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.
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