Ah, medieval Persia. A place of great beauty. A place of technological wonder. A place where villains are grandiose and theatrical, and heroes are gallant, chivalrous and Caucasian.
So Friday saw me perhaps foolishly overlook Red Dead Redemption in favour of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, the 10th game in the PoP series and not a sequel to 2008's un-subtitled Prince of Persia, but an 'interquel' set in between The Sands of Time (which I played last week) and Warrior Within. And it is definitely NOT a movie tie-in.
I did have the game preordered at GAME, along with a limited edition pack of PoP playing cards, but after seeing the queue for Rockstar's Wild West opus, I ducked into HMV instead, whom I discovered were giving away the 1981 version of The Clash of the Titans on BluRay with every purchase of The Forgotten Sands on the PS3. Sold.
So anyway. The prince (unofficially named Dastan in the upcoming Disney film) has been sent by his father (who you had to slay in the first game, having become a sand monster, although that never happened due to the prince rewinding time to before the event, stay with me) to the kingdom of his elder brother, Malik, to learn how to be a successful ruler. Upon his arrival, he finds Malik's palace under siege from unknown invaders, and Malik himself fighting a losing battle. As a last resort Malik unleashes the fabled army of King Solomon, which happens to be an unlimited swarm of sand creatures led by a huge demon named Ratash. With the help of Razia, Ratash's benevolent female counterpart, and the powers she bestows upon him (conveniently including the ability to rewind time a few seconds) the prince has to find a way to defeat the demon and banish the army before the world is overrun and all is lost.
The ice power makes for some very tense moments.
Initially I felt like the game was holding my hand a little bit compared to the prequel, all of the moves and actions seem a lot easier to pull off, and everything moves a lot slower giving you more time to pull them off. The combat has also been noticeably simplified, sacrificing strategic thinking and positioning for waves and waves of easily killed but overwhelmingly numerous enemies for the player to wade through, which sounds like a negative point but in all actuality is extremely satisfying. The major new point is the prince's ability to flash-freeze water, allowing himself access to previously unreachable locations.
Aside from that, the game is pretty much what you'd expect from the series: puzzle-solving, acrobatics and a healthy dose of swordplay. The graphics are spot-on, highly detailed, and the only two visual qualms I had are with the prince himself: his face is distinctly simian looking and his arms have a plastic look about them, similar to Dead or Alive's Ryu Hayabusa. But the detail in his armour is spectacular in HD.
Well, it's an enjoyable game. I'll confess I've only played The Sands of Time and the 2008 PoP up until now, and this game lacks the boy/girl partnership that was done so well in the others. Razia pops up every so often, but it just isn't the same. But that's made up for in the game's cinematic and epic closure, set in the epicenter of a huge sandstorm. Verdict? Not going to win any awards, but fantastic fun and great for any fan of the genre.
So, Metro 2033 then? I haven't got this linking thing worked out. Metro 2033 is a post-apocalyptic First-Person Shooter based on a Russian novel of the same name. The game puts you in the shoes of Artyom, a man born in 2013, the final days of Moscow before the world was devastated by nuclear war and forced to live his first twenty years (2013 + 20 = 2033) in an underground settlement in the city's subway system (hence 'Metro') before leaving for the mutant-infested surface on a mission to save the world. As gamers, I'd forgive you if you think you've heard all this before.
But unlike Fallout 3, the game it shares it's back story with, Metro is a very linear experience, and Moscow is a lot darker and a much more depressing setting than the Capital Wasteland. The scenes set in the subterranean towns are very reminiscent of the flashback/forward scenes in The Terminator, with survivors living woefully in overcrowded squalor. Heading outside is also very different, with the game being set a lot sooner after the nuclear disaster than Fallout 3, making for a more hostile world. The air is still polluted, necessitating the use of a gas mask which requires frequent filter changes. Water is irradiated as you'd expect, and hurts you on contact as opposed to the accumulative nature of the radiation in F3.
Unable to find a Metro 2033 screenshot, I'll have to make do with this stock photo of Birmingham.
Okay, no more Fallout comparisons I promise. The game, as I've mentioned, is very dark and depressing, and mostly (so far, I've only played a couple of hours) spent skulking around in dark tunnels with hideously underpowered weaponry. Ammunition, as you can imagine, is a commodity, and is actually used as currency, with pre-war ammo worth more than the low quality bullets created after the bombs. Things begin to get a bit weird when ghosts start appearing in subway cars, and Artyom is plagued with visions of tall, lank creatures in the darkness, taking you up to just about right where I'm at.
Okay, I can't decide whether this game is really good but hard going, or really, really shit. But it definitely is one or the other. The graphics and atmosphere are both phenomenal, and the fact that the cutscenes play out in first person brings a feel of Half-Life 2 into the mix. Voice acting is hit and miss, with some of the frankly strangest accents I've ever heard flying around, and the characters are all grizzled Russian men, without fail, to the point of not being able to tell them apart. I'll reserve judgment for now, as I'm firmly on the fence with this one.
And that's about it. I finished Alan Wake, and the game seemed to lose it's way a bit. After the first half being genuinely scary, reminiscent of Jame's Herbert's fantastic novel 'The Dark', but not actually that good, the second half brings the gameplay up to scratch, with the story descending into a camp buddy comedy. The whole thing is capped off with a baffling ending that answers no questions and leaves no room for the planned sequels or DLC to follow on from. So the game, while decent, is not a patch on what it could have been.
James Herbert is about the only author this guy doesn't name-drop.
So that's that then. I'll try to be on time next week, with Dante's Inferno, hopefully a verdict on Metro 2033 and I just might possibly get my hands on the original Lost Planet. Time will tell.
Hype is a cruel mistress. She waltzes in to a game's life and promises to spread the word, gets prospective fans excited, sends the media into a frenzy, and the ultimately undoes the game by building up a pre-reputation that it can't possibly ever live up to. Haze fell prey to this, with all the 'Halo on PS3' comments, when in reality it couldn't even hold a candle to the first Red Faction, or the PS2 port of Half-Life (Coincidentally two of the first four games I got for the console). Another casualty of hype was Fable, with verbal-diarrhea sufferer Peter Molyneux making all sorts of wild claims about features of the game that the XBox hardware couldn't even handle, and the otherwise fantastic RPG was stricken with a stigma that outlived the game's own lifespan.
I am going somewhere with all of this, I promise you. Alan Wake (a game that not even I had seen coming in this week's blog) has been in development for nine years, and was formally announced five years ago, and in that time, particularly in the last year or so, has fallen for lady hype hard.
I think the stupidest thing I'd heard was "It's like Heavy Rain on the 360", because the game is everything but that. If anything, it's more like Siren Blood Curse. Before I go on, I want to make it clear that I don't dislike Alan Wake, it's just decidedly average. A storyline that is genuinely gripping and involving (at least after a few hours anyway) is buried under a torrent of disgusting voice-acting, one-dimensional characters and graphics and animation that are just not up to the standard of the rest of this year's releases - Alan himself looks like he's having a stroke, and he seems to bare his teeth at people all the time, like a territorial dog. But hey, at least the 'Energizer' logo is clearly readable on the batteries you find lying around everywhere, and that's the important thing, right? In-game advertising? Anyway.
I see your schwartz is as big as mine...
The story goes: Alan Wake is a successful author, leather elbow pads and all, but has suffered epic writer's block since his last novel three years prior to the events of the game. His wife, Alice, attention seeking jerk and scared-of-the-dark woman-child, decides to lure him to some backwater hick town (which has somehow become a tourist trap despite looking like a bad northern council estate) under false pretense of having a quiet holiday, when really she was just trying to muse him into churning out another pay cheque.
The holiday is cut short however, when Alice is taken by dark forces and Wake looses two weeks of his life, only coming back to consciousness when he is involved in a car crash to find that he's written a book that's slowly coming true. And to top it all off, a dark entity is sweeping over the town and possessing the locals. Shit.
Alan Wake plays like a 'best of' from other franchises. Combat, for instance, is played out with a torch, that you must use to burn the 'dark energy' from your foes, before finishing them off with a couple of bullets, almost exactly like ObsCure. Then there's the bit where swarms of birds are attacking you, and you have to burn them by boosting your torch at them, like the driving section in Gears. Not enough? The enemies are all axe-wielding lumberjacks, who approach you slowly and throw their infinite reserves of hatchets at you, literally exactly like Resident Evil 4 (there are even Chainsaw bad guys that take more damage), even the animations could be ripped directly from Capcom's opus. The car crash scene is near frame-for-frame exactly like the first Silent Hill, and the use of flares as weapons is taken straight from the last. And the episodic formula is ripped from Alone in the Dark and Siren Blood Curse. I could go on all day.
But I won't. because Wake has a saving grace in it's story, which seemed pretty by the book until a plot twist turned everything upside down at the end of the third episode, which was where I last switched off, and I'm looking forward to going back to it tonight. Oh yeah, the collector's edition is fantastic too, and only the same price as the game itself at most places.
I've also gone back to the first of last generation's Prince of Persia games, The Sands of Time, in anticipation of the series' 'interquel', being released on friday. Regrettably, the game has aged horrifically, but it's interesting to see now how revolutionary it must have been at the time, and how that just passed me by when the game was released. You can really see how it helped shape games like Assassin's Creed, Uncharted and the last three Tomb Raiders, and other games of their ilk, and it makes you wonder where they would be if PoP never saw the light of day.
Realising you can rewind time: priceless.
As dated as it is I'm loving it, and can't believe that I've never finished it or even played the rest of the trilogy (sorry, quadrilogy now isn't it), because as a rule I love this type of game. Needless to say, I'm going to go out of my way to complete the story in the near future.
And after getting a lump in my throat over braining Sean Paul in Def Jam: Fight for NY the other week, I grabbed a copy of it's PSP port The Takeover last week. It's a little disappointing that the cutscenes are absent and the fighting is limited to one-on-one, but the core gameplay is still there. The great thing about Def Jam is that losing is just as fun as winning. You can always laugh when you realise you just got stoved in by Flava Flav, who happens to be sporting a rather nice tux.
Don't worry about the car, Xzibit was just gonna pimp it anyway.
However, the game employs one of my greatest pet peeves ever. What's the point in being able to customize your character if their skills and stats depend on what they're wearing? It's like 'yeah, you can look however you want, but if you actually want to win fights, you better wear what we tell you to'. It fucked me off in SoulCalibur IV, It's fucking me off now.
On that note I'll put a lid on it. Check back next week for Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands and possibly, just possibly, Metro 2033. Ciao.
Once again I step up to the mantle with very little to write about. Who's stupid idea was it to make this a weekly thing?
Well, I had a bit more of a go with InFamous, and it still seems pretty shocking (pun intended). I noticed a very annoying game mechanic, where the main character, Cole, would automatically attach himself to the nearest ledge whenever I would jump. Yeah, this is standard in any vertical platforming game nowadays, but most usually just apply it to the ledges you're aiming at, not just any that happen to be near you. I was chasing some kind of visual memory of a target who'd been there previously, to find his current whereabouts, and when I jumped over a dumpster I ended up dangling from an adjacent bus stop and losing my quarry.
You'll survive that fall. Stub your toe and you're fucked.
Cole also has a bit of a Superfriends-era Superman thing going on, in that he seems to develop a convenient new power every time a scenario demands it. Upon finding a dead woman on the ground, Cole exclaims that he's going to try something completely off-the-wall, and touches her head. Hey fucking presto, he can read her memories, despite the fact that the brain is actually dead, holds no impulses and is effectively cat food now. Who would have known?
He also gets an ability where he is able to heal dying civilians by jolting them with his lightning powers. All well and good, if these victims are suffering from a massive cardiac arrest and need defibrillating, but they are mostly dying from a plague, and would probably actually not benefit at all from several thousand volts directly to the heart.
You know what, the more I write about it, the more I hate it. Fuck it, I'm shelving it. It's a ridiculous game, even for one of the Superhero genre. Cole, for all I care, can develop a hunch, and jump off a building, to see if he has a 'nosedive-into-concrete-and-survive' power. Oh wait, he did. AND IT WORKED. But about 3 bullets still kill him.
I also finally got around to trying my hand at the Borderlands expansion pack The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. Guess what? That's pretty dick too. I don't know if I've just tired of Borderlands or what, but the game that made it into my Top 10 of last year doesn't seem to hold the same charm any more. My main problem with Zombie Island is that it just seems like they've simply bogged you down with thousands of respawning enemies to add longevity to the game, as it seems to take hours to travel a few hundred yards.
This screenshot tells you all you need to know about Zombie Island
But the thing is, I can't remember exactly what I liked so much about Borders anyway. From what I remember it was simply just walking through boring, samey landscapes and shooting things, and that's exactly what's on show with Zombie Island too. Surely there must have been something more, but if there was, it's evaded me. Anyway, I think I'm done with Borders now, the rest of the DLC will probably go untouched.
Finally, I downloaded Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection Online on the PS3. It plays pretty much exactly the same as the PSP version, which is no bad thing as said version is just about the best Tekken in the series. Haven't tried it online yet, but I have had countless hours of multiplayer on the PSP version so I know to expect more of the same, just probably with more people who actually know what they're doing, and consequently more ass-kickings for me.
Speaking of PSP, I finally let go of my frankensteined PSP 1000 (Casing and inner components of a JP white console, screen and face buttons of a UK Black one) and upgraded to an absolutely gorgeous Radiant Red PSP 3000 (I'm boycotting the PSP Go, because it's shit). The console is taking some getting used to, with the tighter analogue nub and the smooth, handgrip-less back, and obviously it's a lot lighter and quieter than the Phat, but playing LittleBigPlanet on my TV was great last night, and the UMD movies are near DVD quality even on the 21" inch screen in my bedroom.
Isn't she lovely, isn't she wonderful...
So now, with the ability to play the games without squinting at a tiny screen and being able to hold the console in my lap like a controller, instead of enduring arm-fatigue from holding it in front of my face, some of my unfinished games like Resistance: Retribution, GTA CTW and Tales of Eternia might get some more play. And upcoming games like God of War: Ghost of Sparta and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker will seem all the more special too. Bravo Sony.
It's amazing, that in this day and age, if a linear game takes more than six hours to complete it outlives it's welcome. GTA IV, Fallout 3, that's fine. They've got plenty of things tucked away for the ADHD generation to stumble across, and it's easy to poddle off and play something else for a few weeks and drop back into it if needs be. Yep, £40 is perfectly acceptable for six hours of disposable entertainment.
Take Darksiders for example. One of the finest games so far this generation, capturing the feel of absolutely classic games like Soul Reaver and Primal, and throwing a gripping and engaging storyline and at times jaw-dropping visuals to boot, but after 16 hours of game time, spread over the course of two weeks, it had dragged on a little bit too long.
So when I finally dropped the last enemy last night (enemy is the only word I could use which is still accurate and doesn't give anything away) and laid my pad down, I breathed a sigh of relief. Don't get me wrong, it is a fantastic game, but I was aching for something new.
"I'm a fuckin' Demon!"
But I will at least remember it fondly, and shit, I'm going to recommend it to anyone that will listen (I started that last night by passing the word on to my Elder Scrolls freak sister). As I said, the graphics are stunning in places, with vibrancy in colours on a par with Uncharted and Just Cause 2. And the voice acting is absolutely fantastic, with Mark Hamill and Moon Bloodgood leading the D-list way and Liam O'brien (me neither) doing his best Simon Templeman impersonation as the lead character. The boss fights mostly play out like N64 Zelda bosses, but it does have a go at the 'Epic Boss' style of God of War, without quite pulling it off. I also noticed that, when dismembering an enemy, the wounds are just hollow and red, no meat or bones, which is a bit of a letdown, but doesn't mar the experience and is only really noticeable in some of the larger enemies. Speaking of larger enemies, the end boss is a Fuck Off Dragon. But it's considerably easier to kill than the one in Dragon Age.
The preceding game on my shame pile turned out to be InFamous. For those who don't know, InFamous is a PS3 exclusive free-roaming Superhero game. You play as Cole McGrath, one of those annoying Parkour messengers who was unknowingly delivering a bomb to somebody when it went off, levelling half the city. Being at the epicenter of the blast, Cole naturally develops super lightning powers instead of getting vaporized. But when a plague breaks out, the city is locked off, and gang crime becomes rife. So Cole decides to become the people's protector. Or a public menace. yeah, the game has a karma system.
If you take the evil route, you actually become a Sith Lord.
Well, I've only played for like half an hour so far. Honest first impressions? well, it's a bit... shit really. Surprisingly ugly for a PS3 exclusive, and the fiddly climbing and jumping and hand to hand combat without any kind of lock-on function make it seem no better than Spider-Man 3. The only moral choice I had to make was when I found a food drop, and I could either let the citizens share it amongst themselves or take it all for myself, and sit atop my tower feasting, laughing at the starving peasants below and zapping anybody that comes near. Very black and white. So far, it's not a patch on Prototype, which I can't help but compare it to.
Moving on, Super Street Fighter IV arrived last week, much to my joy. This update to SFIV boasts ten extra characters, a new ultra combo for each character, the return of the car/barrel smashing bonus rounds, redone intros and endings and a bunch of extra multiplayer modes including 8-player team battle and a winner-stays-on type of affair, again for up to 8 players. So the fact that it wasn't just DLC is kind of justified.
Ibuki is a force to be reckoned with.
The characters are a mixed bunch. There's Adon from Street Fighter, and Cody and Guy from Final Fight (or all three of those from Street Fighter Alpha if you prefer), T. Hawk and Dee Jay from Super Street Fighter II, and Makoto, Dudley and the awesome Ibuki from Street Fighter III making a return, along with two all-new fighters. Firstly, Juri is an agent for the evil S.I.N. organization, using Taekwondo and drawing power from a 'Feng Shui device' in her prosthetic eye. Rather than give her the power to arrange furniture, it actually lets her kick fireballs at people, go figure. The second is Hakan, a Turkish oil wrestler who lubes himself up before each fight. I'm telling you, you can't make this stuff up.
Played a few rounds against Raz7el online too, and aside from quite a bit of lag, the game remains pretty tight. I also don't like to brag, but I handed his ass to him on more than a few occasions. Dan Hibiki is awesome.
Well, that's about that. Expect more of an opinion on InFamous next week, and a look at Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. See ya!
