Another one down

Good news, I've finished another game and made progress on a couple of others! So this may be a bit of a long post. Let's get going.

Rage

So I finished Rage last night. I won a copy of Rage in one of those 25 words or less competitions. I played it for a few hours, got up to the second hub, thought “this isn’t too bad”, and then as usual I got distracted and played something else, leaving Rage to languish unfinished.

Going back to it I remembered kind of liking it, despite its flaws in characterisation and design. I thought the weapons were fun, the enemies weren’t bad, and the fights were a laugh. The graphics on 360 looked really good, and overall I enjoyed it as a fun distraction.

Would I have enjoyed it as much if I’d paid $100 for it? Not at all. I’m sure I would have felt pretty aggrieved that such a short experience would have cost so much, and any fun I’d had playing it would have been replaced by a quietly bubbling anger at having been left feeling short changed.

Oh, and let's talk about the end (minor spoilers ahead, minor because nothing really happens). You complete the final mission against some guys who were supposed to be The Big Bad, but were entirely absent until the last two missions. You infiltrate their stronghold, plug in a few machines and hold off a few baddies that are easy to kill. What makes them so easy to kill is that before the mission you're given a massive fuck off gun that makes you invincible. You destroy these easy guys, turn on a computer and that's it! No big boss fight, no dialogue, no challenge, no conflict to speak of. The camera pans up to show a satellite that you've turned on, and then you’re shown some arks rising up through the rubble, the camera zooms in through the open door of one.... and that's it, roll credits.

Like so much of this game it feels like they had intended to do much more, but got a bit bored and said sod it, let's go to the pub.

FIFA 12

So after adding Rage to the Pile of Pride I loaded up FIFA 12 to try to download the Live Season feature that lets you play the fixtures of your favourite teams and leagues as they happen in real life. Unfortunately there were server errors and I couldn't do it. Plus I've done some more investigating and read that you can't play past fixtures further back than 3 weeks, which is a pain as the season started five weeks ago! So I'll have to look into that a bit more.

Battlefield 3

I've gotten about halfway through this one. I'd heard that the single player campaign wasn't all that, and it's pretty standard stuff so far. I've gotten up to the tank level in this one, which was actually pretty good fun and a bit of a change of pace. I'm not invested in the story at all, its structure is far too similar to Call of Duty: Black Ops, and I'm struggling to care. Plus it's really unnerving to see Aaron Pierce from '24' so completely realised in video game form. It just makes me yearn for a decent Jack Bauer game. Oh well, hopefully I'll get through this one in the next couple of days so that I can concentrate on something else other than shooters!

Metal Gear Solid

It's hard to wind your eyeballs back 14 years and look at this game without wincing a little. After playing for a while your eyes adjust and you don't notice it as much. But when I go straight from playing a modern game to this it makes my eyeballs hurt as much as it does to look at that blonde girl off 'The Newsroom' whose eyes are too close together.

I've completed this game about five times over the years, but it's been a while. I'm up to the famous Psycho Mantis fight, which is never really the same after that first impressive time. I'm enjoying this trip down memory lane, although it's really just preperation. The controls aren't as polished as the later games, and at the moment I'm just trying to get through this one so that I can play the HD versions. That's something I'm really looking forward to!

So that's where I'm up to so far. I'll let you know how I'm going in the next few days, or as soon as a game gets clocked!