We're currently in the throes of a midlife crisis here at 24HG-UK towers ladies and gents. It all started with my acquisition of the X-Men Animated Series on DVD, then my rekindling a fondness for the soothing tones of Limp Bizkit. And now, to cap it all off, I've been playing Pokemon.
Not the old versions mind, although I do have both the Yellow and Gold editions and a working Game Boy Colour to hand, but this year's Black version on the DS (the standard DS, puzzlingly enough, as it was released about two weeks before the 3DS arrived, which strikes me as a bit of a missed opportunity), and it is absolutely brilliant. Not that it's any different to the old colours of course, thanks to Nintendo's policy of never changing anything, but that doesn't matter, it's not broken so it need not be fixed, as it were.
I had forgotten how much of an asshole the Pokemon AI can be at times though, upon facing my first Gym Leader's Lillipup, which pumped up it's attack power to astonishing levels right up until it's health was in a critical state, then wiped out all six of my Pokemon in six moves without me getting a turn, the bastard. Not phased though. I just need to train mine some more before I sink further into my youth. Ooh look, Comix Zone is on the PSN store...
More on Nintendo and their unwavering opposition to risk-taking, I've also put a few hours into The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D. I do acknowledge that when the game first arrived on the N64 all those years ago it did radically alter the former Zelda template, but having recently finished Twilight Princess it's glaringly obvious that nothing has changed since then. Once again, however, it's not really that much of a problem because Ocarina is still an incredible game.
One thing though, that really could and should have been altered, is the map in the HUD. Twilight Princess' map switched between floors as you did, making multi-tiered dungeons for more manageable. Ocarina's didn't, and still doesn't, annoyingly.
That's just one minor complaint though, in an otherwise great game, still as impressive now as it ever was, and thanks to a 21st century makeover, it's looking beautiful too. The only thing missing is a touch screen mini game where you catch Link's annoying fairy sidekick Navi in a jam jar and burn the little fucker with a magnifying glass, but no game is perfect, right? Well, not until November anyway.
Hunted has outstayed it's welcome, and as such I've moved on to Red Faction: Armageddon, which ditches the open-world sandbox of it's predecessor Guerrilla for a more traditional underground corridor shooter style that the series was built on. You play as Darius Mason, descendant of Guerrilla's protagonist Alec Mason (Not to be confused with Call of Duty's Alex Mason), a bald man with goggles seemingly surrounded by fellow bald men with goggles (seriously, the game looks like a Chronicles of Riddick convention) who inadvertently condemns the whole of the human population of Mars to life underground by destroying the planet's seemingly solitary terraformer, and then in a completely unrelated event, awakens an ancient race of large surly insects a few weeks later. What is he like?
While the ability to raze buildings to the ground with a lump hammer still... erm... stands, the game seems to have more of a focus on rebuilding and repairing, both of the shattered remains of society that seem to be left every time Darius decides to joke about organizing a riot on Facebook or put a cat in a wheelie bin, and of the environment which inevitably suffers after each hefty firefight, and this concept is seemingly symbolically the franchise as a whole, Armageddon being the closest in tone and concept to the original out of all three sequels. Darius keeps a magic machine on his wrist that unleashes Red Dwarf-style nano-machines to reconstruct anything in it's path, which works as fast as you can run, allowing for some genuinely impressive escapes when things get tough.
Armageddon functions well as a shooter, it's decent. There's no cover system, which would have worked a treat with the rebuild mechanic, and each weapon only has a single function, but everything else is present and correct, if a little old school. The only major problem I have with it is the same thing that bugged me about Halo 2, that you're faced with room after room full of hundreds of bad guys at times, and plugging away at identical aliens for hours on end gets very, very monotonous. And as such, as with Halo 2, I often find myself just legging it past my marauders. Also, as good as Armageddon is (and it is), it fails to live up to Guerrilla's standards. There's still no greater thrill than bombing a 120mph garbage truck into a high-rise building and seeing it collapse on top of you.
Can't help but think though, why didn't he just rebuild the terraformer at the beginning of the game, and avoid all of this hassle? What is he like?
Sunday, 28 August 2011
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
I'll take your brain to another dimension, pay close attention...
I haven't forgotten to post again, truth be told I've just not been all that arsed about gaming over the last couple of weeks, so I've had little to write about.
I suppose the biggest news is my acquisition of a second-hand Nintendo 3DS, Which set me back a meagre £149.99, less than the proposed price cut and I'll still get the freebies from the Ambassador Programme. Also, the dumbassed previous owners had left an 8gb SD card in the machine, further sweetening my deal. If you're reading this by the way, I deleted your holiday photos.
The only games I've picked up, and indeed the only currently available 3DS games that I'm interested in, are The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition (Yes, I'm fully aware that they are both games I already own, I'll buy what I want, you're not my real dad), and I'm saving Zelda for my week in Wales next week, but I'm suitably impressed with SSFIV. It looks better than I ever expected it to, with character models that look almost on a par with it's PS3 counterpart. The backgrounds don't hold up all that well, being made up of layered, stationary 2D sprites, and it gives the whole thing a look like one of those 3D picture box things from Art Attack. The backgrounds are also very low-res, but that's only noticeable in the cutscene before you fight Akuma in Arcade Mode.
As far as gameplay goes, it's about the best version of SFIV I've played (keep in mind I haven't had a go on Arcade Edition yet), must notably because it's got the unreasonably priced DLC costume packs bundled within. Also, the touch screen displays shortcuts to two of your character's Specials and their Super and Ultra, which takes the skill out of it somewhat, rendering them even easier to pull off than Mortal Kombat's all-too-accessible X-Ray moves, but it makes some of the ridiculously difficult moves like Zangief's Ultimate Atomic Buster actually useful, and the charge moves like Guile's Sonic Boom able to be pulled off without being overly obvious to your opponent.
So yeah, good game. The only other thing I've really been playing, albeit at a snail's pace, is Bethesda's Hunted: The Demon's Forge on PS3, and, well, it's alright. I commented the other week on how every game tries to rip off God/Gears of War, but Hunted is the first game I've played that tries to do both. The two lead characters are each equipped with a Bow for cover-based shooting, and a sword and shield for close combat, with sadistic elf Elara specialising in archery and tribal-covered meat head Caddoc majoring in, well, being a meat head. To be honest, the close combat is that dull, boring and most importantly difficult that I've spent just about all of my time behind the cross hairs of the bloodthirsty elf, partly to take advantage of Caddoc's seemingly unlimited reserves of health when under the AI's supervision, and partly because the ranged combat is pretty fun, infinitely more so than the tiresome swordplay.
Occasionally the game attempts to plagiarise a third genre too, the Dragon Age/Dungeon Siege archetype of RPG, with levelling up, short conversational segments and a magic system that is utterly pointless, as it brings nothing to the table. And to say it prides itself on it's split-screen coop multiplayer, it handles that woefully - the fact that even on a widescreen TV the screen is split horizontally, resulting in neither my wife nor I being able to see pretty much anything even on our 40" screen because our letterbox views were too tiny, is unbelievably under-researched, and to add insult to injury the already sub-par graphics are noticeably downgraded too. As this was my first impression of the game, I can't say I was too delighted.
But after a couple of hours with the single-player game, despite it's faults, I find myself strangely endeared. For a game so destined for failure, a surprisingly deep history has been crafted, reminiscent of that of the Dragon Age series. I keep hearing about towns that I'm unable to visit, and discover myself wondering what they look like, how the architecture looks and so on, and with every hint at the fate of the apparently all but extinct Elven race that Elara hails from, at the hands of the so-far-unseen Minotaurs, I yearn to learn exactly what happened and itch for revenge. Yes, Hunted is an okay game, but it's an okay game in a sea of excellent games this year and as such will fall into obscurity.
So, as a parting note as I head off to the Welsh countryside, I put forward a conundrum that has bothered me for some time: Why is it that Bethesda's grasp of the open-world RPG is completely unrivalled - nobody else even comes close to the experience of games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 - yet they seemingly find it so hard to conquer any other genre?
I suppose the biggest news is my acquisition of a second-hand Nintendo 3DS, Which set me back a meagre £149.99, less than the proposed price cut and I'll still get the freebies from the Ambassador Programme. Also, the dumbassed previous owners had left an 8gb SD card in the machine, further sweetening my deal. If you're reading this by the way, I deleted your holiday photos.
The only games I've picked up, and indeed the only currently available 3DS games that I'm interested in, are The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and Super Street Fighter IV 3D Edition (Yes, I'm fully aware that they are both games I already own, I'll buy what I want, you're not my real dad), and I'm saving Zelda for my week in Wales next week, but I'm suitably impressed with SSFIV. It looks better than I ever expected it to, with character models that look almost on a par with it's PS3 counterpart. The backgrounds don't hold up all that well, being made up of layered, stationary 2D sprites, and it gives the whole thing a look like one of those 3D picture box things from Art Attack. The backgrounds are also very low-res, but that's only noticeable in the cutscene before you fight Akuma in Arcade Mode.
As far as gameplay goes, it's about the best version of SFIV I've played (keep in mind I haven't had a go on Arcade Edition yet), must notably because it's got the unreasonably priced DLC costume packs bundled within. Also, the touch screen displays shortcuts to two of your character's Specials and their Super and Ultra, which takes the skill out of it somewhat, rendering them even easier to pull off than Mortal Kombat's all-too-accessible X-Ray moves, but it makes some of the ridiculously difficult moves like Zangief's Ultimate Atomic Buster actually useful, and the charge moves like Guile's Sonic Boom able to be pulled off without being overly obvious to your opponent.
So yeah, good game. The only other thing I've really been playing, albeit at a snail's pace, is Bethesda's Hunted: The Demon's Forge on PS3, and, well, it's alright. I commented the other week on how every game tries to rip off God/Gears of War, but Hunted is the first game I've played that tries to do both. The two lead characters are each equipped with a Bow for cover-based shooting, and a sword and shield for close combat, with sadistic elf Elara specialising in archery and tribal-covered meat head Caddoc majoring in, well, being a meat head. To be honest, the close combat is that dull, boring and most importantly difficult that I've spent just about all of my time behind the cross hairs of the bloodthirsty elf, partly to take advantage of Caddoc's seemingly unlimited reserves of health when under the AI's supervision, and partly because the ranged combat is pretty fun, infinitely more so than the tiresome swordplay.
Occasionally the game attempts to plagiarise a third genre too, the Dragon Age/Dungeon Siege archetype of RPG, with levelling up, short conversational segments and a magic system that is utterly pointless, as it brings nothing to the table. And to say it prides itself on it's split-screen coop multiplayer, it handles that woefully - the fact that even on a widescreen TV the screen is split horizontally, resulting in neither my wife nor I being able to see pretty much anything even on our 40" screen because our letterbox views were too tiny, is unbelievably under-researched, and to add insult to injury the already sub-par graphics are noticeably downgraded too. As this was my first impression of the game, I can't say I was too delighted.
But after a couple of hours with the single-player game, despite it's faults, I find myself strangely endeared. For a game so destined for failure, a surprisingly deep history has been crafted, reminiscent of that of the Dragon Age series. I keep hearing about towns that I'm unable to visit, and discover myself wondering what they look like, how the architecture looks and so on, and with every hint at the fate of the apparently all but extinct Elven race that Elara hails from, at the hands of the so-far-unseen Minotaurs, I yearn to learn exactly what happened and itch for revenge. Yes, Hunted is an okay game, but it's an okay game in a sea of excellent games this year and as such will fall into obscurity.
So, as a parting note as I head off to the Welsh countryside, I put forward a conundrum that has bothered me for some time: Why is it that Bethesda's grasp of the open-world RPG is completely unrivalled - nobody else even comes close to the experience of games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 - yet they seemingly find it so hard to conquer any other genre?
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