Little Crysis Auto

I’ve been a busy boy over the last week or so, and I’ve made some real headway into a couple of games, whilst also finishing off three others.

The first thing I finished was Little Big Planet 2, a cutesy platform game sequel that seemed much easier than the equally cutesy first game had been. The levels were shorter and didn’t contain as many tricky bits that forced you to watch your poor little Sackboy burst into flames again and again, and as a result I powered through this in a couple of days.

While it was essentially more of the same there were plenty of entertaining sections, in particular one level near the end that features you as the General of an army of Sackboy robots, leading the fight through a Little Big Planet interpretation of The Future War from The Terminator. While that may sound dark and moody, it was all done with the usual Little Big Planet charm and whimsy that makes it such a unique franchise. It was a nice change to play something a bit more light-hearted for once, especially considering that one of the other games I finished last week was Crysis 2.

My God, how many shooters are there in my pile of shame? So far I’ve already completed seven first person shooters, and seven more third person shooters or games that have shooting elements. That’s two thirds of the games I’ve completed so far being about putting a bullet or a laser beam into someone or something. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy them, I obviously do, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought them in the first place, I just didn’t realise how much my game library could benefit from a bit of diversification.

I’d enjoyed the freedom that the first Crysis had offered the player. As a super-soldier in a super-suit you take on a bunch of invading aliens, as well as some human counterparts, on a lush tropical island, utilising stealth and firepower in whatever ratio you deem fit. The ability to complete objectives in the manner of your choosing was a welcome variation to the bog-standard “Follow” above some nameless NPC’s head that each Call of Duty and Battlefield game suffer from. This freedom of choice was once again well implemented in Crysis 2, even if the move from the island setting of the first game to this iteration’s New York reduced the scale of the playing area somewhat. The ability to turn invisible and act like a human version of The Predator, targeting and hunting your prey, and then silently dispatching them, provided hours of fun. In one level the music was almost identical to the Predator soundtrack, and applying your cloak produces a sound uncannily similar to the Predator’s famous clicking purr. I enjoyed these little homages, especially considering I was no great fan of the last game to feature Predators.

After completing Crysis 2 and rescuing the city of New York from the alien menace (although the city was left in a pretty bad state), I ventured into another video game version of New York, this time in the form of Grand Theft Auto IV’s Liberty City in “Episodes from Liberty City: The Lost and Damned”.

Going back and spending time in Liberty City was strange. I’d thoroughly enjoyed my time there a few years back, and what I experienced when jumping into The Lost and Damned showed me just how much Rockstar’s games have evolved since then. The movement and combat felt unbelievably sluggish, like my character was running through treacle in a feverish nightmare. The smooth, fluid movement and gunplay of Rockstar’s recent best efforts, Red Dead Redemption and Max Payne 3, are leaps and bounds ahead of the mechanics on display here. I really felt like I was taking a step back a generation. But after this initial struggle I soldiered on, got comfortable with the controls once more, and got myself back into the groove. The city came to life, and I started to enjoy myself in this crazy town once more.

The benefit of this type of additional content is that the developers can focus on telling a concentrated story without the distractions inherent within the usual Grand Theft Auto framework. There are a couple of mini games and side missions, but the main goal is to tell this story in as economical a manner as possible.

And while the storyline is more streamlined, without the plethora of side missions and the constant phone calls from your reprobate family and friends that blighted Niko’s experiences in Liberty City, I couldn’t help wonder how a character whose moral compass is so diametrically opposed to that of the other members of The Lost Motorcycle Club, ever ended being a member there in the first place. This guy starts off seeming to be more interested in appreciating a nice cup of tea and a good sit down. He’s not all about chasing hookers, scoring blow, and shooting people in the balls like the rest of the guys he hangs out with. 

I started to wish that he’d show a little bit of a darker side so that his association with his crew was a tad more believable. Luckily enough by the end of the game he’d stormed a prison with his motorcycle club brothers and murdered at least 87 innocent, hard-working prison officers, just so that he could murder some bastard who’d crossed him. I guess the idea of having another inmate shank this double-crosser never entered his mind.

But nevermind all that, this is GTA, it’s all about riding motorcycles over pedestrians whilst on your way to pick up drug mules from the airport, going on hectic road rage rampages whilst listening to Wet Wet Wet’s ‘Wishing I Was Lucky’, and accepting missions from naked politicians who want you to blow up a helicopter with a bazooka.

I loved every minute of it.

24 down, 26 to go.

Season's Greetings!

Achievements and trophies are like the doors of a Christmas advent calendar. You open them up as you progress towards your ultimate goal, the end of the game, that double door on the 24^th with the big chocolate behind it.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is a visual journey through the trophies and achievements for the games that I’ve completed thus far. These are what have been behind the double doors in my own year-long advent calendar:

1: Bulletstorm

2: Rage

3: Battlefield 3

4: Metal Gear Solid

As Metal Gear Solid has no trophy support here's a reminder of my terrible rating.

5: Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

6: Little Big Planet

7: Aliens Vs Predator

8: LA Noire

9: Driver: San Francisco

10: Dead Space 2

11: FIFA 12

As I didn't 'finish' the game, just played a season, there was of course no trophy stating that the game had been completed. So here's a picture of the virtual me that I created to use in the game. 

12: Mass Effect 3

13:Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty

14: God of War

15: Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

16: SOCOM 4

17: Medal of Honor

Unfortunately I've been a bit too busy enjoying Christmas to get on with the task at hand, so nothing's been completed lately. Hopefully I'll get back on track once the silly season is over.

Happy New Year!

Long weekend, short post

This weekend was a 'Long Weekend' in Australia. I’m not sure what the official reason behind it was, maybe ‘Because we haven’t had one since June’.

You’d think that with three days off I’d have gotten a whole heap of gaming done. That’s what I’d originally intended. I was going to make a massive dent in Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and have a good old go at Borderlands.

Instead I just made a couple of massive curries and watched loads of episodes of Angel, Mad Men, and Hardcore Pawn. So not too much to report today.

I did, however, manage to finish…

Battlefield 3

What did I like about Battlefield 3?

Was it the intentionally glitchy menu screens that flickered and stuttered as you scrolled through each option? Was it the intentionally glitchy music, which crackled and sputtered in a monotonous groan over every loading screen?

Was it the glitchy gameplay, unintentional or otherwise, that caused me to restart entire missions several times because the other characters in my squad would frequently get stuck in a bush, or each other, and not know how to advance?

Maybe it was the story, which jumped around all over the place, fleetingly introducing characters and various protagonists before switching it up so many times it got to the point where I didn’t know who was who, or very much care?

Actually, it was probably the final level that featured no real gameplay and was merely a drawn out series of quicktime events asking me to press corresponding buttons as they appeared onscreen in order to stop some baddie from doing something or other, removing all sense of thrill, challenge, or accomplishment.

Yeah, those were the things I liked about Battlefield 3.

Little Big Planet

After so much manly shooting and shouting in the last few games I’ve knocked off the list I decided that a real change of pace would be to try to guide Sackboy through the last levels of this cutesy platformer. I knew I was only a few levels off the end of this one, but I couldn’t remember what it was that had caused me to stop playing this one. Probably something as simple as a new bargain purchase arriving in my letterbox.

So I fired this up and finished a few more levels, got to what seems like the last or penultimate level, but being half-drunk at midnight I lacked the required skills to competently perform precision platforming, so I left this one to be finished off in the next couple of days.

FIFA 12 and my virtual Fulham FC

I forgot to play this! I’ll try to get a game in tonight, and hopefully do better than the real Fulham who unfortunately lost to Man City on Saturday.

Bollocks.

“C’mon, let’s enjoy life!” - Legendary hardman and notorious killer Solid Snake.

In 1998/99 I was living in Nottingham, England. My girlfriend at the time had moved up there to go to Uni, and I’d gone along for the ride. I spent a lot of my time playing PlayStation, and in particular Metal Gear Solid. I also spent a lot of time going to this dodgy club called The Lenton, and buying bags of dodgy skunk off some dodgy Rastafarians.

Actually, that’s not fair. The Rastas were cool guys, and their weed was really good. So good in fact that it must have blinded me to the fact that the end of Metal Gear Solid is a ridiculously sloppy love fest that bears no resemblance to the hardcore action game that precedes it. After defeating the last of the baddies, Snake and his love interest Meryl are directed to a snowmobile and prepare to drive off into the sunset past a couple of moose.

As they walk to the vehicle there’s an uplifting voiceover about choosing life, living life, and, once again, choosing life. Meryl then finds a sweaty old bandana on the snowmobile. “Let’s keep it as a souvenir!” Snake cries chirpily, as if this stinky old headband will somehow remind them of this experience. Remind them in a good way, of course. Nothing says terrorist nuclear threat, death, murder, betrayal, loss, and fratricide better than taking home some random’s second-hand headwear.

Snake then utters the line that's the title of this post, and off they drive, past the moose (or as Snake points out, the Caribou) and the game ends. Fuck me, I must have been really stoned to have witnessed that and not remembered!

At the end of the credits you’re given a rundown of your performance and a rating in the form of an animal. Here, for your amusement, is my dismal performance rating:

                           

Look at that. Shameful. It tells the story of an impatient playthrough. I looked up the animal rankings, and there are twelve for each difficulty level. 'Hyena' is ranked tenth out of the twelve for ‘Normal’ difficulty. Oh dear, how embarrassing.

I’ll try not to rush when I play MGS 2: Sons of Liberty. Hopefully as I play through each of the Metal Gear games I’ll get better. I actually realised last night that 10% of my Pile of Shame are Metal Gear Games! Not sure if that means anything, I just noticed it and thought it was interesting.

I actually didn’t mean to finish Metal Gear last night. I’d intended to complete Battlefield 3, but I played for about twenty minutes and then this happened:

Make of that what you will. It was an interesting glitch. They wouldn’t advance, there were no enemies to fight, and if I ventured too far I was told to get back to the battle. I tried shooting these guys, stabbing them, and chucking grenades at them, but nothing got them to move. I reloaded the game from the previous checkpoint in the hope that the issue would resolve itself, and there was improvement. This time only three of them decided to occupy the same point in space and time:

Look at these idiots.

I guess I’ll load it up from the beginning of that mission next time to see if that helps, but it was so infuriating that I didn’t want to continue with it, so that’s why I loaded up Metal Gear instead.

So now that’s finished I need to decide what to play next! I’m a bit over shooting stuff. I think I need a new setting. One of the things that makes my pile grow is that I start a game, and then the next one is released before I even get a chance to finish it. By then it feels like I’m really far behind the curve, so it’s hard to get the motivation to finish what I already know is an ‘out-dated’ game. So for that reason, seeing as the next iteration of this franchise is coming out in November, I think I may choose…

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

Am I ready for another adventure with Ezio? Fuck, I don’t know.  I thought the first Assassin’s Creed was great but flawed. The second was fantastic; it was the only game I got 1000 achievement points on. I played all the way through the third one, Brotherhood, but felt that by then it was getting pretty stale.

Then we went on a trip to Italy and every place that we visited I kept looking at the architecture and thinking “Assassin’s Creed!!” It really got my juices going for another bout of rooftop clambering and sneaky shanking shenanigans.

Then I fired this one up when I got back from my trip and it was the same old shit. I completed the prologue bit and got to Constantinople, the main setting of the game, looked around a bit and thought “You know what; I can’t be bothered with renovating more banks, tailor shops, and stables.” It seems that with each instalment there’s less sneaking and assassinating. Instead there’s just a ton of loud weapons and multiple minions to do your bidding while you Sim City the place for the ungrateful locals.

I think I’ll just get this one done in a no nonsense fashion by doing as few side missions as possible.

Monday Update: Slowly but surely

There was a kid in my secondary school who the teachers labelled as “eccentric”. He kept to himself and talked to no-one. He could often be seen muttering in a corner, seemingly having an in-depth discussion or philosophical argument with himself. If you approached him, or happened to come around a corner and startle him, he would run away shrieking madly. Looking back it’s obvious that he had some level of autism and should never have been in an environment that didn’t specifically cater to his needs, or protect him from the callous attitudes of ‘normal’ teenage boys. He was totally unequipped to handle that level of social interaction.

He was also insanely intelligent. He possessed a photographic memory and the ability to decipher complex problems with ease. On one occasion he held our class’s rapt attention as we quizzed him on the periodic table and he answered flawlessly from memory. People would shout random numbers and he would correctly name the element associated with that number. He did this while absentmindedly looking out of the window, eyes occasionally flickering upwards under his eyelids as he processed information, and answering in a high, flutelike voice reminiscent of the Maharajah in ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’. His computer-like brain had taken this massive jumble of words, pictures, and figures, and processed them into a manageable, understandable form.

It was as I stared at the convoluted menu screen of FIFA 12 that I wished I had this kid sitting on the sofa next to me. If anyone could translate this clutter it was him. The menu screen is an abominable mess of options, selections, numbers and acronyms. There’s no instruction booklet (for environmental reasons, apparently), there’s a weak tutorial that only really highlights this year’s new features, and an online manual which is just the aforementioned tutorial put into words. After stumbling around for what felt like ages (it was probably only about 4 or 5 minutes) I finally worked out how to start up a Premier League season, but it was clear that accessibility was not a priority for the makers of this game.

Want to know how to take a free kick, corner, or penalty? Tough. Want to know which buttons are pass, shoot and tackle? That’s up to you to go trawling through options, menus, and setup screens to find out. Eventually I found “Button Help” in the pause menu, but by then I’d already figured it out the basics by booting the ball into the crowd a lot and performing several hilarious fouls. I don’t expect to have my hand held every step of the way, but don’t punish me because I don’t buy this game every year. I just want to have fun.

And eventually, thankfully, I did! My virtual Fulham FC were soon under my admittedly poor control, and I was actually enjoying it a lot. I played the first five games of my season to get up to the same point as the real life season, and the results weren’t too bad at all. Here’re the stats so far:

My Virtual Fulham FC:

POS    P    W    D    L    GD    PTS

6         5      2     3    0      5         9

The real life Fulham FC:

POS    P    W    D    L    GD    PTS

6         5      3     0    2      5         9

So interestingly we’re both in the same position, with the same amount of points and the same goal difference. Let’s see how that changes over the course of the season. Maybe I’ll get better after doing some research on the controls. Or maybe muttering in the corner for a while will do the trick.

Battlefield 3

I played another couple of levels of this. I can’t say I’m feeling this one.  I really enjoyed Battlefield: Bad Company 2, it had that cheesy action movie vibe and didn’t take itself too seriously. The environmental destruction capabilities of the Frostbite engine were great and made the game fun and frantic. This game is trying far too hard to be serious, but just ends up being unmemorable. It’s not particularly thrilling or fun. The in-game destruction in the Frostbite 2 engine just doesn’t seem as good, there doesn’t seem to be as much of the environment that’s destructible. It’s a real step backwards, in my opinion. Oh well, I’ll plough through and get it finished then move onto something more fun, hopefully.

Borderlands

Always one to buck the trend I decided to use the weekend that everyone would be embarking upon their Borderlands 2 adventure to start playing the first one! I roped in my mate Pete for this one as it’s predominantly a co-op game and everyone says that it’s just not as good in single player. We completed a few of the helpful and informative tutorial missions (take note FIFA!) to get a feel for it, and enjoyed it a lot. I can see that getting all the way through will take a fair while, it looks massive. As this is a co-op game it’ll also be dependent upon friends’ availability, so I don’t expect to finish this one in a couple of weeks, more like months.

Metal Gear Solid

Remember when you die in this game there’s the famous music cue that plays as the Game Over screen comes up, Mei Ling cries out over the radio “Snake? Snaaaaaaaaaake!!!!” which is then followed by the sound of a gunshot as you hit ‘Try Again’? I heard that so many times on Saturday night.

I’m trying to rush through this one so I can get to MGS2, and that’s just stupid, you can’t rush stealth games. Well, not unless you’re an absolute master. Or have a big bag of weed. I used to be able to play these games so much better when stoned. The patience and caution were there, the anal retentive qualities needed to succeed were heightened and honed. Well, those were the good old days. I’ll just have to try harder not to be so impatient.

I must admit I had a small panic attack on Saturday night when I looked at my pile of shame and thought “My God, there’s more games in that pile than there are options in a FIFA menu, how will I ever get through them all?!” I don’t know guys, but I’m trying. Once I get past Battlefield 3 I think all will be good. I’m a bit shootered out, so a change of pace will reinvigorate me I reckon. I’m just not sure what I should move onto next. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Another one down

Good news, I've finished another game and made progress on a couple of others! So this may be a bit of a long post. Let's get going.

Rage

So I finished Rage last night. I won a copy of Rage in one of those 25 words or less competitions. I played it for a few hours, got up to the second hub, thought “this isn’t too bad”, and then as usual I got distracted and played something else, leaving Rage to languish unfinished.

Going back to it I remembered kind of liking it, despite its flaws in characterisation and design. I thought the weapons were fun, the enemies weren’t bad, and the fights were a laugh. The graphics on 360 looked really good, and overall I enjoyed it as a fun distraction.

Would I have enjoyed it as much if I’d paid $100 for it? Not at all. I’m sure I would have felt pretty aggrieved that such a short experience would have cost so much, and any fun I’d had playing it would have been replaced by a quietly bubbling anger at having been left feeling short changed.

Oh, and let's talk about the end (minor spoilers ahead, minor because nothing really happens). You complete the final mission against some guys who were supposed to be The Big Bad, but were entirely absent until the last two missions. You infiltrate their stronghold, plug in a few machines and hold off a few baddies that are easy to kill. What makes them so easy to kill is that before the mission you're given a massive fuck off gun that makes you invincible. You destroy these easy guys, turn on a computer and that's it! No big boss fight, no dialogue, no challenge, no conflict to speak of. The camera pans up to show a satellite that you've turned on, and then you’re shown some arks rising up through the rubble, the camera zooms in through the open door of one.... and that's it, roll credits.

Like so much of this game it feels like they had intended to do much more, but got a bit bored and said sod it, let's go to the pub.

FIFA 12

So after adding Rage to the Pile of Pride I loaded up FIFA 12 to try to download the Live Season feature that lets you play the fixtures of your favourite teams and leagues as they happen in real life. Unfortunately there were server errors and I couldn't do it. Plus I've done some more investigating and read that you can't play past fixtures further back than 3 weeks, which is a pain as the season started five weeks ago! So I'll have to look into that a bit more.

Battlefield 3

I've gotten about halfway through this one. I'd heard that the single player campaign wasn't all that, and it's pretty standard stuff so far. I've gotten up to the tank level in this one, which was actually pretty good fun and a bit of a change of pace. I'm not invested in the story at all, its structure is far too similar to Call of Duty: Black Ops, and I'm struggling to care. Plus it's really unnerving to see Aaron Pierce from '24' so completely realised in video game form. It just makes me yearn for a decent Jack Bauer game. Oh well, hopefully I'll get through this one in the next couple of days so that I can concentrate on something else other than shooters!

Metal Gear Solid

It's hard to wind your eyeballs back 14 years and look at this game without wincing a little. After playing for a while your eyes adjust and you don't notice it as much. But when I go straight from playing a modern game to this it makes my eyeballs hurt as much as it does to look at that blonde girl off 'The Newsroom' whose eyes are too close together.

I've completed this game about five times over the years, but it's been a while. I'm up to the famous Psycho Mantis fight, which is never really the same after that first impressive time. I'm enjoying this trip down memory lane, although it's really just preperation. The controls aren't as polished as the later games, and at the moment I'm just trying to get through this one so that I can play the HD versions. That's something I'm really looking forward to!

So that's where I'm up to so far. I'll let you know how I'm going in the next few days, or as soon as a game gets clocked!