SMELLS LIKE GEEK STINK

Battlefield 3

2012-01-04T22:08:00.001Z

Despite having never played any of the previous Battlefield games, something about this one stood out. In one of the early video previews, a team of soldiers cover the main character while he gets ready to deal with a sniper in a nearby building. What you’re expecting is for him to pull out a rifle and with superhuman abilities, zone in on the sniper and takes him out in a single shot. Instead, a grenade launcher is pulled out and half of the snipers building is blown up. That said a lot to me. It said that this was a game that was going to take the first person shooter elements that had become a bit generic and shake them up to give us something new. Sadly, this has not been the case.

Most of what you see in the trailers happen within the first hour of game play. You really have to wonder, when big Hollywood moments loose their impact so quickly, why do so many game publishers insist on showing so much of their games these days in the trailers. Shooting the afore mentioned sniper with the grenade launcher should have felt better than it did simply watching it, but it had long since lost its power.

The major problem is that when the big Hollywood moments come, they have absolutely no emotional context to them. You’re probably thinking that a first person shooter like this should be all manly and not worry about sissy things like emotion, but without any kind of emotion context, how can massive destruction hold any power? Think about the moment in the first Modern Warfare in which you are in a Chinook, trying to get away from a city in which a nuclear bomb is about to go off. The Chinook is shot down by an RPG and your severely injured character drags himself to the edge of the it just in time to watch the nuke go off in the distance and a wall of dust and debris rush towards him. The first time I saw that it gave me the shivers. I never got that feeling with Battlefield 3, even though there’s definitely the potential for it.

Within the first hour of the game you get caught in the middle of an earthquake that does massive damage and brings down a nearby building. The collapsing building could have been something terrifying but the image cuts to black far too quickly. Considering we have seen far more harrowing imagery of this kind of thing in real life, this just comes across as weak and hollow. Your character passes out and wakes a few hours later to the destruction the earthquake has caused which, again, we have seen in real life sadly more than once in the last year. I spent most of this level wondering why the developers even bothered with this earthquake. It doesn't bring anything to the game that wouldn't be there without it and it doesn't bring anything that should be happening. Where were the dead and injured civilians? Where were the emergency services? Where was the human drama? Dice have given us nothing but the generic, bunch of soldiers waiting around in hopes an American soldier will come along.

Despite having an eighteen rating and having a lot of people (i.e enemies) get shot in a bloody fashion, when it comes to showing any kind of non soldier death, the game shies away from it. If you never see the people you are suppose to be helping being hurt by either human violence or a natural disaster, then what are you fighting for? The closest I saw this game come to showing death up close was with a couple of team mates but I didn't care because they died off screen. I came across their bodies after I'd shot down an attack plane that was hounding the unit. There was no emotion, there was no sense of loss. Compare this to Bulletstorm, which on the surface is crass and immature, but because they know this, they can occasionally slip in some genuinely moving moments when the player isn’t expecting it. The friendship between Grey and Ishi is put under strain time and time again over the course of the game, but the scene in which Ishi says “You are my brother,” is a very moving one. When Grey looses Ishi at the end of the game, we genuinely feel for him. Battlefield 3’s characters are so two-dimensional they may as well be cardboard cut-outs.

Game play is equally as two dimensional. What’s really amazes me about this game and Homefront is that they both made no secret about the fact that they were going after Call of Duty. But having played both of them in the same year that I played all three Modern Warfare's I can see exactly where they have gone wrong. Modern Warfare keeps you entertained all the time. Even in the quieter moments it keeps you engaged and in the louder moments it gives you enough variety to stop you from feeling as though you are doing the same thing over and over again. Homefront had no stand out game play, no boss battles and almost no variety. Battlefield 3 tries to give a bit more variety but meets with limited success. The jet sequence, for example. When I first saw my character climbing into that jet, I thought, “Oh, shit.” We’ve all played crappy jet-sims and dreamed how cool they would be if done right. While it isn’t amazing, it works well and blowing other jets out of the sky is fun. The second half, though, I did have some issues with. Black and white imagery? Flashing strobe lights? Modern Warfare, anyone?

Wow, This reminds me of a better game.

Then there was that shootout in the TV station.

Probably just a coincidence.

Then there was that time I was in the back of a car while people spoke in a language I couldn't understand while driving through a foreign city.

Oh, dear…

There’s a difference between wanting to best Modern Warfare and wanting to be Modern Warfare. This wants to be the latter without putting in any of the creativity and variety that made those games so much fun.

Battlefield 3 is also incredibly strict, not just in terms of what you do but also how you do it. Early on in the game it had me sneak up on an enemy and quietly take him out. Later on in the game I came to a near identical situation, but I ran into a problem. Every time I quietly approached the guard, I dropped dead before reaching him. It happened every single time and I was sure I was trapped in an instant kill glitch to the point that I reloaded an earlier save file. What I eventually realised was that the sudden deaths were happening because I was sneaking up on the enemy. The game wanted me to run up to him and have a scripted fist fight. Battlefield 3 is a game that offers the player zero flexibility in how they play the game. This is a game that threatens to kill you and return you to the last checkpoint if you stray to far away from the area you are meant to be in. This is a game that throws invisible walls at you to prevent you from moving into another area before you are meant to.

None of this is helped by the fact that this game is very buggy. One thing you can never call any of the Modern Warfare games is buggy. Those game are solidly put together and I have never seen a single example of the rubbish I’ve seen in Battlefield 3. Sometimes glitches in a game can be funny, you see something odd happening and you take a screen shot to share it with the rest of the internet. Not in Battlefield 3 they’re not, they’re the kind of glitches that just mess up your game and piss you off. One of the first glitches I noticed happening a lot was my gun disappearing leaving only a cross-hair. This was more than annoying, it made the game unplayable as zooming in makes the cross hair disappear (it is meant to be replaced by the red dot). The gun pops back eventually, but I found myself often returning to a check point with no gun and having to wait a good minute or so for it to return. Non Playable Characters were at times invisible, and often scared the crap out of me because all I was aware of was a disembodied voice. My first experience of this was with a friendly soldier, so I didn’t have anything to worry about in a combat sense.

I can hear him, but I can’t see him…

Oh, there he is.

The second time I was less lucky. You can only take my word for it, but in the below screen shot, an invisible man knocked my character to the ground and began attacking. Behind him are two other invisible enemies.

Direct front, my ass.

Both popped into sight a few seconds later, by which point they had already taken a few shots at me.

Even without these problems, combat is still a major pain in the arse. For one, the difficulty curve of this game is far to steep. The game goes from “fair, yet challenging,” to “bloody impossible” far too quickly and as much as I hated myself for it, I had to turn down the difficulty to get through it. One of my favourite things to do with a good game when I'm finished is to go back and play it again on the higher difficulty and challenge myself to beat it. Will I do this with Battlefield 3? Will I hell. Even without the insane difficulty, the game is just plain tedious to play. Bad guys hide in every hole, they can land bullets on you the second you come out from your cover and they have an annoying tenancy to shine bright lights in your eyes, effectively blinding you and leaving you completely vulnerable.

Cheatin’ bitch.

And yes, I have heard that the game's multi-player is quite good, but I'm really not interested in playing online. I’m not interested in competition, or mindlessly shooting at people or building up kill streaks. I’m not interested in having abuse hurled at me by a twelve year old who has just discovered the word “cunt”. I am one of those silly people who thinks that the most important part of a game should be the single player and that online should still be a bonus feature. Sadly the developers now tend to make a so-so single player campaign, because that's what actually sells, with most of the real focus on online gaming. I suspect that in ten or fifteen years time when we look back on this era of first person shooters we will realise what a hollow experience the vast majority of them were.

So, in conclusion: avoid. If you want a good, solid Modern Warfare like experience...go play Modern Warfare.

Games of 2011–The Highs and Lows

2012-01-02T21:36:00.001Z

Let's take a look back at some of my gaming highlights of 2011. They are in no particular order, save for the last one, which is my favourite.

DEAD SPACE 2

This was a fun game to play, a survival horror filled with blood, gore and bad guys lurking in every dark corner. Five years ago I was comparing third person shooters to Resident Evil 4, now I compare them to Dead Space 2. The controls are polished to perfection, resulting in a great third person shooter that allows for speed and mobility but doesn't stop you feeling threatened every time the enemies close in. While there are a few crappy platformer moments and the script, while not as weak as the original game, isn't all it could have been, there's no denying that this is the best third person shooter of recent years and it's going to take a great game to top it.

BULLETSTORM

It was never going to be a game to everyone's taste, and if you're a Fox News watching moron who loves to scream things like, “Won't someone think of the children!” you'll hate this. But looking past the crass language, immature humour and bloody cartoon violence, I see a game that is more clever than it first seems. While the game play is solid and makes the combination of shooting and melee attacks feel effortless, where I really enjoyed this was it's story. The friendship between Grey and Ishi is what holds the game together and even allows for some more tender – I hate to use the word, but – bromance moments, that legitimize all of your actions in this game. Of all the games I played this year, this is the one I want to see more of.

FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS

(Okay, I'm cheating, this game came out at the tail end of 2010, but I didn't play it until this year. My blog, my rules.)

I avoided this one when it first came out, mainly because I'd hear of all the issues with bugs, and I had already gone through all that with Fallout 3. Imagine my surprise them to find that this game was far more stable than I had been led to believe. Maybe giving the game a bit of time to let a few patches come out helped. But the reason I enjoyed this game so much was not just because it was more stable, but because I honestly think it's a far superior game to Fallout 3. It's shooting mechanics still feel old fashioned compared to first person shooters coming out at the same time, but being able to actually aim down the barrel is a welcomed inclusion. The stories are a lot more fun, with characters feeling more unique, stories being more interesting, and bad guys feeling more dangerous. The first time you meet Caesar's Legion, they have crucified a whole town load of people. Exploration is also a tremendous amount of fun. Fallout 3's landscape was quite dull to look at, and often I simply relied on a map marker to guide me to where I was going. In New Vegas, there are a lot of oddities in the landscape, so it's more a case of, “Is that a dinosaur in the distance?” and off I would go to check out said dinosaur. In a game with such a heavy emphasis on exploration, engaging your curiosity makes all the difference.

THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM

This was the game I wanted to play since before it was announced. I am a mere fifty hours into it, and there is still so much to see and do. This game feels epic from the moment you start playing, putting your head on a block to be executed then having said execution interrupted by a dragon attack. From there onwards it's exploration all the way. The reason it takes me so long to work my way through an Elder Scrolls game is because I always want to see what is over the next hill or up the next mountain.

The RPG elements of the game have had a major overhaul and instead of locking yourself into a specific way to play from the beginning, it allows you to experience the different types of combat and more naturally find your own balance. I've always been a sword wielding warrior in these types of games, but the magic is more user friendly and the ability to duel wield meant I was mostly running around with a sword in one hand and a fire spell in the other. Skyrim does suffer from some of the typical Bethesda problems found in previous Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, but (unless you're on a PS3) they rarely get in the way of enjoying everything this game has to offer.

PORTAL 2

This is my favourite game of 2011. It may not be the longest or the biggest, but it's the only game in recent memory that I played four times in a row. It's the only game that made me laugh and cry and made every moment fun, even when I was stuck on a puzzle. GLaDOS and Wheatley are two of the best written characters in any game I've played, and the voice actors bring the human element to them. The game is also effortlessly funny, a rarity in games. The story has many twists and turns in it and also manages to make the player feel a part of it all. The third character, Chell, is really just a blank slate to allow the player to insert themselves into the game, and it really works. When GlaDOS says “Oh, it's you,” she's not speaking to Chell, she's speaking to you, the player. It's smart, it's entertaining, and I loved every moment of it. It's always such a delight to experience a game that isn't another Call of Duty style FPS or another sandbox game. While I wouldn't want a Portal 3, because this one came to a very natural end, I would like to see Valve do another puzzle game, they clearly have a flare for it.

HONORARY MENTION:

RESIDENT EVIL 4 HD

The Idea of HD remakes of games has never sat well with me and you can thank George Lucas and his attempts to utterly ruin Star Wars for that. My attitude was: there are already several versions of this game available (GameCube, PlayStation 2 and Wii) why not just go play one of them? But I'll admit that this is a great deal. They've cleaned up the visuals and taken away that layer of fuzziness that is now painfully obvious on an HD screen. They've also added a new controller layout that is more like modern third person controls (L1 to aim, R1 to fire) which lets slipping back into the game easier, but haven't completely reworked them. It does feel a little clunky now compared to the brilliant controls on Dead Space 2, but it still plays really well, and holds up as a great gaming experience. I came away from this game thinking that this is what George Lucas should have done with Star Wars: clean it up, smooth out the wrinkles, but don't dick around with a classic.

And of course it wouldn’t be a list like this without mentioning some of the disappointments of the last year. Three of the four games, Homefront, Battlefield 3 and Infamous 2, I’ve already covered in greater detail, but I’ll summarise again quickly:

HOMEFRONT

AND

BATTLEFIELD 3

I'm grouping these two together because I have the same complaint for both of them. They are trying to be Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare without understanding what made that game so good. They have characters that are horribly two dimensional that I don't give a damn when they start dying. Compare that to the death of Jackson, a character who never speaks, and yet being with him in his final moments is heart breaking. The combat is boring and only ever hints at the potential for something better and more emotionally engaging. And worse than that, many of Battlefield 3's sequences are lifted straight out of Modern Warfare. Both of these games had the audacity to say they were going after Modern Warfare, and were going to overtake it in terms of innovation, popularity and gamers love. What a joke.

INFAMOUS 2

God forbid they should fix the problems of the first game. That seemed to be asking too much from these people. If they had, this would have been an outstanding game. But they didn't. What they gave us was a game that had enemies that attacked by the dozen with rocket launchers or super powers far superior to Cole. The story happens mostly behind the scenes, with Cole simply being brought in to do the fighting and the moral choices are so black and white they had no impact on me whatsoever.

BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY

I loved Arkham Asylum and really was hoping for a sequel but this is such a let down. It doesn't feel like they have really made any kind of changes, it feels like the same game in a different setting. They've expanded the sandbox structure to make the game feel bigger, but it's still the same fights with the same people standing around waiting for Batman to turn up and kick the crap out of them. It never really does anything with the sandbox element. There are various factions supporting the various super villains, but you never get any real sense of this outside of cut scenes. There are times when you come to the aid of political prisoners, but I swear to god, you are saving the same, identical person each time. How PlayStation 2. When I came to a boss battle with Mr Freeze, the first time the game demanded I put some effort into playing it, I realised I didn't care. I didn't care about the boss fight, I didn't care about the game. It felt like nothing but a boring, missed opportunity, words I hate being associated with Batman.

New 52: The Dark Knight, Birds of Prey, Batgirl, Nightwing and Green Lantern

2011-12-27T20:45:00.001Z

Having already covered Superman #1 and Batman #1 in more detail, I’m going to look at a few more issues from DC’s New 52 line, starting with:

Batman: The Dark Knight.

I couldn’t help but feel a little bit disappointed. Where Batman #1 brought the city and main characters to life through it’s narratives, The Dark Knight feels…alright, but nothing special. Following on from watching Batman Begins, it’s theme of fear feels…alright, but nothing special. It’s not that the comic is is doing anything wrong, it’s just that it lacks that “special something”, that spark of energy and excitement that Batman has. One interesting scene in the first issue comes when a character called Forbes accuses Bruce Wayne of being in league with Batman, who is now considered to be more of an outlaw than a vigilante. Forbes spends two panels talking down to Wayne and I did have a momentary “Oh, shit” feeling. Sadly, before Wayne could respond to any of this, the conversation was cut short by a woman called Jai. I took an instant dislike to her, probably because the first time we get a proper look at her, it was the typical sexualisation of women – the big boobs, the tight dress and the provocative stance.

Lady, I’m the most un-feminine woman I know, and even I can tell you the shoes are suppose to match the handbag.

The first issue ends with Two-Face overly muscle-y, obviously the result of some kind of drug. Issue two sees a lot more of them and ends with the Joker in the same state. It surprises me that at no point does any one bring up the subject of venom which now makes me wonder if Knightfall has been wiped from continuity.

Will I read any more? No. Batman is doing a much better job of telling an interesting, well written story and right now, The Dark Knight feels average.

Birds of Prey

While I have heard of Birds of Prey, I know nothing about them. After reading issue #1, I’m none the wiser. The whole comic is essentially one big fight sequence with one or two flashbacks. We’re told the main character is putting together a new team, but not really told why or what the goal of the team is to be. We’re told she’s wanted for murder, but we aren’t given any backstory on why. We’re shown that a journalist has been tailing them for several weeks and yet the main character doesn’t seem too worried.

Oh, I don’t know…BECAUSE YOU’RE A SUSPECTED MURDERER?

It’s not until they talk face to face, that the journalist even realises who she is. I know that in the DC world a pair of glasses are all it takes to cover up your identity, but this is ridiculous, he was trailing her for weeks. And we’re not even told why.

You know what? Sod this comic. There’s a difference between telling a story over several issues and doing nothing with the story in the first issue, the issue that is meant to get people interested enough to stick around. It has done nothing to interest me in the characters or the story and is made of stupid.

Will I read any more? You must be joking.

Batgirl

Having now seen not one but two instances of Barbara Gordon no longer confined to a wheelchair but walking freely, I had to check out Batgirl for the explanation. Of course, your don’t get one and are only told that she recently regained her mobility. Does a person get better from a gunshot wound that damages their spine and leave them paralysed from the waist down? Yes, Bruce Wayne got better from his broken back, but his recovery was explained. Okay, it was bullshit magic-science, but at least it was something. In the New 52 line up, we are honestly meant to think she just got better.

What they probably should have done was just take The Killing Joke, the comic in which the Joker shot Barbara, out of continuity. The Killing Joke was written by Alan Moore and drawn by Brian Bolland, so maybe the DC editors believed they couldn’t erase it’s existence. But here’s the thing about The Killing Joke – it’s not that good. It’s a comic that it stronger on it’s reputation than it is when you actually read it. Even Alan Moore doesn’t like it. Paralysing Barbara was never anything more than a shock moment that takes up about three pages. Taking it out of continuity and saying she’s Batgirl again would have made more sense than saying she got better.

Having said all that, the writer, Gail Simone, actually uses the events of The Killing Joke to make for a much richer story. The first issue seems to be setting up a story about a woman who is living with a traumatic memory and having to work through her pain and fear to come out stronger. Issues two and three do a great job of carrying this on, with Barbara failing to stop a train from exploding. We also find out that while her back has magically healed itself, there is no guarantee that it will stay that way and all this running along rooftops and being hit real hard isn’t doing much to help. All of this makes Barbara Gordon a far more interesting character . I so rarely come across women writing in mainstream comics and it’s nice to see a woman write a female “super-hero”. She comes across much more realistically way and not the overly sexualised, emotional drama queen she could have been if written by a lesser writer.

Will I read any more? Absolutely.

---

EDIT: Two other New 52’s I’m sticking with:

Nightwing

As with Batgirl, Nightwing too goes for a more character focused story, looking at Dick Greyson’s past without falling back on an origin story. It focuses on the Circus Dick was a part of as a child. The last time the circus was in town was when Dicks parents were killed and it naturally brings back a lot of painful memories for him. None of this is made any easier by the presence of a new bad guy who is out to bring down Dick Greyson – not Nightwing – calling him “the fiercest killer in all of Gotham”. While the writing isn’t as strong as it is with Batgirl, it’s strong enough to keep me interested.

Green Lantern

This is a lot of fun to read. Sinestro gets a green ring back, manipulates Hal Jordan into helping him and very tense hijinks ensues. Sinestro is a villainous type who isn’t pure evil, Jordan is a hero who isn’t purely good and forcing the two to work together makes for some interesting scenes and dialogue exchanges.The writing is strong, the art for the most part is good, but close ups of Hal creep me out…

I will eat your heart. I will eat your children.

…and the cliff hangers – particularly in issue #3 – always leave me wanting more. Issue #4 has a strong stink of ‘filler’ about it, but for the most part this is a well made comic that I actively look forward to reading.

Salt

2011-12-14T23:10:00.001Z

Part One:

Part Two:

The New 52: Batman #1

2011-11-21T22:23:00.001Z

Now this is more like it. Superman #1 was a pointless mess that did nothing for people like me who don’t read much Superman and get most of their information from the first film and the Dean Cain series (Oh, what? I liked it. Until Lois started eating frogs.) Batman #1 is a hell of a lot better. My enjoyment of this is probably down to fact that I love Batman a lot more than I do Superman, and find him a far more interesting character. That’s not enough to make a good comic, of course, and we all know there are plenty of bad Batman comics out there. But these comics manage to hit the nail on the head and manage to be not only a good Batman comic, but a good comic in general.

First of all, the writing is much better. Whereas with Superman #1 I could have – and did – taken a red pen through half of the dialogue to tighten it up, the Batman comics feel like the author actually bothered to do that himself. While the amount of words in both Superman #1 and Batman #1 probably equals out to about the same on the average page, Superman’s dialogue felt flabby. Batman’s dialogue, be it Bruce Wayne addressing a large crowd of people or Batman monologuing during a fight, is always interesting to read, it never feels like a chore. More than that, though, it stays true to the feelings that run through Batman. When he’s speaking about his parents he talks about their death, but also how they influenced him before that. The narration in Superman #1 was an emotionless ‘Superman did this, Superman did that…’ When he is narrating about Gotham City at the beginning of the issue, talking about a long running segment in a newspaper “Gotham is…”, he tells us some of the entries: “Gotham is damned, Gotham is cursed, Gotham is villainous, Gotham is Batman’s city.” Had I never read a Batman comic before – and remember the goal of the New 52 is to have a fresh start for new readers to join – I would have understood perfectly the world Batman lived in and his motivation for doing what he does.

The writer also does another clever thing: he has Bruce test some new gadgets, a direct link to the Bat-computer, and a facial recreation program, which he uses on Tim, Dick and Damian:

What this allows is for the reader to be quickly told who these people are, that they are all former or current Robin’s, and their current role. It’s a brilliantly quick way of giving the information without falling back on pages of narration that so often plague American comics. When we think of Batman using gadgets, we tend to think of him whipping out a can of Shark Repellent©, but much like Arkham Asylum, in this comic Batman uses them as an aid rather than a substitute for his brain, and the writer uses them to quickly and concisely give the reader information.

The art is lovely and my only (minor) quibble is that Bruce Wayne looks a bit boyish. The design gets a bonus point added to the non-existent scores for getting rid of the underwear-on-the-outside. The colour, too, does a great job of setting the mood from the black, grey and brown of Arkham to the softer colours of Wayne Manor.

I don’t want to give anything away about the story. I would be happy to do so if the story was terrible, but since it’s not, I don’t want to give anything away. But I will say that what starts off as a simple murder mystery soon grows into something darker and the ending to the first issue will have you wanting to move straight on to second. It’s also nice to see the return of some old, familiar faces, for example Commissioner Gordon, who I really miss from the newer comics, most notably when I was reading Gotham Central. It’s also a lot of fun for me to see Harvey Bullock again as the sight of him always reminds me of the early nineties, when I was first getting into Batman comics.

Superman #1 was rubbish and I don’t care to read another. Batman #1 is the flipside of that. It tells a story that has depth for older readers of Batman, and for newer readers, gives them the information in an easy to digest way. When the issue ended I went straight into the second one. Issue #3 is in the post and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

The New 52: Superman #1

2011-11-20T18:12:00.001Z

The New 52 is DC Comics latest experiment, doing what they are calling a “Soft re-boot”. Basically they’ve developed selective memory, discarding certain elements of their Superheroes history and keeping the stuff they like. This is nothing new, of course, fans of comics, films and television series have an amazing ability to block out the bits they don’t like from their mind. (The Naked Now didn’t happen, do you hear me? It didn’t happen.)

To be honest, it’s a mixed bag and I can’t help but read Superman #1 and wonder if what they should have done was to either just tell a new origin story or carry on from the fantastic Superman: Secret Origins. Calling your comic #1 does suggest it’s a beginning and as someone who doesn’t read a huge amount of Superman, I couldn’t help but feel lost, like I had jumped into the middle of a story. Why was the Daily Planet building being demolished? Why was the paper now under a new owner? Since when has Lois Lane worked in television? Isn’t she suppose to be a newspaper reporter? Why is there so much emotional baggage attached to these characters when it says #1 on the cover.

Oh, the cover. Take a look at it:

Every New 52 comic I talk about will be getting a bonus point added to the non-existent scores for getting rid of the silly and outdated underwear-on-the-outside look. If my life was a film, Ode to Joy would have started playing when I looked at that cover. But then I looked closer...he’s wearing armour! If there’s one superhero who should never need to wear armour, it’s Superman. You know, the Man Steel. The one whom bullets bounce off of.

Inside the comic, I found things to be very wordy. There’s nothing worse in a comic when a writer feels the need to fill every panel with words. A good writer knows when to shut up and let the artist tell the story. A good writer will know to take a red pen to the first draft to trim the fat and tighten up the dialogue. I am far from a professional comic book writer, but I’ve read enough good comics in my time to notice flabby writing. Even I couldn’t help but edit it.

Click for a larger image: Superman #1, page 3

Let’s go through it panel by panel:

Panel one has the Mayor finish up a two page narrative about the Daily Planet. I’ve scored out “As Mayor of Metropolis” because it clearly says “Mayor Rob Morrisroe on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. There is no need for repetition. The Mayor then says “I take great pleasure in introducing a man who needs no introduction.” That’s just plane lazy writing. I cut out the second half of that sentence and added it to the next panel so that it now reads: “I take great pleasure in introducing a man without whom Metropolis might very well have lost the Daily Planet forever.”
Panel three is a waste of time. It has a commentator talking about the mayor turning the podium over to Morgan Edge, who is now the owner of the Daily Planet. But doesn’t the Mayor say that in panel two? Everything this commentator says is pointless repetition.
Panel five, the line “But to paraphrase and mutilate the works of William Shakespeare:” is to flabby, I cut it down to “But to paraphrase Shakespeare.”
Panel six is another pointless panel that I’ve scored out. It has the characters reacting to a joke that doesn’t exist.

Am I being too picky? Maybe, but I don’t think it makes for a good comic when the reader can see ways to improve upon it. I could have done it with just about every page, page three was just where my frustration with this comic set in.

The first half of it jumps about a lot from one scene to the next. Pages six and seven starts at the Astrodome, then moves to Superman flying, then to a flashback of a fight between Lois and Clark, back to the speech from Morgan Edge from a few pages earlier, back to the fight, then back to Superman flying. It’s such a jumble and the only reason it isn’t a mess is because the artist and colourist do such a great job of making each section feel visually different so that you know you have switches from one scene to the next.

The second half of the comic is a very bog standard fight between Superman and a fire creature which is very heavily narrated in what I think is a report written by Clark Kent for the paper the next day. It tells us what he’s doing, but because it’s Clark writing an article, the narrative never lets us in on what Superman is feeling so the whole action sequence becomes emotionless. The fire alien has the potential to be interesting, especially since it keeps saying the word “Krypton” over and over again. But once the readers are told about this fact, it is never brought up again. The fire alien is eventually defeated by Superman throwing it into space to extinguish it, which is painfully reminiscent of Superman Returns, the climax of which was a giant rock being thrown into space. And god knows how much I don’t want to be reminded of that film.

To be perfectly honest I wouldn’t recommend Superman #1. The story is flabby, badly written and would have been convoluted had it not been for the great art and colour that helped to clear things up a bit. This is probably part of an ongoing story despite not ending on a literal ‘to be continues’ and as such sets the scene for thing to come later on. But as a stand alone comic it’s a jumbled mess and I have no desire to pick up issue two.

The physics in Angry Birds suck

2011-11-05T10:53:00.001Z

Don’t get me wrong, I love Angry Birds as much as the next person, but you have to admit, the physics suck ass.

The first five screenshots were taken after the birds had disappeared and everything had settled. The last was taken before the birds had hit.

I Quit: InFamous 2

2011-09-22T14:06:00.001Z

The original Infamous was not a perfect game, but it did one thing really well: it made you feel like a superhero far better than any other superhero genre game ever had before. A game doesn’t have to be perfect for you to get a great deal of enjoyment out of it, and Infamous had that special something, that meant that for all its faults in graphics, controls and story telling, I still loved it and actively looked forward to the sequel.

I read a letter in Total Film recently, in which someone was commenting on the tendency to judge sequels more harshly than the original. Would Batman Begins, the writer argued, still be considered a great film if it came after The Dark Knight. My answer to that would be of course it would. Batman begins is still the superior film in terms of character study and story structure. But the point is, you always judge a sequel by the one that came before, whether it was good or bad. No one ever says Assassin’s Creed 2 is good, they say, “It’s so much better that the first one!” If InFamous 2 was a stand alone product, I would probably find a way to look past its problems, but because it’s following on from a game that already had problems I can’t do that.

Not every part of InFamous 2 is a let down. The graphics have has a major overhaul and look like proper PlayStation 3 graphics, instead of just very good PlayStation 2 graphics. More than just being good, they are atmospheric. As the Beast draws closer to the city, the skies take on an ominous blood red colour. The controls have also been improved upon, they are far more responsive now and allow you to switch from power to power with ease. Playing the game, however, still manages to be a major drag, for three reasons.

First of all, the enemies are ridiculously difficult. This was a problem with the first game, which had enemies able to land every single shot on Cole, even if you were blazing past the enemies at high speed. Similarly in this game, if the shoot you, they usually hit you, and that’s only the beginning of it. Soon enough you find yourself constantly facing off against huge waves of enemies armed with rocket launchers or have super powers of their own. Where are they all coming from? Where did they get all the rocket launchers? Why can the super powered guys zip about the place at high speeds leaving me barely able to get a lock on them? And then there’s the big monsters who shoot big balls of saliva that all but instantly kill Cole unless he runs away like a big girls blouse. I’m all for a variety of enemies but the difficulty of these guys is insane. Instead of enjoying the combat like I did for the most part in the first game, I ended up dreading it and trying to avoid it.

The second reason is because of the way it tells its story. My major issue with the original game was not so much the story itself, because there was the potential for something interesting and engaging, but rather how the game chose to tell its story. Instead of traditional cut scenes, the camera hung limply behind Cole as he and Zeke just stood still next to each other, talking. Bigger moments had comic book style art and monologues from Cole. The game chose to narrate the major events rather that show them happening and the result was a story that had the potential to be gripping and emotionally engaging ended up being a bit shallow.

It has been improved upon slightly in that they tell a lot of their story in cut scenes and leave the comic book art and narrations for a few of the bigger moments. I was initially hopeful that this would mean a far stronger story this time around. Sadly, it didn’t. The problem this time around is that the characters are so weak, two dimensional and boring that I didn’t care about them. The story itself is hollow and empty and serves no real purpose other than to give Cole lots of enemies to fight. It’s a real shame, because the first hour is interesting, there’s the introduction of the Beast - who doesn’t look as beastly as I’d hoped - there’s the defeat of Cole, and the retreat to a new city. Every now and again you are told, “The Beast is X miles away…” It’s a decent set up but the story so fades away and you are doing the same thing over and over. Missions usually just involve being told that something is going down, and I should go shoot a bunch of people. There was no real substance or meaning behind any of it. I felt like a lot of the story was happening behind the scenes, like the secondary characters were doing stuff unseen by me, and they were only bring me in to be the muscle. Compare that to Grand Theft Auto games, which take a moment it a cut scene to not only set up the mission, but developed the characters and there relationships a bit more. In some ways, GTA never really stops telling its story from beginning to end. In InFamous 2, the story is just a justification for shooting people. The behind the scenes story telling isn’t even implemented that well. At the end of one mission, Zeek settles back with a beer telling you he’s going to chill for a while. Not twenty seconds later he called saying he’d been doing some investigating and I should stop by and see him. No you weren’t, Zeek, you were slouched on a couch doing your best Al Bundy impression. That’s the point I’m trying to make: the story isn’t about the story, it’s about providing trigger points for the action.

Thirdly, the moral choices are still painfully black and white. There’s never a grey area, there’s never a third choice. You have two secondary characters, Kuo and Nix, who represent basic good and bad choices respectively. In this game, making a moral choice usually means choosing between one of the two women, so it feels less like “what do you think is the right choice?” and more “which one of them would like to shag?”

Let me digress for a moment to tell you what I think is one of the best moral choices in a game ever. In Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, you are sneaking through the streets of Jerusalem, guided by a woman, Dahlia Tal, to a terrorist hideout. Dahlia is also a terrorist, but its a case of siding with the lesser of two evils. When you get to the hideout, you receive a new order: “Kill her,” the player is told. “Don’t think. Just do it.” The problem was, in that moment I began over-thinking. I began to panic. I was just ordered to fire on an unarmed woman. Sure, she was a bad guy, but she kept up her end of the bargain, didn’t she? Whether she lives or dies is the choice of the player, but it’s not a simple case of press X for good option, press O for bad option. You don’t even know what the good option is. If you decide to kill her, you have to pull out the gun, aim it and pull the trigger. Then you have to play the rest of the level knowing you killed an unarmed woman. This choice has more power and impact than any other game I’ve played with moral choices because it comes out of no where and stays with you long afterwards.

InFamous 2 just doesn’t have that impact on me. The only real reason for making the choices you do is because, like the first game, your Karma dictates the kind of powers you develop. But all that means is you will play the game once as a good guy then once as a bad guy, you are never really making the choice that you think is the right one in that moment.

I quit InFamous 2. It’s shallow, it’s boring and it just doesn’t have the fun factor the first game had going for it. I looked forward to this game for two years all I got was that mild depression that comes with bitter disappointment.

Oh, well, there’s always Batman: Arkham City to look forward to.

The Amazing Spider-Man Trailer

2011-07-23T23:27:00.001Z

The first trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man is now out, and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. It opens with Peter as a young child as his parents tell him they have to go away for a while. It immediately make me think not of the mainstream comics, but of Ultimate Spider-Man, which gave some backstory of his father doing experiments that lead to the creation of the Venom suit.

Year pass, and…

Oh, God. Emo Peter Parker strikes again…

It seems Emo-Parker likes to sit in the classroom looking very conspicuous in a black hoody as a blonde looks on. Wikipedia tells me this is, indeed, Gwen Stacy and that Mary Jane Watson isn’t in this one. Maybe they’re going to build up the relationship between Peter and Gwen in this one and then bring Mary Jane in to create a love triangle in the inevitable second film.

The scene switches to a dinner table with Gwen and who I assume is her father, Captain George Stacy.

“OMG, you are totally Spider-Man.”

Gwen mentions to her father that Emo-Parker lives with his Aunt and Uncle, and we get our first look at them.

It’s only President Sheen! Also, Aunt May looks less like the frail old woman she is so often portrayed at and more like her Ultimate version of still being fit and healthy.

Most teenagers have an evening and weekend job in a shop or a garage or something. Gwen works part-time at a research laboratory.

I don’t want to stereotype, but it’s hard to take a blonde in a white coat seriously, isn’t it?

Peter ends up in said research laboratory and is told by Gwen not to touch anything. So naturally he wanders into the ominously lit room with the spinning circle thingy.

Never a good sign. We can see where this is going, can’t we?

Now, I’ll admit a bit a bit of nerd rage here. The trailer shows him being bitten on the back of the neck.

It’s a bit of a departure from being bitten in the back of the hand like, oh, I don’t know…

Every single version…

…of the origin story…

…ever made.

The scene quickly shifts to Emo-Parker running about at night, trying out his new found powers, including this shot, upside down in the train…

Hopefully, there’s no passengers in this carriage or this’ll be difficult to explain.

…which kind of looks familiar…

“Ready to play God?” a voice asks and wee see a man walk towards a weird contraption.

My first though was that this was the Green Goblin origins again, but that lack of a right arm says it’s actually Doctor Connors. The film makers seem to be going in the same direction as Batman Begins, in that they are choosing one of the lesser know enemies that won’t overshadow the main character’s origin story.

A voice is heard saying “Do you have any idea what you really are?” and we see Emo-Parker sowing, presumably putting the spidey-costume together.

It always amuses me to think that Peter Parker, science nerd extraordinaire, knows how to sow. It’s a very complicated costume to put together by himself, and if you look closely at the costume see in the trailer…

…as well as the few pictures so far released…

…you can see they’ve gone for a lot more detail in the gloves around the fingers and up the arms. I feel my nerd rage tingling at this as well. You could make the same arguments in the Sam Raimi films that the costume couldn’t have been made by one person, but at least it looked like the Spider-Man costume from the comic.

If they are following the Ultimate Spider-Man route, they may show the wrestling section in which the organiser has the suit made for him, but there’s no sign of that and they may even wish to avoid it since Sam Raimi did it in Spider-Man.

If I was making a Spider-Man film, I might try to go the Batman Begins route of building the costume up over the film, starting out bulky and impractical and moving towards the costume we see in the comic.

The scene shifts to a first person perspective of Spider-Man swinging through the streets of New York and I seriously hope it is in no way reflective of the visual effects of this film. They look like a game and by that I mean they look fake.

Now don’t misunderstand, computer game graphics look stunning these days, but when you play a game you are never under any illusions that what you are looking at is anything other than one hundred per cent artificial. You know people have been sitting at a computer constructing everything you see, hear and interact with. A film is meant to make you believe that what you are looking at is real. The best kind of special effect is one you hardly even notice.

Not that I would object if this really was a game trailer. In fact a first person perspective, Spider-Man-meets-Mirrors-Edge game would be pretty cool if it was done right.

Web slingers are back!

The trailer ends with a line from Peter: “We all have secrets. The ones we keep and the ones that are kept from us.”

Yeah, Peter, your father totally made the Venom suit.

If I’ve come away from this trailer feeling anything, it’s quietly optimistic. I’m torn on the subject of a reboot. On the one hand, wiping the slate clean and taking the movie version of Spider-Man in a new direction could be interesting. On the other hand, Spider-Man was a great origin story and do we really need another one this soon? Still, saying Spider-Man 3 is now void is always a good start and there is the potential to tell a more modern feeling Spider-Man story that draws upon the excellent Ultimate series.

Here’s the trailer in full, you can judge for yourself:

Portal 2

2011-07-15T21:17:00.001Z

The original Portal was one of those games that I wait for. Amid all the sandbox games, racers, RPG's and latest Call of Duty, every now and again a new game will come along that tries to do something new. Cleverly packaged with The Orange Box, instead of marketing it as a stand-alone product, it was presented to players as a bonus game rather than the main attraction. What ultimately happened though, was Portal became hugely popular, standing head a shoulders above everything else in The Orange Box. And trust me, when you're in the same box as Half-Life 2, that really is a triumph. A few years and a few internet memes later, Portal has gained enough popularity and love to allow it's sequel to be released as a stand-alone game. I can honestly tell you that this is one of the best gaming experiences of the year.

If the original game was a revolution, then Portal 2 is an evolution. Unlike most sequels that give you more of the same, Valve have brought many new elements the table. There are still many of the things recognisable from the first game such as the cubes, the big red buttons, the turrets and the Fling. But new to Portal 2 is the Excursion Funnel which you can travel along, Mirrored Cubes used to reflect laser beams, Faith Plates to propel you through the air and the Propulsion Gels, which depending of the colour, let you bounce, run faster or open up portal holes where you couldn't before. While each of these are simplistic enough to deal with on their own, when they start to get combined together in puzzles, it can make for some tricky moments. Cleverly, though, Valve don't throw all of this at you at once, instead they introduce it to you gradually and let you learn each new element. They also seem to be determined to take as much of the potential frustration out of the game as possible. Gone are the flying energy balls and the pools of yucky gunk, both of which result in instant death. Instead we have bottomless pits that can usually be avoided and lasers which you have to run into deliberately and repeatedly before they can kill you.

The music deserves special mention because not only is it good, it's well used. Actions like running or jumping on the Propulsion Gel has it's own little musical signatures. Several puzzles in the game are solved in layers, and the music starts out quiet and subtle. As you solve each part of the puzzle the music builds, gets louder and more of the melody appears. Its a nice way of saying to the players (without actually saying it) that they are on the right track. The soundtrack varies in styles from retro sci-fi to modern electronic, but my favourite part was the middle section of the game, which was reminiscent of Koyaanisqatsi.

There's also a new song for the closing credits, once again sung by GlaDOS. Portal's song, “Still Alive” was always going to be a tough song to follow. Firstly, it was an instantly likeable song, and secondly, it was great to have an original song that didn't suck. Let's face it, for every “Snake Eater” there's a dozen “Eyes On Me”. Portal 2's song, “Want You Gone” is more of a grower. The first time I finished the game, I wasn't so sure about it, but after the fourth time, I was singing along with it, just as I was with “Still Alive”.

Oh, shit, she looks pissed…

The story is by far the most satisfying part. At it's most basic level, it runs the risk of being cliché: former enemy becomes unlikely and untrustworthy ally against a common enemy. But Portal 2 makes it work by having well written and performed characters in GlaDOS and Wheatley. Of course, GlaDOS isn't to pleased to see you at first and takes great delight in putting you back in the test chambers and throw insults about your weight and questionable parentage. By contrast, Wheatley is about the stupidest character you will come across you somehow manages to break you free and help you fight against GlaDOS and try to escape Aperture. Spoilers would be unforgivable, because experiencing this story really is one of the high points of the game, but I will say that for a game that bills itself as a puzzler, it delivers one of the best stories in games for a long time. The story goes places and does things with the characters I didn't expect it to. It never failed to make me smile or gasp in shock and I even found myself getting quite emotional during the games closing sequence, it's that powerful. You'll probably leave Portal 2 wondering why more games don't achieve this. Why do so many games try and fail to combine a great story, characters and humour. I think that while it takes the creation of every aspect of itself seriously, it isn't afraid to laugh at itself a little. This makes for a game that is enjoyable to play and to be a part of, something game developers sometimes forget about.

I feel the need to end on a cliché: Portal 2 is a triumph. I'm making a note here: huge success!

Gotham Central: In The Line of Duty

2011-07-15T21:13:00.001Z

Despite living in an age where information is instantly accessible at any time, any place and on pretty much any device, I have an amazing ability for getting into things long after they have finished. I didn't bother watching Babylon 5 until years after it had ended, I still haven't watched all of Firefly and I'm only half way through the first season of Supernatural. It's the same with comics, probably because I don't follow weekly comics, preferring to just pick up a graphic novel and read a story in its entirety. I went into Gotham Central pretty much blind and found it was a hell of a good read. Then I checked Wikipedia to see how much more of it there was, I was disappointed to find there's only another three more books. Yeah, it ended years ago. I'm late to the party again but I suppose it's better than not showing up at all.

Gotham Central is a Batman comic that doesn't really feature Batman at all. I could probably count up all of his panels in this book and it would still be a single digit. The basic idea is this: how does the Gotham City Police Department deal with loonies like Mr Freeze and Two-Face? Normally in a Batman comic, we only see the police occasionally, as Batman has a chat with Commissioner Gordon. Usually, Batman will leave as soon as he has what he needs from the conversation, leaping out the window or off the roof. We, the readers, follow him away from the police station, but in Gotham Central we stay with the police and watch them deal with the situation.

It's a far more realistic approach to this kind of a world. Batman has, for the most part, always been the good guy. He may be darker than Superman, but we, the reader, know what drives him, and know that there is a line he would never cross. But how do the police feel about him? The first story in Book One, In The Line Of Duty, seems on the surface to be a typical Batman story: super villain is in town, threatening to do something bad, there's a count down to said something bad and the clues have to be pieced together to figure out where the super villain will strike. Instead of using the bat-computer and lurking in shadows, we're in an office with normal people, in normal cloths trying to solve the problem in normal ways.

In the end, though, it's not enough. They put all the pieces of the puzzle together, they know where the bad guy – Mr Freeze – is going to attack, but it's just not enough. They have to turn the Bat-Signal on, they have to call him in. Then they have to watch, after all their hard work, as a guy in spandex and a bat mask swoops in, beats the crap out of Freeze, they leaves again. They genuinely resent having to call him in because they've lost one of their own. The opening of the story sees one of the main characters, Driver, loose his partner at the hands of Freeze. They wanted justice, or revenge, however you see it, and they wanted to do it themselves. I've never really seen Batman stop to think about the nameless cops that die at the hands of super-villains, but the characters in this book can't swoop away from the problem on a bat-line. They have to stay behind and pick up the pieces.

The second story, Motive, is pretty much a far more normal police detective story. Sure it still has the comic book super-villain element to it, otherwise there would be no point in setting the story in Gotham, but it's just a small part of the story. It's really about finding the killer of a dead teenage girl and all the emotional baggage that involves, both in terms of the victim and the detective who is still trying to come to terms with the death of his partner.

The final story in Book One, Half A Life, focuses on Detective Montoya, the only face I recognise in this group as a pre-established character. What starts of as a story about her being sued by a rapist who got away on a technicality, soon grows into something far more complicated. First, she is outed as a lesbian and has to deal with all the emotional problems that creates with work mates and family. Then she's framed for murder and has to deal with all the problems the possibly of spending the rest of her life behind bars can cause. Then it turns out Two-Face was behind all of this, which leaves her trapped at the mercy of a dangerous and seriously unstable bad guy.

Of course, Batman swoops in, punches Two-Face in the gut and swoops out again, but not before the police have found themselves hating Batman a little bit more. By this point they really are starting to wish he would just piss off and let them do their job.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first book of Gotham Central and am already working my way through the rest. It's exactly what I look for in a story: something that isn't so much about the literal problem at hand, but about the people dealing with the problem. Gotham Central is a character driven piece, always staying focused on the people, their dilemmas, their struggles and triumphs. It gives a human face to a genre that is usually about guys running around in silly costumes. It's a genre that I've been moving away from more recently, but it was nice to dip my toes in without having to venture too far into the realm of spandex and super-powers.

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, Part 04: HOLY SHIT! A TOMB!!!

2011-06-15T13:13:00.001Z

Homefront Vs. Bulletstorm

2011-03-27T22:07:00.001Z

Two of the big First Person Shooters of the moment are Homefront and Bulletstorm, so let’s see them go head to head to find out which one is the best.

ROUND 01: COVER

Homefront’s cover is very reminiscent of old school Command and Conquer with the headshot of the lone soldier’s obscured eyes staring out towards the player. It is simple yet powerful and sets the tone the developers were looking for. While Bulletstorm’s cover has more colour, it’s going for a more high energy feel and is falling short, mainly due to the two supporting characters is the background standing a bit limply.

WINNER:

ROUND 02: STORY

Here is Homefront’s story in a nutshell: Koreans have invaded and now occupy America. There is no fuel because of a fuel crisis before said Occupation. Rebels capture three tankers of fuel and use the fuel on seven helicopters. Seven helicopters are all it takes to turn the tides of battle in the good guys favour, it seems, and though it means a supporting character is killed by friendly fire, the first battle against the Koreans is won. No, really, that’s it, and considering how much they promoted the involvement of John Milius, it’s a complete disappointment of a story, relying on one or two shock moments to con you into thinking it is deep.

I wasn’t expecting much from a game like Bulletstorm, and was surprised to find a nice story evolve over the course of the game. In a nutshell, you land on the holiday planet from Hell and stuff is trying to kill you. It’s a revenge story that basically hits all the cliché's, but is held together by a group of great voice actors including Steve Blum (from The Big O and Cowboy Bebop) and Jennifer Hale (from Metal Gear Solid and Mass Effect 2). What’s also great about Bulletstorm is that it knows it’s limitations. Homefront is trying to be something it’s not. Bulletstorm knows its a revenge story with crass language and immature humour, but still manages to slip in those little character moments now and again that lets the story rise above something that’s there simply to join the levels together.

The ending to both of these games strongly hints that a sequel is possible or even in the works. Given the choice, I’d rather go back to Bulletstorm and go on another adventure in it’s world.

WINNER:

ROUND 03: CHARACTERS

The main character in Homefront is Jacobs. He is a pilot. That is all we ever get about the main character. He’s a silent protagonist and with the exception of firing a gun and flying a helicopter, he contributes absolutely nothing to the game or it’s story. The supporting characters don’t fare much better and were so unmemorable, I can’t even remember their names. There was Angry Guy, Emotional Woman, and Token Asian-American Guy. They argue constantly, but their arguments don’t bring anything to the story, they grieve over the death of characters the players don’t know or care about and they irritated me so much I was sorely tempted to leave America to its fate.

Bulletstorm’s Grayson Hunt, on the other hand, is a fully fleshed out character. I didn’t like him during the opening of this game. He was an alcoholic scum bag who casually killed a man and put his whole crew in danger on his quest for revenge. But as the game progressed we saw more and more of him human side and his desire to keep the few people left in his life safe. Ishi makes for an interesting supporting character, a man who’s slowly loosing control of himself to an AI in his brain. He betrays Grey a few times over the course of the game, but they always come back together because of their friendship and by the end of the game, Ishi has found his humanity again.

WINNER:

ROUND 04: GAME PLAY

Homefront is glitchy. It’s nothing major that cause the game to crash, but it’s lots of little things that grow into one big irritation. You will get stuck in the graphics and run into invisible walls. Animation is rough and enemies don’t so much stand up from cover as pop up. Enemy AI is terrible and they are quite happy to running into your cross hair then falling down dead. Homefront wants to be Call of Duty but ends up being nothing more than tedious and boring.

Bulletstorm is not only a solid shooter, but combines shooting and melee combat better than any FPS I’ve ever played. Animation looks great, I never got stuck in the graphics and not a single enemy ever ran into my cross hair. In fact, in this game, they even try to out run your sniper bullets. Add to that, it’s over the top violence and the creative ways in which you kill people makes the game a lot of fun to play. Even when I wasn’t playing the game, I was thinking about how much I wanted to be playing it, and even though I have now finished it, I’m going to be replaying it for a long time.

I’d also like to add that Homefront has no variety of enemies, where as Bulletstorm has a vide variety that require different strategies to defeat. Homefront has no stand out Villain, while Bulletstorm has General Sarrano, a nasty piece of work who wont hesitate to destroy a planet to kill Gray and Ishi. Homefront has no boss battles, while Bulletstorm has many, including fighting a giant killer plant that would put Audrey II to shame and the giant monster that is so big, it had to be dealt with with a mounted gun in a helicopter.

WINNER:

OVERALL WINNER:

While it’s crass language and immature humour will instantly turn some people away from it, for those who aren’t bothered or find that funny, they’ll find a great game that is well constructed but also a lot of fun to play. If you’re humming and hawing over which one to play, I can’t recommend Bulletstorm highly enough.

Homefront Review

2011-03-25T12:51:00.001Z

The first thing you will notice about Homefront is that its story is rubbish. For months now, promotional footage of this game has gone out of its was to remind us that it’s written by John Milius of Red Dawn and Apocalypse Now and that he’s created an oh-so-plausible future of Korean expansion and domination. You’ve probably seen the infamous opening sequence in which you are dragged from your home, put in a bus and forced to watch the brutality of Korean occupation. People are beaten, tied up and a child watches as his parents are shot. All very dramatic stuff, all very shocking. It gives you a reason to hate the enemy, something that’s been sorely lacking in a first person shooter since gamers decided they were done with Nazi’s. Sadly, that opening sequence is one of the only times this game achieves anything dramatic and shocking. It will try, later on, but will rarely succeed. Considering how much they promoted John Milius’s involvement and how much they talked about the setup of events, you would expect a strong story and interesting characters. But what you get is a game that has no story and relies on shock moments to pretend it’s deep. It really isn’t and I assure you, no one is more disappointed about that than I am. I had such high expectations for this game, it’s story and it’s bold depiction of an occupation. Once that initial bus ride was over the game might as well have said, “Right, we’ve shown you they’re bastards, now go kill them.” Everything just turns into an uninspired, generic, third person shooter with a story that at best, is simply going through the motions.

Early on, for example, once I was rescued from the bus, and taken to a rebels hideaway, I was given a brief talk about the place and told to talk to the locals before heading off on the next mission. I talked to two of them before realising I getting one line answers from people who wouldn’t even look at me while they said it. I decided to just go on the mission straight away. Later, I came back from a mission to find the Koreans had found the base and killed everyone. The woman did her crying shtick and the guy did his whole, “Farewell, old friend, I’ll cry when no one’s looking,” routine. But me? I felt nothing.

Apparently, I’m suppose to give a shit that this guy’s dead.

Compare this to a sequence in Half-Life 2 which, in many ways is quite similar: you meet up with the other characters, hang out, chat, then it all goes tits-up. You watch Alyx have the tiff with another scientist, her father has a chat with you and then Alyx then takes you on a tour of the facility. Remember her words, “That’s the old passage to Ravenholm. We don't go there anymore,”? They’re full of sorrow, without being overplayed. We feel for her, but then we enjoy her company as we play fetch with Dog. What makes Half-Life 2’s attempt so much more successful is, it works to make you, the player, connect emotionally with the characters around you. Homefront does not. While Half-Life 2 has character interact with you and talk to you, Homefront’s character's regard you the way they would regard an invisible, non-corporeal life form: like you aren’t there.

If the game had had me spend more time with these people, and had me care about them, I might give a damn when they die, but it didn’t. Failing this, the game tries other ways of making you feel the human drama, but these attempts similarly fall flat on their faces. Once event early on has you defend a house in which a woman and her baby are inside. That baby does nothing but cry from the moment the first shot is fired. Realistic perhaps, but also infuriating. Imagine your favourite gun fight in Modern Warfare 2, then imagine a baby crying over it. It doesn’t help either that the child's mother was constantly screaming things like “Don’t hurt my baby!” I was sorely tempted to leave America to its fate right there and then.

The only other time the game came close to evoking an emotional feeling in me was the now infamous mass-grave moment, in which you and your team mates climb in amongst the bodies and play dead in order to avoid a patrol team. You lye there for a good minute or so, staring at dead bodies, while in the background the Koreans have a scout around. It’s quite disturbing, and evokes memories of World War 2 documentaries, though sadly much was made about it prior to release so I knew it was coming.

Had they not publicised this so much, it might have been a truly disturbing moment.

Unfortunately, for a game that wants us to think about the human element to war, the other man on your group seems emotionally detached. He tells you to get into the bodies like he’s telling you to hide behind a rock. A little bit less “Stop being a pussy” sentiments and a little more “Oh, Jesus, we’re climbing into a mass-grave” would have worked.

Then there’s your team mates, who have the personality of a wooden chair. The game tries to make these people interesting by having them argue with one another, but it usually ends up being an annoyance. Leaving aside the fact that they are badly written, walking stereotypes (the guy’s overly aggressive, the woman’s overly emotional and the other one’s a token Korean-American), their arguments always happen after hitting the checkpoint, not before, and they usually come just before you storm through a door. So if your die and go back to the checkpoint and you have to listen to their drivel all over again, instead of just being able to storm the door again. Pretty soon, I was cringing every time these people opened their mouths. They never had anything interesting to say or add to the moment and most of the time I really wished they would just stay quiet. Add to that, the voice actors are badly directed and conversations just don’t flow together properly. It feels more like they’re talking at each other rather than to each other.

The other major problem is on a technical level. More often than not, people’s dialogue cuts out mid-line, before the other person starts talking only to stop mid line. I heard people holding conversations with someone who wasn’t responding to them, I saw people voices go out of sync with their lip movements. I saw people holding conversations with very noticeable gaps between lines. And then, of course, there were the one liners in battle, and if ever there was a reason to go into the menu and just turn the voice volume down to zero, this is it. These guys have one or two lines at most and they say them over and over. Angry-Guy’s favourite was “Take that, you fucks!” and he must say it about four or fives times a fight. Thinking on how many fights there are in the average FPS, I assure you, those fuck took that. A lot.

I hate these guys.

Gameplay has its ups and downs. The first person shooter elements are competent, if uninspired. It’s pretty much a copy-cat of Call of Duty: you look down your sight, aim the red dot, enemies go down in a few shots. Enemies do have an annoying tendency to re-spawn and keep coming until you move forward and trigger the next event. The animation of these guys is also a bit ropey, and at times they don’t so much stand up from behind cover as pop up out of thin air. Their AI is also rather suspect and they tend to run into your crosshair before adding themselves to the growing pile of bodies on the floor. While the game is a bit more forgiving when it comes to how much damage a grenade will do to you, you will go down in just a few hits and the game can be a bit cheap about this. It seemed like the enemies could shoot through some kinds of cover, which is expected in shooters these days, but when I made a point of trying to shoot through the same cover myself, I couldn’t. I also noticed far to many times that the cover itself was not always high enough to keep me fully covered while crouched. I could have gone prone, I suppose, but that seems more like a design fault that basic cover wont protect me from enemy fire.

There’s more than just the enemies getting in your way, though. First off, there’s your team mates. In far more competent games like Modern Warfare, if you want to stand in a spot another soldier is occupying, he’ll move out of your way. In Homefront, your team mate aren’t moving for diddlysquat, and they hold their ground like a tank. Even brushing past them can stop you in your tracks and you have to give them a wide berth before moving on. What will also grind you to a halt is bits of debris or rubbish on the ground. At one point I was hiding behind a concrete barrier that was torn apart by machine gun fire. I tried to run for new cover, but was stuck in place. By debris.

You’re team mates are also morons and while they do occasionally shoot at something, they mostly just aim at nothing and shout their stupid one liners.

Maybe there’s a bad guy inside the walls…

They’re also very guilty of causing events to grind to a halt. They’ll yell at you to do something like charge through a door or crawl through a hole in a wall, but it’s pretty obvious the game wants them to go through first. Instead of being able to pass through the door I would hit an invisible wall and would have to wait for them to pass through first (usually after another pointless conversation.) One time they were yelling at me to run up a stairwell to get to the roof. I went running past them and to the stairs only to realise, when I got to the top, that they hadn’t followed. They were still down the bottom, yelling at me to get up the stairs. I had to run back down and stand behind them in order to get them to go up.

I’ve heard some people complain that the game has far to much “Hollywood Blockbuster” moments in it, too much over the top action in it. Really, that didn’t bother me so much. It bothers me in Modern Warfare 2, because I know that series can do better than over the top action and shock moments. Homefront can’t, and I know it can’t, so the over the top action was all I could look forward to. Things like the white phosphorous going wrong were honestly fun to watch, and I also enjoyed the change of pace at the half way point where I was sneaking about and snipe people from a bell tower. But still, it’s not enough to make you forget that this game has no central villain, no boss battles and no real stand out game play moments.

You really get the feeling that Homefront’s trying, but it never gets there. When Batman: Arkham Asylum was delayed, it was to take the extra time to give the game a polish, and it showed. Homefront could have done with the same. It wouldn’t have fixed all of the games problems, but it may have sorted some of them. Gamers and critics are happy to ignore the stupid story in Modern Warfare 2 because the game play is really, really good. But the hollow, near non-existent story of Homefront, in combination with a lot of game play annoyances come together to make one big mess of a game. I had high hopes for this game and more than anger or annoyance I just felt disappointment from beginning to end.

What a joke.

Homefront

2011-03-19T14:10:00.001Z

I hate Homefront and I haven’t even played it. Once again I’ve had to learn an important lesson: don’t buy new PC games, you just get screwed. Looking at my PC games collection, the newest one (excluding Homefront) is Modern Warfare 2, and even that pissed me off at the time. Most of my PC games are five years old at the newest. Why? Because they don’t come packaged with bullshit.

Sadly, PC gaming is dying a slow death. Like Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs, it’s lying in a pool of it’s own blood, not quite dead, but past the point of no return. And it really is a shame too, because some game types just play better on a PC format. First person shooters work a lot better with a mouse than analogue sticks and the point and click interface of strategy games and never been bested by a controller.

Sadly what once started off as an understandable need to protect games has morphed into bullshit that screws over the honest consumer. Here I am, six hours after first putting the disk in the computer and I still haven’t played it. Why? Because of bullshit.

Take a look at the cover.

You will notice in the top right hand corner it says “Internet connection required for online activation.” Okay, fine, most games do that these days, it’s not the same issue it was a few years ago. What’s irked my is that this is deceptive. Online activation is not all that is required for this game. Part of the installation process requires a download of four gigs. What will become clear to you during this process is that only half of the game is installed, the four gig download is the second half of the game. Yes, you can’t even install the entire game from the disk. There is no way around it. You install half the game, you download the other half.

Stuff like this has a tendency to piss me right off: Why did it have to be fifty per cent, why couldn’t have been ten? It would have been an irritation, yes, it would have been bullshit but it would have been manageable. I have a copy of Button Man: Killer Killer sitting by my computer, I could have sat back and read. I would have waited for you, Homefront, but you insist on downloading four gigs?

Yes, I’m pissed because by internet connection falls somewhere between pathetic and shite.

Six hours is a hell of a long time to wait for your first shot at a game. I feel like such a cranky old woman every time I try to fire up a new game now because I reminisce about the good old days when you put the disk in and away you went, you didn’t sit around waiting for bullshit downloads.

But here’s what really gets me. Here is the first screen you see during the beginning of the installation process:

We are told a total of nine gigs will be installed. Once the actual installation begins, we get this screen telling us that a total of five gigs, not nine, is being installed.

Once this is over it tells you any “updates” that need to be downloaded will begin. This is when the extra four gigs begins downloading Now, without sounding like a primary teacher, five gigs plus four gigs equals nine gigs. So, I can only come to two conclusions. Either:

a) I’ve bought a disk with half a game on it, and the nine gigs refers to the total after the so-called “update” has downloaded.

Or:

b) The entire game is on the disk, and THQ and Steam and dicking us over.

I have a sneaking suspicion it’s the latter.

I hate THQ, I hate Steam and I hate Homefront, even though I haven’t even played it yet. Whatever moron thought this was a good idea is a cunt and is everything that is wrong with modern gaming.

Dead Space 2

2011-02-13T11:25:00.001Z

The original Dead Space was a surprise for me because what I thought was going to be a Resident Evil 4 rip off turned out to be a far natural successor to that game than Resident Evil 5 was. Resident Evil 4 gave that series, and third person shooters in general, a much needed kick up the arse. What Dead Space did was to take the basics of that game and improve upon it, giving us a great gaming experience. Dead Space 2 has given the original a polish, making the game play perfectly. I could hardly believe what I was seeing the first time it happened, but...

You can reload your gun...while running!

If you don't play third-person shooters, this may sound like a trivial point, but it really isn't. How many times have you been pinned to the spot while reloading or shooting a gun? How many times have you been left vulnerable because the character freezes to perform some kind of mandatory animation? I never once saw any hint of this, instead I saw combat that plays very quickly and very smoothly. Melee attacks are also a lot faster, meaning both hits and stomps have a more damaging impact on the enemy and lets you save a few bullets. I also found myself having a lot more fun with stasis and kenesis effects this time around. Sure, you could slow down enemies in the first one, but now you get to rip their claws off and shoot them back at them impaling them and pinning them to a wall.

Another good thing about combat is that the weapons have had an overhaul. They feel more dangerous and now. The flame thrower, for example, was a pathetic weapon that I never used. Here, it feels more deadly, something I could do serious damage to an enemy with and would also work brilliantly against smaller, weaker enemies that tended to attack in bigger numbers. The Ripper was a good idea in the first game, but was a little awkward to handle, but here it's a great tactical weapon that quickly dismembers enemies. The secondary fire of weapons has also been changed, for example, the Pulse Rifle which, in the original, shot bullets three hundred and sixty degrees around Isaac. It sounds good on paper, but was completely ineffective. Now, it shoots grenades, which is highly effective, especially is a group of enemies are coming towards you.

The enemies themselves, the Necromorphs, have changed very little. I still feel like I'm fighting the same enemies, despite a few additions. There's the guy that pukes acid all over you, the ones that super-charge you and the exploding babies, but really, nothing stood out, it just felt like variations on a theme. I think the reason for that is that there isn't any memorable boss battles in this game. I would even question whether this is any boss battles in the game at all. There are moments in the game that present themselves as boss battles. For example, you fight a brute, but, that's an enemy from the first game, so it's nothing new, and you face that same enemy at least another three times, so it's nothing unique to that moment. You also fight an enemy called the Nest, which is very reminiscent of the Leviathan boss battle from the original, but on a smaller scale. So again, nothing new, and it's repeated later on in the game. The final fight (which I again hesitate to call a boss battle) either feels like the game is dicking you over, or if you go in with too much ammo, is laughably easy.

The story is a huge improvement over the original. The original waited until the half way point for the story to really kick in, and Isaac being a silent character meant it was pretty difficult to become emotionally attached to him and feel for him later on when sad things happen. Thankfully, this time Isaac is a full character from the get go, in a hospital on Titan, seemingly in recovery from his experiences in the first game. Of course, it's not long before there's another breakout of Necromorphs and everything goes to hell again. Isaac has to wrestle with his own sanity while he's fighting monsters and seeing images of his dead girlfriend. Still, I felt at times like the game relied to much on the “Go here and fix this,” plot device, but still it's a much stronger outing this time than last.

I think ultimately, Dead Space 2 can't be described as any better, or any worse than the original. While there are times when the game play blows you away and you wonder why all games aren't as awesome as this one, there are times when you think to yourself, “I did this in the first game.” Still, this game plays wonderfully and the things that didn't quite work in the original have been tweaked so that it offers one of the best third person shooters I've ever played. I can't recommend it enough.

Mass Effect 2

2011-01-22T20:59:00.001Z

This is the game I bought an XBox 360 for. I couldn't stand this not being on PS3. I saw trailers, I saw video reviews and I so badly wanted to play. Eventually, I managed to justify it to myself, I picked up the console and the game and I'm so glad I did. I love it. If Mary Poppins was a gamer, she’d tell you that Mass Effect 2 is practically perfect in ever way. Just watch, in a few years it'll become the modern Final Fantasy VII. When someone asks you what your favourite game is and you answer “Mass Effect 2” they'll roll their eyes and say “Oh, everyone likes Mass Effect 2.” There are several elements that comes together to elevate Mass Effect 2 from 'good game' to 'friggin awesome'.

Game play is solid. In fact, it's so good, the game is relatively easy on standard difficulty because it just plays so smoothly. It's a definite step up from the original game where game mechanics, movements and combat were a bit rough around the edges. But for me, what really makes the game is the story and the world created. Worlds. Galaxies. The entire universe is your playground and that sense of freedom is so liberating. The game will guide you to mission specific planets, but there's nothing stopping you from just aiming your ship for a section of space to see what's there. What this ends up doing is allowing for a huge variety of settings. You might be in a war torn urban hell hole for one mission, then in a Jungle paradise the next. You'll be in a high tech state of the art alien city then a worn down old space station. There really is no limits on what the makers of this series could put in the games and because of this it feels so fresh and new.

The story comes in several forms. There is the main story to go on a suicide mission through the Omega Four Relay to confront the Collectors. You are told you need to put a team together and then you are left to your own devices. With the exception of one or two missions throughout the game, the main story really serves to bookmark the game, setting up the events of Mass Effect 2 and then picking up again after the group go through the Omega Four Relay. The rest of the game is made up of a series of mini-missions, and while this would normally irk me in a game, it works wonderfully here. They come in two forms, when you recruit them and when they need a special favour. What makes these missions so much fun is the stories involved around them. The team you are recruiting is not just a bunch of generic blank slate soldiers, they all have history and emotional baggage, and even characters I wasn't as fond of I still found really interesting, for example, Jack. I was gutted to discover I'd broken a Sinead O'Conner impersonator out of prison, especially one who's idea of upper body cloths is a strap that covers up her nipples. But her back story about being a test subject from birth is wonderfully done and as you walk around the smashed up remains of the research centre with her and listen to her 'reminiscing' about the place, you can't help but sympathise with her. I even softened up to super-bitch Miranda after doing her missions and after helping Garrus to kill a man I actually felt like I had bonded with him. That's what's so great about these missions. They aren't just excuses to shoot at people, they add layers to the members of the team and this is very important later on in the game when you have to make some difficult choices.

And while talking about characters I should talk about the main character, Shepard. Except that I can't really, because that's all down to you the player. You customize the gender, look and abilities to suit how you want to play the game. Other games have promised this before, but your character really just ends up a blank slate, your only character traits readable on a good/evil scale. While Mass Effect 2 also has that scale, it's more noticeable how it effects your character in the game. Choosing whether to be the good guy (a paragon) or the bad guy (a renegade) dictates how you can interact with people and the kind of choices you can make. For example, when on the fortieth floor facing off against a very nasty man I was given the choice. I honesty can't tell you what would happen if I made the paragon choice, I just kicked him out the window. The game never even says, “look what you did, you're a bad person,” instead it says, “wow, you're a bad ass.”

That's what I love about this game, the freedom to go anywhere you want and the freedom to be who you want to be. This is without a doubt the best game I've played all year. I'm so glad I finally picked up an Xbox to play this -

Wait a minute...

Red Dead Redemption

2011-01-22T17:30:00.001Z

My memories of Red Dead Revolver are brief and negative. I didn't like it because what I expected was Grand Theft Auto meets the Wild West and what I got was a game that bored me so I quickly moved on to Gun. Skip forward five years or so to Red Dead Redemption. It's Grand Theft Auto meets the Wild West...and a damn good game.

I actually put off playing this game for a long time because of my growing hatred for the GTA series. While I would never dispute that Rockstar are fantastic at making living, breathing worlds, I would argue that they don't make good games. Level design, mission designs have always been horrendous and the controls for driving and combat have always been frustrating as hell. The only GTA game I can honestly say was well put together and a genuinely enjoyable experience was Chinatown Wars...a game that exactly four people played. So it really took me by surprise by just how much better this one is.

If you strip it to its bare bones it plays a lot like GTA IV, so comparisons are unavoidable, but what I've found is that the core mechanics are so much better in this one. Combat, for example works a lot better. It's the same cover based shooting we've gotten use to, but thankfully a lot of the irritation is now gone as people go down in a shot or two. It's becoming very out-dated for enemies to be able to absorb a clip full of ammo before falling down and while this does make combat a bit easy, I think this game is less concerned with giving you a challenge and more with giving you a fun experience. It wants you to feel like John Wayne when you pull out your pistol and shoot a dude between the eyes. Shooting bad guys, storming forts and taking on small armies are meant to remind you of those fantasies you had as an eight year old when your index and middle finger were the nozzle of a gun.

Horse riding too is a lot of fun. The one thing that always turned me off in GTA was racing. Let's face it, the car controls were shit and I always knew that a racing mission was where the whole game would grind to a halt for a week while I tried to win the damn race. Racing in Read Dead Redemption is a lot more fun because it's a nice change of pace and visuals, and you don't have to worry about taking a corner to fast and crashing into a lamp post. It is also fun and easy to pull of action sequences while riding. Often missions will call on you to defend a coach from bandits and so you will have to ride and shoot at the same time. If a non-lethal take-down is required, you can ride your horse and lasso someone at the same time. Much like combat, it's easy to pull off and gives you that feeling of being the cool cowboy type in a western movie.

The story and characters are typical GTA: John Marsdon is both dangerous and deadly, yet always polite and loyal to his friends. The story, while retaining elements of Grand Theft Auto, had filtered out much of the immature humour. It retains a healthy dose of it, but really the story has more of a threatening tone hanging over it. Marsdon obviously cares a great deal about his family's safety and being forced into hunting down his former gang weighs heavy on his mind, so jokes about titties and blowjobs would have been out of place here. The pre-mission cut scenes feel more dedicated to adding to the story than just having someone say “I'm going to go shoot people, wanna come?” and the dialogue exchanges during the long horse rides help to add some extra characterization or fill up some little holes in the plot.

The supporting characters are the usual mix of crazy people in a crazy world, however I felt like some of them, instead of getting a grand exit they deserved, just dropped out of the game. You spend the early part of the game building up a team to story Bill's fort and once the task is over they say their goodbyes and leave. I enjoyed their company and wanted to continue to see them turn up in the rest of the game. The Mexico sections were more satisfying in this regard because Mexico is full of some evil bastards and naturally you get caught up in the middle of it all.

There's plenty to do when not doing the story, there's a lot of side missions you'd expect from a western game, like herding cows and breaking horses, but there is also a lot more random encounters with strangers that open up missions as big as a main story mission, sometimes even missions that take place over several encounters with strangers. There's also treasure hunts for extra money and gang hide-out's to clear, so even when you aren't doing the story, there's still plenty to do.

The only major thing I can think to criticize is this: While the games main strength is that you can pull off a lot of cool stuff really easily, the games main weakness is that you can pull off a lot of cool stuff really easily. I'm not saying I want the game to be frustrating, but and option for difficulty would have been nice because this game is really, really easy. You'd have to be pretty crap at computer games not to see this one through to the end. The few times that I did see the game over screen was down more to my own stupidity rather than the game being difficult. If your looking for a challenge, this isn't the game for you. But for me, Red Dead Redemption was everything I ever wanted from Rockstar but never got from Grand Theft Auto. It's characters are interesting, it's story more mature and emotional engaging, and its game play is never anything less than fun.

Sonic 4, Episode 01

2010-10-21T15:37:00.001Z

Sonic the Hedgehog was the first computer game I ever played and it, along with its Mega Drive sequels, have a very special place in my heart. We all know that once Sonic moved into 3D, the quality of the games dropped dramatically. Unlike his then-rival Mario, Sonic just didn’t work in a game that wasn’t a 2D side-scroller. It’s taken Sega a long time, but they’ve finally made a good sonic game. Unfortunately there’s just one small problem: I don’t really know how I feel about it.

There are a couple of game play irritations. For one, the floaty gravity. Also the fact that Sonic does not run straight away but instead walks for a few steps before picking up the pace. This is highly annoying, especially in boss battle situations when you need to move out of danger fast, but don’t have enough space to build up speed. But really, these were just irritations compared to the thing that truly irked me about Sonic 4: ever zone is a recreation of an old one.

It is most painfully obvious during the boss battles. The boss battle for the Green Hill Zone, is probably the most iconic of the boss battles, everyone who ever played a Sonic game will be familiar with it.

So when I saw the this recreated in Sonic 4…

…I though, ‘Okay, we’re starting off with a bit of nostalgia, the game will do it’s own thing in the next level.’

The next level was a remake of Casino Night Zone from Sonic 2.

And the boss battle in Sonic 4 is a remake of the boss battle in Sonic 2.

Next zone, we’re reminded of the Labyrinth Zone, infamous for it’s hellish boss battle of navigating traps rather than a direct confrontation.

As I approached the Lost Labyrinth’s boss battle, I though, ‘Oh, God, please not the Labyrinth Zone’s boss battle…’

By the time I reached the boss battle in Metal Gear* zone, a remake of Metropolis Zone, I thought, ‘He’s going to have big bubbles round him like in Sonic 2’

He had big bubbles on him, like in Sonic 2.

Finally the E.G.G Station Zone, which doesn’t fail to keep up the trend. In Sonic 2, Dr ~~Eggman~~ Robotnik jumped into a giant robot and attacked Sonic.

He does the same in Sonic 4.

Admittedly the game threw in a new element with the robot malfunctioning and running rampant, but it’s too little too late.

While the title of this game suggests a continuation of the original in terms of style and game play, what you instead get is a remake. There’s nothing new, there’s nothing original and so I have to question what the point of it is. It’s fun, but only because the original games were fun. You’ll probably replay it, because like the old ones, you want to try and get through the acts as quickly as possible. For fans like me who were playing these games fifteen or more years ago, it’s hard not to be incredibly cynical about Sonic 4. It feels more like a prologue, like Sega is teasing us about the kind of Sonic game they could make. We can only hope that they decide to give it to us when they get around to releasing Episode 2.

*P.S Am I the only gamer who was doing Solid Snake impressions while playing through the Metal Gear zones?

Alan Wake

2010-09-25T15:55:00.006Z

Alan Wake is an interesting experiment. Like Heavy Rain, this game is meant to be more story driven, but unlike Heavy Rain this one appealed to me because it seemed like there was an actual game to be played. It's funny then that most of my gripes are about the game play, but I'll get to that.

The story is one that will keep you interested throughout the game. Alan Wake is a writer who has a hell of a case of writers block. He and his wife, Alice, take a break in the secluded town of Bright Falls and wackyness ensues. Alice is lost at the bottom of a lake, taken by the dark presence in the town. He then looses a week of memories in which he writes a manuscript, a horror story that is coming to life around him. Naturally he has to fight the hordes of darkness while trying to find a way to save Alice.

The story is told partly by cut scenes and partly by in-game voice-overs where Alan narrates to the player. These narrations usually serve to tell the story, but also tell the player what to do next or where to go. For the most part they don't feel intrusive, but occasionally they feel a bit awkward. When Alan accidentally stood on a bear trap, he proceeded to monologue about standing on a bear trap. That's the main problem with the story: it tries to present itself as a first person perspective book, despite being presented on a medium that is more akin to films. You don't need to be told something happened when you just saw it happen.

Occasionally things tend to happen by the power of plot rather than because they make any kind of logical sense and more than once I felt the plot was just a tool for dragging out the game play. For example, at one point I had to make my way to a radio station. In this game, going from point A to point B is never a simple five minute exercise, it will take you about an hour to past through the woods. When I finally got to the Radio station, it was a minute at most before the police turned up and I had to go on the run again through the woods. From a player perspective, it was hard to feel like I was making much progress when I reached a goal only to be given more of the same to do.

The graphics are lovely to look at and combined with a haunting soundtrack do a nice job of bringing everything to life around you. All of the running around forests made me think that this is what I wished Final Fantasy XIII had been. It may seem a bit odd to compare the two games, but not only did this game give a more solid story, it felt much more open. Final Fantasy XIII irritated the hell out of me because each section was just a case of running down an invisible corridor. Alan Wake, on the other hand, drops you in the forest and says, “this is the general direction you are meant to go in” and leaves you to it. It allows you to do some exploring, which often leads to finding extra supplies. One complain about the graphics, though, comes in character expressions. Honestly, the faces look rubbery and expressionless most of the time, and for a game that was in development for four years, you really expect better. I don't know if this stuff was motion captured or not, but I really doubt it.

The game play does bring some interesting ideas. For one, you don't have a cross hair on your screen, instead you aim with your flash light, but even when you have the flash light zeroed in on the bad guys you don't want to shoot. The enemies being nightmare creatures, they are weakened by light, so you keep the flash light on them until they are weakened to the point where shooting them takes them down permanently. In fact, the most deadly weapons in this game are not shotguns or rifles, but flares, flash bang grenades and flare guns. Its a nice contrast to something like Resident Evil's gore and explosions and decapitations.

Unfortunately the novelty does wear off after a while, because the game play remains largely unchanged throughout the entire game, and worse, the enemies rarely change. Yes, there are times when you get overwhelmed with larger groups of enemies, but you're fighting the same enemies at the end of the game that you are at the beginning. And do we really need another Doctor Salvador clone? I'm really getting tired of chainsaw wielding enemy.

This game never claims to be a survival horror type of game (and just as well since it's not even remotely scary) but still, you get into that survival-horror mentality. Because ammunition is far from plentiful in this game, I tended to stockpile. I would only use flares in emergencies, I wouldn't use my flash bangs and I would never use my flare gun, because I figured that I would run into a boss battle that I would need all this stuff for. I never did, and while there are one of two fights you could probably slap the boss battle label onto, these enemies were never anything more slightly beefed up versions of regular enemies. But what really got my goat was that at the end of every level, I lost my entire inventory. Everything I had spent a level collecting was gone, and I would be completely defenceless again, having to start with a revolver and build it all up again. Now, fair enough, from a story perspective this makes sense. The police are hardly going to lock you up in a cell with all your weapons, but with a little imagination, the game could have found a way to give them back to us (for example, retrieving them from an evidence locker). Once I learned to use what I had when I had it, the difficulty of this game dropped dramatically. In the last few sections of the game, it even started happening mid-chapter, for example, when Alan had to jump out of the helicopter. When he landed, he gave us a narration about loosing his guns in the fall. It was frustrating, and it felt like the developers were trying to artificially create more challenges by taking away the items that made fights easier instead of coming up with a variety of enemies that require different strategies to defeat.

And really, that's where this game missed the boat. We're talking about enemies that have been created it the pages of a book. That very premise would allow for some crazy stuff to happen, for creatures that could be over the top, or even go against the laws of physics or logic or sanity. But all we got was the same guy throwing an axe at us and the only time we went against something big, it was essentially a tornado and there was a box of unlimited ammo at the players feet.

Still, I'd say give the game a go because it does tell an interesting story and while it never truly delivers any memorable game play moments, you'll be intrigued enough to stick with it till the end…an ending which might as well say: “To be Continued in the Downloadable Content.”

Resident Evil 5: Lost in Nightmares

2010-08-09T21:50:00.001Z

Lost in Nightmares is a prequel to Resident Evil 5, although, let’s face it, it should have been in the main game. Simply telling us Jill was dead was sloppy story telling. Worse still, you knew she wasn’t dead. You knew she would be back. If this had been a prologue in the game you would have been less certain. But it’s not, it’s downloadable content that comes months after the game. Don’t waste your time or money – it’s rubbish.

The first section of the game is an homage to the original Resident Evil game and by homage, I mean copy. Really, you stand in the main hall thinking, “Is this the mansion from Resident Evil 1?” before remembering it kind of got blown up. I swear to god, that main hall looks near identical and the nostalgia soon fades away and you’re left with this unpleasant feeling of Déjà Vu. This idea of recreating things from the first game doesn’t stop with the main hall. The dinning hall in the next room is the same as the original game. Windows smash open as you run past them just like the original game. You go into a room with a grand piano and Jill immediately runs to it an plays Moonlight Sonata, just like the original game.

Now, seriously, does Jill just automatically play Moonlight Sonata every time she sees a grand piano?

This causes the wall to open and Chris can obtain an emblem, just like the original game. After a while, I started to get really annoyed with this. If I wanted to be playing a modernized version of the original, I would pop in the GameCube remake and play that. One tip of the hat towards the original game is fine, but do we really need it to go this far? Playing Resident Evil 5 was like playing Resident Evil 4, now playing Lost in Nightmares is like playing Resident Evil. Show us something new.

The other major problem with this first section of the game is that there are no enemies, and that’s what really kills the game pretty much every other time you play it. It’s a shame really, because despite my complaints about this being a rehash of the original game, it’s still very atmospheric and creepy. The first time you run past one of the windows that smashes open, you get a fright before you realise nothing is jumping through the window at you. The first time I played Resident Evil Nemesis, I crapped myself when Nemesis burst through the window. The second time I played it I was crapping myself before I got to the window because I knew what was coming. The second time you play Lost in Nightmares and you run past the window, you don’t even react to it because you know nothing will attack you.

After you play the piano and then go off to do something else, when you come back to the main hall you can hear the piano. The first time I heard that, I got freaked out and excited all at once. Someone was in that room playing the piano! I made my way back up there and the music was getting progressively louder. When I got up to the door the music stopped. Whoever was in there knew I was about to enter. Now just imagine if you walked into that room and there’s Wesker at the piano playing Moonlight Sonata:

“Ah, Chris, Jill, come in, sit down. I was just thinking about the Arklay Mansion…”

No one’s there. The room was empty. The second time I played the game and heard the music in the main hall, I though “whatever”.

The second section of the game is where things not only get frustrating, they get really boring. You fall into a trap and naturally lose all your weapons. This causes something of a problem since you now have to deal with actual bad guys. Te way to deal with them is to set a trap with the conveniently located spiked ceilings. You have to find four cranks and have one person arm the crank while another leads the enemy into the trap. It’s so dull . You find four cranks and lead the same four enemies into the same trap. Why couldn’t we have just has a big fight against overwhelming numbers? Why did we have to have a boring, uninspired non-fight?

And that’s the problem with this whole experience is that with a little bit more creative thinking, it could have been something interesting, a fun little addition to the Resident Evil 5 experience but it just feels like the developers couldn’t be bothered. Finally, we end with a uninspired lather, rinse, repeat fight with Wesker. In the end, it’s kind of like watching the Star Wars prequel: you know how it all ends and getting to that ending doesn’t satisfy in the least.

Save your money for something better.

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

2010-08-08T21:53:00.001Z

You want to know the words that sends a cold chill down the spins of gamers? “Movie tie-in.” They always suck. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is a tie-in to the Jake Gyllenhaal movie that I'll probably never watch, so naturally the alarm bells start ringing. But I've been a fan of the Prince of Persia series since playing Sands of Time, a game that revolutionised platforming and showed us how games should play. So naturally I feel obligated to check out The Forgotten Sands, despite the movie tie-in status. Now I hope you're sitting down because what I'm about to tell you may shock you: the game is actually pretty good. It has some issues, and compared to other games in the series, it maybe doesn't hold up as well, but as far as movie tie-ins go, it's bloody brilliant.

The combat of the game is something that has been criticized by some and it's easy to see why. While the old games had you stringing combo's together to pull off fancy attacks, Ubisoft have really stripped it back to the basics where one button handles all your main attacks. It's disappointing to loose some of my favourite moves from the older game, but combat still manages to be fun because instead of throwing four or five guys at you in a fight, it throws twenty at you and perhaps the huge increase in numbers was the reason why the combat has been streamlined. It still manages to be fun, though, because of the numbers and the variety of enemies. You have your basic pawns, the slightly bigger guys, then ones with shields that need to be stunned with a kick first before you can deal the damage. Then there's the bigger guys: big creatures that charge at you like bulls, trolls who want to stomp a mudhole in your ass and the really big guys with their really big swords. The only time combat became dull for me was in the last section of the game when you get a new, more powerful sword. This sword takes down pretty much everyone in a single slash, so fancy combat becomes meaningless and it's just a case of mashing the attack button until everything's dead. Even the really big guys went down in about four hits.

A new element to the game is the Ice/Fire/Wind/Earth elements that you can use in battle. Fire and Ice leave a trail of fire or ice as you move which will damage enemies if they touch it. I'll be honest, I found it completely ineffective so I never used it. Perhaps if these elements effected the Prince's sword and could be used to directly attack the enemies it would have been a different story. The Earth element creates a stone shield around you, but health pick ups were so plentiful, I never needed it (and now I think about it, I don't think I died in a single standard fight). The only one of any practical effect was the Wind element that blasts enemies away, a handy thing to have when surrounded by hordes of sand creatures.

The big breath of fresh air in this game is the time based powers. There are two major ones to speak of. First, there's the ability to freeze water into a solid state. Doing this allows you to pass certain areas by turning the streaming water into pillars to climb, poles to swing on or walls to run across. This is kind of basic stuff, until you start getting to the trickier stuff that requires you to constantly freeze and unfreeze, usually while you're leaping through the air.

The other major power is used while in an old, ruined palace, you are given the memories of how it was in it's glory days. You are able to bring back a section of palace that no longer exists. So if a platform is long gone and you need to stand on it to progress, you can bring it back. The catch comes in the fact that you can only bring back one piece, so if you need to jump from that platform to another than doesn't exist, you must jump off of the old one, then in mid air get rid of it and bring the new one into existence. It's not long before the game intertwines both of these time powers together, and it makes for some interesting and tricky platforming moments. This is the reason I'm ultimately quite forgiving on the game because it does some of the most interesting things for platforming in the Prince of Persia series since The Sands of Time. Sadly, that will probably get overlooked since this is just a movie tie in.

There are a few negatives to The Forgotten Sands. First off, the game is short. I finished it in about six to eight hours, but I'm not the fastest gun in the west. Some could probably finish it in one sitting, especially considering that the default difficulty setting offered little challenge where the combat was concerned.

Secondly, the camera is a bitch. There were times when it would hold on fixed camera angles which stopped me from seeing where I was meant to go and also made knowing which way to aim the analogue stick difficult, usually when swinging on poles or leaping from pillars. Changing camera angles would often make the Prince veer of in the wrong direction and objects I was jumping to sometimes seemed nearer or further away than they actually were so I missed them. During boss battles, the camera has the annoying habit of locking on the boss no matter which way you run off in, so if you want to deal with the smaller enemies on screen it's often difficult to even see them properly in order to fight them.

So the game is not perfect, but it has enough interesting new elements to justify it's existence and justify being played. It's ultimately just an enjoyable distraction, but that's a hell of a lot better than just about any other movie tie-in game ever conceived.

Best Thing I've Seen In A Game In Ages (Probotector)

2010-08-05T21:30:00.002Z

Urban Strike (SNes) Review

2010-08-05T21:28:00.000Z

Avatar

2010-07-13T12:05:00.001Z

What utter rubbish. I am absolutely amazed that this is the biggest selling film of all time. It's bad enough that the previous film to hold that title was Titanic (another James Cameron film) but now this garbage? What is wrong with film-goers? Can you people not see past special effects?

Okay, wait. This is a special effects film and I hate what digital effects have done to movie making. Films like The Matrix are just an excuse for showcasing the latest computer created effects. Very rarely these days do film makers use digital effects as an aid to bringing the world they've created to life. I'm perfectly prepared to admit that James Cameron has achieved this. The world of Pandora is fascinating and not since Gandalf and Pippin rode up the tiers of Minis Tirith have I wished I could actually step into a film and explore the world. And let's not forget that we're talking about a film that features big, blue smurfs. These big blue smurfs are the best digital characters I've seen in a film since Gollum, because like Gollum, you really believe that they are alive. They move naturally, they breath, and their facial expressions are subtle are real instead of over the top and gimic-y.

So there, I've said it. Avatar, on a visual level, is very impressive. But I did start this review with the words “What utter rubbish,” didn't I? If you're the kind of person who just wants a film to blow you away with visuals while you munch your popcorn and slurp your Coca-Cola then you will love Avatar.

But if you're the kind of person who wants a good story...?

Avatar requires you to turn your brain off, because if you even start to annualize this story in any way, you brain will hurt and it will hurt bad. The major issue I have with this story is it's social commentary. Now, I grew up on Star Trek, so social commentary doesn't bother me. In fact, all the great science fiction stories are really just talking about the social issues of its day. My problem is, good social commentary is subtle, Avatar does not do subtle. I think the only way James Cameron could have been more obvious with his social commentary would be to have it take place in New York as the Twin Towers collapsed.

Here's the basic set up: Humans have gone to the planet Pandora to mine a substance that sells for billions and billions of dollars (or nearest future equivalent). They call this substance “unobtainium” which is the Na'vi word for “oil”. Problem is though, the largest deposit of the oil is right under a gigantic tree in the middle of a forest. I don't remember the giant tree been given a name, so I'll just call it Caras Galadhon. It's where a tribe of the Na'vi live. The Na'vi (the afore mentioned big blue Smurfs) who worship the land and respect nature...kind of like, umm....Native Americans...? Yep, the Na'vi are Native Americans, from the way they dress and the sound of their language to the threat of the evil white man wanting to run them off their land.

Jack Sully, a.k.a John Dunbar a.k.a Paul Atreides, is the man who is sent in to observe and befriend them and try to convince them to relocate. The gimmick of this movie is that he lies is this big capsule...thing that never really explained...and his mind goes into the body of an artificially created Na'vi. Of course, he ends up spending so much time with the Na'vi that he eventually becomes one of them and defects to the other side when the attack on them comes. Kind of like Dances With Wolves. Or Dune.

And when the attack comes I really don't know why. For a film that spends so much of it's time trying to convince you that the Smurfs are real living creatures, it really presents humans like caricatures. The main adversary of the film in the Colonel, who for no real reason really wants to destroy the planet, kill the Na'vi and take the oil. He's basically just a two dimensional, stereotypical army bad guy. J. Michael Straczynski said in a Babylon 5 commentary that a monster doesn't see a monster in the mirror. Bad guys feel justified in what they are doing. They think that they are doing the right thing, or the wrong thing for the right reasons. The Colonel is the bad guy of this film...just because. There is never any real justification for his actions, except for hints very late in the movie that Earth is a shit hole with no resources left. But never at any point does the film say clearly what the characters motivations are beyond his itchy trigger finger and his desire to commit genocide.

Why is morality in this film so black and white? Has James Cameron's ability to tell a story dropped so much that he can't even come up with decent character motivations? Why are all the humans bad guys? Why are all the Na'vi good guys? Why does the Colonel decide suddenly, 'screw diplomacy, lets kill them all'? Why is it, that out of the entire military presence on Pandora, when the attack starts, exactly one person in the field (that chick in the chopper) decided she wont open fire on innocent civilians? Why are Humans so morally corrupt in the future that they don't care about the murder of innocents? Why couldn't the Colonel have better motives? Even if he was doing it out of greed, or racism or insanity, surely that would have been more interesting to explore than anything we saw in the film.

And speaking of motivations, the main characters motivations are pretty two dimensional as well. The major character trait of Jack Sully is that he is paralysed and in a wheelchair. He's just taking on the military job to pay for an operation to fix his paralysis, of course, but once he's in the Avatar body he can walk about just fine. I never really felt for most of the film that he was doing anything out of a desire to help the Na'vi or fulfil an assignment. I honestly felt that the only reason he was doing anything in the Avatar body was so that he could walk again, which feels like a shallow and lazy plot device.

When the first major attack on the Na'vi occurs, the military basically bomb the crap out of Caras Galadhon until it topples and it's so painfully, obviously 9/11. James Cameron is basically saying that the Colonel is Osama Bin Laden, which, considering he's the head of an American run military operation is ballsy and cringe-worthy all at once. Later, when the second attack comes another member of the exactly five people in the whole film who decide not to take innocent lives, refers to the next attack as a “shock and awe campaign.”

Screw you, James Cameron, could you be any more obvious? And of course, by this point in the film the Na'vi have stopped being Native Americans and have morphed into Iraqi civilians. You could argue that he's being really clever and he's saying that George W Bush was just as bad as Bin Laden (and you'd probably have a pretty valid case there) but I don't think, after sitting through two and a half hours of this, that James Cameron has the ability anymore to tell a story with that much intelligence. It's hard to believe now that there was a time when he made films with far better stories and characters. Granted, in his better stories the bad guys were machines from the future and aliens that bleed acid, but he could still write good characters. I'm talking about the relationship between Sarah and Reese in Terminator. Knowing the future of mankind doing a total mind-fuck on Sarah in the second film. Ripley's post traumatic stress and her mother/daughter relationship with Newt in Aliens. Man, he's really dropped the ball on this one.

Now, I've kind of been taking the piss out of the things Avatar steals from (Lord of the Rings, Dances with Wolves, Dune) but James Cameron manages to rip himself off. In the final fight, the Colonel gets into a big robot suit of armour:

Look familiar?

Really? He's ripping himself off? Have things really gotten that bad?

James Cameron claims that he's had this story in the works for years and has been waiting for technology to catch up. He's talking crap. Avatar is the new Matrix. It's all about the effects. As impressive as they are, Cameron's focus is very much on them and not on telling a good story. The story of evil white men forcing people off their land has been told many times already and he brings nothing new to it, except painfully obvious social commentary.

And this is the largest grossing film of all time?

Where did James Cameron go wrong?