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!

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