There's a good reason I haven't posted any blog entries for the last month or so. I've been enjoying a fat holiday, and as I write this I'm sitting in a beautiful apartment in Barcelona, sipping on a delightful red. This will be our last stop before we head home at the end of the week.
Its not easy trying to handle such a massive task as completing this pile of shame in one year. It's even harder trying to do it in eleven months seeing as I decided to spend a month touring around Europe (not that I'm complaining about going on such an amazing holiday!)
But I know that I'm leaving myself with a short run in, and a fair few games left to complete. That's why before I left Australia I decided to buy a 3DS and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to play on my holiday, thereby giving myself the opportunity to complete at least one game from my pile of shame while I was away!
It's been really good to feel like I'm still making progress towards knocking off that pile of shame, all while sitting on a plane headed to another wonderful destination!
I've completed a sizeable chunk of Zelda so far, and I'm sure there'll be enough time to get it finished on the 30 hour journey back down under that begins on Friday and ends on Sunday. Well, as long as I can charge the battery on the stopovers.
One of the
most satisfying aspects of working through my pile of shame is the act of moving
a completed game from the pile at the bottom of the bookshelf to join its
fellow finished brethren where they sit nearer the top. Alternatively it’s a
slightly hollow feeling to finish a game that was a digital download as there’s
no physical movement of media that symbolises that I’m a step closer to
achieving my goal.
But, all the
same, I still know that I’m getting there, and having played through Saint’s
Row 2 completely in co-op with my mate Pete I’m feeling good. Good, because we
had a great time playing it; good, because it was a large game, and it’s always
nice to get them completed; and good, because it means that there’s also only
one digital download game, Outland, left in my pile of shame. After that it is
physical games all the way, and another milestone passed.
Saints Row 2
is an open-world, sandbox game where you play as the head of a crime syndicate,
your goal being to eliminate other gangs and take over the city. This is
achieved through cartoonish violence and hilarious means. It was a great laugh,
although at times frustrating, especially in the last few missions where we were
really struggling. Then we worked out that Pete’s controller was broken and
several of the buttons had stopped working, and this was why none of the
helicopter weapons actually worked, making the assault helicopter final mission
rather challenging to say the least. Still, I can’t wait to play through Saints
Row the Third, albeit with a couple of fully functional controllers this time.
So after
blasting our way through Saints Row 2, and laughing for most of it, I
concentrated on a couple of solo games, starting with inFamous 2.
o join it'atisfying aspects of working my through my pile
of shame is moving a completed game from the shame pile up the I liked the first inFamous game, it
was a gritty new superhero tale set in a half destroyed city that was fun to
play around in. It featured a truly rewarding progression of power unlocks and
upgrades, and it also had a cool comic book style to its cutscenes.
Unfortunately
the second game is pretty much just more of the same except that they changed
the main character’s design and voice actor, and relegated the comic book
cutscenes to only three or four instances. The city in this installment, New
Marais, is bright, neon-filled, and gaudy in contrast to Empire City’s gloomy,
post-apocalyptic ruin. It felt odd, like seeing a scruffy little dog that you
love given a bath, tarted up with pink hair dye and a sparkly collar, and carried
around in a stupid, expensive handbag.
The game was
fun enough to play, I enjoyed the power-up progression again, but it felt like
this was an extended expansion pack, and the things they changed weren’t
necessarily for the better. Maybe something with a bit more scope is what’s
needed, this one felt smaller and more enclosed than the last.
InFamous 2
again uses ‘the lightsaber principle’ to display your moral choices throughout
the game. Choose to be good, and the electric missiles and grenades that fly from
your fingers are a frosty blue colour. Choose to be bad, and those same
projectiles are Vader red.
The inclusion
of two new characters who act as the Angel and Devil on your shoulders drive
home the already obvious mechanic of the players’ choice between good and evil
without really offering up much in terms of narrative or emotional impact; they
were both pretty annoying.
Almost as
annoying as your literary agent and best friend Barry in ‘Alan Wake’, another
game I finished off this week. I’ve a troubled history with this game having
played through two thirds of it only to lose my save files when my Xbox deleted
everything on my hard drive. It was frustrating having to play through most of
this one again, but it’s a good, atmospheric action-horror game, if a little repetitive.
It’s also the
game that likes to giveth, but loves
to taketh away. I’ve never had my weapons and items removed from my character
so many times in one game. It wasn’t even restricted to between level thievery,
several times you lost everything mid-level and were left to fend off the
darkness with only your eye-rolling exasperation at having been so completely
hobbled once again.
The plot also
suffered from being overcooked, with too many attempts to convince you that the
story was a dream, a flashback, an imagining, a switcheroo, so much so that by
the end I was thinking, ‘Well whatever the big reveal is will you just hurry up
and get to it please, I’ve other games that need my attention and you’ve just
about worn out your welcome.’
So at the end
(Spoilers), after searching for his missing wife, who was swallowed by a lake,
he dives into the lake to find her, stabs a ghost, and then he, like, lives in a
ghost lake or something. His wife had been missing under the lake for a week,
but now she’s been spat out. So she’s sat there sobbing on dry land, and he’s happily
typing away under the water, like Spongebob. “It’s not a lake, it’s an ocean!”
he declares. And then someone says ‘Wake up, Alan.’ And then Space Oddity
plays.
Call of Duty:
Modern Warfare 3 was a ridiculous experience. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a
game as aggressively linear, and relentlessly noisy. Developers ‘Infinity Ward’
seem to believe that non-stop explosions and endless collapsing buildings equal
an immersive experience. There was barely a moment to pause and absorb the
atmosphere, no quiet lulls to allow you soak it all up before being bombarded
once more by the deafening roar of American bravado.
Instead you
are jostled from one falling landmark to another with little time to hear
objectives or decide which route looks tactically advantageous. Once again it’s
another case of run behind the guy with the big stupid FOLLOW over his head, shut
up, don’t ask questions, and keep on shooting.
It would be
nice to slowly fight your way through levels, to actually feel like you are
taking territory from the enemy, rather than hurtling through blindly as
bullets bounce off you and barely register. It was all so rushed, never more so
than at the very beginning of the game when, after pressing the ‘Start New
Campaign’ button, you are immediately awarded a trophy, just for having started
the game!
There’s absolutely
no immersion, nor time to even admire the fancy graphics. And the production
and presentation are undeniably impressive, especially when compared to the
recently played Homefront. The graphics are fantastic and the destruction,
although mostly overpowering in its persistence, is well done and sounds great. But oddly the same can’t be said for the grenades. I’ve never played a
game with such quiet and ineffective grenades. I’m not sure I killed a single
enemy with one. But maybe that was just because by the time they exploded I’d
already left the area, racing to catch up with the NPC I was supposed to be
following because he’d already completed the level.
The levels are
short, really short, almost like they had a meeting and said “What should
happen in the new game?” and everyone jumped up and shouted out at the same
time;
“A level where
you infiltrate a submarine!”
“A level where
you chase a tube train!”
“A level where
the Eiffel Tower collapses!”
“A level where
New York is all fucked up!”
“A level where
you’re on a plane, and it’s the president’s plane, and there are terrorists,
and then the plane starts to crash, and then you’re shooting the terrorists as you crash,
and then you crash, and then you shoot dudes in the wreckage of the crash!!!!!!
*pant pant pant*”
…and they just
decided to do it all without any real care for rhyme or reason. One level was
only eleven minutes long, which is probably about the length of time it took
them to throw together the story for this thing. They just couldn’t wait to
show you ‘The Next Big Moment’. I just couldn’t wait for it to end.
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.
