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.
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.
So, yeah.
37 down, 13 to
go.
