Once again I step up to the mantle with very little to write about. Who's stupid idea was it to make this a weekly thing?
Well, I had a bit more of a go with InFamous, and it still seems pretty shocking (pun intended). I noticed a very annoying game mechanic, where the main character, Cole, would automatically attach himself to the nearest ledge whenever I would jump. Yeah, this is standard in any vertical platforming game nowadays, but most usually just apply it to the ledges you're aiming at, not just any that happen to be near you. I was chasing some kind of visual memory of a target who'd been there previously, to find his current whereabouts, and when I jumped over a dumpster I ended up dangling from an adjacent bus stop and losing my quarry.
You'll survive that fall. Stub your toe and you're fucked.
Cole also has a bit of a Superfriends-era Superman thing going on, in that he seems to develop a convenient new power every time a scenario demands it. Upon finding a dead woman on the ground, Cole exclaims that he's going to try something completely off-the-wall, and touches her head. Hey fucking presto, he can read her memories, despite the fact that the brain is actually dead, holds no impulses and is effectively cat food now. Who would have known?
He also gets an ability where he is able to heal dying civilians by jolting them with his lightning powers. All well and good, if these victims are suffering from a massive cardiac arrest and need defibrillating, but they are mostly dying from a plague, and would probably actually not benefit at all from several thousand volts directly to the heart.
You know what, the more I write about it, the more I hate it. Fuck it, I'm shelving it. It's a ridiculous game, even for one of the Superhero genre. Cole, for all I care, can develop a hunch, and jump off a building, to see if he has a 'nosedive-into-concrete-and-survive' power. Oh wait, he did. AND IT WORKED. But about 3 bullets still kill him.
I also finally got around to trying my hand at the Borderlands expansion pack The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. Guess what? That's pretty dick too. I don't know if I've just tired of Borderlands or what, but the game that made it into my Top 10 of last year doesn't seem to hold the same charm any more. My main problem with Zombie Island is that it just seems like they've simply bogged you down with thousands of respawning enemies to add longevity to the game, as it seems to take hours to travel a few hundred yards.
This screenshot tells you all you need to know about Zombie Island
But the thing is, I can't remember exactly what I liked so much about Borders anyway. From what I remember it was simply just walking through boring, samey landscapes and shooting things, and that's exactly what's on show with Zombie Island too. Surely there must have been something more, but if there was, it's evaded me. Anyway, I think I'm done with Borders now, the rest of the DLC will probably go untouched.
Finally, I downloaded Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection Online on the PS3. It plays pretty much exactly the same as the PSP version, which is no bad thing as said version is just about the best Tekken in the series. Haven't tried it online yet, but I have had countless hours of multiplayer on the PSP version so I know to expect more of the same, just probably with more people who actually know what they're doing, and consequently more ass-kickings for me.
Speaking of PSP, I finally let go of my frankensteined PSP 1000 (Casing and inner components of a JP white console, screen and face buttons of a UK Black one) and upgraded to an absolutely gorgeous Radiant Red PSP 3000 (I'm boycotting the PSP Go, because it's shit). The console is taking some getting used to, with the tighter analogue nub and the smooth, handgrip-less back, and obviously it's a lot lighter and quieter than the Phat, but playing LittleBigPlanet on my TV was great last night, and the UMD movies are near DVD quality even on the 21" inch screen in my bedroom.
Isn't she lovely, isn't she wonderful...
So now, with the ability to play the games without squinting at a tiny screen and being able to hold the console in my lap like a controller, instead of enduring arm-fatigue from holding it in front of my face, some of my unfinished games like Resistance: Retribution, GTA CTW and Tales of Eternia might get some more play. And upcoming games like God of War: Ghost of Sparta and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker will seem all the more special too. Bravo Sony.
It's amazing, that in this day and age, if a linear game takes more than six hours to complete it outlives it's welcome. GTA IV, Fallout 3, that's fine. They've got plenty of things tucked away for the ADHD generation to stumble across, and it's easy to poddle off and play something else for a few weeks and drop back into it if needs be. Yep, £40 is perfectly acceptable for six hours of disposable entertainment.
Take Darksiders for example. One of the finest games so far this generation, capturing the feel of absolutely classic games like Soul Reaver and Primal, and throwing a gripping and engaging storyline and at times jaw-dropping visuals to boot, but after 16 hours of game time, spread over the course of two weeks, it had dragged on a little bit too long.
So when I finally dropped the last enemy last night (enemy is the only word I could use which is still accurate and doesn't give anything away) and laid my pad down, I breathed a sigh of relief. Don't get me wrong, it is a fantastic game, but I was aching for something new.
"I'm a fuckin' Demon!"
But I will at least remember it fondly, and shit, I'm going to recommend it to anyone that will listen (I started that last night by passing the word on to my Elder Scrolls freak sister). As I said, the graphics are stunning in places, with vibrancy in colours on a par with Uncharted and Just Cause 2. And the voice acting is absolutely fantastic, with Mark Hamill and Moon Bloodgood leading the D-list way and Liam O'brien (me neither) doing his best Simon Templeman impersonation as the lead character. The boss fights mostly play out like N64 Zelda bosses, but it does have a go at the 'Epic Boss' style of God of War, without quite pulling it off. I also noticed that, when dismembering an enemy, the wounds are just hollow and red, no meat or bones, which is a bit of a letdown, but doesn't mar the experience and is only really noticeable in some of the larger enemies. Speaking of larger enemies, the end boss is a Fuck Off Dragon. But it's considerably easier to kill than the one in Dragon Age.
The preceding game on my shame pile turned out to be InFamous. For those who don't know, InFamous is a PS3 exclusive free-roaming Superhero game. You play as Cole McGrath, one of those annoying Parkour messengers who was unknowingly delivering a bomb to somebody when it went off, levelling half the city. Being at the epicenter of the blast, Cole naturally develops super lightning powers instead of getting vaporized. But when a plague breaks out, the city is locked off, and gang crime becomes rife. So Cole decides to become the people's protector. Or a public menace. yeah, the game has a karma system.
If you take the evil route, you actually become a Sith Lord.
Well, I've only played for like half an hour so far. Honest first impressions? well, it's a bit... shit really. Surprisingly ugly for a PS3 exclusive, and the fiddly climbing and jumping and hand to hand combat without any kind of lock-on function make it seem no better than Spider-Man 3. The only moral choice I had to make was when I found a food drop, and I could either let the citizens share it amongst themselves or take it all for myself, and sit atop my tower feasting, laughing at the starving peasants below and zapping anybody that comes near. Very black and white. So far, it's not a patch on Prototype, which I can't help but compare it to.
Moving on, Super Street Fighter IV arrived last week, much to my joy. This update to SFIV boasts ten extra characters, a new ultra combo for each character, the return of the car/barrel smashing bonus rounds, redone intros and endings and a bunch of extra multiplayer modes including 8-player team battle and a winner-stays-on type of affair, again for up to 8 players. So the fact that it wasn't just DLC is kind of justified.
Ibuki is a force to be reckoned with.
The characters are a mixed bunch. There's Adon from Street Fighter, and Cody and Guy from Final Fight (or all three of those from Street Fighter Alpha if you prefer), T. Hawk and Dee Jay from Super Street Fighter II, and Makoto, Dudley and the awesome Ibuki from Street Fighter III making a return, along with two all-new fighters. Firstly, Juri is an agent for the evil S.I.N. organization, using Taekwondo and drawing power from a 'Feng Shui device' in her prosthetic eye. Rather than give her the power to arrange furniture, it actually lets her kick fireballs at people, go figure. The second is Hakan, a Turkish oil wrestler who lubes himself up before each fight. I'm telling you, you can't make this stuff up.
Played a few rounds against Raz7el online too, and aside from quite a bit of lag, the game remains pretty tight. I also don't like to brag, but I handed his ass to him on more than a few occasions. Dan Hibiki is awesome.
Well, that's about that. Expect more of an opinion on InFamous next week, and a look at Borderlands: The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned. See ya!
It's been a busy week boys and girls, but not in a good way. I've hardly had any gaming time at all this week, with the candle being burnt at both ends and all that, it's all caught up to me and as soon as the evening comes round I'm out like a light, when I would normally be gaming.
So I'm still knee deep in Darksiders, although now I'm more used to the gameplay and combat system It's gradually getting a bit easier. I'm not going to bore you with that though. I did however polish off Gay Tony (almost a double entendre, but not quite), so I moved onto another 360 title.
Soldier of Fortune: Payback is a 2007 FPS, and is perhaps most well-known for it's extreme violence. Hell, that's the only reason I bought it. It's a standard Modern Warfare style romp through various Middle Eastern and Chinese locales, the point of which is to rain down American one-man justice on everybody who doesn't fly the Stars and Stripes on their front lawn everyday, or 'terrorists' as they are commonly referred to.
I want to make it clear: This is a BAD GAME. Probably worse than Rogue Warrior. But, it is playable, due in no small part to the absolutely hilarious and over-the-top violence and piss-awful script and voice acting. Each level is just you plugging bullet after bullet into the natives of whichever country you happen to be in at the time, occasionally pausing for some banter with the female operator through your headset, usually dropping more one-liners than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and then back to the slaughter.
Nearly every shot fired severs a limb too. I was once outflanked by a marauding freedom hater, who hit me in the back with the butt of his (rather stereotypical) AK-47. In retaliation, I produced my trusty standard combat knife, and in one fell swoop, decapitated him! The comical level of violence makes carrying on worthwhile, although when I came up to a small escort section, the buddy AI resulted in more mission failures than I had patience for and I placed it back on the shelf. It had served it's purpose.
Sensing that I would have nothing else to write about this week, I hurriedly downloaded a few demos. The first of which was Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction. As ashamed as I am to admit it, this is my first experience of Splinter Cell, despite owning Chaos Theory on the PS2 and never playing it. I don't know why.
The game, as far as the demo shows, is very similar the The Bourne Conspiracy, just with more refined shooting and less interesting takedowns. The interrogation at the start was fun, with a lot of detailed, if a little unbelievably OTT environmental damage, but the rest of the game failed to grab me. I might grab it a bit later on, but the fact that I have four games to catch up on first makes it a little daunting.
I also tried out Blur, which is a very old-school feeling arcade racer. It's pretty much WipEout or Rollcage, only in normal licenced cars. And CSI: Deadly Intent, which is a contender for the worst game I've ever played, with it's patronising tutorial voiceover and the graphical quality of a PSP game. It's the sort of thing you'd expect to find as a free download on the CSI website, a boring point-and-click evidence finder game, which is about as emotionally gripping as cleaning your kitchen floor. And if I was Laurence Fishburne I'd be pretty pissed about how overweight my character model looked.
Oh yeah, I won the NowGamer.com Podcast competition! At the end of each Podcast, they play a piece of music from a videogame (usually remixed or distorted in some way), and whoever identifies which game the music hails from, and is chosen from the other correct answers using the curiosity of a cat, of all things, wins a box of assorted junk from around the NG office. I answered correctly with Laura's Theme from Silent Hill 2, and was lucky enough to be drawn. I'll post over on VGSpace detailing my haul when the postie drags it to my door.
Well, short but sweet, eh? Next week I'll have a report Super Street Fighter IV, and I'll try and get Darksiders out of the way and make a start on InFamous. Tata for now.
This week has been an eventful week for me where gaming's concerned.
On Friday, after blogging I went to work, and was asked if my locker could play host to a friend's copy of Modern Warfare 2, to which I obliged. He then went home without it, and seeing as Saturday was my day off he let me take it home and have a go.
Over the course of Saturday I played through the campaign, choosing to ignore the multiplayer as it really isn't my cup of tea. At first I wondered what I'd let myself in for, listening to gung-ho American troops whoop with delight every time one of them drops an ethnic minority of their choosing, but once I got to the covert ops, with CoD4's protagonists Cpt. Soap McTavish and later (spoiler) Cpt. Price, the game actually got quite good.
Yeah, as with CoD4 the game is split up into two teams' different perspectives. On one side you have the US Army Rangers, lead by The Arbiter from Halo and struggling to understand why they're killing people but happy to do so anyway, and on the other there's the Special Air Service, going behind the scenes and rescuing hostages and whatnot.
Oh yeah, and then there's 'the' airport bit. It's not as bad as you think, you aren't forced to kill any innocents (although I did) and the game even gives you the option to skip the section in case any of you can't tell the difference between games and reality and decide to take up arms in Gatwick or something. Another case of the Daily Mail panicking.
And in related news, I heard this week that EA are planning to rejuvenate their Medal of Honor franchise with Medal of Honor: Modern Combat. No doubt it follows central protagonist Cpt. Radox McTaggart as he trawls through Iraqistan looking for people to suppress. I look forward to it.
And yes, Dragon Age Origins is finally over! The last boss is the single hardest thing I've had to do all year, gaming wise. I thought it would be a great idea to take my Rogue and two Mages with me, to attack from long range and heal me as I did the heroic work. Well, my healer, Wynne, ran out of mana about 12 seconds into the fight from healing everyone who so much as stubbed their toe, and 15 seconds in all three of them were dead. Not a problem, I thought as I hacked away at the ArchDemon (who happens to be a fuck-off Dragon), it seemed really easy at first. Then the bastard flew out of reach and send his army after me, and I had to ballista him, while fighting off the Darkspawn, until he came back into the fight. I finally remembered I could call an army to my aid too, so I did, and while they held back the Darkspawn I took on the Dragon. But he had decided to fight back this time, and before long I was down to my last few Healing Poultices. In a last ditch effort to win, I ran back to the ballista and spammed it until he dropped. I'm really not an RPG gamer though, so maybe it won't be as hard for others. And to clarify, as I said last week, DAO is most definitely my game of the year.
And the day after I finished Prototype. It's possibly a little bit too long, clocking up at 11 hours (but put at least three of those down to aimlessly slaughtering civilians), but it was fun none the less. Hoping to get InFamous soon too, as Prototype gave me a taste for that kind of thing.
One thing I did notice about Prototype though, is that Alex Mercer isn't exactly that original a character. If you watch the movie about how he becomes what he is, and then watch William Birkin's origin in Resident Evil 2, there are some very coincidental similarities.
Rounding things up, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysey does not work properly on XBox360, which pissed me off as I can't be arsed to get the old XBox out. The speech is virtually inaudible, and the FMVs bounce around so much that you can't even see what's happening. So I scratched that off my list along with Ninja Gaiden II, which I simply couldn't be arsed to play after the stress of the ArchDemon. So now I've decided to reacquaint myself with lady Lara Croft and play through Tomb Raiders Legend, Anniversary and Underworld again. And, gaming event of the century, I bought Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard on PS3 for £5.99 on Play.com, which is all lined up for after the Tomb Raiders. As bad as it's supposed to be, it looks like it might be appealing to me.
