Orcs & Elves

With my plans for world domination foiled once again, I find myself resenting being British due to Uncle Sam (and Harmonix) taking a recent opportunity to thoroughly roger me over the frankly bloody extortionate price for Rock Band. As such, I find myself at a loss as to what this week’s review was going to be; I really think my PS3 deserves attention off something that isn’t Gran Tourismo, but Haze appears to have been about as well received as the American Pie direct-to-DVD sequels, while Nintendo have been embracing the summer by once more choosing to release absolutely nothing interesting for the Wii (with the possible exception of Smash Bros Brawl, but due to the aforementioned rogering, it wont be out here for another fortnight or so).

This of course leaves me with the choice of pulling another fashionably late review (Mass Effect comes to mind) out of my arse, when brother dearest came to my rescue, bubbling with excitement over something for the DS by the name of Orcs & Elves. Having mistaken this for Pixar’s latest attempt at milking the Shrek franchise to a very fine and equally dry powder of it’s former cash cow, I decided I’d rather join Uncle Sam and rummage around with both hands for something to write about this week. Having achieved nothing but a very dodgy walk, I stopped screening my calls and agreed to give Orcs & Elves a try; full well in the knowledge that I’d only ever be a bottle of Tequila away from convincing myself I never laid a finger on the blasted thing. It worked with Kane and Lynch.

Now that I’ve managed to put all that childishness behind me, I can crack on with the actual review, rather than my misadventures of the week. In Orcs & Elves, you play as Elli, the um, Elf, who for some bizarre reason never says a word but gets along just fine thanks to his talking wand; who has a name, but also has a habit of boring me to tears so much that I dare not remember it. The game begins in some generic dungeon with no explanation or even half-arsed attempt at a back story, but everyone keeps talking about some Dwarf king you’re apparently here to talk to about… I don’t know, the legal age one can work for a games developer?

Orcs & Elves looks similar to Doom, which about 15 years ago would make it the dog’s pride (always left) and joy (by default, right). Unfortunately, this isn’t 15 years ago, and so the dog’s bollocks it is not. There’s some reference to the apparently “award winning” Doom RPG being made by the same people, but if I had to guess, I’d say said award was probably “biggest commercial challenge” – I sure as hell haven’t heard of it. Never mind that, though, Orcs & Elves is more than capable of letting itself down. For a start it’s a turn based RPG, that also happens to be first person. In this situation, I usually end up decided that the game may have its good points, but is let down by the ‘press a button and wait a long time for death’ combat (with the exception of Mario RPG on the SNES).

However, my problem with Orcs & Elves isn’t that the combat is turn based, oh no, the combat is generally very quick but can still leave you with enough time to rustle up some wine, and even a good vintage at that, while you plough through potions and spells, decided the fate of your foe while they sit there very politely waiting for death. The absolutely massive, completely unbearable irritation in Orcs & Elves is that the whole mother-fucking thing is turn based. When I rule this world, I’ll see to it that someone embodies the turn based method (of everything), and then are to be thrown out of the highest window of my evil lair then skullfucked when they land for good measure.

If KOTOR 2 and Mass Effect proved anything, it was that – well, that film grain sucks – and that everything’s better without a turn based system. Including darts. This leaves me wondering how the holy shitting hell we’ve made it to 2008 while still carrying the haemorrhoid that is turn based gameplay. All the turn based system in Orcs & Elves achieves is turning a videogame back into a board game, only replacing the undisputable dice mechanic in favour of “randomly” generated chance/turn/bollocks, I don’t care. By turning Orcs & Elves into essentially a board game (with every step counting as a turn), it is completely impossible to ignore the fact that it’s Dungeons & Dragons, only without friends to play with.

Somehow EA managed to take the epitome of social suicide, and then wrap its skull around a very antisocial bollard shaped like an appendix and covered in glue and poison. With the very worst that classical music has to offer playing incredibly loudly to boot. As a human being who doesn’t see the world in tiles and dice rolls, I have vowed to never play Dungeons & Dragons, and only played the rip off because I was mislead. Then again, it was probably my own fault for believing something to be interesting, by taking the word of someone who actually enjoys Myst.

The end result is something that has a vendetta against social life as a concept, looks almost impressively out-dated and still only has about 4 character models, and just as many hours of gameplay. Adding to that, there’s the fact that the final boss battle is about as fair as being sent to Guantanamo Bay, via Alcatraz, for peeing behind a bush in the middle of a the countryside. With that combination, I wish I’d rather sold a kidney or so to pay for Rock Band.
I’m not going to stop kicking the shit out of Orcs & Elves yet though, I’ve got plenty to say about boss battles in general, and Orcs & Elves pretty much volunteers itself as a punching bag for the subject. Off the top of my head, Orcs & Elves is the best at demonstrating how not to do a final boss battle, with Twilight Princess being a shining example on how it should be done.

Rule one: make the final boss someone you’ve spent the biggest portion of the game wanting dead.

This isn’t exactly hard; just introduce the antagonist early on. If said antagonist hasn’t already been portrayed as the bastard to end all bastards, then after an hour, have him punch a puppy in the face or something. For some reason, games of late seem misguided in attempts at plot twists, so I’ll spell it out. It doesn’t mean change the bad guy 10 minutes before the end of the game.

Rule two: make the boss battle epic.

Another trick modern games seem to be missing. In the old days, boss battles were epic by, despite looking shite, being long but by no means artificially lengthened by perpetually respawning peons who you’d have to mow down one by one before continuing the fight. The only time it’s even remotely acceptable to ignore the rest of that is when you introduce some awesome cut scenes or at least utilise the power of modern consoles and make everything look awesome.

Rule three: make the boss feel like you can kill him.

This one could be two separate rules if you just place the stress in different places. First, you should be able to go into a boss battle knowing that it’s possible for the fucker to die. Second, the boss shouldn’t feel like a strong breeze will cause him or her to bite it, otherwise it just raises the question: how could such a wussbag become the bane of everything and anything? Is the world populated entirely by the inbred and retarded?

I seriously doubt that anyone is going to read that, then take it on board and make a game, there’s obviously far too much money to be found ripping off everything else.

Next week I’ll be trying my hand at innovation, so expect pain and suffering. Until then, remember you can still get hold of me at the usual place:
phill_j@hotmail.co.uk

(Just be glad you got any pictures this week, I was seconds away from burning myself a CD with GIMP on it, then eating the blasted thing).