have impacted the password reset process on your Steam account during the period July 21-July 25. The bug has now been fixed,’ the company explained in an email sent to users whose passwords had been changed – legitimately or otherwise – during the period. ‘To protect users, we are resetting passwords on accounts that changed passwords during that period using the account recovery wizard. You will receive an email with your new password. Once that email is received, it is recommended that you login to your account via the Steam client and set a new password.’
The company has stated that the original password was never revealed to the attackers, and neither was any internal system compromised: the flaw was limited to an issue with the account recovery wizard, which allowed attackers to reset the password for any account without access to the account’s original email address. Those who use Steam Guard, the company’s two-factor authentication system, were protected even if the password was changed, Valve has added.
Those who have received the email are advised to reset their passwords in order to regain access to their accounts, and to check for any unauthorised activity while the account was in another’s control.
Another Steam bug recently surfaced that let users reset passwords for accounts they did not own. Fortunately Valve were quick off the mark in fixing it, but not before a number of people lost access to their accounts for a few hours.
The issue was dependent on the knowledge of the account’s username, and since that is common knowledge it was easy enough to get password resets sent for accounts. Unsurprisingly a large number of more well known people such as streamers and Youtubers were affected by this, although thanks to a previous change that implemented a five-day ban on trading from accounts that change password or e-mail there was no mass looting of digital items from accounts affected and the majority of people now have back their own accounts.
If you’re interested, a user on Reddit made a video detailing exactly how it worked:
