Category Archive for ‘games’

I really am spoiling you lot with the level of posting on this blog as late.  It is positively snowing high quality bloggage around here.  Let us see whether this continues into – I don’t know – the second half of January?  Anyway, to the matter.  The latest game wot I have played is Uncharted 3, and it’s a humdinger.  I’d have to place it 2nd in the games of 2011, which was an excellent year for games, as it goes, just behind Skyrim, although the two are difficult to compare, in a way, since Skyrim gave me about 100 hours of pleasure and Uncharted 3 gave me, well, perhaps 20.  I don’t feel sore about that, particularly, it’s just an observation.  In fact the comparison between Uncharted 3 and Skyrim is an instructive one because they are in many ways polar opposites in their design and approach.  Skyrim presents a massive open world and lets you do as you will.  Uncharted 3 presents a strictly limited world and you have to do what it wants you to, with the occasional illusion of choice.  Skyrim’s gameplay is a little bit hokey, lumpy, and jerky round the edges.  Uncharted 3 is slicker than Slick McSlickerson.  Everyone’s experience of Skyrim will be utterly unique.  Everyone’s experience of Uncharted 3 will be utterly the same.  Skyrim is filled with hundreds of rather bland and unmemorable characters with slightly rubbish dialogue and no sense of humour.  Uncharted 3 has a few beautifully designed and animated people with sparky and believable relationships and cheeky one-liners.  Skyrim is as long as you want, but it can get kind of repetitive.  Uncharted 3 only has so much to offer, but that’s packed with incident and event.  You see what I’m saying, or must I labour the point some more?  It doesn’t happen often, so once I’ve found a point I really like to give it a hammering.

Anyway, Uncharted really does exude personality, and captures that devil-may-care, Indiana Jones light adventure vibe better than anything else going.  A lot of that is in the beautiful animation of the lead character and the way he interacts with apparently unimportant parts of his surroundings just as you run past, the offhand quips and panicky noises he makes during combat, it all creates a magnificent sense of involvement with the world.  And the character work, acting, cut-scenes are pretty much industry leaders to my mind.  You get some truly stunning set pieces, fleeing through a burning chateau as it collapses around you, or through an ocean liner as it capsizes, poseidon adventure styley, camera swooping cinematically to cover the desperate action.  I found myself frequently chortling with delight.  Possibly even more so than when organising my inventory on Skyrim…

I really liked Arkham Asylum, thought it was one of those games where every detail has been polished until it sparkles, that provided some clever and innovative gameplay, and that, above all, managed to make every aspect somehow quintessentially batman.  Certainly disarmed, knocked the absolute crap out of, snapped the wrists of and left handcuffed any direct-movie tie-in games I can think of (yeuch!).  It’s sequel, well, I dunno, still a great game in many ways, still has some great design, some interesting gameplay, good voice acting and good feel, some excellent set pieces, but it somehow didn’t seem as tight and effective as its predecessor.  I daresay some of that is just familiarity – the basic gameplay mechanics, the fighting, even a lot of the adversaries, are pretty much the same – and they’re never going to have quite the same punch second time round.  Some of it is maybe in the setting – a few city blocks converted into a massive prison worked well at times but didn’t have quite the atmosphere of the crumbling asylum, and there wasn’t the same level of head-fucky investigation of batman’s own psyche, there wasn’t that nasty little edge of madness the first game had.  Some of it was in the shape of the game – they’d gone for more of an open world approach than in the more linear and scripted Arkham Asylum, and I don’t think it worked as well.  It all looked nice, but I’m not sure there was much gained – most of the actual action occurred in more limited single locations anyway, and the city really only served as a set of high towers to swing between in getting from one set piece to another.  Some of it was in slightly muddy plotting – where Arkham Asylum felt tight as a drum, Arkham City had too many villains competing for attention, some of whom would drop in and out without much introduction or explanation.  In the end it all just seemed to peter out a little.

Still an enjoyable, atmospheric way to spend a few hours, but less so than Arkham Asylum for my money.

OK, so it may sound like a sex act you’d perform to get into the mile-high club, but it’s an absolutely brilliant game.  Nowhere in RPGs will you get anything that comes close for scale, grandeur, variety, content, immersiveness.  It’s magnificent.

To a degree that’s always been true of the elder scrolls games – their aspiration to produce huge, open-ended worlds that you could explore in your own way and at your own pace was always impressive – but I’ve had some big problems with them in the past.  Huge and sometimes lovingly detailed though they were, the game worlds of Morrowind and Oblivion never felt that convincing to me.  They lacked theme.   They too often felt like a bunch of fantasy cliches randomly stuffed together into one disunified whole.  Here’s a guy with a lion for a head.  And here’s some roman legionaries.  And here’s an evil necromancer.  And oh, look, some demons.  And an ancient statue.  And just next to it a guy with a snake for a head peddling potions.  And it didn’t help that after trawling through thirty caves, twenty evil temples and a dozen abandoned fortresses you’d start to see a really dispiriting level of repetition in the levels.  The same u-bend of corridor, the same big chamber with the split level and the pond in the middle.  The very open-endedness which is such an advantage could become a real problem as well, with strange interactions of different questlines creating moments of hilarity.  I vividly remember one moment in Oblivion when, while standing next to an arcane gate to hell which had appeared, debouching demons across the landscape and threatening the very fabric of existence, a farmer ran up and asked me if I’d found those three fish he asked me to get way back near the beginning of the game.  Since you might come to different quests and areas at very different levels of power, it’s also necessary to have a mechanic that balances out play and continues to make things challenging.  But this was sometimes handled very lumpily – when you reached high levels every wolf would become more testing than a dragon, every group of thugs would be outfitted in diamond armour and wielding weapons suitable to a mighty hero of yore, begging the question, if you can afford an ebony greatsword of withering, why do you need to lurk in alleys robbing passers by?  There was a sense that there was masses of stuff but none of it was really special.

The good news?  There’s loads of it.  While keeping what was best about it’s open-ended forebears, Skyrim triumphantly overcomes the drawbacks.  Well, most of them, anyway.  And it’s in the setting that it really scores BIG.  Skyrim is a nordic, viking-y sort of a place and it’s concentrating on that theme that has really drawn everything together.  Armour and weapons have nordic swirls, houses have dragons carved on the roofs, mammoth-herding giants roam the tundra and dragons haunt the skies.  The fighters guild in Oblivion were some fighters.  In a house.  Who fought stuff.  The Companions in Skyrim are a load of Valhalla obsessed nords who sit round a firepit in an upended longship.  They’ve got an ideology, man.  The politics of the place even make a rough sort of sense, and there’s much more of a feeling that your actions impact on the world, that you’re a part of what’s going on.  And it looks amazing.  I mean, fantasy has never looked so good.  Frozen forests, snow-capped mountains, forbidding fortresses, subterranean rivers, ancient cities carved from the mountainside, waterfalls gleaming under a sky blazing with strange constellations.  The dragons, for that matter, are pretty amazing to look at, soaring in the distance and perhaps strafing the odd sabre toothed tiger as they pass.  People and faces, well, I guess you could say you’ve seen better but they’re perfectly serviceable.  I suppose the graphics in detail aren’t always amazing, but the cumulative effect, of some of the great vistas from a viewpoint, for instance, can be incredible.  It feels like there’s vastly more variety here than in previous outings, vastly more detail.  You do occasionally get a bit of a sense of deja vu in your fifth ancient barrow or subterranean cave system, but pretty much every one I visited had something unique going on, and a lot of them had a theme – a bandit outpost built around a vast natural chimney, a poacher’s cave where they’d been killing mammoths by herding them down a spike-lined pit, an ice-bound fortress built by a madman.  The range and attention to detail is pretty amazing.

And the sheer quantity of it.  I’d consider 30 or 40 hours a good amount to get out of a roleplayer.  Sixty hours picking the bones of a real beast.  I put over 100 into Skyrim and I completed the central questline and a couple of others, knocked off fifteen or twenty smaller quests and a host of little challenges.  There were three or four questlines I didn’t even start, vast swathes of the map I scarcely visited.  I could put in another 100 hours, easily, and that without starting on the scores of ruins and dungeons one can stumble upon by accident.  It’s truly, staggeringly immense, and quite apart from the sheer value for money that gives you, it lends a sense of scope and grandeur, a sense of being free within an immense and beautiful environment, a sense that your character and your playthrough will be unlike anyone else’s, that I just don’t feel you can get anywhere else.

Downsides?  Nothing that isn’t eminently forgivable given the tremendous upsides.  Play balancing is occasionally still a little bit lumpy but vastly improved over previous outings.  The system for quick-changing items is surprisingly and unnecessarily rubbish and limited given how well thought-out most aspects are.  Character development is much neater thanks to a Fallout-esque perks system that means you can’t excel at everything but have to pick a little more carefully what your approach will be.  I ran across a couple of broken quests, a few nonsensical lines of dialogue given events, the odd bit of ropey voice work, a few graphical glitches, but given the scale and immense variety of permutations that’s hardly surprising.  And a very stable game, as well.  In that 100 hours it only properly crashed twice, which is welcome compared to, say, Fallout:Vegas which was crashy as all hell.

So, overall, it sets a new benchmark.  When looking at recent competition in the arena of Fantasy RPGs, there just isn’t any.  Final Fantasy seems to have run out of steam.  Dark Souls, for all its undoubted good qualities, looks petty, dingy, clunky and meagre by comparison.  I liked the first Dragon Age but the second one looks truly feeble next to this.  Dungeon Siege III?  Puh-lease.  I’ve got to go way back to Baldur’s Gate I and II to find anything so huge and immersive and that, clearly, was an entirely different era.  Mass Effect 2 (and, one hopes, the forthcoming 3) is probably the only RPG that’s coming close, and that scratches a much more limited, arcade-y itch.

Right.  I’m off to wait for the DLC.  And play Arkham City.  Could be worse…

Oh, this is really good.  Tools down.  Cancel Christmas.  You will see me in three months.

I can’t take this…

Yes, more strange, inscrutable gothic fantasy with the difficulty level ramped right up to INSANE from the folks who tested your sanity with Demon’s Souls.  In many ways this game appears a big improvement over the last one, which was certainly interesting itself.  The upsides?  The game world is pretty amazing, the combination of medieval euro-style fantasy 101 with loopy japanese lateral thinking makes for a dark, weird, fascinating, and certainly original experience.  Also the design and the way in which everything interconnects is pretty damn impressive – you’ll see a ruined tower on a hill in the far distance and think, huh, nice scenery, then four days later you’ll be standing on a ruined tower on a hill and think, ‘hold on, is this that tower I saw from over there?  I think it is, you know…’  On the whole the bizarre, incomprehensible mythos is alluring and atmospheric rather than feeling like a bunch of ill-explained mumbo-jumbo.  Then there’s the difficulty level, of course.  Few, if any games, come anywhere close to the savage unforgivingness of this one.  On the whole it felt somewhat fine-tuned, though, there are more shortcuts than in Demon’s Souls, which mean you’re not as often asked to negotiate a long-winded and extremely difficult build up before being instantly killed by an impossible boss.  Twelve times.  Now you have a much shorter route to run twelve times before being instantly killed by an impossible boss.  Which is something.  And on the whole patience and care reap their rewards.  Sloppy players will be crushed to dust.  Instantly.  The upside of all this difficulty is that when you do finally overcome the boss, it’s a feeling of triumph like no other in computer gaming,

The downsides?  Well, there’s that difficulty level again.  I mean, it wears you down, it really does.  Painstakingly working your way through half an hour’s worth of traps and pernickety fights in order to be crushed by a boulder you couldn’t have known was coming and knowing you’ve now got to do that painstaking half hour again?  I play computer games to relax, you know?  I admire the test, I do, but I’m not sure I’ve got the time or energy any more to be tested this hard, and the unrelenting, punishing, hurting darkness and pessimism of the whole thing, unlit by any apparent spark of positivity doesn’t help in that context.  Graphically?  In some ways great, in some very so-so.  Distant vistas can look absolutely incredible, bursting with atmosphere and visual imagination, especially when you know that strange bridge in the far distance is sure to be one you’ll be edging painstakingly across later.  Probably screaming.  But close up the textures and so forth are pretty ropey, which makes a lot of the enclosed spaces feel really dank and dull.  Plus animation on the main character is clunky and cumbersome, and this does translate to some pretty clunky and cumbersome gameplay, which wouldn’t be so bad if total precision weren’t being demanded so often.  I could live with the really narrow swaying walkways if my character wasn’t prone to woodenly topple off even wide stable bridges when you press the attack button.  Fighting isn’t really a reflex affair.  It’s a grind of careful planning, working out how to draw out one enemy at a time, knowing exhaustively the timings and ranges of your (and their) attacks.  Lovers of fluid, devil-may-care character control such as you’d find on Mario 64 or Prince of Persia need really, really not apply.

So mixed feelings, all in all, and there are just so many great games coming out around the end of this year that, having put some thirty or forty hours into this one and being, I’m sure, no more than half way through, I’m just going to have to mothball it.  Maybe that means I don’t have the guts, I don’t know, but it feels more like I don’t have the time.  I’m just not enjoying it enough.  So I started playing Rage yesterday, and when I saw a common-or-garden pessimistic apocalyptic wasteland my heart just sang like a bird released.

DARK souls indeed…

Yes, very good indeed.  Electric superhero Cole McGrath has the choice of aiding the citizens of New Marais in their struggle against plague, fascist militia and mutant freakoids, or cackling evilly while he visits a new reign of terror upon them, and it’s all implemented very nicely.  The New Orleans style setting is big, varied and detailed.  Gameplay hits a good balance between originality and intuitiveness, and you’ll soon be swarming up tall buildings and zipping along overhead powerlines faster than a speeding car, zapping enemies from range, exploding them with electro-grenades, or sending them spinning skywards in a helpless vortex of smashed cars and debris, all of which looks fantastic and makes you feel a big man.  There are some spectacular set pieces and some very nicely made comic-book cut scenes all in keeping with the overall style.  The characters have character, faces are good, voice-acting is nice, especially on Cole and sidekick Zeke, and it even takes a good grab at the twin holy grails, so rarely even approached let alone seized upon in computer gaming – emotional involvement and laughs.

The one criticism I’d make, which isn’t even a criticism, really, more of a personal reaction, is that it never quite utterly gripped me in the way computer games sometimes can, and that I might have expected to be given how well executed every aspect is, and it’s hard for me to put my finger on exactly why.  I had a somewhat similar reaction to the first Infamous, which I played quite a bit and then just never quite got round to finishing.  But this is a big improvement, and overall you’d have to say it’s brilliant.

Near future dsytopian cyberpunk gruff-voiced first person shooter stylings with an emphasis on stealth and lateral thinking.  Well, kinda.  As with the first Deus Ex which came out some years ago on the PC and is one of those there classics of the genre, in theory the game offers you all kinds of ways to play and you make the choice as to how you will approach it.  Invincible cyborg battering ram or ghost in the machine?  Computer whizzkid or martial artiste, the choice is yours.  Well, kinda.

I like it, in general, certainly I played it all the way through.  On the upside the worldbuilding is very nice, the general look is great, and it makes a decent fist of working on several different levels – as a stealth-em-up a la Thief, as a cover-based first person shooter, as a game of exploration and thinking your way through problems.  It manages this combination a lot better than, say, Metal Gear Solid.  There’s also quite a nice line in different ways you can resolve certain situations which may or may not have results downstream.  It’s particularly good early on, when you have to choose your upgrades carefully and hence pick the style of play you’re going to follow.  Will you improve hacking or stealth or opt to run faster or jump higher?  After a while, though, as you rack up experience and unlock more stuff that element fades somewhat.  If you’re anything like me you start playing in a more slovenly manner and getting away with it.  Plus the lateral thinking is never all that lateral.  It nearly always consists of finding a grating somewhere and crawling into an air vent that, miraculously, brings you out in an advantageous position.  They’ve got some pretty damn labyrinthine air vents in some of these places, believe me.

I think if there’d been a much bigger and more extensive skill tree, so you really could keep specialising, it would be a better game, allowing for radically different approaches.  As it is, if I played it through again I’m not sure what I’d really do differently.  Plus the character work was a tad mediocre.  It’s hard to get to involved on a personal level with anyone.  I can scarcely remember one laugh or affecting moment, really.  So I guess I’d say it’s a solid game all round, but lacking that little sprinkle of fairy dust to really put it up there with the greats…