The more awake of you out there may (probably not) remember me briefly slamming the DS version of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars last July. I basically said that the top-down GTA template is long since deceased and the step backwards was an ill-informed one. Well, I couldn't be more wrong, it seems.
I picked up the PSP version a few weeks ago (or rather my wife did, as a birthday present for me from the cat, don't ask) during a brief blunder on Play.com where some bright spark deleted the '2' from the £24.99 price tag. It wasn't a game that I particularly wanted, but at the right side of a fiver I couldn't say no.
First thing I noticed while firing it up on the train is that the cell-shading that the DS used to disguise the awful graphics has completely gone, and the visuals have been tidied up a hell of a lot. Purely aesthetic I know, but I'd rather not have to stare at what looks like a very old Sega Saturn game if I can help it. I also blasted the DS screen, for being too small to tell what was happening in games like this (although in their credit, Nintendo have also realised that now with the DSiXL), and the PSP's larger screen really does benefit the game, allowing the camera to zoom out more and give you a better warning when you're about to wrap yourself around a lamp post. So there, the two major gripes with the earlier version are sorted.
The game accomplishes the feel of a true GTA game quite well actually (I hadn't had enough time with the DS version to notice, due to my instant dislike). Playing it had me wondering, how much actual effort would it be to take the storyline from CTW and recreate it as a 3rd person expansion pack for GTAIV? If we take away the side quests and mini games that is. Speaking of mini games, I wasn't all too comfortable with the drug dealing aspect of the game, and a quick scout around the Internet shows that I'm not alone in that feeling. Says a lot about people, that mowing down a line of Hare Krishnas is thoroughly acceptable, but selling crack to a deadbeat is pushing it a bit.
Moving on now. Perfect Dark, in my teenage years, was not so much a game than a religion to me and my friends. Late into the lives of the PS2, XBox and Gamecube, we would still fire up the N64 and crowd around the TV for a few hours of multiplayer action, trying desperately to achieve that fabled 'Perfect: 1' rank (I managed to get as high as 8, but I think one of my friends was at 3).
The game's prequel, Perfect Dark Zero was also a deciding factor in the XBox360 being my first seventh generation games console, and when I got my hands on it I was severely disappointed. It just wasn't the same, and it also made the crime of giving protagonist Joanna Dark an American accent when in the previous game she was English, which always bugs me (it was one of the reasons I didn't like Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, but I do plan on trying that again fairly soon, for obvious reasons). I did however discover Oblivion a week later, which I'm still playing now, so my 360 purchase wasn't a complete loss. But needless to say I was delighted when Perfect Dark saw the light of day on the XBLA a couple of weeks ago.
The game remains wholly unchanged, save for the character models and on-screen weapons having an overhaul and the game being given an HD makeover. And that is most definitely a good thing. I must admit I did worry about the controls, as Perfect Dark and it's predecessor GoldenEye 007 were the definitive games for the N64's unconventional joypad, but it still retains the awesome feel of the original game. Clutching at straws, the only negative thing I can say is that all of the character heads have changed, and I can no longer use the character that looked a bit like Timothy Dalton in multiplayer. But Perfect Dark is still the only FPS where the multiplayer even slightly interests me, and the single player experience is probably only surpassed by Half-Life 2 in my eyes. A must have for any 360 owner.
And now, the main event. Just Cause was a game I picked up by chance for a few quid from CEX during a summer gaming drought a couple of years ago, and it ended up being a surprisingly enjoyable game, if a little shallow. After the main storyline's climax though, I quickly lost interest in the side missions, and the main character Rico Rodriguez's mullet and the way he ran like he'd shat himself became a little too noticeable and it ended up back on the shelf, quickly forgotten about.
Then the demo for JC2 resparked my interest a few weeks ago, and on the morning of the 26th of March I skipped off to GAME and picked up a copy of the Limited Edition, bizarrely the same price as the standard one.
Where games like Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row offer a free-roaming open world, Just Cause 2 throws an absolute playground of... well, for need of a better phrase, a playground of destruction (sorry EA) at you. Your grappling hook, which is one part Spider-Man's web shooter, one part Scorpion of Mortal Kombat's spear and one part the slime tether from Ghostbusters, is just licence to play around. Not only can you fly around the environment, jumping from vehicle to vehicle, pulling pilots from their helicopters' cockpits and causing general chaos, you can also attach things, or people, to each other. Hooking a luckless soldier to a gas canister and shooting the cap off to watch him shoot off into the distance and explode against a rock, or tearing a statue down by roping it to the back of your car, before dragging the head at full pelt towards a foe and pulling a handbrake turn, swinging the detached concrete skull at them like a huge mace and chain.
For those who haven't played the original, Just Cause and it's sequel are easiest compared to the Mercenaries series. Unlike Mercenaries though, the sequel is a huge improvement. That's not to say it's without disappointment though. A few hours in I tried the PS3 exclusive video capture feature, and after it had reached it's capture limit, all of the sound apart from the music had muted, and the right analogue stick had no movement. Luckily, before I deleted my last save file as a last ditch attempt to remedy the problem, I tried deleting my settings file instead, which worked. But the other day, after a mammoth session, the game decided to not save my game (even though I observed the on screen 'saving' message and didn't switch off until it had gone), losing me about five hours of game time. The final straw having been crossed, I cast the game from my PS3 and onto the bottom of my shame pile. But I will say this, Just Cause 2 is the only game I've ever played that features hijackable crashable Boeing 747s and a set of identical adjacent skyscrapers. Ssh, the Daily Mail hasn't noticed yet...
I have started The Saboteur, but haven't had much time with it yet, so check back next week for that, Dissidia: Final Fantasy and possibly (but not definitely) Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. And as a parting gift, check this out, 2100 Microsoft Points for £4, thanks to MarkySharky of VideoGameSpace. That should get you those Modern Warfare 2 maps for the price that they are actually worth. Or Perfect Dark, if you're more intelligent. Au revoir.
Showing posts with label Perfect Dark. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Perfect Dark. Show all posts
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
Friday, 11 December 2009
My name is Michael Ford. I'm probably the only one left who knows the truth. I know because I was there.
You know when you read a bit of information for an upcoming game, and you instantly know that it's garbage? When they say that, for example, Two Worlds is "Oblivion on Steroids", or when the guy on GAME Radio tells you how revolutionary Women's Murder Club is? Well, I've decided to christen that 'The Molyneux Factor', after the charismatic leader of Lionhead Studios' blunder with the original Fable.
There is a point to this, and that point is that I've been playing The Conduit this week, and I distinctly remember reading that the developers High Voltage Software, who aren't exactly renowned for the quality of their games let's face it, had claimed to have created an engine on the Wii that allowed graphics an visual effects that are "comparable" the those on PS3 and XBox 360 games. Well, they lied. It's about on a graphical par with Halo 2.
And the silly thing is, as with Fable before it, they didn't need to lie about the game because it honestly is fantastic.
For anyone who isn't in the know (and with the game's zero media presence, who'd blame them), The Conduit is a Sci-Fi FPS set in Washington DC shortly before and during an invasion by an insectoid race known as The Drudge. You play as a government agent named Michael Ford sent to recover a device known as the All-Seeing Eye (basically a spherical Sonic Screwdriver) and disrupt terrorist activity in an airport, until you are quickly double-crossed by your admittedly shady looking employer and end up working with said terrorists (who are actually pretty stand up guys) when aliens start popping up everywhere.
I initially had worries with this game, as the Wii isn't exactly well equipped for First Person Shooters with the lack of a second analogue stick. Turning is done by pointing the remote at the side of the screen, thus disrupting your aim which isn't exactly ideal. It is possible to use the Nunchuck stick to turn the player, but that gets rid of the strafe function and after virtually a decade of twin analogue FPSes it makes the game surprisingly difficult to play. It was this control method that ultimately made me stop playing Red Steel, but somehow it seems more manageable on The Conduit.
And another thing that struck me right away was how much the game felt like the original Perfect Dark, far more so than Perfect Dark Zero ever did. The visual style is so much more reminiscent of it, and the way the gun moves depending on where you're aiming is exactly the same. I even found an experimental handgun that looked just like the Mag-Sec 4. If they just changed the name of the aliens from Drudge to Skedar and upped the human technology a bit, it could definitely pass as part of that series.
And as I finished Tomb Raider Legend shortly after posting last week, I've moved on to Tomb Raider Anniversary. That game is fucking hard! Not in a keep dying kind of way, it's just that every room you enter is a huge puzzle, and most of the time the only way to solve the puzzle is by doing about three other smaller ones. It's so mentally taxing compared to Legend, which really is mainly jumping and shooting. I suppose I never noticed before because I hadn't played them side by side. It's obviously not out of my capacity to finish the game, as I have done before, but god, you just lose the will to live when you've spent ages solving a certain puzzle, you strut out of the room feeling great about yourself and you're immediately presented with another. More than a few times I've favoured sleep over carrying on because of this, and that hardly ever happens.
I finished Matt Hazard last Saturday too. After you 'complete' the game, the enemy then forces you into a deathmatch with his IRL henchmen, and all the enemies have stupid names above their heads and stuff. I laughed at that, but the funniest thing was when you finally see the person behind the sexy female avatar who's been helping you through the game and she turns out to be a geeky man! Anyone who's ever used PS3's Home should find that funny. If not, you're dead inside. If Matt Hazard: Bloodbath and Beyond is as much like Shadow Complex as I've heard, then I am very much looking forward to it.
There is a point to this, and that point is that I've been playing The Conduit this week, and I distinctly remember reading that the developers High Voltage Software, who aren't exactly renowned for the quality of their games let's face it, had claimed to have created an engine on the Wii that allowed graphics an visual effects that are "comparable" the those on PS3 and XBox 360 games. Well, they lied. It's about on a graphical par with Halo 2.
And the silly thing is, as with Fable before it, they didn't need to lie about the game because it honestly is fantastic.
For anyone who isn't in the know (and with the game's zero media presence, who'd blame them), The Conduit is a Sci-Fi FPS set in Washington DC shortly before and during an invasion by an insectoid race known as The Drudge. You play as a government agent named Michael Ford sent to recover a device known as the All-Seeing Eye (basically a spherical Sonic Screwdriver) and disrupt terrorist activity in an airport, until you are quickly double-crossed by your admittedly shady looking employer and end up working with said terrorists (who are actually pretty stand up guys) when aliens start popping up everywhere.
I initially had worries with this game, as the Wii isn't exactly well equipped for First Person Shooters with the lack of a second analogue stick. Turning is done by pointing the remote at the side of the screen, thus disrupting your aim which isn't exactly ideal. It is possible to use the Nunchuck stick to turn the player, but that gets rid of the strafe function and after virtually a decade of twin analogue FPSes it makes the game surprisingly difficult to play. It was this control method that ultimately made me stop playing Red Steel, but somehow it seems more manageable on The Conduit.
And another thing that struck me right away was how much the game felt like the original Perfect Dark, far more so than Perfect Dark Zero ever did. The visual style is so much more reminiscent of it, and the way the gun moves depending on where you're aiming is exactly the same. I even found an experimental handgun that looked just like the Mag-Sec 4. If they just changed the name of the aliens from Drudge to Skedar and upped the human technology a bit, it could definitely pass as part of that series.
And as I finished Tomb Raider Legend shortly after posting last week, I've moved on to Tomb Raider Anniversary. That game is fucking hard! Not in a keep dying kind of way, it's just that every room you enter is a huge puzzle, and most of the time the only way to solve the puzzle is by doing about three other smaller ones. It's so mentally taxing compared to Legend, which really is mainly jumping and shooting. I suppose I never noticed before because I hadn't played them side by side. It's obviously not out of my capacity to finish the game, as I have done before, but god, you just lose the will to live when you've spent ages solving a certain puzzle, you strut out of the room feeling great about yourself and you're immediately presented with another. More than a few times I've favoured sleep over carrying on because of this, and that hardly ever happens.
I finished Matt Hazard last Saturday too. After you 'complete' the game, the enemy then forces you into a deathmatch with his IRL henchmen, and all the enemies have stupid names above their heads and stuff. I laughed at that, but the funniest thing was when you finally see the person behind the sexy female avatar who's been helping you through the game and she turns out to be a geeky man! Anyone who's ever used PS3's Home should find that funny. If not, you're dead inside. If Matt Hazard: Bloodbath and Beyond is as much like Shadow Complex as I've heard, then I am very much looking forward to it.
Friday, 30 October 2009
Just try to understand, I've given all I can, 'cause you got the best of me...
Borderlands is like Marmite. You either love it or hate it, there's no middle ground. I know quite a few people who bought it, and all had the same experience: mild disappointment at first because it isn't as much like Fallout 3 as they'd wanted, and then a few hours in either adoring it for what it is, or abhorring it for what it isn't. That's aside from my brother-in-law Trev, who has verbally masturbated at me at every opportunity he's had regarding the game since well before it's release, I'm not sure he was capable of the initial upset.
I'm of the former. My first day with it was a difficult one, physically as well as mentally because the game is very unforgiving at first and I very nearly met my demise in the first unavoidable encounter with the game's ever-present bandits. I carried on making frequent visits to the game's spawn points (poles with lights on, I was so upset they didn't make the checkpoint noise from Sonic) until I was about level 11, and then I had half an hour or so of plain sailing before there was a level hike in the enemies too, then it was back to the spawn points every 5 minutes again. Now my level is around the mid twenties, and I'm starting to cruise once more. For now.
As always, the mulitiplayer had me feeling a little underwhelmed, my first go was with the aforementioned Trev and his younger brother Ross, and they'd played about 24 hours of it solid and were around level 25, compared to my 13 and I basically sat and watched while they did stuff. They took me to the arena and we had a bit of a deathmatch, but with 3 players in a very small venue, even if I was strong enough to slightly upset the other two, it just felt like we were playing Quake II on the PS1, not a part of my life I want to go back to. But I'm still yet to find a multiplayer shooter that's better than Perfect Dark on the N64. CoD fanboys attack.
The second time I tried MP was with Raz7el, who was in the 'hate' camp, and it was much the opposite experience. I was level 23 I think, and he was level 7. Too easy for me, and he didn't see any action.
Borderlands is also like Marmite, in that it looks like shit. No, it's not a pretty game, and looking at old pre-cell-shading screenshots makes me wish they hadn't bothered. Although it makes a change from all of the other Unreal Engine 3 powered games where all the characters look like action figures. Thing is, the cell-shading isn't actually done properly. A lot of the black lines on the scenery are actually drawn on. A bit cheating, isn't it?
Last night, after realising that all I'd done all week was eat, sleep and play Borderlands I thought I'd reach into my shame pile to add a bit of variety to this week's post, and as I'd finished Wolverine quickly last friday to make way for Borderlands, the next game was Halo 3 ODST. Groan.
Guess what: I like it.
The squad thing going on makes it feel a lot more like Killzone, and I'm not being forced to blow off the Master Chief every few minutes like in the previous three. In fact, in the Hour-and-a-half-ish that I spent on it the big green twat didn't even get a mention. And the romance sub-plot in ODST involves a woman who is actually real, which is a bonus. I'd have preferred there to not be one though, they always seem out of place in this sort of game, see Gears of War 2 for example. I meant Marcus and Anya, not Marcus and Dom. Speaking of romance subplots, who should show up in ODST but Nolan North?
And that's about it. Preordered my copy of Dragon Age Origins this week, and I'm planning on hitting GAME at opening time to get it so I've got a couple of hours with it before writing. And to sign out on a laugh, while cataloging my game collection I came across the German cover for Tomb Raider Chronicles. Dr Dre would be so proud.
I'm of the former. My first day with it was a difficult one, physically as well as mentally because the game is very unforgiving at first and I very nearly met my demise in the first unavoidable encounter with the game's ever-present bandits. I carried on making frequent visits to the game's spawn points (poles with lights on, I was so upset they didn't make the checkpoint noise from Sonic) until I was about level 11, and then I had half an hour or so of plain sailing before there was a level hike in the enemies too, then it was back to the spawn points every 5 minutes again. Now my level is around the mid twenties, and I'm starting to cruise once more. For now.
As always, the mulitiplayer had me feeling a little underwhelmed, my first go was with the aforementioned Trev and his younger brother Ross, and they'd played about 24 hours of it solid and were around level 25, compared to my 13 and I basically sat and watched while they did stuff. They took me to the arena and we had a bit of a deathmatch, but with 3 players in a very small venue, even if I was strong enough to slightly upset the other two, it just felt like we were playing Quake II on the PS1, not a part of my life I want to go back to. But I'm still yet to find a multiplayer shooter that's better than Perfect Dark on the N64. CoD fanboys attack.
The second time I tried MP was with Raz7el, who was in the 'hate' camp, and it was much the opposite experience. I was level 23 I think, and he was level 7. Too easy for me, and he didn't see any action.
Borderlands is also like Marmite, in that it looks like shit. No, it's not a pretty game, and looking at old pre-cell-shading screenshots makes me wish they hadn't bothered. Although it makes a change from all of the other Unreal Engine 3 powered games where all the characters look like action figures. Thing is, the cell-shading isn't actually done properly. A lot of the black lines on the scenery are actually drawn on. A bit cheating, isn't it?
Last night, after realising that all I'd done all week was eat, sleep and play Borderlands I thought I'd reach into my shame pile to add a bit of variety to this week's post, and as I'd finished Wolverine quickly last friday to make way for Borderlands, the next game was Halo 3 ODST. Groan.
Guess what: I like it.
The squad thing going on makes it feel a lot more like Killzone, and I'm not being forced to blow off the Master Chief every few minutes like in the previous three. In fact, in the Hour-and-a-half-ish that I spent on it the big green twat didn't even get a mention. And the romance sub-plot in ODST involves a woman who is actually real, which is a bonus. I'd have preferred there to not be one though, they always seem out of place in this sort of game, see Gears of War 2 for example. I meant Marcus and Anya, not Marcus and Dom. Speaking of romance subplots, who should show up in ODST but Nolan North?
And that's about it. Preordered my copy of Dragon Age Origins this week, and I'm planning on hitting GAME at opening time to get it so I've got a couple of hours with it before writing. And to sign out on a laugh, while cataloging my game collection I came across the German cover for Tomb Raider Chronicles. Dr Dre would be so proud.
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