The Man Formerly Known as Max Payne

Another post from Kotaku. This one was kickstarted by the appearance of two new screenshots from Max Payne 3, which brought up old feelings I'd forgotten I had.

Until proven otherwise, I maintain, with every breath in my body, that this is not a Max Payne game, in much the same way that Conviction could be thought of as not being a Splinter Cell game (that's a rant for another day though).

Oh sure, it may bear the name of Max Payne, but if the gameplay is completely different (one of the developers mentioned a cover system), the plot is completely different (it's taking place in São Paulo, as opposed to New York), the lead character is completely different (Max is now fat, bald and bearded, and not voiced by James McCaffrey) and the developers are completely different (Rockstar Vienna/Vancouver as opposed to Remedy Entertainment), then it's a completely different game.

Call it a Max Payne game if you want, but that's nothing more than a lie. This is not a sequel, it's an original game in an established franchise. It's the Halloween 3 of gaming, and until Rockstar realize that Halloween 3 failed for a reason, the game is most likely doomed.

I brought up Splinter Cell Conviction earlier, and I'll bring it up again. Conviction is a Splinter Cell game in name only. The gameplay, possibly the most important thing in a game, is so radically different from the rest of the Splinter Cell series that it hardly bears any resemblance to it at all. The originals were slow paced, stealthy games. Conviction is most definitely not. I'm not saying Conviction is a bad game, but it just doesn't feel like a Splinter Cell game.

That last sentence is also my defense at other franchises where 'everything is different'. Bioshock 2, for example, had different developers and a different lead character, but because it took place in the same city (albeit areas we hadn't seen before), had some of the same characters (Little Sisters, Tenenbaum, Andrew Ryan and Fontaine, even if the last two were just through audio logs) and recreated the feel of the original game so well, it didn't matter if things were a little different. It felt like a worthy sequel.

Fallout 3 and New Vegas are another set of sequels you could say goes counter to my argument, but again, for everything that's different, there's a counterargument that says otherwise. The Fallout series has gone through several different styles (pre Fallout 3, there were the original 2 games, plus Tactics and Brotherhood of Steel), so why should a change to an FPS be any different? And despite them being a lot like Oblivion, there's enough changes and hangovers from the earlier games to make the two games feel like Fallout. The settings were well realized, the stories was appropriate and at times felt like a callback to the first games, the characters were well characterized and compelling... They really did feel like Fallout games.

The fact that something is by a different developer doesn't automatically make a new game in a franchise a bad thing, but when they change every little thing about a game, then you have cause for concern. And that's my problem with Max Payne 3. They've changed everything. That's why I don't think of it as a true Max Payne sequel, and why many others feel the same.

Maybe if Rockstar realize this and make Max look like... well, MAX, we might be more forgiving. As it stands, he just looks like someone from Kane and Lynch, which I think says it all!

Classic Achievements (Article)

Another article from Kotaku. This one posed the question "What achievements would you like to see for classic games?", and I went a little overboard. Here's the first two I did.

Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Spider-Man
Collected all 100 Gold Skulltuta tokens

Touch of Gold
Obtained the Golden Gauntlets
(alternate name: I Keep Ma Pimp Hand Strong)

Swimming with the Fishes
Obtained the Golden Scale

You Got the Thing!
Obtained every single heart container

Bigger is Better
Got the fixed Biggeron Sword

Shot to the Heart
Scored 2,000 points in the Gerudo Valley Target Range

Full to the Brim
Collected, and filled, the largest sized Wallet

Get the Point?
Collected, and filled, the largest sized Quiver

Boom, Baby!
Collected, and filled, the largest sized Bomb Bag

Young Troublemaker
Collected, and filled, the largest sized Deku Seed Bag

It's Magic
Obtained both Deku Nut upgrades

Stick it to 'em
Obtained both Deku Stick upgrades

Practising for Later
Unlocked all 8 masks

Bean Counting
Planted all 10 Magic Beans

Earth, Wind and Fire
Obtained all 3 Magic Spells

Ghost in the Shell
Collected all 10 Ghosts

- Hidden Achievements -

Stabby Time!
Found the Kokiri Sword

Knight of the Round Table
Obtained a Hylian Shield

Engaged? To be MARRIED?
Received Zora's Sapphire

Blue is Better
Replaced Saria's Ocarina with the Ocarina of Time

Bishonen
Received the Master Sword

Phantom of the Opera
Defeated the Phantom Ganon

It Can't Rain All the Time
Learned the Song of Storms

Quit Horsing Around
Escaped with Epona

Stop! Hammer Time!
Gained the Megaton Hammer

That One Level
Entered the Water Temple

I'm Too Old for this Ship
Rode the Phantom Boat in the Shadow Temple

Boom! Head Shot!
Defeated Ganon



Prince of Persia (Classic)

So THAT'S What Happened
Watched the intro

Armed and Dangerous
Found a sword

Stabby Time!
Struck your first blow

Step Aerobics
Completed three levels

Mmm... Refreshing!
Regained health

Level Up!
Gained an extra hit point

Stronger Than I Thought
Flipped the world upside down

Someone Spiked the Punch
Drank poison

Feeling Gassy
Slowly fell to safety

Mirror Universe Counterpart
Jumped through the mirror

Two Halves Make a Whole
Re-united with your mirror self

Made My Way Up From Nothing
Reached the final level

Nothing Stands in the Way of True Love
Reunited with the Princess

Higher Than I Thought
Died by falling too far

Shish Kabob
Died by landing on spikes

Slice 'n' Dice
Died by getting sliced in half

Suicide-by-Cop
Died by being beaten in combat

Far Too Late
Ran out of time

Games I'd Like to See PS3-HD'd (Article)

Just a basic article I wrote on hearing the rumours of a Metal Gear Solid trilogy PS3-HD collection.

Ape Escape

The Ape Escape games are essentially platformers with one major difference - instead of using the right analogue stick to control the camera, you use it to swing a net so you can catch escaped monkeys instead. And this works amazingly well. The original game on the PS1 had two sequels on the PS2 (as well as a few spin-offs, but we won't look at those), and I'd love to see them HD'd, if only so I can once again chase after those naughty monkeys!


Crash Bandicoot

A pipe dream, I know, but it would be wonderful to see the first three games from the original PS1 remastered in glorious hi-res graphics. Failing that, the more recent titles would be nice. Maybe then I could be convinced to give the blasted things another go. Either way, fans would lap them up.


Dark Cloud/Dark Chronicles

Hey, I'd like to see them anyway. They were both great games, despite having practically nothing in common, and they could well do with a second lease of life. Given how busy Level 5 are at the moment, and their current focus, this may well be nothing more than a dream, but it's a nice one to have all the same.


Kingdom Hearts

There's actually been three PS2 titles in this series - the main two, and the midquel 'Re:Chain of Memories'. Bringing all three to the PS3 in an HD collection would definitely appeal to fans of the series, and it would also help to alleviate Square-Enix's financial woes after FFXIV. I'm surprised they haven't already announced it.


Jak & Daxter

There's been five games in the series (Jak X IS canon, fanboys), and I am positive I'm not the only one who'd like to see them all with gloriously remastered graphics. Naughty Dog may have moved on to the Uncharted series, but that's no reason for them to revisit their earlier classics. Hell, I'd even accept the original trilogy, given how Lost Frontier was developed by High Impact Games. Just give us something, damn it!


Klonoa

Another dream, but there's been two core Klonoa games, the first of which was remade for the Wii a year or two ago, so it's not too hard of a leap to imagine them being HD'd and PS3'd. The games had a wonderful lightness of touch about them and a charm that most games lack these days, so I'd love to see the series return, if only to indulge my inner child.


Ratchet & Clank

This could happen, since the original developers are still working on the franchise. And what a collection it would be! The original four games (yes, that includes Deadlocked), remastered for the PS3, with online multiplayer for R&C3 & Deadlocked and Trophies as well as Skill Points... I guarantee it would sell like hotcakes. Why haven't Insomniac Games announced this yet? It's only a matter of time, surely?


Rayman

There's been a couple of Rayman games (well, four, not counting the Rabbids subseries) and I'd love to see them return. Rayman 2 is still one of my favourite 3D platformers, and seeing the PS2-remake Revolution in glorious PS3-vision, along with Rayman 3 would be amazing. Include Rayman M, with online support, and you're golden. Might want to turn down the difficulty of the original though, that was hard as nails.


Spyro

There's been two different Spyro series, but seeing either in HD would be nice. The originals preferably, but since the original developers have moved on (stupid Insomniac making Ratchet and Clank, grr) that's unlikely. It's also unlikely to see the new trilogy remastered, since the last of the three was made by a different developer then the first two. Still, I'd buy it. Maybe others would too.


Timesplitters

There's a fourth one rumoured to be in existence, so it's not too much of a stretch to imagine the original trilogy being remastered for the PS3. Throw in some online multiplayer and you've got one hell of a collection - certainly the closest most people will get to the original Goldeneye on the PS3, anyway. It'd be awesome.


Ty the Tasmanian Tiger

A trilogy of actually quite fun platformers with a very Australian bent. The first was your standard platformer, the second had an open-world aspect and the third is an 'after the apocalypse' sort of game. They're all good, but they seem to have flown under the radar a bit, with the third not actually being released in PAL regions. This could be a good chance to rectify that.

The Power of Starkiller (Article)

Another post from Kotaku expanded to form a full article. It's a good one though. Explains why I'm not really that much of a Star Wars fan these days.

Starkiller is, quite simply, one of the most powerful Jedi or Sith that we've ever seen. And this represents a problem. Because each and every single interpretation of the Jedi/Sith, be it in movies, TV shows, games or comics, has had the powers they command become more and more powerful as time goes on. And the reason for this is audience demand.

Essentially, people demand more from the Jedi/Sith. Basic lightsaber fights and characters barely moving a rock with their minds simply won't cut it. We want more, dammit! So that's what we get, no matter how ridiculous or absurd it is. That's why we get the Clone Wars, with Jedi doing stupid flips and blowing up entire buildings with a handwave.

And THAT'S why we get someone like Starkiller, who is so much more powerful than everyone else, along with the handwave of "oh, the other Jedi were this powerful too, we just never saw it".

Example time! In the original film (A New Hope), the only real lightsaber fight was slow and tension-filled, between a former student and his master. Each one took careful, well-placed swings at each other, much like real swordfighters would, trying in a serious manner to kill the other. It was a gritty piece of drama as much as it was a neat piece of sci-fi action.

The numerous saber battles in later films, say The Phantom Menace, were incredibly stylized but ultimately pointless ballet routines. They look like the combatants are more interested in showing off than actually killing each other. There's no tension, no real atmosphere. Just some awesome stuff happening with no real emotional depth to it.

This is actually one of the main reasons I've stopped being such a huge fan of the series. It's more about the spectacle of the fights and the flashy graphics then it is about the actual characters.

Well, that and they stubbornly refuse to make a new sequel to Jedi Academy. I wanna know what happens to Kyle Katarn, dammit!

Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley (Review)

Decided to rewrite my initial review, since it wasn't very professional. Or good. Ahem.

Comic Jumper is the third game from Twisted Pixel, and much like their other games, it is extremely silly, very funny, wonderfully imaginative and ultimately flawed.

The basic premise of the game is quite simple. You play Captain Smiley, a comic book character who's title is so bad it's almost immediately cancelled, and have to make guest appearances in other comics so you can earn enough money to relaunch your own. It's a little more complex then the other games by the developers ("Help an everything-eating creature to the end of the level" and "constantly blow yourself up to reach the end of the level" respectively), and the game does have a surprisingly strong plot, which is apt, given the subject material.

As you might expect, the humour in this game is brilliant. There's an awful lot for the game to make fun of, from the star on your costume being a pawning fan of your arch-nemesis 'Brad', to Captain Smiley complaining about how it's bad for his image to be shooting female robots, right down to mocking the people who write in to the 'Reader's Mail' bit of a comic. This is, without doubt, one of the funniest games ever made, and it's surprising how far the darkly-rich writing and snarky comments carry things.

Gameplay-wise, the whole thing feels like Contra, with you spending most of your time running from left to right (or in the last few levels, right to left) while shooting in the direction you point the right control stick, occasionally switching from the standard 2D-platforming-rendered-in-3D to run through a short 3D-on-rails section. When you're not shooting stuff, and you're almost never NOT shooting stuff, there's a few incredibly basic fist-fighting sections, but these are brief and lacking in any real depth, and you'll quickly be back to holding down the right trigger and desperately trying to avoid the bad guys.

Which leads to the games biggest problem - the difficulty. This game is incredibly difficult, and not in a good way. Instead of challenging you with enemies that attack in different ways and with various strategies, the game just has the same half-dozen enemies throughout, and just throws more and more of them at you. This quickly becomes absurdly frustrating, as you are constantly trying to move left and right while jumping just to avoid getting hit by any of the dozen projectiles on screen at any one time while also attempting to shoot the enemies throwing the projectiles. You're moving in one direction and shooting in the other, and it's nigh-impossible to do this for long until you get hit. And when you do get hit, it inevitably throws you off and leads to you getting hit again, and before you know it you've lost a third of your health, which the game stubbornly refuses to let you regain without dying and going back to the last checkpoint.

This 'artificial difficulty' - ie: not creating a challenging and intelligent difficulty curve, instead just throwing more stuff at you in the hopes of simulating one - is the biggest problem this game has. It becomes even worse in the later levels, when the stages are in black and white, meaning that you can't even see the projectiles half the time. The end result is a game that will often have you putting the controller down and doing something else for a while just so you can calm down. It's that frustrating.

One of the other problems with the game is that it doesn't really take advantage of the concept as much as it could. The idea of 'jumping' into other comics is an intriguing one, but aside from your own, you only visit three other types of comic - a Conan-style adventure, a return to the Silver Age of comics and a backwards-running excursion into Manga territory - and these don't quite have the imagination to stay interesting across all three levels you spend in each. Two of the levels in both the Conan and Manga comics are almost identical, which is somewhat disappointing. While there's some clever ideas, the game really could have benefited from one or two more styles, or maybe just a little more variation in the styles they do have.

In the end, there's an abundance of ideas in this game. The problem is that they focused too much on the humour and story and not enough on the gameplay. The end result is a game that's mired down by repetitiveness and an unforgiving difficulty. It's still worth trying, but it could have been so much more, and that's one of the worst things you can say about a game. Still, Nordya was hot, right?

Comic Jumper (Review)

Another review. This one's really short, but that's because there's not a whole lot to say about it.

Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley - 7/10

This is, without a doubt, the funniest game I've played all year. Bar none. Sorry Telltale, Sam & Max came a good second, but Comic Jumper has the most wonderfully childish yet dark sense of humour I've ever come across in a game.

Unfortunately, the whole 'game' aspect is where the problems lie. It's basically a 2D sidescroller where you move with one control stick and control which direction you shoot with the other stick. Which is fine in practice, but the game decides that 'increased difficulty' means 'more enemies with their projectile attacks that are nearly impossible to dodge'.

So while the demo level (the first one) gives you a good example of how the game plays, it utterly fails to give you a grasp of how difficult it is. And it is difficult. Especially on the Manga levels, where everything's in black-and-white and you can't even see the projectiles half the time. This is not conducive to good gameplay. This is just clusterf**king.

When it's good, it's brilliant. When it's not, it's an anger-inducing smorgasboard of frustration. And that's how I'd sum up the game in three words. A hilarious clusterf**k.

Also, the 'He Ain't Even Married' achievement can go f**k itself.

Update

Hey ho, another update.

I haven't had much free time as of late - work has been manic, and I suspect will continue to be for the next couple of months - and what little free time I do have is spent on a couple of projects that don't leave much room for anything else.

One of these projects is a series of new in-sleeves for my PS2 games, as the old ones are getting on a bit and I've been able to come up with some much nicer ones. Basically they're just a wallpaper that's been stretched across a DVD cover that I've just slapped a template over, but you'd be surprised how well that works sometimes. I'm about halfway through those ATM, and the hardest part has been finding decent images/wallpapers/fanart/whatever to use. I've had to get a bit inventive at times, but overall it's coming along quite nicely.

Another project has been with my PS3. You may have noticed the gamercard on the right side of the website with all my trophies on it. Getting as many of those as I can has certainly been part of it. The other part is transferring videos, music and wallpapers over to the system. I'm really not sure why I've been doing this - it's not like I don't have the files on my PC - but sometimes it's nice just to be able to watch Doctor Who on my TV without worrying about having to put them onto DVD first.

Finally, I've been sleeping. A lot.

So anyway, that's been my life as of late. Nice of you to ask. :)

Review - Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

I wrote this review for the SwapGame website after reading one that someone else had written that was very negative.

This is a game that, by all rights, shouldn't exist.

It's a sign that big developers are actually listening to gamers, which is an incredibly bizarre thing in this day and age, though it's a very welcome development, if you'll pardon the pun.

Given how much of a split reception the 2008 reboot of the series received, it's no surprise that Ubisoft has taken the Prince of Persia series back to what gamers feel most comfortable with. A new entry in the Sands of Time series (or rather, FOUR new entries, since the Wii and the two handheld versions are completely different games) that doesn't require players to have actually played any of the other games, allowing both old and new players to enjoy their new title. And slotting it into the 7 year gap between Sands of Time and it's previous sequel Warrior Within means that there's much more flexibility with what Ubisoft can do with the series and the characters within.

Unfortunately, while they've made a technically solid game, there's a lot of missed opportunities that prevent it from being the complete return to form that it could have been.

Starting at the beginning, the story is rather one-note and is rather basic compared to the rest of the series. The Prince is visiting his previously unmentioned and never referred to again brother Malik (well, this is a midquel) to learn how to become a leader. But his kingdom is attacked and he's forced to unleash a mystical army that ends up being an evil force that wants to crush everything in its path, and it's up to the eternally un-named Prince to fix things. It's a tired concept and the game doesn't seem to try to make it any more interesting. The whole thing is full of clichés and it's very hard to shake the feeling that we've been here a dozen times before, with the Prince even saying as such in a nice touch of self referential-ism.

The gameplay, on the other hand, is where the game shines. It's a wonderful return to the style of the original Sands of Time, and there are few things as satisfying as successfully making your way across an entire courtyard by climbing along the walls and sliding down a banner. There's even a few new tricks, such as the ability to freeze water and use that as platforms to swing across, or causing lost parts of buildings to temporarily return for you to clamber all over. A few small niggles bring the experience down though. Unlike in any other game, when running along a wall the Prince does so in a sort of rainbow-like arc, which is incredibly annoying when trying to time your way across a series of traps. The Prince also seems to have gained several abilities that he'll forget before his next game, which feels somewhat anachronistic-al. But once you get used to the changes, the game becomes much easier to enjoy.

Until you reach the combat, however, which is the games biggest failing. While before the Prince had free flowing and smooth combat sequences, here the fights are little more than button mashing sequences. There's no finesse to the fights, and no satisfaction to be gained from enemies who only have one attack and constantly try to use it on you. There's also so many of them in each fight, up to 50 at a time, that you'll quickly learn to dread these sections. The now obligatory XP system allows you to learn several abilities, and you'll quickly find the two that are most effective at getting through these fights quickly and will constantly use them, rendering the whole system rather broken.

There's not really much else to say about the game. The music is good as always, the graphics are impressive (except for the Prince himself, who now looks like a football hooligan), the level design is pretty good (if a little illogical when thought about in real-world terms) and the voicework is generally acceptable. But it's hard to shake the feeling that this isn't a game made by the original developers. Rather, it's been made by their biggest fans who desperately want their tribute to be held up and thought of as being as good as the games that inspired them. And while this tribute might be good - and don't get me wrong, it IS a good game - it's not up to the exceedingly high standards of the original trilogy.

But if they want to make more such tributes, well... I wouldn't say no.

A Tale of Drivers

From a comment I made at Kotaku when someone said ATI was better than nVidea.

Let me regale you of a tale of a dark and dangerous world - a world called 'drivers'. Our 'hero', if one can call him that, goes by the name of Catalyst, and no matter where he goes, he is endlessly followed by the tales of the games that were rendered unplayable due to his lack of prowess. It is a sad and unhappy tale, full of misery, woe and anger, mostly mine. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Once upon a time, a young gamer tried to play Bioshock with his outdated PC on too many times and found that the motherboard had died. Sad and frustrated, he convinced his parents to lend him the money so he could purchase a brand new PC, one that would be capable of playing not just Bioshock, but also Crysis, should the mood take him (though it never did, sadly).

This shiny new PC came with nearly everything that PC Gamer magazine (the UK one) recommended, including a relatively new ATI Radeon HD 5850 card. And when he got the PC up and running, it was wonderful! Bioshock could run for longer then 15 minutes at a time! FEAR looked shiny and impressive! Half-Life 2 was much the same!

And when the time came to update his drivers, our gamer did so without nary a question. "New drivers", he told himself, "means better performance with games!" The gamer, if you have yet to realise, is not the smartest tool in the workshop.

Update his Radeon drivers our young gamer did, and now they proudly displayed the number 10.2 on their shield. And the gamer thought no more about it, playing the same games over and over again.

But then the young gamer, in an RPG mood, tried to play Neverwinter Nights. Denied! The game crashed before it even reached the main menu! The gamer was puzzled. The game had always run on his old machine. What had happened? Had the final patch not applied properly?

And so he went through the lengthly process of re-installing NWN and its two add-ons. Remember, the game was released back in the days before DVDs, so in total there were 5 CDs to go through. To say it was inconvenient is somewhat of an understatement. To say it was a massive pain in the arse is much more appropriate.

Yet, once he had re-installed the game and fully patched it, the problem persisted. And so, frustrated and annoyed at the wasted half an hour he had just spent, the gamer turned to the internet for help. And, eventually, he found it, in the form of other gamers complaining of the same problem while possessing similar graphics cards.

The diagnosis? "It's the Radeon 10.2 drivers", they cried! "It interferes with the Aurora engine and stops it from running!" And to the gamer's horror, this meant that any game that used the same engine, or had engines developed on top of it, would have the same problem. Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2, Jade Empire, and even The Witcher! A shocking oversight!

With the 10.3 drivers, the problem was then fixed, and the gamer could enjoy running around the town of Neverwinter and becoming the greatest rat-catcher in history. But this was not the first of the gamer's run-ins with Radeon. Oh no.

After a while, Psychonauts went on sale on Steam. For 99p, no less! The gamer bought it at once and played through it again, safe in the knowledge that it would not suffer the same issues as the PS2 version he had previously acquired.

And it was glorious indeed! The resolution was wonderful - 1440 by 900! The mouse was, as always, much preferred to the joypad, and the world of Whispering Rock was more vivid and wonderful than ever.

But then came Gloria's Theatre. And the game collapsed into nothingness. The framerate, which had until then been wonderful, collapsed into single digits and never recovered, no matter where the gamer went in the game. Almost instantly, the game halted. No longer could the gamer keep playing, his saved game forever corrupted. An unavoidable tragedy.

And then the gamer did something he would do for no other game. He updated his Radeon drivers to the very latest ones (10.4 by now), and restarted the game from the very beginning. A new save game overriding the old one fixed the issue immediately, and he resolved to try again.

Two days he spent returning to his last known place in the game. And played the other levels he did, until there was nowhere left to go but Gloria's mind. And once he did so, the game did once again start coughing blood and clutching at its chest. The framerate plummeted, as did the gamer's hopes of finishing the game. He has yet to replay it, not wishing to play through the rest of the game again only to be disappointed.

And this is still not the end of the story! Yes, there is more woe to come. For as the ATI Radeon grew 'stronger', so to did its ability to break games. 10.5 caused horrific graphical glitches with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (and StarCraft 2, though it had yet to be officially released).

10.6 was particularly hard on the gamer, as it completely broke any game using the any of the Quake engines. This meant the first three Quake games, SiN, the Star Trek: Elite Force games, American McGee's Alice and Jedi the Star Wars games Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy were no longer playable. There's a possibility that this has been fixed in the recent 10.8, but even so the gamer was not able to enjoy slicing the arms off Stormtroopers as a bearded mercenary for a significant amount of time.

Radeon has his moments, but they are far, far overshadowed by his crippling failures and constant neglect from his mentor and ruler, the evil vizier AMD, nee ATI.

And sadly, this is where our tale ends. The gamer has endured much frustration with ATI Radeon and his devilish drivers, and will no doubt continue to do so in the future. The fiend's lack of respect for those that support him and unwillingness to listen and respond to the criticisms they give him are his undoing.

Next time, go nVidea. Then at least the video at the beginning of Bioshock will be true.

Update: I did update to 10.8 (I had to, in order to play Sam & Max 305), and it didn't fix the Quake 3 thing. Grr.

Games You Realise You Hated (Forum Post)

Shut up, I've been busy. But anyway, this is exactly what the title says: a list of games that I realized I hated while playing them.

EDIT: There's a problem with the font that means half the post is in teeny-weeny-eye-strain-o-vision. I'm trying to sort it out, but since it involves retyping everything, my chronic laziness is stopping me from fixing it particularly quickly. Sorry.

EDIT2: Ok, think I've fixed it. Huzzah.

Halo - About 8 hours in, I encountered the Flood. I also realized that I'd just spent the last hour running through the exact same corridor that had been copy-pasted about 300 times. This was around the time I abandoned the game and moved onto something more fun. Looking back on it after I'd finished painting the cat, I realized that aside from a precious few levels that take place outside, the majority of the time I spent playing the game was me running through corridors, all of which looked extremely similar, fighting exactly the same enemies and using exactly the same tactics - shoot everything that moves, wait until my shields are nearly gone, hide behind cover, wait for shields to regenerate, then rinse and repeat. I also realized just how bored I'd been with the game. The series may have a great story and a thrilling arc, but if the gameplay itself is less fun then an hour-long session of Sudoku, then I couldn't care less.

Tomb Raiders I - V - For obvious reasons, really. Playing the Core Design'd Tomb Raider titles in modern times is very, very boring. The games are very slow paced, and while that works for some titles (stealth games like Splinter Cell, mostly), an action packed 3D platformer should be fast paced. TR was most definitely not faced paced. I skipped the first TR in favour of its Crystal Dynamic'd remake (which I very much enjoyed, PoP-style platforming needs to be done in more games), so I have played through about two-thirds of TR2. But I really couldn't keep going past the ice levels, because my arms had fallen asleep by this point. So yeah.

Timeshift - I've actually finished this. But that was on my old PC, when I could only play games for 15 minutes at a time before my graphics card overheated and my PC switched off. Playing it in small chunks, it's surprisingly manageable. Playing it in larger chunks, which my new PC allows me, lets you realize how little fun the game actually is. The time manipulation mechanics are fun at first, but after the novelty wears off, you're left with a distinctly average shooter with a few fancy 'hey, look how cool we are' gimmicks. Or rather, one fancy gimmick, that isn't really all that fancy, because in order to make it through the game, you will be using slo-mo pretty much all the time. And that gets real old, real fast. Which is a little ironic really, when you think about it.

Exodus From The Earth - Chances are, you've never heard of this. Good. It is quite possibly the most boring, tedious, badly translated attempt at a modern FPS I have ever played. Almost every cliché in the book is here, from fighting through a factory/warehouse to a confrontation with a CEO in his office that turns sour, and the action itself is hopeless because you can never tell if you've actually hit anyone with your shots. There's no response - no blood, no screams, nothing. You just have to keep shooting in the hope that you're actually doing some damage. Add in the fact that I genuinely got stuck at one point in the game and had no idea of where I was supposed to go, and I literally just went 'sod it' and gave up. Which is not normally a good thing.

Painkiller / Serious Sam - I've lumped these two together because they're extremely similar (and both have had multiple sequels that changed bugger all but still charged us full price for the privilege), but you can also include pretty much any FPS to come out of Germany along with them. Apologies to Yahtzee, but the reason he likes these games is the same reason I get fed up with them - they're all about killing. And I don't know about you, but when a game does nothing but throw wave after wave of enemies at you, it doesn't take long for you to get tired of it. Especially when there's little to no variation in the enemies or their attacks. I mean, at least Doom had the odd keycard-fetch-quest to liven things up.

Dead Space - Initially this game actually got off to a good start. Then my machine needed reformatting and I had to restart the game. To my utter shock (and indifference), I realized this game did not match up to how good my mind thought it was. Although the game had its moments (and time you enter a zero-g or de-pressurized area, mainly), the vast majority of the time you just do exactly the same thing. Wander around with your gun drawn shooting the arms off stuff. And while that may describe around 95% of games out there, Dead Space somehow managed to make it incredibly repetative, unexciting and routine. The second you see an enemy, you inwardly sigh and start carving all its limbs off, and that's why I gave up. Also, those little insect-like creatures? Screw them. Screw them all.

XIII - I put this solely down to the controls. The game is an utterly horrific console port which, aside from the standard mouse-look that all PC games have to have by law, completely fails to grasp how a PC FPS should work. As well as the movement feeling unnaturally sticky and unrefined, you can't select weapons with the number keys 1-5. Instead, you have to cycle through them using the PageUp and PageDown keys (or Z and X, if you're feeling fruity). That means that it takes far too long to change weapons, and the same goes for the inventory (though that's a little more standard in games). The game has a great story, being based on a cracking graphic novel series, and I spend a great deal of time on it, but the controls really did cripple it and I just couldn't take any more. Shame, really.

The Nomad Soul - Again, this is down to the controls. The Nomad Soul, also known as Omikron, was by roughly the same guys who made Indigo Prophecy (aks Fahrenheit) and Heavy Rain. It attempted to mix several different gameplay styles, such as a 2.5D fighting section, an FPS section and, IIRC, a driving section, all connected by a third person bridge that also served as the main part of the game. Unfortunately, the fighting section is absurdly difficult to control, the FPS section is woefully bad, the driving section lackluster and the third person section incredibly clunky. There's a brilliant story here, and there's a body-swapping mechanic that worked so well the makers of Driver have stolen it, but the over-ambitious attempt to combine so many genres into one just doesn't work. Another shame, but if a game constantly kicks your ass purely because it won't let you play it properly then it's no wonder no-one bought it.