Last week I
finished the fourth of five Metal Gear Solid games in my pile of shame. Metal
Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was a ridiculous, fantastic spectacle that somehow
managed to bring together all the crazy story threads and loose ends from the previous
games and actually compress them into a somewhat cohesive narrative. Of course,
it needed several hour-long cutscenes along the way, but the direction,
invention, and showmanship on display made the whole crazy ride a marvel to
behold.
Whether it was
being dropped into a raging Middle Eastern street war, or sneaking through the
South American jungle whilst aiding local guerrilla fighters, the game was a
blast to play. Then it would switch things up and, like something out of an old
war movie, you were shadowing resistance members through the foggy streets of Eastern
Europe. Eventually you end up returning to Shadow Moses, the location of the first
Metal Gear Solid game for some nostalgic fun before the big finale. It was a
fantastic end to the saga, and I thoroughly enjoyed it all.
But, as usual,
the most important thing to report is this; the title that was bestowed upon
me at the end of the game, the one which would denote my particular playstyle.
For MGS it was:
Hyena
For MGS2: Sons
of Liberty it was: Elephant
For MGS3: Snake
Eater it was: Panther
For MGS4: Guns
of the Patriots it was…
Inchworm?!?!
Bloody hell.
It seems I was
awarded that because I crawled on the ground for more than an hour. Well, that’s
not so bad. In this Metal Gear you also receive additional titles. The ones I
received and their meanings were:
Tarantula:
Get fewer than 75 alerts, over 250 kills, and fewer than 25 continues.
Pig: Use
more than 50 recovery items.
Hyena: Pick
up 400 dropped weapons.
So it seems
that I was pretty sneaky, murdered a lot, collected a ton of booty, and ate
lots of pot noodles. Cool, I guess.
The other game
I finished this week was Dead Island. I’ve always loved zombie movies and
zombie games, but even I’ve been getting tired of their overexposure lately. This game
however was something a little different. Instead of your typical gloomy zombie
setting this one was set in a tropical resort paradise, and all the zombies
came hurtling at you in broad daylight, scantily clad with half-drunk pina
coladas still clutched in their rotting hands. Which was a nice change.
The game
suffered its fair share of terrible graphical glitches, and the most useless
mini map destination plotting I’ve ever seen in a game, but it was actually
quite a good laugh, and it was pretty satisfactory to hack up those stupid zombies. The game was made up of the sort of fetch quests you’d expect to
find in a zombie outbreak: forage parts to get the radio antenna working,
salvage fuel for some vehicles, help out some idiots on the radio who need you
to come and get them in your vehicles, etc.
It’s hard getting back into a game that you last played eighteen
months ago. It’s a bit like stumbling home drunk from the pub. You emerge from
the comforting, known safety of the pub into the strange and unfamiliar darkness of
the streets. It takes a while to acclimatise, to remember how you function,
what makes you do what, and how to utilise any abilities you might have,
special or otherwise. You rely a little on auto pilot, and hope that eventually
you’ll remember the correct path to get you to your goal without falling over
or dying too many times. I’ve encountered this feeling of disorientation more
than a few times over the course of this journey of mine. But never has it been
as hard as trying to get back into Portal 2.
It’s especially hard to jump back into a puzzle game once it’s
been abandoned. You have to put yourself in the mindset of the puzzle
designers, to try to remember the tricks, quirks, nuances, and logic that
define the puzzles and their solutions. It really was quite difficult to begin
with. I felt like a drunkard swaying at the front door, trying to figure out
how to make the keys work in combination with the lock.
Portal’s brain-teasing nature means there’s no ‘Follow’
arrow or obvious pointers, no hand-holding along the way. Jumping in cold made
me feel quite stupid at first. I’d clearly forgotten the functions of half of
the objects and obstacles in the game. I will admit that I had to shamefacedly
turn to an Internet walkthrough to work out what I was doing wrong. Like that drunk,
I had to ring the doorbell, wake the missus and admit that not only did I not
know how to use my keys, but that my attempts to get in had woken up the neighbours
as well.
And as it turned out I’d completely forgotten something very
important, and had totally misread the situation I was in. If I hadn't gotten
that information from the walkthrough I would most likely still be there now,
tearing my hair out in frustration, jabbing the wrong key at the lock of the
wrong house. But the walkthrough had refreshed my memory like a sobering slap
to the face. Eventually I got myself back into the groove, and completed Game Number 30 in a couple of sittings.
There’s only one thing worse than reacquainting yourself
with a complex game after a long absence; starting a game that you've heard
nothing but bad things about. Homefront was generally panned upon release, and I
can see why. The warning signs are there before you've even started playing.
The
game is set fifteen years in the future after North Korea has somehow invaded
and occupied America. As you start a new game a montage of news reels and newspaper
cuttings explain the circumstances that led to this unlikely scenario. Delivered
in grave, dramatic style, and utilising an ominous soundtrack, the developer’s
attempts to draw you in to this potentially shocking world are totally undermined
when, 30 seconds into the opening cinematic, there is the sudden appearance of
a big “Press 'A' to Skip” in the middle of the screen. Wow, is the setup to
your game that boring and redundant that you’re actually encouraging me to skip
past it? Think I'm exaggerating? Take a look for yourself:
But whatever you may think of the intro you’ll soon be wishing
that “Press 'A' to Skip” popped up a whole lot more often, as there are a fair
few problems to be found once the game actually begins. The first thing you’ll
notice is that this is not a particularly good looking game. There’s lots of
distortion, heatwaves, and blurriness from concussive rounds that attempt to
mask the bad graphics, but you can see that a lot more polish was
required. The levels are uninspired and start to feel too similar after a
while. You move through trashed streets, into trashed houses, and on to trashed
supermarkets, and it’s all rather boring. There’s not enough variety, and barely
any destructibility to the environments. Bullets won’t even go through a flimsy
wooden fence.
There are continued attempts to instil anger and hatred
towards the AI enemies, as you encounter mass graves, civilians being tortured
and murdered in the street, and parents shot in front of their wailing
toddlers. But the only people I really wanted to put a bullet in were the AI
freedom fighters I was lumped in with as they were constantly getting in the
way, chatting shit, and generally being annoying. If you happen to stand in
your teammate’s scripted position they won’t go to a secondary spot, they’ll
just move into their assigned spot that you’re in, sliding you out of the way against
your will, and often putting you in the line of fire.
What makes it worse is that you’re treated like an idiot who
needs babysitting at all times, despite the fact that you’re almost constantly
moving ahead of the guy with “Follow’ above his head because he’s just too damn
slow. Homefront makes you wait for everyone to do everything for you. You can’t
open doors by yourself; you have to wait for someone else to do it, and then they must go
through first. In fact they have to do everything
before you are allowed to; climb ladders, enter trapdoors, use turnstiles,
crawl under stuff, move barricades (old fridges, always old fridges). You’re
not allowed to use your initiative, even though the “Follow” guy is always
slowing you down. You may be standing by a ladder you know you have to climb,
but the button prompt won’t appear until the other slowcoaches have caught up
and finally climbed the damn thing first. “Press A to Skip”, indeed.
Your fellow resistance fighters are a bunch of raggedy
people living off the grid in rundown shacks, and surviving on nothing but cabbages secretly grown in their back yards. Yet they somehow possess a fully operational remote-controlled
tank armed with infinite rockets, although it does suffer from a sometimes useless target lock. Instead of
selecting the massive enemy Hum-Vee you’re aiming at, it will select the lone
enemy soldier standing next to it. What’s even more hilarious is that the
resulting rocket explosion is so huge that it utterly obliterates the soldier,
but leaves the Hum-Vee totally unscathed.
What would a first person shooter these days be without the obligatory
stealth/sniper level? In this one you run stupidly around in broad daylight,
standing tall in plain view of what I can only assume were blind enemies,
without any use of shadows or any interesting methods of subterfuge. It’s
horrible.
And then something really weird happened. It started to get
fun. You jump in a helicopter gunship, hijack a bunch of fuel tankers, and then
defend and deliver the tankers to a US army base in San Francisco. After successfully
supplying the fuel you then join forces with the army and launch a full-blown
assault on the Golden Gate Bridge. I was starting to enjoy myself!
And then, as quickly as it had turned interesting, it ended,
like a kid hurriedly finishing a piece of homework so he can go outside and play
football. “And then they killed all the baddies and crossed the bridge the end.”
Massive spoilers below. I've never really given spoiler warnings before, and perhaps I should have. Sorry about that. ---------------------------------------------------------- Gears of War 3 is a game that seems like it was made for 12
year old boys. It’s loud, it’s dumb, and it’s fun. You control a bunch of
grizzled soldiers on a mission to find the hero’s dad and stop a plague of alien
something or others. On the way you’ll use a bunch of different cool weapons to
blow up aliens in various gruesome ways.
You play as Marcus Fenix, a fat man in a doo-rag who’s
clearly modelled after the legendary Bolo from The Amazing Race season 6:
As you and your motley crew race across the planet to get
to Phil at the next Pit Stop rescue Marcus’s dad, you constantly wonder
what planet you’re even supposed to be on. It’s impossible to work out if you’re
on an Earth of the future, or a planet populated by space-faring earthlings, or
just some random alien planet of humans who just happen to have a city called
Hanover. It’s very confusing. I played the first two games and I couldn’t even
work it out.
The game designers litter this half-destroyed world with enough
earth-like familiarity to keep you guessing, but not really caring. At one
point you raid a supermarket looking for supplies. This is despite the fact
that down the street 100 yards earlier you were denied entry to a dilapidated
human survivor encampment, an encampment which one would logically assume would
have raided said supermarket for beans and bullets a hell of a long time ago. But
apparently not, as no sooner had I entered the market than I stumbled upon a
massive cache of weapons, big enough to need a massive mechanical powerloader
and a helicopter to move. And lo and behold, the stupid survivors hadn’t even
found the powerloader either, even though it was just sitting there in the corner
and worked without a hitch as soon as I jumped in.
Such laziness in the plotting is customary in a lot of
action games of this ilk. Similarly the dialogue was so terrible that I groaned
audibly numerous times. While blasting aliens in the supermarket one of my AI teammates
would fire off such hilarious one-liners as, “Clean up on aisle 5!” After
hijacking a blimp that then subsequently crashed they'd quip
about, “That’s the last time I fly with a budget airline!” After crashing a
truck through a barricade, one of my comedian compatriots stated, “I just lost
my good driver discount!” Like I said, awful.
How’s this for shitty plotting. You spend all of Act Three
of the five act game searching for fuel for a submarine. Eventually you find
the fuel, so you head to the docks. What’s the first thing the bloke who knows
how to drive the submarine says? “We need to find some fuel.” I thought we just
spent the last hour or so getting the fuel? So off we trot to get more fuel, without anyone asking what happened to all the fuel we'd previously scavenged.
But despite all this the game remains fun, only it’s dumb
fun. For 12 year olds, remember. One of its biggest problems is that it’s so
easy. It’s essentially a shooting gallery with no need for skill or tactics. The
series’ famed cover mechanic can be almost completely ignored, and you’ll
hardly ever die. You’ll find that the main reason you need to move about is
because your teammates keep blocking your line of fire. But you won’t have to
worry about accidentally killing them because they also needlessly commit
suicide.
Halfway through the game the beardy moody one, Dom, decides
to kill himself by driving a truck into a fuel tank in order to kill a horde of
enemies that have your team surrounded. Even though at about ten different
points up until then simply shooting such fuel tanks was a perfectly feasible
option to destroy large groups of enemies. Your best friend sacrifices himself
merely for drama’s sake, leaving you with all the ones that make the annoying
jokes.
So, as your enemies get fried in slow motion to the haunting
piano notes of that Mad World song from Donnie Darko, Bolo looks on, crushed. “Dom,” he moans.
How many boss fights has the average gamer partaken in? I’ve
been playing video games for over thirty years, so I’d say that I’ve taken part
in a fair few. Boss fights, end-of-level-bosses, the big baddie, call them what
you will; they’re there to offer a challenge and help advance the story.
Ask any gamer and they’ll easily regale you with tales of
the hardest, the zaniest, or the most inventive and enjoyable boss fights of
their gamer career. They may come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they
all have common elements. There are patterns to be learnt and exploited, weak
spots to be targeted. There’s trial and error, repetition, frustration, and
elation. This week I encountered the shortest and easiest boss fights I’ve ever come across. It was truly bizarre.
When Deus Ex: Human Revolution was released people found the
boss fights to be at odds with the general stealthy tone of the game. They were
flat out action segments that didn’t gel with the rest of the sneaky experience.
As it turned out it was because these sections of the game were farmed out to a
different developer, which helped explain the disconnect felt. What it doesn’t
explain is why the second boss took me all of ten seconds to defeat. And eight
of those seconds were the animation of my character unleashing a special move.
Deus Ex’s protagonist Adam Jensen is an augmented
human/cyborg capable of incredible technological upgrades that make him
something akin to Solid Snake meets Robocop. One of these upgrades is the
typhoon weapon system, which at the press of a button sees Jensen whirl around
and unleash a volley of deadly projectiles in a 360 degree arc. Upon performing
this assault you witness a four second animation of the carnage being unleashed.
As is typical before any end-of-level boss fight there is a cut-scene that sets up the fight. I watched the cut-scene, and then the fight
began. The boss, a female cyborg, started to rush at me. Instinctively I
pressed the button that activated the typhoon attack. I watched the animation
deal her untold damage. Control was returned to me, she stumbled, wounded. I
shrugged, pressed the button again, and watched the same animation unfold. The
boss was hit with the projectiles and fell down, dead. Cue another cut-scene that
told me where I’d be going to next. Achievement unlocked, and I was ushered on to
the next level. It took you longer to read that than the entire ‘fight’ did in
real time.
Normally I would be annoyed at the lazy, crappy design of
this boss fight, but in reality I was glad it was over quickly. It wasn’t that
much of a problem. I was enjoying the game for what it was. I wasn’t interested
in a lengthy shootout with some random boss. I was quite happy to continue
sneaking my merry way through air vents.
After some more enjoyable sneaky shenanigans, and another
boss fight that wasn’t particularly taxing or interesting, and not even worth
remarking on, I got to the final boss at the end of the game. This one I dispatched
by merely shooting with a laser beam for five seconds or so. But I had to vault
over a few barriers first in order to avoid some sentry turrets, so that ended
up making this stunning battle last longer than the previous record setting
encounter, and thereby made it far less impressive. Although defeating the very
end boss in twelve seconds could be seen as even more ridiculous, as the end
boss is supposed to be the hardest of the lot. But at least this easy final
boss let me get to the credits a lot quicker, and these were unique.
The credits featured photos of the Eidos Montreal development
team throughout the various stages of development. Sometimes they were in the
office working. Sometime they were having meetings filled with smiles. Mostly
they were partaking in fun team building activities like table-hockey, or football
in the park. And drinking. Lots of drinking. Seriously, someone had a drink in
their hand in about 75% of these pictures. So much drinking. No wonder they had
to farm out those boss fights.
It’s been over six months since I started my yearlong
mission to clear my 50-game-tall Pile of Shame. 28 weeks and 25 games later,
and I’m feeling a bit down in the dumps.
Generally I’ve been getting my head down and hammering away.
The weird thing is that when I take a moment to lift my head and take a glance
at what’s going on in the gaming world I find that it’s not exactly how I
imagined it would look when I started this journey.
Imposing a twelve month ban on purchasing any games is bound
to be hard on a gamer who clearly loves to amass new titles. I had visions of new
games coming out during this time, and me sitting there desperate to play them,
champing at the bit to be enjoying them at the same time as everyone else. But
it seems that every game I had kept an eye on hasn’t really made me that desperate
to play it at all.
There are a couple that seem to have been received quite
well, but they didn’t exactly set the world alight. Hitman: Absolution, Need
for Speed: Most Wanted, Crysis 3, and Dead Space 3 all came and went without
much fanfare in regards to either greatness or calamity.
Then there were the failures. From the extremely mixed
reviews of Assassin’s Creed 3, to the disastrous catastrophe of Aliens:
Colonial Marines, right through to the laughably unplayable Sim City, I find
myself sitting there not really feeling like I’m missing out on anything. Even
GTAV got pushed back, how good is that!
So why am I feeling in a funk? I’m not really missing out on
anything. I can play my way through my pile. I can have fun, and I can achieve
my goal. I should be happy. So why am I so glum?
Oh yeah, that’s right. Because I’ve been playing Dirt3.
I know I’ve previously gone on about how annoying this game is, but honestly, this game makes me so mad. The loading screens, the endless
fucking loading screens, oh my god, enough already. I must have put twenty
hours into this game, and I swear I’ve only actually been driving for about eight
of them. I know that sounds like a total exaggeration, but I played for an hour
and twenty minutes this morning and I tallied up the total amount of time I
spent on the track.
It was a mighty 37 minutes.
That’s how long I was actually playing the game for. Even
though I sat there for 80 minutes, for 43 of those minutes I was resigned to watching
dozens of loading screens, and listening to those bastard douchebags carrying
on. And the worst thing is that this is a good game, the driving is really enjoyable.
It’s so infuriating that it’s buried under so much ugly trash.
It’s like going out on a date with someone you know is
attractive, good looking, and fun to be with. You wait for them to turn up at
the arranged location (they’re late, of course), but when they arrive they’re
wearing really shit clothes, and they’ve done something weird with their hair.
It’s just so off-putting. You know that underneath there’s something you really
want to get your teeth into, but you just can’t get past their abysmal
presentation.
Then they keep disappearing off to the toilet every five
minutes, and each time they come back they’re talking in a different obnoxious,
stereotyped accent, spouting bullshit catchphrases and trying to give you high
fives, before fucking off to the toilet again for another ten minutes. Utterly
infuriating.
So the date with Dirt3 ended, and I settled the bill. I left
it at its doorstep with a polite peck on the cheek. There won’t be any future
dates unless it gets an extreme makeover.
One game that I did successfully take out to dinner this
week, and enjoyed copping a feel of its afterburners, was Tom Clancy’s Hawx.
This fighter jet action game stood out as being utterly unique within my pile,
so I decided that this would be a nice companion to Dirge3, and the combination
of two vehicle games was actually a great start to the second half of my
journey. Hawx was a standard military affair, blow up this, attack this, defend
that, but it was fast paced and I enjoyed its company. I’m struggling to find
much to say about this one. Complaining about Dirt3 has thoroughly worn me out.
I must have been the only person in the world that was happy
to hear that GTAV had been delayed until September. I wasn't sure I would have
been able to stand knowing that a brand new Grand Theft Auto game was out there in the wild,
being enjoyed by millions as I plugged away at my monstrous pile of shame.
Having a self-imposed embargo on purchasing new games until
all of my existing ones have been completed has been pretty hard. There have
been several releases that have tested me sorely. I’d love to get my hands on Hitman:
Absolution, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and X-COM.
I know that as a massive Aliens fan, had Aliens: Colonial
Marines been any good I may have faltered. But it turned out to be a gigantic
turd, and while that may be good for me in my current situation, it breaks my
heart to know that once again the Alien franchise has been mistreated by another
bunch of useless bastards.
But, enough wallowing.
After hog-riding and shotgun-blasting my way through GTAIV’s
biker themed The Lost and Damned last week, I carried on by shimmying, shaking,
and skydiving my way through the fabulous club scene that is the setting for
the second GTAIV episode, The Ballad of Gay Tony.
As with The Lost and Damned the tighter focus on the story,
and a lot fewer fetch quests, made this a great installment The missions were
big, varied affairs that kept throwing up surprising and entertaining scenarios.
Riding on top of trains as you shoot helicopters out of the sky, stealing an armoured
car and destroying an entire police precinct, tons of fun was to be had here.
There was one thing it sorely needed though; either an
instant replay feature, or the ability to post video of your antics would go
down a treat. So many times something hilarious would happen and I’d think to myself,
‘I would love to see that again.’ Perhaps GTAV was delayed so that it could
appear on the newly announced PlayStation 4, where it can take advantage of the
new ‘Share’ feature that allows you to record and upload any portion of the
last few minutes of gameplay? That would be nice.
And so it was with some sadness that I ended my short visit to
Liberty City. I hadn't been there for a while, but it turned out that upon
returning I was warmly welcomed by friends old and new. They had some interesting
jobs for me to do, and far less calls pestering me to go bowling, which was a
welcome change from the last time I saw them.
So that makes it 25 games completed. I’m officially halfway
through my pile of shame! And pretty much halfway through the 12 months I set
myself. It’s nice to be on target and making good progress, but I can’t allow
myself to slack off. I must keep the pedal to the metal, blinkers on, head down, ignoring any distractions in the form of nice shiny new games that come out.
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.
All gamers have gaps in their gaming histories, those classic games or
consoles that they never got around to playing for one reason or another. Most of
us could probably name three or four games we’ve never played that are
considered to be absolute stone cold classics by the gaming community at large.
There are a few in my pile of shame that I’m happy to admit fall into
that category. Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time are both
considered super, legendary classics. There was also God of War that I recently
crossed of my list, having missed it for some reason when it first came out.
But over the last week or so I have been tackling a game that I considered to
be a big, round, gaping hole in my gaming history: Halo.
I never properly played Halo because I didn’t ever own an Xbox. I had a
few goes of it way back when, but there weren’t too many people that I knew
that owned them, so that limited my exposure. But now that they’ve released
Halo: Anniversary I’ve had the chance to travel back in time and finally
experience this legendary game.
In fact, the ability to time travel is one of Halo: Anniversary’s most
intriguing features. The game has had a graphical overhaul to bring it into line
with today’s standards, but with the simple press of the ‘Back’ button
(appropriately), the game reverts to the original graphics that it featured
when released in 2001. This makes for a fascinating glimpse into the past, and
whenever I came across a visually interesting section I would switch back to
the original graphics and play that way for a few minutes to experience it as originally
intended. Of course, I always came back to the future to play using the current
graphics as they were much more easy on the eye, but I appreciated the
inclusion of this feature, and I think you’d get even more out of it if you’d
played this back when it was first released.
Being a fan of shooters and sci-fi in general I’d been looking forward
to this, and overall it was good fun in a tactics-free, blast-a-thon sort of
way. Shoot, retreat, pop out again blasting, that was all you needed to know
really. The graphics were colourful and fun, and I never tired of blowing up
those annoying little Jawa type dudes. I did find that the sound levels were a
bit off, the guns were massively loud, but the voices in the cutscenes were so
low that I’d miss what was said for the first ten or fifteen seconds as I
hunted around for the remote to turn it up. But it didn’t seem like there was
really much that I missed, I got the gist of what was going on. Kill those
things, follow the arrow on the screen. Repeat.
When a game’s been out for years you can’t go without hearing a lot
about it, the talk of classic characters, favourite moments, and of course, the
gripes. I’d heard a lot over the years about the dreaded level, ‘The Library’,
with ‘annoying’ and ‘repetitive’ being the main complaints I’d heard. So when I
finally came to play The Library I was surprised that I found it a tight,
intense, and exciting level. I enjoyed the fight against the relentless enemies,
even if their ranks contained one of gaming’s most annoying and overused enemy
types, the big fat one that bursts into lots of annoying little ones. I
couldn’t understand what everyone had been moaning about with this level. Did
they not play the level just before this one, ‘Assault on the Control Room’?
Fuck me, now there was a repetitive, annoying, and seemingly endless level. I
hated that level so much that as I was playing it I was thinking to myself, “So
this is that Library level they all bitch about, boy, they were right, this
sucks!” But then it turned out it wasn’t even The Library. “How have I not
heard about this particular piece of horrible level design?” I wondered as I
played through Assault on the Control Room, “How bad is The Library going to be
after this nightmare?”
So when I got to The Library for real I was pleasantly surprised. I played
through it, got to the end of the level, watched another mumbly cut scene, and
then started the next level. I ran down a hallway, through some doors, into
some corridors, corridors that started to look a bit similar to, hold on, what’s
through this door, isn’t this... the Control Room?
At this point the game announced that I needed to destroy three exhaust
vents, or something. I dunno, I was too busy staring in disbelief at the TV as
I was told that I was supposed to do this by retracing my steps back through
the entirety of the aforementioned and hated level ‘Assault on the Control
Room.’ Oh, goodo.
It was like some cruel trick. The level I was supposed to hate hadn’t
been that bad, and now I was being forced to revisit the one that had irked me
the most. Had I gotten it wrong? Had I been mishearing it all these years, like
the person whose eBay listing I saw for “a Chester drawers”? Like that stupid,
short, fat woman at work who did a PowerPoint presentation of upcoming events under
the heading “What’s in stall?” Was I like those retards?
Possibly.
The rest of the game was then a retread of the early levels, done in
reverse. How unbelievably lazy is that? It was the game design equivalent of a
palindrome. They made half a game and then just flipped it for the second half.
I was rather unimpressed.
Then to top it off there was the final level where you had to navigate the
practically undriveable jeep thing down an obstacle course in a certain amount
of time to make it to the escape pod. I appreciate a challenge, and the sense
of accomplishment that comes with overcoming that challenge, but I really don’t
appreciate it when game designers make something so frustratingly difficult
that it’s not even fun. I’m pretty sure my neighbours didn’t appreciate the
amount of loud swearing that this final level induced, either.
This week I reached a landmark in my journey. I completed the 20th
game from my pile of shame, and it was thanks to my friend and neighbour,
Simon. Simon is a father of two kids under 3 years old. Like most parents he spends a lot
of time looking after his children, and not a lot of time indulging the child
within himself.
About a year ago, on a rare night off, he came over to enjoy
some beer and games. I asked him what sort of game he wanted to play, and he
said that he’d heard a lot about Call of Duty, so he fancied having a go at one
of those. I put out a selection of COD games, and he selected World at War. We
got through a few levels, he really enjoyed it, and so we decided to see the
whole thing through together.
Every now and then we’d get together for a couple of hours and wage war
against the Nazis and the Japanese. Each time we’d complete a little bit more
of the game, taking small amounts of territory in a fashion similar to that of
the real campaigns. “We’ll have to win that war soon,” we’d tell each other every
couple of months, trying our best to arrange some gaming time, with varying
degrees of success.
Then, last week I saw Simon and he announced, “I’m proposing an end to
tyranny and oppression!” “My God, you’re getting a divorce?” I asked, having
spent a great deal of time lately watching old British sitcoms on The Comedy
Channel. As it turned out he wanted to lock in a time for us to make the final
push and finally complete World at War.
And now I am happy to report that a great day has come to pass. We have
succeeded! We have conquered evil on two fronts. It was a magnificent victory
and a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
It was made all the better because the whole experience harkened back to
those days of yore, a glorious and bygone era. No, not World War II, the
Eighties and Nineties. Playing through this game with Simon reminded me of all
those times growing up when you’d play a game with your friends and share the
whole experience with them. Having someone sitting on the sofa next to you,
passing the controller back and forth, cursing and laughing at their failures,
cheering their successes. It’s like watching a really long interactive movie
where you enjoy it together, and then recall all your favourite parts when it’s
finished.
I remember when I was about 10 years old I would go round to my best friend
Thomas’s house. We would have a terrible time trying to get his ZX Spectrum to
load. We’d play the tape, it would make those horrible, horrible noises for
what seemed like twenty minutes, and only at the very end of the whole process
would we find out if it had even loaded correctly. It seemed that more often than
not it wouldn’t have, and we’d have to repeat the process, desperate for at least
one game of 'International Karate Plus' before I had to go home. It was our own little war
with the ZX Spectrum.
One time we got so pissed off that we started the tape, and then went foraging
for conkers on the common for half an hour or so. When we came back we found
that, much to our delight and surprise, it had loaded! We had won this
particular battle through absence.
From that point on we were convinced that it would only load if we were
out of its line of sight, so we’d set it up and hide so that the Spectrum didn’t
know we were there. It was a surefire guarantee of success! There we would be,
hiding behind the sofa, mucking about and stifling our laughter in case the
Spectrum heard us and chose not to load. It seemed like we had almost as much
fun waiting for the game to load as we did playing it. But the joy we felt when it did
work and we could finally play those classic games was unparalleled.
Even now, 25 years later, those memories bring a smile to my face. I
didn’t realise how much I’d missed the shared fun that comes from gaming in the
same room as another person. Online gaming can put you in contact with people all
around the world, but it doesn’t always bring you closer, or provide a
memorable and enjoyable experience. The co-op experience Simon and I shared with
COD: World at War was a thrilling, laugh-filled affair that brought back a lot
of great memories, and I’m keen for more of the same.
So that’s one Call of Duty off my list, one more to go. I’m tempted to
suggest to Simon that we play through that one together too, but lately I’ve
really been feeling the pile of shame breathing down my neck, and I’m not sure
that his commitments would really be able to mesh with timeframe. But you never know, we may just overcome insurmountable odds.
After all, what fun is going to war without your brothers beside you?
When I started this journey I hoped that I’d complete one game a week in
order to stay on target. I’m in the 21st week and I’ve now finished
19 games. That’s not too bad, especially considering that Christmas and New
Year ate into my gaming time a lot more than I had originally envisaged. I
didn’t complete any games, or even really play much of anything for nearly three
weeks, a shocking lapse. So now is the time to really start ramping it up in
terms of effort and dedication. I did that by finishing off game number 19, Max
Payne 3.
This game was pretty much the same the whole way through. Take cover and
shoot some guys. Enter slow motion and shoot a bunch of guys. Jump forwards
through the air in slow motion and shoot loads of guys. If you really wanted to
switch it up you could jump sideways though the air and shoot up some guys...
in slow motion!
But you know what? This game was fantastic. It just goes to show what
presentation and polish can really do for a game. The grim tone, maudlin
narration, excellent cut-scenes, and the driving, pulsing soundtrack made this
an entertaining and immersive affair, one whose repetition could be overlooked
in favour of the experience as a whole. Besides, the shooting was so tight and
so much fun that it didn’t really matter that that’s all there was. Rather than
being a Jack-of-all-trades, it was a master of one. I loved it. I wanted to
restart on a higher difficulty level as soon as I’d finished it. But that’s
strictly against the rules. There's too many other games sitting there unfinished.
So then, what do I do about that pile of shame? It’s going down, but
it’s still pretty intimidating. I was looking at the games that I’ve completed
so far. Some, like Skyrim, were ones that I knew would take a fair amount of
time to get through, so it’s good to have that one out of the way. I look at
Dark Souls, sitting there barely touched and I know that that one is going to
require a massive investment.
I think the best thing to do is to commit to one longer game, while
trying to get through shorter, lighter fare at the same time. I can chip away
at something like Dark Souls or The Witcher 2, and then jump into something a
bit less challenging and involved, such as Halo or Super Mario 64. Hopefully
that will keep the pile of shame decreasing, and the pile of pride steadily
increasing.
