Over the hump

I must have been the only person in the world that was happy to hear that GTAV had been delayed until September. I wasn't sure I would have been able to stand knowing that a brand new Grand Theft Auto game was out there in the wild, being enjoyed by millions as I plugged away at my monstrous pile of shame.

Having a self-imposed embargo on purchasing new games until all of my existing ones have been completed has been pretty hard. There have been several releases that have tested me sorely. I’d love to get my hands on Hitman: Absolution, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and X-COM. 

I know that as a massive Aliens fan, had Aliens: Colonial Marines been any good I may have faltered. But it turned out to be a gigantic turd, and while that may be good for me in my current situation, it breaks my heart to know that once again the Alien franchise has been mistreated by another bunch of useless bastards.

But, enough wallowing.

After hog-riding and shotgun-blasting my way through GTAIV’s biker themed The Lost and Damned last week, I carried on by shimmying, shaking, and skydiving my way through the fabulous club scene that is the setting for the second GTAIV episode, The Ballad of Gay Tony.

As with The Lost and Damned the tighter focus on the story, and a lot fewer fetch quests, made this a great installment  The missions were big, varied affairs that kept throwing up surprising and entertaining scenarios. Riding on top of trains as you shoot helicopters out of the sky, stealing an armoured car and destroying an entire police precinct, tons of fun was to be had here.

There was one thing it sorely needed though; either an instant replay feature, or the ability to post video of your antics would go down a treat. So many times something hilarious would happen and I’d think to myself, ‘I would love to see that again.’ Perhaps GTAV was delayed so that it could appear on the newly announced PlayStation 4, where it can take advantage of the new ‘Share’ feature that allows you to record and upload any portion of the last few minutes of gameplay? That would be nice.

And so it was with some sadness that I ended my short visit to Liberty City. I hadn't been there for a while, but it turned out that upon returning I was warmly welcomed by friends old and new. They had some interesting jobs for me to do, and far less calls pestering me to go bowling, which was a welcome change from the last time I saw them.

So that makes it 25 games completed. I’m officially halfway through my pile of shame! And pretty much halfway through the 12 months I set myself. It’s nice to be on target and making good progress, but I can’t allow myself to slack off. I must keep the pedal to the metal, blinkers on, head down, ignoring any distractions in the form of nice shiny new games that come out.

25 down, 25 to go.

Little Crysis Auto

I’ve been a busy boy over the last week or so, and I’ve made some real headway into a couple of games, whilst also finishing off three others.

The first thing I finished was Little Big Planet 2, a cutesy platform game sequel that seemed much easier than the equally cutesy first game had been. The levels were shorter and didn’t contain as many tricky bits that forced you to watch your poor little Sackboy burst into flames again and again, and as a result I powered through this in a couple of days.

While it was essentially more of the same there were plenty of entertaining sections, in particular one level near the end that features you as the General of an army of Sackboy robots, leading the fight through a Little Big Planet interpretation of The Future War from The Terminator. While that may sound dark and moody, it was all done with the usual Little Big Planet charm and whimsy that makes it such a unique franchise. It was a nice change to play something a bit more light-hearted for once, especially considering that one of the other games I finished last week was Crysis 2.

My God, how many shooters are there in my pile of shame? So far I’ve already completed seven first person shooters, and seven more third person shooters or games that have shooting elements. That’s two thirds of the games I’ve completed so far being about putting a bullet or a laser beam into someone or something. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy them, I obviously do, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought them in the first place, I just didn’t realise how much my game library could benefit from a bit of diversification.

I’d enjoyed the freedom that the first Crysis had offered the player. As a super-soldier in a super-suit you take on a bunch of invading aliens, as well as some human counterparts, on a lush tropical island, utilising stealth and firepower in whatever ratio you deem fit. The ability to complete objectives in the manner of your choosing was a welcome variation to the bog-standard “Follow” above some nameless NPC’s head that each Call of Duty and Battlefield game suffer from. This freedom of choice was once again well implemented in Crysis 2, even if the move from the island setting of the first game to this iteration’s New York reduced the scale of the playing area somewhat. The ability to turn invisible and act like a human version of The Predator, targeting and hunting your prey, and then silently dispatching them, provided hours of fun. In one level the music was almost identical to the Predator soundtrack, and applying your cloak produces a sound uncannily similar to the Predator’s famous clicking purr. I enjoyed these little homages, especially considering I was no great fan of the last game to feature Predators.

After completing Crysis 2 and rescuing the city of New York from the alien menace (although the city was left in a pretty bad state), I ventured into another video game version of New York, this time in the form of Grand Theft Auto IV’s Liberty City in “Episodes from Liberty City: The Lost and Damned”.

Going back and spending time in Liberty City was strange. I’d thoroughly enjoyed my time there a few years back, and what I experienced when jumping into The Lost and Damned showed me just how much Rockstar’s games have evolved since then. The movement and combat felt unbelievably sluggish, like my character was running through treacle in a feverish nightmare. The smooth, fluid movement and gunplay of Rockstar’s recent best efforts, Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3, are leaps and bounds ahead of the mechanics on display here. I really felt like I was taking a step back a generation. But after this initial struggle I soldiered on, got comfortable with the controls once more, and got myself back into the groove. The city came to life, and I started to enjoy myself in this crazy town once more.

The benefit of this type of additional content is that the developers can focus on telling a concentrated story without the distractions inherent within the usual Grand Theft Auto framework. There are a couple of mini games and side missions, but the main goal is to tell this story in as economical a manner as possible.

And while the storyline is more streamlined, without the plethora of side missions and the constant phone calls from your reprobate family and friends that blighted Niko’s experiences in Liberty City, I couldn’t help wonder how a character whose moral compass is so diametrically opposed to that of the other members of The Lost Motorcycle Club, ever ended being a member there in the first place. This guy starts off seeming to be more interested in appreciating a nice cup of tea and a good sit down. He’s not all about chasing hookers, scoring blow, and shooting people in the balls like the rest of the guys he hangs out with. 

I started to wish that he’d show a little bit of a darker side so that his association with his crew was a tad more believable. Luckily enough by the end of the game he’d stormed a prison with his motorcycle club brothers and murdered at least 87 innocent, hard-working prison officers, just so that he could murder some bastard who’d crossed him. I guess the idea of having another inmate shank this double-crosser never entered his mind.

But nevermind all that, this is GTA, it’s all about riding motorcycles over pedestrians whilst on your way to pick up drug mules from the airport, going on hectic road rage rampages whilst listening to Wet Wet Wet’s ‘Wishing I Was Lucky’, and accepting missions from naked politicians who want you to blow up a helicopter with a bazooka.

I loved every minute of it.

24 down, 26 to go.

Rats live on no evil star.

All gamers have gaps in their gaming histories, those classic games or consoles that they never got around to playing for one reason or another. Most of us could probably name three or four games we’ve never played that are considered to be absolute stone cold classics by the gaming community at large.

There are a few in my pile of shame that I’m happy to admit fall into that category. Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are both considered super, legendary classics. There was also God of War that I recently crossed of my list, having missed it for some reason when it first came out. But over the last week or so I have been tackling a game that I considered to be a big, round, gaping hole in my gaming history: Halo.

I never properly played Halo because I didn’t ever own an Xbox. I had a few goes of it way back when, but there weren’t too many people that I knew that owned them, so that limited my exposure. But now that they’ve released Halo: Anniversary I’ve had the chance to travel back in time and finally experience this legendary game.

In fact, the ability to time travel is one of Halo: Anniversary’s most intriguing features. The game has had a graphical overhaul to bring it into line with today’s standards, but with the simple press of the ‘Back’ button (appropriately), the game reverts to the original graphics that it featured when released in 2001. This makes for a fascinating glimpse into the past, and whenever I came across a visually interesting section I would switch back to the original graphics and play that way for a few minutes to experience it as originally intended. Of course, I always came back to the future to play using the current graphics as they were much more easy on the eye, but I appreciated the inclusion of this feature, and I think you’d get even more out of it if you’d played this back when it was first released.

Being a fan of shooters and sci-fi in general I’d been looking forward to this, and overall it was good fun in a tactics-free, blast-a-thon sort of way. Shoot, retreat, pop out again blasting, that was all you needed to know really. The graphics were colourful and fun, and I never tired of blowing up those annoying little Jawa type dudes. I did find that the sound levels were a bit off, the guns were massively loud, but the voices in the cutscenes were so low that I’d miss what was said for the first ten or fifteen seconds as I hunted around for the remote to turn it up. But it didn’t seem like there was really much that I missed, I got the gist of what was going on. Kill those things, follow the arrow on the screen. Repeat.

When a game’s been out for years you can’t go without hearing a lot about it, the talk of classic characters, favourite moments, and of course, the gripes. I’d heard a lot over the years about the dreaded level, ‘The Library’, with ‘annoying’ and ‘repetitive’ being the main complaints I’d heard. So when I finally came to play The Library I was surprised that I found it a tight, intense, and exciting level. I enjoyed the fight against the relentless enemies, even if their ranks contained one of gaming’s most annoying and overused enemy types, the big fat one that bursts into lots of annoying little ones. I couldn’t understand what everyone had been moaning about with this level. Did they not play the level just before this one, ‘Assault on the Control Room’? Fuck me, now there was a repetitive, annoying, and seemingly endless level. I hated that level so much that as I was playing it I was thinking to myself, “So this is that Library level they all bitch about, boy, they were right, this sucks!” But then it turned out it wasn’t even The Library. “How have I not heard about this particular piece of horrible level design?” I wondered as I played through Assault on the Control Room, “How bad is The Library going to be after this nightmare?”

So when I got to The Library for real I was pleasantly surprised. I played through it, got to the end of the level, watched another mumbly cut scene, and then started the next level. I ran down a hallway, through some doors, into some corridors, corridors that started to look a bit similar to, hold on, what’s through this door, isn’t this... the Control Room?

At this point the game announced that I needed to destroy three exhaust vents, or something. I dunno, I was too busy staring in disbelief at the TV as I was told that I was supposed to do this by retracing my steps back through the entirety of the aforementioned and hated level ‘Assault on the Control Room.’ Oh, goodo.

It was like some cruel trick. The level I was supposed to hate hadn’t been that bad, and now I was being forced to revisit the one that had irked me the most. Had I gotten it wrong? Had I been mishearing it all these years, like the person whose eBay listing I saw for “a Chester drawers”? Like that stupid, short, fat woman at work who did a PowerPoint presentation of upcoming events under the heading “What’s in stall?” Was I like those retards?

Possibly.

The rest of the game was then a retread of the early levels, done in reverse. How unbelievably lazy is that? It was the game design equivalent of a palindrome. They made half a game and then just flipped it for the second half. I was rather unimpressed.

Then to top it off there was the final level where you had to navigate the practically undriveable jeep thing down an obstacle course in a certain amount of time to make it to the escape pod. I appreciate a challenge, and the sense of accomplishment that comes with overcoming that challenge, but I really don’t appreciate it when game designers make something so frustratingly difficult that it’s not even fun. I’m pretty sure my neighbours didn’t appreciate the amount of loud swearing that this final level induced, either.

21 down, 29 to go.