Pickled Unicorn

Sepia Gamer - Episode 1

2008-06-05T01:34:00.001+01:00

A little experiment, enjoy!

Grand Theft Auto IV - In Brief

2008-05-27T02:17:00.003+01:00

(This was my entry for a review competition for the Escapist. The conditions were simple, no more than 500 words. Here's what I knocked up.)

Hype, like many four letter words, carries a lot of negative connotations. Hype suggests that a product might not be as good as we have been lead to believe. Hype suggests that we are being lied to. Hype puts games on pedestals, creating fantasies that the reality often struggles to live up to. This was never going to bode well for Grand Theft Auto 4, as it is possibly the most hyped game in existence. In the eyes of many gamers, Grand Theft Auto 4 is some sort of holy treasure, like the Grail or the knucklebone of a saint. Most gamers seem to be asking themselves what they love most about GTA4 when the real question they should be asking is whether the game deserves such adulation. A worrying number of reviewers have thrown perfect scores at the game and if I hadn’t been honest with myself, I suppose I might have joined them.

I’m not immune to hype and it’s a horrible feeling to have excitement turn to disappointment. I wanted to love this game; I queued up at midnight with my pre-order ticket in my hand hoping it would be everything people claimed it would. In the cold light of day, however, I only like this game, and after such high expectations, I’m not sure that that’s enough.

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what’s wrong with the game; it’s certainly nothing overt, but as they say, the devil’s in the details. Rockstar North have created a sandbox without equal. Liberty City is a living, breathing place with sweeping urban vistas, glass monoliths that touch the clouds and quick flowing rivers of traffic, but the populous is jarringly low-res and driving isn’t as much fun as it used to be; the cars don’t handle well and are too eager to throw you through the windscreen at the slightest bump. The combat is much more sophisticated and deadly but now every shoot-out is a major engagement with a laboured and tedious pace and it’s all too easy to be gunned down by some nameless ‘gangsta’ before you have a chance to react, forcing you to do the whole thing again. The characters are vibrant and rounded and the writing, freed from the constraints of the movie tributes of past games, has a depth and personality unprecedented in the Grand Theft Auto series; but each set of missions feels isolated and disjointed; the gameplay too nebulous and unfocused for the writing to really shine.

Like many things, the myth is often much more attractive than the reality. The myth of Grand Theft Auto 4 is that it is a flawless, peerless piece of video game art, a thing to be revered and venerated, the pinnacle of gaming to date. The truth is that GTA4 is a well made, if flawed, game that has strayed away from the gleeful escapism I enjoyed most about the series, and replaced it with something I don’t recognise anymore.

(After writing this review, I played a lot more of the game. Sadly, my opinion of it has gone down)

Another crack at this video malarky

2008-05-12T21:17:00.001+01:00

I'm a glutton for punishment

A very, very quick audio-visual Portal review

2008-05-11T10:42:00.002+01:00

Christ these things take a long time to do.

DMC4 review, video style!

2008-05-07T16:40:00.002+01:00

I recently had a theory that due to my background in the performing arts, also known as my drama A-level, my reviews may be better if listened to rather than read. To that end I recorded my Devil May Cry 4 review and added a few pictures so your eyes don't get bored.

It wasn't planned as a Zero Punctuation rip-off, that's just how it turned out.

Dark Sector Review

2008-05-06T19:19:00.001+01:00

Dark Sector Review

Dark Sector is a third-person shooter from Canadian developers Digital Extremes, whose biggest claim to fame is that they helped Epic make the Unreal games. They’ve released a few titles on their own, but in all honesty, none of them were very good. Not exactly a great pedigree then, so how does Dark Sector hold up?

Well, I consider it a bad sign when the manual for a game makes no mention of the game’s plot, or even gives the main character’s name, so imagine my trepidation when I started to play. If I lived in a perfect world, all video games would be plot-heavy character pieces with sharp dialogue and gameplay that supports the story like a well-made bra; but I don’t have my perfect world so sometimes I have to make compromises. If a game is fun, then I can forgive weaknesses in the story. This works in Dark Sector’s favour as it seems to have as much use for a plot as Paris Hilton has for a Large Hadron Collider.

Actually, that’s not entirely fair, Dark Sector does have a plot, but it’s very much an excuse for the gameplay. Dark Sector casts you as Hayden Tenno, a reluctant CIA assassin with a murky past who is sent into a fictional Eastern European country to take down a maniac with a man-made biological weapon. Fairly early on, and somewhat predictably, Hayden gets infected and grows a Death-Frisbee out of his right arm, which he makes good use of as strives to complete his mission. Add in a double-cross and a woman from Hayden’s past and that’s pretty much all you need to know. As plots go, it’s no Bioshock, but as a vehicle to drive the game, it does ok.

On paper, Dark Sector sounds like one of the worst games in the world. It takes a dab of Resident 4, a few teaspoons of style from late-eighties anime hero The Guyver, the tiniest pinch of Heavenly Sword, the weapon out of Krull and a couple of massive handfuls of Gears of War and mixes them all together. It would be easy to dismiss the resulting soup as a derivative mess not worth your time, but it holds together surprisingly well.

Now, when I say that Dark Sector has a lot if Gears of War in it, I mean it in the same way that New York has a lot of Americans in it. I’m assuming that Digital Extremes realised that they did their best work with Epic, so they ‘borrowed’ bits of Epic’s recent hit. The resemblance to Gears of War is uncanny, to the point that even the sprinting animation has the same shaky camcorder look. It’s at its strongest in the combat as running headlong into a fight will get you killed very, very quickly, so you have to hide behind pillars, crates, low walls and other bits of stuff strewn about the levels and pop out from cover to fire, exposing yourself to harm with every shot. Luckily for Hayden, a few moments rest will restore him to full health. Sound familiar? I imagine it does to the millions of people who own Gears of War. Dark Sector certainly isn’t going to win many points for originality and that might put some people off, but the game isn’t entirely without new ideas.

Firstly, the Death-Frisbee, which I refuse to call a glaive, because a glaive is a sword on a long stick and not a razor-tipped boomerang, is like the Swiss-Army Knife of weapons, ignoring for the moment that the Swiss-Army Knife itself is a much better contender for the title. Aside from the fact that it’s an insanely sharp whirling instrument of death that can slice limbs off unfortunate foes, it can bust open locks, grab distant ammo caches or weapons and it’s instrumental in solving the assorted puzzles in the game. Utilising the after touch system borrowed from Heavenly Sword and the Death-Frisbee’s ability to store fire, electricity or ice for a short time, Hayden can open malfunctioning doors, burn away the infection lingering on architecture, create makeshift cover out of sprinkler systems or simply, really badly hurt his enemies. The puzzles are rarely difficult, and are often more about aiming properly than really figuring anything out, but it’s a nice break from shooting people or frisbeeing their legs off. The Death-Frisbee also lights up like an Indiglo watch, which is a useful, if odd, power as many of the levels in the game don’t have great natural lighting. Finally, the Death-Frisbee is Hayden’s primary melee weapon, but it seems oddly ineffective when used in this way.

Digital Extremes have added a few more tricks to the combat to differentiate it from Gears. Hayden principally fights soldiers of the fictional country he’s stuck in, but the soldiers have come prepared to fight an outbreak of the bio-weapon, and all their guns are fitted with devices that render then useless after a few seconds when picked up by an infected creature. It adds an interesting dimension to the proceedings, especially in the later levels when ammo is scare. Firing at full auto, desperately trying to get off as many shots as possible before the weapon deactivates is actually quite exciting. This mechanic is supported by Hayden being limited to two guns, a rifle of some description, and a pistol. He has the Death-Frisbee as well, but he can only use it when wielding his pistol, and while it’s undeniably powerful, Hayden must wait for it to return to his hand before he can throw it again and it’s range is rather limited. The only way for Hayden to get a weapon that won’t burn out before he can even fire off a full clip is by buying off black-market arms dealers, who hang out in sewers. It’s also the only place Hayden can install weapon upgrades. The additional level of depth to the weapons stops the game from feeling too much like Gears of War, although admittedly, it does it by making it feel a bit like Resident Evil 4 as well.

The game is also full of nice little touches that show that the design process consisted of more than borrowing Epic’s homework twenty minutes before class. The game use the Havok physics engine, so objects not nailed down move in that pseudo-realistic way that always happens when Havok is involved. You can shoot grenades out of the air, or if you’re a good shot, hit them with the Death-Frisbee. When you burn away the goo that often blocks the way, it burns with a green flame. You can electrify water using stored lightning, killing anything that happens to be stood in it. Basically, it’s full of little things that make you go, “oh that’s cool” in a pleasantly surprised tone. Digital Extremes have also managed to make a game that is simultaneously more and less violent than Gears of War. The curb stomp finisher in Gears was pretty grisly, but Dark Sector ups the ante with dismemberments, snapped spines and slit throats, and yet it somehow manages to feel less gratuitously gruesome. I’ll admit to being baffled as to how they managed it, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t admire them for it.

It’s good news for all the graphics whores in the world too, as the game is simply gorgeous, if a little monochromatic in places. The game’s palette seems to consist of grey, dark grey, even darker grey and black, but every now and then it’ll surprise you with a vivid orange or a warm yellow. OK, it’s not really a big deal but it makes a nice change from the unrelenting ‘grittiness’ that seems to be omnipresent in modern games. Orange is good, I like orange. I like blue more, but I’ve already mentioned that I don’t get to have my perfect world, didn’t I? Anyway, back on topic, the game is dripping with high resolution textures, bloom effects, dynamic lighting and all the other aesthetic tricks that are almost a legal requirement these days. Hayden has quite a fat head, but that’s pretty much the only graphical gripe I have and it gets covered up with a cool helmet later on anyway.

The level design is essentially linear, but the developers have put in lots of little nooks and crannies to explore and secreted ammo, cash or weapon upgrades in many of these crevices. Aside from sounding like a custom official’s best day ever, it’s a nice little bonus for investigating. Sadly, I do have to knock off a few points for the lack of originality. Castle? Check. Abandoned Town? Check. Ruined Factory? Check. Sewers? Alas, check. I can say with some authority that they’re some of the prettiest sewers I’ve seen in a game, but that’s because I’ve seen a lot of them.

There are other problems in the game as well. Probably the worst crime this game commits is letting me make that terrible geometry pun in the review title. There’s also no blind firing, so you have to come out of cover to attack. The black market arms sales, which are a great idea, are hampered by the fact that each weapon is really expensive. I might not have spent hours hunting down every handful of change in the game, but even if I had, I’m not sure I’d have been able to afford too many, certainly not enough to warrant the locker feature in the black market screen, and would it be too much ask for the arms dealers to sell those little metal things that you put in guns, you know, bullets? I said that ammo was scarce in the later levels, but that isn’t strictly true. I had plenty of ammo, just not for the weapon I had. The ammo caches that were so common in the early levels seem to dry up later on and I’m not sure if it’s by design or just an unhappy mistake, and I certainly can’t decide which would be worse. The combat can get fairly repetitive at times, although that is ameliorated by the fact that the game auto-saves after nearly every fight so the game can be played in bite-sized chunks. There are quick time events too, usually when Hayden is grappled by some mutated townsperson, and you have to hammer a button not to get chinned, but irritatingly, it’s a different button each time. It takes the patience of a saint not to propel the game disc into traffic when some stray tentacle kills you near the end of a long boss fight just because your thumb was tired.

To sum up, Dark Sector is a pretty solid game with enough personality to set it apart from the titles that inspired a lot of its gameplay. It looks great and it’s fun to play, and while it’s hurt by its lack of originality in places, it’s certainly worth a look.

Condemned 2 Review

2008-05-06T19:13:00.001+01:00

Having received Condemned 2 from my wife for my birthday, I was pleased for two reasons. Firstly, I really enjoyed the first game, and secondly, it gave me something new to review. So imagine my dismay when a certain countryman of mine beat me to the punch and posted one of his amusing video reviews.

I understand that they’re quite popular with the young people.

But one does not get to where I am by being hasty. Knowing full well the value of patience, I bided my time in my secret volcano lair. Here is a picture of it.

After an appropriate interval, I emerged, review in hand, secure in the knowledge that my time was nigh.

Back on topic, Condemned 2, known as Condemned 2: Bloodshot in the rest of the world, is the sequel to Condemned 1 AKA Condemned: Criminal Origins. Apparently we Europeans don’t deserve subtitles, but if that’s the way Sega wants to play it, then fine, I never liked the snooty bastards anyway. Condemned 2, like its older brother, was developed by Monolith, of F.E.A.R. fame, and casts you as Ethan Thomas, formerly of the Metro City SCU and now professional Wino-at-Large.

The plot of Condemned 2 picks up nearly a year after the original. Ethan’s previous misadventures have taken their toll and caused him to descend into alcoholism and poor facial grooming. In brief, Ethan is recruited by his old employers at the SCU to investigate the murder of his mentor and uncle to the dreaded Serial Killer X, Malcolm Vanhorn. After a lot of faffing around in derelict buildings, things go pear shaped as Ethan gets wrapped up in a millennia old conspiracy and no one is quite who they seem, not even Ethan. What I like about the plot of Condemned 2 is that it takes some of the loose ends from the first game, like Ethan’s weird physiology or the guys with the metal mouths, and ties them up like an old shoe, as well as introducing some interesting new ideas, even if a few of those ideas have been ripped of from the movie, and specifically the movie, Dune. What I don’t like about the plot is it pulls a ‘Matrix Reloaded’ by straying too far away from what made the previous instalment so enjoyable. The plot isn’t terrible by any stretch, but it doesn’t compare well to the original and it’s let down by some of the characterisation. It’s pretty easy to work out who is going to be the baddie in Condemned 2, the fact that he is a dick to you throughout the whole game being something of a hint. The ending also contains a cliché older than I am and the same cliff hanger shit they pulled first time round.

Condemned 2’s game play has a different focus from that of its predecessor. The original Condemned had Ethan desperately using whatever solid object he could find to fend off the never ending tide of crazy people, but in Condemned 2 Ethan can now attack with his bare hands, although thankfully you never have to pick teeth out of your knuckles, perform a variety of combos, and do special attacks in never before seen SLOW-MOTION! Ethan has clearly spent some time studying the fighting arts at the feet of the ancient hobo masters and is now like a stinky version of Clubber Lang. If that wasn’t enough, when you’ve beaten a foe to within an inch of his/her life, you can grab them by the ears and get rid of the remaining 2.54cm in a ‘hilarious’ environmental death blow.

The new and ‘improved’ combat system necessitates new and ‘improved’ enemies to pummel into submission. No longer is the carnage confined to derelicts and weird metal mouthed monsters. Now we get to beat up cops, pyromaniacs, medieval knight analogues, monsters made of crude oil, beast men, beast men in armour, giant beast men in armour and a magician. Oh, and a bear. That’s right, in one level you get chased by a bear. Subtlety, thy name is Condemned 2.

So much effort has gone into making a grisly first person brawler that a lot of the amazingly creepy atmosphere that I loved so much from the first game is absent and has been replaced with teeth-scattering violence. It seems that Monolith was aware of this and tried to compensate by making the levels really dark. Not in tone mind you, but in illumination. Someone needs to tell game developers that there is a difference between ‘atmospherically’ dark and ‘can’t-find-my-arse-with-a-map-and-a-torch’ dark. On the subject of torches, the one that Ethan carries with him is useless. More than once I turned the torch off because I thought it already was off. You’d get better lighting from glow in the dark Dracula fangs and while this might seem like a minor gripe it is a gripe nonetheless.

Condemned 2 hasn’t totally forgotten where it came from though, one element that has survived intact from the original Condemned is weapon degradation, which is something of pet hate of mine. I can understand why it’s in there, and I appreciate that a 2x4 might break after you wrap it round some junkie’s head, but a fire axe is designed for cutting through doors and it still breaks after a few hits. It makes suspension of disbelief more than a little difficult when you discover the crowbar you’re carrying is made of fudge.

It’s not all bad though; Ethan can now reload the various firearms that he finds, as apparently in between drinking and waxing on and off, he completed the ‘How-To-Put-Bullets-In-A-Gun’ correspondence course. It’s a good job too, as there are plenty of guns lying around. In fact, in the last couple of levels they are pretty much the only weapon to be had. These levels show how much faith Monolith has in our abilities, assuming that we’d all get head shots every time and so only put in one gun-based death animation, the classic head explosion, and while I’m quite flattered, my aim with a pad isn’t great and I’d often hit enemies in the chest or legs. That didn’t seem to matter though, as apparently, these guys have really high blood pressure. One nice little touch Monolith has put into the gunplay is to reflect Ethan’s alcoholism in his aiming abilities. Basically, if he isn’t liquored up, his hands shake and he can’t shoot straight. This would be an awesome addition if it weren’t for two factors. One, Ethan’s aim is still pretty good when sober and two, there is booze everywhere. Anywhere you’ll find a gun, you’ll find more than enough hooch or bathtub gin to get you through the level. Perhaps this is Monolith satirising their countrymen, but it’s more likely to be really stupid hand-holding. If Ethan was as accurate as a Palpatine’s finest when sober and whiskey was scare, then maybe it would be a good idea, but as neither is true it makes it a rather pointless addition.

The forensic investigation aspect of the game has had an overhaul as well and unlike the revision to the combat, this was a welcome change. A few years back, forensic investigation was a major interest of mine, even to the point of me making serious enquiries about how to go about becoming a scene of crime officer, and I love it when forensics make appearances in games. I even own the first two CSI PC games, and yes, I’m aware that they’re dreadful. In Condemned 2 Ethan has a compact little toolkit that he uses to collect evidence which he sends on to his partner back at the lab, then gets to ask an assortment of relevant and not-so relevant questions about the assorted bloody artefacts that he finds. I want to be perfectly clear on this, if Monolith had made a game filled with just the forensics, then I would have lapped it up like a starving cat. The investigations are the most fun part of the game. My only criticisms are that there isn’t enough of it and some of the questions that are the ‘best’ ones to ask are counter-intuitive. For example, in one level you find a decapitated corpse with terrible wounds on it and using your toolkit, you try and discern where the murder took place and what the actual cause of death was. After finding some bloodied pieces of metal the correct question to ask is to inquire whether they were cut out of the corpse, but to get that right requires knowledge that you don’t get until later on in the game; at the time it seems like a stupid question. It’s aggravating because choosing the right question has an impact on what rating you get for the that level, which in turn has an impact on what toy you pick up for the next level.

Ah yes, the end of level ratings. Gone is the dead bird and scrap metal collecting of the first game and in its place Ethan must hunt high and low for radios to tune in and sonic emitters to smash up. These macguffins are scattered about the levels, meaning that careful exploration is required to find them all. Now, I may be speaking out of turn here, but when I’m fighting for my life against a crazed lunatic who is trying to cave my face in with a brick, the last thing on my mind is fucking treasure hunt. The problem is that if you don’t go hunting for this crap, you don’t get the best rewards at the end of the level and so the game is made harder. The developers have at least tried to work the damn things into the plot, but no amount of chicanery will disguise the fact that it’s all a bit Super Mario. It seems ridiculous to me to reward activities that detract so much from the atmosphere of the game, but apparently Monolith knows something I don’t.

Now some of you may have heard that our hero picks up superpowers somewhere in the game and those of you who are spoiler-phobic should probably not read the following paragraph. Or any of the preceding ones. I think there a few in those too. Ethan does indeed develop abilities beyond mortal ken. Basically, Ethan is the Kwisatz Haderach, the product of centuries of breeding with the ability to shout people to death and limited but accurate prescience. Taken out of context, this seems pretty stupid, but by the time it turns up in the game, you’ve jumped through so many silly hoops that you take it all in your stride. Ethan’s fearsome voice has the knock on effect of making pretty much every other weapon in the game seem pointless by comparison, even taking the cool down time into account. Why bludgeon people with a stick when you can just say mean things to them and watch them die from the relative safety of a few yards away?

I’ve gone on much longer than I meant to, so I’ll quickly wrap up. For all my criticisms, Condemned 2 is an OK game and it’s certainly garnered good scores from a variety of sources. The new combat system will probably be well received by the greater gaming public, and if the idea of bankrupting the tooth fairy and pushing three mortuaries to bursting point sounds appealing, you’re probably onto a winner. But if like me, you enjoyed the original game for its eerie atmosphere and yearn for a slightly less ‘uber-mensch’ protagonist, prepare to be a little disappointed.

Condemned 2 is the ‘Aliens’ to Condemned 1’s ‘Alien’, while it may pick up some stylistic cues from its older sibling, it’s firmly action and not horror. Personally, I’m hoping that the almost inevitable sequel takes the game back to its roots, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Because I’d die.

Seriously, who do you think I am, Guybrush Threepwood?

Gaming's Awkward Adolescense

2008-04-26T20:07:00.003+01:00

Since its birth in the early 1970’s, gaming has aged slowly. It may be nearly 36 years since Pong first appeared in arcades, but gaming is still fresh-faced and starry eyed, downy peach fuzz dappling its chin as it takes its first faltering step towards maturity. In short, gaming has finally hit puberty.

Don’t believe me? Well, let’s look at some of the evidence.

First and foremost, gaming has had a growth spurt; sales in the US alone have tripled between 1996 and 2007 and are now worth nearly $10 billion. (Source: www.theesa.com). Clearly gaming is a serious business now and much of this growth can be attributed to Sony’s entry into the race.

Back in the Golden Age of 16-Bit Gaming, Nintendo and Sega battled each other for dominance of the console market. The Super Nintendo and the Mega Drive/Genesis were arguably both companies’ most successful systems, but a quick look through YouTube shows that most of their marketing was aimed at kids, and in one case, monkeys. It dawned on Sony that, as enthusiastic as children might be, they didn’t really have a huge amount of disposable income so instead Sony aimed their sights squarely on the 18-30 demographic. Their advertising moved away from the tropes of pearly-white American teens enthusing about how it was just like the arcade and instead presented us with surreal monochromatic vignettes, which crucially, had a much more adult tone.

It was a move that paid dividends as, due to technical and financial considerations on rival systems, the PlayStation had plenty to market. Top tier games like the zombie-tastic Resident Evil and the dystopian Final Fantasy VII appearing on the exclusively on PlayStation and it’s relatively low price compared to its rivals as well as an ad campaign that appealed to grown-ups not only secured Sony’s place as King of the Castle, but also popularised gaming to a much wider market. To date, the PlayStation has sold over 102 million units and its successor, the PlayStation 2, has sold 118 million units. Compare this to the Super Nintendo, the best selling console of its generation, which sold a measly 49 million units and it’s easy to see the impact that Sony had on the market. (Source: www.vgchartz.com)

And it’s not just that gaming is huge now. Like many young men, gaming is starting to realise that girls don’t actually have cooties after all and are, in fact, quite interesting. Unfortunately, like many young boys, their attention is focused on the wrong area. That’s right, gaming is obsessed with tits.

You don’t have to look very hard for examples of over-sexualised women in games; Eidos’ Lara Croft instantly comes to mind. Lara Croft actually appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the 'Most Successful Human Videogame Heroine' and was so famous at her height that she graced the covers of style magazines, hawked us products and appeared on stage with U2. But why is she popular you might ask, is it her intelligence, her integrity, perhaps her athleticism? Well, it might be, but it’s more likely to be the fact that her boobs are bigger than her head.

To list every top-heavy bikini-clad bimbo that appears in a video game would be asinine; suffice to say gaming seems to buy them in bulk and every single one exposes more flesh than is necessary and in most cases sensible. Even in a game like World of Warcraft, female characters seem to get beachwear instead of armour, with little holes to expose midriffs and enhance cleavages, basically negating the any advantage of wearing the armour at all. It’s easy to say that gaming isn’t the only medium guilty of this, as the poor representation of women is a problem wherever you look, but at times it seems that developers are going out of their way to make it worse rather than better. Take Soul Calibur 4 for instance; apparently Ivy decided that the thigh boots, basque and bolero jacket she’d been wearing was too restrictive and traded them in for this:

It’ll be tit tape and a thong next, I swear to god. Oh wait, it already is.

It’s not just Soul Calibur either; just look at the ogling simulator Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, a game in which, rather tellingly, none of the male DOA characters appear, or the Eastern-European shagging-and-sorcery epic The Witcher, where the ability to sleep with practically any female in the game is used to increase replayability! Some titles, such as Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude or Singles: Flirt Up Your Life, eschew the concept of game almost entirely in favour of polygonal breasts, only occasionally forcing you to wash your hands and pick up the controller to play some perfunctory mini-game. The icing on the cake is the appearance of the “Girls of Gaming” articles that have appeared in Playboy, where a variety of game characters appear in various states of undress. Nice one guys, thanks a lot!

This situation would be unacceptable even if gaming was an exclusively male pastime, but research done by the ELSPA in 2004 showed that in the USA, Japan, and UK, the three largest gaming markets in the world, women made up 39%, 36.8% and 27.2% of the total active gamers respectively. (Source: www.elspa.com) It seems strange that in a market that generates so much revenue that publishers aren’t doing more to attract women.

Anyway, when it’s not spending some quality time with the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, gaming has another love, something close to the hearts of many pubescent young gentlemen, both literally and metaphorically.

GORE! (Insert some manner of drunken whooping noise.)

Games seem obsessed with viscera and blood these days. This isn’t idle conjecture either; look, a graph!

This graph shows the number of games that have received 15 or 18 ratings from the BBFC in the last ten years. (Source: www.bbfc.com) Apparently 2005 was the year that game developers finally snapped and in recent times games have given us the chance to chainsaw aliens in half, slice people up with an otaku lightsabre and my personal favourite, stab people in the eye with a piece of broken glass. You can almost see where the Daily Mail is coming from. The games industry seems to have made the same mistake that a lot of teenage boys make in assuming that ‘violent’ is synonymous with ‘mature’, when more often than not the exact opposite is true.

Finally, gaming has started to notice strange things happening to its voice. Gaming learnt to speak back in the early nineties, when CD ROM was becoming more commonplace. Developers, unsure what to do with all that extra space, stuffed their games will full motion video, which was often of a dubious quality. Back in those days, we were more amazed that games could talk at all and weren’t really concerned with the how good it was. It also wasn’t uncommon for games that were less space intensive to have a ‘talkie’ version released on CD-ROM; LucasArts was notable for doing this with many of their adventure games. It wasn’t until the PlayStation and Saturn that speech was made really feasible to the console market, but it soon caught on. As technical specifications improved and storage capacity increased, a fully voiced game became the norm rather than the exception and today a game can be made or broken by the quality of its voice acting.

Oblivion, a game that has almost universally garnered high scores (94/100 on metacritic.com), was lambasted by critics and fans alike for its voice acting, decrying it as being dull and stilted with too much repetition of voices, while Bioshock another game that has almost universally garnered high scores (96/100 on metacritic.com) has been lauded for its voice acting, and in fact, the obligatory plot twist rather bravely hangs on a voice actor sounded very natural when saying something very deliberate, to paraphrase the PC Gamer UK review. We’ve only got Nintendo to convince now, as they resolutely stick to the same text based format they’ve used since the NES.

So what do all these facts, figures and folderol actually mean? It means that it’s a very interesting time to be a gamer. Just like a real teenager, video games now have pretty much everything they need to become anything they want. Only time will tell how the medium matures after its awkward adolescence.

No More Heroes Review

2008-04-26T20:04:00.002+01:00

I hate this game!

No wait, I love it!

No wait, I was right the first time, I hate it.

I hate it because it was mean to me.

Picture the scene; I square off against my opponent in an abandoned school. She dashes forward, her sword’s razor edge glinting in the twilight. I deftly dart around her; with a quick thrust of the nunchuck I push her blade aside, exposing her to an attack. I swing the Wii remote, and deal her a mighty blow!

Whoops! I had my wires crossed, that’s Twilight Princess. What I actually did was hold down Z, dodged awkwardly to one side as she attacked, crashed into a pillar that I couldn’t see thanks to the camera angle and got twatted across the room by an attack that clearly missed me by about six inches.

No More Heroes is the latest avant-garde societal satire from Suda51, creator of the critically acclaimed Killer7 and a load of games us gaijin didn’t get to play. In a way, any review of No More Heroes is a review of Suda51 as well, as he’s something of the auteur, but having never having played Killer7 I don’t have much of a basis for comparison, so I guess he’s off the hook.

For now.

Before we go any further, I’d just like to say that the art direction on No More Heroes is amazing. The combination of cell shaded graphics and the gleeful addition of retro UI elements makes No More Heroes a visual treat, if you can excuse the fairly low resolution compared to other consoles.

Anyway, that’s the one scrap of praise I have for No More Heroes out of the way. Let’s get the vitriol wagon rolling with the thing that got on my tits the most; the plot. No More Heroes casts you as Travis Touchdown, an immature dickhead with all the social graces of a walrus in heat. After buying a lightsabre on eBay, Travis decides that the best use of his time would be to murder a lot of people for money. After killing a drifter, who happened to be the 11^th best assassin in the world, Travis gets wrapped up in killing the ten assassins above him to become number one. For the first ten hours, that’s all the plot you get, which is fine in its own way, but it certainly isn’t the razor sharp writing that other reviewers have been getting so excited about. The second half of the game contains a more traditional narrative, but it relies heavily on an introductory pamphlet that didn’t make its way out of Japan. Without ‘No More Heroes: Anime-Inspired Bollocks Explained’, the plot makes less sense than a custard jigsaw, but even if I had done the assigned reading I’d still be annoyed. If you can’t incorporate your back story into the game itself then you need to try harder. Bioshock doesn’t come with a novella, Deus Ex didn’t come with homework and Fallout did without an encyclopaedia, and No More Heroes is simpler than any of these titles. To me, it’s both lazy and arrogant and does nothing to endear me to the game. It also means that the characters, which are supposedly sharp satires of the demons of society, are totally without context. Not such a big deal with the ranked assassins, but trust me, you’ll feel it later. The icing on the cake is the game’s ending, which is like taking a trip to non-sequitur village to visit the king of the potato people and is such a kick in the balls, you’ll wish you could erase the last 20 hours from the fabric of time itself.

The gameplay of No More Heroes is a much trickier beast to review. If you look at it critically, No More Heroes is basically a collection of mini-games segued by retarded chimp button-mashing, but nonetheless there is something compelling about it. Even when I had fallen out with the game, which was about half way through, I still kept playing. Perhaps it’s due to stubbornness, perhaps I wanted to find out what was going on, or perhaps I wanted to be able to write a review based on the whole game, but I played it through to the end.

Let’s get tangential for a moment. Before Picasso started putting rectangular noses on oblong chins he was an accomplished classical painter. “Logan, I’m perplexed,” I hear you say, “What does the progenitor of Cubism have to do with No More Heroes?” The answer to that question is ‘Fuck All’, but the point I’m laboriously working towards is that before you try to re-invent an art form, you have to have the basics right and in this regard No More Heroes falls more than a little short.

The game is split between the ranked assassin battles and cruising around the town of Santa Destroy on the slowest motorbike since Palaeolithic times earning money to enter the aforementioned ranked battles. Santa Destroy is the worst attempt at a GTA clone that I have ever seen. There is almost nothing that you can interact with, aside from kicking open dumpsters to find T-shirts or digging for quantities of money that are so small they are inconsequential. It adds nothing to the experience and should have been smothered to death with a beach towel before it ever got off the ideas board.

The main body of the game is paradoxically Travis’s struggle to make ends meet. The entry fee for each of the ranked matches is the GDP of Holland plus a 10% tip and so Travis is always strapped for cash. After each boss fight you unlock a new minimum wage job, which is one of the most bizarre rewards in gaming history. Some of these jobs are quite fun and some of them involves scorpions, but you end up doing them all at least once, as they unlock the much better paid ‘assassination’ missions which boil down to beating people up in car parks and alleyways. There are two things that I find aggravating about the part-time jobs. Firstly, they aren’t part of the plot in any way, shape or form. They make the game feel like Mario Party 9: Mario Earns A Pittance. Secondly, the mini-games make much better use of the Wii controls than the combat, where the only good use of the controls is when performing one of the many, many suplexes. With the sword fighting being such a focus for the game, it’s a shame they didn’t make more of it, as the Wii is uniquely suited to making sword-fighting games.

The ‘levels’ that precede the ranked battles play like Golden Axe, except without the fun of kicking gnomes to death. Each one is a is exactly the same, you fight wave after wave of identical enemies all the time hoping that you get one of the ‘dark side’ powers so you can get through it all that little bit quicker. These sections wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t have to kill everything in a room before you can move on and the few good ideas that appear in these sections are swamped by enough repetitive dross to drown a brontosaurus. They can’t even claim to be challenging as every single one can be completed first time using only the most basic tactics. Fighting your way to the ranked matches is like having an easy but boring job, possibly something in data entry or retail.

The ranked fights are a mixed bag. The first few are undeniably fun, but you get to a point when fighting the next assassin becomes a chore. It’s almost as if the game changes gear when the ‘plot’ turns up. The tougher assassins will NEVER let you get a full combo off; you will be able to hit them maybe three times before they start guarding. These fights are also plagued by some really amateur mistakes. If a boss is in the middle of an animation, you can’t hit them. Many times I turned the air a rich cyan as my attacks rebounded off an armour-plated hairdo. The collision detection is dreadful and you will routinely be damaged by attacks that clearly hit nothing but air. When locked on, the camera seems to be firmly stapled to Travis right shoulder, meaning that any nearby obstacle on his left hand side is practically invisible and as locking on is the only way to guard effectively, you very quickly lose your bearings when the more agile bosses start leaping around like kangaroos on pogo sticks. The game also has a fondness for difficult to dodge death blows when the bosses are low on health. More than once, at the end of a long boss fight the game would arbitrarily decide that I was close enough to be hit by one of these attacks and I would have to start the whole sodding fight again.

In conclusion, No More Heroes may be an amazingly spot-on indictment of twenty-first century culture, but it’s completely buried in a rubbish game. No More Heroes is like a Christmas bauble, shiny to look at, but utterly hollow. It also has a string in the top to hang it off the branches...or maybe not. My advice to Suda51 is to find someone who isn’t in awe of him and hire them to hit him in the head when he tries to impart some deep nugget of truth at the expense of gameplay. I desperately want games LIKE this to do well, as it will lead to deeper and more interesting games in the future, but I want THIS game to die in a gutter like a piss-soaked hobo.

Mass Effect Review

2008-04-26T19:59:00.003+01:00

Mass Effect is an action RPG from Canadian developers Bioware. Now, I am of the opinion that Bioware is so good at making RPGs that they have entered into some covenant with a terrible and dark beast, possibly Cthulhu or Baoht Z’ugga-Mogg. I still get warm fuzzy feelings when I think about Knights of the Old Republic, and in many ways, Mass Effect can be considered KotOR’s baby brother, taking more than a few stylistic cues from its older sibling. Where KotOR had blasters, Mass Effect has magnetically-accelerated assault rifles, where KotOR had the force, Mass Effect has biotics, where KotOR had lightsabres, Mass Effect, well, Mass Effect has magnetically-accelerated assault rifles.

Having made arguably the finest Star Wars game in existence, Bioware decided to make a sci-fi franchise of their very own and Mass Effect represents the first foray into a bold new intellectual property. Originally envisioned as a trilogy, although now that Bioware has been consumed by the leviathan that is EA ‘hexadecilology’ is closer to the mark*, Mass Effect is very much a scene setter. It’s obvious that they’ve worked hard to create a believable universe to base the game in, even drawing on current scientific thinking for their ‘mass effect’. Every single one of the eleventy-million planets you visit has a little bit of history attached to it, even if it’s just a turnip-shaped lump of cold rock orbiting a dying sun in the arse end of the galaxy.

Now, I know how this goes, you’ve put a lot of work into something, you want people to see it and enjoy it, and praise it and call you some kind of reviewing god and lay rose petals at your feet as you pass...I think I may have gotten off track, but appalling jokes aside, Mass Effect is at times like a child that really, really wants to show you the drawing it’s just done, constantly tugging at your sleeve and fawning for your approval. The background in Mass effect is significantly better than the wax crayon monstrosity that your nephew has just made and personally I enjoyed reading it, but if the devil is in the details, then Old Nick could be hosting a kegger for all the demons in hell and still have enough room for a kickabout afterwards. While you’re never required to read any of it, there’s certainly a lot there to ignore.

Being an RPG, the plot of Mass Effect is central to the experience. You take the role of Commander Shepherd, executive officer of the SSV Normandy. This tighter focus on who the player is means you can be referred to by name, something that always bugged me about RPGs before and to their credit, Bioware does a good job of making Shepherd someone you can identify with without the ‘cut from whole cloth’ character creation they have used in the past.

It’s actually quite hard to provide a brief synopsis of the plot as Bioware has made a complex beast and there are a lot of things going on all at once, but what the hell, I’ll give it a whirl. Shepherd is sent to collect an ancient alien beacon that has been recently discovered on Eden Prime, humanity’s oldest colony. This mission also marks the beginning of a period of assessment for Shepherd’s suitability to join the Spectres, a sort of secret agency without the secret part; Shepherd’s admission into the Spectres would represent a big step towards humanity being accepted fully by the galactic community, who view humanity as a very young and impulsive species. Naturally the mission goes tits up when the Normandy receives a distress call from the surface and we get a glimpse of a mysterious alien ship the size of Manhattan. Landing on the surface they discover that the colony has been attacked by a horde of sentient robots lead by a rogue Spectre agent. After reclaiming the beacon and being zapped by it, it is up to Shepherd, newly inducted into the Spectres, to find out what the rogue agent is up to and stop him at any cost.

Obviously there’s a lot more to it, but I could easily add another thousand words to the review, and if you want to know the plot you can always look on Wikipedia, or just play the damn game!

As good as the plot is; I can’t help but feel like there’s something missing. The storytelling and characterisation seems to have taken a retrograde step. For example, Nihlus, the Spectre agent who is assessing you at the start of the game, tells you that Eden Prime will be the first of several missions together, then you don’t see him for half an hour, and then you get a cutscene showing him get murdered. I can’t help but feel that it would have been better if Eden Prime really had been the first of several missions together, then his death would have had a little more impact. The way Bioware has done it, it’s a little like hearing the news that a very distant relative that you haven’t seen since 1986 has just passed away. You say “how sad,” but you don’t really care and you just get on with your day.

Similarly, the various NPCs and squad mates you meet are pretty good, with good dialogue and acting, but none of them really sparkle. There’s no HK-47 to be found anywhere in the game. I also really miss the ability to talk to my squad in the field, even in the relative safety of the Citadel, a city sized space station guarded by a whole sodding fleet, they remain tight lipped, aside from the occasional comment on the nice statue or plant or pile of burnt bodies. They also never talk to each other, a feature I really liked in Baldur’s Gate 2, except in the agonisingly long elevator rides to be found everywhere in the bloody game and then it’s only pleasantries. There’s also a fake-and-switch with a major villain which isn’t quite ‘eleventh hour’, but isn’t that far off. That’s not to say that the storytelling and characterisation are bad, it’s just that they’re not excellent like I’ve come to expect from Bioware.

The main quest is very short, about 10-15 hours, and follows the Bioware formula, with the beginning and end set in stone but the option to pick which planet you go to in the middle. The problem is, while the planets you do visit as part of the main quest are varied and aren’t bloody Tatooine, there’s not a lot to do on each one. I would have preferred Bioware to have stuck a little closer to the formula, with each planet being a hub for a plethora of adventures, rather than each planet having a single objective to achieve. There is a galaxy full of planets to explore, but most of these are pretty much filler. There are about six different types of planet, a couple of bases and the same mine repeated ad inifinitum. After the first few planets you really start to notice it and exploration becomes a lot less appealing.

For gameplay, Bioware has taken KotOR, Rainbow Six Vegas and drunken figure skating and blended them all together into a creamy health drink that, like many things that supposed to be good for you, tastes a little odd. For the most part Mass Effect play like KotOR, you and your squad wander round whatever planet you happen to be on chatting to all and sundry, doing quests, earning pocket money and finding enough guns to arm Arkansas twice over. The new conversation system, which got so much attention from the gaming media, deserves all the praise it received. Rather than writing out all possible responses in full, Mass Effect gives you options that give the general tone of the response and choosing the response you want is a simple matter of pushing the stick in the right direction and pressing a button. It’s quick, easy and dynamic, making a conversation in Mass Effect much more like a conversation in real life.

So all is good on the role-playing part of the game, very good in fact, but what about the action element? Well, Bioware seemed to have lost their taste for turn based combat, no bad thing in itself, but what they’ve replaced it with is a tactical squad based third-person shooter and I’m not sure that Bioware are really cut out to make that kind of game. There’s nothing wrong with the combat per se, but it’s certainly not great. You can issue squad commands and use powers in something that looks a lot like real time, but your squad seem to like bullets an awful lot and the concept of cover seems to confuse them from time to time. There is also a complete lack of melee options, unless you count bashing an enemy in the face with a rifle butt when they get too close. I suppose it’s more realistic, but I kinda liked using a sword or even better, a lightsabre in a fight. Hell even a knife would have been nice. Sadly, what it means is that battles that should have a lot of dramatic intensity end up as “hide-behind-a-box-shooting-until-someone-falls-down” fests. If that wasn’t enough, about half way through the game you gain access to the Spectre armoury, which features weapons that make anything else you find pretty much irrelevant.

The more perceptive amongst you make have noticed that I mentioned drunken figure skating a couple of paragraphs back. “Surely,” you might intone, “Mass Effect doesn’t include an alcohol fuelled version of figure skating, glittering crown of the Winter Olympics?” Well, no, not really, but that’s what the bloody driving sections put me in mind of. The Mako APC handles like a greased shopping trolley. I’ve played a lot of video games in my time and the only game that has worse handling that I can think of is a movie tie in, and no one expects them to be any good. Add a turret with a crosshair that is almost impossible to see and regenerative shields that take so long to recharge that you could find a safe passage to India while you wait and it isn’t exactly a compelling experience. The game even denies you the satisfaction of running over enemies, as very often they will get back up and shoot at you at close range, where you can’t hit them with the turret. This wouldn’t be so bad if the Mako was used sparingly, but it turns up on every single level like herpes.

The game also has a couple of technical issues that, while not game breakers, detract from the experience a little. The first one is graphical. The game looks awesome, the graphics are truly stunning.

Once all the textures pop in.

Seriously, for the first few seconds after you enter a level it’s like you’re wearing your contact lenses inside out. It’s more than a little jarring and it happens pretty much every time. There’s also a problem with the sound, as the speech volume is really inconsistent. Sometimes it’s really low, even when you turn the other volumes down and other times its fine. Now, for some people it’s not going to be a problem, but I had heard that if you interrupt a person when they are speaking they will like you less, and I really wanted to get myself some alien booty, just for the achievement obviously. So I turned the subtitles off, because I read faster than a puma on speed and I’m quite impatient at times, but it meant that sometimes I couldn’t hear what was going on, and I missed about 90% of the tiny, nearly silent audio cues that a squad member gives when they have something to say.

The thing about Mass Effect is that despite all its flaws, it’s still a really good game. It’s smarter than most games available at the moment, it has adult themes and features sex without being juvenile about it (Witcher, I’m looking in your direction.) If you have a 360, then I recommend that you buy it, if you have a PC, then you’re in luck as its being released for Windows, if you have a PS3, ooh, nevermind.

*This word is a fabrication. It’s meant to mean sixteen.

Devil May Cry 4 Review

2008-04-26T19:55:00.000+01:00

Devil May Cry 4 is, predictably enough, the fourth game in the Devil May Cry series,. It’s the first game in the series not to be exclusive to the PlayStation, so finally, Microsoft aficionados get to experience the campy slack-jawed fun that is the DMC franchise.

Now, I like clever things. I like fresh ideas, I like compelling stories and I like realistic characters. However, due to a finely tuned sense of irony, I also like things that are so mind-numbingly stupid and over the top, they become awesome again. A good example of this is the movie Kung Fu Hustle, a bad example of this are the Underworld movies and an example that irritatingly defies classification is Devil May Cry 4.

In the Devil May Cry series you play a white haired smart-arse, wielding a sword the size of a park bench and some utterly useless firearms. Using this bizarre compliment of weapons you fight your way through legions of identikit monsters, doing your best to string attacks together without getting hit to generate combos. This carnage is only interrupted by pitched battles with the enormous demons that serve as the game’s bosses. Devil May Cry 4 mixes it up a bit by giving you TWO white haired smart-arses to play as, but otherwise does not deviate from this formula even one iota.

The game opens with a long cinematic which introduces us to new boy Nero and then does a quick tour of most of the major NPCs. In brief, a mysterious stranger, who would be a lot more mysterious if it wasn’t bloody Dante, murders the kindly old man who predictably turns out to be evil while the misguided but honourable knight and the plucky, impulsive hero watch in dismay and the brave and sweet damsel in distress gasps in horror. Archetypes are one thing, but these characters are so one-dimensional they shouldn’t be able to exist in our universe. Later on you get to add a mad scientist and an overtly sexual femme fatale to the line-up, which is good, because it’s always nice to have a full set of stereotypes.

The plot is similarly perfunctory. The various convolutions are so obvious they might as well be adorned with neon signs and a carnival barker. The only surprise came when one character turned out to be a character from an earlier game in disguise, but the only reason I didn’t see it coming is that I had forgotten that character had ever existed. You get the feeling that Capcom are trying, but they just aren’t very good at this sort of thing.

But as easy as it is to make fun of the shallowness of the story and characters, it’s not entirely fair. The plot is invariably going to be the weakest part of this kind of game and to condemn it is like condemning Tiny Tim for not being a very good dancer. The real meat and drink of any of the games in the Devil May Cry series is the combat and Devil May Cry 4 does pretty well in that respect. The actual mechanics of pushing buttons is blissfully uncomplicated. You have one button to leap tall buildings in a single bound, one button to swing your oversized, novelty sword, one button to fire your woefully underpowered gun and another button to use whatever special power you might have. The various special attacks are performed either by changing the timing of your button presses or by locking on and pushing the stick in a certain direction as you attack. The animations that accompany your button presses are gorgeous, especially the special attacks that Dante performs as part of his styles and it really helps to cement the idea that the characters you are controlling are slick and competent combatants rather than the mouth-breathing dunces some of their dialogue implies.

Of the two characters, Dante is the more fun to play as. As in previous games, he can equip a variety of ‘Devil Arms’ and seems like Capcom have decided to have some fun with them this time round. It’s hard not to like a backpack that contains an infinite number of exploding pink needles and a flamenco soundtrack or a pair of unholy cowboy boots that come with a jetpack. The styles from Devil May Cry 3 make a return as well, and you can change between them instantly by pressing the appropriate direction on the D-Pad. It makes for a fluid and dynamic combat system that you can tailor to your own playing style. Nero, by comparison, is dull. He uses the same weapons throughout the game and his special power is the arm he borrowed from Reed Richards. The only other special ability he picks up is his Devil Trigger and it takes about six levels for him to get it. It’s worth mentioning though, that you don’t really notice how badly Nero gets the shaft because the game wisely has you play as him first, and leaves Dante as a nice surprise.

So to recap, we have a plot that has the depth of a puddle, but pretty cool combat, which is, let’s face it, the reason people play Devil May Cry games. Surely that means that Devil May Cry 4 is a good game overall? Well, sort of, as there are other points that need to be mentioned.

The cut scenes, at least for me, are one of the most infuriating parts of the game. When the characters are fighting, the energy and sheer awesomely ridiculous action make the cinematics a joy to watch. Sadly, the enchanting effect is somewhat ruined when the characters open their mouths and a wave of smugness pours out. Dante comes off the best, as he is a least ONLY smug, whereas Nero oscillates between smugness and emo whinging with every alternate step.

The game also suffers from some earth-shatteringly bad design decisions. The level design follows the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ school of thought, in that it marches you up to the top of the hill, then marches you back down again, forcing you to replay all of the levels in reverse order. Similarly, all bar one of the bosses are fought multiple times, in exactly the same way, and mostly in exactly the same place. The first time you fight Berial, Conqueror of the Fire Hell, is fucking cool, but by the third time it’s lost most of its charm. To make matters worse, the camera is unwieldy and all too often is fixed in place. You’d have thought that after more than a decade of making games with ropey cameras, Capcom would be able to figure out what they’re doing wrong.

I could go on pointing out flaws in the game, after all I haven’t mentioned the thinly disguised block pushing puzzles or the inventory system that punishes you for using items, and I haven’t even touched on the board game level that I spent hours on until I rolled the right number on the giant dice, but the only reason to list them all would be catharsis, and this is supposed to be a review, not a therapy session. Suffice to say that the good elements of Devil May Cry 4 are punctuated with so much irritating bullshit that it’s easy to lose sight of the fun you had in the earlier levels.

In conclusion, Devil May Cry 4 is really only for fans of the series. I realise that that is a massive cop out, but it happens to be true. It seems that in making the jump to the next generation of consoles, Capcom bottled it just before the edge and instead decided to play it safe and release a game just like its predecessors. I did finish it, but that had more to do with sheer bloody-mindedness than any desire to see the ending. The replay value is too dependent on the player loving the game, as it offers nothing to reward playing it on the higher difficulty levels aside from bragging rights and personally, I have better things to do than try and compete with the obsessive shut-ins that occupy the top spots on the leader boards. Devil May Cry 4 is a game that I finished, enjoyed in places, but ultimately am going to trade in for something better.

Crysis Review

2008-04-26T19:51:00.001+01:00

Spiritual Successor is a term that seems ubiquitous these days, and all too often it seems to mean “We wanted to make a sequel, but we lost the license”. This is all too true of Crysis, the latest offering from German developer Crytek, who liked Far Cry so much that they decided to make it again.

The plot of Crysis is something of a chimera, blending as it does the plot of Far Cry and the plot of Predator into a gloriously derivative whole. In brief, you play as “Nomad”, part of a US Special Forces squad named Raptor Team. Raptor Team are apparently so top-secret that they don’t have proper names, just a cavalcade of call signs that bear no relation to the persons’ personality. After all, if Prophet lived up to his name, he wouldn’t get abducted by a space octopus would he?

Raptor Team is sent to a tropical island in the South Pacific to rescue a team of archaeologists who have been taken hostage by the Korean People’s Army. After the team are separated by a strange electrical disturbance, Nomad has to traipse through the jungle in his high-tech, near-future nano-suit to rejoin the rest of his team, encountering resistance from the KPA along the way. After the squad’s redshirts are killed in rather grisly fashions, they begin to realise that there is more happening on the island than their superiors have told them. Now, while none of this is particularly original, it is a least not as stupid as the drivel that gets tacked on to most shooters these days. It’s actually quite a sensible plot, if a little fantastical.

Similarly, the characters get a pretty good deal. Crytek have taken a leaf out of Valve’s book and made their characters likeable and believable, a seemingly insane gambit that has fortunately paid off. Nomad is a fairly typical protagonist but he does distinguish himself by actually having a voice and by reacting to the stranger things he encounters with genuine surprise and wonder rather than some gung-ho nonsense and bullets. The other major characters are similarly well treated. The female scientist you rescue isn’t some top-heavy bimbo, but a sensibly-dressed, intelligent young woman who is pivotal to defeating the aliens, and the other members of your squad aren’t waddling slabs of steroid infused jingoism, but have distinct personalities that can be enjoyed without irony. In fact, the only time the voices get annoying is when they are yelling at you for not completing an objective within the handful of picoseconds they deem long enough to do it.

Unfortunately, for all the praise I have for the plot and characterisation, the game play gets little more than scorn. It would help if Crysis could decide what kind of game it wanted to be. When you start playing it feels like a stealth game, but later on it feels like an action game and this lack of focus means that while it is competent in most areas, it doesn’t excel at any one thing. The best example of this is the nano-suit. It has a variety of modes that you can swap between in real time, but most of the time you’ll stick with the armour setting or the cloak. Having the nano-suit is like being Superman, if Superman could only use his powers one at a time. If you decide to wade in using the Strength setting to bust some heads you quickly find yourself gunned down as you are without armour. If you try to flee using the Speed setting you find yourself unable to activate your cloak until your suit energy regenerates, a process which takes such a short amount of time, it makes you wonder why they didn’t just make the suit energy last longer.

Level design is another area where Crysis falls down. Despite Crytek’s claims that it is a free-roaming game, the only choice you really get is which bush to hide behind on your way to your next objective. Once you do get there you’re usually faced with the next in a series of identical outposts made of corrugated iron and cardboard. The aforementioned nature hike is often a long slog punctuated only by falling foul of one of the numerous patrols that seem to appear out of nowhere, and unless shrubs really get you going you’re going to get bored very quickly. The shanty town outposts are manned by guards so stupid that they’ll trip over the big pile of bodies that is stacked up by a door and still think it’s a good idea to go have a look by themselves. This sequence is repeated so many times it’s like listening to a particularly dim parrot. A special mention has to go to the alien spaceship level, which aside from looking like the ship from Alien mixed with Tron, has some of the most unintuitive and confusing design I’ve seen in a long time.

There are three levels in the game where you are supposed to hop into a vehicle and fight pitched battles against hordes of enemies utilising the powerful weaponry onboard. The only problem with this is the vehicles in Crysis are apparently made of tissue paper and they handle like they have attention deficit disorder. Fortunately in two of the three levels you can get out and perform the tasks on foot, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that getting into vehicle in Crysis is the equivalent of taking a long time pressing the quick load button.

A review of Crysis wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the graphics. A rather significant amount of wood pulp has been devoted to extolling Crysis’ beauty and while it is an attractive game, the quality of the aesthetics comes at the detriment of the engine, or to put it another way; Crysis is like a girl with a truly beautiful face and body but who is crazier than a sock filled with bees. The CryEngine is a monster, riddled with bugs and errors at every turn. In the time I was playing it, it crashed at least six or seven times, most of these prompting a reboot. This is after I had downloaded a very large patch that apparently fixed a number of stability issues. One level resolutely refused to render until I updated my graphics card drivers, despite all the previous levels working fine. The ridiculously high system specs have very little to do with the game’s level of prettiness, after all it’s not that much better looking than Call of Duty 4 or Bioshock, but has quite a lot to do with the fact that the seems to have been coded by chimps.

In conclusion it’s hard for me to recommend Crysis, at least at the moment. The best time to enjoy the game will be in a year or so when the system requirements are more in line with what people actual possess rather than what appears in the latest sci-fi blockbuster. I did have fun playing it and perhaps with a bit more work from Crytek it could be a more stable and less infuriating experience.

Beautiful Katamari Review

2008-04-26T19:51:00.000+01:00

Beautiful Katamari is the fourth game in the Katamari series, and is the debut for the franchise on the Xbox 360. Despite being the fourth in series, it’s only the second of the Katamari games to be released in the UK, which, due to an amazing lack of foresight, is where I happen to live. I could have played the second one, We Love Katamari, but apparently actual physical copies of it are as rare as pickled unicorn.

There’s something I want to get off my chest before I go any further; Beautiful Katamari is short. Not eight hours short like Call of Duty 4, I mean as short as a stunted hobbit. If you’re any good at Katamari games, then it’s about the same length as Portal, a couple of hours, which would be fine if it wasn’t three times the bloody price. That’s not to say that the game is utterly without merit, far from it. I had a lot of fun playing it, it’s just the fun didn’t last very long.

For those of you who don’t know, Beautiful Katamari is all about rolling around a small sticky ball, picking up random bits of detritus until the ball reaches a certain size, at which point the so-called “King of all Cosmos” descends from on high and judges your efforts using the some arcane formula that is as inscrutable as the instructions that come with IKEA furniture. As your Katamari grows in size you can pick up increasing large objects, until you’re picking up things like the Great Wall of China and Belgium.

There’s a definite degree of satisfaction in doing well at Beautiful Katamari and this works in the game’s favour as there isn’t really anything else to do. A couple of the levels try to mix it up a little bit, but ultimately it’s the same thing with a slightly different scoring system.

Visually, Beautiful Katamari has its proverbial shit together, set as it is in an ultra-stylised version of Earth populated by the most untidy people in the universe. This is a good thing for a couple reasons: firstly, it means that that game looks different from pretty much everything on the 360 at the moment, and secondly, it means that there can be a lot of things on screen without the hardware having a fit. Beautiful Katamari takes what would normally be a liability, the need for low polygon counts, and makes it into a part of the experience. The audio is a little bit more difficult to recommend however. I like it a lot, but my tolerance for odd Japanese pop and lounge music is pretty high and it’s not hard to imagine it getting annoying very quickly.

It’s not all chocolate and kittens though, as the game has some truly infuriating elements. Firstly, as I mentioned before, it’s fucking short. I played through the entire single player ‘campaign’ in about two hours and a sizeable portion of that was spent dicking around listening to the King. In fact, the King is the source of most of the things that make the game frustrating. His dialogue is supposed to be humorous, but after the first few exchanges, it begins to get irritating, after a few more, you just skip it. It doesn’t help that it’s accompanied by a weird scratchy sound that is like nails on a blackboard.

He’s also a twat.

To qualify that statement a little more, at the end of each of the levels you have to report back to the King. As I mentioned earlier, he has some arcane formula that he uses to judge the worth of your Katamari and then he assigns a point total. As far as I can see, the highest score you can get for a Katamari is 100, but a score of 75 is ordinary and you are criticised for it. Now, I am not a game designer, but I would have thought that berating a player for what is a pretty good score is not a good way to keep them playing. Then again, I suppose they don’t care. After all, you’ve already paid, haven’t you?

The multi-player options in this game are a joke. They have a tacked on feel that isn’t even subtle. The co-op mode would be great fun if it allowed you and a friend to play through the game as a team, but it doesn’t do that. Instead you get three short levels that even a novice can complete first time. The versus multiplayer, while an amusing distraction, doesn’t have enough legs to hold your attention for long, and I doubt that the Xbox Live community will care.

In conclusion, it’s very hard to recommend buying Beautiful Katamari. It’s too short and its replay value is very dependent on how much you like rolling up crap and how much you like competing with the frankly frightening people that populate the leader boards. On the other hand, it IS fun, especially if you’re new to the franchise. Basically, this is one to rent, rather than buy.