Firstly, and it occurs to me that I haven't actually mentioned this so far in this blog, I have spent months scouring every videogame shop I've seen for Jaws Unleashed on either the PS2 or XBox, and finally the other day I saw it sat in plain view on a shelf in the newly reopened Playtime in Sheffield for £14.99. And today I sat down with it for the first time, and there's half an hour I'm not getting back.
The game involves eating things, which is what I expected, and fair enough is fun as hell. When you can actually see what's happening that is. The camera spends most of it's time either looking at the side, front or top of the shark, and it pretty much breaks the game. So to say I'm disappointed is an understatement.
I've had quite a bit of spare time this week, and have got a fair bit of gaming done. The first game I played through was Halo 2, as I said last week I wanted to see what all of the fuss was about. Now, I know I played neither Halo nor Halo 2 on their releases, or even in the right generation, so they are bound to feel a bit dated, but neither have really grabbed me. I spent most of Halo 2 slogging through the endless waves of respawning enemies just wishing the game would end so I could stick it back on the shelf and never lay eyes on it again. In fact, by the end of the game I was just running past all the enemies as they fought each other, because it was quicker than having to take down each enemy's shield and then killing them in turn, not to mention scrabbling round on the floor for new weapons all the time because you can't collect ammo for the best ones. And then there was the bug...
Every so often (well, every 10 minutes or so), the background of the level would emboss itself on the screen, obscuring my view sometimes so badly that I just couldn't play it and forcing me to quit out of the game and restart it. I don't know if this was a problem with playing the game on the XBox 360 or not, but I was led to believe that before Gears of War reared it's steroid-filled head Halo 2 was still the most-played game on XBox Live, and I can't imagine that Microsoft would allow such an awful bug in a game that's still being played so much without patching it.
On a more positive note, I had an hour on Halo 3 after I finished it, and that was much better.
The other game I was mainly playing this week was Red Faction Guerrilla. Now, this game is an odd one, because it starts off a blast, genuinely fun to play, but quickly gets repetitive in the middle before regaining the spark at the end. But the middle really is so boring that very few people will actually see the end, and that really is a shame.
The game centres around a bunch of people who go to a recently terraformed Mars looking for a mining job, and when their employers start shooting them, they decide that instead of contacting the Union or simply quitting, they'll hole themselves up in hidden camp sites and emerge every so often to bother them, usually by fucking up a building or something, with the hope of eventually liberating Mars. Not that they'll be anything left of Mars after they've driven a truck through every building on it.
Yes, the story is bullshit. But the gameplay itself is great, every game needs this level of destruction in it. There is no greater feeling than the one you get when you Hijack a JCB and plough through a tower block, or when you steal one of those Power Loaders from Aliens and... plough through a tower block. The only problem is that sometimes the gravity doesn't seem to work, and buildings can be held up by toilet roll tubes and blu-tack, but that's random physics for you.
Also there's the throwbacks to Red Faction, and to a lesser extent Red Faction 2, that suitably send me into a fanboy delight. You even revisit the ruins of the Ultor corporation, although it doesn't have the same feel as returning to Shadow Moses in Metal Gear Solid 4. And it's a bit morbid when you find out that Parker, the hero from the first RF is now a mental hobo and Alias from RF2 managed to die in the martian wastes. You don't expect such things from hero characters.
To finish off, I tried out Shadow Complex finally and today bought some Microsoft Points to buy the full version. I got a 2100 Point card, so I'm torn between either Monkey Island SE or Fallout 3: Mothership Zeta for the rest of the points. Either way, I need Shadow Complex, and I think I have a man crush on Nolan North. The wife also bought me a year of XBox Live today, and I intend to get into online gaming a bit more now. Hopefully ODST will be a good introduction for me. I managed to resist buying Left 4 Dead today.
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