How is it possible to be even less like a Resident Evil than 5?
Easy.
Resident Evil 6 is a third-person shooter with very clunky controls. There’s really not much to say. I don’t know if I should be disappointed. It’s not like I expected much, if at all, from this game.
At least I didn’t have to pay for this, though I’m pretty sure it won’t take long for “them” to start charging for demos.
Talking about Heavy Rain as a game is quite pointless. It’s only two gameplay mechanics are moving around in an unbelieveably counterintuitive manner: you press the R2 button to move forward and you choose the direction in which you walk with the left stick, so simply pushing the stick forward will not make your character move forward. Quick time events are the other mechanic. And boy is there a lot of QTEs and some of them are like playing Twister with your fingers. Example: hold triangle then hold X. Then hold down the R1 button. Then square and for the last one, press L1. A game made me press a button with my face and if I hadn’t poor dopey-faced Ethan would’ve been electrocuted.
I had one serious problem with this game: the interaction prompts. Semi-transparent white is quite hard enough to see. Semi-transparent white that shakes and spins like a hamster on coke is impossible to see. I missed two quite critical things because of the fucking prompts. Example #1: I missed some kind of receipt in the club’s office, but because the screen was an absolute fucking mess, a light grey mess to be specific, I missed out on must-have evidence and couldn’t solve the crime. Example 2#: The cops are approaching a main character’s hotel room and I’m supposed to call him to get the fuck out. When I get to the phone my character wonders what number the room was. I knew it was 207, but because I couldn’t make out the prompts, I chose the wrong one. Fuck. You. Game.
And that’s it. That’s Heavy Rain as a video game. All-in-all, it’s nice to see Quantic Dream trying different things. Fahrenheit had vastly different gameplay… oh wait. Too bad I couldn’t accidentally take migraine painkillers and alcohol together in this…
So. What should I see Heavy Rain as? An interactive drama? An emotional storytelling experience?
Okay.
The plot of Heavy Rain. At first it’s a jumbled mess and then, when it’s time for the big reveal, it goes from jumbled to downright stupid. First of all, and this is a spoiler for any who are really interested in playing this, the “Origami Killer” is one of the four playable characters, the P.I. to be exact. Now, the way I played the game, Scott Shelby turned out to be a pretty decent guy; I beat up a john who was getting violent with a prostitute, I stopped an armed robbery and I saved the single mother of a baby from suicide. I could have just left them to their fates, and I believe it would have been more in line with the fact that Scott is a fucking serial killer, but I usually go for the good karma route every time I play a game for the first time, the Fable series excluded. Furthermore, I knew the identity of the killer, a video I watched of a hilarious glitch spoiled it for me. I wanted to see how many good guy opportunities this game would throw at me when playing as the killer. It’s also never explained why he suddenly decided to investigate the murders he perpetuated.
The main point of the story is the kidnapping and subsequent rescue of Ethan Mars’ son Shaun. And that’s about it. At first you see the Mars family living in what seemed to be an architectural nightmare of a house happy as can be. Until they go to a mall and your jackass idiot of a son, Jason, runs out into the street and gets run over by a car. One thing. How did Jason die? What I could tell, the car hit Ethan. Of course, he apparently spent six months in a coma and yet somehow he found himself to be responsible, a sentiment apparently shared by his wife.
Before shit gets real however, you are supposed to watch over and do stuff with Ethan’s surviving son, Shaun. Whether its to cook him a microwave dinner, making him do his homework or to play with him in a park. But then out of nowhere, Ethan blacks out. And the kicker is: it is never explained why he blacks out and it isn’t relevant at all in the story. It’s not even used as a plot device to get the cops to suspect Ethan, his psychiatrist finds an origami that Ethan dropped in his office, regardless if you told him about the black outs. And when Shaun gets kidnapped, the next chapter has you in a police station answering questions about the colour of Shaun’s coat and pants. How the fuck would I know what colour his clothes were?
As crap as all that was, the game nails the emotional part of its moniker with one scene. Ethan is forced to chop off one of his fingers in order to get a clue to save Shaun. Even though I knew about that beforehand, it was still a cringe-worthy scene.
The experience part comes from the main female protagonist, Madison Paige. Now, keep in mind one thing: David Cage, basically the man behind Heavy Rain and Fahrenheit, recently told the gaming industry to grow up, to mature. However. The way Heavy Rain uses, no, outright exploits Madison Paige makes this ring quite fucking hollow. Now, I’m not complaining about the blatant objectification, I’m merely calling out this bullshit. God knows, if this hadn’t had all those quite risque situations for Madison to find herself in, my experience with the game would’ve been diminished; they were something to look forward to amidst the finger-chopping and quick time event bonanza. I suppose you’d need examples to back this up. Madison’s first chapter has her in her underwear strutting about her aparment, taking a shower in which the camera is all over her and theb getting assaulted by rapey ninjas. In another chapter, she is tied to a table while an insane, rapey ex-surgeon tries to operate on her. Of course, in these it’s obvious that the assailants want to kill Madison, but the last example is that of Madison doing a striptease at gunpoint, and it is a striptease as the more you waste time the less clothes Madison has, going all the way to only wearing panties. And suffice to say killing poor Madison was the last thing on the gun-toting thug’s mind. Oddly enough, you can not fail in this sequence.
Mr. Cage seems to have some kinks he should work out.
And now we come to the FBI Agent, Norman Jayden. What was his purpose in all this? Other than having those kick-ass Minority Report glasses?
And yeah, I guess there was a story in there somewhere, one that you could influence with your decisions. So storytelling’s in the bag.
Spec Ops: The Line is without a doubt one of the best new games I’ve played in a long, long while. It has a solid third-person shooter gameplay core with which Yager Development tells an interesting and fresh story for a video game; it has no clearly defined good or bad and by the end of it, you yourself seem to be the worst of the lot.
In the sand-choked ruins of Dubai, you’re forced to make morally questionable decisions throughout the game, all the while the supposed villains of the story, who are played by Bruce Boxleitner of Babylon 5 fame and Jake Busey from Starship Troopers, taunt and berate you over the radio. The strain from this leads to the contextual banter and actions of Cpt. Martin Walker, the player character, and his two squadmates becoming more and more unhinged. For example, you can execute dying or meleed enemies and at the beginning, Walker kills them quickly and efficiently by either stepping on their neck, snapping it, but by the end of The Line, he violently beats his beaten and broken enemies to death with the butt of his gun or stuffs the operational end of an AA-12 right in the poor sod’s ugly mug before blowing it to smithereens.
I’d say that this is the way to make any game; the single player campaign must be the main focus. Yager did it and boy does it show. Of course, as good as the plot and the setting is, the core gameplay suffers from being a bit too stock. What’s there works, but it won’t blow anyone’s socks off and the mechanic of using sand against enemies was way too scripted and worse yet, only a select few encounters in the game allow you to bury the opposition in sand. Usually, if a place has windows and is at least partially buried under the encroaching desert, you can shoot out said windows to unleash the torrent. However since not every fight takes place in one of the opulent towers of Dubai, the only environmental aids you get are your standard red-painted propane canisters.
One thing did royally piss me off though: this game has the worst checkpoints ever. I played through on hard and let me tell you, I died my fair share and didn’t much appreciate having to either wait for the game to load before I could skip the pre-rendered cut-scene even though the damn game was installed on the HDD, courtesy of the Unreal engine, or the checkpoint drops you into an in-game cut-scene that can’t be skipped. Seriously, I had to watch Colonel Campbell get shot at least a dozen times thanks to a stupid checkpoint. Also, there is severe texture popping here and there, but that’s to be expected with Unreal.
And yes, there is another pointless competetive multiplayer component, but honestly, I can’t be arsed.
There is also what I believe to be a Warhammer 40k reference in the shopping mall. Now that’s cool.
This game is so abjectly mediocre, I simply stopped playing it near the end and left it so for over a month. Now I finally pushed myself to play through.
So, how’s it compare to Killzone 2? It’s exactly the same, but this time you can shoot out of cover with less hassle. And that’s “cover” since you still get shot while in it, even if the enemy is on the same vertical plane.
The story? Well, in the end you commit genocide on the Helghast. That’s the most interesting part, the rest is just this grey paste that dribbles out of the screen in its blandness. Also, Malcolm McDowell is a crazy sonovabitch in this.
As a foreword, I’d like to say to whoever thought that the server(s) you had ready for launch would be quite enough: nice job, dilhole. To their credit, they did fix it quite fast as I actually managed to play a few hours after the servers went live, but come on, with the amount of preorders? You had to know there’d be a shit-ton of traffic. There just is no excuse.
And as for the game itself. It, to me, seems to have a severe identity crisis. It’s like it wants to be an MMO, yet isn’t. The interface is taken straight out of World of Warcraft too and it doesn’t really work here. Specifically the chat window. It’s ok for the Barrens chat, but for another game altogether, one that lacks said chat it’s frankly a terrible decision. I imagine it would be useful if you were to play with others, but why would you join some random guy’s game of Diablo I don’t fucking know and with friends I use Skype. The maps, not dungeons we’ll get to them later, suffer from the same thing as Fable and honestly every other RPG out there nowadays: they’re just very wide corridors to your next objective that just happen to be filled with enemies. Neverwinter Nights had a very confusing forest at one point and it wasn’t always clear where you needed to go and you stumble across a wizard’s tower and do an impromptu quest there involving two brothers and their experiments and then it falls to you to judge whose fault it was that those experiments were buggered. So why exactly they needed over ten years to get around making this?
I don’t know. Really, I don’t know. This game’s been popping up every now and then on various gaming news outlets starting way back as 2008 and even earlier if my memory serves me well. Maybe they got too much WoW on their plate.
The dungeons. They are randomized, with random layouts, random monsters and random loot. This is an amazingly good idea to put into something like this.
One thing I’ll say is that playing co-op with a buddy has been quite fun, even if I tend to frost ray (read: super death laser) everything to death before my friend gets to smacking range. Just one disconnect: players seem to get different loot, which means we have to loot everything twice. If one of us finds a chest, the other needs to haul his ass there to check what he got that the one who did the opening doesn’t see. And usually this leads to me getting all the stuff my buddy would find helpful and vice versa. Or we find just utter garbage. I know it might be to cut down on the ninjas, but that’s only really an issue if you’re playing with strangers. And I don’t get the trade window. I can just chuck what I don’t need but my friend does out of my bag and have him pick it up his own damn self. It might be for gold, but I haven’t found anything to spend it on. Sure, you can buy magical stuff from vendors, but I know well enough that vendors overcharge for stuff you can get from mobs. Alas, playing with someone seems to make this game laughably easy. Me and my said buddy have cut a swath through all those random dungeons and the first boss without even breaking a sweat and we’ve died only once each and that’s only thanks to those bullshit tree things that leave those pods that cause damage if you stand over them and that was just because we started looking through our inventory and didn’t notice them.
I guess I’m still on the fence about Diablo III. So far the game’s felt a bit meh. Maybe I need a good run of DayZ for ArmA II to get a clear perspective. Or a zombie chewing on my jugular. If I get over the damn choppy frame rate. Goddamnit I hate PC gaming.
Uncharted 2 is a damn good game.
The game is, I think, the very definition of what is, or was at one point, considered a console game. An action adventure. While the gameplay was for the most part solid, I had a few issues. Two especially. Drake had a tendency to plant his ass in cover, but not on the side where the bullets won’t shoot said ass off. This is probably a flaw in the cover system itself. A pet peeve really, you can mostly avoid this if you’re careful with your button inputs and preferably not getting shot at by two guys toting miniguns on hard mode.
Now for the real issue: I’ve played too much Assassin’s Creed and that series wrote the book on climbing walls and other paraphernalia. It’s fluid and you don’t need to press counterintuitive buttons to climb up onto a roof or similar more or less horizontal plane. And the ace in the hole: you can climb almost anywhere. If it looks like there’s at least a half an inch of finger space, you can use it for climbing. In Uncharted, you need to press X to climb up, just tilting the left stick up doesn’t do shit and a few times I got stuck hanging from a wall and got shot for it. The real bummer is that there is only a few climbable walls, specifically designated for Drake to monkey about on. Many times did I see where I needed to go, but failed see the small bricks that slightly poked out from the wall while I was fruitlessly jumping in front of a pillar that Ezio or Altaïr wouldn’t have had much of a problem with. And sometimes the game did a one-eighty and wanted me to climb the pillar while I was looking for those tiny bricks. A prime example of this is the Nepal stage. I knew I needed to get to the second floor of a building. I thought that I could climb the door frame and then up to the windowsill, but Drake just bounced in place. Then the game slaps me in the face and points me to a signpost. I’m not sure whether it’s a question of thinking too abstractly or thinking too simple. My first thought was to climb the building I needed to get to and not look for a path, a path that was admittedly just a couple of metres away from the building and painted with garish colours. This is an issue with design and one that I hope Naughty Dog takes a look into.
Storywise, think Indiana Jones but set in modern times and starring modern people straight out of a magazine or something. Now that may be a bit cruel, but that was the impression I got from the scene at the beach. Later on, that impression does fade away, especially on Nathan Drake’s part. I really like Nathan Drake, he’s what I think video games are missing nowadays. A wise-cracking guy who has a certain moral ambiguity, but in the end does the right thing. Also, some of the dialogue was honestly funny.
With a less than stellar start for my foray into PlayStation 3’s exclusives, Uncharted 2 is the first game on the platform I can say I like. Now the shit thing is I might have to play Killzone 3 before going on to Uncharted 3. I really don’t want to. I really don’t fucking want to.
I remember this game being dubbed as a “Halo killer” at some point. Is it?
No.
While graphically quite impressive, the game is lackluster at best. The setting is just the Second World War in space. And I may have missed something storywise. I only played the first Killzone for maybe an hour and the only thing I distinctly remember is a bug where if you died while having the night-vision goggles on, your corpse lacked textures and was just this gray thing. So when this game starts and it seems I’m the invader I had to pause for a second and look up the synopsis of the first game online. Of course, this game would’ve been much better if I was the evil invading force, if just for its novelty value.
Speaking of evil, the Helghast are almost comically so. I honestly thought they’d yell “I’ll eat your babies!” and it wouldn’t be in any way out of place. They’re also all speaking in a British accent.
As for the gameplay, I don’t know whether it’s the game itself or the horrible PlayStation controller or what but this thing handled like a greased pig that’s dead. The FoV is way too close, giving you a serious case of tunnel vision; the gun takes up a lot of the screen, especially if you’re trying to bash someone over the head and it doesn’t help that the game is dark as shit. You got to press four buttons to fire from your cover that really doesn’t, ironically, cover you all that much. You hold down L2 to go into cover, up on the left stick, then you press L1 to aim down the sight and then R1 to fire. What a clusterfuck. And since L2 is also your crouch button, or more like bend your knees slightly button, going into tall cover forces you to stand up so you sometimes can’t get a decent shot or more commonly to keep your head down as the Helghast try to saw it the fuck off. Also, using the Sixaxis for anything else other than making Rosemary’s tits bounce is a horrible idea. I got a headache on one loading screen when it kept shaking. Then I put the controller down, it stopped. Curious, I picked up the controller again and the loading screen wobbled around some more. I had to facepalm. One more thing, I don’t have Parkinson’s and I assume a lot of other gamers do either, so why does the scope sway only when I move the controller? It’s either a feature made especially for the elderly or for spasmodic kids.
That’s about it for Killzone 2. A mediocre shooter with some questionable design choices but that is graphically quite nice. Next up I’ll either trudge through Killzone 3 or try something that’s said to be good. Namely Uncharted 2.
So, the stalker finally did get out of here…
It’s a very sad day indeed, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is one of my favourite games of all time. The game was awesome when I played it for the first time, killing bandits and blind dogs in Cordon. Searching for artifacts and stashes while avoiding falling into a vortex or whirligig, their presence only announced by a rippling of the air around them and the beep of the anomaly detector when you got way too close. Then there was the first time you go into the bowels of the Agroprom research institute, your meagre flashlight and the occasional spinning warning light the only sources of light. Then you hear the heavy breathing and you aim your shit AK74 into the dark. You think you saw something, but you aren’t quite sure. What you do know is that the heavy breathing has become laboured, ragged panting. Something in the room is very agitated. You squint your eyes, but you see nothing, nothing but two eyes coming at you fast! And then it’s too late, the bloodsucker is already munching on poor Marked One’s corpse while you yourself are curled up in the fetal position on the floor. After a change of pants, load your quicksave and this time, take out your sawed-off shotty. C’mon you invisible, tentacled bastard, I’ve got a whiff of the old brimstone for ya right here! You finally kill the damn thing and go on your merry way, shooting your way through a group of soldiers, find Strelok’s stash and look for the exit. You think you found it, the corridor looks right for the job. Wait. Why is there a dude without a shirt… oh shit. You are now face-to-face, which is exactly where you don’t want to be, with a Controller and it is between you and the exit. Have fun.
“What have you got?”
“A body, it came from the death truck. It’s got… the mark.”
“Well, you know the drill, leave him…”
“This is a live one.”
“Bullshit! You’re lying!”
“Let the Zone take me if I am.”
STALKER dropped you into a very hostile area, filled to the brim with stuff that’ll kill you in seconds. You began the game as a nobody armed only with a knife, a Makarov pistol, binocs and an unlimited supply of structural bolts. Everything and everyone else had the leg up on you. The bandits had sawed-off shotguns and the rare MP5 and there were more of them, usually 5 or 7. You traverse the Zone and you’ve got the radiation trefoil on your screen. There was a reason those bandits hauled bottles of delicious vodka with them. The gist: you were the underdog and you had to fight your way to the top. In no other game that I can think of were you left to really fend for yourself. No handholding, no pick-me-ups, just you, your gun and dangerous mutants, anarchists and bandits, but none of them will stop you on your triumphant march toward, well, loot and more loot. You take on a job to kill a pack of pseudodogs, only to have the last few scurry away, never to found again. You just ballsed the whole mission, you ain’t ever going to find them now. Better return to Sidorovich and tell him the bad news.
The point: you were left to your own devices. Unlike, say, in Skyrim where you stumble upon something, like the thief you runs up to you and gives you a random item; that event is scripted. The thief was spawned out of sight and he ran up to you because you triggered the encounter. In Stalker, you hear gunfire over the next hill and you see a group of stalkers fighting boars and fleshes or you might hear the roar of assault rifle fire dying just before you go over the crest and see the stalkers or the mutants dead. Sometimes you see some absentminded fool walk right into an anomaly. The wild territory is a prime example. Many times have I entered only to find a four-way war going on. Duty vs. bandits vs. mercenaries. vs. mutants. What other game does that? In what other game can you just sit back and wait for the fight to be over before sweeping in, shooting the survivors and looting them all? And it would be totally random? Let me tell you what other game: none. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is truly one of a kind.
Sure, the game had its faults, there were bugs, sometimes nigh-game killing bugs at that. The first time through I never got the mission to take the psi measurements around Yantar, depriving me of the psi protection helmet. I had to go into the lab with nothing but around 100 medkits. Let me tell you; the final chamber, well, I used up all of the medkits to get through the section and that was just thanks to the psi emissions. I used all my bandages as well to heal bullet damage.
But it didn’t stop me from playing.
All the little quirks of the game, the weird items GSC forgot into the Zone, like “bread” and that one bottle of vodka that crashes your game and corrupts your save at the military camp under the railway bridge. The game had a homey feel to it. It truly felt like people had crafted the game, not a machine that plops out the next Call of Duty along the production line. It was an absolutely brilliant experience.
If those quirks irk you, get Call of Pripyat. It’s a much more stable game with even more gameplay mechanics and even more randomness thrown in. One time, around 20 stalkers left Skadovsk and I thought nothing of it and went about my business. Then a massive battle erupts not far from the ship. I get out and run to get to the corpses, and their stuff, before their friends do. There wasn’t any danger of that, however. A fight between the 20 stalkers, some bandits and a chimera had ended with almost everyone dead or dying. Or what about having to slowly slog into a cave under the weight of your 12 AKs and/or RPG-7s you were supposed to haul to the shop thanks to a randomly occurring emission that will kill you if you don’t find cover?
What can really be said? A great company and a great series of games is dead, yet those more deserving of this fate just plod on.
The folks at GSC were reformed into Vostok Games and now they are working on a free-to-play FPS MMO. Two things: free-to-play is never free and MMOs will fail. Still, I hope for the best for those guys.
By now, we all know what’s what with the ending, all the crazy stunts the fans pulled off to get this. BioWare gave in and will be giving us dlc to tie everything together neatly and for absolutely free. Now that is a switch.
There’s just one but and I applaud BioWare for maintaining some of its integrity, what little it had left, by outright declining from giving us a better end. And I do say better, because no matter what they do to the end as it is now, it still leaves it dreadfully bad. BioWare refuses to give us the end most of the fans want, an ending that gives us what we want: as cliché as it sounds, we wanted to destroy the Reapers and ride off into the sunset on the Normandy and its crew. That’s a broad generalization, but the ending we were given and the ending that BioWare will be expanding upon, well it left the galaxy fucked six ways from Sunday. How? Play the game or look it up. The thing that irks me is that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can’t win the game. And that pisses me off. If I want to play a game that you simply cannot win, I’ll play Garry’s Mod. Its been said and already been made fun of, but the only thing that changes in the, what, 16 “radically different endings” is the colour of the energy projected by the deus ex machina. Really, it is so bad, I haven’t even thought of playing it through as femShep much less to play it again as broShep. Hell, I can’t even look at the other Mass Effect games or listen to their soundtracks without being reminded of the horrible, horrible ending. What’s the point? Everyone’s fucked in any case.
Now here’s my piece. BioWare gave in to pressure from its fanbase. The fanbase wanted a better end. Not wanting to compromise its artistic vision, BioWare decided to expand upon the ending it gave to the fanbase to begin with. Problem is, no one likes the ending and it’s still going to suck no matter how many epilogue scenes you throw our way. So why not go all the way? They already sold out so what’s the problem? Why not give us an entirely new ending, an ending that would leave us satisfied with the investment we put into the trilogy? An ending we would like?
The stunt you pulled off, this extended cut? It’s kind of like having to explain a joke. It’s awkward and it’s just going to make you look like a damn fool.
Know Thy Games 