Fuck off, it's a new dashboard, not something I'd call an "experience". If you have any idea what I'm talking about then you already know that Microsoft has stolen Nintendo's Mii avatar things, even though I'm not entirely sure why.
That's the most obvious change, along with completely changing the menu again which personally confused the shit out of me and it took me about 10 sodding minutes to figure out how to start the game already in my 360. Shut up, all the boxes look the same. While I'm talking about the games/box, I'd like to point out that Microsoft have set themselves up to be royally screwed up the arse by any half-decent hacker with a Blockbuster membership. If you fancy using up some more time and HDD space, you can now choose to install your games onto your 360.
As anyone who owns a PS3 will know, installing games is exactly what we all want because of the noticeably quicker loading times. Ow, it hurt so much to write that blatant lie.
Yes, it's nice and colourful now but the new avatars seem completely pointless - just like real Mii's. If you could take control of your virtual you and go fuck around in the deepest recesses of your 360, or even just mercilessly beat the shit out of your friends' avatars, I'd be much happier to have them but at the minute they're just animated gamer pictures. I also have an issue with the customisation: I made my virtual me without seeing any of my friends' and by taking quite a bit of care to make him actually look like me. Within two hours we all had pretty much the same avatar with slightly different hair colour.
Who knows, it could be interesting in the future (most likely when someone exploits it, see "Rules of the Internet" number 15), but at the minute it's just more colourful and otherwise point.
Showing posts with label xbox 360. Show all posts
Showing posts with label xbox 360. Show all posts
Wednesday, 19 November 2008
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Before I get started, I feel I should let you all know that this week I was planning on reviewing Lair on the PS3. For some reason I only managed to play the first level and then it completely slipped my mind for what turned out to be over a week. Normally anything with dragons that makes me dive around my room with a joypad goes down a storm, or at least leaves some sort of lasting impression. So much for PS3 exclusives then?
Anyway, while C&C 3 has admittedly been out for quite a while, I always thought that the only people who bothered playing it were massive fans of the series. And by “massive fans of the series”, I don’t mean fanboys. What I mean of course is socially inept future serial killers. If you can find me any other kind of person who gets their jollies from pretending to be sitting in a big chair sending legions of soldiers to their death while simultaneously collecting various minerals in a manner that borders on obsessively compulsive.
Being one of these socially inept future serial killers, I don’t quite understand why I have such a poor relationship with RTS games. Watching little people stab, shoot and bugger other little people while stockpiling huge piles of shiny things from the comfort of my lovely chair should, in theory, be more fun for me than the average psychopath gets from shouting at people on buses.
I accept that I’ve taken a massive break from all RTS games, following an oddly obsessive bureaucratic phase during which I locked myself in my room playing Sim City 4, so I decided to don my “commander” costume (consisting entirely of my pants and a big bag of crisps), fired up C&C 3 and tried to rediscover why it was I’d abandoned all hope of RTS games. And more importantly, why I’ll be upset when Tom Clancy’s End War is released.
As I understand it, Command & Conquer has always been one of (if not the most) popular RTS franchise EVARRRR. Especially when you consider that Age of Empires is mostly played by students during college time and Supreme Commander is exclusively played by people who don’t lose sleep over how much RAM their computer has – but only because they’re worrying about a staggeringly long and complicated list of things the average human being doesn’t even know exists. Granted, a number of these could be imaginary; concocted to make the rest of us feel small and silly, but who can really understand what goes on in the head of someone who’ll defend to the death a machine they have to gut and upgrade every time a half decent new game comes out.
I digress, my point is that as far as RTS games go, Command & Conquer is probably the best. In all honesty, I very nearly approached this review with the intelligence of a psychopath who gets his jollies from shouting at people on buses. Should you be a normal human being, I should probably inform you that technically you are going to get bored rigid reading this, and in C&C 3 there are two basic factions locked in battle of some sort – there’s GDI, which is basically the United States with a few tins of Dulux, and there’s the brotherhood of NOD, who are basically religious communists – which is clearly more than meets the criteria for being on GDI’s bad list. It’s also worth taking note of the cutscenes in the C&C series, which are usually in place to make the story more dramatic, but really just exacerbate the situation by looking like out-takes from Babylon 5.
Anyway, my almost psychopathic mistake was to play through the GDI campaign until I reach what I like to call the RTF (Real-time Fuckery); which is that point in any RTS game when the difficulty curve you’ve been casually strolling along suddenly decides to spike up into a wall, impaling you through the arse leaving you crying and wondering why you bothered trying to play an RTS game again. I spent days trying to free myself from this anus spike; which in this particular instalment was to leave me in the middle of a heavily populated enemy area with but a handful of soldiers (most of which had fought their way to this place and had a very real risk of suffering a massive heart attack from breathing too quickly), very little resources and a miniscule but still very much blown up base – and then I was told to survive for five minutes until reinforcements arrived to let me build a real base, then ordered to rescue them and bring back to what was left of my base; and what was left was a smoking crater and half of NOD’s populous.
Speaking of spontaneous coronary issues, I forgot how hard you have to concentrate when playing an RTS. In fact, at one point I was concentrating so hard I didn’t even know I’d lost all of my paranoid-ninja-self-defence senses. Somehow I didn’t notice someone walk past a window directly adjacent to my face, and nor did it register when they opened the unlocked door directly behind me. As such I shat myself rotten, far worse than anything even Condemned 2 could have thrown at me, when said person said the terrifying word “hi”. It’s times like these that I really fall out with games.
When I decided this wasn’t actually possible, I set off to bitch and moan about being royally buggered time and time again, but then remembered that I could play through as the other side if I so choose. Now I’m sorry, but if you offer me a choice of being a noble, almost demigod gallant knight, or the choice of being a complete bastard whose only motivation in life is to give those self-righteous wankers whatfor; well, in that situation I’d have already killed your dog and stole all your food leaving behind only a tin of tomatoes in my wake.
I then proceeded to enjoy killing and tea-bagging GDI for a few hours, while trying worryingly hard avoiding getting, uh, you get the picture. The RTF moment in the NOD campaign was when I was told to command a literal one man army, then to take out a quite heavily protected GDI base. Granted, I did eventually get some reinforcements, but they consisted entirely of a couple of scout helicopters, and a disturbing group of lemmings who detonated whenever someone coughed on them. I spent a couple of days on this mission, suffering a number of RSI and stress-related injuries, before dubbing it pretty much impossible and giving up.
It was at this point I remembered why I should never be allowed near an RTS ever again. I remember a number of times when I’ve been playing The Settlers or Age of Empires, and I just sat there whimpering into my monitor and crying myself to sleep, having just watch some unstoppable force waltz onto my screen, murder all my people and pillage my whole society while occasionally stopping to insult my mother and choice of trousers. You’d be surprised at what happens to you when you watch hours of work and planning get wiped off the screen as if it were but a shit on the wall of a toilet bowl.
So here I am, wearing more than my pants and finishing off the last of my crisps trying to come to a conclusion on a game no one bothered playing over a year ago when it was released. I’m just so, so proud of me. In all fairness, the onslaught of console-friendly RTS games is set to begin soon and after a whole, painstaking 20 seconds of research, I realised there are a whole four RTS games over the current generation of consoles. One of them is on the Wii, so you can bet your arse that the strategy bit is gone, two of them are C&C 3 and the other looks like it’s been aimed at six year-olds. Considering that I’ll be damned if I’ll be flummoxed by a game aimed at people who can’t tie their own shoelaces, there’s technically only one RTS game on the current generation of consoles and that’s Command & Conquer 3.
If you need me to recommend an RTS game you can play with a joypad because, like me, you find keyboards bewildering and lacking in feel when it comes to gaming, then it’d have to be C&C 3 (either Tiberium Wars or Kane’s Wrath, seeing as I’d struggle to differentiate between the two). If on the other hand, one decent console RTS isn’t enough for you, I recommend you start travelling on buses more often and find people to shout at for no apparent reason.
Thursday, 10 July 2008
FPS Showdown
I’m not exactly sure at this point if this could classed as a triumphant return, but depending on how this plays out, I’ll probably just go back to writing stuff on a weekly basis. Thanks for being patient, the reason it’s taken me three times longer than normal to bring you a review is because this week isn’t a review. Read on this week as I try my hardest to avoid innuendos in this, um, three-way. Shit.
Anyone who’s spent any length of time rummaging around the internet will know that at some point, every forum ever turns into a childish argument over which is best, and more often than not it’s about games. More specifically the consoles, but if you must really judge the three current machines I guarantee that it’s best to talk directly about games in comparison, rather than picking your favourite, having sex with it, then deciding to only whip it out around the others in order to take a great big piss all over them.
That said, over the last three weeks I’ve being – well, I’ve been moving house actually, so if it wasn’t for that I could probably have got this out sooner, but never mind – anyway, over the last three weeks I’ve been putting my trio of consoles through their paces to come to what turned out to be a rather illogical judgement on which console does an FPS best. The easy option would have been to play COD4 on the 360 and PS3, genuinely injure myself trying to find any differences, or something involving Halo 3 and Resistance: Fall of Man. Unfortunately, I’ve played Resistance and quickly just wanted to punch everyone who said it was the be-all and end-all of shooters. After COD4, as is the way with these people.
The contenders, then, are:
Representing everyone’s favourite stick-waggling Christmas present is Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles.
Emerging at last from the pits of pure fanboyish hype on the PS3 is Haze.
And finally, picked almost at random from an uncomfortably large selection of mediocre FPS’s for the 360 is Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.
In all honesty, I was really intending this to be a blow-by-blow and occasional kick in the bollocks tearing up of these three games and declaring the survivor the winner, but I may have approached it a bit wrong. You see, I’m proud to say I managed to stay completely uninterested during any Resident Evil game ever; being completely unable to comprehend why anyone could enjoy dodgy camera angles, running away from anything that moves when it eventually moves and forever backtracking in a ratio I estimate as five steps forward, four steps back, pick up some…thing then run back to where you eventually got to. My word, just even thinking about it is making me feel knackered. Anyway, as I understand it, Umbrella Chronicles is a way of catching up on the Resident Evil story in time for Resident Evil 5, without having to sit through any of the bloody backtracking and also a brilliant way to cut out most of the bullshit dialogue and cutscenes which never really helped my distain of this base of all Playstation fanboyism.
Forgive me, it’s probably not that clear why I feel Umbrella Chronicles was a bad choice for the Wii in this org-ahem, organised face-off we see too often in forums. My point it this, I approached Umbrella Chronicles with the thought in the back of my head, “if I have to sit through anything involving a 20-somethng girl who looks about 12, walks like a 12-year old, has the intelligence of a rotten turnip and somehow has been trusted to clean up some form of disaster, I WILL snap my Wiimote”. Sure enough, this was the first FUCKING thing I was presented with. Then it went on to leap out of this race, over the barriers and flung itself into the articulated lorry of my abuse and illogical hatred. All I wanted was Time Crisis with zombies, but no, apparently when facing the international organisation of smallpox carriers, the smart thing to do is stand perfectly fucking still until everything around you has died or killed you. As if not being able to take cover AT ALL didn’t piss me off enough, each checkpoint feels like a calendar month.
What I discovered while doing this was that Umbrella Chronicles can’t really be compared to any even half-arsed shooter, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to carry on mercilessly beating the shit out of it in my comfort zone. My biggest problem with every Resident Evil game ever is the dialogue, which is as staggered and annoying as climbing a huge flight of stairs made of bourbon biscuits. It’ll frequently fall through, there can’t possibly be anything worth the trouble at the end and you would have much preferred to eat it instead. But the key reason I only played it for a few hours before trying to smother myself was a similar reason I never finished the original Rainbow Six Vegas, but at least I could respect that. You see, Vegas was a hard game even though you cold take cover and hide like a little girl before someone inevitably decided to paint the level with your tender brains. Vegas may have kicked my arse, but it did so fairly and expertly; making me rethink my priorities and dashing any hopes I ever had about appearing in some sort of games tournament. Umbrella Chronicles, however, decided to glue my feet to the floor and shove half a zoo of zombie animals up my arse. Just being able to take cover behind frankly anything would have seen Umbrella Chronicles going down smooth.
Once a game decides it doesn’t want my to finish it or even progress at all, I decide it’s about time that game is prescribed a lethal dose of humility. With the Wii let down and flicked out of this competition like a gnat with premium bonds, let’s get cracking on some real FPS’s. Well, a pair of half-arsed FPS’s, seeing as COD4 is fast approaching its birthday and talking about Halo 3 at all on the internet is a sure-fire way to get your house burned down.
So, firstly, what attracted my to Haze and Turning Point? Generally when I pick a game to write about, it’s something I’ve been waiting for, something I can think of something really rude to say about it or I’ve read the box as it’s been delivered and thought “hmm, that looks interesting”. Battlefield Bad Company is one of the latter, so expect that to show up pretty soon. When Haze was launched, I had the privilege of working virtually full time at a games shop over about two weeks and I was the only person to sell any copies of it – two, in fact – and I also got to personally bring back these two copies almost immediately. I found this interesting because for a game hyped to buggery by every Playstation fanboy, it sold actually impressively badly. Naturally I had to investigate the single most powerful tool in shutting up fanboys. Turning Point, on the other hand, was another one of those games that managed to get released without many people noticing; and for a game that didn’t involve the words “xtreme”, “trains” or “hot wheels”, I found this intriguing too.
Every shooter I bother playing has to have some sort of USP (the key word in that is unique, so that’s all you have to worry about), and I honestly doubt Haze was certain about what it was. In Turning Point, it’s quite simple: it’s WWII time(ish) Winston Churchill is dead and the Nazis are taking over the world. OK, not exactly unique, but it’s stuff like that I get attracted to like a fly to a bug zapper. And sure enough, I usually get zapped in the face; with the possible exception of when they went off on a tangent on Enterprise and decided to make a two-part episode set in Star Trek’s famed “alternate universe” – which I fucking loved.
Anyway, Haze’s problem with its USP is that it thinks that having a plot twist is a USP. When you remember that it’s wise to advertise a USP, you see that Haze looks completely retarded without even having to play it. Unfortunately, so many games have double-crossing plot twists that any game without a twisty plot is much more interesting. Before I ramble on about how Haze could have been more interesting than some old carpet, I need to explain something.
In Haze, you are a Mantel soldier – i.e., a mercenary. But more importantly, you’re given Nectar, which in my head is a mixture between steroids and crystal meth; and when a faceless military organisation starts pumping its soldiers with crystal meth, it’s no surprise they may be lying about their motives. After playing for about 20 minutes, Captain Brainstorm – aka Sergeant Carpenter – picks up on this and defects, just as the box explains. Then it’s up to you to work with the most irritating people in world to take Mantel down, although from the way they scream abuse you can’t blame anyone for thinking they were actually terrorists.
Anyway, Haze would be greatly improved if Ubisoft hadn’t decided to stick to the pussy idea of being a hero, and instead decided that Carpenter finds out what Mantel is up to and decides to go along with it. I mean, come on, it’s a game! It’s supposed to be fantasy! I’m sick of playing some chiselled American soldier out to save the world from evil. Why can’t I choose to just be the biggest bastard who ever bastarded a bastard in the face? This is why I loved Fable (and why I’m sure I’m going to be let down when Fable 2 is eventually released), you could choose to be good or evil with no real consequences, you just did as you pleased. On top of everything else, it’d really piss off Jack Thompson.
Now that I’ve thought of another brilliant idea surely no developer will ever gaze upon, I can get on with repeatedly mashing together Haze and Turning Point in some twisted game of virtual conkers. In my mind, the most important part of any FPS is to balance speed and weight in the aiming, and it you can’t get it right by default, then it can’t be that hard to shove sensitivity adjustment things into the options. You know, “adjust x axis”, “adjust y axis”, nothing fancy but quite adequate for finding your sweet spot. With Haze, I didn’t really find it to be much of a problem even with Sony’s pleasant looking, but in practise useless, analogue sticks. Turning Point, on the other hand. Gave me the option of default, slow and fast. By default up and down is absolutely fine, but turning around takes a fortnight, so when you want to leg it like the civilian you are (and naturally you are just a civilian with massive balls and a gun, I mean heaven forbid you get to play as a soldier in a war game), all you really get is a face full of the bullets you were trying to hide from. The smart choice is to turn the horizontal sensitivity up… ah. You see, the pair are tied up in “look sensitivity”, which means that by the time you’ve managed to turn around comfortably, the slightest nudge up or down will fuck up your world more than being stabbed in the face with a talking hamster.
That annoyed me, because I really wanted to like Turning Point, so I pressed on. You see, I stopped playing WWII games after Medal of Honour 2, and wondered why no one else did – once you’ve spent enough time with a 60-year old rifle, you realise that Tom Clancy has a much better idea on how to make a shooter.
Another thing about shooters as of late is that you quickly find a favourite weapon and it sees you through to the end, aside from once or twice when you needed a rocket launched – which has also become the FPS bitch, and will kill you if you hit anything less than a mile away but somehow has the splash damage as dropping an elephant in the battlefield. Suspiciously, most rocket launchers take about as long to reload as hoisting said elephant up on a crane, ready to be dropped again. And hang on a minute, any homing rockets also seem to follow their target about as well as an elephant that’s been dropped on its face from 80 feet… what the hell are developers doing to elephants?!
What was I getting at before I turned into Ross Noble? Oh yeah, favourite weapons! Far too many shooters these days leave you picking what inevitably turns out to be some sort of rifle as you best friend in the whole game, and makes you feel silly whenever you try straying off to another weapon. COD4 got around it by dropping you in a variety of obscure situations, which left you needing either a bullet hose, a sniper rifle, anti-air/tank weapons and of course SMGs. Haze, on the other hand decided that the Mantel rifle is more than capable of dealing with pretty much every situation and everything else has the accuracy and poise of a fat kid at McDonald’s. Turning Point got around this by letting you use the gun you’d prefer to use until the end of time only once – by only giving you ammo for it at the start of one level, the rest of time you only really had ammo to use some shitty German SMG. Fucking woo.
If we can briefly stick to methods of dishing out pain, Turning Point and Haze both used some interesting ideas, rather than holding down the melee button until everything in front of you breaks. This is still Condemned territory, but it’s worth a mention with these two. With Turning Point, you walk up to your target, press B when prompted and the quickly press down on the d-pad to your victim hostage or you can press up to twat the shit out of that bastard. Should you choose the latter (as I did all but once, in the interests of science), you’re treated to a third person animation of… whatever his name is… beating the shit out your dear Nazi friend. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t play a single hand in the actual fighty bit, but it is still strangely satisfying in a world of lame FPS melee attacks. It’s a bit like the bit in Casino Royale when Daniel Craig got tied up and hit in the bollocks with the knotted rope – well, not quite on the basis that you can actually watch the beatings in Turning Point, rather than turning away and holding onto your bollocks for dear life.
As this is a comparison, and because I’ve already said it’s interesting, I guess I should get talking about why the melee attacks in Haze are worth mentioning. Well, in the past when you melee an enemy in a shooter, the melee you straight back and this generally carries on until someone dies or someone else gets bored and realises they actually have a shell in their shotgun. In Haze though, some clever arse realised that there aren’t many people who can react immediately to being cracked across the face with a big lump of iron or fist, and as a result, when you give someone a smack, they take a moment to recover and twat you back; and it works both ways. What’s more interesting is how this system works when you play as a rebel. This may be a personal thing, but I’ve always wanted to play a game where I can steal my enemy’s weapon, shove it up their nose and scream at the top of my lungs “HOW DO YOU LIKE IT MOTHERFUCKER!!”. It’s possible that I just don’t react well to campers. Either way, as a rebel, once you’ve given your ex-comrade an Oltronion vasectomy (watch My Hero with that bloke off Father Ted, it involves bricks), you can then pinch the gun out of their hands and then shoot them in the face with it. And when the little bastard’s been hiding behind a rock taking pot shots at you for the last 5 minutes while you’ve had something bigger to deal with, nothing is more satisfying than making him eat on of his own bullets. Nothing.
But not all is well with these two games; you couldn’t really pass either off as a commercial success and there are reasons why. Haze, for instance, starts off with you spending quite a lot of time with some of your squad, and I pray on my knees until I’m up to my arse in my own blood and cartilage that I was supposed to laugh and these two idiots are a bold-faced satiristic statement about Republicans. If, on the other hand, they were a serious attempt at showing casual/realistic banter between human beings, then I’m afraid I’ll have to hold my head below the aforementioned pool of blood and cartilage until my brain stops making impulses, for I’d have given up all hope for the world. I wish I was being melodramatic. Turning Point also suffers from a criminally half-arsed art department and for the first few levels of the game I couldn’t help but notice I wasn’t fighting Nazis, but instead I was fighting a legion of Adrian Edmondsons. And seeing as I love Adrian Edmondson, I was upset that I had to repeatedly kill him, especially with something as dull as a German SMG.
Both of these games got off to good starts, with Haze I was presented with lots of mercenary action and a lovely drug to make the annoying little bastards not so much glow, but look like they were rather on fire a bit. There was the little fact that Haze uses first person cutscenes which it tries to pass off as interactive by letting you look around a teeny tiny bit, but at least it makes up for them by having moments when the Nectar starts wearing off and you realise Mantel soldiers only see what they’re supposed to – and it’s genuinely chilling when you and your squad walk through an empty room and your vision screws up showing blood all over the walls and your armour along with a big pile of rebel corpses, then they disappear with no reaction from your squad. Turning Point gave me a good feeling at the start thanks to a cuts scene showing a 1940’s New York being blown to pieces by Germans. And frankly, if America couldn’t see the massive fleet of Nazi bombers and such charging across the Atlantic, it deserves to be turned into a smouldering crater.
Annoyingly, I wanted to give Haze a damned good kicking and run it in the face of everyone who was looking forward to it (much in the same way I enjoy laughing at everyone who’s been waiting for Splinter Cell Conviction), but Turning Point doesn’t had anything that can match it, all it has is the question “what if…?”, which is what games should be like in my opinion, but they still need more. What they also need is to run smoothly. I mean, both of these games are disappointing when it comes to graphics, and neither of them do anything to justify being so fuck ugly. Haze has loading times best described as simply painful, and Turning Point… well, remember when Halo 2 came out and people were complaining about how the “popping” in the cut scenes was molesting their children and slapping about their mothers? Well, Turning Point just, in fact I don’t know… I think it just keeps forgetting to load up the whole level before you get to it, and to top it off, most of the textures are so ugly, you can’t really tell when it’s done.
If you’re keeping score, Haze is ahead right now, because although the backdrops in Haze actually look like cardboard cut-outs, Turning Point is generally pretty damn ugly and pop-tastic. In the interest of being fair, I can still slap these two about a bit for making the same mistakes. And so I shall. The splash damage is absolutely ridiculous in the pair of these games, and what terrifies me more is that it’s starting to make me believe that I’d be find if I stood at one side of my room and rolled a live grenade to the other side. And having that thought floating around in your head when prone to bouts of biblical boredom is a dangerous combination. That said, mini-nuke grenades still wouldn’t do much with the main characters in these games, and the pair of them seem quite capable of surviving anything right up to a grenade hanging out of their arse exploding. Then it takes little more than a sneeze to recover.
The last excuse I’m going to use to crack these two games’ heads together is that they have the least likeable characters ever. In Turning Point, the main character is a builder of some sort, and the only reason he isn’t a soldier is because he can’t be arsed. Now that demolition is a bigger business in America, he decides he might as well join the resistance, with his only real motive being to get his job back, I imagine. Somehow he’s arguably the best soldier in the 1940’s, but just can’t be arsed doing it until a bunch of Germans land on his face.
And Carpenter in Haze? Don’t you dare think I’m letting him get out of this in one piece. He’s a whiny little bitch with commitment issues and I much preferred him when he was drugged up to his eyeballs on steroids, at least he didn’t talk as much then. On more than one occasion, I actually tried reaching into my TV in order to slap the little bastard around a bit. Having finally put my hatred of Carpenter down in words, it makes sense why I found myself deliberately stepping on grenades, landmines and anything else explosive I could find. He also has no friends. Well, I doubt he did when I was done with Haze, having shot his schoolmates in the face and then realised that friendly fire is turned off once you’re a rebel – which really annoyed me on the last level when I got lost while being followed by a big group of very loud, very hostile Mexican freedom fighters. It’s one of those things I wish I’d noticed earlier. I could have saved about 200 bullets.
I should make a judgement now, seeing as I seem to have more than made up for my recent silence on the internet. The thing is, do I deal the final blow to the bloodied Turning Point, or the now toothless Haze? Well, Turning Point tried incorporating 3rd person action in a 1st person shooter, which as you can imagine, doesn’t fit and doesn’t work; then there’s the fact that I actually had high hopes for it, whereas I was just trying to find out how bad Haze actually was.
This is a bit of a mess then, somewhere outside splattered across the road of prejudice is Umbrella Chronicles, which was adamant to fuck itself over as quickly as possible; in one corner I’ve beaten Turning Point to a pulp then kicked it in the bollocks for not living up to my expectations, and I’m left with the judgement that Haze is a shit game with good ideas. And that’s a shame, because if Ubisoft had decided to let someone vaguely intelligent to take control of Haze, it could have been really quite good.
(I'd apologise for the lack of pictures, but all I could think of was porn... and I think you've got enough writing out of me to make up for it).
Anyone who’s spent any length of time rummaging around the internet will know that at some point, every forum ever turns into a childish argument over which is best, and more often than not it’s about games. More specifically the consoles, but if you must really judge the three current machines I guarantee that it’s best to talk directly about games in comparison, rather than picking your favourite, having sex with it, then deciding to only whip it out around the others in order to take a great big piss all over them.
That said, over the last three weeks I’ve being – well, I’ve been moving house actually, so if it wasn’t for that I could probably have got this out sooner, but never mind – anyway, over the last three weeks I’ve been putting my trio of consoles through their paces to come to what turned out to be a rather illogical judgement on which console does an FPS best. The easy option would have been to play COD4 on the 360 and PS3, genuinely injure myself trying to find any differences, or something involving Halo 3 and Resistance: Fall of Man. Unfortunately, I’ve played Resistance and quickly just wanted to punch everyone who said it was the be-all and end-all of shooters. After COD4, as is the way with these people.
The contenders, then, are:
Representing everyone’s favourite stick-waggling Christmas present is Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles.
Emerging at last from the pits of pure fanboyish hype on the PS3 is Haze.
And finally, picked almost at random from an uncomfortably large selection of mediocre FPS’s for the 360 is Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.
In all honesty, I was really intending this to be a blow-by-blow and occasional kick in the bollocks tearing up of these three games and declaring the survivor the winner, but I may have approached it a bit wrong. You see, I’m proud to say I managed to stay completely uninterested during any Resident Evil game ever; being completely unable to comprehend why anyone could enjoy dodgy camera angles, running away from anything that moves when it eventually moves and forever backtracking in a ratio I estimate as five steps forward, four steps back, pick up some…thing then run back to where you eventually got to. My word, just even thinking about it is making me feel knackered. Anyway, as I understand it, Umbrella Chronicles is a way of catching up on the Resident Evil story in time for Resident Evil 5, without having to sit through any of the bloody backtracking and also a brilliant way to cut out most of the bullshit dialogue and cutscenes which never really helped my distain of this base of all Playstation fanboyism.
Forgive me, it’s probably not that clear why I feel Umbrella Chronicles was a bad choice for the Wii in this org-ahem, organised face-off we see too often in forums. My point it this, I approached Umbrella Chronicles with the thought in the back of my head, “if I have to sit through anything involving a 20-somethng girl who looks about 12, walks like a 12-year old, has the intelligence of a rotten turnip and somehow has been trusted to clean up some form of disaster, I WILL snap my Wiimote”. Sure enough, this was the first FUCKING thing I was presented with. Then it went on to leap out of this race, over the barriers and flung itself into the articulated lorry of my abuse and illogical hatred. All I wanted was Time Crisis with zombies, but no, apparently when facing the international organisation of smallpox carriers, the smart thing to do is stand perfectly fucking still until everything around you has died or killed you. As if not being able to take cover AT ALL didn’t piss me off enough, each checkpoint feels like a calendar month.
What I discovered while doing this was that Umbrella Chronicles can’t really be compared to any even half-arsed shooter, so if you don’t mind, I’m going to carry on mercilessly beating the shit out of it in my comfort zone. My biggest problem with every Resident Evil game ever is the dialogue, which is as staggered and annoying as climbing a huge flight of stairs made of bourbon biscuits. It’ll frequently fall through, there can’t possibly be anything worth the trouble at the end and you would have much preferred to eat it instead. But the key reason I only played it for a few hours before trying to smother myself was a similar reason I never finished the original Rainbow Six Vegas, but at least I could respect that. You see, Vegas was a hard game even though you cold take cover and hide like a little girl before someone inevitably decided to paint the level with your tender brains. Vegas may have kicked my arse, but it did so fairly and expertly; making me rethink my priorities and dashing any hopes I ever had about appearing in some sort of games tournament. Umbrella Chronicles, however, decided to glue my feet to the floor and shove half a zoo of zombie animals up my arse. Just being able to take cover behind frankly anything would have seen Umbrella Chronicles going down smooth.
Once a game decides it doesn’t want my to finish it or even progress at all, I decide it’s about time that game is prescribed a lethal dose of humility. With the Wii let down and flicked out of this competition like a gnat with premium bonds, let’s get cracking on some real FPS’s. Well, a pair of half-arsed FPS’s, seeing as COD4 is fast approaching its birthday and talking about Halo 3 at all on the internet is a sure-fire way to get your house burned down.
So, firstly, what attracted my to Haze and Turning Point? Generally when I pick a game to write about, it’s something I’ve been waiting for, something I can think of something really rude to say about it or I’ve read the box as it’s been delivered and thought “hmm, that looks interesting”. Battlefield Bad Company is one of the latter, so expect that to show up pretty soon. When Haze was launched, I had the privilege of working virtually full time at a games shop over about two weeks and I was the only person to sell any copies of it – two, in fact – and I also got to personally bring back these two copies almost immediately. I found this interesting because for a game hyped to buggery by every Playstation fanboy, it sold actually impressively badly. Naturally I had to investigate the single most powerful tool in shutting up fanboys. Turning Point, on the other hand, was another one of those games that managed to get released without many people noticing; and for a game that didn’t involve the words “xtreme”, “trains” or “hot wheels”, I found this intriguing too.
Every shooter I bother playing has to have some sort of USP (the key word in that is unique, so that’s all you have to worry about), and I honestly doubt Haze was certain about what it was. In Turning Point, it’s quite simple: it’s WWII time(ish) Winston Churchill is dead and the Nazis are taking over the world. OK, not exactly unique, but it’s stuff like that I get attracted to like a fly to a bug zapper. And sure enough, I usually get zapped in the face; with the possible exception of when they went off on a tangent on Enterprise and decided to make a two-part episode set in Star Trek’s famed “alternate universe” – which I fucking loved.
Anyway, Haze’s problem with its USP is that it thinks that having a plot twist is a USP. When you remember that it’s wise to advertise a USP, you see that Haze looks completely retarded without even having to play it. Unfortunately, so many games have double-crossing plot twists that any game without a twisty plot is much more interesting. Before I ramble on about how Haze could have been more interesting than some old carpet, I need to explain something.
In Haze, you are a Mantel soldier – i.e., a mercenary. But more importantly, you’re given Nectar, which in my head is a mixture between steroids and crystal meth; and when a faceless military organisation starts pumping its soldiers with crystal meth, it’s no surprise they may be lying about their motives. After playing for about 20 minutes, Captain Brainstorm – aka Sergeant Carpenter – picks up on this and defects, just as the box explains. Then it’s up to you to work with the most irritating people in world to take Mantel down, although from the way they scream abuse you can’t blame anyone for thinking they were actually terrorists.
Anyway, Haze would be greatly improved if Ubisoft hadn’t decided to stick to the pussy idea of being a hero, and instead decided that Carpenter finds out what Mantel is up to and decides to go along with it. I mean, come on, it’s a game! It’s supposed to be fantasy! I’m sick of playing some chiselled American soldier out to save the world from evil. Why can’t I choose to just be the biggest bastard who ever bastarded a bastard in the face? This is why I loved Fable (and why I’m sure I’m going to be let down when Fable 2 is eventually released), you could choose to be good or evil with no real consequences, you just did as you pleased. On top of everything else, it’d really piss off Jack Thompson.
Now that I’ve thought of another brilliant idea surely no developer will ever gaze upon, I can get on with repeatedly mashing together Haze and Turning Point in some twisted game of virtual conkers. In my mind, the most important part of any FPS is to balance speed and weight in the aiming, and it you can’t get it right by default, then it can’t be that hard to shove sensitivity adjustment things into the options. You know, “adjust x axis”, “adjust y axis”, nothing fancy but quite adequate for finding your sweet spot. With Haze, I didn’t really find it to be much of a problem even with Sony’s pleasant looking, but in practise useless, analogue sticks. Turning Point, on the other hand. Gave me the option of default, slow and fast. By default up and down is absolutely fine, but turning around takes a fortnight, so when you want to leg it like the civilian you are (and naturally you are just a civilian with massive balls and a gun, I mean heaven forbid you get to play as a soldier in a war game), all you really get is a face full of the bullets you were trying to hide from. The smart choice is to turn the horizontal sensitivity up… ah. You see, the pair are tied up in “look sensitivity”, which means that by the time you’ve managed to turn around comfortably, the slightest nudge up or down will fuck up your world more than being stabbed in the face with a talking hamster.
That annoyed me, because I really wanted to like Turning Point, so I pressed on. You see, I stopped playing WWII games after Medal of Honour 2, and wondered why no one else did – once you’ve spent enough time with a 60-year old rifle, you realise that Tom Clancy has a much better idea on how to make a shooter.
Another thing about shooters as of late is that you quickly find a favourite weapon and it sees you through to the end, aside from once or twice when you needed a rocket launched – which has also become the FPS bitch, and will kill you if you hit anything less than a mile away but somehow has the splash damage as dropping an elephant in the battlefield. Suspiciously, most rocket launchers take about as long to reload as hoisting said elephant up on a crane, ready to be dropped again. And hang on a minute, any homing rockets also seem to follow their target about as well as an elephant that’s been dropped on its face from 80 feet… what the hell are developers doing to elephants?!
What was I getting at before I turned into Ross Noble? Oh yeah, favourite weapons! Far too many shooters these days leave you picking what inevitably turns out to be some sort of rifle as you best friend in the whole game, and makes you feel silly whenever you try straying off to another weapon. COD4 got around it by dropping you in a variety of obscure situations, which left you needing either a bullet hose, a sniper rifle, anti-air/tank weapons and of course SMGs. Haze, on the other hand decided that the Mantel rifle is more than capable of dealing with pretty much every situation and everything else has the accuracy and poise of a fat kid at McDonald’s. Turning Point got around this by letting you use the gun you’d prefer to use until the end of time only once – by only giving you ammo for it at the start of one level, the rest of time you only really had ammo to use some shitty German SMG. Fucking woo.
If we can briefly stick to methods of dishing out pain, Turning Point and Haze both used some interesting ideas, rather than holding down the melee button until everything in front of you breaks. This is still Condemned territory, but it’s worth a mention with these two. With Turning Point, you walk up to your target, press B when prompted and the quickly press down on the d-pad to your victim hostage or you can press up to twat the shit out of that bastard. Should you choose the latter (as I did all but once, in the interests of science), you’re treated to a third person animation of… whatever his name is… beating the shit out your dear Nazi friend. Don’t get me wrong, you don’t play a single hand in the actual fighty bit, but it is still strangely satisfying in a world of lame FPS melee attacks. It’s a bit like the bit in Casino Royale when Daniel Craig got tied up and hit in the bollocks with the knotted rope – well, not quite on the basis that you can actually watch the beatings in Turning Point, rather than turning away and holding onto your bollocks for dear life.
As this is a comparison, and because I’ve already said it’s interesting, I guess I should get talking about why the melee attacks in Haze are worth mentioning. Well, in the past when you melee an enemy in a shooter, the melee you straight back and this generally carries on until someone dies or someone else gets bored and realises they actually have a shell in their shotgun. In Haze though, some clever arse realised that there aren’t many people who can react immediately to being cracked across the face with a big lump of iron or fist, and as a result, when you give someone a smack, they take a moment to recover and twat you back; and it works both ways. What’s more interesting is how this system works when you play as a rebel. This may be a personal thing, but I’ve always wanted to play a game where I can steal my enemy’s weapon, shove it up their nose and scream at the top of my lungs “HOW DO YOU LIKE IT MOTHERFUCKER!!”. It’s possible that I just don’t react well to campers. Either way, as a rebel, once you’ve given your ex-comrade an Oltronion vasectomy (watch My Hero with that bloke off Father Ted, it involves bricks), you can then pinch the gun out of their hands and then shoot them in the face with it. And when the little bastard’s been hiding behind a rock taking pot shots at you for the last 5 minutes while you’ve had something bigger to deal with, nothing is more satisfying than making him eat on of his own bullets. Nothing.
But not all is well with these two games; you couldn’t really pass either off as a commercial success and there are reasons why. Haze, for instance, starts off with you spending quite a lot of time with some of your squad, and I pray on my knees until I’m up to my arse in my own blood and cartilage that I was supposed to laugh and these two idiots are a bold-faced satiristic statement about Republicans. If, on the other hand, they were a serious attempt at showing casual/realistic banter between human beings, then I’m afraid I’ll have to hold my head below the aforementioned pool of blood and cartilage until my brain stops making impulses, for I’d have given up all hope for the world. I wish I was being melodramatic. Turning Point also suffers from a criminally half-arsed art department and for the first few levels of the game I couldn’t help but notice I wasn’t fighting Nazis, but instead I was fighting a legion of Adrian Edmondsons. And seeing as I love Adrian Edmondson, I was upset that I had to repeatedly kill him, especially with something as dull as a German SMG.
Both of these games got off to good starts, with Haze I was presented with lots of mercenary action and a lovely drug to make the annoying little bastards not so much glow, but look like they were rather on fire a bit. There was the little fact that Haze uses first person cutscenes which it tries to pass off as interactive by letting you look around a teeny tiny bit, but at least it makes up for them by having moments when the Nectar starts wearing off and you realise Mantel soldiers only see what they’re supposed to – and it’s genuinely chilling when you and your squad walk through an empty room and your vision screws up showing blood all over the walls and your armour along with a big pile of rebel corpses, then they disappear with no reaction from your squad. Turning Point gave me a good feeling at the start thanks to a cuts scene showing a 1940’s New York being blown to pieces by Germans. And frankly, if America couldn’t see the massive fleet of Nazi bombers and such charging across the Atlantic, it deserves to be turned into a smouldering crater.
Annoyingly, I wanted to give Haze a damned good kicking and run it in the face of everyone who was looking forward to it (much in the same way I enjoy laughing at everyone who’s been waiting for Splinter Cell Conviction), but Turning Point doesn’t had anything that can match it, all it has is the question “what if…?”, which is what games should be like in my opinion, but they still need more. What they also need is to run smoothly. I mean, both of these games are disappointing when it comes to graphics, and neither of them do anything to justify being so fuck ugly. Haze has loading times best described as simply painful, and Turning Point… well, remember when Halo 2 came out and people were complaining about how the “popping” in the cut scenes was molesting their children and slapping about their mothers? Well, Turning Point just, in fact I don’t know… I think it just keeps forgetting to load up the whole level before you get to it, and to top it off, most of the textures are so ugly, you can’t really tell when it’s done.
If you’re keeping score, Haze is ahead right now, because although the backdrops in Haze actually look like cardboard cut-outs, Turning Point is generally pretty damn ugly and pop-tastic. In the interest of being fair, I can still slap these two about a bit for making the same mistakes. And so I shall. The splash damage is absolutely ridiculous in the pair of these games, and what terrifies me more is that it’s starting to make me believe that I’d be find if I stood at one side of my room and rolled a live grenade to the other side. And having that thought floating around in your head when prone to bouts of biblical boredom is a dangerous combination. That said, mini-nuke grenades still wouldn’t do much with the main characters in these games, and the pair of them seem quite capable of surviving anything right up to a grenade hanging out of their arse exploding. Then it takes little more than a sneeze to recover.
The last excuse I’m going to use to crack these two games’ heads together is that they have the least likeable characters ever. In Turning Point, the main character is a builder of some sort, and the only reason he isn’t a soldier is because he can’t be arsed. Now that demolition is a bigger business in America, he decides he might as well join the resistance, with his only real motive being to get his job back, I imagine. Somehow he’s arguably the best soldier in the 1940’s, but just can’t be arsed doing it until a bunch of Germans land on his face.
And Carpenter in Haze? Don’t you dare think I’m letting him get out of this in one piece. He’s a whiny little bitch with commitment issues and I much preferred him when he was drugged up to his eyeballs on steroids, at least he didn’t talk as much then. On more than one occasion, I actually tried reaching into my TV in order to slap the little bastard around a bit. Having finally put my hatred of Carpenter down in words, it makes sense why I found myself deliberately stepping on grenades, landmines and anything else explosive I could find. He also has no friends. Well, I doubt he did when I was done with Haze, having shot his schoolmates in the face and then realised that friendly fire is turned off once you’re a rebel – which really annoyed me on the last level when I got lost while being followed by a big group of very loud, very hostile Mexican freedom fighters. It’s one of those things I wish I’d noticed earlier. I could have saved about 200 bullets.
I should make a judgement now, seeing as I seem to have more than made up for my recent silence on the internet. The thing is, do I deal the final blow to the bloodied Turning Point, or the now toothless Haze? Well, Turning Point tried incorporating 3rd person action in a 1st person shooter, which as you can imagine, doesn’t fit and doesn’t work; then there’s the fact that I actually had high hopes for it, whereas I was just trying to find out how bad Haze actually was.
This is a bit of a mess then, somewhere outside splattered across the road of prejudice is Umbrella Chronicles, which was adamant to fuck itself over as quickly as possible; in one corner I’ve beaten Turning Point to a pulp then kicked it in the bollocks for not living up to my expectations, and I’m left with the judgement that Haze is a shit game with good ideas. And that’s a shame, because if Ubisoft had decided to let someone vaguely intelligent to take control of Haze, it could have been really quite good.
(I'd apologise for the lack of pictures, but all I could think of was porn... and I think you've got enough writing out of me to make up for it).
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