Blobs, Saints, and Angels.

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.

Detention, I say!

45 down, 5 to go, 28 days left.

Not-so-Super Mario.

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.

42 games down, 8 to go, 43 days left.

Making progress once again

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.