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.
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
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, 19 February 2010
Now, I like Tatsunoko, and I also like Capcom. But which is better?
This week I've been playing one of those games that defines a console, defines a genre, even defines a generation. It's an FPS that features a protagonist with a crisis of alliegance, a group of chemically altered warriors with golden visors on their high-tech armour. It's vehicular combat is second to none. If I say that it's title is a simple four-letter word, and the first two letters are H and A, then I'm sure you will be able to figure out what game I'm talking about. That's right, Haze.
And you'll probably also be able to figure out that the last paragraph is riddled with sarcasm, as Haze is one of the most offensive pieces of garbage I've ever had to play. For those of you lucky enough to not know, Haze is a below average PS3-exclusive shooter developed by Free Radical (who, with the Timesplitters series under their belts, and with ex-Goldeneye developers on the team, should have known better) that's major downfall was it's overhyped pre-release. Upon seeing the yellow visor splashed all over the promotional material, everyone and their gran made the Halo connection, and thus was born the "it's Halo on PS3" stigma was born, and expectations were raised to a level that Haze was never going to deliver. When put into words like that, the fate of Haze sounds quite sad, but the truth is, it would have still gotten those piss-poor reviews without the Halo comparisons. It just wouldn't have been pushed into the limelight as much.
Haze begins with you in the shoes of Shane Carpenter, who works for an American military group known as Mantel, who dose up on a hallucinogenic chemical known as Nectar before each conflict. Nectar dulls the soldier to the horrors of war, making things such as blood, injuries and even dead bodies invisible, and making morally wrong actions (like throwing babies in fires, as we find out) seem all in a day's work. On your first mission, naturally to rough up some ethnic minorities, your Nectar Administrator malfunctions and you realise that you're on the wrong side and that your enemy, a supposed vicious dictator and cannibal known as Skin Coat is actually quite a nice guy, and that the reason the Matel are invading their apparently very religious country (Somewhere in South America by the looks of things) is to harvest the plant that Nectar is refined from. So you set off and join him instead, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The story, as well as being a not-so-subtle dig at current events in the middle east, is actually one of the only redeeming features of Haze (the other being that you can switch it off), It kept me interested enough to put myself through the horror of the game. Texture pop-in is a term that really doesn't apply here, the textures fade in is if they were hoping that you wouldn't notice. Each scene starts off looking like a PS2 game, and gradually becomes a sub-par PS3 game. I have also never seen clipping issues quite so bad since the last generation either. Okay, so graphics don't really matter. What about controls then? The reload button, for one, is entirely in the wrong place at Triangle, when it should be Square. There's no dash either, so you have to saunter everywhere, meaning quite often I resorted to driving across some of the open areas to save time. Well, I wouldn't call it driving, not with the handling that's casually thrown into the game. The vehicles are controlled as they would be in a racing game, as opposed to the Halo/Mass Effect twin-stick driving method. But instead of R2 being the accelerator, it's R1, meaning you have two speeds: A billion miles per hour, or standing still. There's a nitro boost that can be activated with the X button that doesn't alter your speed at all, and the vehicles corner like a wet turd on a frozen lake. Just typing about it pisses me off.
Because I like to do things a little differently around here, I'm going to finish off my Haze rant by comparing it, and it's PS3 FPS brethren to, what else, the Baldwin Brothers. Killzone would be Alec Baldwin, strongest and most successful of the brothers. Resistance would be Billy Baldwin, still good, but lacks the edge of it's older brother. Haze, alas, is Stephen Baldwin: Short, ugly, boring and spouts religious nonsense at every opportunity. To perfectly sum it up, here's a video of a Mantel soldier being a very naughty boy indeed.
The week hasn't been all bad though, as my fantastic wife brightened up my Valentine's Day with a copy of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All Stars on the Wii last weekend, and it is absolutely brilliant.
Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is the latest in a long series of fighting games putting Capcom's greatest warriors up against, well, everyone really. The series started with X-Men vs. Street Fighter, and Capcom have since gone on to fight the expanded Marvel universe, SNK and (in Japan only) Namco, until most recently coming to blows with 1970s' anime label Tatsunoko.
Now, I'd be lying if I said I knew anything about Tatsunoko. I remember watching Battle of the Planets (the American dub of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) as a kid, so characters like Ken the Eagle, Jun the Swan and Joe the Condor are recognisable to me, albeit with different names to what I remember them as. But aside from that, I'm still learning. But I do love the Capcom vs. Series, and I love seeing characters that I know and love outside of their surroundings, and the Capcom side of the roster does not disappoint. Whereas every one of the vs. Series up to this point has been 2D and mostly made using recycled sprites from other games, TvC features fully 3D graphics, and has given Capcom and excuse to port some other under-used characters over, like Batsu from Rival Schools, and PTX-40A, the giant robotic suit from Lost Planet. But the real star of the show, for me anyway, is Dead Rising's Frank West, who comes with some suitably "Faaaaantastic" moves, from throwing a Zombie in a shopping trolley at his opponent, to slamming a Servbot mask on them and faceplanting them into the ground, all in the comfort of his own stage at Willamette Mall (the game actually prompted me to play Dead Rising for a bit this week. It hasn't stood the test of time very well). The game also features characters like Darkstalkers' Morrigan and Street Fighter III's Alex, featured for the first time in 3D.
The whole game is about excess. The special moves, similar to Marvel vs. Capcom, often fill the screen, and whenever a combo is executed on your enemy, instead of a damage percentage being shown, it will tell you you've done 12.874 billion points of damage or something, which is completely bonkers. Then there's the screen-filling enemies like the aforementioned PTX and Tatsunoko's Gold Lightan, who are so big the camera has to zoom out. I absolutely love it.
To complement TvC, I also picked up the new Classic Controller Pro for the Wii, which is a great controller. The arms and the repositioned shoulder buttons improve the controller to no end, and the glossy finish makes it look really smart. The lack of vibration places a downer on things, but I still hold it as the best Nintendo joypad I've ever used. Obviously a sentiment echoed by others too, as I think I picked up the last one in the whole of Sheffield.
Right, I'll drop it at that. I finished ObsCure, and after dragging my characters kicking an screaming through the game without a single fatality, one of them died in the climactic boss battle, much to my annoyance. And as I had read, the game took me little over three hours to finish, which is also a bit of a downer. And, for those who didn't know, Street Fighter III's Ibuki, Makoto and Dudley have been announced for Super Street Fighter IV. I've been wanting some SFIII characters for SFIV since it was first announced, so with that news I put in a preorder. Next week's post could be a little late, as I might be too busy playing Heavy Rain to write anything. I'll do my best.
No Baldwins were harmed during the making of this Blog.
And you'll probably also be able to figure out that the last paragraph is riddled with sarcasm, as Haze is one of the most offensive pieces of garbage I've ever had to play. For those of you lucky enough to not know, Haze is a below average PS3-exclusive shooter developed by Free Radical (who, with the Timesplitters series under their belts, and with ex-Goldeneye developers on the team, should have known better) that's major downfall was it's overhyped pre-release. Upon seeing the yellow visor splashed all over the promotional material, everyone and their gran made the Halo connection, and thus was born the "it's Halo on PS3" stigma was born, and expectations were raised to a level that Haze was never going to deliver. When put into words like that, the fate of Haze sounds quite sad, but the truth is, it would have still gotten those piss-poor reviews without the Halo comparisons. It just wouldn't have been pushed into the limelight as much.
Haze begins with you in the shoes of Shane Carpenter, who works for an American military group known as Mantel, who dose up on a hallucinogenic chemical known as Nectar before each conflict. Nectar dulls the soldier to the horrors of war, making things such as blood, injuries and even dead bodies invisible, and making morally wrong actions (like throwing babies in fires, as we find out) seem all in a day's work. On your first mission, naturally to rough up some ethnic minorities, your Nectar Administrator malfunctions and you realise that you're on the wrong side and that your enemy, a supposed vicious dictator and cannibal known as Skin Coat is actually quite a nice guy, and that the reason the Matel are invading their apparently very religious country (Somewhere in South America by the looks of things) is to harvest the plant that Nectar is refined from. So you set off and join him instead, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The story, as well as being a not-so-subtle dig at current events in the middle east, is actually one of the only redeeming features of Haze (the other being that you can switch it off), It kept me interested enough to put myself through the horror of the game. Texture pop-in is a term that really doesn't apply here, the textures fade in is if they were hoping that you wouldn't notice. Each scene starts off looking like a PS2 game, and gradually becomes a sub-par PS3 game. I have also never seen clipping issues quite so bad since the last generation either. Okay, so graphics don't really matter. What about controls then? The reload button, for one, is entirely in the wrong place at Triangle, when it should be Square. There's no dash either, so you have to saunter everywhere, meaning quite often I resorted to driving across some of the open areas to save time. Well, I wouldn't call it driving, not with the handling that's casually thrown into the game. The vehicles are controlled as they would be in a racing game, as opposed to the Halo/Mass Effect twin-stick driving method. But instead of R2 being the accelerator, it's R1, meaning you have two speeds: A billion miles per hour, or standing still. There's a nitro boost that can be activated with the X button that doesn't alter your speed at all, and the vehicles corner like a wet turd on a frozen lake. Just typing about it pisses me off.
Because I like to do things a little differently around here, I'm going to finish off my Haze rant by comparing it, and it's PS3 FPS brethren to, what else, the Baldwin Brothers. Killzone would be Alec Baldwin, strongest and most successful of the brothers. Resistance would be Billy Baldwin, still good, but lacks the edge of it's older brother. Haze, alas, is Stephen Baldwin: Short, ugly, boring and spouts religious nonsense at every opportunity. To perfectly sum it up, here's a video of a Mantel soldier being a very naughty boy indeed.
The week hasn't been all bad though, as my fantastic wife brightened up my Valentine's Day with a copy of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All Stars on the Wii last weekend, and it is absolutely brilliant.
Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is the latest in a long series of fighting games putting Capcom's greatest warriors up against, well, everyone really. The series started with X-Men vs. Street Fighter, and Capcom have since gone on to fight the expanded Marvel universe, SNK and (in Japan only) Namco, until most recently coming to blows with 1970s' anime label Tatsunoko.
Now, I'd be lying if I said I knew anything about Tatsunoko. I remember watching Battle of the Planets (the American dub of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) as a kid, so characters like Ken the Eagle, Jun the Swan and Joe the Condor are recognisable to me, albeit with different names to what I remember them as. But aside from that, I'm still learning. But I do love the Capcom vs. Series, and I love seeing characters that I know and love outside of their surroundings, and the Capcom side of the roster does not disappoint. Whereas every one of the vs. Series up to this point has been 2D and mostly made using recycled sprites from other games, TvC features fully 3D graphics, and has given Capcom and excuse to port some other under-used characters over, like Batsu from Rival Schools, and PTX-40A, the giant robotic suit from Lost Planet. But the real star of the show, for me anyway, is Dead Rising's Frank West, who comes with some suitably "Faaaaantastic" moves, from throwing a Zombie in a shopping trolley at his opponent, to slamming a Servbot mask on them and faceplanting them into the ground, all in the comfort of his own stage at Willamette Mall (the game actually prompted me to play Dead Rising for a bit this week. It hasn't stood the test of time very well). The game also features characters like Darkstalkers' Morrigan and Street Fighter III's Alex, featured for the first time in 3D.
The whole game is about excess. The special moves, similar to Marvel vs. Capcom, often fill the screen, and whenever a combo is executed on your enemy, instead of a damage percentage being shown, it will tell you you've done 12.874 billion points of damage or something, which is completely bonkers. Then there's the screen-filling enemies like the aforementioned PTX and Tatsunoko's Gold Lightan, who are so big the camera has to zoom out. I absolutely love it.
To complement TvC, I also picked up the new Classic Controller Pro for the Wii, which is a great controller. The arms and the repositioned shoulder buttons improve the controller to no end, and the glossy finish makes it look really smart. The lack of vibration places a downer on things, but I still hold it as the best Nintendo joypad I've ever used. Obviously a sentiment echoed by others too, as I think I picked up the last one in the whole of Sheffield.
Right, I'll drop it at that. I finished ObsCure, and after dragging my characters kicking an screaming through the game without a single fatality, one of them died in the climactic boss battle, much to my annoyance. And as I had read, the game took me little over three hours to finish, which is also a bit of a downer. And, for those who didn't know, Street Fighter III's Ibuki, Makoto and Dudley have been announced for Super Street Fighter IV. I've been wanting some SFIII characters for SFIV since it was first announced, so with that news I put in a preorder. Next week's post could be a little late, as I might be too busy playing Heavy Rain to write anything. I'll do my best.
No Baldwins were harmed during the making of this Blog.
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.
Friday, 29 January 2010
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...
There's been a decidedly Sci-Fi feel to my gaming this week. As reported, I was attempting to gather up the remaining Achievements on Fallout 3, so it occured to me that I should download and play the 5th and final expansion pack Mothership Zeta. I'd not heard good things about it to be honest, but for the sake of my Gamerscore (which, as any self-respecting Xbox gamer will tell you, is a virtual extension to one's penis), I thought I'd give it a shot.
The add-on is triggered when you find Fallout 3's fabled UFO crash site, previously infamous for the ridiculously powerful Alien Blaster you find there, and are 'beamed up' so to speak, to the titular alien mothership where you are experimented on and placed in an induced coma. When you awaken, you are greeted in a cell by a lady named Somah. She throws the idea out there that if you stage a fist fight the guards will unlock the door, and then the two of you can fuck them up and escape, and surprisingly it works (although she neglected to mention that she's bricks hard and very good at unarmed combat, and that resulted in a crippled head for me). So begins a tale of survival and escapism, involving a cowboy, a samurai, about a million aliens and a 200 year old little girl, but I'll not ruin any of that for you.
I actually enjoyed it, not as much as Point Lookout but definitely as much as The Pitt and more than Broken Steel and Operation Anchorage. It appeased the latent Sci-Fi geek in me, and kept me occupied for pretty much a full day. There are a bunch of new weapons available, my favourite of which was the Alien Disintegrator, a sort of Laser Rifle with a clip capacity of 100 shots and a reload time of under a second. At the end of the story I came away with upwards of 1600 rounds for it, and that's after heavy usage throughout too, so it will most likely see me through the last four Cheevos that I haven't acquired yet. Also to note is the fact that all of the alien equipment is extremely light, most of it doesn't weigh a thing, so you can virtually bankrupt the Capital Wasteland when you get back with your loot, which oddly enough none of the merchants bat an eyelid at. Much recommended anyway.
Fallout 3 has pretty much taken up the bulk of my week, but the big story is today's release of Mass Effect 2, the collector's edition of which saw me £60 poorer this morning. First things first, the collector's content is actually really good. The double-thick cardboard sleeve houses both a steelbook and a cardboard case (a mere mortal collector's edition only offers one of either). The steelbook holds both game disks and a bonus disk (the contents of which are still a mystery to me), plus the instructions, obviously, and a download code for some GAME-exclusive armour, and the fold-out cardboard case contains a plastic wallet-size Cerberus Network membership card (Mass Effect 2's platform for downloading DLC, which costs a completely unreasonable 1200 MS Points for anyone who buys the game preowned), which then grants you access to a downloadable squad member and side-quest, as well as a hardback artbook and the first issue of the Mass Effect: Redemption comic series. It doesn't look like much, but it seems worth it when it's in your hands. It's safe to say that, apart from the Guitar Hero bundles, this is the most expensive game I've ever bought though.
On to the game. I can't say too much, mainly because I haven't had time to form a proper opinion on it just yet. I will say that it doesn't seem quite as good as the first one, it just doesn't feel as deep. The game is more of a shooter it seems, and less of an RPG. Your squadmates, for example, have a default look, which isn't changeable. And the guns have technologically regressed, and now need reloading, like every other FPS. They tried to explain it, something about the advanced weaponry needing extra coolant that needs to be changed, but any way you look at it it's still reloading, and you need to collect the coolant, which is still ammo. The graphics, which were my only gripe with the first one, have been improved tenfold, there's none of the scruffy shadows and the texture pop up is entirely gone. It makes my pasty, deformed Shepard look a lot, ahem, more noticeable. Another plus-point is the fact that you can sprint outside of combat now, and for a lot longer, so you don't have to dad-run around the Citadel anymore.
The new characters (who I won't go into in detail for risk of spoilers) don't seem as likable as the ones in the first game though. I've seen a few returning faces, Seth Green's abhorrent Joker is still around and even more hateful, and Dr Chakwas (an anagram of 'hacksaw', fact fans) is knocking about on the ship. There's also been brief appearances from everyone's favourite bigots Ashley and Navigator Pressley, Cpt. Arbiter (sorry, Anderson) and Udina, Tali and even that Asari I let escape from Saren's lab on Virmire the first time round. There are a few new races too, the only ones I've seen so far are called the Vorcha, who are very theatrical enemies with the way they bare their fangs and growl as they talk. They are basically the monster equivalent of Dick Dastardly.
I'll report more next week, after I've had a bit more time with it. In other news this week, I earned my first ever Platinum Trophy on the PS3, for Assassin's Creed II. For the XBox fanboys out there, a Platinum Trophy is awarded when you collect all of the other Trophies, which usually mirror the Achievements on a 360 game. So in effect, I 1000ed it. And on a similar note, I got that 490 point Cheevo on Band Hero. I'm not addicted to Gamerscore, I promise. I was very proud of myself for not buying Tatsunoko vs. Capcom today, opting to be the bigger man and actually get my nephew a birthday present. Mario Kart Wii, if you were wondering. Oh, and ask Raz7el what happened when we played Dead or Alive 4 today. Laters...
The add-on is triggered when you find Fallout 3's fabled UFO crash site, previously infamous for the ridiculously powerful Alien Blaster you find there, and are 'beamed up' so to speak, to the titular alien mothership where you are experimented on and placed in an induced coma. When you awaken, you are greeted in a cell by a lady named Somah. She throws the idea out there that if you stage a fist fight the guards will unlock the door, and then the two of you can fuck them up and escape, and surprisingly it works (although she neglected to mention that she's bricks hard and very good at unarmed combat, and that resulted in a crippled head for me). So begins a tale of survival and escapism, involving a cowboy, a samurai, about a million aliens and a 200 year old little girl, but I'll not ruin any of that for you.
I actually enjoyed it, not as much as Point Lookout but definitely as much as The Pitt and more than Broken Steel and Operation Anchorage. It appeased the latent Sci-Fi geek in me, and kept me occupied for pretty much a full day. There are a bunch of new weapons available, my favourite of which was the Alien Disintegrator, a sort of Laser Rifle with a clip capacity of 100 shots and a reload time of under a second. At the end of the story I came away with upwards of 1600 rounds for it, and that's after heavy usage throughout too, so it will most likely see me through the last four Cheevos that I haven't acquired yet. Also to note is the fact that all of the alien equipment is extremely light, most of it doesn't weigh a thing, so you can virtually bankrupt the Capital Wasteland when you get back with your loot, which oddly enough none of the merchants bat an eyelid at. Much recommended anyway.
Fallout 3 has pretty much taken up the bulk of my week, but the big story is today's release of Mass Effect 2, the collector's edition of which saw me £60 poorer this morning. First things first, the collector's content is actually really good. The double-thick cardboard sleeve houses both a steelbook and a cardboard case (a mere mortal collector's edition only offers one of either). The steelbook holds both game disks and a bonus disk (the contents of which are still a mystery to me), plus the instructions, obviously, and a download code for some GAME-exclusive armour, and the fold-out cardboard case contains a plastic wallet-size Cerberus Network membership card (Mass Effect 2's platform for downloading DLC, which costs a completely unreasonable 1200 MS Points for anyone who buys the game preowned), which then grants you access to a downloadable squad member and side-quest, as well as a hardback artbook and the first issue of the Mass Effect: Redemption comic series. It doesn't look like much, but it seems worth it when it's in your hands. It's safe to say that, apart from the Guitar Hero bundles, this is the most expensive game I've ever bought though.
On to the game. I can't say too much, mainly because I haven't had time to form a proper opinion on it just yet. I will say that it doesn't seem quite as good as the first one, it just doesn't feel as deep. The game is more of a shooter it seems, and less of an RPG. Your squadmates, for example, have a default look, which isn't changeable. And the guns have technologically regressed, and now need reloading, like every other FPS. They tried to explain it, something about the advanced weaponry needing extra coolant that needs to be changed, but any way you look at it it's still reloading, and you need to collect the coolant, which is still ammo. The graphics, which were my only gripe with the first one, have been improved tenfold, there's none of the scruffy shadows and the texture pop up is entirely gone. It makes my pasty, deformed Shepard look a lot, ahem, more noticeable. Another plus-point is the fact that you can sprint outside of combat now, and for a lot longer, so you don't have to dad-run around the Citadel anymore.
The new characters (who I won't go into in detail for risk of spoilers) don't seem as likable as the ones in the first game though. I've seen a few returning faces, Seth Green's abhorrent Joker is still around and even more hateful, and Dr Chakwas (an anagram of 'hacksaw', fact fans) is knocking about on the ship. There's also been brief appearances from everyone's favourite bigots Ashley and Navigator Pressley, Cpt. Arbiter (sorry, Anderson) and Udina, Tali and even that Asari I let escape from Saren's lab on Virmire the first time round. There are a few new races too, the only ones I've seen so far are called the Vorcha, who are very theatrical enemies with the way they bare their fangs and growl as they talk. They are basically the monster equivalent of Dick Dastardly.
I'll report more next week, after I've had a bit more time with it. In other news this week, I earned my first ever Platinum Trophy on the PS3, for Assassin's Creed II. For the XBox fanboys out there, a Platinum Trophy is awarded when you collect all of the other Trophies, which usually mirror the Achievements on a 360 game. So in effect, I 1000ed it. And on a similar note, I got that 490 point Cheevo on Band Hero. I'm not addicted to Gamerscore, I promise. I was very proud of myself for not buying Tatsunoko vs. Capcom today, opting to be the bigger man and actually get my nephew a birthday present. Mario Kart Wii, if you were wondering. Oh, and ask Raz7el what happened when we played Dead or Alive 4 today. Laters...
Friday, 22 January 2010
Matt Day-Mahn!
You know what makes me awesome? The fact that I buy games that I know to be widely condemned as shit, unplayable smears of filth on a perfectly good BluRay or DVD, wastes of nonrenewable resources used to create the disk, just so I can attempt to entertainingly write about how shit they are for you, the 3 or 4 people who actually read this crap every week. But you know what makes life awesome? When they aren't actually that bad.
Take Hellboy: The Science of Evil as an example. The PS3 version, which is the one I've been playing, received a score of 47% on Metacritic, yet I fail to see what's so bad about it. It's not like Batman, where I'm a complete fanboy, I did love the first Hellboy movie but the second was garbage, the comics do very little to hold my attention and the animated films are a bit on the mundane side, so if I was to be biased I'd be joining them.
The game itself is an enjoyable God-of-War-em-up which places you in the hooves of the titular demonic anti-hero as you (for reasons yet unknown) chase a Witch through a surprisingly atmospheric forest graveyard, bashing the daylights out of everything in your way with your signature massive stone hand, or whatever you find yourself close enough to pick up at the time, from discarded weapons to chunks of a tree to severed parts of enemies departed. As well as the melee combat you also have Red's trusty sidearm, his oversized revolver which can be equipped with various different kinds of ammunition to serve different purposes, from freezing enemies to destroying enchanted doorways.
The game occasionally flashes back to one of Hellboy's previous missions too, the first of which being a trip to Japan which throws quite a few nods to the first of the animated films 'Blood and Iron', with enchanted swords and floating heads, and to bait the fans an encounter with Herman von Klempt and his kriegsaffe, Brutus.
It's good brainless fun, slightly average but not bad, and it will sate my appetite before I get my hands on God of War III, Dante's Inferno and Darksiders in a couple of months. Glad I played Hellboy first though, doubt it would receive such a positive review after the big three.
Also, given this weeks post's title (I couldn't resist even though it's not his likeness), I've hammered through The Bourne Conspiracy on the XBox360, and absolutely loved it.
The game borrows from a lot of others, but the most unlikely (but most apparent) influence comes in the form of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. When Bourne first appeared onscreen I immediately thought, with his appearance being close to Nathan Drake, Shadow Complex's Jason Flemming and Dark Void's William Grey, that he should have been voiced by he-who-shall-not-be-named. But the way he runs, takes cover, flinches from near misses and to an extent fights (he uses Drake's familiar jump-punch move) also echo Naughty Dog's triumph.
The gunplay is what ultimately lets Bourne down, being uninspired copy-and-paste Gears of War style hide and shoot (although with the more realistic weaponry and destructible cover, it also harks back to Uncharted), and as well as being a bit mundane at times it also gets a little frustrating. But the melee combat really shines. Unlike Uncharted, where you could punch and shoot on the fly, when an enemy engages Bourne up close the game shifts into a Shenmue style fighting mechanic, in which combinations of heavy and light attacks can be used, and when an on-screen 'adrenaline meter' reaches the appropriate level, the B button can trigger 'takedown moves' which immediately incapacitate between one and three enemies in a true-to-the-film cinematic fashion, often making use of the environment in typically inventive ways.
Speaking of cinematics, some of the cutscenes are hauntingly close to the film, particularly the failed assassination attempt on the boat and the Paris apartment attack, which was without a doubt a highlight of the game for me. And taking to the streets of a very destructible Paris in a very indestructible Mini Cooper in a Burnout meets The Italian Job frenzy was an absolute thrill-ride. I had hoped the driving mechanic would pop up again somewhere, as it was fantastic fun, but it never did. Anyway, I whole-heartedly recommend this to fans of both the film and the genre, it's available at most preowned shops for around £7 and won't eat up a lot of time, but it's a very rewarding experience.
It's a rare game that challenges a player to question his or her own sexuality. Curiosity led me to Google Dragon Age: Origins' man-on-man sex scene, and I unwaveringly decided it wasn't for me. Yet Band Hero, which the wife brought home on Sunday, had me worried at times at just how much enjoyment I was having with it, not only was I fearing for my heterosexuality but at times, bopping along to No Doubt's 'Just a Girl', I even began to wonder about my actual gender.
I know I commented on the demo, saying it was arse, but the full game actually proves itself to be more fun and actually slightly more polished than Guitar Hero 5. The series' cast is back in full force, but they've been bastardized to fit the game's X-Factor aesthetic. Gone is Johnny Napalm's Mohican, tamed to blond spikes. Goodbye Judy Nail's piercings, she's resorted to the awful Avril Lavigne 'mosher' template. And what did they do to Axel Steel...
The band also play a more visible role this time, when a track features a female vocalist the game provides you with one, so you aren't watching a butch metalhead squeal out a girlish ballad. Also, in the case of Evanescence's angst-ridden abortion 'Bring Me To Life', the bits where the guy sings were performed by my avatar, the guitarist. "Ha ha, you're the fat one" the wife pointed out. Her words cut deeper than any knife. I did resent the fact that, when playing 'Wannabe' by the Spice Girls, the camera panned to me for the line 'Easy V doesn't come for free'. Not only does it insult my sexuality, now I'm a hooker too. And a real lady, apparently. It makes up for the insults in a very realistically obtainable achievement worth 490 points (seriously) though.
Okay, to wrap things up: Having a bit of a break from Sam and Max after a barmy (yet equally genius and hilarious) song and dance routine about war performed by a bunch of presidential aides just about melted my brain, and have decided that ACII Discovery isn't as good as it first seems, as it's all to easy to wind up stuck between two guards and with the blocking reversals from the other games somehow forgotten about this surely means certain death. And have decided to spend the XBox time between now and Mass Effect 2 hoovering up the last few achievements on Fallout 3, including collecting the Bobbleheads, which I epic failed at when I blew up Megaton without collecting the one from Lucas Simms' house and forgot to save beforehand. I had to go back to the previous save before that, which lost me about three hours' play. And a warning to anyone else starting afresh, don't try to do Operation Anchorage at level 5. It's unforgiving. Ciao.
Take Hellboy: The Science of Evil as an example. The PS3 version, which is the one I've been playing, received a score of 47% on Metacritic, yet I fail to see what's so bad about it. It's not like Batman, where I'm a complete fanboy, I did love the first Hellboy movie but the second was garbage, the comics do very little to hold my attention and the animated films are a bit on the mundane side, so if I was to be biased I'd be joining them.
The game itself is an enjoyable God-of-War-em-up which places you in the hooves of the titular demonic anti-hero as you (for reasons yet unknown) chase a Witch through a surprisingly atmospheric forest graveyard, bashing the daylights out of everything in your way with your signature massive stone hand, or whatever you find yourself close enough to pick up at the time, from discarded weapons to chunks of a tree to severed parts of enemies departed. As well as the melee combat you also have Red's trusty sidearm, his oversized revolver which can be equipped with various different kinds of ammunition to serve different purposes, from freezing enemies to destroying enchanted doorways.
The game occasionally flashes back to one of Hellboy's previous missions too, the first of which being a trip to Japan which throws quite a few nods to the first of the animated films 'Blood and Iron', with enchanted swords and floating heads, and to bait the fans an encounter with Herman von Klempt and his kriegsaffe, Brutus.
It's good brainless fun, slightly average but not bad, and it will sate my appetite before I get my hands on God of War III, Dante's Inferno and Darksiders in a couple of months. Glad I played Hellboy first though, doubt it would receive such a positive review after the big three.
Also, given this weeks post's title (I couldn't resist even though it's not his likeness), I've hammered through The Bourne Conspiracy on the XBox360, and absolutely loved it.
The game borrows from a lot of others, but the most unlikely (but most apparent) influence comes in the form of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. When Bourne first appeared onscreen I immediately thought, with his appearance being close to Nathan Drake, Shadow Complex's Jason Flemming and Dark Void's William Grey, that he should have been voiced by he-who-shall-not-be-named. But the way he runs, takes cover, flinches from near misses and to an extent fights (he uses Drake's familiar jump-punch move) also echo Naughty Dog's triumph.
The gunplay is what ultimately lets Bourne down, being uninspired copy-and-paste Gears of War style hide and shoot (although with the more realistic weaponry and destructible cover, it also harks back to Uncharted), and as well as being a bit mundane at times it also gets a little frustrating. But the melee combat really shines. Unlike Uncharted, where you could punch and shoot on the fly, when an enemy engages Bourne up close the game shifts into a Shenmue style fighting mechanic, in which combinations of heavy and light attacks can be used, and when an on-screen 'adrenaline meter' reaches the appropriate level, the B button can trigger 'takedown moves' which immediately incapacitate between one and three enemies in a true-to-the-film cinematic fashion, often making use of the environment in typically inventive ways.
Speaking of cinematics, some of the cutscenes are hauntingly close to the film, particularly the failed assassination attempt on the boat and the Paris apartment attack, which was without a doubt a highlight of the game for me. And taking to the streets of a very destructible Paris in a very indestructible Mini Cooper in a Burnout meets The Italian Job frenzy was an absolute thrill-ride. I had hoped the driving mechanic would pop up again somewhere, as it was fantastic fun, but it never did. Anyway, I whole-heartedly recommend this to fans of both the film and the genre, it's available at most preowned shops for around £7 and won't eat up a lot of time, but it's a very rewarding experience.
It's a rare game that challenges a player to question his or her own sexuality. Curiosity led me to Google Dragon Age: Origins' man-on-man sex scene, and I unwaveringly decided it wasn't for me. Yet Band Hero, which the wife brought home on Sunday, had me worried at times at just how much enjoyment I was having with it, not only was I fearing for my heterosexuality but at times, bopping along to No Doubt's 'Just a Girl', I even began to wonder about my actual gender.
I know I commented on the demo, saying it was arse, but the full game actually proves itself to be more fun and actually slightly more polished than Guitar Hero 5. The series' cast is back in full force, but they've been bastardized to fit the game's X-Factor aesthetic. Gone is Johnny Napalm's Mohican, tamed to blond spikes. Goodbye Judy Nail's piercings, she's resorted to the awful Avril Lavigne 'mosher' template. And what did they do to Axel Steel...
The band also play a more visible role this time, when a track features a female vocalist the game provides you with one, so you aren't watching a butch metalhead squeal out a girlish ballad. Also, in the case of Evanescence's angst-ridden abortion 'Bring Me To Life', the bits where the guy sings were performed by my avatar, the guitarist. "Ha ha, you're the fat one" the wife pointed out. Her words cut deeper than any knife. I did resent the fact that, when playing 'Wannabe' by the Spice Girls, the camera panned to me for the line 'Easy V doesn't come for free'. Not only does it insult my sexuality, now I'm a hooker too. And a real lady, apparently. It makes up for the insults in a very realistically obtainable achievement worth 490 points (seriously) though.
Okay, to wrap things up: Having a bit of a break from Sam and Max after a barmy (yet equally genius and hilarious) song and dance routine about war performed by a bunch of presidential aides just about melted my brain, and have decided that ACII Discovery isn't as good as it first seems, as it's all to easy to wind up stuck between two guards and with the blocking reversals from the other games somehow forgotten about this surely means certain death. And have decided to spend the XBox time between now and Mass Effect 2 hoovering up the last few achievements on Fallout 3, including collecting the Bobbleheads, which I epic failed at when I blew up Megaton without collecting the one from Lucas Simms' house and forgot to save beforehand. I had to go back to the previous save before that, which lost me about three hours' play. And a warning to anyone else starting afresh, don't try to do Operation Anchorage at level 5. It's unforgiving. Ciao.
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