Foregoing the 2010 roundup (I'm going to stop unveiling my plans in advance, because I never keep them) as I found that writing about 27 different games and keeping the post down to a 'light read' size was proving difficult, I'm moving on to the official 24HG top 10 games of 2010! The only games that I've been halfway bothered about playing that have eluded my grasp last year are BlazBlue and CoD: Black Ops, but I doubt that either would have dented the list in any way (I do love fighting games but have trouble adjusting to new systems, and CoD really isn't my thing).
2010 has been an absolutely amazing year for games. I've revised this list a number of times, because the consistently great videogame experiences throughout the year, coupled with my tendency to back the underdog, have made choosing incredibly difficult. I think I've got it down though. So as with any great ranking list, I'll start from the bottom.
10: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories - Climax Studios - Wii (PSP, PS2)
Shattered Memories was a game I played early in the year, close to it's release, and spent the rest of the year clinging on to the hope that there weren't that many games that beat it, because it deserves honouring too much. I know the number 10 spot suggests that I did take pity and slap it in regardless, but the game it beat to get this far was Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, and it is doubtless a much better game. Forgetting the Resident Evil inspired gameplay of the series so far, and adopting a Heavy Rain-esque approach to the series, this re-imagining of the original white-knuckle terror-fest succeeded in not only being the best Silent Hill games ever, but also one of the greatest Wii games to date. I just hope they can work the magic again with Silent Hill: Downpour this year, Homecoming was a travesty.
9: Darksiders - Vigil Games - PS3 (360, PC)
Darksiders is cruelly lumped in the 'God of War Clone' category too often, when in reality it takes the best bits from so many games and mashes them together into one expansive, original and utterly gorgeous work of art. Taking cues from Zelda, Soul Reaver, Fable, Portal and more, and throwing in a Mark Hamill led voice cast, Darksiders was something of a surprise for me, and had me hooked to the very end, despite the difficulty. An absolute must play, if you haven't already. It can be scooped up for less than a tenner now, you've no excuse.
8: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - MercurySteam/Kojima Productions - PS3 (360)
Before I get into the gameplay, LoS is by far the best looking multi-platform game there is. Reportedly no texture in the game was reused, making each new scene look breathtaking and fresh, also accounting for the game spilling over onto a second DVD on the 360 version. But aside from being a visual masterpiece, the game is also an incredible experience, bolstered by the strong double-act of Patrick Stewart (who's Oblivion references are hilarious) and Robert Carlyle providing the major characters' voices. The only thing holding it back is that the developers don't seem to have mastered the GoW formula in the way that others have, as the story and rebooted mythos have me craving more and the ending was phenomenal in the eyes of a gamer still pining for more Legacy of Kain.
7: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West - Ninja Theory - PS3 (360)
Bland at first, this Uncharted meets (once again) God of War soon becomes a masterpiece in storytelling and the importance of companionship. A retelling of the classic Chinese fable 'Journey to the West' (or the TV show 'Monkey' if you're a Sun reader), Enslaved puts you into the shoes of a loner known as Monkey as he is forced to escort a young girl named Tripitaka through a post-apocalyptic New York, all the while evading marauding robots and slavers. Led by the fantastic Andy Serkis, it's the unfolding narrative that pushed the game strongly into my affections, and it draws upon the tried and tested (yet surprisingly underused) Boy-meets-girl, blossoming friendship mechanic, as seen in the likes of Ico, Prince of Persia and to a lesser extent Resident Evil 4, which really endears you to the characters.
6: God of War III - Santa Monica Studio - PS3
And so the game that the last three have been leading up to... There's little to say about this game other than it carries on the solid gameplay of the first two games in the series (why fix something that isn't broken), augmenting it with breathtaking visuals and the most epic cutscenes and boss battles ever witnessed. Kratos is at his brutal best (some of the executions are stomach-churning to say the least) and this 'conclusion' to the story never once disappoints. I'm almost willing to put money on him making a comeback soon though, away from prequels and cameos, especially after the ominous ending.
5: Fable III - Lionhead Studios - 360
What came at first a slight disappointment at the changes made from the previous games in the series became a magical adventure that reeled me in like the original did years ago. With a refined combat system and a star-studded British cast with the likes of Stephen Fry, Simon Pegg and Jonathan Ross, the charming world of Albion has finally reached the industrial age, and tyrannical rule from a renegade King necessitates a revolution - and that's where you come in. Plenty of quests (every character in the game has the potential to send you on at least one quest, however simple), with far more variety than the last game, will provide the would-be adventurer with many a sleepless night, and the choices you have to make are far more impacting than any game before it. A 100% improvement over Fable II.
4: Red Dead Redemption - RockStar San Diego/RockStar North - PS3 (360)
I'll admit, the whole 'Cowboys and Indians' thing kind of put me off at first, and on their joint release day I opted to go out and buy Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands instead, but a few weeks later I subsided and my wife, in all her pity, bought me a copy of Red Dead. If I only had to say one thing about this game, it's this: IT'S BETTER THAN GTAIV. More likable characters, a more interesting open world, an even more shocking and emotive ending and more of the familiar RockStar humour and self parody make the game one of the most immersive and expansive titles this year. Couple this with the crazy-enough-to-work Undead Nightmare DLC that came out later in the year and you are on to an absolute winner. GTA needs an Undead Nightmare too though.
3: Mass Effect 2 - BioWare - 360 (PC)
The sequel to one of the best games of this generation came and, while it oversimplified the system and took the story in a direction that I wasn't too comfortable with initially, it still completely blew me and the collective gaming community away. The fact that it was the very first game I bought last year and it still holds such a prestigious place in the list is a testament to it's quality, and the fact that BioWare managed to make every single decision made in the first game impact the events of the second was nothing short of ingenuity. Looking back, the only thing I can think of that hampers the game is that the cast of characters aren't as fresh and emotive as those in the last game, and of the two that do return, why pick Tali? She's boring as hell. Still, incredible game, but with a sequel out later this year, I just hope EA can resist making it a yearly franchise.
2: Heavy Rain - Quantic Dream - PS3
Love it or hate it, you can't ignore the fact that there isn't a game in the world quite like Heavy Rain. Amazing graphics, a thrilling and brutally mature storyline and an outcome that nobody saw coming all make for a completely unmatched gaming experience, as down on his luck dad Ethan Mars struggles to find his abducted son Shaun, with the help of an investigative journalist, an aging private detective and Fox Mulder. The only problem I had with the game was with Mulder's magic future glasses, which dragged the sombre and engrossing story kicking and screaming back out of the realm of realism every time he put them on.
1: Fallout: New Vegas - Obsidian - 360 (PS3, PC)
Yeah, so what? So it isn't as good as Fallout 3, well, neither are Heavy Rain, Mass Effect 2, Red Dead Redemption or REAL LIFE. Granted, FNV is absolutely infested with bugs, but not a single one made the game unplayable in my experience (well, apart from the one that corrupted all of my saves, but I only lost out on a few hours play), and it isn't a Bethesda RPG if it hasn't got more than it's fare share of glitches. Truth be told, no other game this year has swallowed up quite so many of my gaming hours all year. A lot of people were expecting more from the game, but it delivered exactly what I wanted: more of Fallout 3. The new party system was easy to follow too, and with such great companions (I opted for the robot dog/schizophrenic old lady trapped in the body of a Super Mutant combination) the fun was endless. Sure, getting stuck in the ground every so often is a bit of a ball-ache, but as long as you save often there's no problem. And if I learnt anything from Oblivion and Fallout 3, it's SAVE OFTEN.
So there you have it, I can hear the cries of disgust at my choices already. Ah well, life goes on. Looking to the future I can already predict that next year is going to see Bethesda snaffle the top spot again with the delicious-looking Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on the horizon, backed up by future classics such as Uncharted 3, Dragon Age II, Mass Effect 3 and dare I say Mortal Kombat? Who knows? I'm looking forward to finding out, that's for sure...
And for those wondering where their games were, here's the rest of the games I played in 2010, in ranking order:
11. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light - Crystal Dynamics - PS3 (360, PC, iOS)
12. The Sims 3 - Visceral Games - PS3 (360)
13. Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood - Ubisoft - PS3 (360)
14. Bioshock 2 - 2K Marin - 360 (PS3, PC)
15. God of War: Ghost of Sparta - Ready at Dawn Studios - PSP
16. Alpha Protocol - Obsidian - PS3 (360, PC)
17. ModNation Racers - United Front Games - PS3 (PSP)
18. Perfect Dark - RARE - 360
19. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands - Ubisoft - PS3 (360)
20. Tatsunoko vs. Capcom - Capcom - Wii
21. Limbo - Playdead Studios - 360
22. Alan Wake - Remedy Entertainment - 360
23. Super Street Fighter IV - Capcom - PS3 (360)
24. Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock - Neversoft - 360 (PS3, Wii)
25. Dante's Inferno - Visceral Games - PS3 (360, PSP)
26. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands - Ubisoft - Wii
27. Just Cause 2 - Eidos - PS3 (360, PC)
28. Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions - Beenox - 360 (PS3, Wii, PC)
29. Halo: Reach - Bungee - 360
30. Dead to Rights: Retribution - Volatile Games - PS3 (360)
31. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II - LucasArts - 360 (PS3, PC, Wii)
32. Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker - Kojima Productions - PSP
33. Batman: The Brave and the Bold - Wayforward Technologies - Wii (DS)
34. GoldenEye - Eurocom - Wii
35. Metro 2033 - 4A Games - 360 (PC)
36. Bayonetta - Platinum Games - 360 (PS3)
37. The Whispered World - Daedalic Entertainment - PC
Showing posts with label Heavy Rain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heavy Rain. Show all posts
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Alice in Wonderland
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.
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.
Tuesday, 20 April 2010
Party for two
After last week's mediocre gaming, the last seven days have come as quite a relief to me, as things have definitely looked up a bit. I started the week with survival horror title Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, opting for the Wii version over the PS2 and PSP, for unknown reasons.
Shattered Memories is a loose remake of the original SH on the PS1, one of my favourite ever games, and definitely my most replayed game ever. At my heyday I had a save file on my memory card which had saves before every single boss and all five endings, which took literally weeks to accomplish. The game's storyline was one of my favourites, and I pretty much committed it all to memory, so when the film was released and shat all over it, I was furious. Naturally, when I heard of the remake I was a little cagey.
I had kept an eye on the game throughout it's development, and with every new tidbit of information I grew less and less interested. First they decided not to include combat, then they changed the Other World from a rusted, blood and puss soaked hell, to a pretty tame Ice World, then they gave protagonist Harry Mason a frigging Cell Phone with a camera and GPS and all that, even though the original game was set in 1986, and by this point my interest in the game (and, after the completely unplayable Silent Hill: Homecoming, the series) had waned. Then they announced that the game was non-canon, and wouldn't have an affect on the greater story at all, which cheered me up a bit.
But what's the point in playing a story-driven game if it's story doesn't actually count for shit? Well, because it's fucking fantastic, that's why. The game begins just as it's source material did, with Harry regaining consciousness after a car crash and finding his young daughter Cheryl missing, and that's pretty much where the similarities end. The game swaps between two mechanics, the first being set in the real world. Solving puzzles is the order of the day, and there are some absolutely devilish ones too, and interspersed with these are some very Heavy Rain style exploration sequences (a comparison first brought to my attention by the pressing A to shout Cheryl bit at the start), were you have to use different combinations of buttons and movements to perform tasks.
Is that Katie Price?
The second mechanic takes place in the 'Ice World' and involves reaching a target destination whilst running from and evading the Raw Shocks, featureless creatures that relentlessly pursue Harry and latch on to him, lowering his body temperature until he passes out. Why the hell do I keep buying games on the Wii? Like Cursed Mountain before it, Shattered Memories requires you to fight off your enemies by performing different motions with the Wii Remote and Nunchuck, and like Cursed Mountain, most of the times these don't work properly. It makes for some very frustrating moments.
All in all, frustrations aside, SH:SM is a fantastic game, one of the best on the console. It's absolutely gorgeous too (although the same can't be said for Harry, one of the ugliest videogame characters I've ever seen), with the worlds merging in real time, and the level of detail in the environments is astounding for a Wii/last generation title. Also, between each section the game psychoanalyses you, by making you take tests in a shrink's office, and changes itself depending on your psyche, which once more is impressive on a lower powered console. A return to form for the series.
I've also been getting to grips with Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony this week. Last week I expressed a disliking for it's predecessor The Lost and Damned, and can honestly say all is forgiven. Gay Tony goes back to the more tongue in cheek, humorous style of the GTAIII series, with comical over-the-top characters like GTAIV favourite Brucie Kibbutz's outrageous brother Mori, and Arab property tycoon Yusuf Amir providing out loud laughs as well as missions. Also the dancing mini game from San Andreas makes a return, but apart from the ability to replay completed missions to improve scores, there's nothing new. That doesn't matter though, when you aren't being forced to endure the painful Bike physics all the time. It's well worth getting Episodes from Liberty City just for this, The Lost and Damned is just a flawed but playable bonus.
TBOGT returns to the series' outrageous roots.
And I've spent the latter part of the week knee-deep in Darksiders, Vigil Games' contender to the God of War throne, and it's so very nearly achieving that target. The game casts you as War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, awoken when the end war between Heaven and Hell begins on earth. As you arrive to sort things out, you realise that you three brethren haven't turned up, and the Angels decide that you've brought about the war early for your own reasons. After a 'brief' jury, War is sent back to earth a century later to prove his innocence, despite the complete extinction/zombification of the human race.
The God of War comparison is only really valid in passing, a few hours of observing the game will show that it has just as much in common with games like Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the former with the ruined environments and visual style, the latter with the Crossblade, a huge shuriken that acts very similarly to Link's boomerang, and the targeting system for which is virtually identical. And the way that the Crossblade can take on any elemental powers it comes into contact with is very Dark Sector.
Zelda's comparisons don't end there, War has bound to him a companion by the name of The Watcher, voiced by the legendary Mark Hamill (yeah, he's doing the Joker voice, but it's still great), who acts as the Navi to War's Link, popping out occasionally to offer advice and hints. Oh yeah, there's bomb plants too.
I have to note that the difficulty is quite unforgiving. After getting trounced on the demo, I stuck the game on the easy setting, and am still getting my arse passed to me on a regular basis. It's not quite Ninja Gaiden difficult, but it's approaching it. I'll persevere, but a rather epic boss battle with Bat-Queen Tiamat has me currently well against the ropes.
well, wrapping things up, I've had a crack at LittleBigPlanet PSP this week, which is just as good as the PS3 version, but not really better. The features are a bit more limited and Stephen Fry is at his most patronising, but the physics and graphics are top notch. Also had a bash at Final Fight: Double Impact on the 360, which is a great port. I might splash out on it, as both Final Fight and Magic Sword are both excellent retro games. Oh, and MARVEL VS. CAPCOM 3! The teaser is great, especially with the appearance from Chris Redfield as he takes on the Hulk (let's face it, the only Marvel with bigger arms than Chris) at the end. It's Super Street Fighter IV next week, but it's hard to be excited now I've seen that. I'll link to it here, but don't be surprised if they take it down as I believe it was leaked early. Bye for now.
Shattered Memories is a loose remake of the original SH on the PS1, one of my favourite ever games, and definitely my most replayed game ever. At my heyday I had a save file on my memory card which had saves before every single boss and all five endings, which took literally weeks to accomplish. The game's storyline was one of my favourites, and I pretty much committed it all to memory, so when the film was released and shat all over it, I was furious. Naturally, when I heard of the remake I was a little cagey.
I had kept an eye on the game throughout it's development, and with every new tidbit of information I grew less and less interested. First they decided not to include combat, then they changed the Other World from a rusted, blood and puss soaked hell, to a pretty tame Ice World, then they gave protagonist Harry Mason a frigging Cell Phone with a camera and GPS and all that, even though the original game was set in 1986, and by this point my interest in the game (and, after the completely unplayable Silent Hill: Homecoming, the series) had waned. Then they announced that the game was non-canon, and wouldn't have an affect on the greater story at all, which cheered me up a bit.
But what's the point in playing a story-driven game if it's story doesn't actually count for shit? Well, because it's fucking fantastic, that's why. The game begins just as it's source material did, with Harry regaining consciousness after a car crash and finding his young daughter Cheryl missing, and that's pretty much where the similarities end. The game swaps between two mechanics, the first being set in the real world. Solving puzzles is the order of the day, and there are some absolutely devilish ones too, and interspersed with these are some very Heavy Rain style exploration sequences (a comparison first brought to my attention by the pressing A to shout Cheryl bit at the start), were you have to use different combinations of buttons and movements to perform tasks.
Is that Katie Price?
The second mechanic takes place in the 'Ice World' and involves reaching a target destination whilst running from and evading the Raw Shocks, featureless creatures that relentlessly pursue Harry and latch on to him, lowering his body temperature until he passes out. Why the hell do I keep buying games on the Wii? Like Cursed Mountain before it, Shattered Memories requires you to fight off your enemies by performing different motions with the Wii Remote and Nunchuck, and like Cursed Mountain, most of the times these don't work properly. It makes for some very frustrating moments.
All in all, frustrations aside, SH:SM is a fantastic game, one of the best on the console. It's absolutely gorgeous too (although the same can't be said for Harry, one of the ugliest videogame characters I've ever seen), with the worlds merging in real time, and the level of detail in the environments is astounding for a Wii/last generation title. Also, between each section the game psychoanalyses you, by making you take tests in a shrink's office, and changes itself depending on your psyche, which once more is impressive on a lower powered console. A return to form for the series.
I've also been getting to grips with Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony this week. Last week I expressed a disliking for it's predecessor The Lost and Damned, and can honestly say all is forgiven. Gay Tony goes back to the more tongue in cheek, humorous style of the GTAIII series, with comical over-the-top characters like GTAIV favourite Brucie Kibbutz's outrageous brother Mori, and Arab property tycoon Yusuf Amir providing out loud laughs as well as missions. Also the dancing mini game from San Andreas makes a return, but apart from the ability to replay completed missions to improve scores, there's nothing new. That doesn't matter though, when you aren't being forced to endure the painful Bike physics all the time. It's well worth getting Episodes from Liberty City just for this, The Lost and Damned is just a flawed but playable bonus.
TBOGT returns to the series' outrageous roots.
And I've spent the latter part of the week knee-deep in Darksiders, Vigil Games' contender to the God of War throne, and it's so very nearly achieving that target. The game casts you as War, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, awoken when the end war between Heaven and Hell begins on earth. As you arrive to sort things out, you realise that you three brethren haven't turned up, and the Angels decide that you've brought about the war early for your own reasons. After a 'brief' jury, War is sent back to earth a century later to prove his innocence, despite the complete extinction/zombification of the human race.
The God of War comparison is only really valid in passing, a few hours of observing the game will show that it has just as much in common with games like Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the former with the ruined environments and visual style, the latter with the Crossblade, a huge shuriken that acts very similarly to Link's boomerang, and the targeting system for which is virtually identical. And the way that the Crossblade can take on any elemental powers it comes into contact with is very Dark Sector.
Zelda's comparisons don't end there, War has bound to him a companion by the name of The Watcher, voiced by the legendary Mark Hamill (yeah, he's doing the Joker voice, but it's still great), who acts as the Navi to War's Link, popping out occasionally to offer advice and hints. Oh yeah, there's bomb plants too.
I have to note that the difficulty is quite unforgiving. After getting trounced on the demo, I stuck the game on the easy setting, and am still getting my arse passed to me on a regular basis. It's not quite Ninja Gaiden difficult, but it's approaching it. I'll persevere, but a rather epic boss battle with Bat-Queen Tiamat has me currently well against the ropes.
well, wrapping things up, I've had a crack at LittleBigPlanet PSP this week, which is just as good as the PS3 version, but not really better. The features are a bit more limited and Stephen Fry is at his most patronising, but the physics and graphics are top notch. Also had a bash at Final Fight: Double Impact on the 360, which is a great port. I might splash out on it, as both Final Fight and Magic Sword are both excellent retro games. Oh, and MARVEL VS. CAPCOM 3! The teaser is great, especially with the appearance from Chris Redfield as he takes on the Hulk (let's face it, the only Marvel with bigger arms than Chris) at the end. It's Super Street Fighter IV next week, but it's hard to be excited now I've seen that. I'll link to it here, but don't be surprised if they take it down as I believe it was leaked early. Bye for now.
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
This! Is! SPARTA!
Last week I hit a milestone in my life. I turned a quarter of a century old. Officially, by mathematical terms, I'm pushing 30. So, I decided the best course of action was to have a midlife crisis and blow about £200 on videogames to drown my sorrows, and resurrecting my Shame Pile.
First things first though. For my birthday, which was actually last Thursday for anyone interested, my wife bestowed upon me God of War III and The Saboteur, both on PS3, and Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines, and the cat (allegedly) bought me Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on the PSP. I dove straight into God of War III, naturally.
The game starts immediately where we left off, with Kratos leading the Titans in an assault on Mount Olympus. A few betrayals and a lot of blood later and Kratos finds himself back in Hades, and his quest for vengeance truly begins.
I can't really go into things any deeper, as the story hurtles along at an alarming pace and the spoilers flow thick and fast. The gameplay though, is the usual God of War affair, solid fighting, over the top gore and intermittent puzzles and platforming sections. Kratos has picked up a few new moves this time, like the ability to mount and ride larger enemies and lasso flying enemies to cross gaps. He also picks up a few new weapons along the way, most of which are variations of the sharp things on chains theme, but the most effective of all being two huge metal gauntlets, a lot like the ones he used in Chains of Olympus.
I recall a while ago reading a post on Twitter by Mortal Kombat's co-creator Ed Boon, saying he was motion capturing new finishing moves for Mortal Kombat 9, and that he was worried that he was 'going too far'. Seeing what God of War gets away with, I highly doubt it. I've mentioned before the head-ripping and disemboweling, but that's only the icing on the cake. Again, I don't want to spoil too much, but it's the first time I think I've seen eye-gouging in a videogame. And I even felt like looking away as Kratos dispatched with dear old brother Hercules...
The last thing I really want to talk about is the visuals. Graphically, GoWIII is a triumph, pretty much the most beautiful game I've ever seen. After playing Heavy Rain a month ago, and Uncharted 2 just before Christmas, that compliment is given far more weight too.
Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines was my back-up title this week, for when the wife was on Oblivion. The PSP-only game serves as a true sequel to the first Assassin's Creed, following what Altair did next, namely stalking the Templars to Cyprus. Not much really happens, apart from our hero repeatedly bumping into Maria Thorpe, the Templar that got away (and evidently from a flashback in ACII, future Mrs. Ibn-La'Ahad, if she can pronounce it).
It's strongest point is that, unlike the two AC games on the DS, Bloodlines looks and plays like a proper AC, more specifically the first one. Being set in the same time period, and in a similar locale, the architecture is more or less the same. The gameplay has been somewhat simplified, shaving a few of Altair's moves off to cram it all into a UMD, including, bafflingly, his diving assassination move, which is one of the most useful moves in the other game. The free climbing though, one of the series' major positive points for me, remains unchanged.
Another good aspect of the game is that the boss characters are unique, not just reskinned guards like in the other games. They fight with signiature weapons, like a ball-and-chain, or sharpened fingernails, and also trigger different counter moves.
I suppose the worst thing about Bloodlines is the fact that the city streets aren't as bustling as the ones in it's parent games, but that is fully understandable given that the game is running on a machine with a fraction of the power of a PS3 or an XBox 360. Overall, it's a very good game for the system, harshly received because it can't live up to it's expectations.
Okay, I'll keep it brief for the remainder. Next on the newly formed Pile of Shame was a game I missed out on but have always been interested in: Velvet Assassin. Oh good god, it's bad. The game is a 'True Story' about an MI6 spy behind enemy lines in World War II. She conveniently loses her equipment at the start of the game, and quips about how it won't hold her back, even though it does. It really fucking does. A quick look on Wikipedia shows that this World War II game about a British agent was actually developed by a German company, Replay Studios, which might explain why she's armed with a toothpick and a nasty look, and the Germans are all superhuman cyborgs or something. Either way, sporadic checkpoints and trial-and-error gameplay make this game completely not worth playing.
And I've spent a bit of time getting to grips with The King of Fighters XII on PS3 this week. A look at some YouTube videos shows just how impressive this game can look in the right hands, but I was brought up on the simpler Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat 2D games, so it was distinctly more boring while I was playing. Admittedly though, the hand drawn two dimensional graphics were absolutely beautiful, although a bit pixelated compared to Super Street Fighter II HD Remix. A highlight for my immature mind was being told to 'choose my member' at the character select screen. I can't give the game a bad write up due to my own inadequacy though, and I'm sure that in the capable paws of a seasoned fighting game fan it's fantastic. But it's not exactly going to get in between me and Super Street Fighter IV in a month's time.
Check back next week for Just Cause 2, GTA Chinatown Wars and The Saboteur!
First things first though. For my birthday, which was actually last Thursday for anyone interested, my wife bestowed upon me God of War III and The Saboteur, both on PS3, and Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines, and the cat (allegedly) bought me Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on the PSP. I dove straight into God of War III, naturally.
The game starts immediately where we left off, with Kratos leading the Titans in an assault on Mount Olympus. A few betrayals and a lot of blood later and Kratos finds himself back in Hades, and his quest for vengeance truly begins.
I can't really go into things any deeper, as the story hurtles along at an alarming pace and the spoilers flow thick and fast. The gameplay though, is the usual God of War affair, solid fighting, over the top gore and intermittent puzzles and platforming sections. Kratos has picked up a few new moves this time, like the ability to mount and ride larger enemies and lasso flying enemies to cross gaps. He also picks up a few new weapons along the way, most of which are variations of the sharp things on chains theme, but the most effective of all being two huge metal gauntlets, a lot like the ones he used in Chains of Olympus.
I recall a while ago reading a post on Twitter by Mortal Kombat's co-creator Ed Boon, saying he was motion capturing new finishing moves for Mortal Kombat 9, and that he was worried that he was 'going too far'. Seeing what God of War gets away with, I highly doubt it. I've mentioned before the head-ripping and disemboweling, but that's only the icing on the cake. Again, I don't want to spoil too much, but it's the first time I think I've seen eye-gouging in a videogame. And I even felt like looking away as Kratos dispatched with dear old brother Hercules...
The last thing I really want to talk about is the visuals. Graphically, GoWIII is a triumph, pretty much the most beautiful game I've ever seen. After playing Heavy Rain a month ago, and Uncharted 2 just before Christmas, that compliment is given far more weight too.
Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines was my back-up title this week, for when the wife was on Oblivion. The PSP-only game serves as a true sequel to the first Assassin's Creed, following what Altair did next, namely stalking the Templars to Cyprus. Not much really happens, apart from our hero repeatedly bumping into Maria Thorpe, the Templar that got away (and evidently from a flashback in ACII, future Mrs. Ibn-La'Ahad, if she can pronounce it).
It's strongest point is that, unlike the two AC games on the DS, Bloodlines looks and plays like a proper AC, more specifically the first one. Being set in the same time period, and in a similar locale, the architecture is more or less the same. The gameplay has been somewhat simplified, shaving a few of Altair's moves off to cram it all into a UMD, including, bafflingly, his diving assassination move, which is one of the most useful moves in the other game. The free climbing though, one of the series' major positive points for me, remains unchanged.
Another good aspect of the game is that the boss characters are unique, not just reskinned guards like in the other games. They fight with signiature weapons, like a ball-and-chain, or sharpened fingernails, and also trigger different counter moves.
I suppose the worst thing about Bloodlines is the fact that the city streets aren't as bustling as the ones in it's parent games, but that is fully understandable given that the game is running on a machine with a fraction of the power of a PS3 or an XBox 360. Overall, it's a very good game for the system, harshly received because it can't live up to it's expectations.
Okay, I'll keep it brief for the remainder. Next on the newly formed Pile of Shame was a game I missed out on but have always been interested in: Velvet Assassin. Oh good god, it's bad. The game is a 'True Story' about an MI6 spy behind enemy lines in World War II. She conveniently loses her equipment at the start of the game, and quips about how it won't hold her back, even though it does. It really fucking does. A quick look on Wikipedia shows that this World War II game about a British agent was actually developed by a German company, Replay Studios, which might explain why she's armed with a toothpick and a nasty look, and the Germans are all superhuman cyborgs or something. Either way, sporadic checkpoints and trial-and-error gameplay make this game completely not worth playing.
And I've spent a bit of time getting to grips with The King of Fighters XII on PS3 this week. A look at some YouTube videos shows just how impressive this game can look in the right hands, but I was brought up on the simpler Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat 2D games, so it was distinctly more boring while I was playing. Admittedly though, the hand drawn two dimensional graphics were absolutely beautiful, although a bit pixelated compared to Super Street Fighter II HD Remix. A highlight for my immature mind was being told to 'choose my member' at the character select screen. I can't give the game a bad write up due to my own inadequacy though, and I'm sure that in the capable paws of a seasoned fighting game fan it's fantastic. But it's not exactly going to get in between me and Super Street Fighter IV in a month's time.
Check back next week for Just Cause 2, GTA Chinatown Wars and The Saboteur!
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
Wow, what a mansion! (AKA the 24 Hour Gamer DLC edition)
Okay, doing something a bit different this week. With the recent trend of affordable DLC hitting the PSN store, I thought I'd grab a bit and give it a write-up, especially seeing as my Shame Pile has dried up. So here I go.
I started off with the two pieces of episodic DLC for Ubisoft's masterpiece (and clear winner of most improved sequel of the last decade) Assassin's Creed II, entitled The Battle of Forli and Bonfire of the Vanities. The two pieces fit nicely into the conveniently skipped chapters of the main game's storyline, so it's possible to play them both as part of a complete playthrough as well as going back to them after the game's conclusion. At £3.19 a piece, they don't exactly break the bank either.
The Battle of Forli takes place right after Ezio officially earns his Assassin's stripes, when the fight with Rodrigo Borgia, the would-be Pope, went a bit wrong. It involves a siege on the palatial home of briefly seen countess of Forli (and, lets face it, a bit of a slapper) Catarina Sforza, during which two of her seemingly countless children are kidnapped, along with the Apple of Eden, an artifact of limitless power.
The chapter starts with an escort mission, where you need to get Catarina and fellow Assassin Niccolo Machiavelli safely to the castle's keep, and is frustratingly annoying. Both of your charges would much rather dance around catching enemy axes with their faces than do anything useful, so it takes a lot of patience and perseverance to get through the very first bit. Once you get past that small annoyance though, it's back to the usual standard of the game though, fun, stylish combat and satisfying kills. The last kill, which took place atop a tower in the centre of a restricted area was extremely gratifying for me, as my assault on the monolith went flawlessly, with me stealing around the grounds surreptitiously picking off guards when their backs were turned, before leaping up the bastion, taking my target's mace out of his hands and deftly planting it, with the greatest of care, into his arsehole.
While The Battle of Forli wasn't to the standards of the main game, The Bonfire of the Vanities was a disgusting disappointment. It sees you, with freshly cultivated facial hair, tracking down the captor of the aforementioned Apple of Eden, exiled friar Girolamo Savonarola, who has taken over Florence. He has stationed 9 lieutenants around the city, who must each have their day ruined before the big man himself.
One of these future corpses is stationed on a boat, and for some reason if any of his guards see you the mission is over, despite the fact that he really isn't going anywhere quickly on a moored sail barge. The single assassination alone took me over an hour of swearing and pillow punching to (pun intended) execute, as it appears that 15th century guards can see through walls. I came so close once, after a flurry of smoke bombs and throwing knives, only for my prey to see me standing BEHIND him. And this, this single insignificant murder, made me go from loving Assassin's Creed II, to never wanting to play it again.
I was much happier with the two extra chapters for Resident Evil 5, a game I wasn't too thrilled with to begin with. Both are available now for a measly £3.99 each, and offer about an hour and a half of genuinely great gameplay.
The first, titled Lost in Nightmares tells the story of how series staple Jill Valentine met her apparent demise at the hands of superhuman baddie Albert Wesker during the assault on Ozwell Spencer's stately mansion, as told through a flashback in RE5's main story. The plot though, is a thin disguise for a basic summation of the first Resident Evil, and feels like a big 'thank you' to the fans from Capcom. It has all of the favourites, from the 'Jill Sandwich' spiked ceiling, to the secret door opened by playing 'Moonlight Sonata' on a Piano, to the different shaped cranks used to progress. There are even a few stray Zombies dotted around too. The only real let down of the piece is a slightly sketchy boss fight with Mr. Wesker, but that's only a small complaint and doesn't mar the experience one iota.
The second part, titled Desperate Escape, tells the events of RE5's climax from the point of view of Miss Valentine, and her new acquaintance Josh Stone (not Joss Stone), of the West-African branch of the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance, or BSAA. Where the first pack was mainly puzzle based, this is all about action and does not disappoint, throwing all kinds of enemies at you. There are plenty of Executioners, Chainsaw Majini and Gatling Gun Majini to keep the action flowing, with mannable grenade-launcher emplacements dotted around sporadically, and ammo everywhere to keep the carnage up. The chapter climaxes with what is basically the game's mercenaries mode, with you holding position while waiting seemingly hours for an evac, which gets genuinely tense. Both expansion packs breathe life into a game that frankly got stale before it's own ending.
Finally, I finished off with the first chapter of the episodic Heavy Rain Chronicles, ominously named The Taxidermist. Way back during Heavy Rain's early development, Quantic Dream showed a technical demo of the game's heroine Madison Paige being chased around a house by a crazed killer, and that eventually became what I was playing. Currently unavailable commercially, I downloaded it freely with the game's collector's edition.
It starts off with Ms. Paige investigating a potential Origami Killer, an ex Taxidermist (hence the title) who turns out to be away from home when she arrives. Naturally, she breaks into his home and starts to snoop around. Upstairs she makes a grizzly discovery in the bathroom; the body of a woman in a bath filled with more blood than water, then in a large open plan room at the end of the corridor, more dead women, this time stuffed and placed in provocative clothing and positions, including, sickeningly, a nude one in a double bed.
The look of shock on Madison's face and how she reacts to everything she sees is fantastic, it really shows emotion that isn't usually conveyed in games outside of cutscenes. And it's mirrored in the player when the killer returns home, I've honestly never felt so tense as I tried, and ultimately failed to sneak out of his house, I could actually hear my own heartbeat. Long story short, things ended badly for poor Madison, but that was only one of a potential six conclusions, so it has replay value too. I'll definitely go back to it, and await future episodes eagerly.
Back to normal next week, and I'll try and dig up something to play and comment on before then. I might finally have time to give Little Big Planet a proper go. Until then.
I started off with the two pieces of episodic DLC for Ubisoft's masterpiece (and clear winner of most improved sequel of the last decade) Assassin's Creed II, entitled The Battle of Forli and Bonfire of the Vanities. The two pieces fit nicely into the conveniently skipped chapters of the main game's storyline, so it's possible to play them both as part of a complete playthrough as well as going back to them after the game's conclusion. At £3.19 a piece, they don't exactly break the bank either.
The Battle of Forli takes place right after Ezio officially earns his Assassin's stripes, when the fight with Rodrigo Borgia, the would-be Pope, went a bit wrong. It involves a siege on the palatial home of briefly seen countess of Forli (and, lets face it, a bit of a slapper) Catarina Sforza, during which two of her seemingly countless children are kidnapped, along with the Apple of Eden, an artifact of limitless power.
The chapter starts with an escort mission, where you need to get Catarina and fellow Assassin Niccolo Machiavelli safely to the castle's keep, and is frustratingly annoying. Both of your charges would much rather dance around catching enemy axes with their faces than do anything useful, so it takes a lot of patience and perseverance to get through the very first bit. Once you get past that small annoyance though, it's back to the usual standard of the game though, fun, stylish combat and satisfying kills. The last kill, which took place atop a tower in the centre of a restricted area was extremely gratifying for me, as my assault on the monolith went flawlessly, with me stealing around the grounds surreptitiously picking off guards when their backs were turned, before leaping up the bastion, taking my target's mace out of his hands and deftly planting it, with the greatest of care, into his arsehole.
While The Battle of Forli wasn't to the standards of the main game, The Bonfire of the Vanities was a disgusting disappointment. It sees you, with freshly cultivated facial hair, tracking down the captor of the aforementioned Apple of Eden, exiled friar Girolamo Savonarola, who has taken over Florence. He has stationed 9 lieutenants around the city, who must each have their day ruined before the big man himself.
One of these future corpses is stationed on a boat, and for some reason if any of his guards see you the mission is over, despite the fact that he really isn't going anywhere quickly on a moored sail barge. The single assassination alone took me over an hour of swearing and pillow punching to (pun intended) execute, as it appears that 15th century guards can see through walls. I came so close once, after a flurry of smoke bombs and throwing knives, only for my prey to see me standing BEHIND him. And this, this single insignificant murder, made me go from loving Assassin's Creed II, to never wanting to play it again.
I was much happier with the two extra chapters for Resident Evil 5, a game I wasn't too thrilled with to begin with. Both are available now for a measly £3.99 each, and offer about an hour and a half of genuinely great gameplay.
The first, titled Lost in Nightmares tells the story of how series staple Jill Valentine met her apparent demise at the hands of superhuman baddie Albert Wesker during the assault on Ozwell Spencer's stately mansion, as told through a flashback in RE5's main story. The plot though, is a thin disguise for a basic summation of the first Resident Evil, and feels like a big 'thank you' to the fans from Capcom. It has all of the favourites, from the 'Jill Sandwich' spiked ceiling, to the secret door opened by playing 'Moonlight Sonata' on a Piano, to the different shaped cranks used to progress. There are even a few stray Zombies dotted around too. The only real let down of the piece is a slightly sketchy boss fight with Mr. Wesker, but that's only a small complaint and doesn't mar the experience one iota.
The second part, titled Desperate Escape, tells the events of RE5's climax from the point of view of Miss Valentine, and her new acquaintance Josh Stone (not Joss Stone), of the West-African branch of the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance, or BSAA. Where the first pack was mainly puzzle based, this is all about action and does not disappoint, throwing all kinds of enemies at you. There are plenty of Executioners, Chainsaw Majini and Gatling Gun Majini to keep the action flowing, with mannable grenade-launcher emplacements dotted around sporadically, and ammo everywhere to keep the carnage up. The chapter climaxes with what is basically the game's mercenaries mode, with you holding position while waiting seemingly hours for an evac, which gets genuinely tense. Both expansion packs breathe life into a game that frankly got stale before it's own ending.
Finally, I finished off with the first chapter of the episodic Heavy Rain Chronicles, ominously named The Taxidermist. Way back during Heavy Rain's early development, Quantic Dream showed a technical demo of the game's heroine Madison Paige being chased around a house by a crazed killer, and that eventually became what I was playing. Currently unavailable commercially, I downloaded it freely with the game's collector's edition.
It starts off with Ms. Paige investigating a potential Origami Killer, an ex Taxidermist (hence the title) who turns out to be away from home when she arrives. Naturally, she breaks into his home and starts to snoop around. Upstairs she makes a grizzly discovery in the bathroom; the body of a woman in a bath filled with more blood than water, then in a large open plan room at the end of the corridor, more dead women, this time stuffed and placed in provocative clothing and positions, including, sickeningly, a nude one in a double bed.
The look of shock on Madison's face and how she reacts to everything she sees is fantastic, it really shows emotion that isn't usually conveyed in games outside of cutscenes. And it's mirrored in the player when the killer returns home, I've honestly never felt so tense as I tried, and ultimately failed to sneak out of his house, I could actually hear my own heartbeat. Long story short, things ended badly for poor Madison, but that was only one of a potential six conclusions, so it has replay value too. I'll definitely go back to it, and await future episodes eagerly.
Back to normal next week, and I'll try and dig up something to play and comment on before then. I might finally have time to give Little Big Planet a proper go. Until then.
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of graveyard, and it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall
Another month, another candidate for Game of 2010. After Mass Effect 2 a month ago, I recall expressing concern and doubt about playing a game that I would consider it's equal in the preceding eleven months. Yet here I am, four mere weeks later with a game in my clammy paws that I possibly like even more.
The game in question is Quantic Dream's PS3 exclusive epic Heavy Rain, spiritual successor to the fantastic (if a little flawed narratively) Fahrenheit (known as Indigo Prophecy stateside thanks to the combined efforts of Micheal Moore and Osama Bin Laden). When I first played Fahrenheit, it was completely new to me. The only games I could even begin to compare it to were Shenmue, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, but even then the comparisons were vague and incomplete.
Heavy Rain goes down the same path in terms of delivery, but throws away the fantasy elements of Dreamfall and (to a lesser extent) Broken Sword and, taking the spiritual guidance of Shenmue, throws you into a very serious, very mature murder mystery. The story begins with a ridiculously perfect family living a ridiculously perfect life together, until one family day outing spells disaster for the father, Ethan Mars, when his eldest son of two, Jason, wanders off. Ethan eventually finds him, but their reunion is cut dramatically short when they are both struck by an oncoming car, sending Ethan into a coma and Jason into an early grave.
Two years later we rejoin Ethan a bit worse for wear. His marriage has ended and he's just picking up his remaining son Shaun from his ex wife's house. Instead of moving to Malibu with Charlie Sheen as some people do in these situations, he's got himself a shitty little house in the most depressing part of town. Shaun is quite understandably a bit pissed off at Ethan, obviously he never knows when he's going to get led into traffic by his dear old dad, and to make it up to him Ethan takes Shaun to a playground. Right about now seems a good place to mention that Ethan's coma rendered him a bit of a Schizo with a penchant for blacking out, and after placing Shaun on a merry-go-round (don't all playgrounds have them?), he promptly does just that. He wakes up later on to find his son missing, and a small origami figure in his hand, the calling card of a mass child murderer known as (wait for it) 'The Origami Killer'. So Ethan goes on a quest to find his son, along with FBI agent Fox M... sorry, Norman Jayden, lovable private dick Scott Shelby, his prostitute sidekick Lauren Winter and Madison Paige, a journalist who's clothes keep falling off.
Heavy Rain places itself in a very unique position in that it's not only one of my favourite games (I will go that far, I absolutely loved it), but also one of my favourite films too. A lot of the time I almost forgot I was playing at all, robotically hammering the quick time events in without even really noticing them even appearing onscreen. Another fairly unique thing about the game is that when a character dies, the game carries on without them instead of ending and letting you continue. Ironically, I can only think of one other game that does this and that's ObsCure, a game I only played a couple of weeks earlier.
Heavy Rain, like most PS3 exclusives, really excels in the graphical department. To say it looks beautiful is a criminal understatement. Even the graphical might of Uncharted 2 and Killzone 2 doesn't seem to hold up against Heavy Rain. The only thing I don't like about it really is the creepy facial expressions from Fahrenheit occasionally crop up, as if the motion capture artists didn't smile when they should have and one was thrown in at the last minute, a shining example of this is during the nightclub scene where Madison dances on the podium. I am just nitpicking for the sake of it though.
Before Heavy Rain I returned to the macho, closely shaven world of Richard B. Riddick once more, with The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Not so much a sequel to Butcher Bay, Dark Athena is more of an expansion pack. It plays exactly the same, which was quite disappointing to be honest. Even the main story seems completely plagiarised, with the prison planet that Riddick must escape from in Butcher Bay replaced with a mercenary ship filled with prisoners, that Riddick must escape from. It's considerably longer than Butcher Bay, but that's the only thing I can really say about it. If it wasn't for the first game being included on Dark Athena's disk, it really wouldn't be worth buying.
Thursday's PSN Store update saw the releases of demos for Darksiders and God of War III, both of which are bloody fantastic hack-and-slash kill-em-ups and like the earlier Dante's Inferno are both based on religious mythology, and have thus been locked in a friendly battle. There's no contest really, Kratos has made sure of that, but so far Darksiders seems to be superior to Dante's by a gnat's wing, mainly helped along by the bold imagery, great voice work (thanks Mark Hamill) and the fact that it's not shamelessly ripping off God of War in every way. But God of War III seems to be shaping up very nicely, losing none of what made it's three prequels brilliant. And it's just about the most violent game I've ever played: the demo sees you disemboweling a Centaur (raising questions about how their innards are arranged), yanking the eye from the head of a Cyclops (the stalk doesn't snap immediately like the previous games, it has to be pulled to it's elastic limit and then snapped off) and ripping the head from sun god Helios' shoulders with your bare hands, seeing the flesh tear bit by bit before it gives. Absolutely brutal, yet I would expect nothing less.
Finally, I finished my second play through of Mass Effect 2 this week. I didn't mention it so as not to give anything away, but the ending of my first attempt saw three of my crew in their graves: The Salarian scientist Mordin, Asari law enforcer Samara and Human/Llama hybrid Miranda. This time I was 100% successful, seeing all of my crew through the mission. I also went down the renegade route this time, essentially becoming a space Jack Bauer, and it made the game a lot more entertaining. Yes, there was a scene where I punched a woman news reporter completely without provocation, and I will admit I laughed out loud when it happened. It was her own fault, she was making disingenuous assertions, and Shepard had had enough of them. And for lack of anything to play on my 360 last night, I fired up Saint's Row. Big mistake. It hasn't stood the test of time well, with it's awful graphics and awkward humour. Don't think I'll play much more of that one. Anyway, I'm off to play Oblivion now, buh-bye.
The game in question is Quantic Dream's PS3 exclusive epic Heavy Rain, spiritual successor to the fantastic (if a little flawed narratively) Fahrenheit (known as Indigo Prophecy stateside thanks to the combined efforts of Micheal Moore and Osama Bin Laden). When I first played Fahrenheit, it was completely new to me. The only games I could even begin to compare it to were Shenmue, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey and Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon, but even then the comparisons were vague and incomplete.
Heavy Rain goes down the same path in terms of delivery, but throws away the fantasy elements of Dreamfall and (to a lesser extent) Broken Sword and, taking the spiritual guidance of Shenmue, throws you into a very serious, very mature murder mystery. The story begins with a ridiculously perfect family living a ridiculously perfect life together, until one family day outing spells disaster for the father, Ethan Mars, when his eldest son of two, Jason, wanders off. Ethan eventually finds him, but their reunion is cut dramatically short when they are both struck by an oncoming car, sending Ethan into a coma and Jason into an early grave.
Two years later we rejoin Ethan a bit worse for wear. His marriage has ended and he's just picking up his remaining son Shaun from his ex wife's house. Instead of moving to Malibu with Charlie Sheen as some people do in these situations, he's got himself a shitty little house in the most depressing part of town. Shaun is quite understandably a bit pissed off at Ethan, obviously he never knows when he's going to get led into traffic by his dear old dad, and to make it up to him Ethan takes Shaun to a playground. Right about now seems a good place to mention that Ethan's coma rendered him a bit of a Schizo with a penchant for blacking out, and after placing Shaun on a merry-go-round (don't all playgrounds have them?), he promptly does just that. He wakes up later on to find his son missing, and a small origami figure in his hand, the calling card of a mass child murderer known as (wait for it) 'The Origami Killer'. So Ethan goes on a quest to find his son, along with FBI agent Fox M... sorry, Norman Jayden, lovable private dick Scott Shelby, his prostitute sidekick Lauren Winter and Madison Paige, a journalist who's clothes keep falling off.
Heavy Rain places itself in a very unique position in that it's not only one of my favourite games (I will go that far, I absolutely loved it), but also one of my favourite films too. A lot of the time I almost forgot I was playing at all, robotically hammering the quick time events in without even really noticing them even appearing onscreen. Another fairly unique thing about the game is that when a character dies, the game carries on without them instead of ending and letting you continue. Ironically, I can only think of one other game that does this and that's ObsCure, a game I only played a couple of weeks earlier.
Heavy Rain, like most PS3 exclusives, really excels in the graphical department. To say it looks beautiful is a criminal understatement. Even the graphical might of Uncharted 2 and Killzone 2 doesn't seem to hold up against Heavy Rain. The only thing I don't like about it really is the creepy facial expressions from Fahrenheit occasionally crop up, as if the motion capture artists didn't smile when they should have and one was thrown in at the last minute, a shining example of this is during the nightclub scene where Madison dances on the podium. I am just nitpicking for the sake of it though.
Before Heavy Rain I returned to the macho, closely shaven world of Richard B. Riddick once more, with The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Not so much a sequel to Butcher Bay, Dark Athena is more of an expansion pack. It plays exactly the same, which was quite disappointing to be honest. Even the main story seems completely plagiarised, with the prison planet that Riddick must escape from in Butcher Bay replaced with a mercenary ship filled with prisoners, that Riddick must escape from. It's considerably longer than Butcher Bay, but that's the only thing I can really say about it. If it wasn't for the first game being included on Dark Athena's disk, it really wouldn't be worth buying.
Thursday's PSN Store update saw the releases of demos for Darksiders and God of War III, both of which are bloody fantastic hack-and-slash kill-em-ups and like the earlier Dante's Inferno are both based on religious mythology, and have thus been locked in a friendly battle. There's no contest really, Kratos has made sure of that, but so far Darksiders seems to be superior to Dante's by a gnat's wing, mainly helped along by the bold imagery, great voice work (thanks Mark Hamill) and the fact that it's not shamelessly ripping off God of War in every way. But God of War III seems to be shaping up very nicely, losing none of what made it's three prequels brilliant. And it's just about the most violent game I've ever played: the demo sees you disemboweling a Centaur (raising questions about how their innards are arranged), yanking the eye from the head of a Cyclops (the stalk doesn't snap immediately like the previous games, it has to be pulled to it's elastic limit and then snapped off) and ripping the head from sun god Helios' shoulders with your bare hands, seeing the flesh tear bit by bit before it gives. Absolutely brutal, yet I would expect nothing less.
Finally, I finished my second play through of Mass Effect 2 this week. I didn't mention it so as not to give anything away, but the ending of my first attempt saw three of my crew in their graves: The Salarian scientist Mordin, Asari law enforcer Samara and Human/Llama hybrid Miranda. This time I was 100% successful, seeing all of my crew through the mission. I also went down the renegade route this time, essentially becoming a space Jack Bauer, and it made the game a lot more entertaining. Yes, there was a scene where I punched a woman news reporter completely without provocation, and I will admit I laughed out loud when it happened. It was her own fault, she was making disingenuous assertions, and Shepard had had enough of them. And for lack of anything to play on my 360 last night, I fired up Saint's Row. Big mistake. It hasn't stood the test of time well, with it's awful graphics and awkward humour. Don't think I'll play much more of that one. Anyway, I'm off to play Oblivion now, buh-bye.
Friday, 26 February 2010
Lethargy and Gaming - every TUESDAY.
Just a small announcement, due to time constraints I'm moving the deadline for each post to Tuesdays. It makes sense, I don't have to go and do my real job on a Tuesday, so it gives me more time to write, and more time to play any new releases that come out on the Friday before I write about them.
So please, check back on Tuesday for a look at The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Heavy Rain and first impressions of God of War III and Darksiders, and probably a short bit about Mass Effect 2 cheekily squeezed in there. Hope to see you then.
So please, check back on Tuesday for a look at The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Heavy Rain and first impressions of God of War III and Darksiders, and probably a short bit about Mass Effect 2 cheekily squeezed in there. Hope to see you then.
Friday, 12 February 2010
Oh my God, they killed Kenny!
This week, as I said I would, I finally got back on track with my backlog of unplayed Christmas games. Hellboy: The Science of Evil was first on my pile, after I briefly touched upon it a few weeks ago, before Mass Effect 2 barged in and ate up my whole life for a week.
As I had said previously, Hellboy was perhaps under appreciated, below average review scores all-round. But it found a fan in me. Where it admittedly lacks in areas such as next-gen visuals (the polygon count is quite low and the size of the on-screen text shows that it wasn't meant for HD gaming) and the story is fairly hard to follow with the slightly below-par scripting, the gameplay is brainless fun, and it offers plenty of fan service in the form of more gas mask wearing Nazis and frog demons than you could ever ask for. And the final boss fight is genuinely a good fight, unlike a few very highly praised games, Uncharted 2 springs to mind. And plus, it's got Ron Perlman in it, which generally adds a few points to the overall score.
With Hellboy finished I moved on to the often ignored PS2 high-school horror game ObsCure, a 2004 release from french developers Hydravision Entertainment. The premise of a possible Canis Canem Edit plus Resident Evil with a pinch of the school section of Silent Hill made the game very enticing to me, and while that wasn't exactly what was delivered, I'm still enjoying it.
The game opens with panning shots of an ordinary American high-school, accompanied by the dulcet tones of Canadian pop-punk jerks Sum 41 (music that sets the tone about as well as Slayer would for Mary Poppins). The camera comes to a halt in the school gym, as a mismatched group of youth stereotypes play a game of basketball. Here we are introduced to our five 'heroes': Kenny; a 'roid monkey, Stan (I think somebody was watching South Park); an underachiever who seems to fail, as so many white American teens do, to understand that he isn't a black gangster rapper, Josh; school newspaper geek and Shannon; all round genius who dresses slutty to downplay her intellect (she's got her priorities right). After everyone leaves Kenny to work off his steroids, he gets a phone call from our last player character, his girlfriend Ashley; a laitina cheerleader with bizarre fighting skills. While he's distracted by the phone, his bag is taken by a mystery evildoer, and he naturally chases them into an underground lab filled with monsters, where he is captured. The rest of the group, upon realising he's missing the next day, neglect to call the police the next day, and instead hide in the school (where all of the teachers appear to actually live) until the evening and go looking for him.
And so begins our tale. I want to point out here, that for a game approaching six years of age, the graphics are spot-on. All of the backgrounds are fully 3D and the characters look great. And the real time physics are among the best I've seen on the console, things move realistically when you brush past them, in a generation of consoles where most objects are super glued in place. The music is great too, Canadian arseholes aside, it goes from an eery choir one minute to the next being quite reminiscent of the Shinra Mansion section of Final Fantasy VII. There was a dodgy bit during a puzzle involving acid, a paper cup and a padlock (ripped straight from Monkey Island), which sounded like a German Oom-Pah band, but it was over quickly.
The game is a bit Resident Evil Zero, in that you control two characters at a time, with the ability to swap between them at will and the AI taking over the rejected character. However, ObsCure does this better than RE0 in a few respects. Firstly, the game features drop in/drop out multiplayer, like a bastardized Lego game, although I haven't actually tried that yet. Secondly, if the AI decides the best course of action is to drop the secondary character in the shit, so to speak(And it does in both games), and they wind up dead, this doesn't spell Game Over in ObsCure, the rest of the gang go on without them (or even shedding a tear, it seems). So in effect, you have five lives, and each life has a unique ability, be it Stan's 'master of unlocking' (worrying that a school lists this as a plus point on his report card), Ashley's worrying level of fighting prowess, Josh's journalistic ability to know whenever anything is interesting in the room, Shannon's precognitive ability to know what to do next or Kenny's ability to erm... Run quite fast.
Not that you'll get to use many of these skills though, because the game's infuriating difficulty level means that your teen heroes will drop like flies within seconds of a monster making itself known. You have to collect discs to save, and the limited nature of these makes it difficult to judge when to use them. Couple that with the even more limited health items and the fact that your characters are more fragile than Samuel L. Jackson in Unbreakable and it spells disaster. When you find a pistol and subsequently a shotgun (always lying about in an American high-school), the game gets a bit easier, but the first half hour or so is very tense.
I have played (and replayed after dying without saving) for about an hour and a half now, and am actually really enjoying it, despite difficulty being a bit of a phobia of mine. I have read in reviews that it only takes 3 hours to finish though, which is a bit of a downer. But I do have ObsCure 2 in the pile too, this time on the Wii. In the words of our racially confused hero Stan, ObsCure is Hype, yo. I don't know what that means either.
Here's where I would normally put a lid on things, but no! I got an early demo of Heavy Rain through an online promotion this week. The demo puts you in the shoes of an elderly and overweight police detective named Scott Shelby at first, and makes you question a prostitute over a serial killer who happened to target her son. It's a bit odd at first controlling your character like a racing car, pressing the R2 button to control the speed at which you walk and steering with the left analogue stick, but you get used to it.
As with Fahrenheit before it, most of the scenes are played out in the form of Quick Time Events. Before you all groan and switch off, they are done really well in this, particularly in the demo's fight scene, once an unwanted guest of the prostitute gets a bit shirty and you have to sort him out. It's a lengthy scene, and the commands come thick and fast, and missing one doesn't fail you instantly, instead the fight takes a different course. And watching the fight is a treat too, the cinematics are fantastic.
The second scene puts you behind the wheel of FBI agent Norman Jayden, and you are charged with investigating a murder scene. At your disposal are a pair of high tech glasses and a glove (to be honest, they were the only thing that seemed to put a damper on the experience, it subtracted from the realism greatly) which help you find clues and evidence. A quick sniff round and you find out that the killer escaped in a car, and that's where the demo ends. I hope the next two weeks are short ones, because I can't wait to get my hands on that game.
Now I'll wrap it up. Tried the beta of Modnation Racers and the demo of Sonic and Sega Allstars Racing this week, and controversially I prefer Sonic in terms of actual gameplay. But truth be told, neither really have the charm of Mario Kart anyway. And placing Sonic in a car and Tails in an aeroplane is redundant. Bit like giving Luke Skywalker a baseball bat. Bye for now!
As I had said previously, Hellboy was perhaps under appreciated, below average review scores all-round. But it found a fan in me. Where it admittedly lacks in areas such as next-gen visuals (the polygon count is quite low and the size of the on-screen text shows that it wasn't meant for HD gaming) and the story is fairly hard to follow with the slightly below-par scripting, the gameplay is brainless fun, and it offers plenty of fan service in the form of more gas mask wearing Nazis and frog demons than you could ever ask for. And the final boss fight is genuinely a good fight, unlike a few very highly praised games, Uncharted 2 springs to mind. And plus, it's got Ron Perlman in it, which generally adds a few points to the overall score.
With Hellboy finished I moved on to the often ignored PS2 high-school horror game ObsCure, a 2004 release from french developers Hydravision Entertainment. The premise of a possible Canis Canem Edit plus Resident Evil with a pinch of the school section of Silent Hill made the game very enticing to me, and while that wasn't exactly what was delivered, I'm still enjoying it.
The game opens with panning shots of an ordinary American high-school, accompanied by the dulcet tones of Canadian pop-punk jerks Sum 41 (music that sets the tone about as well as Slayer would for Mary Poppins). The camera comes to a halt in the school gym, as a mismatched group of youth stereotypes play a game of basketball. Here we are introduced to our five 'heroes': Kenny; a 'roid monkey, Stan (I think somebody was watching South Park); an underachiever who seems to fail, as so many white American teens do, to understand that he isn't a black gangster rapper, Josh; school newspaper geek and Shannon; all round genius who dresses slutty to downplay her intellect (she's got her priorities right). After everyone leaves Kenny to work off his steroids, he gets a phone call from our last player character, his girlfriend Ashley; a laitina cheerleader with bizarre fighting skills. While he's distracted by the phone, his bag is taken by a mystery evildoer, and he naturally chases them into an underground lab filled with monsters, where he is captured. The rest of the group, upon realising he's missing the next day, neglect to call the police the next day, and instead hide in the school (where all of the teachers appear to actually live) until the evening and go looking for him.
And so begins our tale. I want to point out here, that for a game approaching six years of age, the graphics are spot-on. All of the backgrounds are fully 3D and the characters look great. And the real time physics are among the best I've seen on the console, things move realistically when you brush past them, in a generation of consoles where most objects are super glued in place. The music is great too, Canadian arseholes aside, it goes from an eery choir one minute to the next being quite reminiscent of the Shinra Mansion section of Final Fantasy VII. There was a dodgy bit during a puzzle involving acid, a paper cup and a padlock (ripped straight from Monkey Island), which sounded like a German Oom-Pah band, but it was over quickly.
The game is a bit Resident Evil Zero, in that you control two characters at a time, with the ability to swap between them at will and the AI taking over the rejected character. However, ObsCure does this better than RE0 in a few respects. Firstly, the game features drop in/drop out multiplayer, like a bastardized Lego game, although I haven't actually tried that yet. Secondly, if the AI decides the best course of action is to drop the secondary character in the shit, so to speak(And it does in both games), and they wind up dead, this doesn't spell Game Over in ObsCure, the rest of the gang go on without them (or even shedding a tear, it seems). So in effect, you have five lives, and each life has a unique ability, be it Stan's 'master of unlocking' (worrying that a school lists this as a plus point on his report card), Ashley's worrying level of fighting prowess, Josh's journalistic ability to know whenever anything is interesting in the room, Shannon's precognitive ability to know what to do next or Kenny's ability to erm... Run quite fast.
Not that you'll get to use many of these skills though, because the game's infuriating difficulty level means that your teen heroes will drop like flies within seconds of a monster making itself known. You have to collect discs to save, and the limited nature of these makes it difficult to judge when to use them. Couple that with the even more limited health items and the fact that your characters are more fragile than Samuel L. Jackson in Unbreakable and it spells disaster. When you find a pistol and subsequently a shotgun (always lying about in an American high-school), the game gets a bit easier, but the first half hour or so is very tense.
I have played (and replayed after dying without saving) for about an hour and a half now, and am actually really enjoying it, despite difficulty being a bit of a phobia of mine. I have read in reviews that it only takes 3 hours to finish though, which is a bit of a downer. But I do have ObsCure 2 in the pile too, this time on the Wii. In the words of our racially confused hero Stan, ObsCure is Hype, yo. I don't know what that means either.
Here's where I would normally put a lid on things, but no! I got an early demo of Heavy Rain through an online promotion this week. The demo puts you in the shoes of an elderly and overweight police detective named Scott Shelby at first, and makes you question a prostitute over a serial killer who happened to target her son. It's a bit odd at first controlling your character like a racing car, pressing the R2 button to control the speed at which you walk and steering with the left analogue stick, but you get used to it.
As with Fahrenheit before it, most of the scenes are played out in the form of Quick Time Events. Before you all groan and switch off, they are done really well in this, particularly in the demo's fight scene, once an unwanted guest of the prostitute gets a bit shirty and you have to sort him out. It's a lengthy scene, and the commands come thick and fast, and missing one doesn't fail you instantly, instead the fight takes a different course. And watching the fight is a treat too, the cinematics are fantastic.
The second scene puts you behind the wheel of FBI agent Norman Jayden, and you are charged with investigating a murder scene. At your disposal are a pair of high tech glasses and a glove (to be honest, they were the only thing that seemed to put a damper on the experience, it subtracted from the realism greatly) which help you find clues and evidence. A quick sniff round and you find out that the killer escaped in a car, and that's where the demo ends. I hope the next two weeks are short ones, because I can't wait to get my hands on that game.
Now I'll wrap it up. Tried the beta of Modnation Racers and the demo of Sonic and Sega Allstars Racing this week, and controversially I prefer Sonic in terms of actual gameplay. But truth be told, neither really have the charm of Mario Kart anyway. And placing Sonic in a car and Tails in an aeroplane is redundant. Bit like giving Luke Skywalker a baseball bat. Bye for now!
Friday, 5 February 2010
I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favourite store on the Citadel!
Ladies and gentlemen, if you don't want to read about Mass Effect 2, then don't bother going any further. It's just about all I've done this week, literally.
When I reported in last week, I had played for maybe two hours, and truth be told wasn't too impressed, but was putting on a brave face in hope that things can only get better. The RPG elements that I'd become accustomed to in my four play throughs of the first one had been neutered within an inch of their life, everything had got a bit sweary (which I've noticed has happened with a lot of sequels, Assassin's Creed II, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resident Evil 5 spring to mind), and the shooting mechanic has gone for the old copy-and-paste Gears of War method. Couple that with the still ridiculous reloading mechanic, and well, my first impressions were a bit testing, as much as I didn't want to admit it.
Things, however, did get better. 34 hours of gameplay better in fact. And I never once, in all of that time, actually wanted to set the controller down out of boredom. I actually scanned every planet, did every side-mission on said planets, all of the loyalty missions, everything.
For a bit of a story breakdown, after Shepard and his multicultural band of brothers saved the universe from a giant metal squid in 2007, they spent their days flying around the galaxy wiping out stragglers from the ranks of their enemies, the Geth. That is until their ship got ripped in two pieces by a mysterious new antagonist, and thanks to annoying pilot Jeff 'Joker' Moreau (who shows no sign of remorse throughout the game), things ended pretty badly for Shepard.
Then his body was recovered by Martin Sheen, who could rebuild him, He had the technology. He had the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Commander Shepard would be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster. Sorry, lost myself a bit there. Anyway, after two years of being rebuilt, Shep wakes up to find out that humans everywhere are being abducted by crazy bug people, and naturally sets out to round up a bunch of hardasses and do some damage.
At first, as I was secretly not enjoying the game as much as I wanted to, I jumped headlong into the main story with little regard for anything else. I recruited the squaddies, of course, and when I first met Garrus, my joint favourite character (with Wrex) from the last game, and unlike all the other returning faces he actually wanted to join me, I could barely conceal a smile. But it wasn't until about half way through the story, when I was deep in enemy territory and the plot was beginning to unfold, that I got that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that I was in for something special.
And something special it was. I know there's a lot of people out there who are still knee deep in this, so I will go no further, but a special mention has to go out to my new hero, ME2's krogan, Grunt. He's bloodthirsty, wreckless and at times laugh-out-loud funny. And he's the only squaddie I used in the game that never once needed a medi-gel. I have a new Wrex.
I was a little annoyed that such a good game was out in January though, as I had very little hope of playing another game quite as good as that all year. That was until last night's teaser trailer of Fallout: New Vegas though, and it's ambitious predicted release date of Autumn 2010. The trailer opens with some bizarre TV-headed robot sifting through a mass grave in the Nevada desert, with a surprisingly well preserved Las Vegas in the background. As the camera pans out, a mysterious long-coated character with a New Californian Republic flag looks on. He then turns to the camera, revealing a mask that resembles that of one of Killzone's bad guys, the Helghast. It's going to be a long 7 months or so for me now. Well, I still have three achievements yet to get on Fallout 3 anyway, so I still have a bit of Fallout to keep me going. If they fire out a new Elder Scrolls this year too, I'll be happy as a pig in shit.
I'll try and have more to talk about next week, I'm in the process of trying to get my grubby hands on a Heavy Rain demo, and I'll hopefully get motivated enough to finish Hellboy and start on something else, more than likely PS2 survival horror ObsCure. Bye for now.
When I reported in last week, I had played for maybe two hours, and truth be told wasn't too impressed, but was putting on a brave face in hope that things can only get better. The RPG elements that I'd become accustomed to in my four play throughs of the first one had been neutered within an inch of their life, everything had got a bit sweary (which I've noticed has happened with a lot of sequels, Assassin's Creed II, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resident Evil 5 spring to mind), and the shooting mechanic has gone for the old copy-and-paste Gears of War method. Couple that with the still ridiculous reloading mechanic, and well, my first impressions were a bit testing, as much as I didn't want to admit it.
Things, however, did get better. 34 hours of gameplay better in fact. And I never once, in all of that time, actually wanted to set the controller down out of boredom. I actually scanned every planet, did every side-mission on said planets, all of the loyalty missions, everything.
For a bit of a story breakdown, after Shepard and his multicultural band of brothers saved the universe from a giant metal squid in 2007, they spent their days flying around the galaxy wiping out stragglers from the ranks of their enemies, the Geth. That is until their ship got ripped in two pieces by a mysterious new antagonist, and thanks to annoying pilot Jeff 'Joker' Moreau (who shows no sign of remorse throughout the game), things ended pretty badly for Shepard.
Then his body was recovered by Martin Sheen, who could rebuild him, He had the technology. He had the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Commander Shepard would be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster. Sorry, lost myself a bit there. Anyway, after two years of being rebuilt, Shep wakes up to find out that humans everywhere are being abducted by crazy bug people, and naturally sets out to round up a bunch of hardasses and do some damage.
At first, as I was secretly not enjoying the game as much as I wanted to, I jumped headlong into the main story with little regard for anything else. I recruited the squaddies, of course, and when I first met Garrus, my joint favourite character (with Wrex) from the last game, and unlike all the other returning faces he actually wanted to join me, I could barely conceal a smile. But it wasn't until about half way through the story, when I was deep in enemy territory and the plot was beginning to unfold, that I got that familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach, the feeling that I was in for something special.
And something special it was. I know there's a lot of people out there who are still knee deep in this, so I will go no further, but a special mention has to go out to my new hero, ME2's krogan, Grunt. He's bloodthirsty, wreckless and at times laugh-out-loud funny. And he's the only squaddie I used in the game that never once needed a medi-gel. I have a new Wrex.
I was a little annoyed that such a good game was out in January though, as I had very little hope of playing another game quite as good as that all year. That was until last night's teaser trailer of Fallout: New Vegas though, and it's ambitious predicted release date of Autumn 2010. The trailer opens with some bizarre TV-headed robot sifting through a mass grave in the Nevada desert, with a surprisingly well preserved Las Vegas in the background. As the camera pans out, a mysterious long-coated character with a New Californian Republic flag looks on. He then turns to the camera, revealing a mask that resembles that of one of Killzone's bad guys, the Helghast. It's going to be a long 7 months or so for me now. Well, I still have three achievements yet to get on Fallout 3 anyway, so I still have a bit of Fallout to keep me going. If they fire out a new Elder Scrolls this year too, I'll be happy as a pig in shit.
I'll try and have more to talk about next week, I'm in the process of trying to get my grubby hands on a Heavy Rain demo, and I'll hopefully get motivated enough to finish Hellboy and start on something else, more than likely PS2 survival horror ObsCure. Bye for now.
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