Come On You Whites!!

I always knew that playing through this many games would be a tough slog. There were always going to be stretches where I didn’t get to play very much. I thought that setting myself the task of playing one game of FIFA a week to coincide with the real life Premier League season would enable me to slowly eat away at that title while concentrating on others at the same time. I fully anticipated that I’d be making excuses and apologies for not having played that much or completed any games for a while. I’d hoped it would be further down the track, not a mere two months into my journey.

So I’m sorry I haven’t been updating the weekly results of my virtual Fulham FC. The reason is that I’ve been enjoying playing FIFA so much that I couldn’t contain myself to one game a week! The more I played, the more I enjoyed it, and the more I learnt. I steered the murky waters of its myriad menus. I plumbed the depths and managed to find controls that had previously remained hidden. I enjoyed trying out skill moves and shooting with finesse. I mastered the lobbed through-ball. I raced ahead and completed my season. Here’s how the table ended up.

9th. A top ten finish. Not that bad really! The season had it’s lowlights, losing 2-1 to Wolves at Craven Cottage was a notably shameful occurrence, but it had it’s highlights too including winning 3-0 at Old Trafford, and putting five past Liverpool at Anfield. I ended up joint top in terms of clean sheets, and if you look closely at the picture of the table you can see that two of my players were in the top four scorers for the season with 21 goals. I found that I played much better once I’d turned off the repetitive and annoying commentators. I also performed better with the best part of a bottle of red inside me. All in all I thought I did The Mighty Fulham proud for a FIFA noob.

"Don't relax just yet, Marines!"

I swear I heard that phrase about a hundred times while playing through Aliens Vs Predator. It’s pretty much the only line of dialogue that they bothered to record for the humans, so when you’re stalking the marines as the Predator or the Alien that’s all you’ll hear them say. There are one or two lines that are uttered when you are pouncing onto your prey; ‘There it… !’, ‘Urk!’, and ‘Gar!’ do feature as you eviscerate and decapitate your enemies, but when you’re silently traversing the levels getting ready for some tasty murder nearly all you’ll hear is “Don’t relax just yet, Marines!” Again, and again.

And the frequency of it! Dickhead Number 1 would be saying it, only to have Dickhead Number 2, too excited to wait three seconds for his time to blurt out the same tired line, repeat it over the top of Dickhead Number 1. It’s like when you get a bunch of people singing the different lines of “Row, Row, Row Your boat” at different times so that there’s a clashing cacophony of unbearable nonsense reverberating around your skull! Just terrible.

Couldn’t they have recorded a couple more lines? How much longer would it have taken? How much more would it have cost? Did no-one playtesting this game ever say “Hey boss, this ‘don’t relax just yet marines’ line sure is getting bloody annoying!” Maybe. Maybe not. And that’s the big problem with this game. Large problems that were easy to fix were overlooked or ignored. It’s just really lazy game making.

I wasn’t a big fan of this one. Each of the three campaigns was short and re-trod the same three locations as the previous ones, just in a different order. More repetition. It seems to be the main motif of this game.

FIFA 12 – Virtual Fulham FC

There were no Premier League games this weekend due to World Cup Qualifiers, so no FIFA was played by me as a result.

So now that AVP’s finished I guess I’ll concentrate on another repetitive game, LA Noire. Hurray. I’ll try to mix that up with a bit of Alan Wake before tackling Dead Space 2. There were never any scary bits in AVP so I’m looking forward to a couple of games that build tension and create atmosphere. I’m looking forward to being scared. I’m looking forward to not relaxing just yet, Marines.

Two more down. The horror!

Two games completed this week! They were...

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

After the initial apprehension I had for this game I ended up quite liking it! The storyline and missions were more streamlined than in previous instalments, and I enjoyed running around Constantinople a lot more than I did Rome in AC: Brotherhood. There were some elements that I felt didn’t work too well. I wasn’t that into the bomb making or the ‘Den Defence’ sections, and for brevity’s sake I ignored some of the tedious side missions. But I had fun and I think that overall I enjoyed this one more than Brotherhood.

I also finished off Little Big Planet. I only had five or six levels left to do on this one, and it was a nice change of pace from the shooters and military themed games I’ve been completing over the last month.

So with another two out of the way I’m making good progress. However, I’ve been feeling that lately I’m falling back into old habits. I’m flitting from game to game. A little bit of Assassin’s Creed here, some Little Big Planet there. I also put Dirt 3 in and had a couple of races on that. Then sometimes I’d I stare at Metal Gear Solid 2 and think, hmm, maybe I’ll do a bit of sneaking…

I need to be more organised. Create a better structure for getting through this pile of shame. I need mini deadlines to help me get through, otherwise it all seems like too great a task. I need a theme that will allow me to allocate four or five games that I can commit to finishing by the end of the month.

So, seeing as Halloween is approaching I thought that Horror Month might be exactly what I need to get focused! With that decided, I took a look at the horror games in The Pile. There’s a few too many to realistically get finished in the next four weeks. So these are the ones that I’ve decided I want to get finished by Halloween.

Alan Wake

I got this game a couple of years ago (for my birthday, of course) and played about half to two thirds of it. I was enjoying it even though it had its flaws. I wrote a piece that was published in Game Informer AU lamenting the game’s ridiculous carrot dangling and goalpost moving. I didn’t intend to abandon this game, but as per bloody usual I saw something shiny and game shaped out of the corner of my eye and promptly left this one on the shelf unfinished.

Then a terrible event occurred; ‘The Great 360 Hard Drive Disaster of 2011’. I was still using the 20 GB hard drive that had come with my 360 back in 2007, and I saw a deal on one of those ‘Deal of the day’ sites that was a 60GB hard drive and a new headset. Perfect!

I needed a new headset because of a catastrophe that predated the ‘G360HDDof2011’. The cat had jumped onto my lap while I was playing online and wearing the headset; she’d got caught in the wire that connected the controller to the headset, had a fit and jumped off in terror, ripping the wires out of their sockets, rendering them useless. The headset flew off my head and broke into three pieces against the door. What can I say, she’s a big cat.

So I purchased this deal and received my new hard drive. I went online to find out the best way to transfer the data from hard drive A to hard drive B. Stupidly ignoring the advice to use a Microsoft approved transfer cable (it was 25 bucks!) I followed the instructions for using a flash drive for the transfer.

I copied all my original data onto the flash drive, and went to install it onto drive B. The data wasn’t there. So I tried again. It still wasn’t there. I then discovered that not only had this procedure not copied the data to the flash drive, but it had removed all the data from my original hard drive as well.

Hilarious.

All of my game saves since 2007 had been destroyed in an instant, and there was no way to retrieve them. This is a massive part of the reason that so many of my Xbox 360 games sit there unfinished.

I have to start them all over again.

This is the case with Alan Wake.

What a pain in the arse.

(The headset works fine though)

Aliens vs. Predator

When I was a kid I spent almost every day, night, and weekend obsessing over Aliens, Predator, Robocop, and The Terminator. I owned all the movies, comics, magazines, collector’s cards, toys, models, games, special effects books, everything that related to these movies that I could get my hands on. My friend Louis and I just couldn’t get enough. Every Saturday we’d spend hours in Forbidden Planet and various other comic and collectables shops in London’s West End.

If I’d played this game in 1990 I would have wet my pants in joyous excitement. If I’d played this game in 2000 it would have been awesome. But unfortunately this game seems to be stuck somewhere in the early noughties. It ignores obvious advancements in the genre (and gaming in general), such as the ability to crouch, or aim down your gun’s sights, or use a flashlight, and is generally just a bit rubbish. And the fact that it’s almost the same game as Aliens vs. Predator 2 that came out for PC and Mac in 2001 is far too evident. It’s a crying shame. The thirteen year old in me tries to be positive about it, I want to love it, but unfortunately I can’t.

I’ve no idea how far I’d gotten through this one before abandoning it in disappointment. There are three campaigns, human, predator, and alien. If I had to guess I’d say I’ve done two thirds of the human portion, a third of the predator bit, and five minutes of the alien one. So I think finishing this one will be a bit of a joyless slog for me. There are some good moments in this, but too much that just feels unevolved.  

Dead Space 2

The first Dead Space was great, the haunted house in space setting was right up my alley. It featured genuine scares and tension.

I haven’t started this one yet, so I’m hoping to start it and get it done in a couple of fat sessions over a couple of days. I really want to soak up the atmosphere of this one.

And lastly we have here a horrible game, truly devoid of humanity, emotion, and joy, a game that chills me to my bones.

The last game that I want to get finished in Horror Month is…

LA Noire

Ugh. I don’t like this game. I was really, really excited for it. There aren’t enough detective games. I was looking forward to examining evidence, piecing together puzzles, and using lateral thinking to discover the truth. Unfortunately it was a game that promised a lot, but actually delivered very little. Its graphical achievements were legitimately fantastic, but it was repetitive, featured a blatantly flawed interrogation system, restricted you at almost every level, and basically played itself.

I’d had visions of having two suspects with evidence that pointed to both. I would then have to interrogate them, look at their answers in conjunction with the evidence, and determine which of them was guilty.

Unfortunately the only time this happened you actually knew that neither of them was the killer. Yet the game made you accuse and arrest one, even though you knew it to be bullshit. Your boss then had a right go at you because the guy was innocent. Wow, way to reward the player. Who wrote this shit?!

I wrote this piece for the Sydney Morning Herald’s video game blog that pretty much sums up my feelings about this game. Not sure whether I should do this in a couple of big chunks, or do one case a night over the next couple of weeks. Dragging it out might make it worse!

FIFA 12 - Virtual Fulham

My virtual Fulham had an ok couple of weeks, played twice, lost one, won one, which was better than their real life counterparts who only managed a draw out of their two games. They started their Horror Month before I did.

Here are the current standings:

Virtual Fulham FC

 POS   P   W   D   L   GD   PTS

    6      7    3     3    1     6      12

The Real Fulham FC

POS    P   W   D   L   GD   PTS

   9       7    3     1   3     4       10

So that's all for now, I've still got a lot of (scary) work ahead of me. I'm off to go and play in the dark. 

That sounds so wrong.

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.

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!