Some more catch-up blogging.

I got a random impulse to buy some games the other day as I’ve not bought any for ages (in fact Resi 5 might be my only 2009 purchase so far). So I got Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom (very, very cheap) and Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts (fairly cheap)

Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom is a bad game. It’s a very bad game. I got it because I fancied a bit of a hack & slash, loot finding, dungeon crawling, trad fantasy type thing. Which sadly is genre pretty much ignored on this generation of consoles. What is remarkable about the game is it involves nothing more than pressing ‘A’. You press ‘A’ again & again & again to slash your sway through swathes of enemies, you walk forward 50 yards and repeat the whole process. You can’t block, you can’t jump, you can’t do any moves, you can’t mix-up or combo your attacks (there is another attack button, but you can’t combo with it) all you do is press ‘A’. Sure you find loot; armour, weapons, etc. but it all makes very little difference. There is no map to explore, just walk forward – and face wave after wave of identical enemies with you hacking through them with the A button. I switched it off after about 2 hours

So Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.
This is much better. The much anticipated return to the Banjo Kazooie series (which we’ve not seen since the N64 days) It’s not the platform game you’d expect. The game is based on building lots of customised vehicles and completing challenges in them. The vehicle building aspect is pretty clever and works surprisingly well, you can very easily knock-up mini tanks, boats, helicopters, trucks, planes and everything in-between. it’s pure digital Lego. The game is also gorgeous, with a nice detailed, fairytale-like vibrancy, rare in games these days, coupled with an impressive draw distance.
Hard to put my finger on why but I got bored with it after about 5~6 hours. The challenges quickly become a chore (some of them are really tough, requiring dozens of attempts) and the novelty of the vehicle construction soon wears off. It’s definitely not a bad game, but I found myself not wanting to play it, something about it wasn’t grabbing me. I was forcing myself to switch it on – this isn’t a good sign, so for now it’s gone back on the shelf.

No natty subtitle – no time for that, I’ve got catchup blogging to do

I got Dead Space late last year in the silly season, but saved until a few weeks ago, it was getting a lot of love on rllmuk so I thought I’d save it until I has some time to do it justice.

Wow! now this is how to do survival horror. It’s the videogame equivalent of Event Horizon meets Alien meets Resident Evil meets The Thing. I’ll cut to the chase plot-wise; you’re a space engineer dude, you’ve come to rescue some giant ‘planet cracking’ super mining ship, turns out this ship has gone all kinds of batshit mental since they picked up some alien “Marker” thing from the planet below. The uphsot is – the ship is now infested with necromorphs – sort of undead, mutant, evil, deformed killer things. Sounds a little bit shit so far, right?

It isn’t. It’s a terrifying, well paced, slice of true survival horror. See Resident Evil was the game that pretty much invented the whole survival horror genre, but has moved  further and further from it in recent years. So it’s refreshing to see a game return to those roots and do it so well, and in space. The necromorphs are bloody nasty (the graphics in the game are superb), and the main premise of the combat is to try and slice and dismember them rather than just blast away. This works really well, especially with certain weapons like the ‘Ripper’ basically an industrial circular saw you can use to dismember the necromorphs as they crawl/run/amble towards you, yes it gets messy.

(more…)

Where on earth do I start with Resident Evil 5? such a mixed bag of feelings; anger, disappointment, pity, nostalgia.

OK first of all, I’m a long time Resident Evil (RE) fan, I got the first game with my first Playstation back in 1996 (doing extra temp work as a bin man, so I could save up and afford it!). I found it to be a scary, engrossing, funny & challenging experience, the likes of which nobody had really experienced before (it was 1996 remember) Since then I’ve gone on to accumulate & play 16 different RE games!, more or less the entire series. So yeah – I’m a bit of a fan.

Next, Resident Evil 4 (RE4). Easily one of the best games I’ve ever played, best in the RE series & comfortably in my top 10. Amazing from start to finish. It’s stood the test of time, has a metacritic score of 96 and consistently appears at the top of greatest games of all time lists (Edge put it at number 2 in 1997). Trust me on this one, it’s a very, very good game.

So that leads us finally to the point of this post – Resident Evil 5 (RE5). It’s evident that it had a lot to live up to, but hey Capcom had over 4 years to develop it, they have a proven track record as one of the industry’s best developers, so what could go wrong?

Everything.

To sum it up RE5 is a below average generic shooter, devoid of fun, story, charm & ideas. You have to play the game in co-op mode, there is no true “single player” anymore. Playing single player results in the co-op partner (a token black lady called Sheva, who actually isn’t black if you spent more than 5 seconds looking at her) being controlled by some of the worst AI I’ve ever had to endure in a videogame. She wastes her ammo, uses health packs when they aren’t needed, is in your line of vision/fire about 90% of the time, pinches items that you wanted to pick up and basically is an abomination. It’s fair to say Sheva is all that is wrong with RE5. You spend nearly all of your time playing simply wishing she wasn’t there, she also spoils the atmos.

That leads me onto another major problem with RE5, they’ve taken all the main elements of the RE series (RE4 in particular) and pissed them up the wall. There is none of the oppresive, dark and spooky atmosphere, there is no exploration or puzzle solving, there is no real inventory management (RE4′s brilliant inventory system being crudely reduced to 9 item boxes). The game has essentially become a linear, generic, 3rd person shooter, think Gears of War but with shit controls.

Ahh the controls, so they haven’t changed since RE4, you still can’t move and fire, the turning and aiming speed would make an arthritic turtle look speedy and thanks the new real time inventory most fights decent into a Benny Hill chase, round and round while you find a safe spot to reload or heal. These controls worked in RE4 but that game was 4 years ago – things have moved on Capcom.

I could go on all day about the frustrating and poorly designed boss fights (which seem to be every 10 minutes), the short game length (a measly 10 hours), the fact you seem to jump from location to location with no real reason, the copy and paste enemies from RE4, QTE events in the middle of boss fights, etc, etc.

Then there is the whole racism debate, that is probably a topic for an whole other post, but lets just say when I was blasting the heads off African tribes people in grass skirts, living in little mud huts it did feel like Capcom had scraped the bottom of the stereotype barrel

So…. I think RE5 can’t win. Compared to it’s mighty predecessor it’s doomed to fail, despite copying so much from it’s older sibling it makes a massive balls up of it all, I think the developers wanted to tap into the RE4 “magic” but just didn’t get it. On the other hand, remove RE5 from the shadow of RE4, and it’s nothing more than just another 3rd person shooter with awful archaic controls and AI co-op partner you want to kill more than the bad guys. So after 4 years of waiting, I think it’s fair to say I’m more than a little diapointed in RE5.

So I’ve not blogged for ages. Normally this would be because I’ve not been playing any games, but in this case I have been playing; a lot. I’ve been playing Fallout 3 since early Jan and last night I finally finished it (well not really but more on that later)

Fallout 3 is a action RPG set in an post apocalyptic future where America and China have had an all out nuclear war, and there’s not much left of the world. Despite it being the year 2277 culturally America is locked into a 1950′s like era, you know that kinda of future-retro thing.

The game is vast and open ended, once you escape the Vault you’ve been brought up in and clamber out to the wasteland – you really can go anywhere and do anything you want. This is probably where I will lapse into gushing praise, but I can’t help it. This game is incredible in it’s scope; the sheer amount of places to explore, things to find, people to meet, stuff to do; far exceeds any other game I’ve played. I spent over 100 hours on this game and only found a fraction of the game had to offer. Now often this “embarrassment of choice” can be overwhelming in a game, but not in Fallout 3. You don’t have to worry about doing things in the correct order or playing it the “right way”, the game permits you the freedom to do what you like. See that interesting looking building over in the distance? why not check it out. That bloke you met that mentioned an android? sound more interesting than what you are doing now? why not investigate.
Getting sidetracked is part & parcel of the experience. I’ve mentioned before my love for games that reward the player for going off the beaten track, Fallout 3 is positively the pinnacle of this idea. Going off the beaten track you won’t just find some ammo and bits and bobs, but you’ll find an whole new town or set of tunnels filled with people and quests – as a reward for your curiosity

The main storyline is fairly short, the bulk of Fallout 3 is taken up in general exploring and doing sidequests. I estimate than at least 90% of the games content is entirely optional it really takes balls for a developer to do this. Detail is lavished on every little nook and crany, despite the fact that the majority of players might never stumble across it. I fell completely in love with this game, I’ve never spent anywhere near 100 hours playing a game before, that fact alone shows how much the game absorbed me. This is definitely one of those games you don’t want to end, but ultimately I got to the point where I felt it was time to move on, or at least take a break for a while.

There are still 3 chunks of DLC (Downloadable content) to play though, of which only one has been released so far. I might pick up the game again once they are all out

In summary games like this get made once every 10 years, it really is a work of art, it’s easily in my all-time top 5 games.
Buy it, Play it.

For a true ode to Fallout 3 see Consolevanias “review” of it here

A couple of gameplay videos to give you a feel for what the game is about

Something I was idly thinking about the other day, was games controllers and the number of buttons they had. Playing on my ZX Spectrum all those years ago, you had just one ‘fire’ button on your Kempston joystick and that was your lot. Obviously games have come a long way since then and their controllers have got more complex…

Number of buttons on game controllers has increased over the years

Something that really gets me down when firing up a game for the first time is finding out that every single button on the pad has been assigned a function, it makes jumping from game difficult when the reload button in one game, is ‘the lob grenade at wall and kill yourself’ button in the next. Maybe I’m just getting old!

So are we at that optimal stage? part of me thinks yes – the 360 pad for example is fantastic and adding any more buttons it’d start to get really daft. But if you went back in time and asked me in 1992 if the SNES pad needed 5 more buttons I’d have probably said the same thing.

Nintendo have really shook things up with regards to control schemes, with the Wii and the motion sensitive ‘Wiimote’. For once somebody really took a step back from the pad design (which fundamentally hasn’t changed since the NES days). They’ve come up with something new and different, however it’s not necessarily better – it’s really quiet specialised and fits certain types of game better than others.

Anyhow time will tell, if the XBox 720 (yup, you heard it here first folks!) will have a pad with 15 buttons, or if the Playstation 4 will have a controller with 20 buttons and fires real lasers.

I made this post ages ago when playing Bioshock which got me thinking about shops and stores in games, and as a lazy blog post I thought I’d compile quick list of some of the most memorable

The Merchant – Resident Evil 4

Lets start with a bona-fide classic. Anyone that’s played RE4 will remember the merchant and his repertoire of phrases such as “What you buyin?”, “Got a good selection of good things on sale, stranger!” and “I’ll buy it at a high price”. What this guy is doing standing a round in a zombie infested hell waiting for someone to come along and buy stuff is anyone’s guess. The stress probably explains his strange vocal tick of adding “stranger” to the end of every sentence.

Beedle’s Boat – The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

Memorable in much the same way as the Merchant in Resi 4 – for the odd noises and phrases he made. And being named after the much maligned and now dead British TV “prankster” Jeremy Beadle – which apparently Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto was a big fan of. This is about the best picture I can find of him

Sadly I can’t find a link to his brilliant little “ooooooowww” and the enthusiastic “thank you” sounds. On a side note – how much business did he actually get from running a shop, in a boat, in the middle of the ocean??

Circus of Values – Bioshock

Bioshock is a creepy and strange game, so obviously it has a creepy and strange shop. Scattered all over Rapture are vending machines called the “Circus of Values” with a scary looking clown on the front. First of all it’s a vending machine that sells a mixture of both ammunition and vodka, which doesn’t seem a wise combination to dispense. Secondly why is it called the Circus of Values and not Circus of Value, are we making some moral choice by purchasing items there? What use are human values if they can be bought and sold? Hmmm these are just some of the ethical challenges the game puts to us (either that or I’m reading way too much into it – )

“Fill your cravings at the Circus of Values! Ha ha ha ha ha!”

Listen: Circus of Values – Audio

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

Another old school nut job. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (SOTN to his friends) is a 2D masterpeice. The shop in the game consists of The Librarian, an aged old fool voiced by what sounds like someone trying to do an impersonation of Worzel Gummidge after breathing in Helium. Everything he says is pretty much a “WTF?” moment, I especially like how initially he won’t help you, but decides instantly it’s OK to help if you are paying. The little “Thank You!” he exclaims upon an purchase, is pure gold.

Video quality is terrible but you get the idea

I’ve been lucky enough to get hold of a Beta key for LittleBigPlanet.

Wow. What a charming game, brimming with little touches and brilliant ideas. From the second Stephen Fry’s voice kicked in I knew I was in for unique treat. So what is LittleBigPlanet about? well I’m lazy sod so I’ll pinch the description from Wikipedia

In LittleBigPlanet, players control small characters (nicknamed either “Sackboy” or “Sackgirl”, owing to their material and appearance), each of which can jump, move, and grab objects. Players can use their abilities to shape and develop the highly manipulatable environment to build custom spaces either individually, collaboratively, and/or competitively. Levels focus on co-operative, physics-based gameplay, and players can use mechanisms such as cogs and blocks to build anything from small level parts to large, complex worlds. The game will also allow opportunities for players to acquire new skills and tools.

It’s a joy to play. At face value the gameplay can seem simplistic, sure it’s not a deep or complex platformer like say Super Mario World. But that doesn’t matter as there is just so many cool little ideas and fun things to do. The level creation mode is where it comes alive. The scope of what you can do is staggering, the game comes with an enormous toolkit of stuff to play with and build levels. Levels can be published online and shared for everyone to play, picking through some of the user created levels online has been a mixed bag – but several of them have shown stuff I didn’t think was possible, and you come away with ideas for your own creations!

I’m in love with LittleBigPlanet – roll on the 24th Oct when it’s released fully.

So it’s that time of year again, the time of year where 99% of publishers release their “triple A” titles.

Gaming has always been a seasonal hobby, and it’s inevitable that publishers are going to release games in the run up to Christmas, but I think things are getting silly. For example this year in the next 3~4 weeks we have coming out: Fable II, Fallout 3, Dead Space, Little Big Planet, Mirror’s Edge, Far Cry 2, Gears of War 2, Tomb Raider: Underworld, Prince of Persia, Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty 5. And that’s just the ones I want off the top of my head, that’s a LOT of games. Four of those games all come out on the SAME DAY.

Now personally it’s not about the cost, although I appreciate for many people this is a major complaint. Really how can we give our time and dedication to these games, to do them justice? Titles like Fable II and Fallout 3 I’m hoping to get a good 40~50 hours of play out of, which is probably a month or so of play each.

Something will have to give, some of these games will not be bought straight away. Using a bit of willpower I will wait – maybe till next summer when there will be no games being released and play them then. The games will also be half the price at that time.

I’m curious how the game publishers expect to benefit by this glut of choice? Inevitably some of these games will sell far less than others in the face of all the competition, and I think the publishers are shooting themselves in the foot.

I’ve knocked up a command for Ubiquity to integrate with Blippr

To install & use it, visit this page you should see a notification at the top of your browser, click the Accept button and follow the process to install it.

You will need Ubiquity installed for it to work, dhur.

Enjoy!

I wanted to show my Amazon wishlist on my blog, actually I have a custom ‘wishlist’ on Amazon, listing what I’m currently playing – it was that I really wanted to show.

So I thought Amazon will provide that as an RSS feed and I’ll embed it in, no problems. No. They don’t, no idea why this obvious and useful feature is not provided! Grrrrr

To cut a long story short I found nothing out there that would do this (and worked for the Amazon UK site) so I knocked up a quick WordPress plugin to do it. You can see it in use on my site.

Features:

• Show small/medium/large images for the items in your wishlist
• Links through to Amazon
• Include your Affiliate ID (If you have one)#
• Supports all Amazon locales (US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, Japan)

Usage:

• Install as you would any other standard WordPress Plugin
• Go to: Design -> Widgets and add the widget to your sidebar
• Set the options as required, note the List ID is a required field

How to Find your Amazon wishlist ID:

• Logon to Amazon and click the “Gifts & Wishlists” link near the top
• Click Wishlist
• In the “Your Wishlists” section on the right click the relevant wishlist
• The ID will be in the URL of the page, e.g. /gp/registry/wishlist/2GMNFC0FKPU37/ref=cm_wl_rlist_go

Download – WordPress Amazon Wishlist Plugin v1.0