Category Archive for ‘games’

The short version – though not without some significant shortcomings, this is an often spectacular, occasionally stunning, in many ways groundbreaking piece of work with some of the wildest ideas and design – and definitely the best companion – I’ve ever seen in a video game.

If you’ve got the slightest interest in games you really should play it.

The longer version might take a while…

The first two Bioshock games both take place in the amazing undersea city of Rapture, and though I very much admired the ideas, the unique design and loopy characters, the unpredictable, mystery-based plotting and the attempts to examine some properly adult themes (not adult in the sex and gore sense, but in the political and philosophical sense), I wasn’t quite as taken with them as others have been.  Partly it was because, beneath the admittedly spectacular dressings, I found them rather limited and dreary as first person shooters, which has never been my favourite format anyway.  The gameplay didn’t inspire me particularly, and there was a claustrophobia about the whole thing I found, I dunno, a bit wearying.

And though it’s no sequel, exactly, the DNA of those two previous Bioshocks is very much present in this one.  Again you fight your way through a beatiful yet corrupt impossible city controlled by a sinister idealogue in which you get the sense that everything is a metaphor but you’re not entirely sure what for.  Gameplay is very similar – gun in one hand, magico-biological power of some kind in the other – and the arsenal is maybe less varied than before, if anything.  Enemies aren’t all that exciting or intelligent either, and the stealth elements have disappeared entirely.  Indeed one could make the rather bizarre assertion that Bioshock Infinite is at its least interesting in the midst of combat.  The original Bioshock at least paid lip service to some moral choices – use the helpless or save the helpless, fight the monster or become the monster.  Here the moral choice tends to boil down to – gun down the indoctrinated masses or bludgeon their heads off – and the gung-ho splatter seems a little at odds with the much subtler things the game aims to achieve.  At times it’s a little like two games forced to exist unnaturally within the same dimension – one a rather mediocre first person shooter in which you rummage through crates a lot, the other an evocative character piece in an amazing setting, filled with nimble ideas and a wonderfully realised co-star.

The graphics are beautiful, but in a painterly, impressionistic, unreal style, packed with powerful imagery, the score is fantastic, featuring late twentieth century classics reimagined to suit the 1910s mood – a barbershop quartet version of the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows has been haunting my dreams ever since I heard it.  The sense created of an utterly other world set partly within our history, really is … well, something else.  In spite of being a blockbuster in scale and quality there’s an arthouse feel about the whole thing, full of clever asides and self-referential touches.  It dabbles in physics, determinism, spirituality, prejudice, politics, and though there’s sometimes a bit of a lack of depth – I’m not sure it has much to say about many of its more controversial themes beyond HERE THEY ARE – at least they’re making the attempt.

There are some really stunning set piece moments – falls from floating buildings, giant clockwork robots smashing through windows, airships going down on fire – but some really affecting and emotional moments too.  Dialogue and voice acting are very, very good, the voice recordings scattered about the city – as in the earlier games –  add to the background, though you might say the secondary characters don’t quite have the zing of the first Bioshock.

The crowning glory though is Elizabeth, co-star, companion, axle of the plot and emotional anchor of the story.  Generally speaking, in video games, no one likes an escort mission.  Companions are dumb, boring, get in the way, get themselves killed, undermine any sense you’re in a real place containing real people.  This is the first time I’ve ever seen one work anywhere near so well.  She’s superbly designed – hitting that spot between realism and cartoon-i-ness, actually useful from a gameplay standpoint, and highly expressive (especially about the eyebrows), her reactions adding extra emotion to the events, providing a naive counterpoint to the used-up pessimism of the central character.  In a way the whole plot (and indeed experience of the game) is based around their relationship.  On occasion you’ll see the joins – she’s got a habit of flicking coins at you when you’re concentrating on something else, sometimes not looking right at you during an emotional speech, but overall she’s a pretty amazing achievement.

IT’S TOUGH TO DISCUSS THE PLOT WITHOUT SOME MINOR SPOILERS. THIS ISN’T GOING TO KILL THE GAME FOR YOU BUT IF YOU’RE PRICKLY AND HAVEN’T PLAYED IT YOU WOULD BE WELL ADVISED TO LOOK AWAY NOW!

In general I think the plotting is bold, mind-bending, and fully immersive when you’re in it, but I also think, with hindsight, it sets up some problems.  The basic conceit of multiple alternative dimensions in which every possibility is played out allows some really clever things to be done with the gameplay mechanics and the setting, and sets up some strong plot twists that I have to admit I didn’t see coming (for all everyone else on the internet apparently did). But the writers follow the concept only as far as they need to to make the plot work and supply the fireworks, and refuse to go the rest of the way – that in infinite dimensions every possibility must occur, and therefore there is no meaning to preferring one outcome over another.  There’s a price to be paid in this, I think – if you can always slip into another dimension where one or other problem is solved, where’s the drama in solving the problems you’ve got here, now?  Where’s the drama in any given result since there will always be a place both where it happens and where it doesn’t?

There’s also, looking at it from the end, a rather lumpy progression to the storyline, in which things seem (relatively) normal for most of the game, with the foundational mystery being drip, dripped through to you, then towards the end the revelations come thicker and faster until there’s finally a hefty sequence where they really give up on gameplay altogether and spoon up undigested plot for fifteen minutes.  I mean, it’s an incredible and ambitious sequence in many ways but I still think it could have been more artfully done, more spread out and organically revealed within the rest of the game.

But I feel bad, now, because the failures, such as they are, are the sort common to a lot of games or born of high ambition, and the successes, of which there are many, tend to be unique and groundbreaking.  In the end, Bioshock Infinite delivers a feel, vision, and intelligence you just can’t get anywhere else. I found it to be a throughly enjoyable, thought-provoking, and at its best a truly magical experience.

I find myself in a strange position, because I’ve often argued that gameplay is always king, and then I’ve found myself greatly enjoying and admiring two games in a row in which gameplay is actually a relative weakness.  But both Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider are triumphs in their own ways even so, because they score very highly on things that are a lot harder to come by in video games – story and emotion.  In Tomb Raider it was a strong central character, a powerful driving narrative, crunching violence and cinematic sequences, and a real sense of threat and physical danger.  In Bioshock it’s the wild ideas and the unravelling of the mystery, the way that music, design and pacing create a unique sense of place and moments of high drama, all given energy and purpose by an amazing secondary character.

Fine, fine times to be a gamer, my friends.

OH, BY THE WAY, BIG, BIG SPOILERS IN THE COMMENTS!

This was really, really good. In ways that video games often are, but also in ways they often aren’t.

I remember the first Tomb Raider coming out in – Wikipedia says 1996, would you believe – with an unprecedented marketing drive, game-changing graphics, and exploration of detailed 3d worlds like never before. Lara Croft became the definitive badass video game heroine for quite some time, I guess. But I think it’s fair to say the franchise lost freshness over many sequels and became … kinda stodgy. Uncharted then picked up the archaeological adventure baton and added snappy gameplay, cheeky characters, and stunning cinematic sequences. With this reboot Tomb Raider has snaffled that baton back, not quite getting Uncharted’s lightness of touch on the characters, but delivering big on drama and thrills, the cinematic sequences and then some, and adding a bit more exploration back into the mix. But, bottom line, it just tells a great story, and delivers a kind of emotional involvement in the action you just don’t get much in video games.

In outline it’s one of them reboot origin story prequel type-o-things we keep getting these days.  With a young and naive Lara shipwrecked with some sidekicks-r-us on a mysterious island that puts one strongly in mind of both the first Uncharted and Lost.  We then follow her progression from crapping her pants archaeology graduate to hard ass survivor as she tackles the sadistic cult that’s grown up on the island, plus older, darker powers, with thrills aplenty along the way.

To quickly cover the basics, gameplay is solid – action pretty good, climbing about and exploring pretty good, enough to find if not too much, puzzles perhaps a little on the straightforward side, but generally the whole thing works nicely with good sound and atmosphere, lots of cracking cinematic sequences and a lot of variety in the movement of the character, making her feel very real.  It’s an object lesson in pacing, with more open, explore-y sequences that reward the grey matter and give some spectacular settings alternating with more scripted, cinematic sections that really get the heart going.  Far Cry 3, say, didn’t seem to be able to marry its plot and its free-form stuff very well, but Tomb raider keeps a narrative coherence, it all feels part of the same story, with cut scenes doing what they need to without intruding. And it keeps on delivering new thrills, new ideas and new content, with plenty of skills to learn and weapons to modify.  There’s a real sense of building up to crescendoes then settling back, then back to crescendoes again. I can’t remember a game that seemed so truly cinematic. Longer than expected, as well, and with a great ending. Interest doesn’t peak early then start to wane as it often can.

There’s a bit of work to do on the secondary characters, I’d say – they pretty much all turned out to be exactly what you thought they’d be from the first moment they appeared, and the dialogue, relationships and voice-acting were nowhere near as free wheeling and appealing as in Uncharted, nor the cut scenes quite so lavish in their lighting and detail, but Lara herself was great.  I mean, she weren’t ugly, and she was extremely attached to that hardest working vest in video games, but she was reassuringly unsexified.  A solid female lead, not played for fan service, at least from where I was sitting.

It was connection with the character where it really shone. Just a great and very cunningly calibrated central narrative, as Lara goes from helpless innocent to hardened survivor. Initially she’s stumbling about coughing, shivering, horrified.  When she first gets her hands on a gun it trembles as she aims.  But steadily her skills and yours improve.  And the stakes feel high.  The action is crunching, visceral, unforgiving.  At times there’s a resident-evil like nastiness and threat about it.  Lara’s hung upside down among corpses, impales herself on spikes escaping, slides down mountains, falls out of wrecked planes, is beaten up, and gets progressively more scratched, torn, battered, bandaged and dirty.  You never fear for Nathan Drake, and though you might be wowed by the cinematics in Uncharted, I don’t know if you’re ever emotionally affected in the way you are by Tomb Raider.  You really find yourself rooting for Lara, and that sense of immersion just ups the ante on everything. When you make a long jump over a dizzying void and she just clings on by her fingertips – you feel it. When she dodges a goon’s machete and rock-axes him in the head – you feel it. When she parachutes down a mountainside and impales herself on a tree because you were too busy watching the landscape swoop past – you feel that too.

And that connection meant nothing in it really came across as cheap or schlocky.  There was a real emotional weight to the violence, a real sense of danger, pain, and impact, that stands very much at odds with the sawdust-chewing action of something like Max Payne 3.  I’ll let someone who speaks from more experience talk on that score.

So in sum, a good game, which isn’t all that rare, but an excellent piece of storytelling, which is. Very promising for the future, not just of Lara Croft, but of video games in general…

Now to Bioshock Infinite…

Good game, good game.  Aliens threaten Planet Earth, and only the X-Com project (think men in black meets starship troopers) stands in their way.  They do this at linked strategic and tactical levels.  At the strategic, you build up your subterranean bunker, research new technologies, defend against UFOs with fighter craft and generally manage and prioritise in an effort to repel alien attacks and keep panicky politicos off your back.  At the tactical you command a 6 soldier squad against ever more deadly aliens in a variety of turn-based missions.

The tactical level is in some ways quite an old-school isometric affair, reminiscent of Fallout Tactics, though when shooting and charging around the camera occasionally swoops in to focus on an individual.  Enemies are a little passive, generally just waiting to be discovered before starting to attack, but it can still be pretty testing, with caution being the watchword and the disastrous wiping out of your squad never all that far away.  A soft touch, careful use of cover and a slow probing of unknown territory generally reaps rewards.  Devil may care charging into combat will usually result in a bloodbath.  Soldiers develop with experience and begin to specialise in one of four classes, giving you many options for tailoring your squad and approach.  Unless of course they’re all massacred in a moment of carelessness, in which case you may find yourself painstakingly building them up once again.  But that’s half the fun, right?

The link between the strategic and the tactical levels works nicely, with new technologies leading to new armour and weapons which make all the difference on the battlefield.  I’m not convinced how much depth there is in some of the strategic decisions, though.  I often ran out of money or resources of one kind or another but never felt under desperate pressure, and despite there being lots of options I’m not sure how much skill is really involved in the arrangement of your base or the deployment of your fighters.  Perhaps on harder levels the choice of one research project over another can make the difference between success or failure, but who’s got time for harder difficulty settings these days?

Actually, you know what, this is one game I could foresee picking up again, as there really are a vast range of different approaches on offer and the missions are constantly varying.  It’s hard to think of many console games that offer such an effective combination of the tactical and strategic without the interface being a total pain in the ass.  There’s lots to explore, it looks good, it’s deep without being finicky, thoughtful without being pretentious, and there’s actually quite a lot of satisfaction to be had from watching your sniper blast an alien to sludge with a plasma rifle.

Earth is in safe hands…

Death is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse!  Who, are, er, the last four of a race of insane hybrids of angel and devil, and charged with keeping the balance between heaven and hell.  And one appears to be a woman.  A horsewoman, presumably.  Of the apocalypse!  But I digress.  Death’s co-horseperson War has, er, done something really bad by possibly starting a war between heaven and hell.  Though, you know, he is WAR.  Isn’t starting wars his whole raison d’etre?  I’m not totally sure on the details, I didn’t play the first game.  Death has sworn to save him by, hmm, something along the lines of tapping the power of the corrupted Well of Souls so that humanity can live once again.

So far so mildly incomprehensible.  But plot, schmot!  What we have here is something with a free-roaming world and dungeon-solving structure very reminiscent of Zelda, combat a bit like God of War, and some running and jumping that reminded me of Prince of Persia.  God of Prince of Zelda!  Only with an art style and design all of it’s own.  In fact it’s in the visual imagination that it really excels, with some great location and character design, very much at its best when showing off some crazy vista of collapsing hell or the immense throne of the King of the Dead, dragged through tempestuous skies by two gigantic vomiting skull-worms.  Bet you haven’t seen that before.  The great imagination in the visuals does rather hide a bit of mediocrity in the rest, though.  There are a fair few hidden corners, I’m sure, but you don’t really feel a lot of drive to seek them out.  Mostly it takes the form of guy A asking you to go to Dungeon B to do thing C (having defeated boss D) so that you can reach guy W who’ll point you to Dungeon X to do thing Y.  Watch out for boss Z while you’re there, though!  Gameplay doesn’t offer much that the aforementioned Zelda, Prince of Persia and God of War didn’t offer better, honestly, and the plot ends up feeling a little-shot off, as if it only works as one part of a larger narrative (and possible not even then).  Early on there are some inventive set pieces, but it felt as if the whole thing got increasingly brainless and button-mashy over time.

Not a bad way to spend a few hours, and some visual treats, but my soul was not set aflame with excitement…

I liked this a lot, overall, though not without its wrinkles.  An RPG that’s somewhere between the Western and Japanese traditions, maybe.  Kind of Skyrim meets Dark Souls without the loopy scale of the former or the loopy difficulty of the latter, and a little less atmosphere than either.  It reminded me somewhat of the open-world wandering and slightly strange pacing of the Gothic games, which I really enjoyed but don’t necessarily have a high profile, shall we say.  Where all those games give you in effect a single character against the world, Dragon’s Dogma offers you a faithful pawn follower, who you can design and equip with the same loving detail as your main character, instruct to behave in certain ways, and teach to fight different monsters more effectively as you go.  You can then take on two other pawns designed by some other denizen of the internet, and later let them know what you thought of their creations, while other players might make use of your pawn.  Quite a neat way of making you feel connected to the wider community without, ahem, having to actually relate to them in any way.

My enjoyment level was a bit patchy – way high initially and as I first started to explore the land and work out how things worked – dropping off somewhat as the plot lurched rather haphazardly towards its culmination and I found myself doing a lot of rather dull running around – then shooting up in the excellent final battle with the dragon – staying high as the weird post-game played out – and finally scratching my head in mild bafflement at the somewhat bizarro ending.  So often the way that as long as the possibilities are infinite it seems fascinating, but as the map is gradually revealed and you see the shape and extent of the world there’s a slight sense of – ah, that’s it? In many ways there’s not that much going on outside of a few key locations, though to be fair there’s a nice curve-ball at the end.  Things can unfold rather strangely, though, little is done by way of explanation so stuff just … happens, really, sometimes leaving one tantalised by the mystery, sometimes bemused by the inscrutability.  Incidental characters get very emotional about things and you’re left thinking – did I miss something?  Should I know what the hell’s going on here?  Better than a lot of infodumps, though, I guess.  And combat is pretty cool with a big range of available character styles, techniques, and equipment, and clambering up a cyclops to stab it in the eye never gets old.  Overall not quite in the league of Skyrim or Mass Effect, but a lot to like.  I’d play another.

Dragon’s Dogma has turned up and that’s looking very, very much like my cup of time-sink, so it looks like Max Payne 3 will remain uncompleted, at least for the time being, and I can’t say I’m all that sorry.  I can remember the first game pretty distinctly, from way back when, and it sticks in the mind as being innovative both in its slowed-down bullet-timey gameplay and the appealling gritty world-weariness of its wisecracking central-character’s voiceover.  I didn’t play the second one, but number three doesn’t really seem to have added a huge amount to the formula, and it’s a formula that intervening years of much slowed-down bullet-timey gameplay and gritty world-weariness in video games has rendered a lot less interesting.

Max himself is older, more beaten down, more alcoholic and world-weary than ever, a washed up, clueless ex-cop hired to protect rich folk in Sao Paolo, and that all works pretty nicely, especially as things spiral downwards and he gets more and more dishevelled, beat up, scarred, bearded, shaven-headed, and craply dressed.  Cut scenes and dialogue are neat if a little heavy handed and pleased with their own split-screen stylishness.  Backdrops are rendered with a lot of loving detail, the plot moves quite neatly between the past and the present.  But for a great deal of the time it’s just so mindlessly violent.  A lot of games are, of course, but boy, there’s just something about the way the waves of enemies brainlessly swarm at you and you just blaze brainlessly away at them and they splurt blood and fall over, then get up, then fall over, then get up.  Badda badda badda splatter splatter splatter, twitch, crawl, badda badda badda, guy falls screaming off a building on fire, grizzled wisecrack voiceover, next wave, that leaves you feeling kind of empty and upset with yourself.  Like eating a whole meal of mars bars.  Do I need to play more of this?  Is it fun?  At the end of each wave of brainless enemies you are given the charming option to slow down time to a crawl and watch the last hapless thug’s flopping body be ripped to mincemeat by all the ammunition in the world.  God knows, I’ve a high tolerance for violence, but is this really adding anything to the experience?  No.  No it isn’t.  When I’m finding something cheap and tasteless you know it’s got to be CHEAP and TASTELESS in big ass capitals.

And given this is basically a hell-for-leather action game the action seems a little, I don’t know the word, fudgey, messy, imprecise?  The mechanics are basically duck and cover but Max doesn’t interact very smoothly with his environment, or flip between cover, or even aim from cover very effectively a la something like Uncharted.  Often you’ll have an enemy in cover somewhere out of sight, and you’re in cover, and you know the only way to get to them is to laboriously get up and lumber over to the next bit of cover, getting shot all the way.  You can dive slow-motionly to the side, but once you get there you’re lying down, and even if you’re behind cover, you have to cumbersomely stand up then squat behind it, usually exposing yourself to the attentions of an entire well-armed street gang.  Sometimes you’ll leap crazily into a firefight, blaze away and come through without a scratch.  Other times you’ll pop up from cover for a carefully planned instant, be riddled with lead and die.  Still other times the total reverse is true.  The whole thing just feels rather clumsy and random.  Perhaps that speaks to the truth of a firefight in a collapsing skyscraper with a gang of Mexican paramilitaries, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a rewarding gaming experience…

You know what, I actually quite enjoyed this.  It weren’t no Skyrim, it weren’t no Mass Effect, but it was an enjoyable enough way to spend a few evenings.  Quite a lot of evenings, actually, as it is undoubtedly massive.  Perhaps a bit too big to maintain interest throughout.  A little less size and more work on the character interactions would’ve been time well spent, I think.  It had a slightly young adult feel, a little on the cartoony side, but was certainly very pretty at times.  Perhaps it had slightly the sense of an MMO without any other players in its rapid fire quest giving and constant battles.  Cheesy world-building, one would have to say – you got some kinda dwarves, some kinda elves, a foresty area, a deserty area, a jungly area, you know the type of thing.  Fantasy 101, to a degree.  Lots of background and stuff being said, history of this or that, but I really wasn’t listening too closely after a while because, being honest, the way the conversations were rendered was pretty stiff and dull, not so much the voice acting, although that wasn’t really A-grade, but the tedious way the whole thing was shot with the same three camera angles endlessly employed, the utter lack of convincing emotion on either your character or any others, all made for a bit of a stultifying experience, especially after the quality of Mass Effect, which really does lead the pack in that regard.  The saving grace of Amalur is really the action, which is pretty cool, actually, probably one of the better efforts I’ve seen at combining RPG with arcade-y elements, and a nicely flexible method of character development, all of which ties in nicely with the game’s central conceit of unteasing the threads of fate.  It all does get a bit easy once you’ve worked things out and mastered the item crafting, though.  Game developers seem to have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to the whole area of crafting…

Anyway, it won’t blow your mind, but a pleasant enough romp.

With a few reservations, I thought this was a bloody brilliant game, capping off a trilogy through which you can take a single character, earlier decisions having (some) later impacts.  As far as RPGs go, in a sense it represents the opposite approach to the other current class-leader, Skyrim.  Where that game provides a vast world to explore at your leisure and in your own way (lets call it the Bethesda approach), Mass Effect is much more ‘on rails’.  With some optional stuff and exploration, it basically takes the form of a set of missions following one after the other, and each of those missions takes place along a pretty tightly confined track.  That’s particularly true of this third instalment, set against a backdrop of an all-out war for survival, and in which the exploration elements have been thinned down to virtually nothing, so much so they feel a little vestigial, actually.  But where Mass Effect definitely loses out in sense of scale, it scores big on character, drama, and action (we could call that the Bioware approach, maybe).

Having lost my character to a catastrophic Playstation failure a few months ago, I actually took the opportunity to quickly replay the second Mass Effect just beforehand, so I’ve got a pretty good idea how the two differ.  Looks and feel wise, 3 improves on the already excellent.  There’s a cinematic feel to everything, character models look great (even if the bottom of my character’s brows would occasionally wander through her eyelids at times of high emotion), and the detail and background on the levels is better than ever – sometimes there’s amazing stuff happening in the distance, particularly as the gigantic reapers sow destruction.  Mass Effect has always been a really nicely styled and presented game, but there’s more going on here than before – a lot of thought has gone into the framing, the editing, the lighting, the cut scenes integrate into the action sometimes with sweeping shots as Shepard jumps from the shuttle.  A little glitchy at times, actually, on my PS3, but you can’t fault the ambition.

Gameplay-wise 3 is pretty similar to its forebear, cover and shooting, activating powers of various kinds.  The roleplaying elements were very stripped back in the second game so I’m pleased to see they’ve added some complexity back in to the levelling-up system and equipment, even if it doesn’t always seem to have a marked effect.  There are fewer team mates but they have more varied powers.  It actually makes for a pretty decent shooter.  Without all the roleplaying elements it would be nothing special but as far as action in an RPG you won’t get better.  Certainly greatly superior to Skyrim from a gameplay standpoint.  The enemies are perhaps a little limited – it tends to be various configurations of Geth, Cerberus paramilitaries or Reaper wierdos, but the backdrops keep on changing, no repetition of the same warehouses or space-stations which figured in the first game, and utterly killed Dragon Age 2, everything here is unique and shows a lot of care.  Lots more stuff happening around you, as well – Shepard being flung from a balcony to the ground far below, a Sandworm smashing through a bridge ahead of you, shuttles crashing overhead, all accompanied by suitably panicked dialogue from your squadmates.  It ain’t Uncharted but it’s moved a little in that cinematic direction without sacrificing anything.

Voice-acting continues to be very strong, on the whole.  If I was being picky I think I’d say the dialogue isn’t quite as sharp as it was in 2, less of a light touch, and the paragon and renegade options don’t seem quite as nifty, in the main.  The basic system, though (which rather than giving you good or evil options gives you soft versus ruthless ones within the context of the wider mission) works very well, and really gives you a sense of making choices.  Shepard has her own personality but it’s one you can steer to suit (I always play a ruthless hardass, in case you were wondering).  Although you spend a lot of time watching and listening rather than playing you get enough choice (or at least illusion of choice) for there to be an undoubted connection with  the main character.  There’s a real kick to seeing this person you’ve created delivering the lines, taking the actions.  There’s less character stuff going on this time around but then a lot of that was set up in the previous two games and pays off big here.  In general there are a lot of loose ends, at both the personal and political level, that get nicely tied off.

My main criticism would be of some parts of the plotting.  It starts off by plunging you into an apocalyptic war so there’s a breathless atmosphere to it which works well at driving things forward but means there’s a lot less side stuff going on.  It’s also a bit more, I don’t know, foursquare in its morality somehow?  A bit more gung ho.  A bit more cheesy.  In the second game you end up forced to work with Cerberus, a highly suspect organisation but perhaps the only hope.  It felt like there was a certain level of moral ambiguity to Shepard’s actions as a result.  You really were free to be ruthless, and your boss, the Illusive Man, was an excellent shady superior.  Were you on the right side or the wrong, and did you like being there?  This time around you’re working for the alliance again and it’s lantern jaws and good guys to the rescue all around.  Your boss, Admiral Hackett, is a lot less interesting, the motives ain’t all that complex, Cerberus have gone back to being caricature bad guys and the Illusive Man a caricature nutcase villain.  Little bit of a missed opportunity, I felt.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the ending, and I can kind of see where they’re coming from, but at the same time it didn’t really bother me.  It was confusing, maguffin heavy, not really set up in this game let alone the earlier ones.  As is so often the case, the villain’s plot, so mysterious and thrilling when unknown, seemed rather silly and baffling when explained.  Plus heavy exposition from a glowing child is really, really never a good idea.  On the other hand, I was so impressed with the sheer scale, bombast, and technical achievement of the action leading up to it I didn’t care.  Mad firefights through the streets of ruined london, tanks exploding all around, gigantic reapers dwarfing big ben in the background.  Then, having been zapped with a death ray Shepard limps along, bleeding from every orifice, armour partially melted off, just about clinging on to her pistol while a gigantic space battle takes place overhead.  So the outcome was far from the strongest part but the emotion still very much held together for me and it far from spoiled the whole experience.  Which is, I would say, about as good as you can get from a video game.  If I could pick two games from this generation of consoles to take to a desert island they’d probably be Skyrim (no end) and Red Dead Redemption (now there’s an end).

But if I could add a third, this would be a strong contender.

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…