Yes! I have news!
...
No, I haven't managed to secure myself a copy before the worldwide release, I'm not nearly important enough yet. Anyway, read on.
We've all been waiting for Little Big Planet for quite a fucking ridiculous time now, and now that the wait is almost over Sony realises that it might offend Muslims because they chose some music that takes some of its lyrics from the Qur'an. Just sit back and think about how stupid that is. I mean, fair enough, Muslim extremists are renowned for riots and call for blood when someone calls a teddy bear Mohammed (even though you probably know at least one Mohammed whose blood isn't being ordered for lunch).
Don't call me racist for even one second. I may not understand why they get so pissy about anything remotely to do with their religion but I do know that people get paid to choose the music for games and they also get paid to check it BEFORE IT GOES INTO PRODUCTION.
Oh yeah, the article is here; go read and spread ignorance and racism in the name of Sackboy.
Monday, 20 October 2008
Friday, 17 October 2008
Fracture
Just no. No. I'm not fucking playing it until someone starts paying me to do these.
It's a shooting game were you fuck around with the floor. Sorry, but that's not a USP, that's just lazy level design. If you ever want me to review Fracture, you better be brandishing a big juicy contract.
It's a shooting game were you fuck around with the floor. Sorry, but that's not a USP, that's just lazy level design. If you ever want me to review Fracture, you better be brandishing a big juicy contract.
Friday, 10 October 2008
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Just to be clear before I start, I was intelligent enough to play the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Star Wars, full in the knowledge that the Wii version would at best be nothing short of gimmicky. And shit.
With that in mind, I got to play the game in all its Euphoria and DMM enhanced glory; I’m also now cynical enough about Star Wars that playing with the new physics was my main reason behind playing The Force Unleashed. So, as literally everyone now knows, you play as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice during the exact time that no one really cares about.
That’s a little too much story than is really necessary when you make a game that lets people fling storm troopers around “because they feel like it”. But it’s not just about flinging storm troopers around; you can also throw heavy things at storm troopers. Or launch storm troopers into orbit. Or smash them into the floor at astonishingly comical speeds. It’s so much fun that I decided to ignore the fact that all lightsabers act like little more than great big glowing bats (apart from when I cam across a purge trooper, in which case I began cursing this oversight with the intensity of a thousands women in labour).
I can’t think of much to say about The Force Unleashed, other than it’s generally very good for what it is. It’s a very linear action game with some basic RPG elements; cool physics and Jedi. I wouldn’t call it perfect, but it was good enough make me actually want to play through it rather than just try reaching the credits to write one of these in the hope that someone with a little too much money will read it and give me some of it.
That said, the auto-targeting system is just plain awful even by my low standards (considering I was frankly amazed by the auto-targeting in GTA IV and Crackdown). And when I mean it’s bad, I mean I think I may have seriously upset the person responsible for it, because in one particular part of level involving big explosive pieces of scrap and hostile tie-fighters, the obvious course of action was damn near impossible. While I could occasionally grab hold of one tie fighter and slam it into another, all my other attempts resulted in whatever I eventually manager to grab with the force either exploding instantly, or getting launched into the nearest wall no matter which direction I pointed. The only feeling this managed to provoke was that same feeling you get when grocery shopping; you know when you’re getting something out of a fridge that has mirrors and you don’t realise that they are in fact mirrors? Yeah, that same sense of eventually embarrassing futility.
Now that I’ve come to write about it, it has suddenly become painfully obvious exactly how simple the formula for The Force Unleashed really is: star level, have a fight, head somewhere else, occasionally pick up a couple of holocrons, have a bigger fight while you’re trying to do something else; then finish with a boss fight and do the whole thing again. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a certain something that means it never actually boring. Sometimes disheartening, like when you’ve had to repeat the same fight about 7 times because every time you clear some rooms, some bright spark decided it’d the game could be significantly improved by introducing more heavily armoured imperial forces while you’d rather be looking for mountainous piles of bandages and cotton wool.
So, ok, it drops the ball a couple of times and yeah, it does concentrate on all the action intensive crap from the prequels, but I’d still hold it as one of the best Star Wars ever games made. Although that may be because it takes turn-based combat and exiles it to the deepest, darkest depths of some long forgotten ditch on some moon somewhere. Hell, if they actually finished Knights of the Old Republic 2 and used some real combat without using any frankly bewildering babble about how the roll of a virtual dice you can’t see decides whether you die or do a little bit of damage, then I’d happily dub it my favourite game of all time. Holy crap, that really hurt my brain.
But someone at LucasArts decided that they really don’t like me, so it was never to be.
No!
This isn’t about the back catalogue of LucasArts and how they’ve made some brilliant games, some shit games and just occasionally missed the mark of perfection by a margin so slim it’s only worth mentioning to stop more intelligent people taking the piss out of you. This is supposed to be about one particular game, The Force Unleashed and so help me, the only tangents I’m willing to go off on are ones that are funny.
What we also have in The Force Unleashed is another problem with modern games that’s really starting to annoy me, and I’m certain I brought it up in Haze. You start the game as the evil Sith Lord’s equally evil S&M bitch who will quite happily maul legions of storm troopers if it involves tracking down and royally violating Jedi with your lightsaber and fists of force-imbued fury. Despite the number of times Darth Vader betrays your character, he remains oblivious that Vader is in fact the emperor’s S&M bitch and that’ll never change. The main problem I have with the story in The Force Unleashed is that it takes a perfectly evil Sith apprentice, and gradually turns him into another angsty Jedi teenager who decided to genuinely try overthrowing the empire. And yes, I do know that you can get an evil ending (heaven forbid someone makes a game with just one ending these days), but the whole story arc begs for a hero who’d rather shove his lightsaber up the emperor’s arse rather than taking Vader’s place as the biggest and baddest asthmatic S&M bitch.
If you can forgive the completely random auto-targeting, there’s a lot to like about The Force Unleashed and it really is worth getting; but I’m personally waiting for Fable 2 for some good old wholesome evil and corrupt gaming while I’m not too busy playing with my dog. If not, you’re an idiot.
Incidentally, if you’re on facebook, you could do worse than joining my group “Fable 2 will be good or Peter Molyneux’s dog will die”.
With that in mind, I got to play the game in all its Euphoria and DMM enhanced glory; I’m also now cynical enough about Star Wars that playing with the new physics was my main reason behind playing The Force Unleashed. So, as literally everyone now knows, you play as Darth Vader’s secret apprentice during the exact time that no one really cares about.
That’s a little too much story than is really necessary when you make a game that lets people fling storm troopers around “because they feel like it”. But it’s not just about flinging storm troopers around; you can also throw heavy things at storm troopers. Or launch storm troopers into orbit. Or smash them into the floor at astonishingly comical speeds. It’s so much fun that I decided to ignore the fact that all lightsabers act like little more than great big glowing bats (apart from when I cam across a purge trooper, in which case I began cursing this oversight with the intensity of a thousands women in labour).
I can’t think of much to say about The Force Unleashed, other than it’s generally very good for what it is. It’s a very linear action game with some basic RPG elements; cool physics and Jedi. I wouldn’t call it perfect, but it was good enough make me actually want to play through it rather than just try reaching the credits to write one of these in the hope that someone with a little too much money will read it and give me some of it.
That said, the auto-targeting system is just plain awful even by my low standards (considering I was frankly amazed by the auto-targeting in GTA IV and Crackdown). And when I mean it’s bad, I mean I think I may have seriously upset the person responsible for it, because in one particular part of level involving big explosive pieces of scrap and hostile tie-fighters, the obvious course of action was damn near impossible. While I could occasionally grab hold of one tie fighter and slam it into another, all my other attempts resulted in whatever I eventually manager to grab with the force either exploding instantly, or getting launched into the nearest wall no matter which direction I pointed. The only feeling this managed to provoke was that same feeling you get when grocery shopping; you know when you’re getting something out of a fridge that has mirrors and you don’t realise that they are in fact mirrors? Yeah, that same sense of eventually embarrassing futility.
Now that I’ve come to write about it, it has suddenly become painfully obvious exactly how simple the formula for The Force Unleashed really is: star level, have a fight, head somewhere else, occasionally pick up a couple of holocrons, have a bigger fight while you’re trying to do something else; then finish with a boss fight and do the whole thing again. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a certain something that means it never actually boring. Sometimes disheartening, like when you’ve had to repeat the same fight about 7 times because every time you clear some rooms, some bright spark decided it’d the game could be significantly improved by introducing more heavily armoured imperial forces while you’d rather be looking for mountainous piles of bandages and cotton wool.
So, ok, it drops the ball a couple of times and yeah, it does concentrate on all the action intensive crap from the prequels, but I’d still hold it as one of the best Star Wars ever games made. Although that may be because it takes turn-based combat and exiles it to the deepest, darkest depths of some long forgotten ditch on some moon somewhere. Hell, if they actually finished Knights of the Old Republic 2 and used some real combat without using any frankly bewildering babble about how the roll of a virtual dice you can’t see decides whether you die or do a little bit of damage, then I’d happily dub it my favourite game of all time. Holy crap, that really hurt my brain.
But someone at LucasArts decided that they really don’t like me, so it was never to be.
No!
This isn’t about the back catalogue of LucasArts and how they’ve made some brilliant games, some shit games and just occasionally missed the mark of perfection by a margin so slim it’s only worth mentioning to stop more intelligent people taking the piss out of you. This is supposed to be about one particular game, The Force Unleashed and so help me, the only tangents I’m willing to go off on are ones that are funny.
What we also have in The Force Unleashed is another problem with modern games that’s really starting to annoy me, and I’m certain I brought it up in Haze. You start the game as the evil Sith Lord’s equally evil S&M bitch who will quite happily maul legions of storm troopers if it involves tracking down and royally violating Jedi with your lightsaber and fists of force-imbued fury. Despite the number of times Darth Vader betrays your character, he remains oblivious that Vader is in fact the emperor’s S&M bitch and that’ll never change. The main problem I have with the story in The Force Unleashed is that it takes a perfectly evil Sith apprentice, and gradually turns him into another angsty Jedi teenager who decided to genuinely try overthrowing the empire. And yes, I do know that you can get an evil ending (heaven forbid someone makes a game with just one ending these days), but the whole story arc begs for a hero who’d rather shove his lightsaber up the emperor’s arse rather than taking Vader’s place as the biggest and baddest asthmatic S&M bitch.
If you can forgive the completely random auto-targeting, there’s a lot to like about The Force Unleashed and it really is worth getting; but I’m personally waiting for Fable 2 for some good old wholesome evil and corrupt gaming while I’m not too busy playing with my dog. If not, you’re an idiot.
Incidentally, if you’re on facebook, you could do worse than joining my group “Fable 2 will be good or Peter Molyneux’s dog will die”.
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Too Human
After playing games for so many years, you’d think I’d have learned by now that it’s not actually worth looking forward to a game, especially one that’s been delayed for significantly longer than the train you were actually on time for. But, lo and behold, I made the newbie error of thinking that that Too Human looked totally awesome and that it could possibly be the most interesting and unique games I’ve played this year. And considering that the only significant interruption to the flow of almost dangerous level of mediocrity was Grand Theft Auto 4 (and everyone who disagrees can all go tape themselves to a Scud missile and learn what’s really “too serious”), it couldn’t be too hard for a game to grab that title.
Things started falling apart during the first cutscene, when I became quite aware as to why there had been such a public cat fight between Silicone Knights and Epic over the game engine. I seriously haven’t seen anything as inconsistent as the frame rate in Too Human since the first time I tried making ReadyBrek. Seeing as Too Human had been branded an action RPG, I forked over my hard-earned monies and gave it a wide birth on the understanding that everything would pick up later and I’d have weeks of fun while deciding to be a gallant and pure human knight, or load myself up on enough cybernetics to make the Borg queen say “Jesus Christ, mate, don’t you think that that’s a bit much?”.
But no.
Instead I got a sluggish, tiresome and repetitive Devil May Cry rip off that didn’t even have the healthy supply of hard rocking metal music thrashing away, accompanying images of a goliath, glowing hammer obliterating legions of evil robots. Somewhere towards the end a rather pitiful guitar solo showed up, but like I said in my Bully review, it’s like seeing a whale with a golfer’s glove glued to it. It doesn’t fit and all it does is make you wonder why anyone decided to put it there.
A big problem with Too Human is it makes my favourite genre sound like an excuse for schizophrenia and blatant laziness. You just know that someone tried justifying the slow pace of this “action RPG” by saying it’s an RPG and you have to sit back and take it in, but when asked about the lack of any kind of choice or penalty (for anything at all), someone very similar (but with a suspicious looking moustache and sweater) says that it’s an action game and no one who plays action games has the patience for that sort of malarkey.
So, with that in mind, Too Human managed to almost instantaneously label itself as completely fucking useless. Surely, such a long and complicated birth can have some kind of pay off; some kind of amazing physics engine that makes candyfloss melt realistically? Well maybe, but they made the massive mistake of making a game with absolutely no candyfloss, nor any opportunity to do so despite Norse Gods being renowned for their love of such a fabulously charming way of eating sugar. It’s the only explanation I can think of as to why it took so long to release the damn game, because even the combat (and it’s between 70% and 95% combat, depending on how much fannying around you do with different coloured armour and weapons) is nothing shy of painful; slow, sticky and with such a feeling of futility that makes you wonder if you’re actually in the middle of an MMO, furiously grinding away while your friends are all out kissing girls.
Call me a sucker for flashing colourful lights and other general shininess of sci-fi, because I was determined to see it through to the end; although it was also partly down to an overwhelming desire to not get beaten by such a shit game. Again.
Anyway, my advice is this: don’t bother. Yeah, it’s being marketed as the first in a planned trilogy, but on no circumstances does that give anyone the right to make a game with such a poor ending. Baldur sticks his sword through a table and goes off on a huff. There, that’s it, I’ve just saved you about 10 hours of your life. The whole idea seems drastically flawed… Norse Gods in shiny armour shooting and crushing robots is very cool; but how the bejesus do you classify someone as a Norse God? No one has any super powers, everyone can (and quite a lot do) die and in fact, one of them is blind. BLIND FOR GOD’S SAKE. Towards the end you get sent on a mission to assault hell. In theory, this should redefine “badass” but instead it’s just bland and dry, with the itching feeling that you’ve just figured out where all of Earth’s metal actually comes from.
I don’t profess to know much about Norse Gods or the logistics involved in fighting legions of robots, but I can guarantee you that when mixed with sci-fi and made into a game, the word “boring” should be lost in the deepest depths of the minds of anyone involved. Even if you can’t nail the action, The Lost Vikings proved years ago that you can make a brilliant game if you combine Viking mythology with sci-fi. Again, if you disagree, scud missile.
Whatever, it’s lame and takes a brilliant idea for a story, then gives it a vasectomy. Personally, I think they could have made a massive improvement if they had you play the game as Lt. Commander Worf and then threw in a bunch of driving sections from Burnout. Then bundle the game with a lighter and some sherbet.
Things started falling apart during the first cutscene, when I became quite aware as to why there had been such a public cat fight between Silicone Knights and Epic over the game engine. I seriously haven’t seen anything as inconsistent as the frame rate in Too Human since the first time I tried making ReadyBrek. Seeing as Too Human had been branded an action RPG, I forked over my hard-earned monies and gave it a wide birth on the understanding that everything would pick up later and I’d have weeks of fun while deciding to be a gallant and pure human knight, or load myself up on enough cybernetics to make the Borg queen say “Jesus Christ, mate, don’t you think that that’s a bit much?”.
But no.
Instead I got a sluggish, tiresome and repetitive Devil May Cry rip off that didn’t even have the healthy supply of hard rocking metal music thrashing away, accompanying images of a goliath, glowing hammer obliterating legions of evil robots. Somewhere towards the end a rather pitiful guitar solo showed up, but like I said in my Bully review, it’s like seeing a whale with a golfer’s glove glued to it. It doesn’t fit and all it does is make you wonder why anyone decided to put it there.
A big problem with Too Human is it makes my favourite genre sound like an excuse for schizophrenia and blatant laziness. You just know that someone tried justifying the slow pace of this “action RPG” by saying it’s an RPG and you have to sit back and take it in, but when asked about the lack of any kind of choice or penalty (for anything at all), someone very similar (but with a suspicious looking moustache and sweater) says that it’s an action game and no one who plays action games has the patience for that sort of malarkey.
So, with that in mind, Too Human managed to almost instantaneously label itself as completely fucking useless. Surely, such a long and complicated birth can have some kind of pay off; some kind of amazing physics engine that makes candyfloss melt realistically? Well maybe, but they made the massive mistake of making a game with absolutely no candyfloss, nor any opportunity to do so despite Norse Gods being renowned for their love of such a fabulously charming way of eating sugar. It’s the only explanation I can think of as to why it took so long to release the damn game, because even the combat (and it’s between 70% and 95% combat, depending on how much fannying around you do with different coloured armour and weapons) is nothing shy of painful; slow, sticky and with such a feeling of futility that makes you wonder if you’re actually in the middle of an MMO, furiously grinding away while your friends are all out kissing girls.
Call me a sucker for flashing colourful lights and other general shininess of sci-fi, because I was determined to see it through to the end; although it was also partly down to an overwhelming desire to not get beaten by such a shit game. Again.
Anyway, my advice is this: don’t bother. Yeah, it’s being marketed as the first in a planned trilogy, but on no circumstances does that give anyone the right to make a game with such a poor ending. Baldur sticks his sword through a table and goes off on a huff. There, that’s it, I’ve just saved you about 10 hours of your life. The whole idea seems drastically flawed… Norse Gods in shiny armour shooting and crushing robots is very cool; but how the bejesus do you classify someone as a Norse God? No one has any super powers, everyone can (and quite a lot do) die and in fact, one of them is blind. BLIND FOR GOD’S SAKE. Towards the end you get sent on a mission to assault hell. In theory, this should redefine “badass” but instead it’s just bland and dry, with the itching feeling that you’ve just figured out where all of Earth’s metal actually comes from.
I don’t profess to know much about Norse Gods or the logistics involved in fighting legions of robots, but I can guarantee you that when mixed with sci-fi and made into a game, the word “boring” should be lost in the deepest depths of the minds of anyone involved. Even if you can’t nail the action, The Lost Vikings proved years ago that you can make a brilliant game if you combine Viking mythology with sci-fi. Again, if you disagree, scud missile.
Whatever, it’s lame and takes a brilliant idea for a story, then gives it a vasectomy. Personally, I think they could have made a massive improvement if they had you play the game as Lt. Commander Worf and then threw in a bunch of driving sections from Burnout. Then bundle the game with a lighter and some sherbet.
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
Spore
By this point, both of my regular readers will be aware of how I feel about PC gaming, and that as far as I’m concerned all you PC gamers need to be sent somewhere labelled as “E3”, but instead replace all the shininess and half naked women (who must surely be upsetting their parents) is replaced by someone better than Paul McKenna, who can then hypnotise you into the normal way of thinking that is “coding does not equal fun; thus patches, installation keys, reboots and constant upgrading and anything else that requires that much work just to play the fucking thing is not fun”. A key example of this is when I recently installed the complete original Sims game, which took me literally an hour and 18 motherfucking disc swaps. Seriously, I changed the discs 18 times, and this was without any hiccups.
One of you two will be thinking it serves me right for wanting to play the Sims, but shut up, it proves my point exactly. In general, PC gaming is about as much fun as PC work, and usually there’s just a spreadsheet splitting the two. Anyway, some time ago, I was told about Spore and promised that one of the selling points of it was it was being designed to run on pretty much any PC. After I spoke to someone more interesting, I was told the really interesting thing about Spore was that it lets you make an alien race, starting from the very beginning as a microbe, then working your way up the evolutionary chain, then the food chain until eventually your alien race ends up with a galactic empire.
Now that I’ve written that down, it’s basically an extended version of the Sims & SimCity; but fuck it, it’s all customisable and shit. Having decided that I’d be more mature and make a race of interesting aliens that don’t look like they’re from Star Trek (or just a race of giant penises), I decided to fuck around with the creature creation tools as much as possible, I wound up with something resembling an understandably pissed off, fat platypus gorilla; then accidentally ended the species’ evolution with something that wouldn’t look out of place in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
At first this filled me with woe for making a creature whose head actually touched its arse if it tried looking up, then I decided to be proud of this monstrosity, partially because I was stuck with it, but mostly because this six-limbed, ugly bastard was pretty much the point of Spore. However, it was at this point I nearly died. I realised that my microscopic, style-over-function, energy saving midget of a PC was running Spore very smoothly, albeit with the settings on low, but frankly, it’s a hell of an achievement for something bought as a complete package with an on-board graphics card. I was seriously expecting it to install, then get a message off EA saying they’d successfully stolen £25 of my money and there was no way for me to enjoy it or get it back.
But never mind my hideous monster, or his space ship which resembles a green USS Stargazer (because it wouldn’t let me make an Enterprise). I’m here to tell you what I thought of Spore before I get far too curious and read up what everyone else thinks about it. I was initially sceptical about Spore, partly because it’s been delayed at least two years, but mostly because it was originally SimEverything; which to me said it was going to be the Sims, but with weird monstrosities.
Luckily I was treated to something a lot more interactive, and a pair of stages that had me rediscovering the word “nomnomnom”. The thing I like about Spore overall, is its simplicity. Even though it was on easy mode (fuck you, I’m getting to grips with something different than I’ve ever played), the controls were kept simple, as was, well, everything else. Click on something to eat it/use it/fuck it, depending on if you’re set to nice or dickhead mode. And that’s pretty much how the whole game plays out, even when you evolve to the tribal, civilisation and space stages.
Having said all that, and the admiration of the simplicity of Spore, I do think that called Spore very flat is perfectly reasonable. While I personally believe that all the needs and desires of Sims is a perfect way to introduce OCD to any given nation; the lack of pretty much everything other than a health meter at any given stage seems like a let down best described by remembering the first time you got Sky TV, then looking through a year later and realising there isn’t really that much on offer. Sure it’s fantastic to start with, and you can never imagine getting tired of it… but sooner or later you’ll realise all you’re doing with your time is neglecting the few friends you have in order to watch repeats of shit 80’s sitcoms and wondering why none of the few hundred channels you pay for shows Star Trek anymore.
Hindsight has once again proven itself to be a cynic’s most powerful weapon, but until I actually reach that level of boredom, repetition and general melancholy, I’m pretty determined to enjoy Spore and the trouser-tightening feeling I get from being given the power to condemn not only a single person, family or even city to hell and damnation; but instead given the power to make a whole alien race’s entire existence incredibly uncomfortable and inconvenient (such as locating said alien’s arse directly about it’s head).
I may at one point try the extreme lifestyle choices – pussyfied vs. the borg – but I’d rather delay it because I seriously doubt these choices work nearly as well as Fable, which for me still has massive replay value even today. Much in the same way that I still love DS9.
Should your short term memory be functional, you’ll have no doubt noticed a recurring Star Trek theme, but what can you expect from a game that gives me the option of making an alien race, then eventually letting me make a galactic empire with the option of designing their space ships? Yeah, I thought so. I’d like to see anyone who made it to the space stage of Spore and still hasn’t made anything the resembles something from a Sci-Fi series/movie. When I find this person, I can bring him to the Manchester University’s science department and have them disembowelled, studied and used as proof of life on other planets.
I’m really just waiting for the Event Horizon piloted by Care Bears.
One of you two will be thinking it serves me right for wanting to play the Sims, but shut up, it proves my point exactly. In general, PC gaming is about as much fun as PC work, and usually there’s just a spreadsheet splitting the two. Anyway, some time ago, I was told about Spore and promised that one of the selling points of it was it was being designed to run on pretty much any PC. After I spoke to someone more interesting, I was told the really interesting thing about Spore was that it lets you make an alien race, starting from the very beginning as a microbe, then working your way up the evolutionary chain, then the food chain until eventually your alien race ends up with a galactic empire.
Now that I’ve written that down, it’s basically an extended version of the Sims & SimCity; but fuck it, it’s all customisable and shit. Having decided that I’d be more mature and make a race of interesting aliens that don’t look like they’re from Star Trek (or just a race of giant penises), I decided to fuck around with the creature creation tools as much as possible, I wound up with something resembling an understandably pissed off, fat platypus gorilla; then accidentally ended the species’ evolution with something that wouldn’t look out of place in Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
At first this filled me with woe for making a creature whose head actually touched its arse if it tried looking up, then I decided to be proud of this monstrosity, partially because I was stuck with it, but mostly because this six-limbed, ugly bastard was pretty much the point of Spore. However, it was at this point I nearly died. I realised that my microscopic, style-over-function, energy saving midget of a PC was running Spore very smoothly, albeit with the settings on low, but frankly, it’s a hell of an achievement for something bought as a complete package with an on-board graphics card. I was seriously expecting it to install, then get a message off EA saying they’d successfully stolen £25 of my money and there was no way for me to enjoy it or get it back.
But never mind my hideous monster, or his space ship which resembles a green USS Stargazer (because it wouldn’t let me make an Enterprise). I’m here to tell you what I thought of Spore before I get far too curious and read up what everyone else thinks about it. I was initially sceptical about Spore, partly because it’s been delayed at least two years, but mostly because it was originally SimEverything; which to me said it was going to be the Sims, but with weird monstrosities.
Luckily I was treated to something a lot more interactive, and a pair of stages that had me rediscovering the word “nomnomnom”. The thing I like about Spore overall, is its simplicity. Even though it was on easy mode (fuck you, I’m getting to grips with something different than I’ve ever played), the controls were kept simple, as was, well, everything else. Click on something to eat it/use it/fuck it, depending on if you’re set to nice or dickhead mode. And that’s pretty much how the whole game plays out, even when you evolve to the tribal, civilisation and space stages.
Having said all that, and the admiration of the simplicity of Spore, I do think that called Spore very flat is perfectly reasonable. While I personally believe that all the needs and desires of Sims is a perfect way to introduce OCD to any given nation; the lack of pretty much everything other than a health meter at any given stage seems like a let down best described by remembering the first time you got Sky TV, then looking through a year later and realising there isn’t really that much on offer. Sure it’s fantastic to start with, and you can never imagine getting tired of it… but sooner or later you’ll realise all you’re doing with your time is neglecting the few friends you have in order to watch repeats of shit 80’s sitcoms and wondering why none of the few hundred channels you pay for shows Star Trek anymore.
Hindsight has once again proven itself to be a cynic’s most powerful weapon, but until I actually reach that level of boredom, repetition and general melancholy, I’m pretty determined to enjoy Spore and the trouser-tightening feeling I get from being given the power to condemn not only a single person, family or even city to hell and damnation; but instead given the power to make a whole alien race’s entire existence incredibly uncomfortable and inconvenient (such as locating said alien’s arse directly about it’s head).
I may at one point try the extreme lifestyle choices – pussyfied vs. the borg – but I’d rather delay it because I seriously doubt these choices work nearly as well as Fable, which for me still has massive replay value even today. Much in the same way that I still love DS9.
Should your short term memory be functional, you’ll have no doubt noticed a recurring Star Trek theme, but what can you expect from a game that gives me the option of making an alien race, then eventually letting me make a galactic empire with the option of designing their space ships? Yeah, I thought so. I’d like to see anyone who made it to the space stage of Spore and still hasn’t made anything the resembles something from a Sci-Fi series/movie. When I find this person, I can bring him to the Manchester University’s science department and have them disembowelled, studied and used as proof of life on other planets.
I’m really just waiting for the Event Horizon piloted by Care Bears.
Battlefield Bad Company
Before you start sending me unsavoury messages regarding the punctuality of this review, might I remind you that first and foremost, I don’t get paid to do this. I get paid to stand around a shop all day selling expensive things to people who don’t earn a penny they spend – and with a lack of windows, I’ve actually forgot what the sun looks like. I should also inform you at this point that I wrote a charming piece regarding nightclubs about a month ago, because I couldn’t be arsed writing this review earlier. Incidentally, fuck me, I’ve been really lazy…
Over the course of the last twelve months, I’ve played some decent (note: “decent” as in “nothing special but not actually bad”) FPS’s, some really good FPS’s, and some FPS’s that disappointed me to say the least. Actually, that’s a lie; Halo 3 and Frontlines: Fuel of War were decent, COD 4 was brilliant but I don’t dare play it online from the sheer volume of dickheads I encounter who play it, and pretty much everything else constitutes a big steaming dump on the latrine that is the current games industry.
I’ve also seen some good ideas in FPS’s this year, and more importantly, I’ve watched them fall apart on screen, jump out of the screen and slap me in the bollocks with a great big battered haddock; see Turning Point that FAILED to combine FPS action with some limited 3rd person exploration, and was pretty determined to look like a burnt arse, overshadowing the “what if” scenario which became my favourite after watching that episode of Enterprise. There was also Haze that decided it wanted me to be the whiny hero, when I’d personally rather be the biggest drug-fuelled badass known to man.
My theory of games is that they are supposed to let you do things you’re too much of a wuss to do in real life, for example using GTA 4 to climb to the top of the not-empire-state building with full health, firing a rocket the wall and watching Niko plummet to his fiery and infinitely painful fate, all in the knowledge that even if you don’t crush someone with your charred corpse, you’ll at least give someone a hell of a show. Another would be repeatedly shooting your team mate in the face whenever he (because you don’t know any girls) does anything stupid. As a gamer, in reality, when someone throws a brick at you head you’re more likely to run off home rather than start hurling insults.
Now then, the interesting thing about Battlefield that made me bother to actually remember it’s name can be outlined in the tried and tested phrase “blow shit up”. If you show me any FPS that will let me level the world around me with grenades and tanks, then I probably wont even notice if it looks like a burnt arse; I’ll be too busy landscaping. If you then prove to me that it looks very good while doing so and that I can eventually go to war in a golf cart, there’s little you can do to fuck the whole thing up.
As such, Battlefield: Bad Company has landed me in an awkward spot, chiefly because it’s bloody hard to be funny when talking about a game I’ve genuinely enjoyed. Sure, at first the aiming sensitivity feels far too high, but after a few minutes it’s perfect. I remember playing Battlefield on the original Xbox, and being wooed by the interesting and diverse environments (I’ve still not had a good fire fight in the snow since), and there was also of course the awesome flying camera whenever you switched character.
Upon reflection, my critical eye has come into play… for some reason, in Bad Company, you are one soldier in a group of four, and there’s no switching classes or awesome flying cameras. There’s also no denying that you’re in a battlefield, as the name suggests. Hang on, no you’re fucking not, you’re in a massive (but very pretty) field, with a few enemies dotted around in buildings which make up about 1% of the whole map and you spend an entirely unnecessary charging up and down said field finding these few berks dumb enough to hang around in pairs. But at least when you get there you can just blow the living shit out of anything you see, and watch rubble rain down all over your triumphant erection.
There’s also one confusing little factor I still can’t get my head around… in Bad Company, America is fighting Russia, which is fair enough, America usually fights Russia in games and movies. BUT! What the hell are they fighting over in Bad Company? It seems to be set in the present day, so no one’s trying to say it’s the Cold War, but there’s absolutely no indication as to why the FUCK you’ve been caught up in this quibble that I assure you will cost you your life on multiple occasions. Which brings me to another issue. There is absolutely no punishment for dying. Someone turns you into a lead sculpture of your former self, then you and your team immediately respawn about 20 feet away with everything exactly as it was when you died a few seconds ago. Even if you drop a grenade while surrounded, you’ll immediately respawn, but every enemy caught in the blast will be suspiciously absent.
Maybe someone’s just trying to say US health care kicks ass?
There are also collectables… which seem to do nothing other than exacerbate any OCD tendencies you already have, although I could be wrong, maybe you unlock them in multiplayer. Unfortunately as you may be aware already, I only get hold of most of these games for about a week, so I was busy ploughing (hehe) through the single player campaign. I have one final line of praise to sing of Bad Company, and that is that the vehicles are actually fun to drive – which is a bit sad, seeing as having fun driving sections seems to be about as easy as pissing out boulders.
Now that’s out of the way I’ve got one more bone to pick. The story of Bad Company quickly deviates from Russia vs. USA, which is just as well seeing as it wasn’t explained anyway; then you and your squad accidentally piss off the US army, go rogue and start stealing gold off mercenaries. There’s nothing wrong with this story, but there is that fact that you can quite easily finish the game without collecting a single bar of gold yourself, seeing as one is stolen in a cutscene which triggers the plot. Considering this is quite an important part of the story, I have to ask why the bloody Moses isn’t there something in place to encourage you to collect it yourself, other than the twang of an electric guitar?
Over the course of the last twelve months, I’ve played some decent (note: “decent” as in “nothing special but not actually bad”) FPS’s, some really good FPS’s, and some FPS’s that disappointed me to say the least. Actually, that’s a lie; Halo 3 and Frontlines: Fuel of War were decent, COD 4 was brilliant but I don’t dare play it online from the sheer volume of dickheads I encounter who play it, and pretty much everything else constitutes a big steaming dump on the latrine that is the current games industry.
I’ve also seen some good ideas in FPS’s this year, and more importantly, I’ve watched them fall apart on screen, jump out of the screen and slap me in the bollocks with a great big battered haddock; see Turning Point that FAILED to combine FPS action with some limited 3rd person exploration, and was pretty determined to look like a burnt arse, overshadowing the “what if” scenario which became my favourite after watching that episode of Enterprise. There was also Haze that decided it wanted me to be the whiny hero, when I’d personally rather be the biggest drug-fuelled badass known to man.
My theory of games is that they are supposed to let you do things you’re too much of a wuss to do in real life, for example using GTA 4 to climb to the top of the not-empire-state building with full health, firing a rocket the wall and watching Niko plummet to his fiery and infinitely painful fate, all in the knowledge that even if you don’t crush someone with your charred corpse, you’ll at least give someone a hell of a show. Another would be repeatedly shooting your team mate in the face whenever he (because you don’t know any girls) does anything stupid. As a gamer, in reality, when someone throws a brick at you head you’re more likely to run off home rather than start hurling insults.
Now then, the interesting thing about Battlefield that made me bother to actually remember it’s name can be outlined in the tried and tested phrase “blow shit up”. If you show me any FPS that will let me level the world around me with grenades and tanks, then I probably wont even notice if it looks like a burnt arse; I’ll be too busy landscaping. If you then prove to me that it looks very good while doing so and that I can eventually go to war in a golf cart, there’s little you can do to fuck the whole thing up.
As such, Battlefield: Bad Company has landed me in an awkward spot, chiefly because it’s bloody hard to be funny when talking about a game I’ve genuinely enjoyed. Sure, at first the aiming sensitivity feels far too high, but after a few minutes it’s perfect. I remember playing Battlefield on the original Xbox, and being wooed by the interesting and diverse environments (I’ve still not had a good fire fight in the snow since), and there was also of course the awesome flying camera whenever you switched character.
Upon reflection, my critical eye has come into play… for some reason, in Bad Company, you are one soldier in a group of four, and there’s no switching classes or awesome flying cameras. There’s also no denying that you’re in a battlefield, as the name suggests. Hang on, no you’re fucking not, you’re in a massive (but very pretty) field, with a few enemies dotted around in buildings which make up about 1% of the whole map and you spend an entirely unnecessary charging up and down said field finding these few berks dumb enough to hang around in pairs. But at least when you get there you can just blow the living shit out of anything you see, and watch rubble rain down all over your triumphant erection.
There’s also one confusing little factor I still can’t get my head around… in Bad Company, America is fighting Russia, which is fair enough, America usually fights Russia in games and movies. BUT! What the hell are they fighting over in Bad Company? It seems to be set in the present day, so no one’s trying to say it’s the Cold War, but there’s absolutely no indication as to why the FUCK you’ve been caught up in this quibble that I assure you will cost you your life on multiple occasions. Which brings me to another issue. There is absolutely no punishment for dying. Someone turns you into a lead sculpture of your former self, then you and your team immediately respawn about 20 feet away with everything exactly as it was when you died a few seconds ago. Even if you drop a grenade while surrounded, you’ll immediately respawn, but every enemy caught in the blast will be suspiciously absent.
Maybe someone’s just trying to say US health care kicks ass?
There are also collectables… which seem to do nothing other than exacerbate any OCD tendencies you already have, although I could be wrong, maybe you unlock them in multiplayer. Unfortunately as you may be aware already, I only get hold of most of these games for about a week, so I was busy ploughing (hehe) through the single player campaign. I have one final line of praise to sing of Bad Company, and that is that the vehicles are actually fun to drive – which is a bit sad, seeing as having fun driving sections seems to be about as easy as pissing out boulders.
Now that’s out of the way I’ve got one more bone to pick. The story of Bad Company quickly deviates from Russia vs. USA, which is just as well seeing as it wasn’t explained anyway; then you and your squad accidentally piss off the US army, go rogue and start stealing gold off mercenaries. There’s nothing wrong with this story, but there is that fact that you can quite easily finish the game without collecting a single bar of gold yourself, seeing as one is stolen in a cutscene which triggers the plot. Considering this is quite an important part of the story, I have to ask why the bloody Moses isn’t there something in place to encourage you to collect it yourself, other than the twang of an electric guitar?
Tuesday, 19 August 2008
Music and Nightclubs
I like to consider myself a connoisseur of music, and as such I have about as much patience for music manufactured for the sole purpose of making drunk people dance as the average person has patience for a bed of knives being delivered second class. That said, if you stole my iPod while I was busy pissing off the side of a metrolink platform (and thus leave me in no real position to complain to the police), you'd find it stuffed with mostly rock music and a couple of 90's dance compilations. I can, however justify this by reminding you all that even Green Day covering The Ramones for an MTV award ceremony, and 90's dance music, has far more artistic merit and sustenance than anything you'll hear in a typical English nightclub. Then again recording someone farting on a jam sandwich hard enough to follow through generally has more artistic merit than anything you'll hear in a typical English nightclub.
Which neatly leads me onto something else that's been bugging me. Nightclub owners. Now, to run a nightclub, it helps if you're a bit of a dick, but it's not completely necessary. To own a nightclub though, the requisite immediately following "being loaded" is "be a total dickhole", which admittedly comes hand in hand with being rich. As all of us without money know, everyone with money is a complete bastard. Aside from Patrick Stewart, of course, who I imagine has more money than God thanks to a career spanning over 20 years, and recently advertising everything Nintendo has to offer. And Domestos. And Curry's.
So yeah, bastards own nightclubs. Now then, anyone who cares about being labelled a bastard is naturally going to try shaking this label. Unfortunately, as a nightclub owner it's impossible. You see, a nightclub owner makes money by basically poisoning and deafening people. And also charging obscene amounts to do so. Seeing as lots of people will have already decided that you sir, Mr Nightclub owner, are a complete twat, the only to truly shake the label is to do something ridiculously noble, but also make it as public and obvious as possible. Call me a cynic, but surely anyone partaking in a publicity stunt (without of course trying to ruin it by using a laser pointer with a penis lens) cares so much about what other people think about them, that they completely and utterly deserve to be publicly humiliated by having a penis drawn on their forehead while campaigning against homophobia.
As such, Mr Nightclub owner, the only way you can prove to everyone you are not the be all and end all of complete bastardry is to do something incredibly noble and keep it a secret from everyone, who'll assume you're just another nightclub owner who spends his weekends clubbing seals using frozen aborted babies.
I know that had nothing to do with games, but God dammit, it's about time someone said it.
Which neatly leads me onto something else that's been bugging me. Nightclub owners. Now, to run a nightclub, it helps if you're a bit of a dick, but it's not completely necessary. To own a nightclub though, the requisite immediately following "being loaded" is "be a total dickhole", which admittedly comes hand in hand with being rich. As all of us without money know, everyone with money is a complete bastard. Aside from Patrick Stewart, of course, who I imagine has more money than God thanks to a career spanning over 20 years, and recently advertising everything Nintendo has to offer. And Domestos. And Curry's.
So yeah, bastards own nightclubs. Now then, anyone who cares about being labelled a bastard is naturally going to try shaking this label. Unfortunately, as a nightclub owner it's impossible. You see, a nightclub owner makes money by basically poisoning and deafening people. And also charging obscene amounts to do so. Seeing as lots of people will have already decided that you sir, Mr Nightclub owner, are a complete twat, the only to truly shake the label is to do something ridiculously noble, but also make it as public and obvious as possible. Call me a cynic, but surely anyone partaking in a publicity stunt (without of course trying to ruin it by using a laser pointer with a penis lens) cares so much about what other people think about them, that they completely and utterly deserve to be publicly humiliated by having a penis drawn on their forehead while campaigning against homophobia.
As such, Mr Nightclub owner, the only way you can prove to everyone you are not the be all and end all of complete bastardry is to do something incredibly noble and keep it a secret from everyone, who'll assume you're just another nightclub owner who spends his weekends clubbing seals using frozen aborted babies.
I know that had nothing to do with games, but God dammit, it's about time someone said it.
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