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.”
Massive spoilers below. I've never really given spoiler warnings before, and perhaps I should have. Sorry about that. ---------------------------------------------------------- Gears of War 3 is a game that seems like it was made for 12
year old boys. It’s loud, it’s dumb, and it’s fun. You control a bunch of
grizzled soldiers on a mission to find the hero’s dad and stop a plague of alien
something or others. On the way you’ll use a bunch of different cool weapons to
blow up aliens in various gruesome ways.
You play as Marcus Fenix, a fat man in a doo-rag who’s
clearly modelled after the legendary Bolo from The Amazing Race season 6:
As you and your motley crew race across the planet to get
to Phil at the next Pit Stop rescue Marcus’s dad, you constantly wonder
what planet you’re even supposed to be on. It’s impossible to work out if you’re
on an Earth of the future, or a planet populated by space-faring earthlings, or
just some random alien planet of humans who just happen to have a city called
Hanover. It’s very confusing. I played the first two games and I couldn’t even
work it out.
The game designers litter this half-destroyed world with enough
earth-like familiarity to keep you guessing, but not really caring. At one
point you raid a supermarket looking for supplies. This is despite the fact
that down the street 100 yards earlier you were denied entry to a dilapidated
human survivor encampment, an encampment which one would logically assume would
have raided said supermarket for beans and bullets a hell of a long time ago. But
apparently not, as no sooner had I entered the market than I stumbled upon a
massive cache of weapons, big enough to need a massive mechanical powerloader
and a helicopter to move. And lo and behold, the stupid survivors hadn’t even
found the powerloader either, even though it was just sitting there in the corner
and worked without a hitch as soon as I jumped in.
Such laziness in the plotting is customary in a lot of
action games of this ilk. Similarly the dialogue was so terrible that I groaned
audibly numerous times. While blasting aliens in the supermarket one of my AI teammates
would fire off such hilarious one-liners as, “Clean up on aisle 5!” After
hijacking a blimp that then subsequently crashed they'd quip
about, “That’s the last time I fly with a budget airline!” After crashing a
truck through a barricade, one of my comedian compatriots stated, “I just lost
my good driver discount!” Like I said, awful.
How’s this for shitty plotting. You spend all of Act Three
of the five act game searching for fuel for a submarine. Eventually you find
the fuel, so you head to the docks. What’s the first thing the bloke who knows
how to drive the submarine says? “We need to find some fuel.” I thought we just
spent the last hour or so getting the fuel? So off we trot to get more fuel, without anyone asking what happened to all the fuel we'd previously scavenged.
But despite all this the game remains fun, only it’s dumb
fun. For 12 year olds, remember. One of its biggest problems is that it’s so
easy. It’s essentially a shooting gallery with no need for skill or tactics. The
series’ famed cover mechanic can be almost completely ignored, and you’ll
hardly ever die. You’ll find that the main reason you need to move about is
because your teammates keep blocking your line of fire. But you won’t have to
worry about accidentally killing them because they also needlessly commit
suicide.
Halfway through the game the beardy moody one, Dom, decides
to kill himself by driving a truck into a fuel tank in order to kill a horde of
enemies that have your team surrounded. Even though at about ten different
points up until then simply shooting such fuel tanks was a perfectly feasible
option to destroy large groups of enemies. Your best friend sacrifices himself
merely for drama’s sake, leaving you with all the ones that make the annoying
jokes.
So, as your enemies get fried in slow motion to the haunting
piano notes of that Mad World song from Donnie Darko, Bolo looks on, crushed. “Dom,” he moans.
