That's what I saw as I looked at the back of the box for Dark Souls.
I'd heard that this game offered up a real challenge. So much so, in fact, that the developers felt confident enough to boast about it's toughness on the box itself. But first I needed to complete Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker.
Peace Walker is an interesting entry in the Metal Gear franchise. The narrative is split into separate missions, a structure born as a result of the game's original handheld release, and is an interesting change that worked surprisingly well. It wasn't as long and convoluted as previous entries in the series, and is designed more for returning to time and again to complete and perfect the many missions. As I was somewhat rushing through it due to my looming deadline I look forward to revisiting it in the future to fully experience all that it has to offer. But at the time I couldn't dawdle. My mind was elsewhere. I knew that I needed to focus on Dark Souls.
So, after reading the back of the box (or the game's own title screen if you've bought this new version), and preparing myself for death, I started to play. I then saw this screen a lot:
This is a crushing, punishing game. But in a good way! Patience and perseverance are rewarded. Small gains are momentous, reaching the next save point is a rare and monumental occasion. The world is unique and intriguing, full of horrible beasties and exciting combat.
It tells you almost nothing about how to play it, leaving so much to trial and error that you feel overwhelming pride and joy to make even the smallest of realisations or discoveries. And then it smacks you back down if you start to get cocky and think you've got its number. It really is tough. And that's why I'm sorry to say I haven't completed it. I didn't leave myself enough time.
I was talking to a guy on a video game forum who said that he was on his second playthrough and he was only halfway through after putting in 62 hours. He's already beaten it, knows what he's doing, and yet he still has dozens of hours ahead of him before finishing. This is definitely not a game to play against the clock.
But I don't feel bad. It's like reaching the World Cup final and getting beaten by Brazil; there's no shame in it. I completed 49 out of 50 games from my pile of shame, and I was beaten by the hardest game out there.
No, that's not exactly right. I wasn't beaten by it, I just didn't anticipate how long it would take for me to master and eventually beat it. And I will complete this game. One day. But before that happens I imagine that I'll be seeing this screen a lot:
I’ve completed three more games, and now I only
have two left to go. And I’ve really been struggling to find the time to write
this entry as I’m up against the clock.
First off I finished The Legend Of Zelda:
Ocarina of Time. This game pops up on “Best Games Ever” lists all the time, and
having just played it I can see why. It’s an incredible RPG with brilliant level
design, fantastic puzzles, and awesome music.
When I talked about Halo: Anniversary I
made reference to infamous levels of classic video games. Ocarina of Times
infamous level is the Water Temple, a supposedly rock-hard mindfucker of a
level. I must say I’m not really sure what all the fuss was about, it wasn’t
that bad! It may have been the most challenging of the temples in the game, but
I must admit to being a little perplexed about what everyone was so dumbstruck
by. I even completed it without realising that I could get a tunic that let me breathe underwater.
Overall I loved playing this game having missed it all those years ago, it was
awesome.
Next up was God of War 2, another game in
the last ten or so that featured swords and slashing and skeletons. Much like
the first God of War game, and Zelda, this one featured great level design,
production, and tight gameplay. I tore through this one in an attempt to get
down to the final few, and it’s insane button bashing fights left me with sore
hands for the week of so I had this one in the disc tray.
The last of the trio I finished recently
was Deadly Premonition, a serial killer murder mystery game that the acronym
“WTF” was invented for. Honestly, this game was next level bonkers. I’d heard
it was mental, but this one has to be seen to be believed. It features a
confusing plot, awful dialogue, terrible voice acting, bad PS2-era graphics, a
totally bizarre soundtrack, and all-round catastrophic gameplay consisting of
poor controls, rubbish driving, woeful shooting, and crappy melee attacks.
And yet it was one of the most entertaining
and contrary experiences I’ve ever had. I’m a long-time lover of movies that are
‘so bad they’re good’. No-one has ever managed to capture that feeling in a
video game before, but this game does, it’s balls-to-the-walls crazy. Jaunty
xylophone music plays as you discuss gruesome murders. The main character
discusses the case with an invisible friend, and it’s not until 8 hours into
the game that you realise that everyone else can see and hear him do this, and
they seem to be quite alright with it. Take a look at this video to see just how wacky this thing is.
So now I’m down to the final two games in my pile of shame. Metal
Gear Solid: Peace Walker, and Dark Souls.
And I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.
I always knew that Dark Souls was hard.
Possibly the hardest game out there. And people love it for that very fact. That’s fine, I
like a challenge and I’m not really a fan of the incessant handholding that
goes on in most games these days. My idea was to leave this one until last so that I
could concentrate on it without having a whole bunch of other games still left
hanging over my head. I also wanted to have another game to play through so
that I had somewhere to turn if things got too frustrating.
But having spent the last week or so trying
to make inroads into Dark Souls I realise that this is a game I should have
been chipping away at over the last year. It’s hard as nails. It’s a complete
bastard. But strangely I’m really enjoying it. It’s a great game, really well
done, and with a fantastic balance of challenge and reward. It’s just not the
game to attempt with a looming deadline.
Over the course
of this journey, project, challenge, mission, whatever you want to call it,
I’ve played a lot of games that involved shooting people and blowing shit up.
That’s always fun, but it’s nice to change things up every once in a while, so
whenever the time came for a racing game or a whimsical platformer it was
always refreshing.
In ‘de blob 2’
the monstrous Comrade Black has drained the colour from the world, leaving it a
bleak black and white affair. It’s your job as Blob to suck up colour into your
blobby body, and paint colour and life back into the world of Prisma City.
The city starts
off completely black and white, populated with a few enemies and a slow, droning
soundtrack. As you go about your task brightening up the world you release the
colourful citizens from their imprisonment. Each little section rescued adds a
jazzy instrument to the soundtrack, so the further you progress the more upbeat
and uplifting the music becomes, until eventually you’re bopping along to some
funky tunes while flinging colour all over the place.
I didn’t play
through this in one or two large sessions, I used it as a relaxing antidote to
the other games I’ve been playing lately. After a few levels hunched forward
playing Killzone 3, or a couple of long and dialogue-heavy quests in The
Witcher 2 I’d pop this on, relax with my feet up and enjoy the calming effect
of rejuvenating the world of de blob. It was really quite soothing, and a
lovely change to play something so full of bright colours, charm and humour.
Then I went back to games about shooting shit and blowing people up.
The crew that stars in Saints Row the Third
Sequels are
usually a let down. There’s a regular decline in quality, sometimes because it’s simply
a rehash, or they changed too much, or maybe they don’t change what needed
changing. Or it’s a combination of all these things. Saint’s Row The Third,
however, improves upon everything that was good in Saints Row 2 and manages to
make an experience that was even more fun than I would have imagined.
Firstly they
take care of the little things. When playing in co-op both players can now buy
ammo and weapon upgrades at the same time. In Saints row 2 one of you had to
wait around in the ammo shop while the other was doing this, which was pretty
frustrating. Plus, they added little translucent arrows to guide you to your
destination so that you didn’t have to rely on the minimap, making the journey
a lot smoother.
Go that way, Pete!
They also added
a quick steal element that allows you to sprint towards a vehicle and jump in
feet first through one of the windows, making for a speedy getaway when under
fire. They also eliminated
the need to constantly fill up on Respect in order to play missions. Now
there’s no need to go and do busy work activities to fill your Respect meter,
so you can get carried along with the insane main story and not have to stop
every 2 minutes for another tiger escort chore (actually that one was quite fun).
The main story
in this installment is crazy, with each mission feeling like an end of game finale
to another entry in the series. Right from the start you’re robbing banks and
then jumping out of exploding jumbo jets. The next thing you know you’re firing
bazookas from helicopters, getting into intense car chases, instigating massive
shootouts, and hijacking high grade military equipment, sometimes all in the
same mission. The delicious graphics, a massive improvement on 2007’s Saints
Row 2, only make the game that much more impressive.
Saints Row 2
Saints Row the Third
My co-op partner
Pete and I had a wicked time with this one, and we blasted through it in only a
couple of sessions.
When I was in
secondary school my chums and I were made to suffer Religious Education lessons
under the watchful gaze of Reverend Iball (I shit you not). I remember one
lesson he caught me doodling a picture of Jesus being crucified, and almost
had a conniption fit, but being a Godly fellow he managed to restrain himself
and only dished out a Friday afternoon detention, rather than some sort of
self-flagellation that had maybe first sprung to his mind. I wonder what he
would have made of ‘El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron’, a bizarre
platforming/hack and slash game with an intensely religious story.
As the scribe
Enoch you are tasked by God with purifying seven fallen angels who have created a
strange tower and are doing naughty things inside.
You’re given weapons of God to
dish out this sweet justice, my favourite being a shield that splits in two to
smash people with. Each level of
the tower is an odd, ethereal, dream-like place full of trippy visuals, pulsing
colours and moving platforms of varying design, making it represent what it must be like to turn up to Sunday School on acid.
You fight your
way up the tower, taking on enemies, navigating 3D and 2D platforming sections,
and then dispatching with the fallen angel who presides over this level of the
tower. It was whacky, intriguing, and fun, and it was nice to see such
interesting art direction and an attempt at a slightly different style of storytelling.
Maybe if Reverend Iball had been this interesting I wouldn’t have ended up doodling
such blasphemous doodles.
After the shallow blast-athon of
Borderlands I decided to jump back into The Witcher 2, a medieval sword and
sorcery romp I’ve been playing on and off for the last few months. It was a huge
change going from a game with almost no story to one with perhaps a little too
much. The Witcher games are based on a series of novels, and even though they
try to cram in a bit too much back-story and character history, The Witcher 2
is a fantastic, involving experience featuring a wonderfully immersive world
that any Dungeons and Dragons or Game of Thrones fan would enjoy spending time
in.
It’s odd that two games can be so similar
in structure, and yet produce such different experiences. Both Borderlands and
The Witcher 2 involve central hubs that feature various mission and quest
givers, offering up fetch quests and murder jobs that can be completed by
wandering out into the surrounding wilderness. But where The Witcher 2 gets it
so right is that it creates a reason to do these things, an overarching story
to be invested in, characters to care about, and decisions with real weight
that affect the overall outcome of the story. Plus it was vulgar and violent as
hell. I loved it.
I also finished off Outland, a downloadable
platformer that features an interesting art style of silhouetted foregrounds
against rich and colourful backdrops as you fight through the origins of Man’s
good and evil, or something, I wasn’t listening. You fight bugs, gargoyles, and
impressive bosses while navigating the complex levels filled with traps and
damaging cosmic energy beams. It was pretty good fun, but not something I’d
rush back to.
So, here comes the controversial bit. I
finished Super Mario 64, one of the most critically lauded and well-loved games
of all time. The problem is that I really don’t like this game very much.
Back in 1997 I was living with a group of
friends in a share house in South London. We were all in our early twenties, in
various stages of employ. One friend worked out of our shed making paintball
accessories, and another sold weed out of his bedroom. We had a projector
hooked up to a Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation, and everyday one whole wall of
the living room came alive with four player Goldeneye battles and WipEout 2097
tournaments.
Due to the many weed customers there was a nonstop rotation of
contenders, so there wasn’t much opportunity for single player games. As soon
as you had loaded up a one-player game there’d be a knock at the door, and
before you knew it a transaction had taken place, a spliff was being passed
round, and it was Goldeneye time.
I’d always thought this was the reason I’d
never properly played through Mario 64. But as soon as I started playing this I
remembered why I’d never persevered with this game. I cannot stand the terrible
controls and appalling camera issues.
Mario is very awkward to control, he turns oddly, and he slides when you want to stop, as if every surface is ice. His
jumps are unpredictable, or difficult to pull off. And the camera, my god, that
bloody camera. You have to constantly choose the camera angle, not through the
fluid, precise movement of a second analogue stick, but in 45-degree increments
using four different buttons. Unfortunately the angle you want will often not
be available, leaving you to make a lot of blind leaps of faith.
If you’re lucky enough to finally line up
the camera for that difficult jump you’ll take off running and then the game
will just change the camera angle on you to something completely different. As
a result it changes the direction that you’re heading in, leading to you simply
plummeting off the ledge you were happily running along. I can’t count the
number of times I died simply because the camera angle up and changed itself,
sending Mario to his doom, and me into another fit of swearing.
Try navigating this as the camera chops and changes willy nilly.
It's also unlike any Mario game that I've played. There's no Luigi, no Yoshi. There's barely any jumping on enemy heads, and there's hardly any blocks that you jump into from underneath to release powerups. They feature sporadically, but there's no mushrooms that change you from normal to Super Mario. Old favourites like the fire flower and the invincibility star are replaced by an invisibility cap that lets you walk through a limited selection of objects, a metal cap that lets you sink in water, and a wing cap that lets you fly, but these are only used a handful of times, and are ultimately pretty boring. As a game it's frustrating beyond belief. As a Mario game it's barely recognisable to the ones I grew up with.
When I started this pile of shame journey I
said I’d finish each game to the credits, not worrying about completing every
side quest or getting 100% completion. This has never been more relevant than
with this game. There are 120 stars to find hidden within the levels of Mario
64. However, you are free to access the end boss when you have gotten only 70
stars. As soon as I hit 70 stars I was straight up those stairs to fight Bowser
one last time. I’m really glad I’ve finished this game.
Coming back from such a long hiatus and looking at the remaining games in my pile of shame was daunting. It seems like I've left myself loads of long-winded RPGs and open world sandboxes, and a short window of opportunity to get them finished to boot. I decided to start with something that I imagined would be fairly easy to blast through, Killzone 3. What I'd forgotten was that I would be using the Sharpshooter light gun, something that's not especially easy to use when it comes to frantic boss battles. The first person perspective made it slightly easier to use than with SOCOM 4, but it was still easy to get disoriented and end up whirling around blindly looking for targets in a dark room before realising I was staring at the floor or ceiling. What didn't help was that the game itself had a bunch of schizophrenic and epileptic qualities that further added to the confusion and disorientation. Inconsistent continuity constantly left me scratching my head. My fellow soldiers would turn up at the end of the level to rescue me in hovering drop-ships, and then seconds later I'm starting the next level driving an ice sled with no explanation of where it came from. Towards the end of the sled section the icy snowscape changes into a barren rocky one. The next thing I know I'm running through a massive junkyard that appeared out of nowhere. These unheralded switcheroos were perplexing, although nothing was as baffling as your teammates revival mechanism whenever you were incapacitated. One of your buddies would run over and zap you back into action, but every single time it rotated you 180 degrees so that you were put back on your feet facing the wrong way and taking bullets in the back of the head. Couple all of this with unsynchronised cutscene dialogue, and the game makes you feel like a drunk suffering blackouts, dizziness, and delayed hearing. And much like a night where you drink too much, it ended abruptly too. There's a big explosion, your character says one line and then he's cut off mid-sentence as some hard rock/dubstep number blasts forth from the speakers to assault my already bewildered senses. Real blackouts end in blissful silence. Another game that would have benefited from some lovely quiet was Borderlands. Why oh why must game developers insist upon putting the most annoying characters in their games, and then ensuring that these idiots repeat the same lines again, and again, and again, ad nauseam? The idiotic robot Claptrap lets you know when missions become available in various locations throughout the game. Except he feels the need to do this every ninety seconds, spouting the same shrill nonsense like it's going out of style. He's like the robot version of The Dean off 'Community', forever popping in with useless information, much to the annoyance of everyone involved. I wasn't a big fan of Borderlands when I initially started it a couple of years ago, and I wasn't looking forward to this playthrough. It's an ok game, I guess, but I wasn't really feeling it. I didn't get immersed in the world. Maybe that was the lack of cutscenes, the limited NPC interaction, or the total absence of story and character. I just didn't like it. I'm glad it's over and I never have to hear Claptrap ever again. 39 down, 11 to go.
There's a good reason I haven't posted any blog entries for the last month or so. I've been enjoying a fat holiday, and as I write this I'm sitting in a beautiful apartment in Barcelona, sipping on a delightful red. This will be our last stop before we head home at the end of the week.
Its not easy trying to handle such a massive task as completing this pile of shame in one year. It's even harder trying to do it in eleven months seeing as I decided to spend a month touring around Europe (not that I'm complaining about going on such an amazing holiday!)
But I know that I'm leaving myself with a short run in, and a fair few games left to complete. That's why before I left Australia I decided to buy a 3DS and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to play on my holiday, thereby giving myself the opportunity to complete at least one game from my pile of shame while I was away!
It's been really good to feel like I'm still making progress towards knocking off that pile of shame, all while sitting on a plane headed to another wonderful destination!
I've completed a sizeable chunk of Zelda so far, and I'm sure there'll be enough time to get it finished on the 30 hour journey back down under that begins on Friday and ends on Sunday. Well, as long as I can charge the battery on the stopovers.
One of the
most satisfying aspects of working through my pile of shame is the act of moving
a completed game from the pile at the bottom of the bookshelf to join its
fellow finished brethren where they sit nearer the top. Alternatively it’s a
slightly hollow feeling to finish a game that was a digital download as there’s
no physical movement of media that symbolises that I’m a step closer to
achieving my goal.
But, all the
same, I still know that I’m getting there, and having played through Saint’s
Row 2 completely in co-op with my mate Pete I’m feeling good. Good, because we
had a great time playing it; good, because it was a large game, and it’s always
nice to get them completed; and good, because it means that there’s also only
one digital download game, Outland, left in my pile of shame. After that it is
physical games all the way, and another milestone passed.
Saints Row 2
is an open-world, sandbox game where you play as the head of a crime syndicate,
your goal being to eliminate other gangs and take over the city. This is
achieved through cartoonish violence and hilarious means. It was a great laugh,
although at times frustrating, especially in the last few missions where we were
really struggling. Then we worked out that Pete’s controller was broken and
several of the buttons had stopped working, and this was why none of the
helicopter weapons actually worked, making the assault helicopter final mission
rather challenging to say the least. Still, I can’t wait to play through Saints
Row the Third, albeit with a couple of fully functional controllers this time.
So after
blasting our way through Saints Row 2, and laughing for most of it, I
concentrated on a couple of solo games, starting with inFamous 2.
o join it'atisfying aspects of working my through my pile
of shame is moving a completed game from the shame pile up the I liked the first inFamous game, it
was a gritty new superhero tale set in a half destroyed city that was fun to
play around in. It featured a truly rewarding progression of power unlocks and
upgrades, and it also had a cool comic book style to its cutscenes.
Unfortunately
the second game is pretty much just more of the same except that they changed
the main character’s design and voice actor, and relegated the comic book
cutscenes to only three or four instances. The city in this installment, New
Marais, is bright, neon-filled, and gaudy in contrast to Empire City’s gloomy,
post-apocalyptic ruin. It felt odd, like seeing a scruffy little dog that you
love given a bath, tarted up with pink hair dye and a sparkly collar, and carried
around in a stupid, expensive handbag.
The game was
fun enough to play, I enjoyed the power-up progression again, but it felt like
this was an extended expansion pack, and the things they changed weren’t
necessarily for the better. Maybe something with a bit more scope is what’s
needed, this one felt smaller and more enclosed than the last.
InFamous 2
again uses ‘the lightsaber principle’ to display your moral choices throughout
the game. Choose to be good, and the electric missiles and grenades that fly from
your fingers are a frosty blue colour. Choose to be bad, and those same
projectiles are Vader red.
The inclusion
of two new characters who act as the Angel and Devil on your shoulders drive
home the already obvious mechanic of the players’ choice between good and evil
without really offering up much in terms of narrative or emotional impact; they
were both pretty annoying.
Almost as
annoying as your literary agent and best friend Barry in ‘Alan Wake’, another
game I finished off this week. I’ve a troubled history with this game having
played through two thirds of it only to lose my save files when my Xbox deleted
everything on my hard drive. It was frustrating having to play through most of
this one again, but it’s a good, atmospheric action-horror game, if a little repetitive.
It’s also the
game that likes to giveth, but loves
to taketh away. I’ve never had my weapons and items removed from my character
so many times in one game. It wasn’t even restricted to between level thievery,
several times you lost everything mid-level and were left to fend off the
darkness with only your eye-rolling exasperation at having been so completely
hobbled once again.
The plot also
suffered from being overcooked, with too many attempts to convince you that the
story was a dream, a flashback, an imagining, a switcheroo, so much so that by
the end I was thinking, ‘Well whatever the big reveal is will you just hurry up
and get to it please, I’ve other games that need my attention and you’ve just
about worn out your welcome.’
So at the end
(Spoilers), after searching for his missing wife, who was swallowed by a lake,
he dives into the lake to find her, stabs a ghost, and then he, like, lives in a
ghost lake or something. His wife had been missing under the lake for a week,
but now she’s been spat out. So she’s sat there sobbing on dry land, and he’s happily
typing away under the water, like Spongebob. “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean!”
he declares. And then someone says ‘Wake up, Alan.’ And then Space Oddity
plays.
Call of Duty:
Modern Warfare 3 was a ridiculous experience. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a
game as aggressively linear, and relentlessly noisy. Developers ‘Infinity Ward’
seem to believe that non-stop explosions and endless collapsing buildings equal
an immersive experience. There was barely a moment to pause and absorb the
atmosphere, no quiet lulls to allow you soak it all up before being bombarded
once more by the deafening roar of American bravado.
Instead you
are jostled from one falling landmark to another with little time to hear
objectives or decide which route looks tactically advantageous. Once again it’s
another case of run behind the guy with the big stupid FOLLOW over his head, shut
up, don’t ask questions, and keep on shooting.
It would be
nice to slowly fight your way through levels, to actually feel like you are
taking territory from the enemy, rather than hurtling through blindly as
bullets bounce off you and barely register. It was all so rushed, never more so
than at the very beginning of the game when, after pressing the ‘Start New
Campaign’ button, you are immediately awarded a trophy, just for having started
the game!
There’s absolutely
no immersion, nor time to even admire the fancy graphics. And the production
and presentation are undeniably impressive, especially when compared to the
recently played Homefront. The graphics are fantastic and the destruction,
although mostly overpowering in its persistence, is well done and sounds great. But oddly the same can’t be said for the grenades. I’ve never played a
game with such quiet and ineffective grenades. I’m not sure I killed a single
enemy with one. But maybe that was just because by the time they exploded I’d
already left the area, racing to catch up with the NPC I was supposed to be
following because he’d already completed the level.
The levels are
short, really short, almost like they had a meeting and said “What should
happen in the new game?” and everyone jumped up and shouted out at the same
time;
“A level where
you infiltrate a submarine!”
“A level where
you chase a tube train!”
“A level where
the Eiffel Tower collapses!”
“A level where
New York is all fucked up!”
“A level where
you’re on a plane, and it’s the president’s plane, and there are terrorists,
and then the plane starts to crash, and then you’re shooting the terrorists as you crash,
and then you crash, and then you shoot dudes in the wreckage of the crash!!!!!!
*pant pant pant*”
…and they just
decided to do it all without any real care for rhyme or reason. One level was
only eleven minutes long, which is probably about the length of time it took
them to throw together the story for this thing. They just couldn’t wait to
show you ‘The Next Big Moment’. I just couldn’t wait for it to end.
Last week I
finished the fourth of five Metal Gear Solid games in my pile of shame. Metal
Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was a ridiculous, fantastic spectacle that somehow
managed to bring together all the crazy story threads and loose ends from the previous
games and actually compress them into a somewhat cohesive narrative. Of course,
it needed several hour-long cutscenes along the way, but the direction,
invention, and showmanship on display made the whole crazy ride a marvel to
behold.
Whether it was
being dropped into a raging Middle Eastern street war, or sneaking through the
South American jungle whilst aiding local guerrilla fighters, the game was a
blast to play. Then it would switch things up and, like something out of an old
war movie, you were shadowing resistance members through the foggy streets of Eastern
Europe. Eventually you end up returning to Shadow Moses, the location of the first
Metal Gear Solid game for some nostalgic fun before the big finale. It was a
fantastic end to the saga, and I thoroughly enjoyed it all.
But, as usual,
the most important thing to report is this; the title that was bestowed upon
me at the end of the game, the one which would denote my particular playstyle.
For MGS it was:
Hyena
For MGS2: Sons
of Liberty it was: Elephant
For MGS3: Snake
Eater it was: Panther
For MGS4: Guns
of the Patriots it was…
Inchworm?!?!
Bloody hell.
It seems I was
awarded that because I crawled on the ground for more than an hour. Well, that’s
not so bad. In this Metal Gear you also receive additional titles. The ones I
received and their meanings were:
Tarantula:
Get fewer than 75 alerts, over 250 kills, and fewer than 25 continues.
Pig: Use
more than 50 recovery items.
Hyena: Pick
up 400 dropped weapons.
So it seems
that I was pretty sneaky, murdered a lot, collected a ton of booty, and ate
lots of pot noodles. Cool, I guess.
The other game
I finished this week was Dead Island. I’ve always loved zombie movies and
zombie games, but even I’ve been getting tired of their overexposure lately. This game
however was something a little different. Instead of your typical gloomy zombie
setting this one was set in a tropical resort paradise, and all the zombies
came hurtling at you in broad daylight, scantily clad with half-drunk pina
coladas still clutched in their rotting hands. Which was a nice change.
The game
suffered its fair share of terrible graphical glitches, and the most useless
mini map destination plotting I’ve ever seen in a game, but it was actually
quite a good laugh, and it was pretty satisfactory to hack up those stupid zombies. The game was made up of the sort of fetch quests you’d expect to
find in a zombie outbreak: forage parts to get the radio antenna working,
salvage fuel for some vehicles, help out some idiots on the radio who need you
to come and get them in your vehicles, etc.
It’s hard getting back into a game that you last played eighteen
months ago. It’s a bit like stumbling home drunk from the pub. You emerge from
the comforting, known safety of the pub into the strange and unfamiliar darkness of
the streets. It takes a while to acclimatise, to remember how you function,
what makes you do what, and how to utilise any abilities you might have,
special or otherwise. You rely a little on auto pilot, and hope that eventually
you’ll remember the correct path to get you to your goal without falling over
or dying too many times. I’ve encountered this feeling of disorientation more
than a few times over the course of this journey of mine. But never has it been
as hard as trying to get back into Portal 2.
It’s especially hard to jump back into a puzzle game once it’s
been abandoned. You have to put yourself in the mindset of the puzzle
designers, to try to remember the tricks, quirks, nuances, and logic that
define the puzzles and their solutions. It really was quite difficult to begin
with. I felt like a drunkard swaying at the front door, trying to figure out
how to make the keys work in combination with the lock.
Portal’s brain-teasing nature means there’s no ‘Follow’
arrow or obvious pointers, no hand-holding along the way. Jumping in cold made
me feel quite stupid at first. I’d clearly forgotten the functions of half of
the objects and obstacles in the game. I will admit that I had to shamefacedly
turn to an Internet walkthrough to work out what I was doing wrong. Like that drunk,
I had to ring the doorbell, wake the missus and admit that not only did I not
know how to use my keys, but that my attempts to get in had woken up the neighbours
as well.
And as it turned out I’d completely forgotten something very
important, and had totally misread the situation I was in. If I hadn't gotten
that information from the walkthrough I would most likely still be there now,
tearing my hair out in frustration, jabbing the wrong key at the lock of the
wrong house. But the walkthrough had refreshed my memory like a sobering slap
to the face. Eventually I got myself back into the groove, and completed Game Number 30 in a couple of sittings.
There’s only one thing worse than reacquainting yourself
with a complex game after a long absence; starting a game that you've heard
nothing but bad things about. Homefront was generally panned upon release, and I
can see why. The warning signs are there before you've even started playing.
The
game is set fifteen years in the future after North Korea has somehow invaded
and occupied America. As you start a new game a montage of news reels and newspaper
cuttings explain the circumstances that led to this unlikely scenario. Delivered
in grave, dramatic style, and utilising an ominous soundtrack, the developer’s
attempts to draw you in to this potentially shocking world are totally undermined
when, 30 seconds into the opening cinematic, there is the sudden appearance of
a big “Press 'A' to Skip” in the middle of the screen. Wow, is the setup to
your game that boring and redundant that you’re actually encouraging me to skip
past it? Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look for yourself:
But whatever you may think of the intro you’ll soon be wishing
that “Press 'A' to Skip” popped up a whole lot more often, as there are a fair
few problems to be found once the game actually begins. The first thing you’ll
notice is that this is not a particularly good looking game. There’s lots of
distortion, heatwaves, and blurriness from concussive rounds that attempt to
mask the bad graphics, but you can see that a lot more polish was
required. The levels are uninspired and start to feel too similar after a
while. You move through trashed streets, into trashed houses, and on to trashed
supermarkets, and it’s all rather boring. There’s not enough variety, and barely
any destructibility to the environments. Bullets won’t even go through a flimsy
wooden fence.
There are continued attempts to instil anger and hatred
towards the AI enemies, as you encounter mass graves, civilians being tortured
and murdered in the street, and parents shot in front of their wailing
toddlers. But the only people I really wanted to put a bullet in were the AI
freedom fighters I was lumped in with as they were constantly getting in the
way, chatting shit, and generally being annoying. If you happen to stand in
your teammate’s scripted position they won’t go to a secondary spot, they’ll
just move into their assigned spot that you’re in, sliding you out of the way against
your will, and often putting you in the line of fire.
What makes it worse is that you’re treated like an idiot who
needs babysitting at all times, despite the fact that you’re almost constantly
moving ahead of the guy with “Follow’ above his head because he’s just too damn
slow. Homefront makes you wait for everyone to do everything for you. You can’t
open doors by yourself; you have to wait for someone else to do it, and then they must go
through first. In fact they have to do everything
before you are allowed to; climb ladders, enter trapdoors, use turnstiles,
crawl under stuff, move barricades (old fridges, always old fridges). You’re
not allowed to use your initiative, even though the “Follow” guy is always
slowing you down. You may be standing by a ladder you know you have to climb,
but the button prompt won’t appear until the other slowcoaches have caught up
and finally climbed the damn thing first. “Press A to Skip”, indeed.
Your fellow resistance fighters are a bunch of raggedy
people living off the grid in rundown shacks, and surviving on nothing but cabbages secretly grown in their back yards. Yet they somehow possess a fully operational remote-controlled
tank armed with infinite rockets, although it does suffer from a sometimes useless target lock. Instead of
selecting the massive enemy Hum-Vee you’re aiming at, it will select the lone
enemy soldier standing next to it. What’s even more hilarious is that the
resulting rocket explosion is so huge that it utterly obliterates the soldier,
but leaves the Hum-Vee totally unscathed.
What would a first person shooter these days be without the obligatory
stealth/sniper level? In this one you run stupidly around in broad daylight,
standing tall in plain view of what I can only assume were blind enemies,
without any use of shadows or any interesting methods of subterfuge. It’s
horrible.
And then something really weird happened. It started to get
fun. You jump in a helicopter gunship, hijack a bunch of fuel tankers, and then
defend and deliver the tankers to a US army base in San Francisco. After successfully
supplying the fuel you then join forces with the army and launch a full-blown
assault on the Golden Gate Bridge. I was starting to enjoy myself!
And then, as quickly as it had turned interesting, it ended,
like a kid hurriedly finishing a piece of homework so he can go outside and play
football. “And then they killed all the baddies and crossed the bridge the end.”
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