AngeloComet's Game Journal

On A Dead Island

2012-01-27T07:17:00.000-08:00

I received Dead Island for Christmas, but I’ve spent my time with Batman:Arkham City since then so only just got around to having a go on it. Just over two hours worth of time on it and I think I’ve got a pretty good feel for what it’s all about. It’s not quite the first-person Resident Evil type game I expected; it’s actually more like Fallout 3 fused with Dead Rising 2 (both of which are games I don’t particularly like!).

Dead Island has just about kept my interest, so far. Of course it originally had a lot of hype because of that awesome promo featuring the holidaying family battling zombies that had already attacked their little girl. The game starts after that moment (though very early on there is a reference to it as you can go into the room where it took place and see their bodies lying on the floor).

From the selection of four characters I went with a black guy whose name I can’t remember, mainly because it stated he was good with blunt instruments. I figured there would be a lot of use for using blunt instruments and I was right, so in that respect he was good choice. His voice is really irritating, though.

So from the situation of being on the holiday island of Banoi I’ve basically been roaming around the beach and the pools and the holiday homes, battering zombies with whatever blunt instrument comes to hand. Figuring out that items I’ve picked up get stored in an inventory and can be accessed and armed took a bit of detective work but it’s not exactly in-depth. The levelling up system is in place, with the annoyance that the enemies level up as I level up.

Why? Part of the fun in levelling up is becoming stronger so that enemies are weaker. As I level up I expect to progress through the game and meet tougher enemies in harder areas – not have every enemy I meet evenly matched. Probably that’s a preference thing since I know other games of this ilk operate in the same manner. Personally, I’m not a fan.

Something that did look interesting, that I didn’t get into on this first session, was the co-op element of the game that appeared to take the form of a drop in, drop out aspect. Potentially this makes more sense of pitching the enemies to your particular level, to balance things no matter what level of person you are joining a game with. I don’t know how well the co-op mode will work, or how it will manage in terms of completing missions (I guess if people joined my game they could do my missions and vice versa) but it’s got my interest piqued.

I basically reached the point where I secured a lifeguard headquarters so survivors could rally there with better supplies. The moment that scene ended my mission map lit up with stacks of potential missions to do so, in the face of such overwhelming choice, I switched the game off and went to bed.

Dead Island does a good job in generating some tension from its zombie attacks. The sounds they make are animalistic and unnerving and whilst combat with them sometimes literally feels hit and miss, it’s got a satisfying and bloody quality about it that can surely only get better as I get better weapons.

I did also admire the freedom the game afforded. I went right off the beaten track of my mission and found myself near some power station, and got in a truck and drove it around a bit. I was hopelessly lost, mind, but that only added to that sense of getting into a bad situation and being unsure if I was going to be able to get out of it.

The voice-acting is a bit lame and the graphics are nice without being amazing, but so far Dead Island isn’t quite what I expected but is turning out to be an intriguing proposition.

Batman City Limits

2012-01-23T04:52:00.000-08:00

You know, if I’d found the time and energy to write a post or two about Batman: Arkham City whilst I had been playing it I might not have been so kind about it. It’s fair to say there were points during this game that I experienced annoyance. It was stuff like there being stacks of armed guards hanging around in between locations, meaning trying to collect stuff or do the AR challenges meant having to engage in lots of fights with armed people, taking them out in time-consuming fashion.

Fair enough having such encounters in the main game, but having them as re-spawning enemies on the main map is just irritating. Either have them there to be taken out and stay taken out, or don’t have tough villains in great numbers hanging around at all.

That’s my major rant. My other rant was how finding things could be annoying. Like you’d set a waypoint on the map and then get to it, but because there was no sense of depth with the indicator to tell you if you’re above or below your intended destination (just a small up or down arrow would have done) you can spend ages hunting for, say, a dead body, or a door. Again, annoying, and needlessly so. A petty inconvenience that could have been easily remedied.

So, rants over, and them withstanding I can still state that Batman: Arkham City is a wonderful game. It is magnificently-well put together, with maddening attention to detail, faultless characterisations and terrific atmosphere. It’s telling that I’ve finished the game and a number of the sidequests, including Catwoman’s stuff, and there’s still about 45% of the game remaining. You certainly get value for money, and that’s just the main game – there’s the challenge maps and campaigns in the mix, too. It all amounts to a great package that more than makes up for the lack of multiplayer (which I struggle to imagine there’s any need for anyway).

If you haven’t played the latter stages of the game, and in particular if you haven’t finished it and seen the amazing ending (really, it’s quite special) then there are SPOILERS abound that will ruin this game for you. Stop reading. Go away.

So last time I posted I was just about to tackle the Penguin regarding his capturing of Mr. Freeze (whom I needed to make me an antidote to cure the disease I was carrying, phew!). The Penguin fight wasn’t really troublesome, just annoying in trying to get close to him. Indeed, whilst the boss fights have felt like a step up from the previous game they were still more irritating than engaging. Like the fight against Solomon Grundy – dodging the timing of the attacks whilst still being able to inflict damage became quite a precise thing towards the end of the fight, yet when it comes to straight out running and jumping Batman doesn’t fare too well – he’s certainly no Nathan Drake.

The best boss fight was against Mr. Freeze. This one really played to the strengths of the game, requiring a multitude of different techniques from stealth, to gel explosives, to drop attacks as Mr. Freeze stalked about the room evolving and adapting to each attack you made, meaning the same technique couldn’t work twice. I really liked it.

Since the Scarecrow was not present this time around there were other devices used to create some trippy sequences. None of them were as good as, say, the bit in the first game where it appeared that the game had broken and reloaded, but the journey into the weird world of Ra’s Al Ghul was fun. And a meeting with the Mad Hatter cropped up out of nowhere for a strange sort of encounter that the game probably could have done just fine without, really, but it all adds to the package.

The real class act though, and the part you really don’t want to read about if you haven’t finished the game, was the end. It actually felt a tad climactic, at first. Whilst the lair of Hugo Strange was interesting in its totalitarian design leanings I didn’t much of a sense about the character himself, and the reveal that Al Ghul was the mastermind behind it all did little to overwhelm.

That both of these guys were taken down without a significant battle at first made me think the game had rather cheaped out on providing a proper confrontation. Of course, the Joker took to the stage for the finale. I particularly enjoyed the twist about how he had been using a double to disguise his ravaged looks. I didn’t see it coming though it did make sense of all the remarks and hints and clues that had been scattered throughout the game puzzling over as much.

The subsequent fight against Clayface was not really befitting as a grandstanding last game boss battle, to be honest. Lots of games struggle to deliver in this regard, though, so it’s no massive letdown. And the game ultimately packs more of a punch with the final scenes. Some ironic, bittersweet exchanges between Batman and Joker are the last words the two share before the Joker actually dies.

The image of Batman carrying the body of his nemesis and laying it down was really quite moving, and the game closed out on a powerful tone in that regard. Having Joker sing ‘Only You’ over the credits at the end just really added to the emotional impact. There’s been moments in a number of games that have drawn tangible emotions out of me, but the finish to Batman: Arkham City really left me feeling a kind of subdued astonishment – in a very good way.

Of course, finishing the game doesn’t mean the game is over. There’s still sidequests galore (find Nora for Mr. Freeze, discover who the ‘watcher’ is, capture deadshot, a murderer, and not to mention the vast number of Riddler trophies to find and puzzles to resolve to save hostages. Unlike the Joker, there’s life in the game yet!

Batman Goes Citywide

2012-01-22T06:53:00.000-08:00

I got Batman: Arkham City for Xmas. And it’s not that it’s taken me ages to play it, it’s just taken me a while to getting around to posting about it. (And, for the record, I wrote this post once already and then it just disappeared, which I certainly haven’t at all found annoying in the slightest!

Breathe.

The first Batman: Arkham Asylum was a pleasant surprise. I didn’t quite get overwhelmed with gushing praise for it like much of the gaming press seemed to. It came out around the same time as Uncharted 2 and, for me, there was no question which was the better game. And curiously, this game has come out around the same time as Uncharted 3. Arguably, it’s Batman: Arkham City that has made more progression than its predecessor between the two, though quite how much more there is I have yet to uncover.

I am up to the point where I am tracking down the Penguin in order to free Mr. Freeze. There’s a fairly convoluted plot but basically Batman has been injected with a poison and needs an antidote. The Joker also needs the same antidote, too. Following the events of the previous game he appears to have been left reeling, weakened, but he still seems to be quite a presence in the game.

I still find it hard to believe that it’s Luke Skywalker doing the voice!

I was a bit confused at the start of the game, to be honest. There was a rapid assault of exposition and there I was as Bruce Wayne, imprisoned! It was a disorientating beginning, for sure, but I kind of liked it. Preferred when I got back in the suit, mind, and began the game properly.

The major difference here is the more open world of Arkham City compared to the closed off corridors of Arkham Asylum. The main narrative is still linear (not a complaint) but there is a constant bombardment of side missions opening up – from ringing telephones to political prisoners being harassed – that certainly keep things busy (and also make journeying across the city littered with incidents to keep it engaging).

The Riddler trophies have become more advanced this time out, too. It’s not just about finding them anymore, it’s also about solving puzzles around them to do with trigger switches and pressure pads and who knows what else. Initial feelings about them were that I wasn’t keen, but maybe that’s because they’re just so many of them it felt like an overwhelming challenge. (It’ll be a nightmare to try and get them all even with youtube or a guide helping since they’re so many and so scattered!)

The real pleasure of the previous Batman game, for me, was actually delving into the history of the character and the world, and also meeting the characters. The game does a terrific job of depicting these famous, and not so famous, villains. I’ve met Two-Face first up, and Riddler was viewed for the first time (though I’ve not met him in person). Batman really does have a rich mix of characters in its world and since I’m pretty ignorant to all of it besides what’s been put on film then it’s all new and interesting for me.

I downloaded the Catwoman DLC before I started the game, so that her sections would be interspersed throughout my game. She’s not quite as easy to control as Batman, though her ceiling climbing skills add a new dimension to exploration and combat. So far with her I’ve tackled Poison Ivy but not done much else. So far her sections are a nice diversion but not particularly fascinating.

First impressions are certainly that this game pretty much expects players to have experienced the original, not just because the story follows on but also because there’s a lot less of a learning curve. It’s not that you’re totally thrown in at the deep end, but it doesn’t take long before you’re being attacked by multiple foes, or faced with using whatever stealth tactics you can imagine, as well as having a decent set of Bat-equipment at your disposal from the beginning. It definitely looks to be a far superior game, though – and considering the first was pretty awesome then that’s nothing but super fine goodness!

GodHard

2012-01-09T08:34:00.000-08:00

Well well, it’s raining Platinum trophies, thanks to God Of War and God Of War 3.

The situation was, on God Of War, I needed to go through the game in under five hours. I had already slogged through the ‘challenge of the Gods’ section to get the Dairy Bastard costume, though, so I knew I had an advantage. And what an advantage it turned out to be. The ability to have infinite magic meant no battle was too tough.

Something I hadn’t realised about the speed run was that the clock reset whenever you got killed and reset at a checkpoint. I didn’t know that. I kind of thought the five hour time limit was like a constantly ticking clock the moment you started the new game and dying was just wasting precious seconds. Once I realised that checkpoints stored your current time the pressure eased right off.

I think I did the game in about four hours, maybe even less. I just tore right through it, on Easy, wearing the Dairy Bastard costume. I can’t remember a single section of it troubling me. I did enjoy it all over again, though, and once finished and a Platinum trophy awarded I actually had a renewed interest in taking another run at God Of War 3 and seeing if I could get the Platinum out of that.

I had to complete the game on Hard, and complete the ‘challenge of the Gods’ section, too. And there were no costumes or perks I could use to help me with either. It was time to role my gamer sleeves up and see if I had what it took.

Funny thing about playing games on Hard is you get better at them. It seems obvious, but you are pushed to improve just to survive. Like when I was fighting Poseidon I was getting nailed time and time again. Previously when playing I had just soaked up damage and battered my way through, but on Hard that just wasn’t possible.

So I had to watch him more. Study his attack patterns, learn how to defend without taking injury in between attacks. That becomes true of the game later on – you watch the enemies more and search for vital weaknesses or better attacking techniques rather than just soaking up damage and dishing out more to compensate. As such I think I enjoyed the Hard playthrough of God Of War 3 more than I did the first time around. Same was true of Dead Space on Impossible mode. There’s an argument that suggests all games might benefit from being tackled on hard levels. . .

Best fight in the game was still the Hades one. Loved it before, loved it this time. It might be the best fight in the entire series, in fact. It goes through so much variation, so many attack patterns you have to learn and adapt to, it’s a satisfying slog of a battle.

The toughest parts of God Of War 3 all come towards the end. In fact I can remember them all very distinctly, because they certainly caused me some hassle. There were 3 of them – just 3 sections in the whole game that really took some effort to get through.

The first was a battle at the end of the Labyrinth, shortly after hooking up with Pandora. It was just one room with lots of sirens and other enemies constantly appearing. It was the length of the fight that proved troublesome.

Wave after wave, constantly whittling down my health. It was important to take down the Sirens as a priority, because the moment they started singing you were in trouble. The importance of grappling attack (L1 and circle) cannot be underestimated. The sigh of relief I breathed upon completing the challenge was shortlived, however, because minutes later I was into the toughest fight of the game: the Hades Cerberus Breeder!

I remembered this being a tough fight on Normal. On Hard it’s no joke. It took me many, many goes. Ostensibly it breaks down into three stages of the fight, and here’s how I did it should you want to know.

First stage is when the fight starts. Forget about grabbing the dogs it spits out and booting them back at it. It takes too long and you’re likely to lose health. No, switch to the Hercules Gloves (hopefully fully-powered up by now!) and concentrate on getting to the side or rear of the dog and batter him. Dodge and roll to ensure you’re at its side or rear and keep hitting and, eventually, the circle will appear above its head and that will be Stage One over.

Stage two sees a Satyr appear. Just roll around and dodge attacks (switch to chain weapons for faster movement) until the two of them are close together and then hammer Poseidon’s Rage. Basically with Stage Two you use all your magic up. With any luck you’ll use up all your magic and have taken out the Satyr and the dog will be ready for a circle finish (otherwise get your gloves back on and repeat the attacking from stage one to see it off – it won’t have much left).

Stage three sees two Satyrs appear. Ignore them, and go into ‘rage of the Gods’ mode and absolutely hammer at the dog. If the Satyrs get close, hammer them. The goal is to see the dog dead before your power runs out. That done, if there’s one or two Satyrs left you can deal with them most easily by just using a straight grab attack. Don’t try and hit them – just press circle when they are fairly close. Two or three of those grab attacks each and they die pretty easily. Fight over!

The last tricky section is the final fight against Zeus, inside Gaia. This close to the end, a brutally tough fight actually frustrated me more than anything else the game had thrown at me.

Turned out there’s a relatively easy way of winning – just spam the hook grab attack (L1 and circle) wearing the Hercules gloves. This should, for the most part, stop him doing most of his magic spells and multiplying parts. You might still have to deal with some of then, and you’ll have to dodge when he flies in the air and slams down, but by far and away spamming L1 and circle should make it a cinch.

So, wow! God Of war 3 done on Hard mode. All that remained was the ‘challenge of the Gods’, which have been the hardest parts of the first two God Of War games so I wasn’t looking forward to them. And you know what? They turned out to be not so bad at all.

Hardest one was probably the ‘turn to stone 10 times and live’ medusa challenge. By the time you’ve been turned to stone around 7 or 8 times it gets silly, with enemies like trolls and soldiers all over the place. I just about scraped through after countless attempts.

There were a couple of other tricky ones. The ‘no weapons’ one was tough – reliant on using soldiers as battering rams against trolls. That took many, many goes. And the one where trolls kept multiplying as I killed them was rock solid, too – another one I just about scraped through. The rest, however, I handled with little fuss or fanfare. And so it was that I was furnished with a Platinum trophy for God Of War 3, and meant I had earned a Platinum for all three games!

Veteran Warfare The Third

2011-12-29T12:19:00.001-08:00

Taking on Modern Warfare 3 on Veteran level was something I was always going to take on. I had done Modern Warfare 2 on the same Veteran level and, whilst that had been a nightmare of frustration and rage at times, the regular trophy awards and sense of accomplishment make it worth the effort. And since Modern Warfare 3 was the more spectacular campaign level I was kind of looking forward to going through it all again and this time having to really think about how I tackled the levels and situations to get through.

Weirdly, the first level is one of the most difficult. I found it tricky on Normal, but just getting through the very first part of the street on Veteran was really tough going. It did make me wonder, If the whole game is going to get harder than this then maybe this is not such a good idea.

The submarine level was also tough, but so long as you take your time and make sure you’re ready to duck and take cover when the next enemies are triggered then you can slowly pick your way along.

After the initially difficult stages, however, I actually found the majority of the game rather a lot of fun, and whipped through it a lot faster than I thought I would. I didn't like the mortar bombing part and there were one or two other tiny sections that saw me having to take a few attempts to get it right (taking down the Eiffel Tower was one such part). To add to the hassle, mind, I was also using a guide to locate all of the Intel packs to collect on all the levels as I was going through. So sometimes that meant going out of my way to collect them, meaning I had slightly tougher going on top of what was already tough going.

However, let’s cut a long story short and talk about the last level. The last part of the last level, to be precise. The bit where you’ve stormed the lair of the bad guy and had your Juggernaut suit blown to bits and the elevator doors open and, with the clock ticking, you’ve got to wade through stacks of bad guys, in a hurry, to get your man. That section was, no joke, where I thought I might have hit my skill barrier. Time after time those doors opened and I stepped out and tried to pick out the enemies and press forward only to get absolutely killed in moments. Whatever I tried, whatever tactics I tried to employ, I just could not get through. I began to wonder if I really was never going to be able to manage it.

And then I noticed that the enemies seemed to trigger at a certain point and spill into the room, running around the ledge. Eventually, playing it enough times, I got to learn what guys were killed and how far forward I could move before some speech was uttered which I knew served as a trigger to notify that the men were coming out of their doors. So over on the right, just near the elevators, I was ready with a full clip of a light machine gun and I let those bastards have it.

When you decimate most of your enemies before they even get to fire a shot in return suddenly the impossible became possible. And with that absolutely horrible section completed I pushed on to find the bad guy and kill him off, quick as you like. And that was that, Modern Warfare 3 completed on Veteran with everything collected and every little side trophy award obtained.

I’ll almost certainly never get the Platinum because that depends too much on the Special Ops stuff, but I’ve got a major percentage return now and that sense of achievement. I did it. That’s all the reward I needed.

Challenge Of The Gods

2011-12-08T04:11:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who is perhaps what you’d consider a trophy rival. We’ve been competing for ages to see who can get the highest trophy score level, the most platinums. . . It was a relatively even contest until recently when he got to sit on his backside all day, not going to work, playing games constantly.

Oh sure, he went into hospital and had an operation and so was at home recuperating. Whatever. He’s still gaming like a beast, tearing through games and racking up trophies to make it no longer a contest. I’ve got a full-time job and a wife and kid! Times are hard enough to get gaming as is!

Anyway, one thing did pique my interest. I noticed in his recent gaming exploits that he had got a Platinum trophy on the first God Of War. Now I played this game ages ago and basically dipped out on the Platinum because of two gold trophy challenges. One was for completing the Challenge of the Gods, the other for completing the game in under five hours. Since I thought completing the game in under five hours would be near-impossible I skipped it and moved on.

Seeing my friend had got the Platinum, and had achieved these things, forced me to reconsider. I learned that completing the Challenge of the Gods would unlock a costume that would allow infinite magic power and make a speedrun altogether more viable.

Right then, I thought. Let’s get this Challenge of the Gods thing done. . . No mean feat.

The trial challenges in God Of War are tougher than in the sequel because your progress does not get saved. You have to complete all 10 challenges in one sitting. That worked out around 3 hours for me – slightly more investment time than I had anticipated, but perseverance reaps rewards.

It was tough at first just to get used to the controls again, remembering what buttons and button combos produced what moves. Yet for the most part the challenges were varied and, indeed, challenging, but it was really just three of them that really tested me. Challenge Number 2, Number 8 and Number 10.

Challenge Number 2 basically saw you leaping round a circuit of floating platforms and killing all the enemies there, as well as being dogged by harpies, and it had to be done in a tight time limit. For some reason I really struggled with this. Time just constantly ran out on me. In the end I worked out a point to use my magic power and fell back on my ‘rage of the gods’ – a power that probably was better off being saved for a later challenge, but oh well. . .

Challenge Number 8 was one that featured lots of medusas and soldiers, and all had to be defeated. There was no time limit, it was just such a long slog that if you didn’t get turned to stone and killed in one hit you eventually got your health worn down and were killed off. It was gruelling, until I discovered that using the jumping slam (when medusas weren’t hitting me with their gaze) near the edges propelled the enemies over the side rather than having to batter them all to death. Using that method I got through it reasonably quickly.

The final challenge. By this point I was entering the small hours of the morning on a work night, and I was damned if I was quitting for bed without succeeding! This one basically involved killing endless satyrs and small cerberus’ to raise the small platform I was fighting on high enough to reach the goal. It was tough, and after various strategies failed I finished up using a lot of air attacks to muddle through. As much luck as skill saw me make it to the top and make the terrifying leap to the finish.

Gold trophy awarded! Now the only thing between me and a Platinum was the matter of completing the main game in under five hours. I had the ‘Dairy Bastard’ costume available to me now, though. . . I was all set to unleash infinite magic death and destruction!

Completing The MW3 Campaign

2011-11-30T04:37:00.000-08:00

I’ve been to Prague in real life. Amazing city. Probably the best city I’ve ever been to, actually. I only mention it because, during Modern Warfare 3, there are a couple of levels set in that city. And there was just a moment, when I was in the water getting through enemy territory and I looked to the left and saw the famous old bridge recreated there in the game and it quietly blew me away.

It was like how I remembered it; how the bridge looked from the water (I took a boat trip in real life, and can thus verify that perspective!). I’ve really enjoyed how the game has taken the trouble to make the game feel more vivid by recreating these real world places. Albeit with some artistic licence.

I’ve been to Paris, too. Though when I was there it wasn’t courtesy of zipping between a helicopter pilot raining bombs and machine gun fire on choppers and tanks and infantry with merry abandon before I was then thrust into the shoes of my man on the ground and battling at the foot of the Eiffel Tower when the thing was brought down in a toppling inferno.

The Paris level was amazing in how it switched between chopper and soldier, giving me the bird’s eye view and then thrusting me into the thick of the action on the ground. Again, another example of Modern Warfare 3 just pushing tried and tested tropes to unique effect. Maybe the latter half of the campaign doesn’t possess quite the same wow moments as the first half, but if there is a dip in that sense it’s not by much. Between sniping around Prague’s castle walls to battling through Paris catacombs (I’ve been there, too!) to emerge into a frantic car chase shootout (intense and exhilarating), it’s been relentlessly entertaining.

The demise of Soap was moving, too, mainly because of Price’s anguished reaction. He didn’t completely lose his senses – he still had the guile to trick my guy Yuri into getting knocked into the cellar so he could learn about how he knew Makarov. And the small backstory of Yuri and Makarov furnished previous games with contextual details that were nicely handled.

Perhaps my only complaint is that the ending, the last level, felt a little tacked on from the main narrative thrust. Like the whole mission got resolved, the president and his daughter were rescued, and the war was ended and diplomacy was back on the table and. . . Oops, forgot to get the bad guy! Never mind, Price and Yuri can suit up and charge into Makarov HQ all guns blazing and finish the matter off.

It was a fairly spectacular and satisfying end, of course. I particularly liked the brutality of Makarov’s demise and the comforting feel of Price lighting up a cigar to himself after another victory – it just felt, as I said, tacked on. It has for me been the most enjoyable of the Modern Warfare campaigns, though – perhaps purely from a scale and spectacle point of view.

I suspect back to basics purists will lament the lack of straight shooting battles with every level always feeling like it needs to have some extra hook – be it firing mortars, vehicle chases, setting out done targets. It was the variety and swift changes from regular battling, however, that I liked most of all. An FPS game gets a bit monotonous for me otherwise.

So it seems this Modern Warfare trilogy has come to an end. I don’t know if this is the end for all the characters that have become familiar this far (most of them are dead, to be fair) but I have no doubt that the Modern Warfare series will continue. It’s too successful not to and, if they only better the campaign next time out, I’ve got no problem with that.

Doubling Up For MW3

2011-11-28T04:11:00.000-08:00

I suspect there’s a good number of people that bought Modern Warfare 3 on the day it was released and didn’t touch the Campaign mode. I am one of these people. I bought the game on the day of release (I must admit, I can’t say I intended this but reasonable price (I recall Modern Warfare 2 was in the £50+ region when it was first released) and a deal with PSN vouchers made it an attractive offer).

So when I first sat down with the game I didn’t go into the Campaign. However, unlike the majority of players, I didn’t go into the Multiplayer either. Nope. For Mrs. Comet and I, it was all about Special Ops!

We loved Special Ops in Modern Warfare 2 and it’s no mistake to say that learning they were back, and with even more depth, was key to me buying the game on day one. There is the Mission Mode and the Survival Mode and, already, Mrs. Comet and I have sunk a fair few hours into both.

The Missions section was very much like the original Special Ops. Even the first mission was a training target run (which I still find near-impossible to get three stars on!). The rest of the missions were varied and challenging, and for my money a lot more impressive than the ones from the previous game.

They seemed bigger and more comprehensive. Like ones where you’d be in a helicopter or jeep, shooting like crazy, before then moving back on foot to complete the task and then get back to the vehicle. These felt as involved as entire levels from the campaign, but of course they were just one-shot, solitary missions to complete.

Really good stuff. We went through the lot on Regular level, one-star standard (Tactician trophy!) but no doubt Mrs. Comet and I will return to the more challenging levels and see how we fare then!

Meanwhile there’s the Survival mode, which Mrs. Comet and I have spent way more time with and yet found far more difficult and made a lot less progress! Oh, there’s been progress but for a long time we got stuck on Wave 15, where two Juggernauts show up. (I’m blaming Mrs. Comet, really. The notion of running away to survive just didn’t seem to work out for her.)

We eventually did manage to complete it, and survived a few more waves after that, but I am unclear about how many waves there are. Does it just keep going indefinitely? Surely not. There has to be a limit. Doubt I’ll ever see it, mind. All in all the Special Ops section is far superior to the Modern Warfare 2 one, and that wasn’t exactly a slouch either. I can see many more an hour being sunk into it.

Eventually I did get to turn my attention on the Campaign. So far I have got up to what I presume is the ‘controversial’ sequence of the game that I could have skipped had I selected that option: the home video being taken of a little girl in London unwittingly standing beside a van with a bomb in it that exploded. It was nowhere near as ‘shocking’ (I use that term loosely) as the airport massacre sequence from the last game (I could argue the artistic merits of that, but as a gamer it was actually a rather dull level to play through) yet I liked the style of it – short but carrying impact.

I have been very impressed with the Campaign so far. It’s been utterly spectacular. Sure the graphics aren’t on the same level of sophistication as Uncharted 3 but they still contain the capacity to wow. And the scale and sense of being epic has been well-realised. I think of the dazzling chaos of the speedboat chase away from the sub, or the riotous gobsmack of the London underground sequence, tearing past screaming commuters on the platform before watching a train carriage barrel rolling in front of me. . . I was playing whilst being happily amazed.

Each level has packed in some element of innovation that mark it out from just being a treadmill FPS, and that’s what’s kept me engaged. Like the Russian plane level – moving from zero gravity shootouts, surviving a crash (back end of plane tearing off, just like in Lost!) and then having Makarov make a fatal surprise appearance – it just packed in idea after idea. Whipping around the globe, generally in what I can only assume are relatively faithful recreations of actual places, it’s like the game can’t bear the idea of letting itself settle on any one thing or any one place for too long. It’s not a sedate experience, and it’s far from subtle – but as a straight blast of fun there’s little to top it.

It’s also strangely good to be back in the company of Soap and Price as well, Price especially. Over the course of these games he’s cemented himself as an iconic character, with an unmistakeable voice and a legendary moustache. World War 3 is breaking out but if one man can win it, it’s him.

And me, of course!

Crushing Uncharted

2011-11-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

No sooner had I completed Uncharted 3 on Normal I was back into it again, tackling the toughest difficulty of Crushing. I rather fancied my chances of success. Whilst I was playing through the game for the first time I was taking mental note of the trickier sections that I figured would be challenging at the hardest level and, whilst I figured there would be some tough times, I didn’t see anything that I thought I wouldn’t be able to handle.

Truth of the matter was I sailed through the game on Crushing far easier than I thought I would. There were one or two sticking points but, really, the parts I envisaged would be total nightmares actually weren’t that bad.

Trickiest part? For me it was in the cargo hold of the ship, just after I discovered the fake Sully. (An utterly nonsense thing for the bad guys to have put there, to be honest.) There was just a really hard moment where a guy was on a balcony, another two guys were walking towards where I was taking cover in the corner, and an enemy with a shield was lurking in the background. I died over and over, refining my actions down to taking out balcony guy, man on crate, then making a run for it to pick off the shield guy and, hopefully, still have a grenade, bullets and health to bring down the armoured guy as the next wave of attack came in.

The ship level also contained a pretty tough situation in a stage room that I knew would be tough, but mostly it was challenging due to a lack of ammo. That aside, the start of the very final level had a tough part with grenade launching guys and snipers to tackle alongside approaching enemies that basically required some fast, accurate takedowns, but it was easily manageable.

The part I thought would be hardest was the part with the flamehead enemies, particularly at the fountain area with about five or six of them to deal with. That had been horrendous on Normal, and I was dreading it on Crushing. However, first time around I hadn’t been aware of the RPG over to the left, or the Grenade Launcher, and with a TAU and T-Bolt sniper combo taking potshots I handled it like a pro!

I found the fight sections annoying on Crushing mode, since it generally didn’t show button prompts to display what you should be pressing. (OK, it basically boiled down to hitting Triangle or Circle, but still!) The last fight became a bit irritating in that regard, when I’d get hurt and then killed off in two moves despite feeling like I had countered correctly. Glad to see the back of it.

The physical fights never really did grow on me, but they were the worst part. Otherwise I actually really enjoyed playing in Crushing mode! Far from being a soul-destroying slog it just made the game more exciting, and made the shootouts more intense, tactical affairs where you felt like picking the right spot for cover was important and every shot had to count.

My impression of the game changed during this second playthrough. Things that had blown me away first time didn’t quite amaze (like the walk through Yemen market town) and parts that hadn’t initially dazzled this time had a better effect (in particular the entire ship sequence which, end to end, is a remarkable technical feat and probably the game’s tentpole highpoint, as well as the astounding-looking part hanging out the back of the plane).

I still can’t really call it on which one is best, Uncharted 2 or Uncharted 3. I’d say the third one is the most impressive, and more like the interactive blockbuster the game strives to be. It’s also the most enjoyable and exciting due to the higher frequency of set piece moments. However, it’s because of all those set-piece moments I think the gameplay doesn’t feel quite as meaty as the second one, which was more of a shootout blast and felt like a bigger game (even though they both have the same number of levels).

In short, Uncharted 3 was the more spectacular, set piece action game, whereas Uncharted 2 probably had a higher body count and is slightly more hardcore. (Neither of them are as hardcore as the first one, though, but that’s also the weakest of the series.)

The Platinum trophy was soon awarded. Once the Crushing game was done I could go back, pick a chapter, and collect missing trophies or pick the best parts to, say, throw back grenades at enemies or kill enough of them with a handgun or alternate shooting and fighting. . . Pretty easy with a bit of concerted effort. I rather wish it had more online-based trophies to encourage me on there. One for completing all of the co-op missions would have been a good one. Oh well. No doubt I’ll play them anyway - Uncharted’s online game has for a long time been my favourite multiplayer so I won’t be missing out just because there isn’t a trophy in it.

Shutting Down On A High

2011-11-21T07:23:00.000-08:00

I was right and I was wrong, and the stuff I was right about was good and the stuff I was wrong about worked out good. What am I jabbering on about? The end of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, that’s what. SPOILERS about the end of the game from here!

So upon leaving Megan Reed and seeing to it that she and the rest of the scientist people got away from wherever I was on the helicopter, I then had to make my own escape via some kind of rocket, which was pretty cool. It was there I had my first encounter with the near-rabid, messed up augmented people; a mad bunch I’d be dealing with a whole lot more before I was done. . .

So my big concern was that I was going to be faced with another slog of stealth and hacking to progress through. . . and it is on this that I was wrong. And oh what a joy! The base I landed at had suffered the ravages of augmented people going mental and attacking everyone else and so the place was rather deserted once I got there, save for the odd rabid person hanging around. But a quick smack about the head soon put them down.

Otherwise I was free to roam the corridors and halls, only having to essentially hack a computer to turn a turret off. Otherwise I just had freedom! It felt good. Even though I did spend half the time being cautious round corners and wary of making too much noise – mainly because old habits die hard.

The confrontation with Hugh Darrow, as a ‘boss’ encounter, took the shape of a conversation that I think I failed at. It didn’t prevent me continuing though it probably denied me a trophy. After that the real fun began, with a supposed rescue mission of Sarif and Taggart and a fight through a horde of mad augments!

I say it was a ‘supposed’ rescue mission because I managed to completely miss both Sarif and Taggart and got to the exit lift without them. (I since went back from a save point and completed the end of the game fully – winning the conversations, finding Sarif and Taggart, and seeing all the endings.) The last boss was reasonably easy, but also fun in the sense that it was both a fight and a puzzle. Again, my grenade launcher came in good use here when it came to blasting the shield.

The end of the game offered options on how it was set to end, though on this I thought the game felt a little bit ponderous and naval-gazing. The arguments of the merits of technology for mankind all felt too extreme for me to really be able to side with any one of them. In all honesty I thought the game reckoned itself more profound than it really was, and was rather didactic in its approach.

Far more gratifying as a gamer was the trophies that pinged at the end. My toiling efforts had been worthwhile when the ‘Foxiest of the Hounds’ and ‘The Pacifist’ trophies were awarded for never alerting hostiles to my presence and never killing anyone. As I understood it those were the most demanding trophies to obtain in the whole game and, for a second playthrough on Hard, there’s not too much standing in the way of me getting a Platinum for it. And, hey, on this second playthrough I can now be a little more carefree about being seen and killing people! Fun times!

System Crash

2011-11-16T01:36:00.000-08:00

You know, Deus Ex: Human Revolution is sort of winning me round. Oh a lot of the niggles and moans I have remain; the frustrating repetition of sneaking around, the laborious chore of hacking, a main character that’s less than engaging. And yet for all that the atmosphere and style of the thing has kept me interested, and when I think back to all the things I’ve done in the game the memories feel vivid and varied.

Where am I up to? Well, I feel like I must be closing in on the final stages of the game. I defeated a third boss and found Megan, which ushered in a seismic plot twist and another really dramatic event.

SPOILERS abound here on in.

I am glad I left Hengsha. The place was even more of a chore to get around due to the alerted security presence all over the place. It meant just getting from one place to the other presented its own challenges, and involved various forays into the sewers. When the moment came for my character David Jenson to climb into a pod and see where he ended up I was pleased to be putting China behind me even though I was surely going to be headed someplace worse.

I’m not entirely sure where I ended up, actually. It appeared to be some kind of base where the kidnapped scientists were all being kept. I spent a lot of time wandering around that base, I can tell you! At first I’d managed to speak to a couple of the scientists and get a plan going for a major distraction without alerting many guards but, by the time I was trying to leave I had pretty much been around the whole place and knocked every guard unconscious.

It just makes travelling around easier!

I liked the part where I inserted a virus into a machine and then had to quickly find somewhere to hide before all the alerts sent guards and bots on the loose. (First time I was left utterly stuck – second time I got wise to it!) And so I found myself confronted with the third boss encounter.

With my augmentations all going fuzzy and him throwing flash grenades and stuff at me, it wasn’t proving easy to pick him off with my machine gun. So after a few deaths I took a different strategy, whipped out my grenade launcher and let him have it. I only had to dodge a couple of attacks because three direct hits later he was down.

I’d be lying if I said that didn’t feel good.

And so I finally caught up with Megan, though it was hardly the romantic or even emotional reunion I would have imagined. Turned out she was quite happy continuing her research, until she realised she was being played and there on screen I witnessed Hugh Darrow flick a switch that sent people with augmentations absolutely wild.

I don’t know how widespread that attack was – whether it was just people in the room or populations worldwide have all started going crazy. I saved my game there and ended my session. I am figuring there’s at least one more boss fight with the female terrorist, and surely a confrontation with Darrow yet to come. The game’s definitely got my interest in its plot twists and potential conclusions now – the only dampener to proceedings is the thought that I’ve got more hours skulking around behind things and hacking doors before I get there. . .

Back To The City

2011-11-10T08:36:00.000-08:00

Some spoilers for Deus Ex: Human Revolution coming up. I think I am perhaps past the midway point of the game, two-thirds complete, maybe. Hard to say. I’ve really no idea how long the thing is. But the most recent event to occur was my return to Hengsha, and the death of Faridah!

Easily this has been the game’s most brutal and effective moment, genuinely provoking an emotional response from me. After the helicopter crashed and she was left stranded but demanded I make my escape quick whilst the enemy approached her was valiant and heartwarming. But then to watch her execution as I travelled away in an elevator, dragged out onto her knees and shot in the head whilst spitting defiance, that was properly tough, cold, dramatic stuff.

I at first assumed there was nothing I could have done to save her, but now I am thinking there probably was and maybe that would have informed one of the game’s different endings. Ah well. There’s always another go.

It didn’t even occur to me to try and save her because I am still sticking to playing the game for both the Foxiest of Hounds trophy (never alert hostiles to my presence) and Pacifist trophy (never kill anyone). And I’ll be very disappointed if or when I get to the end to discover I haven’t fulfilled these achievements because it’s not been easy.

Having left Hengsha for the first time, I was went to the Picus offices, which became more of a pain than it initially appeared when the place was flooded with soldiers. The revelation that Eliza, the newsreader, was a hologram AI was a nice reveal though.

The following boss fight took me a few goes to get right. I got the impression there was probably a specific tactic I should have been employing that perhaps would have made the fight go easier. I had the general tactic of chasing the woman around, following her movements in the water, and stunning her, and then whilst she was stunned switching weapons and hitting her with some Revolver fire. That seemed to do the trick but probably there was a better way of handling it.

It was back to Chicago after that. I must confess that whilst I am just about following the plot it’s not particularly engaged me – in general I am on the lookout for my girlfriend again (tellingly I can’t even remember her name) whilst trying to work out whether or not this David Sarif fella is trustworthy whilst tracking this terrorist organisation. I kind of follow it, but the subtle nuances have been left by the wayside.

So it was that the helicopter crash on returning to China, and the subsequent slaughter of Faridah, has been the ‘highpoint’ purely because it was a more immediate event rather than the muted, talk-heavy exposition the game otherwise expects me to keep track with. I still can’t say it’s really grown on me, but it’s not a pain to play either. It is all starting to feel somewhat repetitive so I am hoping the end comes sooner rather than later since I’m not overly-keen on continuing with it for, say, another 10 hours or something.

Uncharted 3 Fully Charted

2011-11-07T12:59:00.000-08:00

Please be advised that the below post details the entirety of all that occurs during the single player campaign of Uncharted 3. As such, it’s absolutely SPOILER territory!

As Uncharted 3 is probably my most looked forward to game in a long time, and I seem to have engineered lengthy sessions to play it, I can hardly see myself breaking off to write up about it every now and then. So instead I’m just going to document my time with the game as I am playing it – getting my instant reaction at regular intervals throughout the process, which should be fun.

04/11/2011

11:45 am: Game finally arrived. Within minutes inserted into PS3 and the adventure begins!

11:55 am: Cool bar fight. Took me a few seconds to get used to the mechanics of it but, basically, so long as you’re vigilant for pressing triangle then you can’t seem to go far wrong. Picked up my first treasure behind the bar, too! Trophy!

12:00 pm: Nate and Sully shot and left for dead! Shock horror! (I’m sure they’ll be fine.)

1225: pm: Young Drake in a museum! Cool touch, and seeing how Sully and Nate first met was a nice touch. Loved the chase sequence out of the museum – best part of the game so far. Got caught a few times, though – the chase very much came down to a memory test of where to go next. Will be more fun when I know what to do!

12:30 pm: So it was all a ruse. . . although I don’t overly-trust Charlie won’t turn out to be a wrong ‘un further down the line. But nice to see Chloe is back in the mix, already, and with so little fuss. Been a lot of movies so far. . . and only just got my hands on a gun!

12:40 pm: Cool car-key related puzzle. Impressions of the game so far are favouring towards the ‘wow I’m impressed by how it looks and sounds’ but still feeling like I am not really getting into the game. Still haven’t fired a bullet! It’ll come. . .

14:00 pm: Session resumed after various domestic interruptions (honestly, can’t the real world leave me and Nate in peace!?) so time to get back in to it. Have shot some guys, finally. We are up and running!

14:35 pm: First big shootout section, blasting through the London underground. Brought back a lot of memories of Uncharted fights of old, and it felt good. The only gripe I do have is that the new circle button to get in a grapple proved problematic when I just wanted to roll away after doing some running and gunning. Grabbing hold of one guy whilst his mates shoot me to death is certainly something I am going to have to be wary of! I did get a trophy for brawling here, it should be noted!

14:40 om: In Eastern France with Sully. A jungle environment. Looks gorgeous, although so far I am getting the sense that this is very similar to Uncharted 2. Our hero shot at the beginning, a museum heist, shootout in a dark place after climbing around and now wisecracking in the woods with Sully – it’s practically the same!

15:11 pm: Made it through chateau and landed in some kind of cave. I am expecting spiders. Enjoyed the banter between Sully and Nate throughout this. And, also, if it seems like I am going slow here it’s because I’ve been poking around looking for treasures. And stopping to write this. And, also, I took a shit.

15:36 pm: Wasn’t in the cave for long, but it had some cool water effects. Instead I got involved in a couple of major shootouts. No problem for me playing on Normal level, but I suspect they could be a pain in Crushing mode! Just completed a tile puzzle thing which, for some reason, took me a lot longer than it should have to figure out.

15:40 pm: Back in the spider caves again, this time with torchlight . . . I expect my stay won’t be as brief this time!

16:00 pm: Wall tile puzzle. Took forever for penny to drop. . . and there being two spots on the board where the lion could go left me stumped for a bit. Annoying! The crypt having half of the possible location goal is skirting very close to the events of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade too!

16:05 pm: Spider chase! Was fun, but at the same time I felt like I was getting bitten and nearly killed and there really wasn’t any way I could have gone any faster. . . I am presuming the game was doing that for dramatic effect.

16:25 pm: Just got out of the burning chateau sequence. It’s now the new high point of the game. Some of the dizzying camera angles, and the amount of falling through crumbling, burning wood, dangling over inferno-like abysses below. . . Dazzling stuff. Two points to note, though. 1, I got my Run and Gun trophy during the flaming firefights. And secondly, some of Sully’s remarks during the cutscene afterwards made me worry that he might not make it through to the end of the game. Given the focus on his character here, I am wondering if this might be his swansong. . .

16:33 pm: Just a word to say how damn amazing Syria town looks from the viewpoint of me scaling a castle wall. . .

16:45 pm: Cutter (who I thought was called Charlie!) is definitely marking himself out as being the traitor in our midst for me. He and Chloe have been left unattended and surely he told the bad guys about Sully and I at the chateau. I’ve got my eye on that Jason Statham wannabe!

16:49 pm: Trophy! Just got the one for shooting people with grenades and making them drop them.

17:00 pm: Another trophy! Brute beater. Finally killed one without taking a hit. Enjoyed the previous fight, dangling outside a tower before climbing back in and shooting up the place.

17:20 pm: Just completed stealth section. My brain is still rather wrapped up a lot in Deus Ex: Human Revolution at the moment and my stealth tactic skills from that aren’t quite working the same here. . . I notice that Charlie/Cutter keeps pressing ahead and quite happy to leave Chloe and Sully behind. He’s definitely not a team player!

17:30 pm: Interesting. Charlie got hit by a dart that’s made him go crazy and no longer trust Drake, but before that moment it seemed like he was perfectly loyal. Perhaps I was wrong about him? Which also means there still could be a traitor in my midst? Although that villain guy does seem to have some kind of magical powers so I’m not going to be too presumptuous. Now into another cave, carrying a flaming torch. Surely not more spiders?

17:35 pm: Fight with Charlie. . . So far I am not a huge fan of the fight mechanics in this game. They’re a bit of a pain, really. They’re almost like QTEs. Anyway, Charlie got stopped from killing me and he seems back to his old self but I still don’t trust him. I’ve also noticed spider webs dotted around. . . Those fucking spiders are going to be back, aren’t they? Fuck’s sake. . .

18:00 pm: Wow. Right. Well. There were spiders. But it seems I really was wrong about Charlie after a rather moving cutscene saw him save the gang almost at the cost of his own life. He’s now got a broken leg which means escape is going to be tricky – but I quite liked the introduction of the playing card about his person. These villains have some strange sorcery. But I must escape!

18:01 pm: Trophy! Bare knuckle slugger!

18:13 pm: I was wondering where Elena was. Seems her and Nate got married, and then got unmarried, in the time since the previous game. Good to see her again, anyway. And it sounds like she’ll be along for the ride. Though once again there’s remarks about Sully not making this one because he’d do anything for Nate and Nate ought to let it go. . . I am sensing tragedy (but then I’ve been wrong about a lot so far so let’s hope I am about this, too).

18:16 pm: Trophy. Apprentice Fortune Hunter. I suspect I’ve missed quite a few, and there was one in the spider-dam cave I could see but couldn’t get! I should say at this point that Yemen looks astonishing – the sun effects and atmosphere are great.

18:22 pm: The walk through the Yemen market ranks as the most quietly gobsmacking section of the game so far. The chateau fire had all the dazzle and flash but for sheer ‘wow’ this innocuous stroll is superb.

18:35 pm: Brief break just before I drop down a well after having a fight in a fish market (quite liked it, actually, because of the possibilities of interacting with stuff around the place – maybe the fighting thing will grow on me more) as I need to eat. Scoff a pizza and then get back to it. . .

18:55 pm: Getting back to it.

19:15 pm: Just solved two puzzles, both quite fun, with some interesting optical illusion effects thrown in just to make them seem that little bit better. Sure, it basically just involved sticking cogs into one thing and sticking a stick in the right hole for the other, but they were classy presentations of that old style puzzling!

19:23 pm: More spiders! The most exciting encounter yet, though they’re still not all that convincing. More intriguing was Nate asking Sully to just remember the constellation stuff he saw. I fear that not writing it down will be costly if Sully doesn’t make it. . . Should also mention at this point that Elena looks fantastic; they’ve really done good work on her facial expressions that make her seem more realistic than she ever did before.

19:40 pm: Interesting trippy sequence after Nate got darted (would it have gone on forever or was there specifically only one route out as I realised my journey through the market was looping around?). But the cutscene afterwards was better, with Marlowe talking about how Nathan Drake wasn’t even Drake’s real name and how Sully might just be in it for himself. I was actually engaged in the drama there – totally forgot I was watching a videogame. That doesn’t happen often.

19:49 pm: Whoa Just finished an exhilarating extended footchase through the Yemen streets. It was amazing, full of well-choreographed incidents and near-catches before the usual fighting kind of put a dampener on it. Possibly this might have been my favourite set piece of the game so far. The chateau fire was more spectacular, but the footchase was more intense.

20:22 pm: Phew. Just ploughed through a seriously tough battle against some pirates set against a whole load of boats in a kind of dock junkyard. Shooting from the water, whipping up to boats to grab a rocket launcher to take out the machine guns. . . And guys just kept coming from every angle. Sheesh! Great fun!

20:43 pm: Experiencing great irritation. There’s a treasure on a girder of a ship. I can see it. The game knows I’m supposed to go there to get it. But someone didn’t tell the coding people because you can’t climb or grip properly on the girders and so keep falling to your death. Fair enough if this was because the game didn’t want you to go down that route – but there’s a fucking treasure on it! Annoying. First actual genuine annoyance of the game.

20:46 pm: Got the treasure. Now not as annoyed.

20:50 pm: Trophy! Hangman! Earned on one of those really cool vertical shootouts that Uncharted 3 has brought to the party.

21:10 pm: Oh now we’ve just hit all kinds of awesome. A boatyard shootout, a chase and leap onto a boat, and then a leap on another boat because the one I was on caught fire. And that resulted in me rocket launching another attacking boat. Brilliant. The waves and the ocean look staggering and the whole thing is really taking the game up a notch in the action stakes.

21:30 pm: Charging around onboard a big ship. Earned all kinds of trophies for killings with certain guns, and for getting over a hundred headshots. Weirdly, the fight in the ballroom with the chandelier felt like a crucial fight scene during the first Uncharted game, with the way the attacks came from various sides. Those snipers are pains in the arses. This part on Crushing will be a fucker.

21:45 pm: Wife came home in the middle of me trying to escape the sinking, capsizing ship. I thought she might sit there, impressed, but she didn’t. And so I had to turn it off, mid-escape, which was a bit of an atmosphere breaker. Maybe when she goes to sleep I can pick it up again.

23:15 pm: Wife in bed, the adventure continues. Back into the heart of a sinking ship!

23:20 pm: Now washed up on a beach. That all worked out. It was a spectacular set piece, overall, though given I had heard about it beforehand I can’t say the sinking ship level blew me away as much as I thought it would.

23:25 pm: Trophy. Skilled Fortune Hunter, for some treasure I found on a crate in a hangar of the airport I am sneaking around in.

23:34 pm: Another trophy for a set number of kills with a grenade!

23:50 pm: Just boarded an aeroplane courtesy of Elena, a jeep and the landing gear. Really cool moment. But given that Uncharted 3 has artwork all over the place that shows a crashed plane in the desert I suspect the coming down part is going to be a lot more spectacular than the taking off!

23:59 pm: Ha ha! Gloriously dumb. The crash landing plane happened sooner than I thought, with a bit of hanging out of the back of a plane action (like in The Living Daylights) before everyone got sucked out of a big hole. What was gloriously dumb was how Nate managed to grab a hold of a crate with a parachute attached in mid-air and drop to safety. Although ‘safety’ is a loose term considering I am now in the middle of the desert. . . Oh but it does look beautiful!

00:34 am: A little bit of desert fatigue; playing this bit has made me thirsty! Stumbling through the desert (really well done, totally sold the desperation of the situation) and then into an extended shooting fight, which just about felt like it was going on too long and then the cavalry showed up. Another section to dread for Crushing level. . . Glad the riding around on horseback seemed shortlived, though – I wasn’t a fan of that!

00:44 am: Spoke too soon, I’m back in the saddle!

00:57 am: I take it all back. The horseback sequence was exhilarating stuff; fast-paced, lots of shooting, and it seems I am reunited with Sully! Yay! Definitely a high point of the game, though probably the footchase through Yemen was still the bit that I thought was the best so far.

01:17am: Time to call it a night. I’ve just made it through a really quite difficult section in a sandstorm with snipers and bullets flying everywhere, and have now found shelter in some huge building. It feels like I might be drawing towards the end of the game, too, so I’d rather come to that fresh.

05/11/2011

12:18 pm: Back on it for a bit, whilst I have a pie in the oven for lunch!

12:25 pm: Nice reveal behind the massive doors of the ancient forgotten city. Now I just have to work out how the hell I get down there!

12:28 pm: Me looky at Atlantis in the Sands with me eyes widey open in absolute amazement.

12:31 pm: OMG. Wonderful cutscene with dramatic consequences. . . Sully was shot. Is this permanent? I can’t help but hope that somehow, some way, there’ll be a way to bring him back from the dead – maybe a form of immortality power that the baddies are after? Either way I’m now angry but got pasted by some strange bad guys that can teleport in flames. Oh man, talk about a bad day.

12:40 pm: Heck of a fight, but there was something quite exhilarating about fighting the flaming heads. There was a sense of balance and challenge about it all that really worked well – with a good environment to run around in.

12:57 pm: Excellent surprise hallucination, calling back the beginning part of the game very nicely. The fight with the flameheads I just had was tough going, though. The trick is to keep moving, I feel. And use the TAU Sniper or the T-Bone. Anything sniper. That tends to work pretty sweet.

13:05 pm: Break for lunch!

13:19 pm: Back into the fray.

13: 22 pm: Sully is alive. . .? It was the water, not the gas? Well, I’m willing to believe Sully for the moment but I am still keeping back a little bit of reservation that there isn’t some kind of rug pull headed my way.

13:31 pm: Just got a trophy for being a headshot expert for killing five enemies in a row in the head. Which is nice.

13:40 pm: Trophy for kills with the SAS Shotgun. They just keep racking up.

13:55 pm: Well, so far it seems like I am at the climax of the game and it all does feel very much like Uncharted 2. Still, Marlowe appears to be dead so that just leaves one very angry Talbot remaining. I suspect he’s going to be the final boss, but then he always was going to be. I wonder what form of fight it will take. The game could do with a really spectacular finish to cap it off, though for now I have a run across a crumbling ruin to traverse.

14:05 pm: Well, that all ended sooner than I expected. Firstly, it did bring the spectacular. The running and jumping across the platforms looked utterly amazing. No question. Shame that the final battle basically came down to another brawling thing, though – and whilst on harder levels it may be a pain in how fast you get killed it does basically come down to how fast you react to pressing triangle. Ah well. That’s really the only negative I have.

I do have a criticism of the narrative. I have no idea really what the big plan was for the baddies, nor what they were and why some of them seemed to have magical powers. That was all rather glossed over as far as I could tell. . . unless the magical powers were all based around the hallucinogenic properties they had? That’s my best guess (it does explain the flaming head warriors, which is a cool touch).

What was Marlowe talking about, Nate not using his real name? What was with the playing card left on Cutter? The first question, potentially, is just something they've seeded here to discuss in future instalments of the game so I can kind of live with that, though I wish they'd just answered questions they'd raised here rather than sow the seeds for future revelations.

End sequence was nice. Kind of moving, in a way. I did like how they’d handled the break up of Nate and Elena – leaving aside the details and just allowing us to make our own ideas up about what went on. Good stuff. And I am pleased that Sully did make it to the end – it would have absolutely been too sad to have him killed!

So, game finished on Normal run through with 34% trophies obtained. There’s certainly a lot more to go at, but maybe whilst I have some time I might go and check out the online stuff. . .

Great game. Need more time with it to fully digest and appreciate and decide if it’s better than the 2nd. It’s certainly better-looking and with bigger wow moments, but was there a level better than, say, the train one from Uncharted 2? Not sure. But either way it’s close – both of them are truly excellent games and it’s been a blast to play from start to finish. I mean, look at how intensely I’ve been playing this one! Few games can hold me like that.

Co-operation

2011-11-02T13:35:00.001-07:00

Look, it’s not entirely my fault it took me so long. Portal 2’s co-operation mode isn’t exactly a piece of cake to get through, but more to the point the clue is in the title in that it absolutely demands co-operation! And unfortunately for me the only person I had around to go through the game with was Mrs. Comet, and not only was she not very familiar with Portal as a concept she’s also quick to throw in the towel when the going gets tough.

I’ve had to drag her through and, especially at the end, it was sometimes a case of just completing a single stage of an area before she’d call it a day. That makes getting to the end of this thing a long, drawn-out process. Jesus, there was one fucking time she decided taking a nap would be more appropriate and I was picking up my controller, progressing, then putting my controller down and picking hers up and working through in that manner. I only persevered in that manner because it was right near the end of the level - but this tells you a lot about the type of shit Mrs. Comet was giving when the going got tough.

It is to the game’s credit that the co-op mode was so substantial. Whilst it naturally didn’t possess all the cinematic thrill or stylised bells and whistles of the single player game what it did bring was a mass host of fiendish puzzle rooms, lots of quips and tomfoolery from GLaDOS and the two robot protagonists, and a completely self-sufficient plot (that, I believe, opens up potential avenues for further games in the series should there ever be any).

Whilst playing the game I wasn’t entirely sure where chronologically this co-operative story stood in the Portal scheme of things. For the most part I thought this was perhaps taking place after the events of the first game but before the second. I thought that GLaDOS was using these two robots to gain information and codes so she could launch some kind of attack on the outside world, potentially nuclear, and so set-up the probably post-humanity world that seems to exist in Portal 2.

Turned out that GLaDOS was, as expected, patently up to something devious but it wasn't apocalypse. As is revealed at the end, this is clearly set after the events of Portal 2 and GLaDOS is merely procuring for herself more test subjects. Plot wise, then, not exactly revelatory stuff but it kept me interested.

The gameplay was the key here, with the introduction of two players using two sets of portals employed to brain-bending effect. Seriously, I found some of these puzzles hard. Credit to Mrs. Comet, too, who did engage with the game and managed to figure out a few things for us.

It’s pointless to try and go into specifics of puzzles, or really even discuss how difficult they were – save to say they were tough, especially towards the final stages. I can’t imagine how anyone would get through the game playing co-op online without a headset. Whilst the game did have non-verbal commands at its disposal, I just don’t see how two people that can’t speak to each other would puzzle their way through the game together.

Mrs. Comet and I experienced our fair share of arguments and hostilities as we played the game – frustrated with one another for all kinds of reasons – so I can’t say it’s got that ‘feelgood’ factor for a 2-player co-op, but it was an immense gaming achievement to get through it and I was glad to get to the end and see the resolution of the story. All told, though, the single player campaign remains the far superior way to play Portal and it’s for that, really, do I consider Portal 2 to be the best game of the year so far.

Uncharted 3 will probably blow it away, though.

Made In China

2011-10-31T05:30:00.000-07:00

So my gaming journey with Deus Ex: Human Revolution saw me journey to Hengsha, in China. I feel like I spent absolutely ages there. And whilst it initially felt like an overwhelming, multi-levelled sprawl I eventually got used to it and found my way around and realised it wasn’t quite as large as initially appeared.

Again, like in Detroit, I was initially impressed with the atmosphere of the place. That feel of landing in a new location, where the people didn’t often speak my language, and were going about their lives whilst I went about my business was fairly well-realised. In next to no time I was roaming the halls and rooms of a brothel and soon sent on a mission to help some hooker.

There were a couple of other missions on the go, usually leading me into a club called The Hive. Thankfully I’d been snooping around the hotel rooms and managed to get a card to get me access into the place. I’ve heard of people complain about not being to get into the police station, or not being able to get into The Hive, and I can imagine it being a pain to have to sneak around those places.

The simplistic nature of the missions didn’t exactly wow me. The best part of the whole Hensha area was the section inside the large ‘capsule’ compound, like a hotel of pods, that was a curious environment but was also quite tricky to escape from undetected when enemies swarmed into the place.

I completed all of the side missions that I was presented with (it’s impossible to know if I've done them all without looking online, something I haven’t done, but I feel like I missed one or two things in Detroit but may have potentially completed everything in Hengsha).

The final mission was quite good fun – there were some spectacular views of the city in the morning light through the windows of the laboratory I was infiltrating. It was nice to be able to walk around as though I was an employee as well as have to slip into stealth mode occasionally. There wasn’t quite the same level of restarting required here as the was with the FEMA facility, which made for a more flowing, engaging experience.

I was anticipating a boss fight, but there was none. Instead some woman gave me the slip and then I was trapped in a room with a horde of soldiers pouring in hunting for me. The handy vent over on the right afforded me an easy escape route so it felt like something of a rather convenient end to the level. Not that I am complaining too much – combat is something I’ve scarcely been involved in so the less boss fights, the less physical encounters, the better!

Deus Ex Not A Gaming Revolution

2011-10-30T13:50:00.000-07:00

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was one of those games I was aware of well in advance of its release, that was being talked up as something special, and one I could barely summon any interest in. I just didn’t know where it was coming from, what the big fuss was – it felt like some kind of franchise that had passed me by.

Then it got released, and all the reviews were amazing and extolling about the freedom the game afforded and how it was a revelation. Friends and people at work got it and were talking and enthusing about it. I figured it’d be one of those games I’d end up getting. . . and then it turned up on Amazon for less than £20 (so soon after its release date, what’s that all about!?) and I thought that good a deal to turn down.

So then. Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a game I have played so far up to the point where I have just arrived in China. There’s stuff I like, and stuff I don’t like, but mostly I am fairly certain I’ll see it through but it’ll never be the great game that reviews and even my friends made me think it was going to be.

I should point out something, however; this first playthrough of the game I am trying to get through the whole thing without being seen by hostiles and without killing anyone. I believe achieving both of these things will net me two tricky trophies, for one, but the stealth element seems to be keeping in the spirit of things. The game wants me to sneak around rather than go in all guns blazing.

It’s just as well – the shooting parts, for what ought to ostensibly work as well as any first person shooter game – don’t feel good at all. That’s criticism number one. (I should note that I started the game first time shooting my way through but, not liking the feel of it and discovering that stealth was more highly prized, re-started a new game.)

As a consequence of my stealth and trying to never get seen, there’s a lot of quitting and restarting going on. I am saving often. I’ll successfully whip past some guards in a room after a few attempts and save my game just so I don’t have to do it again, and all it really comes down to is watching their movements to slip through unnoticed.

Don’t try and kid me this is sophisticated gaming. Metal Gear Solid was doing this stuff over ten years ago. Christ, Bonanza Bros on the Megadrive was based on a similar premise!

I do appreciate that the sophistication and freedom of Deus Ex is found in how you can tackle the various environments. Even taking the stealth root, there are surely stacks of ways you can go about getting through the place without being seen – moving boxes if you’re strong enough, or hacking computers to switch off certain things, or finding hidden vents. . . I get that this element of the game is exceedingly well executed and its admirable how it really comes across; the feel of being there and able to do anything.

There haven’t been many places where I’ve noticed the joins to the world in this respect. You can tell you’ve triggered certain conversations and actions sometimes, as you walk close enough to a particular point, and of course I know if I were to sit in one spot and watch the guards they would continue repeating the same moves endlessly, eternally, caught on a loop only I can interrupt. At the end of the day it’s just a game but I guess all the buzz about how revolutionary the game was made me expect something less rudimentary.

Griping over, because there is a lot about this game that is exceptional. It’s super-stylish for one. I really liked the opening, with my guy just walking through the facility, talking with his ex-girlfriend – there was a real sense of the place being alive and occurring. Likewise when I first got to exit the building and head out into the streets of Detroit – ultimately it’s a relatively small area to explore but it feels otherworldly and yet engrossing.

Playing the game is like those really exciting thriller movies when the hero is somewhere he shouldn’t be, perhaps rifling through secret files, and it occasionally cuts to a guard or a villain returning back to the place – that stomach-tingling excitement translates here when sneaking past locked doors and getting into drawers. For all my previous moaning, when this game sucks you in the immersion is fantastic.

It’s just a shame that sense of immersion gets shattered when you’ve quit and reloaded the same bit ten times over because some guard you hadn’t noticed spotted you scampering behind some crates!

Whilst the freedom aspect of things is in place for how to tackle situations it doesn’t quite extend to the narrative so much as I can tell. I have tried to get involved in whatever sidequests have come up and get them completed, though I have a nagging suspicion that I may have left Detroit having not done everything. I did get into the police station (talked my way in, unlike a work colleague who told me he’d had to get in through the back alley grating) and complete the mission there, and other little quests for some guy at the office who was in trouble peddling drugs – these were good diversions but the game would have played by regardless of my having seen them or not.

It’s that sense of being able to unnoticeably miss such things which convinces me I probably have done!

I did learn a truth about my character Jenson, however, and how his parents weren’t really his parents. That seemed like a big revelation too big for the wider narrative to just ignore so I am wondering if that may have changed the shape of how this game of mine turns out. (I noticed there is a trophy for seeing all possible endings so I figure there must be something I can and can’t do to effect that!)

The boss fight that closed off my visit to the FEMA facility (took me ages to get through there without being seen!) was initially one I thought was going to be a pain. Since I’ve been concentrating on upgrading my skills as a hacker and haven’t concerned myself with strength, health or weapons (I figure since I’m avoiding everyone and not killing anyone I don’t need to worry about my offensive capabilities) I thought I might have a problem.

Turned out I just needed to stun him in the face a couple of times to hinder him and then put him down. It was almost pathetically simple, to the extent I’m still in a state of disbelief that it worked. But oh well, he set me on my merry way to China and that’s where I am at now. See how it goes.

Last Residence Of Evil

2011-10-25T03:29:00.000-07:00

And so the Island, the last section of Resident Evil 4. It’s perhaps not quite as big on set piece sequences as the earlier sections of the game, and instead decides to test your mettle by throwing in lots of army-type infected. Naturally these are quite tough due to the weapons they carry, the armour they may have, and their propensity to be lobbing dynamite about the place.

Not to mention the small matter of the big guy with the big machine gun. If you aren’t hitting him hard with either a Magnum or a Rifle then it’s game over.

Of course the Island is home to the game’s most fearsome and frankly worrisome enemies in the shape of the Regenerators. Woe betide anyone that didn’t equip the infrared scope. . .

Technically all you have to do is highlight them in your scope and then shoot the leech-like things off them before it gets to you. Sure, that’s made a tad trickier when you have to blow the legs off them to get at the one on its back, but it’s not too demanding. What really adds to the effect is the eerie sound effects that play when they are near, and the unnerving shuffling, snivelling noise they make. It’s a triumph of panic-inducing sound design and certainly makes lining up those shots feel all the more pressurised.

Possibly the hardest part of the game is against the cargo container monster (I think it’s called U3, or something like that). I never enjoyed fighting this thing on Wii, and the same went here.

The first section of the fight is a pain since you can’t kill the creature here, you just have to avoid its attacks whilst you frantically run around the maze of crates trying to find the buttons to either press or shoot that will open the doors and cause the crates to drop (nothing quite like a ticking clock at the top of the screen to really add to the stress!).

I took the approach of just keeping running, around it if necessary, rather than standing shooting it. I think you can end up needing to use a health pack by the end, but it’s worth it. Yet just when you think you’re clear you have to fight the thing properly, and it’s this battle – running in caves and around a stone whilst it gives chase, burrowing underground to attack from there – that I often struggled. I just couldn’t quite work out the best technique to taking it down effectively and often rattled through a lot of ammo.

The very end of the game, however, is actually pretty easy so long as you buy a rocket launcher from the Merchant just before it.

Just take a few choice shots at the weak points to make him reveal his eye, and then take out the rocket launcher and nail him with it. Fight done. All you have to do then is made your way over to the other side where Ada helpfully provides you with another rocket launcher to finish the game off (barring that irritating speed boat escape).

Once the game was finished, however, it then unlocked various other modes. Mercenaries (some may call this sacrilege, but I prefer the Mercenaries mode on Resident Evil 5) becomes available, but is not in any way essential to play for any trophies. Howver, Ada’s story ‘Separate Ways’ is required to get a bronze, which is pretty measly for a sizeable game in its own right that clocks in at over 4 hours to complete and is easily as challenging as the regular game.

Separate Ways does tend to lean on piling a lot more enemies in rather than doing anything too special, but considering it’s ostensibly an add-on game (and in the modern age this is the kind of thing that would have been released as DLC – and would be good value for money, too) you can’t complain. Only really one of the levels has new areas to explore (the fourth level), which is actually quite jarring, but mostly it’s just a well-executed additional content that really helps explain another dimension of the story and make what Ada was up to make sense.

A bronze trophy awarded then, for all that effort. . . The trophy-awards for this game have been disappointing, and it looks especially worse now I am at the end of it. I’ve got every single trophy the game has to offer except for the one for completing it on the hardest level. You get a solitary Gold trophy for that. So I’ve got all but one Gold trophy in the entire game and yet my return is a measly 68%.

One Gold trophy is worth 32% of the game’s trophy return! That’s pretty unbalanced, to me, but the worst thing is that to get this trophy you need to complete the game twice since the hardest mode is only unlocked after you have completed the game on one of the initially available modes. And going through the game twice would take easily 35+ hours.

So whilst I think I could manage to beat the game at the hardest level, doing so for the sake of that one trophy just doesn’t justify it. So I’m not bothering. It’s not really a big deal, I guess, but it still bugs me and mars what has otherwise been a fabulous title to have been re-released for PS3.

Road Of Devastation

2011-10-24T11:37:00.000-07:00

The DLC for Dead Nation was released and being a big fan of the game, and seeing it came with a little set of trophies too, I was more than keen to get stuck in. Honestly, considering I had conquered the game with a Platinum trophy I figured this DLC would be some extra fun but I could handle it.

How wrong I was. Road Of Devastation is, make no mistake, truly for the hardcore Dead Nation gamer.

It’s a simple enough structure. Taking place in a kind of controlled testing environment, you step out and are confronted with three doors, three choices: do you choose the route for weapons & accessories, money & health or armour & high scores? Once you make your choice you will progress further to two more actual doors (so if you’d chosen the ‘weapons & accessories’ route you’ll then have to pick either weapons or accessories).

Progress through that stage and you wind up back at the beginning. Round 1 over. The door you previously picked is then closed for a round and you make your next choices. The enemies increase in strength and number, and so it goes, ever increasing difficulty, round after round.

I believe there are a total of 10 rounds in all, but I can’t confirm that because I’ve never made it that far. As I said, it’s hardcore.

And it’s not like I am being some total noob either. I have probably played the game as many times online, in co-op, as in solo, and it seems the game must have attracted decent players because everyone I’ve hooked up with has known what they’re doing. That still doesn’t stop it all going belly up when you find yourself locked in to a section that sees stacks of zombies and jumpers all piling in, overwhelming your miserable defences in alarmingly quick fashion.

When you die, that’s it. No restart points. No ‘lives’. No second chances.

I totally love it. The tactics in deciding which routes to go down are still ones I’m ticking over in my mind. The armour and score route is a nightmare section, though worth going through early on to get better armour to speed up movement and defences. After that it’s a matter of alternating between getting cash and getting weapons and accessories (the turret gun accessory is a must!).

So far I think I’ve got up to about round 7, both solo and online (in co-op the enemies are toughened up slightly to keep it challenging for two) but every now and then I keep going back to it to take another shot at the challenge. So far it always ends in devastation but, with perseverance and skill, and maybe a bit of luck, maybe I’ll see it through to Round 10 and find out what happens then!

Taking The Castle

2011-10-23T12:15:00.000-07:00

It’s only as I keep progressing through Resident Evil 4 do I keep getting reminded of just how many fantastic bits there are in it. As I go through some new door or enter a new area, my memory will be refreshed and I’ll recall the stuff that’s coming up. It’s certainly proving to be a larger game than I remember it was, and it’s so packed full of top class moments.

Thankfully the control scheme has stopped providing me with so much of a headache as it used to. I’m never going to be as quick on the draw and aiming as speedily as I did on the Wii, but I’m more than holding my own thank you very much.

So Leon, with Ashley in tow, moved into the castle for the next section of the game. Much of this part of the game deals in releasing enemies into tight spaces and forcing you to deal with them. The introduction of the flaming crossbow firing baddies certainly create their fair share of problems, but probably the most memorable creations are the Garridors. . .

I remember very vividly my first time journeying into that dank prison and having to contend with the blind Garridor and his razor sharp claws; me skulking around as quietly as I could and attempting to get a clear shot at its back. Experience has taught me that you want to go for high power shots, so I was hitting it with my rifle! A few shots are all it takes.

Of course, that’s not so bad when it’s just you and one Garridor. *Resident Evil 4* ups the stakes later on by sticking you in a small cage with one of them whilst baddies also drop in, as well as enemies firing at you from outside the cage. And then another section sees you dealing with two Garridors at the same time whilst, sure, baddies also occasionally turn up to make you make noise and reveal your positioning. Tough times!

But that’s just one such set piece amongst a whole wealth of set pieces in the large mid-section of the game. There’s the maze, for example, populated with wolves that may be hiding around every corner or running up behind you. . .

Or there’s the bit where you take control of Ashley for a little while, running around with just a torch to shine in dark places, no weapons, and the occasional clanking knight running after you. Yet that’s not as bad as the intense section when dealing with Salazar’s right-hand man, trapped in a tight room and needing to use liquid nitrogen against him.

First time I ever encountered him I ended up just continuously running away until I could escape the area. Experience has taught me that freezing him and then taking aim with a well-placed rocket launcher shot (as can be picked up for free in an earlier display case) takes him down with little fuss. Silver trophy for that, too!

There’s all these amazing ‘beats’ in the game, and there was still the riotous minecart ride, the bit where you enter a fiery steam room and two giant trolls rumble in (say goodbye to your ammo!). All this and more just in the mid-section castle bit, that then ends with a showdown with Salazar – although the irritating little child morphs into a disgusting beast to keep you on your toes.

Again, with experience I know it’s not too tough a fight. Dodge left and right on the upper level taking shots to expose his big eye and, once revealed, pull out a magnum and hit that thing full force as often as you can. He doesn’t last long using that method! And so it proved, and then I was off on a speedboat to the Island – the final stage of the game. There are Regenerators waiting for me there. . .

Come Forth Evil In HD

2011-10-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

I’ve been looking forward to Resident Evil 4 coming to PSN. It was being given a HD makeover, and coming with a full trophy pack. It all boded so well. I mean, since I played the game on Wii a few years back (and, I should add, played the absolute hell out of it to that extent of completing it on the hardest level, and beating all the sub-games and side missions) I was of the view that Resident Evil 4 was one of the very best games I had ever played in my life.

That’s not an accolade I ascribe lightly. And, let’s state this at the top, Resident Evil 4 remains an utterly outstanding game. There’s just something they’ve managed to nail so perfectly, be it in terms of atmosphere, environment, variation of game. . . It’s near-impossible to pinpoint but this game has the perfect chemistry. Compare and contrast with Resident Evil 5, a game that took the same style and had next-generation computing power at its disposal and still came up short in comparison to its former offering.

One game has it, the other game couldn’t recapture it.

But Resident Evil 4 comes to PSN with a few irritations that have marred what it could have been. First, the HD transfer isn’t as impressive as you’d think. I think of the God Of War collection, that had HD transfers of the first two games in that trilogy, and they looked sharp and really made a good effort at pulling old games to stand side by side with next gen counterparts. When you see Resident Evil 4 running in HD you’ll be hard-pushed to differentiate it from the regular resolution versions of yesteryear.

Secondly, for the trophy-hunting man in me, the fact that the game wasn’t given a Platinum set of trophies really rankles with me. Given the size and scale of the thing it could have very easily accommodated as much. And the trophies that are on offer aren’t a particularly inspiring bunch. Where’s one for, say, getting 50 headshots, or a trophy for fully-upgrading a weapon? Basic stuff, but would have added something extra.

Thirdly, and this is based a lot from my beloved experience of playing the game on the Wii, the lack of Move support feels like a complete own goal. Why Sony didn’t demand as much, it’s beyond me. Move is in desperate need of games that support it, and a classic like Resident Evil 4 that played like such a joy on Wii has been denied as much on PS3. Silly oversight. (Resident Evil 5 eventually got upgraded to support Move after all, so it’s not like such a thing is totally inconceivable to have repeated for this HD-revisit!)

Without Move, then, I was playing the game with a regular controller. And my God, they’ve only gone and made it totally counterintuitive. The left stick is used to control targeting. Let me repeat that. The left stick is used for targeting. Most games I can think of always use the right stick and, indeed, at first, it was a real fight against my gamer-thumb instinct to stop hitting the right-stick (which is supposed to control the camera but it’s not the kind of 360 degree freedom of modern day third-person camera views). This wrestling readjustment to the controls has definitely made the game more challenging. I am now starting to get used to it, but there’s no doubt when things get tense I’m not the sure shot I’d rather be.

Still, I’ve worked through the first section of the game (the game, for me, breaks down into three main sections: village, castle and military island). The one thing the difficult control scheme has brought home for me is the sense of dread and tension at dealing with the infected enemy. The more difficult aiming, and the more restrictive camera moves, really clench tight the sense of claustrophia. Whilst I’m busy aiming at one thing I’m conscious I’m oblivious to whatever could be approaching from the sides, from behind. . .

Fact is, a good game stands the test of time. Resident Evil 4 remains a good game. And maybe decades from now the graphics won’t hold up and the game will look and play clunky and glitchy and basic – but over five years on it plays as good as any modern day release and those set piece moments come thick and fast and impress.

From diving into a village house to trigger the sound of a chainsaw and a race for the shotgun upstairs to stand a chance of survival, to battling a beast in the lake on a flimsy boat, to the excellent house siege with Leon and Luis pushing cupboards over the windows and doors and trying to fend off the hordes battering and clambering in – Resident Evil 4 is like a custom-built exercise in how to deliver gaming awesomeness. Poor HD transfer, lousy trophy support and controls that make me feel retarded – I don’t care, it’s still fucking brilliant.

Second Raid, Platinum Haul

2011-10-16T02:58:00.000-07:00

Well, Tomb Raider Underworld did not take too long to complete. The Croft Manor level was surprisingly short, but to be fair the last two levels were rather more elaborate. I’m not really complaining, though – whilst the game was good it didn’t bring quite enough that was new and varied to be able to sustain itself for a lengthier duration.

I definitely felt there was a Platinum trophy to be obtained out of the game. I’d kind of been keeping an eye on getting some trophy awards on my first playthrough, and I took some time to get the Climbing ones and the Speed Demon ones and the Grenadier and Head Shot ones, too. It's not that these were easy - some of the Speed Demon ones worked out simple but figuring them out wasn't a cinch. With all of those out of the way, and the game complete, the only thing left to do was collect all the Treasures (absolute pain - thank you internet), all the Relics, and complete the game on the hardest difficulty (no problem at all, should have started the game on Hard to begin with, it barely made any difference to the challenge).

Indeed, it was some of the generous restart points that helped me out during the first playthrough. Like when I’d need to drop down to a low area and couldn’t find a way, I’d fall and die and then start back up again where I was trying to get too! Brilliant! (Well, brilliant for me. Not exactly a triumph of game design.)

In some ways this instalment was true to the old-school Tomb Raider games in that initially refreshing and compelling levels eventually give way to a feeling of having to persevered through ever more elaborate and laborious rooms to progress. I think the section of the game that involved three giant swinging hammers, various cog rooms and a lot of pillars to jump and climb and run around on just about overdid things and turned the game from being fun into a slog.

The game isn’t helped by having a control scheme that doesn’t quite work – with the capacity to be dangling off something and wanting to climb onto it quickly turning into jumping into clear air to your death. You press the same button and move the stick in a similar way; the difference between success and failure is based somewhere around getting in the right position and more precise in how quickly you move the left stick. That, to me, is not acceptable. The Sixaxis joypad has more than enough buttons to allow for such important commands to be worked out better!

I did like the vehicle sections, though. Previous forays into snowmobiles and jeeps in previous games have always felt more like a hindrance and a chore than a lease of freedom. The bike in this game was a lot more fun, especially because you could run down animal enemies with it (indeed, there was a trophy in it!) and not have to get on and off the thing for combat purposes.

The ending to the game was based around a lot of climbing around and pushing stuff. I suppose this is where Uncharted has really taken Lara Croft’s crown, given that it’s put more dynamic excitement into the shooting and set piece elements of the same adventure genre. I don’t think Lara will get her crown back by attempting to compete with that, but I hear the new game is going to take a grittier, survivalist approach to the Tomb Raider style – that sounds like a good idea. Uncharted is all set to make the big-screen blockbuster movie vibe become an interactive experience - Tomb Raider should go right back to basics in a different direction and make more of the exploration and adventuring and less of the cumbersome, tiresome rudimentary climbing and puzzling.

(Dunno why this piece ended on such a downer. I thought the game was all right and I got a Platinum trophy out of it! My tenth! I'm really fucking happy!)

Underworld Raid

2011-10-11T13:23:00.000-07:00

Ahh, free games! Can’t beat ‘em! And two free games is precisely what I got on account of staying over at my parents house one night after a few drinks. Waking up in the morning, in my brother’s room, I took it upon myself to peruse his game collection and liberate a couple of older titles there that I knew he wasn’t playing anymore.

Hence I skipped out of there with Tomb Raider Underworld and Dead Rising 2 under my arm.

Dead Rising 2 was set to one side, and instead I plumped straight for Tomb Raider Underworld.

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by the game. I used to really enjoy the original Tomb Raider games back on the PS1. Lost track of the saga somewhere around Tomb Raider Chronicles, but the first two remained real highlights in my memory (though I am well aware if I were to revisit them now I doubt I’d enjoy them anywhere near as much). Tomb Raider Underworld, in some ways, plays and looks like how I remember the originals did, which might sound like a weird thing to say but it makes sense in my brain!

I’ve now completed the first two stages, and they both felt like classic, old-school Tomb Raider. Lots of exploration, climbing and puzzle solving interspersed with the occasional bit of shooting enemies. The shooting part is probably the weakest, but perhaps that’s because I’ve become accustomed to the duck and cover tactics of Uncharted and Mass Effect.

Tomb Raider basically amounts to ‘running and gunning’, although this game does have a slo-mo and headshot facility, which at least provides that little bit of extra ability that may become essential in the heat of a tough of battle.

Really it’s all about the exploration, and that’s what has most impressed me about the game. The genuine feel like you’re going someplace, finding stuff out – the original games used to reek of that exciting feel, the feel of raiding tombs, and this game has really re-captured that.

I’ve been especially impressed with the visuals. Lara herself, and the various enemies (human and otherwise) that I have encountered so far haven’t been particularly impressive (though I do like Lara’s incidental reactions, like shielding herself from heat or brushing away ferns that waft in her face), but the environments look and sound great. The waves of the ocean on a clear blue day, to the claustrophobic heat of the jungle; it’s really good.

The standout section so far has been onboard the ship. Running around the decks, blasting the guys was fun – as it was the first time combat had been properly introduced. But the set piece of being inside the thing as the ship capsized and sank was good stuff. I’ve heard that the forthcoming Uncharted 3 will feature a similar kind of set piece – I expect it to be a lot better! But, for now, this remains the best bit of ‘being in sinking ship escape sequence’ I’ve ever played in a game!

Next stop for me is to go and explore beneath the Croft Manor. I do feel like this is quite a bit easier than the older games used to be, and perhaps it’ll work out to be smaller, too. . .

(Not sure on that last point; games in general have gotten longer these days so what feels like a short game now was probably an epic 10 years ago!).

Everyone Gets Epic

2011-10-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

I have to hand it to Mass Effect 2; it’s a game that sure knows how to stage a grand finale. It’s always been my opinion that the game is superb when employing more cinematic structure to its gaming proceedings and in the big climax it really drew everything together to deliver a fantastic finale.

Basically it was a grand rescue mission, deep into the heart of enemy territory. The cutscenes of the ship blasting into the fray were brilliant (as, indeed, all the cutscenes have been).

Big plus point was how the game utilised the large group of people I had assembled. I think of Final Fantasy games that also involve the recruitment of a large group that, by the end, you basically ignore the majority of and just stick with your favourite characters. Whilst this situation was basically true here the game did generate the vibe that everyone was in the thick of it even if I wasn’t directly controlling them.

Having to select the appropriate squad members to take leadership of the secondary team, or to disable some security device, or to escort the doctor back – it all went to make it feel like everyone was involved, contributing, and that it had been worthwhile going to the effort to get them onboard.

There were two major sections before the big boss showdown. The first was the mildly pressurised race against trapping my team member in a hot pipe by turning valves (I had picked Tali who had, by that point, managed to figure out a way for us get down a dirty with one another – nice way to repay her!). The second was using Samara to project a huge shield that my team had to remain inside whilst working our way forwards, blasting every nasty that got in our way.

All of this led to the grand showdown against the weird, giant Reaper-human monster. Whilst it didn’t exactly have the most advanced or complicated attack pattern it felt epic enough to justify its status as the last boss. But really it was the entire piece – from flying in to getting out (with the usual last second race against time before explosion, natch).

It was interesting that the game closed out with me having to make one last vital decision regarding whether or not I retained the enemy technology to be used by the allies, or destroy it all. I opted to retain it. I can only assume that this decision will perhaps have ramifications in Mass Effect 3? That I could load my game data from here into the new game and it will carry over? I can’t imagine why else the decision would be required otherwise.

The game ended with the foreboding image of a vast armada of Reapers gathered, clearly demonstrating there was a hell of a force to contend with ready to pounce and, once again in the Mass Effect mythology, wipe out all life from the universe. Fairly big stakes then, and it certainly makes me excited about Mass Effect 3.

Good Guys Finish Games (And Then Go Bad)

2011-10-03T11:57:00.000-07:00

It felt like an effort to return to InFamous. I had got to the Historic district, the last third of the game, and I just felt like the repetition of completing missions as well as progressing with the main plot was too uninspiring to get excited about. However I ushered myself along and fired the game up and, you know, I actually rather enjoyed myself.

The missions here seemed quicker and easier than missions I had done before, which meant rattling through and clearing the zones of enemies was swift and satisfying. And whilst the details of the main plot were pretty much lost on me – Moya and John and Kessler and that woman’s voice in my head; it was all a jumble of characters and intentions to me. And yet the ending managed to come with what felt like a decent twist.

SPOILERS!

OK, it did sound rather paradoxical, too. The general gist of it (and I’d had quite a bit of wine when I closed in on the finale of the game, which doesn’t help my memory) was that my future self had come back in time and set me up to become the superhero person I had turned into. It’s a neat twist, and certainly a meaty plotline for the sequel to pick up.

It is almost certainly paradoxical, of course. But maybe they’ll get clever and manage to circumvent that. Or not. It is only a videogame after all – stupid plots and loopholes and videogames have been together since Pac-Man first ate a dot.

The final battle took me a few goes to get right, again probably the wine wasn’t helping that, either.

Yet once the game was done and I was back on the streets of the game to mop up some of the missions left to do I did find my energy and interest in it was renewed. So I started a new game – and at least this time it would play out differently because I would get to become the bad guy!

My second playthrough has been fun, easy, but also more methodical. I figured I’d make an effort at trying to find all the drop points and shards (I hadn’t realised how useful L3 was in tracking these things until the second run through reminded me of that functionality!) and so far that has been working out well. There’s a couple of trophies to mop up along the way, though the thought of converting this into a platinum seems. . . tricky.

Completing the game on Hard would be one such challenge, and also completing all the Stunts another potentially irritating task. Not to mention finding every single blast shard. So I’m not really playing it with a view to completing it all in that way, but I’ll make a stab at collecting everything and pulling off all the stunts and, if I manage that, maybe taking an attempt at Hard might be in order. . .

Next To Last Effect

2011-09-26T13:32:00.000-07:00

You know, for a game that seemed so initially sprawling, a game that seems to have taken me forever to plough through, now I am approaching the end of Mass Effect 2 it’s surprising to see how actually rather linear and simplistically structured it has turned out to be.

Fundamentally the game has seen me go through the process of assembling a squad of people and then, for each person I recruit, there is then a secondary mission that will allow me to make them loyal. Intermittently between these missions there are certain mandatory missions but, otherwise, that’s pretty much all there is to be done before you can go to the last part.

Of course, such a basic overview completely ignores the sheer wealth of other stuff there is to do. The sidequests, extra missions, the avenues of character interactions and explorations. . . I’m not trying to belittle the game here, it’s an absolute feat in creating an in-depth, self-contained universe, it just surprised me that it could be pared down to so simple a summary.

The latest, and last, squad acquisition was a Geth by the name of Legion. I have to confess I probably found his mission the hardest thing I have encountered in the game so far; just masses of those beasties bearing down on me and taking my squad down. Admittedly I have since come to realise that I have been terrible at utilising my team members and their powers which would have made this whole thing a lot easier. I’ve been getting through the game purely by brute force, and that tactic wasn’t working great for me here.

I did kind of like it, though. Whilst it was frustrating it was also challenging me to take up better positions and move my guys into more strategic spots. And the last bit, with swarms of Reapers entering the sealed room, made for a good shootout fight.

Meanwhile, back on the ship, having absolutely blown my chances of romance with Miranda I have since turned my attention to Tali. She seems keen now. Willing to find some way to remove her mask and clothing so we can physically get it on. I’m being patient. Her character is actually rather sweet.

God knows what she looks like under that mask, though. When I first met her I thought that was her face!

I am now poised at a point in the game where I can plunge headlong into the last mission after an excellent sequence saw me taking control of the crippled pilot Joker as Collectors attacked and snatched the rest of the crew. It was really good – well-executed, cinematic and exciting. It kind of made me wish more of the game had been made up of set pieces like it instead of the more rudimentary exploration and shooting aspects.

When Mass Effect 2 turns on the style and drama it’s absolutely top class. And yet the game can sometimes be glitchy in other places, or feel like a lesser-standard third-person shooter rather than an immersive experience. I think I’ve said it before but, really, the game excels in its characterisation, drama, performances and set pieces; they’re probably more sophisticated than any other game I’ve played.

Vanquished

2011-09-25T02:38:00.000-07:00

Vanquish got completed, then. It was expected. I had been told the game was short and quick to tear through and so it was. And yet, still, I don’t feel shortchanged. (OK, I only paid £15 for it, which certainly eases things!) It was definitely a satisfactory blast through and, furthermore, I am not done attempting it on harder levels (which I fear may very well be rather more painstaking to work through) and obtaining the various trophies.

The last two Acts of the game offered little let up in the action and pacing. Even if the game did repeat certain larger bosses, or just piled on a few more enemies, the thing about Vanquish and the control styles meant I always had a sense that there surely had to be a way of doing what I was doing a whole lot more cooler! Boost slide in, flip into slow motion and pick off the killer shots before returning to real time and zipping on out of the carnage. You want to be almost balletic in your shooting and destruction – not ducking for cover and popping your head up to take pot shots and whittle down the enemy.

The climax of the game saw Burns become both a bad guy and, yet, a noble and patriotic soldier. I was glad he didn’t turn out to be just out and out bad; I had liked his character and, in particular, his relationship with Sam – although I suppose the ruthlessness by which he allowed his own men to be killed didn’t make him particularly admirable.

Something that perhaps did jar a little with the game, possibly intentionally, was the extreme violence and strong language. Given the old-school arcade feel and the fact that I was killing robots and not men, it felt like a game that could have got away with a far lower age restriction. Instead it chucked in brutality and violence (the suicide at the end of the game was absolutely shocking in its depiction) and offensive language, as well as the main protagonist Sam on a total pro-smoking vibe.

(Loved how he sparked up whilst dangling off a ledge just before the final battle, though. Once again the game made me guffaw aloud at its sheer knowing absurdity!)

I will give the game credit and suggest these more adult elements were added deliberately to juxtapose the old-school, ‘friendly’ arcade game vibe to be more jarring. In which case, for me, the game succeeded.

The last boss fight was tricky but not too difficult though I can’t help but figure that on harder difficulty levels it might be a bit more of a pain. I’ll cross that bridge if I ever get to it. In the meantime I can say that I have enjoyed the brief but exhilarating blast that is Vanquish. It proved to be one of the best-looking games I’ve seen, and was impressive in terms of how it didn’t show up any glitches or problems when all hell broke loose on screen. It’s like a diamond; small, but perfectly formed and a thing of quality.

Vanquish 2

2011-09-22T12:54:00.000-07:00

It’s true that Vanquish is a short game. It’s definitely one that in a solid session you could see off in one go. But even though, for once, I had the time and freedom available to do just that I’ve been rather taking my time with it. I think partly it’s to just stagger the experience and enjoy it, but it’s also because each ‘Act’ of the game, whilst being short, packs in so much that it is a little bit exhausting.

After each Act I invariably feel like I could do with a break just to wind down!

I have really got into the swing of the game, though. The control mechanics of slowing down the action and taking shots in slow-motion, then speeding away to find cover, they are all becoming natural and fluid. Furthermore I have now got used to the weapons – how they perform and what they do – which has made selecting the right gun for the given situation a lot more appropriate.

There has, as ever, just been lots and lots of terrific sections. The only time the game slows down is when you’re in an elevator or moving through a tunnel to the next section (and I suspect these are enforced slow down periods so the background code can load up the next big sequence without delaying the in-game play).

Standout parts have been an uphill run up a slope where debris is being flung down, blasting enemies every step of the way. And also a part onboard a monorail train thing, shooting at another train racing alongside that resulted in the other train literally looping over and above me – two sets of enemies shooting up at one another as the trains circled around.

Jaw-dropping stuff that you can’t help but grin about as you are playing it.

The game even found time for a quieter, sniping section that did actually feel quite tense – but that then only gave way to a section of absolute carnage, battling against this enormous ‘Kreon’ robot. Vanquish does a great job in generating masses of explosions and shouting and chaos all around you and still making you feel empowered and thrilled to just power though and blast hell out of all and sundry.

What I have really enjoyed, also, is the sense of humour the game has. That old-school, arcade feel is a burst of retro dumbness that I think is brilliant. Right down to the way the main character will chug on a stupidly-big cigarette at any given moment, and the enemy is just some foreign dictator; the game doesn’t care much for political correctness or po-faced dramatic credibility.

I do also love the interplay between my guy and the gruff lieutenant Burns. There’s has been a relationship of him barking out tougher-than-old-boots orders whilst my guy is recklessly heroic. Respect is there on both sides, but neither will acknowledge it. The funniest exchange for me:

My guy Sam crashes a small ship into the enemy, blowing it up and leaping clear just before impact. With a “this is gonna hurt” remark before impact he leaps clear and lands with a crunch on the ground. Burns strides over. Sam says, “I’m getting good at falling out of vehicles.” Burns extends a hand, picks him up onto his feet, clearly proud of what he just did. And then he says, “You’re getting good at looking like an asshole.”

It made me LOL.

Variation Effect

2011-09-16T11:53:00.000-07:00

Mass Effect 2 has been a game on the go for quite a while now. With the recent influx of new games in my life it’s been taking something of a backseat, but I certainly haven’t forgotten about the missions of Shepard and co, and nor do I intend to allow the game to go unresolved. Indeed, more recent sessions of the game have yielded more variation to the game and kept it interesting.

Chiefly, two missions helping Thane and Samara have proven far more interesting than the regular fare of turn up, talk and shoot stuff pattern of other missions.

Thane’s mission involved stealth tactics, following my quarry from up above, which proved kind of stressful (as any such following sections invariably are) and yet just made a nice change from the usual turn up and shoot stuff pattern.

Samara’s mission was even better though. . .

. . . with me having to get to her daughter, who was something of a black widow-like femme fatale. I had to impress her in a bar and then talk to her in such a way that got her attention enough to consider me interesting enough to take back to her place so Samara and I could spring the trap.

It’s in handling these things where Mass Effect 2 really impresses most. The shooting parts have been done in other games, far better – but for the sophistication of the dialogue and the sheer ooze of style in cutscenes and presentation, Mass Effect 2 really stands apart from the rest.

The most recent recruit I made, which I thought was going to be the last member of my party, was to get Zaeed (or whatever he is called!).

It had taken me a while to get around to downloading the game material from the code I got with the game to unlock the mission to get him, and to be fair he’s hardly the most impressive character nor does he have the most interesting story to go with him. And, to be honest, there’s perhaps just too many characters in the game now. Since you can only ever take two people on a mission at any one time then all of these extra other people feel somewhat redundant.

Earlier Final Fantasy games used to suffer from the same thing, where you’d get a full group of characters but just never end up using the majority of them when you could just stick with your favourites. I suppose I should be using, indeed, even checking out, their unique abilities and using them more but, frankly, I find I am getting through the game with good old-fashioned shooting skills.

Platinum Standard Zombie Killing

2011-09-06T10:35:00.001-07:00

I have been absolutely loving Dead Nation. For a game that was handed to me free by Sony for the PSN outage a while back, I really cannot complain! I’ve had more time and fun spent on it than I have with many other game I’ve paid full price for! However, it was only after I took some time completing the missions one by one, getting all the treasure chests and loot on each, did it occur to me that I might be able to get a Platinum trophy out of the game.

Having got all the collectible stuff, and killed over 54,000 zombies, there were just a couple of major hurdles in the way. The first was completing the game on Morbid level, and the second was completing the game in co-op.

Dead Nation on Morbid level was pretty tough-going, no question. Having been through the game a number of times I was already aware of which sections I anticipated to be tough – but there were other parts that I had previously strolled through that at this level were no mean feat. Zombies that took a good few shots to kill compounded by greater damage being done if you were hit, also adding to the fact that you can’t collect as much cash and so can’t upgrade weapons as much; it all makes it so much harder.

As expected, the end of the Graveyard level was hellish. It was bad enough on the easier levels, but at this difficulty it was an utter beast.

Tactics taking down one ‘Mouth’ behind a wall and then dealing with whatever big nasties got released until the zombie crowds were more manageable and then taking on the next ‘Mouth’. . . That didn’t work. So on the go that succeeded I just went beserk with every grenade, stick of dynamite, mine and rocket launcher shell I had to take them all down and then dealt with everything that was unleashed afterwards as best I could.

Man it felt good when I made it!

But by far the hardest bit was at the very end, the final stage before the finish of the game. That was no joke. I took attempt after attempt after attempt – techniques of flame throwing soldier zombies, to using flares and blade cannons to take out bunches of them – they worked well. But then the part where Cutters and then Bombies and then Jumpers all attack in packs was just outrageously difficult, and all my ammo and secondary weapons were getting used up fast.

Once you get past that part the rest of it is a slog, but manageable. That didn’t stop my heart from pounding and my palms getting sweaty as I ploughed onto the end as carefully as I could. Happy day when I finished it! All I had to do then was a level at the very hardest ‘Undead’ level (no problem) and all that remained between me and a Platinum trophy was the co-op mode.

Having tried to hook up online with co-op companions and finding they're too few people willing to play along, I was reliant on Mrs. Comet helping me out. She was reluctant to say the least, which I found it a bit frustrating because:

a) She loves a good co-op zombie-slaying, shooting experience. Resident Evil 5 Mercenaries of Modern Warfare 2 Special Ops, she’s totally into that!

b) She’s pretty good at it! Quickly getting into the controls and charging in to blast away, as well as not being shy with a machine gun or shotgun once she got her hands on them.

So it was a slow experience, working through the levels on an easy level in co-op. Not challenging, really. Mrs. Comet’s recklessness did mean she died a couple of times as we worked through it and I had to finish the level/stage alone to keep things moving, but otherwise it was plain sailing over the course of a few nights until, hallelujah, the game was finished!

Bling! Trophy for completing the game on co-op. BLING! Platinum trophy for getting every other trophy in the game!

GET IN!

Another well-earned Platinum Trophy to add to my modest tally of 9. Dead Nation has been officially done to death.

Vanquishing

2011-08-22T11:52:00.000-07:00

When Vanquish was first released I remember it received a lot of praise and positive reviews; it was said to be a rip-roaring blast of a game that was terrific fun. The reviews did also mention that it was incredibly short – and with no multiplayer or extra content, paying full price for a short third-person shooter just didn’t cut it with me.

But then I went to a supermarket and was browsing the games there and spotted Vanquish for a far more respectable price of £15. Now that was more like it!

I played through Act I on my first playthrough and, despite some occasional frustration, did find myself warming to it more and more. The controls were the first thing to get used to. The use of a speedy slide, and the ability to slow things down for a short period were novel elements, but all of these powers limited by a finite amount of time they could be used for before needing to be recharged. That meant Vanquish doesn’t quite play the same way as other shooters I am used to, and so that took some adjustment.

Beyond the control scheme, the first thing that struck me about the game was the curious mix of gung ho arcade style presentation fused with more serious, cutscene heavy plotting. I think the opening movie, showing some Russian guy launching an attack and my guy getting introduced to the unit he was a part of, must have gone on for over five minutes. And yet then the game had all the brash panache and loud noises of a straight-to-business arcade shooter.

Honestly, I half expected the game to boom out ‘insert coins’ at me.

It was certainly intriguing, this mixture of po-faced seriousness with tongue-in-cheek daftness. Somehow it worked and it captured a kind of retro feel of when games were all about the visceral experience of playing rather than about emotional and stylish showcases aping movies.

So how did it play? Well, I think it plays very well. I think it’s fairer to say that I didn’t play it particularly well! I mean, I got through it just fine. The only time I died was at the end of Act fight against the Russian in a robot suit, and that was only because I missed the command to hammer the button when we got into a grappling fight (and I just sat there getting hacked up wondering what on Earth I was supposed to do to stop it!).

I certainly expect my journey through the game will extend the running time! The first encounter with a major boss – a massive robot creature that I had to blast the legs and arms off before hitting the hot spots – took me absolutely ages. I eventually realised that my strategy had been rather lame and that I should have been taking out limbs and then hitting it with mounted heavier weapons when it went down, but I got through it.

Vanquish does look spectacular. Given the speed and business of the action on screen and the rather large playing areas I’ve not noticed any glitching or drop in frame rates or anything. The business of picking up and switching weapons is easy, and the guns feel satisfying. I am still grappling with speeding about the place, and jumping over stuff, and using the slow-motion technique isn’t one that I have become very familiar with quickly. Yet I get the sense that this is a game that can allow for fumbling players like me to get through and enjoy it, whilst also allowing scope for developing skills to become honed to make flying through the game much more exhilarating.

Given that just over the course of Act I I have taken down a giant robot thing, wandered through a dark tunnel guarding a transport and had a one-on-one scrap with the main enemy it’s certainly not been dull or littered with filler. Again, like good old-fashioned arcade games used to be: they just throw everything at you and keep you wanting to play on because it’s constantly exciting.

For the money I’ve paid, I’d rather have a shorter game that’s packed with constant thrills than a longer, more drawn out game that pads out all its good bits.

Limbo

2011-08-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

I don’t often see many games over on the Xbox that make me wish I had one rather than a PS3. Aside from Gears Of War there’s not been an exclusive on that system to really bother me. Compared to having Uncharted and Modnation Racers and God Of War amongst many other exclusives I’m pretty confident that PS3 is the better machine for exclusive titles.

There was one Xbox exclusive that I did look on with envy, and that was a minor, online-only indie game called Limbo. It looked sensational and fresh, and it was apparently dripping with atmosphere and played great and, for whatever reason, I just knew it would be the type of game I’d like.

It was a happy day when I heard that Limbo was making it to PSN, then. And not long after it landed I went and got it for myself. Over the course of a weekend I properly got stuck into it and enjoyed it immensely.

It’s a two-dimensional platform game, requiring both puzzling and quick reactions to progress. Yet, like Braid, it’s more than it looks. The experience of playing the thing yields much more than screenshots and explanations can provide.

I had a great time playing it. The game is kind of broken across three ‘phases’, though it works hard to make playing it entirely seamless. Not only are there no ‘end of levels’ to mark your progress, there’s no words on screen, no talking, no status bars or life counts or anything. You start waking up as a Boy in a strange world and you work your way through it, and what happens and what you make of it is left largely to interpretation.

Having reached the end I can’t say I know what it was all about. It’s so vague, so slippery with anything approaching definition, that interpretation is all you have to go on.

It’s a brutal game. It would be absolutely impossible for even the most skilled and seasoned gamer to get through it first time without dying. Invariably the game introduces the puzzles and obstacles by having them kill you in some manner first. (Indeed, the variety and brutality of the various deaths to occur to the Boy are all part of the horror the game quietly captures and help create the sense of peril.)

Whether it being stalked by a giant spider or led into traps by feral ‘others’, seemingly other boys with spears, death comes quick and regularly. Probably the hardest trophy to obtain in the whole game involves getting through it all in one sitting never dying more than five times. At time of writing that is the only trophy I haven’t got, and it’s going to be seriously challenging to get it.

There were definitely one or two sections that had me stumped, for sure, though annoyingly when I was forced to turn to the internet for a little nudging assistance, the solution was glaringly obvious (and invariably something I had been thinking along the lines of, just hadn’t quite made the definitive connection).

I did need more assistance to help reveal the whereabouts of the glowing egg things, that basically accounted for the majority of trophies to be earned in the game. A couple of them I found for myself – like the one at the start for going the wrong way, or the ‘alone in the dark’ one, but the rest eluded me and probably most of them would have done so had I not looked them up.

The PS3 version of the game did boast an extra area, newly-added. I went through this to obtain a trophy and it presented the hardest part of the game, easily. Most of it took place in pitch black, with only the whites of my character’s eyes on screen as a guide, and there I had to negotiate my way through all manner of machine guns and saw traps pretty much just by reacting to sounds and the occasional flashing glimpses of danger.

It was some serious trial and error, yet challenging in such a way that it felt immensely difficult but also totally engaging.

I don’t ever want to do it again, mind!

Limbo is yet another refreshing game, sitting happily alongside the likes of Braid and Portal as examples of sophistication and emotional expression being reflected in the genre, as well as just being damn clever games. It’s a game like this that shows how well the small development houses can flourish on PSN, producing lower-budget but ‘braver’ content and delivering them to a wide audience.

Power Surge

2011-08-10T12:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve been pushing on with InFamous and whilst it won’t be troubling my Top 10 best games ever list there’s something nicely ‘pick up and play’ about it that keeps me cracking on. The fact that I got it from PSN and so don’t have to mess around with discs has also been a really key contributor in what keeps me returning to it.

At time of writing I’ve just finished a boss fight against some guy at the top of a transient tower in The Warrens.

My friend Zeke has just gone off with the bad guy with the source of all the powers (but I also know he returns as someone trustworthy in the sequel, thanks to a review I read, so I figure he’ll not only survive but come back to my side before the end!). The big battles have actually been very good in InFamous, albeit few and far between.

There have been some good mission-based set piece as well. A mission involving escorting an armoured bus across a bridge was irritatingly difficult but, in fairness, terrifically good fun as a big old blast. And a similar blast when defending a prison was also a lot of big bang fun.

The tedium of doing other missions is still a gripe with the game. I completed all of the missions in the first section of the city (sticking with being a good guy, I’m now at ‘hero’ level). And I’ve been collecting shards and the dead drops, though quite what the plot of those are, or indeed the plot of the game in general, is kind of lost on me.

Moya turning out to be playing me felt like a nice twist surprise but otherwise there’s just been talk of a lot of names and people wanting powers and I get the sense that the game expects me to be a lot more in-tune with events and keen to see what happens next – but I’ve not really been able to get absorbed in the plot at all. I just don’t understand the context of what’s going on or who everyone is to get immersed.

Next stop appears to be the Historic District. Not been there yet, but given I’m now surely two-thirds of the way through the game then I may as well keep on with it. I’m still intrigued by going through it again and being a bad person, too – mostly to see what the differences are.

Infamy

2011-08-06T03:06:00.000-07:00

The other free game I got from Sony on account of the PSN hack was InFamous. I’ve since had quite a few sessions on it, though none of them tend to last very long as it doesn’t really feel like the kind of game I want to play for prolonged periods of time. It started out kind of cinematic, and with a driven narrative, but it’s since become a more open world game of collecting stuff and taking on missions.

It basically feels like a cross between Uncharted and Grand Theft Auto without the spectacular drive of the former nor the immersive freedom of the latter. It’s a good game in many ways, it’s just one that feels riddled with irritations and flaws that could have been ironed out, or removed, to generate a better experience.

The repetitive nature of the missions is one such bugbear. Whilst they are short and quick and easy to play, it’s that very frivolous quality that stops them from being involving. And they can be rather tedious, too, when all that makes them difficult is a sudden appearance of a stack of bad guys that all the look the same. Me stuck on a roof picking them off until I’ve cleared them away so I can progress soon gets a bit dull.

InFamous does have some great qualities, though. I really like the super hero and powers angle – and how I am continuously learning new skills, and able to buy further upgrades (although this ability to upgrade was only something I stumbled across by accident when flicking through the menus – I don’t recall the in-game tutorials ever specifying this!). And the real ‘hook’ of the game – to be either good or bad – is a nice one that, albeit somewhat tenuously – does alter how I am playing it. I could see early on it was best to go one way or the other, so I elected to go purely down the ‘good’ route. I suspect this might actually be the easier path in terms of getting upgrade points (for healing) – but we’ll see.

If I do summon enthusiasm for a second playthrough then, of course, I’ll be sure go down the ‘bad’ route.

New Theme

2011-07-31T07:00:00.000-07:00

Ah, Modnation Racers. Ever since I got the Platinum Trophy for the game I’ve never really had much call to go back to it. I’d already played online for more time than I’ve probably played any other game online and more than got involved in the play, create, share vibe. It remains one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played so I was very happy to see that further DLC had been released offering up new themes and, more importantly, extra tournaments.

The first new theme tournament that was released was the Arctic Theme. Whilst this only involved five new tracks to race on and win, the trophies attached meant I had to complete all the extra challenges and collect all the tokens as well as do other extra bits on some of the courses to get the award.

Despite how frustrating that could sometimes be (hit three racers with a single sonic boom – argh!!!) it demanded that I have to properly get to grips with the courses and, therefore, spend more time with it and get to appreciate it more. Because, fact is, if the challenge was just in winning the races then it’d be a pushover – despite being away from the game I’ve not lost it, I’m still pretty damn fast.

Indeed, I went online for a quick play and totally won every race I played. I even won one race by such a margin I consigned all the other racers to the ignominy of a ‘DNF’ end. Slowcoach losers!

I liked the Arctic theme a lot. Whilst track designers had managed to create a kind of snow effect already with the existing themes (very light gravel with the sun shining as bright as possible to create a ‘white’ effect) having the real icy deal felt refreshing and, ah, cool.

The Big City Theme followed, and was certainly something of a disappointment.

To all intents and purposes it was the same set-up as the Arctic theme; you got new courses, new challenges to them all (and trophies) as well as a new theme, with props and objects, to make new courses with. It was just I found both the tracks and the themes rather uninspiring. In fact, I thought the tracks the game creators UFG had made were the most lame ones yet - really lacking in invention and thrills in comparison with some of the other stuff they made.

Some had good ideas - like driving along skyscraper rooftops - but a lot of these ideas have already been done before using the existing themes within the game and a lot of imagination by MNR gamers. The Arctic theme was generally new and refreshing, yet the Big City theme didn't really feel too much different to some of the big city type tracks you could make using the Seaside theme.

Still, I played through the game courses and completed all the challenges and trophy challenges required pretty much like a breeze. I still wanted to retain my 100% trophy record for the game after all - I sure as well wasn't letting that slip!

I think the next best theme MNR could produce is a proper night time one, with lights, neon lights. A Tokyo Drift-style theme would just about be awesome.

Another Portal

2011-07-19T11:58:00.000-07:00

Really I was supposed to be writing this in instalments like I usually do. I get a game, I play on it for a bit, and then I break off and note down my thoughts so far. Like a diary of my gaming – that’s basically the whole point of this blog! But Portal 2 has simply proven too good to waste my precious spare time not playing to write about playing it.

So it is I write this having completed the whole game, over the course of a few good sessions over a few days. And it’s been a terrific experience.

I used that word ‘experience’ a lot when discussing the first Portal game and I stand by it. That game was more than the sum of its parts and beyond the puzzling joy of the thing itself, what lasted with me was the story, the potential mythology and the characters. If anything it was a continuation of that which drew me towards the sequel more than the game itself.

Portal 2 is a full-blown, standalone title and it’s a pleasure for me to report that the game has been an absolute joy to play. The term that best describes it is faultless, and here I am only talking about the single player campaign. I know there’s a substantial co-op game lying there for me to get stuck into (if I can ever get Mrs. Comet to come around to thinking with portals!) so that’s a treat just sitting there waiting to be unwrapped.

The single player campaign was tremendous fun from beginning to end, packing in witty black humour and terrific voice acting. Stephen Merchant was an inspired choice as Wheatley; a vocal performance actually worth hanging around for, and hanging on to every word of.

I thought the game paid slightly less concession to newcomers than the original did (not that I was complaining) and, certainly, whilst the ‘plot’ of the first game is in the most part to be considered slight it would, in full, take quite a while to explain it all. Same goes for the game mechanics of ‘portalling’ – newcomers, I think, would have to pick up things a whole lot quicker than veterans of the original and quite how easy going through the whole game would be in that respect I can’t say.

What I can say, with pride, is that I went through the whole game without resorting to help on the internet or consulting any kind of assistance. There were certain points in the game where I was temporarily stumped, for sure, but then the strength of the game was in always being logically-sound and, provided you applied yourself, the solutions were there to be figured out.

The satisfaction was in that moment of realisation, that ‘ah-ha!’ penny dropping upon figuring out what needed to be done. The game actually had me working out puzzles when I wasn't playing. If I was stuck I'd turn the game off for a while and go and do other things but, always, in the back of my brain, I ticked over potential things to try out when I next went back to it. Sometimes the penny dropped when I didn't even have the game switched on!

Even elements of the game that could have proven to be messy and confusing – like the various coloured gels of different properties. . .

. . . were worked brilliantly into the puzzling of the game, as well as serving as a narrative dynamic tracing the development of technology at Aperture dynamic. The trip to the bowels of the company, literally, to work my way through the ages was great stuff. And the voice-acting and gradual tale of Cave Johnson was, again, a prime example of the subtle yet compelling means by which Portal 2 could tell a story alongside the gameplay rather than making you pause and watch expositional cutscenes.

Outside of the puzzling what really impressed me about the game was the more upbeat, action scenes. Whether it be running away from GLaDOS across walkways and dark corridors, through offices and conveyor belts – or the latter stages of the game tackling the twisted machinations of Wheatley. . .

Best of all was the knockout of a climax, though. The ‘Lunatic’ trophy received at the end of the game carried the information tagline ‘That just happened’, like you needed outside confirmation that what you thought you saw was what you really saw.

SPOILER

That glorious moment, when all looked lost, of taking a glimpse at the moon and near-instinctively lifting up my gun and taking a shot at it was just superb. It felt like the kind of grandstanding climax most ‘blockbuster’ game could only dream of generating. And then the end sequence ushered in another GLaDOS song and what appeared to be a happy ending for Chell!

Great game then, no question. And, as stated, I still have the entire co-op to take on which will, I am sure, yield more fun and depth and surprises all of its own. Portal 2 is effortlessly the best game of the year so far for me, and I suspect the only thing that really has a chance at dislodging it is Uncharted 3.

Free Burn

2011-06-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

Another offshoot of the Sony PSN ‘welcome back’ pack was a free month’s subscription to Playstation Plus, which in turn meant I could download Burnout Paradise for free and play it for as long as the subscription lasted (which meant about three weeks, for me). Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth I duly went and downloaded it, figuring I’d play it a lot and if I really liked it I’d buy it but, otherwise, once my free time expired I’d happily let it go.

At time of writing I was already thinking of not buying it, but then the game went and removed my saved data, inexplicably, meaning I just started playing again as though from scratch for no reason so I’ll be letting it go - but that’s not to say I’ve hated it, it’s just that there’s not that big enough of a draw about it to make me want to pay (or start again from scratch!).

What I like about it is the immediacy of it – how fast you can hit the streets of Paradise City and roam around the place. The actual matter of activating my own races was a weird one to get used to, but it’s a good system overall. You can either drive around and explore and complete the challenges scattered about the place, or crack on with racing to upgrade your licence.

The racing itself is fun in terms of how the vehicles handle and the sense of speed. I can’t say I like the nature of being able to race anywhere to get to the finish line, though. Being given a start and end point and total freedom to get there is a nice idea, but then it comes with drawbacks. Like on some races I can be miles ahead of the rest and then one wrong turn (or, in my case, jump a ramp and end up on an Interstate highway) and suddenly the race is lost.

To add insult to injury you still have to make your way to the finish line even if the rest of the competition have long since finished. Irritating. Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit similarly bugged me in this way with its stack of shortcuts (and sometimes longcuts) that make you take your eye off the business of racing to constantly be checking a tiny map of roads upcoming to spy out other routes. I want to play a race game to concentrate on the road ahead, and the people I am racing against, not be totally reliant on a form of satellite navigation to try and take the lead!

On the plus side there have been stacks of trophies to be earned from Burnout Paradise so that alone, as a free game to have a blast at, it’s been fun. And I’ve liked smashing other cars off the road, and how you get to race on motorcycles, too – which offer some really zippy, speedy weaving around the roads and traffic for a genuinely exhilarating experience.

I had one online session as well, and the host seemed decent throwing out all kinds of different challenges and settings that seemed like a lot of fun. As a concept, the kind of sandbox racing area with option races to select from is fun, and well-handled, it’s just not exactly my cup of tea for a longterm, really get stuck in and race kind of game. But then, you know, maybe if all my save delete hadn't been deleted I've have continued further with it and found more to enjoy and then, hell, maybe even fucking paid for it!

Their loss.

Kill For Your Country

2011-06-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

Why thank you very much, Sony. Following the chaos of the Playstation Network attack and the near-month of online downtime, Sony responded with a gift for their customers – two free games from a choice of 5. Good news for me was that there was at least two of those games that I was interested in already, so getting them for free was sweet news.

The two games I got were Dead Nation and InFamous, and the only one I have so far played is Dead Nation. And I love it!

Dead Nation is actually a derivative game style in a derivative genre. A top-down shooter, using dual sticks to move and to aim, has been done countless times before (particularly a decade or so ago when this type of game was more popular). Furthermore, it lands the player in a city over-run with zombies, hands them a stack of guns and lets them go pop caps into the undead. If the game were looking for points for originality it would be sorely disappointed.

Originality be damned, however, because the game only goes and turns out to be a riotous, fun blast. It’s quick and easy to pick up and doesn’t waste too much time before it’s sending hordes of zombies your way. With a gun, a charge attack and melee at your disposal you can just about take care of things – but you also need to be picking up loot scattered around the levels so you can upgrade and buy new weapons for when things get decidedly tougher further on.

I have progressed up to around Level 7 – a Graveyard level. The end of this level was probably the most challenging section I have encountered yet, with all manner of shouters and ‘bombies’ and jumping zombies mixed in with an never-ending mass of shuffling (and not so shuffling) undead.

I have a few more levels to go yet but I am sure I’ll get through them, but that’s just the solo campaign on the easiest level and merely the tip of the iceberg. Where Dead Nation has really elevated itself as something special is in the co-op element (both offline and online it works well) and with the country vs country leaderboards.

It’s an inspired idea. Pitting each country to compete for who has taken out the most zombies throws in a whole extra dimension to the game.

What is interesting is that it isn’t just about which country has killed the most zombies (if that were the case then the USA, with way more players, would win easily.) Instead the system is based on the country's population. So for the UK, I suppose, the target is 60 million. Once that many zombies are killed that’s one phase over and another one begins. Last time I checked the UK was on about Phase 42. That should start increasing faster, though, now more people have got the game for free and can get involved. Last check there were 30,000 ‘recruits’ for the UK meaning we need to kill 2,000 zombies each to complete a phase.

I’ve killed over 10,000 already, so I am more than doing my bit!

I certainly plan on killing a lot more. I have an offline campaign game started with Mrs. Comet (she’s tentatively willing to get involved, hopefully she’ll get more into it with a tad more persuasion!) and will surely hook up online with people I know and other strangers for further zombie-slaying thrills.

Yes indeed, thank you very much, Sony. You’ve introduced me to Dead Nation and I absolutely love it. Best free game ever!

Screwing Up Screwing

2011-06-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

It seems Mass Effect 2 has cruelly mirrored real life. Just when I think I’ll be getting it on with a hot chick something goes wrong and the whole thing is ruined. Such was the way of it regarding my main character and Miranda.

After I had come back from helping Jack out with her childhood issues there then ensued some conversation between her and Miranda that involved a disagreement. I am totally vague about this conversation because I left the room to go and get a drink or something like that.

I came back and discovered I needed to respond in some way to what had been going on, but didn’t really know what the situation was. So, since I’d just willingly helped Jack, I agreed with her. Turns out that was a big mistake. Miranda was not impressed and has totally gone cold on me. Like, ice-cold.

Now when I go back into the room and try to talk she flatly states that she doesn’t want anything to do with me and petulantly suggests I go and speak to Jack instead.

I don’t know whether she’s going to thaw out anytime soon, or whether I really have blown my chances with her. Oops. So maybe I will just have to take her suggestion onboard and go and take a crack at Jack instead. I mean, come on! Of all of these women I’ve managed to recruit you’d think one of them would be willing to put out!

(Footnote: Since writing this I did indeed go and take a crack at Jack and, yes, managed to nail her as well. It didn't get me a trophy for a relationship though - I guess there has to be feelings and sentiment involved rather than the purely physical sex I got involved in. Pah!)

Feel The Burn

2011-06-04T09:50:00.000-07:00

The reason I ended up buying EA Sports Active 2 was because the Zumba game that recently came out was getting terrible reviews everywhere. Mrs. Comet had wanted that game so she could start exercising at home to it, and that it turned out to be a load of clag meant I went scrabbling around the Internet looking for an alternative.

EA Sports Active 2 was available at half-price, so I bought it. And then it eventually turned up in a big orange box and, I discovered, contained all of these fancy arm and leg bands that measured your heart rate and monitored movement. All of a sudden the game had my interest; I wanted a go and I wanted to be getting fit!

At time of writing I’ve done two sessions in my 3-week aerobics workout programme. At time of writing I rather ache – mainly in my legs due to some serious squat moves. But I have to hand it to the game – it’s very good. I mean, I once attempted to buy into the whole Wii Fit craze and hoped it would turn out to be something special. It never did. How many Wii Fit Boards lie under cupboards and beds, unused?

So I committed myself to this 3-week programme, four days a week, to see what it was all about. You have to take it seriously – changing into gym gear and getting properly strapped up. Fact of the matter is I have broken out into a sweat both times so you either take it seriously, or you don’t.

I am ready and willing to take it seriously because EA Sports Active 2 has given me faith that it’s worth taking seriously. Not like Wii Fit, where you feel that if you threw everything into that you’d be deluding yourself into believing it was really making you get fit. This game, with its pulse rate monitor, calorie burn count and more customised workout routines, feels more like the real deal.

So of the two workouts I’ve done I’d really liked the variety of exercises to go through. I think my very favourite one was the mountain bike one. . .

. . . purely because it was a great combination of jumping, squatting and running that was engaging. The pure running ones are good, too. When I eventually get around to creating my own workout routine I suspect those will feature heavily.

Mrs. Comet, it should be noted, also has her own profile and game set up and has got involved the same way I have. There’s a bit of a quiet contest between us about which one will keep it up before the other quits. I am rather confident I’ll succeed. I mean, on top of all this health and fitness there’s also a lot of trophies to be won!

Pac-Toad 2

2011-06-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

Pac-Man Championship Edition and the Blue Toad Murder Files games I picked up from PSN have proven to be enjoyable and engaging for differing reasons.

Pac-Man has been great to quickly put on and have a quick blast at. There have been plenty of different levels to work through, each offering score attacks and time trials, to keep me focused. The fact that I have a Baby Comet in the house means games like this are very useful – they can be quickly dropped in and out of or quit altogether.

Mrs. Comet occasionally liked a play on it, too, so sometimes we’d just take it in turns, doing a challenge each. It’s not a game that can profess any great depths but this isn’t to its detriment – this is the very thing that makes it great.

Meanwhile, over at Little Riddle the Blue Toad Murder Files game has oddly proved to be something of a draw as a party game for when people have come round, eaten food, and then gather in the lounge for entertainment. Whack that game on, 4 players all taking turns, trying to resolve the not-always-easy puzzles and conundrums the game throws up.

I’ve been very impressed with the charm of the game, and the excellent dialogue. I happened to notice that all of the voice-acting in the game is done by just one guy, too, and it’s quite the wealth of range and variety being showcased.

At time of writing I am now up to the very last chapter, and I suspect there’s going to be one or two more fiendish puzzles standing in the way of me and completion. But aside from playing the game with others I’ve always gone back through it, alone, repeating older chapters to yield whatever trophies I missed the first time around.

This game will get completed with 100% trophy yield, sharpish!

Complications

2011-05-29T06:01:00.000-07:00

The plot of Mass Effect 2 grows more complicated and, to be fair, the finer details of it are getting a little wasted on me. I’ve gleaned that the bad guys are the Collectors, in tandem with the Reapers – and one of these races used to be some other race but they got genetically mutated into the baddies they are now.

Whatever. They represent a clear and present danger to the survival of the human race so that’s what I’m all about trying to stop.

The mission I found all of this information out on was probably the toughest one yet, mainly because of this great big flying robot thing that was a bitch to take down. Probably there was a better technique I could have used but I’m finding brute force is more or less getting me through.

The Illusive Man remains true to his name – I’ll be surprised if he turns out to be a ‘good’ guy; he’s got a bigger agenda, surely. But the most annoying thing about him is how his communication and mission requests keep inhibiting the freedom of my own progress. I wanted to get on recruiting more people and fulfilling missions for my existing team to make them loyal but, it seems, the structure of the game is such that once I’ve made a certain amount of progression he crops up with a ‘must-complete’ mission.

I’ll do my best to avoid doing any more ‘official’ missions whilst I go about the galaxy doing all the side mission stuff at my own leisure.

One such side mission was the ‘Lair of the Shadow Broker’ story, that I believe was once a DLC extra that was incorporated into the game for the PS3 release. It was a fairly hefty undertaking, culminating in a decent ‘boss’ fight against the Shadow Broker himself.

The game does still basically break down into the talk, explore and then progress through shooting part structure. I guess that is the game and all that can be improved and developed are the sophistication and inventiveness of each. I’ve racked up over 20 hours of game time and still feel like I’m finding my feet so I am not at all under the impression that this will be over any time soon.

I’m enjoying stretching it out, like reclining on a luxurious bed. Speaking of which. . .

. . . I’m a little closer to getting this hot piece of ass into the sack. I keep going talking to her, most lately remarking about how I was admiring my body, and she appears to be coming around. She’ll get it before the game is done, for sure.

Still Taking Effect

2011-05-23T12:25:00.000-07:00

The team gathering continues in Mass Effect 2. I can see there are still a number of slots available in my team rankings so I suspect there’s a good few missions to go on to get them all before I am done. But, furthermore, the game has now moved into creating sub-plot missions for a lot of the characters that I also have the choice of undertaking.

There has been some momentum with the main ‘plot’, where I landed on a planet that had been attacked by the ‘reapers’ and had my first encounter with them, but I’m in no rush to plough on with that when I can be gathering more people, completing more sub-missions and boosting up my stats.

I most recently completed a sub-mission for Miranda who is ridiculously hot and, for sure, seems to be the one major love interest Shepherd is going to get involved with. The mission revolved around getting her sister to safety and resulted in me killing some traitorous guy, but the upshot is Miranda is now loyal to me. And I can change her clothes.

Perhaps the only criticism I could have of Mass Effect 2 is that there is something of a uniformity developing. Regardless of the reasoning for missions they seem to invariably turn into a standard third-person shootout which do sometimes feel a little bit repetitive.

There have been attempts to break this up, though. A section that involved using a spaceship to traverse various environments offered something new (though I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it!). Yet what the game excels at is delivering a compelling new plot concept or character to maintain interest.

The spaceship level, for example, eventually served up a plot of a dangerous viral computer that ultimately turned out to have a horrific backstory and devastating human cost. To discover the quivering, tearful man harnessed into the machine, kept there by his own brother, was one terrific payoff and a great example as to how that little bit more sophisticated the game treats its subject matter, and respects the gamer with something a little more moral and emotional to contend with.

I went with the humane option, and demanded the brother be released and looked after. Generally-speaking I have been playing the game as ‘decently’ as I can, though I’ve still been unlocking Renegade points for various conversation dynamics.

The latest recruit was an Assassin, whom I eventually met and got to join my team on a planet that felt a lot like Coruscant (I don’t think the creators would deny it, either) but, like all the locations and different races, it felt real and interesting none-the-less. So despite the mild sense of monotony the drive of wanting to explore further, see and meet more people, and see how the plot unfolds is more than enough to compensate such minor grumbles.

Portal

2011-05-16T12:42:00.000-07:00

First, a confession. I’d had Portal available to play for a while – my brother-in-law had loaned me ‘The Orange Box’ and it was on there, ready. But, pathetically, I had chosen to not play it for the plain and simple reason that it didn’t have Trophies with it.

This ignorance was further aggravated when the games site Gamesradar recently proclaimed Portal to be the best game ever – even above the immortal Tetris. With that kind of praise, and a sequel recently-released that was also garnering a lot of hot buzz and might warrant a purchase, trophies or not I owed it to my integrity at as a gamer to play the thing.

So, over the course of one evening and into the early hours of the morning, I started and finished Portal all in one session. I’m utterly glad I did it.

Portal turned out to be so much more than it first seemed. Before playing I understood it was some kind of first-person puzzle game involving shooting ‘portals’ that would open a door to another door positioned elsewhere. In all honesty it sounded like a bit of a headache, which explains some of my reluctance to get involved.

I was ostensibly right about the game mechanics. After a few challenges you eventually end up with the ability to fire portals at pretty much any surface which serve as connection points and, from this simple concept, 19 challenges of witty invention ensue.

19 challenges doesn’t sound like much, and the game is certainly slender, but these offer up plenty of satisfactory puzzling fun. But the real joy is mined out of the controller of the challenges, GLaDOS, and her taunts and teases, praise and faint praise, and amusing lies (that, as the game progresses, are tinged with increasing menace).

Indeed, what’s clever about the game is the sense of plot progression as you question the purpose of the challenges and discover ‘behind the scenes’ areas where desperate pleas for help and dire warnings have been scrawled by, presumably, previous challengers. The military robots summarise the tone: deadly shots with infrared guided machine gun fire who have innocent voices and near-childish mannerisms.

“Are you still there?” they enquire when you hide away from their attacks. A sublime mix of appealing viciousness; this same vibe permeates the whole game. The brutal end to the challenges, apparently trying to lull you into believing you’re to be rewarded with cake when you are instead being fed into an incinerator obviously conjures concentration camp comparisons and it’s all just so accomplished.

The surprising ‘escape’ aspect following the challenges was also excellent, creating a confusing, nightmarish plight culminating in a top class, end of game ‘boss’ fight that I failed at first time, but managed the second time of asking. Like solving many of the puzzles in the game, it was extremely satisfying.

The ending of the game also retained the clever slice of wit and ingenuity. The ‘still alive’ song was, again, a perfect blend of cute and creepy but that the game found space for an ending coda suggesting that GLaDOS might not have been lying after all only further perplexed.

It’s interesting that I am writing about the game not in terms of the puzzles I solved, or the levels I played – rather the emotional and mental process, the experience I had playing it. What other game would see you peeking through a window of a dark room to watch a slideshow presentation just to try and derive some kind of clue about what the hell might really be going? After four or five hours of game time, it’s fair to say the memory of playing it has kicked around in my brain since; the permutations about the whole 'mythology' in the background have made me conjure up my interpretation about what's really happened, but it feels like just that: an interpretation.

I have no doubts I will end up getting Portal 2. Not sure how soon that will be but, just to be requited with GLaDOS, to see what further layers behind the mysterious corporation and challenges can be gleaned, I am mightily intrigued.

Not sure I would place it as the best game ever made (I don’t think the game offers much in the way of replay value for one thing) but it is a perfectly-formed thing of intelligence and wit that plays like a refreshing tonic amidst all the generic genres, styles and characters games usually possess. It's shameful I waited so long to play it but, hey, better later than never. And at least when I did it I went right in and did it properly and fully!

Epic Fail

2011-05-12T12:24:00.000-07:00

‘Tis a cruel disappointment. It was all going fantastically well on Final Fantasy XIII. I was hellbent on getting the Platinum trophy and making great strides towards doing so. Indeed, what I thought were going to be the two toughest challenges were eventually overcome.

Getting a five star rating across all the Cieth Stone missions, that was one such feat that didn’t even sound easy, yet it proved to be a lot easier than I expected. It did require a few ‘cloak’ shrouds activated sometimes, and they didn’t come cheap once I’d run out of my existing stock, but they were worth it.

The Jumbo Cactuar was the trickiest, I’d say. . .

. . . purely because the only way to take it down was by having a Random Stagger activated via a Speed Sash. I equipped four of the things on two characters to make it work! But, beyond that element of luck, the rest were all reasonably easy to manage.

Next up was the matter of taking down a Long Gui. It was a long, tough battle because those suckers do not go down easy. Yet it was a triumphant moment in the life of AngeloComet when I nailed it. Boom! Down you go!

So, that was nearly it. All I needed to do was complete the trophy for having held every weapon and accessory. I felt confident this was going to be pretty easy, albeit time-consuming to generate the money required to get all my weapons upgraded.

I was right about it being time-consuming, but what I didn’t reckon on was how soul destroying it would be when I thought I’d finally done it only to discover that there must have been some accessory out there in the world I’d missed.

The biggest worry was the thought that it was an accessory that I couldn’t buy or upgrade to, i.e. one that I had missed in the game and could not return to. I was fairly sure I hadn’t missed anything mind, but the painstaking task of going through all the items I had got, checking off the spreadsheet list I had, just felt like too much hassle, too much administration, just for the sake of a trophy.

I had to console myself with the truth that, no matter what, I had seen and done everything in Final Fantasy XIII. Every enemy that could be fought, I fought them. Every place that could be seen, I went there. I did the lot. I may not have a Platinum trophy to show for it but, damn it, I totally completed the hell out of that game!!!!

A Massive Effect

2011-05-05T12:22:00.000-07:00

It’s ace when things turn out better than expected! I mean generally I try to start all new games with a clear head and a hope for the best, and so I had bought Mass Effect 2 for two reasons: it had been given astounding reviews and it was at a bargain price on Amazon. I’d never seen it in action but the word was that it was worth it. So I got it. And I played it. And, well, it’s ace when things turn out better than expected!

Safe to say I’ve totally enjoyed my first forays into the world of Mass Effect 2 and by the scale of the world and the sense of plot progression I don’t think I’ve ventured particularly far into it, either. At time of writing I am just assembling team members and have so far picked up a professor, a thief, some kind of wanted soldier and, most recently, a convict.

Already I feel like I have seen and done so much. The opening sequence alone, on board a doomed ship that sent me hurtling into space, was classily done – and that sense of class has really permeated throughout the rest of the game. The atmosphere and characters, the sense of a fully-realised world (or worlds) is brilliant – making me feel like I am stepping into a whole new Star Wars-like universe.

I have slipped into the combat effortlessly, as well. Playing with a similar feel to Uncharted 2, but with added RPG-like elements of upgrading my team and controlling my party, it’s easy to get into and yet offers plenty of depth. So much just works so right. The cover system is spot on, the shooting feels accurate, the balance between taking damage and dishing it out nicely calibrates. And you know what else? I like how the ‘camera’ shakes when you run; it feels dramatic and urgent and cool.

Outside of the action, the ‘downtime’ parts are enjoyable. Perhaps the game has just caught me when I am not in the mood for instant thrills, but I’ve enjoyed completing rudimentary fetch missions for members of my crew, I’ve got involved in scouring planets for resources and going around chatting to people to gain points.

Fact of the matter is I could probably be more thorough, but I’m hardly skimming things or rushing through. I don’t yet know how much effect the various choices and decisions I’ve been making will have on the game. Early on I made what felt like a bad move when I didn’t let some alien go because I wanted to question him. It turned out he knew nothing and so it was a waste, and pissed off another character. Whether that one act will have lasting consequences I don’t yet know.

I suspect the first part of the game will be about me amassing my full team (I like how they are populating various parts of my ship). I like the quick-talking Mordin, though I think the assassin thief Kazumi is the most intriguing and alluring of the characters I’ve met so far. (If romance should kindle between my guy and anyone, I hope it’s her!)

So, yeah, I suspect this first part of the game is about me getting my full team together and then it will advance. As is, I am in no rush to hurry through that. I am discovering there’s a whole lot of universe out there to explore, a great load of missions waiting for me to take on – I am actually really excited to see where the story takes me and what transpires. If this game gets better it’s going to really blow me away.

Mission Man

2011-05-03T11:49:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long haul, and I’m not done yet. I’ve been getting on with fully-completing Final Fantasy XIII on and off for the past few weeks and have made some major big league progress.

I’ve defeated all but one of the Cieth monsters – the very last one has so far proven too tough to take down (that one fucking devastating attack it repeatedly does just nails me eventually). . .

. . . but I can take heart in the fact that I neither have my characters fully-upgraded yet, nor do I have any of their best weapons. So with that in mind I have turned my attention to taking down the large hulking beasts roaming Gran Pulse. They takes ages, but I can handle them – and they deliver 80,000 CP and there’s a chance I’ll get the necessary mineral (Trapohezodren, or something like that) to get the best weapons.

Even if/when I do eventually beat the last Mission I’ve still got to take down a Long Gui (met one, got battered – Ultima’d!). . .

. . . and I have the not insignificant matter of getting a 5-star rating on all the missions (not so worried about that one – I’ve already got a lot of them done already including quite a few of the difficult ones) as well as getting all the items and weapons (which might be a bit painstaking at first, but the moment I can start selling stuff should make the upgrading of other stuff easier).

I couldn’t really imagine it a few weeks ago but, after all this effort, with the end in sight, I might actually get the Platinum trophy. Don’t let me sound underwhelmed here. If I pull this off it’ll be my proudest Platinum trophy yet!

Pac-Toad

2011-04-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when you browse cheap games. I happened across PSN, in a ‘Spring Sale’ section, and there perused some of the games. Many of the games on offer had free trials, so I downloaded some of the ones I liked the look of to give them a whirl.

Some were shite.

But two of them made a good enough impression on me to make me buy the things. Blue Toad Murder Files and Pac-Man Championship Edition.

Pac-Man proved to be an updated but fun blast of the original classic, and I really like it. It’s fast-paced, constantly requires full attention and yet altogether easier than the original (thanks, mainly, to bombs – but also fairly generous life allowance). However, whilst getting through the stages was relatively easy, getting the top high scores is a whole different ball game.

Getting 1,500,000 points in the five-minute game mode, or 2,000,000 points in the ten-minute game mode are, so far, the only point scoring trophies that elude me. But I haven’t unlocked all the levels and stages yet – maybe there are more high-scoring opportunities down the lines. . .

Meanwhile, in a completely different style and change of pace, was the Blue Toad Murder Files: The Mystery of Little Riddle. I discovered that ‘episode 1’ was free, and that it was Move-enabled, so I thought there was no harm having a go. And I discovered something rather fun.

It’s a very stylish and witty presentation of a child-like murder mystery story. It reminded me a lot of puzzle books I had when I was younger; ones that had cryptic clues and visual mysteries to unravel as you progressed through the story; Blue Toad Murder Files is just like that, only in video game format.

I liked the verbose narration and quirky characters that populated Little Riddle, and I soon fell into the rhythm of watching a brief cutscene and then playing a puzzle. The first episode I played on my own and, whilst I did trip up on a couple of them first time, I solved all the puzzles pretty easily and correctly nailed the ‘killer’.

Spotting the game also supported two players, though, I invited Mrs. Comet to play the second episode with me. Whoa! Where did the sudden increase in difficulty come from!?

Maybe it was just that I wasn’t quite gelling with the puzzles but I don’t think that was quite it – I do believe there was a significant ramp up in the complexity and challenge of the various tasks. It was fun, actually, to be tested a bit more – but it did make me wonder if this kind of difficulty curve was going to continue to trend upwards as we progressed through the rest of the episodes. . .

Maybe episode 6 is designed purely for Mensa candidates! Whatever. I’m a smart guy. I’m sure I can handle it!

More Killzone (Please!)

2011-04-25T11:17:00.000-07:00

Turned out I was right about being close to the end of Killzone 3. The battle through the space station turned out to be the final location of the game, before it concluded with an actual spaceship shootout section (that I didn’t particularly like).

It was a weak end to an otherwise very accomplished and enjoyable campaign. Mrs. Comet and I have pushed ahead with the co-op, as well, and I’ve been very impressed with how the game has managed to make this aspect of the game work so well and still play so great.

Meanwhile, I went and took a look at the multiplayer. . . and I was surprised to discover it wasn’t at all as brutal and noob-unfriendly as I was expecting. Don’t get me wrong, I was still generally one of the weaker players on whatever team I was on, but I was still getting kills, or taking down turrets, or reviving players, or helping complete an objective. . . I was contributing rather than just feeling like a bullet-magnet to raise other people’s kill ratios.

I still think Uncharted 2 offers the best multiplayer package around at the moment, that I have played, but Killzone 3 certainly has its merits. However, when I consider the full package of the whole game I have to say I am glad I got it a lot cheaper than full price. For such a big, high-profile release you would expect more for your money. A fairly short campaign mode and just three different multiplayer games? That’s it?

To be fair I haven’t tried it with my Move, and I’ve not seen it or experienced it in 3D (and probably never will). Even still, these are superficial additions and won’t put much meat on the bone. The Killzone 3 meat is tasty, but there ought to have been more of it!

In The Killing Zone

2011-04-19T12:26:00.000-07:00

The co-op campaign hasn’t been carried forth as much as I would have hoped, as real life has conspired against it. Mrs. Comet and I just can’t quite find the time to get together for long enough to mount a sustained gaming session into it. So mostly my experiences of Killzone 3 have come from playing the single player campaign, where I have made significant progress.

At time of writing I very much might be in the final stages of the game as my guys appear to have elevated themselves into a space station as a last ditch mission to thwart the Helghast plans to destroy humanity. No biggie, then. But even if I am getting close to the finish the only negative thing I’ll have to say is that it’s been too short – but it’s certainly not been boring or uneventful.

The opening chapters set the tone – from running around shooting, to sniping, to getting into vehicles for a more on-rails blast, and then heavy firepower destruction in mech suits; I couldn’t fault the game for keeping up energy and variety. These were all crammed together thick and fast in what sort of turned out to be a carnage-ridden, chaos-packed first act.

What was perhaps most surprising, and what has borne out through the rest of the game, is that the rather threadbare story has been given real narrative and emotional thrust via the excellent characterisations. The decent “can do” Sev, the hot-headed Rico and the stalwart but flawed captain form a central trio not always united but invariably pulling together and doing the right thing. Killzone 3 has actually created relationships that seem meaningful, and make watching the cutscenes actually worthwhile (rather than the usual filler moments before the next bit of shooting such sequences usually possess in FPS games).

The facial expressions and terrific voice-acting certainly help sell all this. The game doesn’t feel like it’s trying to blow you away with anything – what it does is make everything look great, at the cost of a little bit of glitching (mostly in co-op) and the occasionally looped speech. No big deal.

Gameplay-wise, there are just brilliant set pieces after set pieces. I really enjoyed the change of pace of a stealth section that concluded in me being a lone soldier battling through a wealth of enemies that had found the allies and gone after them with full force. . .

. . . and using the jetpack to make massive leaps to attack the enemies bases and ultimately detonate large rigs was another good change of style and presented something refreshing for the genre. And I’ve not even mentioned the prison breakout from behind enemy lines (using their mega powerful weapons) or the hijack of a giant crusher, nor what I most-recently did in taking down this enormous mech (a sequence that was a triumph of scale and sound effects especially and probably the game’s major highlight).

Minor niggles exist in the shape of that occasional frustration about not being clear on what’s supposed to be happening next (which, to be fair, I’ve hit upon way less than I did in the likes of Call Of Duty or Resistance 2), and the vehicle sections are just OK but don’t feel particularly meaty; more like variety ushered in to break up the monotony than vital gaming parts in their own right.

Good game all round though and, like I said, that’s just the solo campaign. I will be dipping my toe into the multiplayer (to, no doubt, get my ass well and truly handed to me) and there’s the co-op campaign to enjoy also. Just as soon as myself and Mrs. Comet can get around to it. . .

With Or Without You

2011-04-17T13:47:00.000-07:00

I still get excited about getting a brand new triple-A title that’s only just been released. I mean, it’s good getting a new game off PSN. And getting an older game at a cheap price is fun, too. But there’s something about getting a game that’s new, that’s now, that makes you feel like it might be the best thing around at the moment until something better comes along. Well, I just got myself Killzone 3, one of the flagship Playstation titles; Move enabled and with 3D capability (not that such functionality matters on my 2D telly!); I was expecting big things.

I’d played Killzone 2 at a friend’s, and I thought it was all right. But the big draw about Killzone 3 for me was the inclusion of a full co-op campaign mode. Mrs. Comet and I have had many a merry time on Modern Warfare 2 Special Ops, and a full game FPS for us to both go at sounded like a good proposition.

So that was the main reason I bought it. It may also mean that limping along with Mrs. Comet dictating the pace of the gaming may mean it takes me a while to get through the game! Indeed, on my first playthrough, I had to go solo because Mrs. Comet was on the internet/looking after the Little Comet/on phone. But when we did eventually play together we got up to where I had gone alone, so it’s sort of balanced out now. Poised for us to press on together into the unknown.

Thoughts so far are a mix between being really positive whilst also feeling rather underwhelmed. The opening cutscenes were impressive, particularly the facial animations for the speech, but I’d have expected a big budget, high profile game like this to open with a major set piece first level. Instead it was a training session that ended with a neat reveal that then set the rest of the game as a flashback leading up to that moment. Beyond that it was the basics of moving through areas, ducking and shooting and learning how to melee kill – fundamentally nothing I hadn’t seen a stack of times before in any other current generation FPS.

One thing I did change was the controller settings. I could not get on with R3 being used to bring up a sight. I liked how the game had basically set it up so that you could get Call Of Duty style controls as the alternate. I liked that the game makers had included this, considering COD is clearly a major rival. But I also skimmed some of the other options and the added ‘bot’ multiplayer seems like an interesting extra to practice on before going for the real online experience – and if that level of thought and care has gone into every other aspect of the game then it very well might be a multiplayer worth my interest.

But for now it’s all about the campaign – whether I be experiencing that alone or with Mrs. Comet. I’m hoping the game is going to bring about some ‘wow’ moments. Get some!

Challenge 100

2011-04-09T02:27:00.000-07:00

Challenge Level 53. Those three words may not mean much to a lot of people, but they mean a lot to anyone who took a serious attempt at trying to complete all the Challenge mode of Critter Crunch. Getting through all of those challenges was the one and only thing remaining to be done in the game to get a 100% trophy haul. Mrs. Comet and I had both been chipping in to the game, and it just came down to the challenges. Challenge Level 53 was the one pain remaining. It had been started and attempted countless times, and then abandoned for other challenges. Once all those other challenges were done, it was all that was left.

What made it so difficult was having to keep certain critters alive whilst staving off the descending horde of other creatures. With blockers and vegetarians regularly in the mix, as well as a speedy drop rate, it genuinely was the toughest thing encountered in the whole game.

Eventually Mrs. Comet went to bed. I remained for a while, stricken with a ‘one more go’ mentality to get it done. 10 minutes later, with nerves shredded and a near-breakdown level of panic as I clung on to get the last few points. . joy! I had done it! Bling! The success trophy popped up! The game was 100% complete!

But I’m not one to rest on my laurels. Eyeing up another Platinum takedown, I returned to God Of War 2.

My previous run throughs of the game had found me lacking certain trophies, pretty much all based around collecting chests for Gorgon Eyes and Pheonix Feathers, as well as these “uber-chests” that were secreted well away. Just going through the game again and collecting all of those would get me two silvers and two golds, so it was worth a shot.

I rampaged through the game and managed to unearth all the necessary trophies required. It was actually a lot of fun and, for some reason, was a lot easier second time around even though I started the game completely from fresh. I enjoyed it, too. It made me re-appreciate the game that, first time around, I had perhaps been a little too hard on. I still thought the flying horse bits sucked ass, but the rest of it was fine.

Trophy awards all fully-stocked, all that was left was the major league headache of the Challenge Of The Titans.

Easily the toughest part of the whole game, I anticipated periods of frustration and upset on my behalf as I tried to best them. I ignored the little voice in my head that worried, ‘What if you can’t do them all?’ It was all that stood between me and a Platinum.

My fears were unfounded. Challenge number 2 was an absolute motherfucker, mind. Having to get a certain number of air kills in a specific period of time – those things didn’t come easy and getting the quota required was a total pain. Elsewhere the one where I had to turn a certain number of enemies to stone and then destroy them turned out easy once I got the hang of it, but the last challenge. . . oh the last challenge did have me worried. . .

Just beat every enemy, without taking a single hit in return. It wasn’t at all easy and there were no cheap tricks you could pull or special powers you could spam – you just had to do it, properly, perfectly. Of course, I did manage it. The whole Challenge Of The Titans challenge took a couple of hours of a quiet Saturday afternoon to best, but it was a triumphant achievement. The Platinum Trophy was mine!

Tumbling

2011-04-05T12:12:00.000-07:00

I’d played Tumble ages ago, when my brother-in-law brought his Move round for me to have a go on. Months passed, I got a Move of my own, and I’d had it in my mind that Tumble was one of those games I ought to get for it. Upon noticing that it had been discounted by a few pounds on PSN I thought I would be doing myself a dis-service by not getting it. Besides, I’d no other bloody games to use my Move for!

Getting to play Tumble properly, alone, I settled in and allowed myself to be impressed by the presentation. It’s got a minimalist style, but a nice female voiceover guide serves really well to give the game a slick and friendly feel. Even subtle touches, like how the ball on the Move controller changes colour to match the on-screen colours, display some genuine care and effort went into making the game feel polished.

As a showcase for Move I can’t think of a better game. In just the tutorial section there’s a bit where you are encouraged to move the controller around in your hands – turning it round, back and forth – and on-screen the icon mirrors the movement perfectly. In that one instance everything that is unique and cutting edge about the Move over, say, the Wiimote is on show. The game then continues to meaningfully make use of this functionality – not something that many other games have properly taken advantage of.

Tumble itself is, in the main, a bit like a game of Jenga. Blocks are provided and the aim is to stack them up on a platform as high as possible, or sometimes just getting as many pieces on as possible. Other game modes involving placing explosives on a block tower to best dismantle it, or moving mirrored blocks around to re-direct laser beams (probably my favourite game mode so far). I suspect other variations will present themselves in due course but those are the only ones I’ve seen so far.

It’s a good game, though not one I can play for sustained periods of time. So far it’s been fun because I have invariably been able to get ‘gold’ awards for every single stage. I suspect things may become a lot more frustrating and less enjoyable should it start getting trickier and those ‘gold’ awards start to seem like impossible feats. For now, whilst I progress and attain success, Tumble is holding up as a solid game.

Severed

2011-03-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

The first (and as far as I am aware only) piece of DLC game for Dead Space 2 got released. As I learned the game featured main characters from Dead Space Extraction I waited until I had finished with that before I got involved with this, Severed.

Severed isn’t exactly big on plot. It can be summarised quickly. Gabe is married to a pregnant Lexx (both characters from Extraction) and living on The Sprawl when the necro outbreak occurs. Gabe then tries to get to Lexx before some soldiers and unitologist people can get to her. That’s it. And in gaming terms it basically does a reverse retread from the mining area and the hospital area featured in Dead Space 2. Beyond a few new locations it’s basically taken a lot from the main game – there’s even a bit where my guy gets hung upside down and has to shoot at beasts for a while. Severed is short, too. Two chapters long. Though they are chapters that are light on drama and cutscenes and heavy on blasting monsters.

I must admit I was initially concerned – barely a few minutes into the game and I was trapped in a room of grinding drills being accosted on all sides by shrieking babies and necros with exploding sacs. Then minutes later there were these super-fast ‘miner’ necromorphs that were hard to kill and nasty as hell. This was the start? Christ, I thought I was going to get hammered.

But the game settled down, or I got more into the rhythm of it. Whatever, I soon progressed rapidly through the chapters with very little issue. Hardest section by far was a whole part with ‘raptors’ – they were many and they were deadly and, on my first playthrough, I hadn’t brought mines with me. That wasn’t a fun section! All in all my impression was that it could have been longer. Or they could at least have put a bit more effort into the presentation of the story – there was no sense of what Gabe was doing, or who the person he was trying to thwart was in relation to him. It just got into the action as fast as possible and, whilst that was as polished as the main game, there was nothing there to rival anything the main game also had.

A nice bounty of trophies to be won certainly lessened the sense of injustice. I took another run through it on Zealot level, having been through and got the rest of the trophy awards as I worked through it (the ‘grindhouse’ one was the biggest pain until I realised melee was the best method) but it certainly didn’t take long to get it ‘all’ done. Oh well, I guess I just retire the Dead Space 2 disc now I have done with Extraction and Severed and turn my attention to other games. . . until, perhaps, further DLC emerges!

New, Revisited and Finished

2011-03-21T13:29:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s been a while since I last blogged, but there’s been much going on in my life. A weekend break, illness (tonsillitis) and the day-to-day task of going to work, being with my family. Sheesh. With all of this going on how is a gamer supposed to get on with gaming? Well, truth be told, I’ve not been doing that bad at all. Played a new game, revisited an old game, and finished up with a game I’ve had on the go for a while. It’s all happening.

New Game - Critter Crunch

Honestly, it was more for Mrs. Comet. She loves this kind of game. Puzzle-strategy, addictive action type thing. Critter Crunch is probably most comparable to Bejeweled in terms of aligning things of the same colour and creating chain reaction explosion events to clear the screen. But Critter Crunch is more focused on passing through stages, be it via progressing through the Adventure mode or beating all of the (extensive) Puzzle or Challenge levels.

It’s certainly a lot of fun. Challenging in places, particularly as the adventure mode progresses, but also constantly introducing new elements for each stage to keep it interesting. I also liked how it didn’t particularly focus too much on random chance and luck – skill definitely gets you through.

To date I’ve let Mrs. Comet handle most of the Adventure mode, but I had to finish it off for her with some of the more taxing Puzzle and Challenge levels she couldn’t manage. But by far my crowning glory was taking the game online so I could get the two online-based trophies. One trophy for beating someone else in versus mode, and another one for developing up to level 5. I managed the latter one by beating someone out there in the world who was ranked 134th! To put it in perspective, I was ranked at over 30,000th! And I didn’t just beat them once, it was a few times before I eventually achieved that level 5 rank.

Boom! I felt like a Critter Crunch underdog king!

Revisited Old Game - Final Fantasy XIII

It’s already been a long haul, for a second playthrough, but there’s a whole lot longer to go yet. Whilst I initially started the run thinking I would just work smarter about getting better weapons so I could see and fight some of the more tougher and more ‘advanced’ sections of the game, there’s a faint twinkle of a suggestion that I might have a shot at getting a Platinum trophy out of it.

I’m certainly not counting my chickens, mind. As stated, there’s a long way to go.

I am enjoying it, though. I’m now up to the point in the game where I can make a last push for the end of things – which I know unlocks the last part of my character enhancement. But I elected to go back to Gran Pulse and level up further. Having completed the game once before I happen to remember a whole host of tough battles between me and the end and I want to be in tip-top condition for them. But I’ve been pretty methodical about upgrading my weapons and items, and I am on course for getting everyone’s best weapon (once I have a serious amount of gil!), and I’m willing to put in the time and effort to do everything that needs to be done.

The good thing is I don’t think I can ‘miss’ anything. Patience and endurance ought to see me get everything done. And maybe, just maybe, not a little bit of skill!

Finished Game - Dead Space Extraction

My opinion of this game has, by the end, come out quite favourable. I respect what it was trying to do – marrying the survival horror vibe with a straight on-rails shooter. It’s not exactly an easy mix since the survival horror genre dictates that you are permitted to survive in whatever way is best to suit you, whereas the on-rails shooter is usually an all-action, point and shoot reaction fest.

Dead Space Extraction falls between the two genres and, it’s in this uneasy mix, where it does sort of fall. Too much time watching characters talk whilst my reticule sat idle. And too much reliance on fast responses to catch the pick ups and collectibles that were essential for survival, which was sometimes frustrating.

I was surprised that the game spent so much time on the Ishimura, and I thought it did this really well. It really did feel like I was revisiting the old locations I knew so well from Dead Space but from a more intimate perspective. I liked that, and I liked how Isaac Clarke's girl featured in the mix as well as other elements of the Dead Space mythology that were worked into the plot and I really liked the atmosphere and ‘scares’. As the various characters I played as cracked up and experienced visions there were some corkers – one where there were just people standing in a tram station was really eerie and had an effective shock kick to it.

Overall, though, it just wasn’t the satisfying, trigger-happy blast you’d expect or enjoy from an on-rails shooter game. I believe they have tried to address this with a challenge mode section but, as at time of writing, I don’t have much interest in tackling it. I’m glad I saw it through to the finish, and there was much of merit here including atmosphere and decent plot twists and brutality (especially considering this was originally a Wii-only title), but as a purely enjoyable gaming experience then it just didn’t quite cut it.

Over-Zealous

2011-02-27T11:35:00.001-08:00

That’s Dead Space 2 done, then. Managed to complete the game on Zealot (Hard) level and, barring a fairly nightmare-like death spree over the last two chapters, it was a bit of a pushover. Still, it was always going to be a lot easier with a New Game+ backing me up – lots of weapons and ammo and health and money. You won’t find me talking myself up about taking on Hardcore mode though. Fuck that. That’s just stupid hard.

Before I let the game go to rest, though (or, at least, until the DLC expansion stuff I have heard about gets released), I decided to have a play on the multiplayer online element to see what it was all about. My impression was distinctly underwhelmed.

I just didn’t like it. It felt slight. Playing as either a human or a necromorph, it basically boiled down to finding opposing players and shooting/attacking them until they died or you died. Then you find another one, or you respawn and find another one. And repeat.

Apparently there are objectives for the humans to complete, that the necromorphs were supposed to thwart, but I couldn’t work out what the hell they were. So I just killed as many as I could, and that invariably stuck me at the top of the leaderboard. I wish they’d made it more of a co-op thing – like Mercenaries mode in Resident Evil 5 or Co-op Objective mode in Uncharted 2. It was good to have other ‘Isaacs’ on my team, battling in the Dead Space environment – a proper co-op platform would have been absolutely awesome, no question.

But there isn’t one of those, there’s just a crap tacked-on multiplayer element that just didn’t float my boat at all. As far as I’m concerned they may as well have not bothered.

Further dampening the party, with Dead Space 2 done I could pick up some other games and play them once more. So I went back to Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit but, alas, the shine and gloss on that game has also started to wear a bit thin for me.

The trouble is, despite the various different challenges, it is all a bit samey. And now that the challenges in the campaign mode are starting to get trickier, it’s not as satisfying.

I still think the game is quality. It looks great, the cops and racers duelling is great, and the presentation and implementation of it all is top notch. It’s just not quite inspiring enough. I’ll probably play it again, every now and then, and probably go online with it, too – but as the next game to sink my teeth into and really absorb my time? Nah. I’ve got other plans.

I fancy returning to Final Fantasy XIII, actually. I always play Final Fantasy games more than once, and generally enjoy them more second time around. And now, whilst my gaming roster is relatively clear, I see no reason not to go back to Cocoon, to Gran Pulse, back to Lightning and the gang and see how it feels this much farther down the line. There are some big battles left to win. I have unfinished business. . .

From Death To Growth

2011-02-17T12:00:00.000-08:00

I didn’t plan it this way, honest. But there’s four games to discuss at present, four games I’ve got on the go – and there’s a kind of thread that can be run through them that connects them all rather neatly. I’ll explain as I go.

So first up I’ve been playing more Dead Space 2. I am now on my third run through of the main game, this time on Zealot (a.k.a Hard) difficulty. I had previously gone through it on Easy, mainly to stock up on guns and ammo and health, and also to fulfil all the criteria demands for various trophies. I have now got them all. Trophies for killing certain numbers with alt-fire of a Line gun, or decompressing necromorphs, or killing 4 creatures with one Ripper blade. . . Got them all.

I’ll be honest, it’s not been that tough. Indeed, the only tough thing about the game is the Hard-Core mode, which just seems too tough to even consider tackling. The cynic in me thinks it’s a ploy by EA to get people to buy extra content that will help them do it. I’m not biting.

After all these playthroughs, though, I have been able to form a much better idea of what I think of the game, particularly in relation to the first. All in all, I’d say they’re just as good as each other. I think the first game is more tightly constructed in terms of its progression of equipping guns and dispensing items whilst also avoiding you becoming overpowered. The original game also has way more moments to ‘dread’. The end boss of the first game is also way better than the measly offering the second game proffers.

Dead Space 2 does have much better environment, though. The Sprawl is a great place to explore. And the set piece moments – like dangling from the train carriage, or being decompressed with a huge monster chasing you – are proper jawdropping stuff. The sense of narrative with the sequel is also better, but it’s a shame about the faintly wimpy climax that felt a bit too easily ‘happy’ for my taste.

For better suspense and survival horror, the first game is best. For action and spectacle, the second game takes the honours. I have no concerns that I’ll rattle through Zealot level quickly enough and then that will probably be the end of it for me.

Meanwhile I’ve also started Dead Space Extraction, which came with my ‘limited edition’ Dead Space 2. I had played the game once before, when I bought it for my Wii (but I didn't play it very much before it got shelved, not for anything major wrong with the game and more because there was better PS3 games to play at the time). But the improvement here graphically with the HD facelift it’s been given is impressive. I thought it might look a bit lame, but it really hasn’t fared too badly at all in the port.

I can’t say I am totally gelling with the game itself, though. I am up to Chapter 3 and it feels like heavy going. A lot of talking, a lot of dramatic scenes to sit through, interspersed with the occasional blasting moments. And I don’t think I’m doing very good at it. Too often I’m finding myself running out of ammo, or getting hit by creatures that seem to be taking too long to kill off. I’ll persevere with it because I want to see how the story plays out, and I do want to get better at it (and, besides, I bought a fucking Move for it!).

Another new game to hit my life is a relatively new title on PSN - Plants vs. Zombies. (You see the link: Dead Space and it’s necromorph enemies to zombies in this game – keep up!). Previously I understood this game was on PC in some form or other, but I’d never seen or played it. There was a free trial on PSN of it, though, and when I tried I discovered I liked it.

Brilliantly it has co-op, so Mrs. Comet can get involved, and this is definitely more her type of game. And whilst the co-op of the adventure game is limited (in the sense that, really, one person could handle it alone) the drop in, drop out nature suits us both (with a baby Comet in the household who could demand attention at any given second).

Between us, over a weekend, we have hammered the main game and completed it. Mrs. Comet triumphantly taking down the last boss of the whole game herself (ushering in that awesome end sequence music video, a fitting encapsulation of the excellent sense of humour the game possesses). But the end of the adventure mode only unlocks and highlights the mass amount of other stuff left to do. All the other game challenges, and the Zen Garden, which could lead to who knows what else in the game. It’s felt like great stuff, and good value for money. The pair of us haven’t been this addicted to a game since Pixeljunk Monsters stole many an hour off our lives!

Lastly, I’ve been returning to another PSN game called Flower (again, the link here from previous game of “PLANTS” to “FLOWERS”, geddit!?). Ostensibly I noticed this looked like a low percentage game in terms of trophies so I thought I’d take another look at it, with a principle view to getting the missing Trophies.

What may have initially felt like a chore actually turned into an enjoyable experience. Whilst the fundamental game style of Flower isn’t innovative (move character over specific points in a specific order) the implementation makes it feel utterly fresh and novel. It’s a mild candidate for the ‘game as art’ debate (Braid is the strongest contender in my range of experience for that debate) but mostly it’s just a pleasant experience.

Except for when you’re trying to negotiate the pylon level without getting electrocuted for a Trophy. Then it becomes a tense nightmare frustration on repeat. Still, I managed some rather simple ones (like illuminating pools) and finding the secret flowers on stages was fun and rewarding. I may not manage 100% on the game but I’ll definitely get a more respectable trophy percentage whilst enjoying myself. Can’t say fairer than that!

Gaming Glory

2011-02-07T12:57:00.000-08:00

Well well, it’s been nought but success for the gaming Comet this past week or so. A finished game, and two platinum trophies. Can’t be bad.

The first of my Platinums came from Hasbro Family Game Night. The difficulty I was having here was in getting one game online, due to the lack of online players. However, I had put myself on a messageboard requesting boosting help, and got a ‘friend’ request through to help me. So when this person came online whilst I was there I got in touch, suggesting we have a quick game to get the trophy.

They didn’t respond. I was in the game lobby, waiting around, and the swine wasn’t responding to my message request! How annoying!? But then I refreshed the game lobby and, lo and behold, there was someone else in there!

Bang. I quickly joined their game and, before I knew it, I was playing Yahtzee online with a total stranger. Once the game was done (I lost, but whoever it was I was against got lucky on the last throw of the dice) I got my trophy, my Platinum, and could move on.

Meanwhile, weeks and weeks of toil and endeavour on Modnation Racing finally came to an end when I accrued the mammoth 500,000 XP required to get to Level 30. It’s been an epic slog, no doubt about it. Culminating in many tracks created, over 1100 races won, lots of hosting and lots of XP Series and just a whole stack of time. It’s easily been the most hard-earned, most gruelling Platinum trophy I’ve been awarded.

Right now, as much as I think Modnation Racing is an awesome game, I am glad to see the back of it. It’s like a tremendous weight has been lifted. I am free!

Last but not least, I finished the last portion of Dead Space 2. The last few levels certainly proved tough, but only via the sheer onslaught of monsters that were thrown my way, all problematically complicated by the appearance of a dreaded ‘regenerator’ creature.

I hated the regenerator creature from the first game. A beast you can only shoot the limbs off to slow it down and buy yourself some time before it gets back up to come after you again is a stressful element. And this thing kept cropping up all through the last chapters – hounding me through section after section of monster-ridden areas. They would have been tough enough without a regenerator on my six – but that added pressure was truly intense.

I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t get to outright kill it. At time of writing I don’t know if it actually can be killed. Right towards the end of the game I made a desperate run through various corridors and rooms and thought I may have glimpsed an area where some kind of beam or energy source might have been useful – but then I went through another door and inadvertently into the final stage of the game.

The last boss of the whole game wasn’t as climactic as I’d hoped. I quite liked how it was character-focused (SPOILER), concentrating as it did on Isaac and his guilt over Nicole. Having her be present in the final encounter (and inducing suicide should she grab me) made sense, though quite what the firey marker I was destroying was all about in relation to her was a bit lost on me.

I figured out I had to shoot Nicole enough to reveal the marker, and shoot that until it was destroyed. In between that there were multitudes of those horrible child-necros to contend with, that saw me ripping through my ammo like there was no tomorrow. Once I got the hang of it, though, it wasn’t too troublesome. When I delivered the final shot and blew the marker up I was actually surprised that was it.

So the end of the game actually proved to be a bit of a warm and fuzzy, really. Ellie showed up to save Isaac, and there was a little riff on the end of the first game, only instead of screaming Nicole there was just one-eyed Ellie, suggesting Isaac has purged his demons and might just have some new romance in his life. Is this the end of the line for Isaac? Will the Dead Space franchise pick up with someone else? I kind of hope so.

Not that I personally am done with Isaac, mind. I’m now looking forward to going back into the game with a New Game+, on Easy, to boost up my weapons and stash of items, doing all the necessary feats for Trophies – before I go take a run at the Zealot setting.

Always Outnumbered, Almost Outgunned

2011-02-01T13:22:00.000-08:00

And so the horror continues, as I plough further through Dead Space 2, now at time of writing having worked my way through Chapter 12. Pretty swift progress which is probably equal parts the general ease of the game and, dare I say, my own skill due to such familiarity with the first game. Anyway. I’ll be detailing some of the revelations found within the deeper reaches of the game here so those who wanna be unspoiled will wanna get outta here!

Let’s first discuss what bugs me, so far. What bugs me most is how the game still operates very much forcing the player into difficult and stressful situations purely by the distribution and management of ammo and health. In the first fame I had, by this stage, a full-up safe of stashed items as well as bulging inventory. In Dead Space 2 I’ll very literally be involved in fights that require me to be on my last gun, with all others emptied, desperately trying to survive.

It does make for intense playing, but there’s a large part of me that feels poor game design mechanics are at fault, creating extra frustration when I’ve not been wasteful with my resources at all.

That being said, a desperate situation created a really satisfying section. There are these raptor like necromorphs that like to peek round corners, sometimes as a distraction, whilst the one you weren’t looking at and didn’t know about makes a charge. A room full of those meant I had to seriously employ the new detonator (mine) weapons, setting them up so the creatures ran into them. It took a few goes, but it was extremely satisfying when I pulled it off.

And whilst I am moaning about how the game keeps putting me under the cosh, it’s got to be noted that I am progressing rapidly through it, barely having to do any one tricky section more than a few times. Fundamentally what I am moaning about is not being able to do it first time with no trouble! I realise, writing this, what an absurd complaint that is.

But try telling me that when I am stressed and vexed, battling hordes of necromorphs with nothing but a Force gun and a flashing red health bar!

Anyway.

The next batch of chapters I have worked through have remained strong. Whilst I think it’s a bit disappointing that the residents of the sprawl seem to have vanished (all slaughtered, probably, but the beginning of the game with the screams and panicked cries of crowds, and the sounds of terrified voices behind closed doors was really effective) there have been one or two other characters thrown into the mix with me. And there’s always my dead ex-girlfriend apparition Nicole to keep me company.

The game seems to be heading towards a showdown with the truth behind this apparition, and I am hoping for a kind of revelation within Isaac’s own psyche. Potentially there’s even potential for him to give in and join the marker, align with its intent, though that might skirt a bit too close to Resistance 2 for comfort!

Whilst I don’t think the game has quite reached the same nasty sick streak the first game had (I am thinking of the occasional encounters with Ishimura staff half-mad, cackling, butting walls or slicing open their colleagues) Dead Space 2 isn’t exactly a shrinking violet. A sequence in a nursery, all bright colours and tinkly music, set against necromorph babies with explosive pus sacs is pretty sick stuff, for sure. And all that preceded a seriously tough battle on a stage, with hordes of babies, screeching children and other nasties all making a charge for me.

More ammo please!

The standout Chapter, however, has to be Chapter 10. I didn’t expect this at all, but the whole level was set aboard the Ishimura (reclaimed and examined at the sprawl).

Just going back in, reliving the first game’s environment (albeit with plastic sheets and fluorescent paint all over the place) was just exhilarating stuff. It even had the gall to repeat the same quarantine lockdown moment from the first game (tricking you with a false threat first time, hitting you full on second time).

I should also mention that the use of zero g in this game is a major improvement from the first game. Now given full control to move freely in any direction, when I first heard this was a part of the game I dreaded being stuck in a terrible, disorientating mess, with monsters flying at all angles and a pot luck shooting spree occurring. Not so. The zero g sections are all either tight corridors to navigate, or vast open space areas demanding exploration and vigilance to solve the basic puzzles. What’s important is the handling is done spot on and the areas designed to be more skewed towards problem solving than fighting – and it works great.

Actual full-on boss encounters have been limited, thankfully. Dead Space has never really handled big boss fights very well. Never really been suited to it. Better is to have the levels climax with a taut set piece with, usually, more enemies than normal swarming in. Chapter 1 ended with a big fight against a large beast, one that gets encountered again further on – and both of these sequences have been irritating (especially because of its unavoidable jump attack!).

Where to now? Well I have stormed the government headquarters and it seems I am steering towards a showdown with the military might of Tiedmann – a character not yet directly met. Between him, and the inevitable encounter with the marker and the Nicole thing, that’s what I suspect lies in store for the closing few chapters. I’m kinda looking forward to getting to the end just so I can go back to a New Game+ start and work through it all again, with better weapons and more ammo!!!!!

Return To Dead Space

2011-01-30T13:43:00.000-08:00

At last the much-anticipated (by me, anyway) Dead Space 2 finally arrived. It’s been a bit of a wrench to enforce a break on myself so I can document my progress so far (and look after my baby son, and, you know, eat and stuff!). One of the early concerns about the game was that it would lose its tension and intensity in favour of more shoot-heavy, set piece thrills. Whilst it’s fair to say Dead Space 2 doesn’t have quite the claustrophobic, horror vibe of the first it still very much feels like the original.

Right from the opening static screen, and the way the controls all (mostly) operate exactly as the previous game, and how the menu system is handled in-game, and the unnerving sound-effects. . . It’s all there. It’s all distinctly recaptured that Dead Space feel and literally minutes in I was a happy gamer.

The game didn’t waste any time in throwing me right into the nightmare action. Many survival horror games will start you off unarmed, but Dead Space 2 begins with lead character Isaac literally no-armed, strapped in a straitjacket. Having to make a mad dash through bloody, dark corridors whilst monsters scrambled out of every side was an awesome adrenaline jolt. Inspired, also, was the first time getting to use the gun (pulling it off a machine whilst a necromorph tore some guy up just feet away – brilliant!). Plasma gun in hand, let the Dead Space experience commence.

I am up to Chapter 6 at the time of writing, which is just a little less than halfway through the game. There is much good stuff to note. The story is engaging – beginning with the chaos in full flow, and a guy stating that what was done to Isaac was unforgivable (before he killed himself) set up an intriguing mystery. But between that and answers there’s a whole bunch of monsters and action to wade through.

The Sprawl is a good location, a little bit more varied than the first game and so far a bit more creepy because of its use of nice areas like malls, and children’s nurseries, all twisted and ripped apart and laced in blood. One of the new necromorph beasts, this child-size creature, is particularly unpleasant in this respect (and even worse because of its fondness of attacking in packs, screeching as it leaps in for the kill).

There have so far been a few standout moments that stick in the memory. Chapter two had a terrific tram sequence – moving from carriage to carriage as it rushed headlong before it somehow derailed, leaving me dangling by the leg, upside down, just as necropmorphs started closing in around me. That was cool. But not as cool as the most eye-popping sequence involving a giant beast that I fought for a bit, before making a run for it into a room where the windows got blasted out and both Isaac and monster were sucked into space, clattered into a ship, and then got blasted back into a building. It was just superbly done, proper blockbuster-standard action. Loved it. I doubt the game has anything that will pack something more spectacular than that moment, but I’ll be thrilled if it does.

It’s not all rosy, mind. Whilst the darkness element that lends a greater necessity for shining torchlight to view things has been used more, I think it’s been overused. The game is just too dark for too long and it becomes a bit of an irritation. Couple this with necromorphs that attack just a little too quickly sometimes (on a par with the boost-speed beasts from the first game) and the game descends into a frantic, trigger-happy frenzy that may either end well, or with death, and there’s a fine line between both. That was a bit irritating, too.

As a consequence of this there's very often times where ammo in my inventory is scarce, and health in short supply. Whilst you might think this would aid that sense of survival-horror I did, personally, find it a bit unbalanced. I'm playing the game on Normal, but employing a lot of the skills and tactics I learned from playing the original at Impossible level. There's no way I should be scrimping for bullets, but the mechanics of the game can dictate as much. I do understand that the new game+ system can also allow different difficulty levels to be taken on, which does suggest that there's been consideration to making the game interesting and challenging even when players have better weapons and suits and more available funds. . . But that has imbalanced the first time playthrough a tad. Just a tad.

I do have half a mind on tackling the ‘Hardcore’ level at some stage, mind. One where you only get three saves and, if you die, you go right back to your previous save. With those kinds of speed beasts on hardcore level it does seem like an insurmountable problem – but then I’ve not experimented with all the weapons, nor fully-souped anything up and, really, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m not even halfway through my first run! But, to be sure, I am having fun in the dark with the blood and the things that are all out to get me. Minor grumbles aside, I’m having a great time indeed.

Heavy Platinum

2011-01-28T16:13:00.000-08:00

A little bit of intensive game-time with Heavy Rain saw me finally achieve the Platinum Trophy for it. If I remember rightly that brings my total Platinums to a modest five – not bad going, but not great. The process of working through Heavy Rain so thoroughly, however, did allow me to garner a better appreciation of the game as a whole.

Annoyingly I would have potentially had the game done a lot quicker if I had stayed at the back of the shop during an earlier scene and let it play out. As it happened I didn’t, I intervened, and that prevented me from getting a Trophy for allowing the killer to commit a perfect crime.

Still, just working through the game scenes without trying for Trophies again was done and dusted rather quickly. Some of the more contrived elements of the plot that bugged me first time around felt smoothed over on reflection, going through the game again. The only sequence that really spoils the party is in the clockmaker’s shop. SPOILER: The murder, search for files and phone call to police simply could not have been done in the time afforded the killer – no way.

It’s a shame, because otherwise the interweaving, multi-stranded story all hangs together pretty well.

I still contest that more branches would make for a better game. Now having seen every possible ending I have a full understanding of how limited the structure is. Fundamentally it’s only the last few scenes that can really alter the flow of how the plot turns out – almost crucially coming down to who survives, or figures out, how to get to where Sean Mars is being kept.

That being said, I got to play the game where all characters arrived at the scene and it made for a great climax. Ethan getting his son, Jayden scrapping on the conveyor whilst Madison rushed around trying to stop the cops – it really pulled together into a proper finale.

Most of the other ‘bad’ endings were pretty depressing, though. If you didn’t get the game ‘right’ then you were invariably treated to seeing characters kill themselves in one way or another from despair. Heavy Rain, heavy going.

With just days to go before Dead Space 2 was due to show up, I went a-Trophy hunting on the unlikely Hasbro Family Game Night. By pure chance I had set my nephews playing on it to amuse them and noticed their casual efforts had yielded a Trophy or two. So I checked out the Trophy list and realised there was a good portion of them I could get, maybe even all of them – and that meant a lot of juicy Silver and Gold Trophies were up for grabs.

Playing Battleship against myself 20 times to get a Trophy wasn’t exactly thrilling, mind. Nor was trying to beat the computer 4 times in a row at Connect 4. . .

. . . but I’ve probably done far more mundane and laborious things in the name of a Trophy before (the everlasting slog of Modnation Racers springs to mind – about 40,000 XP to go!).

The real potential fly in the ointment is one solitary Trophy for playing a game online. The big problem with Hasbro Family Game Night in this respect is there are few people who probably own it, even fewer people who are still playing it, and even fewer still that are playing it online, and even fewer more that are playing it online when I am online.

In fact, no one is playing it online when I am online so far when I have tried to find games. But I have checked out a few message boards online and can see there are people in a similar situation. Hopefully I can hook up with them and we can help one another out. And then I'll have another sweet ass Platinum in my Trophy cabinet!

Perfect 10

2011-01-24T14:24:00.000-08:00

I should have posted this a while back - but a mixture of Christmas, baby, and various other games showing up kept shoving it off the board. But here it is anyway!

The first serious piece of downloadable content for Enslaved: Odyssey to the West arrived and, though it cost eight pounds, I had seen just about enough in some trailers and the odd report to tell me that it was worth a punt. In a strange way I also wanted to kind of support Enslaved; a good game that didn’t receive the recognition it deserved (in terms of sales) and yet one I’d welcome a sequel for.

Pigsy’s Perfect 10 is the DLC in question, and it concerns the side-character Pigsy in a starring role in his own little story, set before the events of the main game (not surprising news for anyone that finished Enslaved!). Basically he is tired of living alone and decides to build a new friend for himself (his only company being this floating, robotic television screen called Truffles) from scrap robot pieces he will salvage together. That’s the plot.

I have now completed the game, but it was a meaty, substantial offering with many chapters (though a ‘chapter’ here is nowhere near as long as a chapter from the full Enslaved game) and I have been impressed with the new game mechanics and the quality of the game itself. There’s actually more game than I expected.

It’s tough going, too, which makes even the relatively short levels themselves something of a slog. It’s difficulty is both its strength and its biggest source of irritation. Principally, Pigsy battles enemies by taking them out with a gun – but if any Mechs are charging at him then he can’t shoot them before they get there. Similarly, if he hasn’t got cover, then he can’t stand and shoot them down whilst they open fire from distance at him. This presents a problem.

To get around it Pigsy slowly acquires extra tools, like the familiar decoy from the main game, but also EMP mines, or mines that ally enemies that are close, and it’s using these for all the various Mech encounters does the game forge its challenges. And they are challenging.

There’s some satisfaction in solving the problems though. Using the right decoy tactics to lure in Mechs, then disabling them in one blast with an EMP hit before quickly picking them off with sniper headshots is intense due to the strict time limit pressure, but also rewarding in that it works.

Less fun are those moments were near insurmountable Mech enemies can rush me, resulting in numerous deaths and the feeling like the techniques I use to get through are scrappy; like I’ve survived through near-knuckle flukey skill than an ideal clean solution. The game throws in more of these as it closes in on the end and that makes the climactic run-in rather frustrating.

I also find the controls tricky, too – having to constantly remind myself before I perform certain actions what the required button commands are. For some reason they haven’t sunk in to an instinctive level. And, as with the main Enslaved game, the action commands just aren’t as responsive as they ought to be for a game based around running, climbing and jumping (or, in this game, grappling).

Those are the niggles, but they are outweighed by the quality. The stealthy takedowns mingled in with some terrific fast-paced chase and escapes (particularly novel being a dog mech’s eye view perspective as it hounded after me) which really are impressive. The cutscenes are also brilliantly animated, the voice-acting and scripting entertaining, and the overall atmosphere has been carried across. The world of Enslaved feels dangerous, constantly, and the level of detail and finesse of this DLC is on a par with the regular game’s standard.

Mopping Up

2011-01-15T06:35:00.000-08:00

I seem to have found a small window of downtime before the next big gaming event in my life shows up. (That would be Dead Space 2.) As such I’ve been able to spend time with a few other games ticking over, ever in pursuit of those lovely Trophies.

Modnation Racers has been a constant for quite some time. Invariably I’ll just go on for an hour or so in the late evening just before I go to bed. Either I’ll play some casual races, or an XP Series, but I’ve also occasionally spent a bit of time on single XP Races. None of them get you much, but they all add a bit more to that XP total.

I currently need about 100,000 XP. A couple of my tracks seem to be going down well. One in particular, called ‘Spectacular! Spectacular!’ has been downloaded and raced by other people without me being there I have noticed, which is heartening. I have submitted some more tracks for the Hot Lap, too, but so far those bastards in charge have never picked it (and the tracks they do pick, I feel, are a whole more shitter than mine, but there you go).

As ever, I’ll get there.

Meanwhile I played Batman: Arkham Asylum. I went and played through the game again, this time on Hard. It didn’t take me long and it wasn’t all that hard, really. The Poison Ivy fight was troublesome, and the end fight with Joker took a few goes, but mostly it was plain sailing. I then turned my attention to collecting all the Riddler clues (used the internet for a few of them, but the majority I got for myself) before getting involved in the Challenges.

I’d like to say I completed all the Challenges as required because that would mean I had a Platinum trophy to boast of, but I didn’t, and I don’t expect I will. Too hard. Especially the ‘extreme’ ones. However I did succeed in enough of them to rack up a few Trophies for attaining enough ‘bats’, as well as ones for getting a 40+ hit combo, or doing a stealth level with nothing but silent takedowns.

I’ve finished up with 80% of Trophies for the game. I can live with that. I did live with that. And moved on to Heavy Rain.

I wanted to have another play through of the game anyway, just to try and check out different story branches. But the added incentive of working through the different ‘scenes’ and ensuring I was doing what was required to get a Trophy didn’t hurt. And since I had already unmasked the killer there was no issue with me having a little look on the old Internet to check I wasn’t missing anything.

At time of writing I had managed to complete ‘the bear’ challenge, for which I believe the ‘kamikaze’ trophy is the hardest one in the game. It took me a lot of goes to get right, mainly because my ‘right tilt’ action with the joypad didn’t seem to be registering. (In hindsight I was perhaps being too quick and aggressive with it, but that whole challenge was tense, man!)

So in the mornings before work I have a bit of time for a cup of coffee and about 45 minutes with Heavy Rain, and in the evenings try to log some time with Modnation Racers to top up my XP. That’s the current situation. Right up until Dead Space 2 rocks up. . .

I Feel The Need. . .

2011-01-09T06:54:00.000-08:00

I got Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit for Christmas. (I had asked for it, mind. I couldn’t imagine my mother standing in Game debating the finer merits of whether it should be Hot Pursuit or Gran Turismo 5 for her son for Christmas!) I’ve now had a few days playing on it and can report back a decent first impression, and what I can report back is very favourable.

Being rather steeped in kart racers lately – specifically Modnation Racers (still pursuing that Platinum!) – it was rather jarring to go into a ‘proper’ race game, one where I had to use my brakes and the roads weren't made up of crazy turns and jumps. A welcome change, mind, and once I adjusted my style (can’t just hold down accelerate and bomb round perfectly) I really got into it.

Hot Pursuit impresses from the start with its simple menu that, when any selection is first made, has a soothing female voice explain what it’s about. It’s slick and simple. I leaped straight into the Career mode where I found that I could alternate objectives between being a Racer and being a Cop for various challenges; races, busts, time trials, etc.

Initially the Racer sections were the easiest to grasp, being just straight races on regular roads. Having to dodge through regular traffic and keeping an eye out for shortcuts keeps proceedings on a knife edge. As mentioned earlier, once I got used to the handling of the cars I found myself having a great time. The graphics looked terrific, the soundtrack full of good songs, and the difficulty pitched just right to make it challenging without being too extreme or a pushover.

The Cop parts were a refreshing change (well, I have played Chase HQ way back when, but it wasn’t quite as polished as this!). Giving pursuit to one or more Racers and smashing into them, or taking them down with the various methods gradually introduced, was all very engrossing – and the takedowns, in glorious slow-motion, were very satisfying.

The Career alone is worth the asking price as, at time of writing, there’s an absolute stack of missions to work through. But Hot Pursuit has a major ace up its sleeve in the shape of the Autolog feature. Luckily I have managed to accrue quite a selection of PSN ‘friends’, mostly through my time on Modnation Racers. These likeminded people have also got Hot Pursuit and so were immediately part of my Autolog (as noted by the Socialite trophy I received just for logging in!). All their times are on display, and should I beat them they are notified of it.

Likewise, of course, that door opens the other way and I am notified when any of my records beaten. There’s a whole section in the menu that you can enter where all of the specific challenges where records have been taken, or have been recommended by the game as good ones to tackle, can be attempted to claim leadership over friends.

It’s a really fluid system, laced over and around the game without being intrusive and yet giving extra focus and sense of competition to every single challenge played in the game. I’d argue it’s more fiercely competitive than the proper online game.

Online in real time is also fun, though I can see it becoming a little limited. The various game styles of being Racers and Cops (roles doled out randomly, into teams) is good fun, but the pattern of dodging attacks and so forth will become stale before long, I imagine. But there’s also regular racing to be had, which offers more longterm appeal to me. I did actually win one, too – after coming mid-table race after race.

The trick was in sussing out the handbrake around those sharper bends. Once I had that figured out it was like a new lease of racing life got opened and I was screwing it around corners and boosting into the straight with thrilling aplomb. So between the online racing, beating my friends and taking on the Career it’s fair to say that there’s plenty of, ah, mileage in Hot Pursuit left for me yet!

Far East Nation

2010-12-30T13:01:00.000-08:00

After an extremely long time, and a whole deluge of DLC (most of which has been negligible props and costumes, but some of which – like the Stunts and Carnival themes – have really added value) Modnation Racers received some worthwhile extra content. The Far East Pack contains a Far East theme and appropriate props (which, at time of writing, I have not had chance to delve into), some extra Trophy challenges and, best of all, five new tracks that comprise a complete tour.

To say that I have blasted through the Far East Tour would be an understatement. I completed all Tracks in one session, and won the thing. That was easy. It was the business of completing all the challenges and collecting all the tokens that has kept me returning and re-trying particular tracks. But getting all of them didn’t take too long, either.

Without blowing my own trumpet, it’s fair to say that I am pretty damn good at Modnation Racers. The amount of times I win an XP Series is testament to that (indeed, my actual win to race ratio suggests I come first at least every 1 in 3 races).

Some of the Trophies appear rather tough, though. There are two in particular that have me concerned. The first involves using another player’s warp field on a particular track, and the other involves hitting three racers with one single electricity bolt, again on a particular track.

The bolt one is going to be tricky but, with some perseverance, I reckon it can be done. The warp one, however, leaves me to be utterly at the mercy of an opponent not only getting a Level 3 boost but using it in front of me so that I can then skip into it! That seems to be asking a lot in terms of luck and random opportunity and those kinds of challenges don’t appeal to me at all.

(Update: Both of these Trophies have been obtained. The Warp one was done online - a bit of communication with a kind lady from America had her tell me when she had a Warp ready and I just lined up behind her and rode into it. The bolt one took me a while, mainly because I didn't realise it was a Level 2 bolt that was required. Once I knew that, I did it first go when a cluster of three were close enough together to take the hit. With that one hit I had managed to get all the Trophies for the DLC! Boo yah!)

Batman Ends

2010-12-28T05:59:00.000-08:00

I was wrong about not having to fight Poison Ivy. She only went and turned out to be the next major boss fight in Batman: Arkham Asylum. It has to be said that her, like many of the other boss fights, haven’t exactly been taxing.

Poison Ivy’s encounter basically involved running side to side and shooting her occasionally, whilst avoiding her plants and smacking a few bad guys. The only way you could really make a mess of it was with impatience. On the flip side, the best ‘boss’ encounter was the whole sequence against Killer Croc. It sustained a suitable air of menace and required decent reactions to get through.

Up until the finish of the game, though, for me the grandstanding elements were anything to do with Scarecrow. The last confrontation with him induced another nightmare scenario that was the game’s most striking moment. Breaking the fourth wall practically, the game pretended to shut down in a glitch, and then restarted with the opening sequence – but then the differences became apparent as Batman assumed the Joker role and was the one being interred in Arkham.

I thought that whole part was well done, and even if the eventual boss fight with Scarecrow wasn’t anywhere near as inventive it didn’t matter – those parts of the game were all brilliantly executed.

The final battle against a souped-up Joker was also a fitting climactic end (even if it did feel a bit crass that they’d had to make Joker into a hulking beast, especially since his physical power didn’t really enter much into the actual battle).

I did find this final battle tricky, though. Realising what needed to be done wasn’t immediately apparent, and once it was it took me a few infuriating attempts to get right. In basic terms, battering guys and then pulling Joker off his ledge when his back was turned isn’t overly-demanding – but the space was rarely cleared of enemies for long enough to get the time to achieve what needed to be done.

Felt good when I did it, mind. And as the ending sequence played out I had to reflect that Batman: Arkham Asylum had been a very good game, reeking of quality and with enough variety and style to make the forthcoming sequel something to look forward to.

No new game plus, element, so far as I could tell. This means I didn’t get anywhere near completing all of the Riddler challenges – but for the sheer wealth and cunning of those things I suspect a guide of some kind will be in order. I think there are some in the game that can only be obtained during specific moments, too, so getting the full lot first time around was never likely to occur.

To round off my gaming session I did have a brief foray into the Challenges section of the game.

Although I haven’t unlocked them all I got the general gist that they are split into two types: combat and stealth. The combat ones were the most fun, though my skills at racking up combos are rather pathetic (I’ve only just scraped over 20 once or twice) though, with more time at my disposal I can imagine getting quite absorbed with it. The whole Challenge section is a nice addition, and neatly put together – a proverbial cherry on top of the cake.

Deeper into the Asylum

2010-12-19T04:58:00.000-08:00

Somewhere along the line I got my cape slashed. It’s a small detail, but the slash holes in my cape have remained since whenever they happened and it’s impressed me. I turn the game off, then come back to it, and the same rips are there. Batman: Arkham Asylmum has Batman retain the damage he has suffered – including bullet dents and scuffs – as the game continues. It’s a subtle but effective detail that adds nothing to the game itself and yet just makes the whole package that little bit sweeter.

However, as I have been playing the game more (and it feels like I am closing in on the latter stages of it) I have been increasingly underwhelmed. It’s not that I am disappointed so much as I keep expecting there to be more. More what? Not sure. More diversity, perhaps. More challenge, definitely, as most encounters and situations I have been through have sometimes resulted in a bit of trial and error death but are otherwise perfectly manageable.

The game is slick and polished but for some reason I expect a bit more ‘oomph’ to be injected, and it’s not forthcoming. Maybe all of its ‘game of the year’ plaudits have raised my expectations but compared to, say, Uncharted 2, there’s no question which is the superior game. (It’s Uncharted 2!)

At time of writing I have just beaten a boss battle against two titans – goons that were injected with Joker’s serum. It was a very pleasing fight, because I had noticed there was a Trophy for taking one down without using a Batarang. So using the dodge to get them clattering into one another, and then eventually clambering on the back of one to scrap with the other, I managed to see one off before then taking the other one down with a Batarang and battering combo. Two Trophies awarded in one fight – nice!

Previous to this there have been some other fine moments that stick in the memory. The second encounter with Scarecrow was, once more, a highlight. The hallucinogenic gas this time having Batman revisit his parents murder, you can tell these dramatic, insane-like, mental unravellings are something the game developers have enjoyed and spent a lot of time creating and it really pays off.

I’ve also really enjoyed the recreation of some of the villains I’ve seen. Harley Quinn was irritating as hell, but her grating voice taunting me as I tried to save some cops worked well. And the beguiling introduction of Poison Ivy was excellent – I get the impression she’s not someone I’ll have to fight in this game but I’m sure we’ll meet again.

No Two-Face or Penguin so far (and, I suspect, they won’t show up here) and despite hearing Riddler’s voice and tying to find all 240 of his clues (an undertaking that’s sure to drive me to rage as it continues) I doubt I’ll get to see him in person either. But that’s OK. Probably wise. Best to leave some good stuff for sequels rather than rush through a host of cameos. This game has really looked after the feature characters brilliantly – it’s meeting them that have really made it enjoyable to play through.

Ultimate Collection - Part 1

2010-12-13T11:38:00.001-08:00

I happened upon this game purely by chance, but when I saw that it contained 40+ titles from the Megadrive era, including some games I had fond memories of and various games I didn’t know, for a bargain price it seemed like a total no-brainer. And so I got it. A happy by-product was that there was incentive to try at least all the games if only to unlock a Trophy challenge it contained, which was what I basically set myself doing from the start. So here’s part 1 of my impressions of the games, in alphabetical order, and my progress with the Trophies.

Alex Kidd and the Enchanted Castle

I’d heard of Alex Kidd, being something of a Sega mascot before a certain blue hedgehog rocked up and stole his crown, but I had never played any of his games. On the strength of this title I wasn’t missing much. A fairly rudimentary platformer that ought to at least play a bit like Mario, but instead had inertia and jumping physics that made things trickier. I didn’t particularly like it. I got as far as Level 2. Didn’t see any enchanted castles.

Trophy

I just had to get a certain number of points, which was not that difficult at all. Since the enemies reset (a common facet of these retro games that seems bizarre now) if you had moved away from them I could go through Level One, collect the chests, and move back and forth killing the baddies as I went along until the quota had been met. Not very challenging.

Alien Storm

A big title back in the day, and one I had heard of but never played. I can well imagine I would have totally loved it, especially in two player. Basically being a side-scrolling shooter (though my gun had very limited range) it played well, albeit quite hard. But the interesting element was the diverse stuff – like switching to a first person shooter for brief sections, and one part that was a side-scrolling dash. Chuck in lots of varied enemies, tough boss fights and tactical use of special weapons and it’s a decent slice of retro action. Back in the day, with two players, this would have been awesome.

Trophy

A good challenge in that it kept me alert, as I had to get through a certain number of levels in the game but without using a continue. Given these retro games are way more ruthless at stripping away health and lives than pansy modern day games, this kept me playing with as much skill as possible and felt rewarding to unlock.

Altered Beast

If it wasn’t for the Trophy I’d have probably given this about a minute before abandoning it. A side-scrolling beat ‘em up, which basically saw me getting upgrades that made me more powerful until I indeed did ‘alter’ into a beast, at which point a boss fight ensued that had to be beaten before the level was done. Crappy fight mechanics and limited moves with a cumbersome feel meant the game felt far away from being fun.

Trophy

A bad game with a tough trophy – I had to complete Level One but with a certain score. I thought it would be simple, but the Level One boss was pretty tough to beat, and furthermore once the level was done I learned I hadn’t got enough points. The trick to it was in getting to the altered beast state to induce the boss fight as soon as possible to generate a higher bonus at the end – but that took me a few goes to figure out. Once I had it I was glad to see the back of it.

Beyond Oasis

There was something strangely familiar about this game. . . It was not that I had played it before, it’s that I had played Zelda before! Beyond Oasis (otherwise called The Story of Thor) was a blatant Zelda rip off, but nowhere near as good. A lot more rushed in feel, and rougher, I was actually enjoying it for what it was. And then there was this boss fight against a strange spider-like creature that was just stupidly annoying – bad collision detection and too tough attacks that saw me scuttling away and replenishing my energy all the time. It wasn’t a fight I won, it was an encounter I survived by attrition. Luckily the Trophy award wasn’t far away.

Trophy

I just had to get some kind of Water Spirit, but it was basically part of the game that got unlocked by progressing to a certain point within the Water Temple, having beaten that stupid boss thing. Aside from that boss it wasn't a particularly troublesome Trophy (and I suspect having learned how to use magic, as I realised I could use, before taking on the fight might have worked out better for me!).

Bonanza Bros

Now here was a game that genuinely looked terrible. But not for the first time in this Ultimate Collection would I come across a game that was fun to play despite its rudimentary appearances. Bonanza Bros was basically a heist game, with my character (or characters in two players, but Mrs. Comet wasn’t in the slightest bit interested) entering a building and having to get past (or shoot with stun bullets) all the various guards, get the swag, and get out within a time limit. So it was a side-on shooter, but with a real strategy element. It was actually really good fun, although a bit hard at times, but moreover it had a real charm to it that I can’t quite explain with words. It really looked tailored to two-players as well, with its split screen set up, and I bet that would have been a terrific slice of pure co-op action.

Trophy

I had to get through the first level, but having reached a particular score. This meant I had to take a good few goes at the game to get it right, which meant I had to persevere and allowed me to appreciate the game more. Once I had sussed out how to complete the level I thought doing it quickly would get me the score I needed, but a few attempts at that showed me otherwise, so I instead went quickly through the level, but then generated points capping guards before the time ran down and, once I had enough, went for the exit. Trophy awarded. Job done.

Bat-Time

2010-12-02T13:08:00.001-08:00

Progression with Batman: Arkham Asylum has been slow-going for me, but that’s kind of deliberate. I’ve been playing the game in small doses in the mornings, before work; at other times I’ve got a new baby in the house that demands much of my time and a spot of Modnation Racers in the evenings has been in order to keep whittling away at the last two trophies to complete the set.

Well, actually, last one Trophy now. I managed to get the Trophy for obtaining 250,000 Create XP. I initially thought this would be the hardest Trophy to obtain but I was wrong. Getting to Level 30 is the real challenge. But oh well, at least now I can use XP Series to generate further XP as well as Casual Races. I will get there. . .

But back to Batman, and I got through a couple of cool sections that have elevated my impressions of the game. First was an encounter with Scarecrow, which has been the highlight point of the game so far.

The initial eerie transition from being exposed to Scarecrow’s mind-altering gas provoked a genuinely creepy scene in a mortuary that had a really good nightmarish quality, capped off with a run and cover bit to eventually halt Scarecrow’s mental assault. It was really stylish, and good fun to play, and since I didn’t actually despatch Scarecrow I can only assume I haven’t seen the last of him.

I’m glad. I think he’s my favourite Batman villain thus far.

Shortly after there was a boss fight against Bane. . .

. . . that felt like a retread of an earlier fight against a big mutant but with a few more baddies thrown into the mix and a more satisfying payoff. With these two highlights I feel like I have really settled into the game and can appreciate its quality – it’s a game that makes you feel like you’re in good hands, that the creators have laid out something well thought about, polished and calibrated.

I suspect there’s a lot of replay value buried in there, too, if only to collect all of those infernal Riddler clues littered all over the place. And I haven’t even looked at the Challenges that I have been unlocking occasionally – other stuff that I can turn my attention to once the main game is done.

As stated, it’s been slow-going, and with Xmas on the horizon (which will surely mean a few new games to slot along the ones I have going on at the moment) demands on my time are greater than ever. If only I didn't need sleep!

Batmad

2010-11-23T09:41:00.001-08:00

With the recent spate of Platinum trophies obtained there was something of a space opening up in my gaming life for new challenges. And new challenges are forthcoming, thanks to spending power online! And the first new game to enter my world via my doormat was Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Obviously I’m a little late to this party, given how long it has been out and all the awards and plaudits it has picked up. But better late than never, and I got it pretty cheap so no complaints here!

Arkham Asylum sees Batman transferring the Joker into the aforementioned mental institution only for him to break loose, alongside all manner of key villains from Batman mythology – and now he’s in amongst them trying to restore order via batterings, batarangs and bat-sense skills.

I managed to get in a couple of hours getting to grips with the game and made reasonable progress. I got introduced to the fighting mechanics (initially rather basic, with an emphasis on combos that I have yet to properly master) and the idea of grappling and using the bat-vision element to find secret items and resolutions to puzzles. Throw in something of a pushover boss fight against some big mutant. . .

. . . and I felt like I had scratched the surface of something I was getting a good feel for. I have certainly enjoyed the sense of atmosphere and how well it’s captured the comic book Batman feel (as opposed to the moody Dark Knight interpretation). Seeing a prison cell dotted with green question marks of the Riddler, or a poster referencing the Penguin sent a tingle of excitement at all these vibrant, larger-than-life characters I may encounter within the walls of Arkham Asylum as the games goes on. All good, appetising stuff.

I also like the stealth attack elements. . .

. . . that lend the game a bit of a Metal Gear Solid element. Given how effortlessly Batman can be machine-gunned to death then it becomes necessary to employ tactics to taking down thugs with slick skills and precision attacks rather than just wading in mashing the square button. As much as it may have been irritating to die so rapidly, floundering, I can appreciate that it’s totally in keeping with the Batman-style and, once I master it (or, at least, get better at it) then I am sure it’ll prove very satisfactory.

So I finished my game session having defended my Batmobile from thugs.

Now I am on the hunt for Commissioner Gordon, but since I have found myself in the wide open space of the Island I imagine I’ll spare some time for exploration to check the place out for all the wonderful hidden clues and tapes and glyph stuff that, whilst being nothing more than just collectibles like in any other game, have a richness and a quality (such as the interview tapes) that make them worthwhile collecting for what they contain rather than just another extra number in the allotted quota.

There feels like a lot to sink my teeth into, and I am looking forward to tucking in. The ease of the game has made me wonder if I shouldn’t have dived right in on Hard level, but then it’s early days yet. And I have a feeling the Joker isn’t going to go down easily. . .

Not 100% Platinum

2010-11-20T03:40:00.000-08:00

So here’s a thing. I’ve had Enslaved ticking along in the background of my to-do list on account of the Tech Orbs in the game that needed collecting. They were the only thing left in the whole entire game that I had not done – the only thing standing between me and getting the Trophies 100% complete and a Platinum trophy for my efforts.

And so I turned my attention to working through the levels and collecting the damn things. And they are damnable things. Particularly on Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 which were all, for their various reasons, absolute pains to find all the Orbs for. (Other later Chapters, perversely, were far more linear and easier to get the full quota.)

I got it down to one last Chapter. Chapter 9. The one that ends in a pursuit of a big dog as it chases Trip.

I’ve done this level a couple of times already – once as part of the regular game, the second to get the Trophy for catching the dog in quick time, and so going through it again was starting to feel like something of a chore. And by God I lost track of the number of times I did that dog chase until I spotted a little cluster of orbs right near the end that I needed.

So I got them. Finished the level. Uh-oh. No Trophy.

Turns out there are still some left. Goddamn it! So I go back (later on, having had a break, a much-needed break) and tried again. Once more going through the entire level in a painstaking manner, checking if there was one or two I had missed despite feeling sure I had checked this level as thoroughly as humanly possible.

Turned out the remaining orbs I needed were on that dog chase bit at the end of the level, in some part over to the right off the fastest track. Jesus. So it’s past midnight, and I finally, finally get the last of the orbs and before the level is even complete those last two Trophies ping up on my screen.

I’ve done it! Platinum Trophy! 100% complete game.

Ah, actually, no. . .

Turns out that some new downloadable content is arriving for the game and as a consequence further trophies have been enabled for it and so, alas, I actually have completed just 83% of the Trophies! Unbelievable.

I don’t know much about this latest DLC but unless it gets a terrible panning or it costs a ridiculous amount then I’ll probably end up getting it. Maybe then I’ll restoresee Enslaved have a 100% alongside it!

Still, at least I got the Platinum. Another one, since my recent Dead Space glory, taking my grand haul of Platinum trophies up to 3! Woo!

Impossible Schmimpossible

2010-11-19T12:20:00.000-08:00

So apparently I did the ‘impossible’ and managed to complete Dead Space on the hardest difficulty – ‘impossible’. Colour me pleased with myself. And, whilst it’s not exactly been easy, it’s not really presented any sections that had me totally stumped. There were few places where I died and had to try them over again various times. Indeed, sometimes I would allow myself to die at some points just so I could do them again with better awareness and make sure I didn’t get injured.

Really the trick to beating it was careful management of weapons and ammo and ensuring that I never took too much damage at any given section.

That’s not to say it was all plain sailing, mind. The moment the levels switched up to the sections where the monsters go ‘dark’, and where they also move fast, then it ushered in a noticeable level of difficulty.

Particularly tough to kill in the latter stages of the game where the little leaper creatures with tentacles – sometimes hard to spot, capable of taking a lot of hits, and also able to inflict a lot of damage. They could be genuinely problematic, particularly when there were stacks of other monsters vying for my attention.

A bit, among many, where the place goes into lockdown and absolutely tons of monsters come piling in proved tough, for sure. . .

. . . but for a lot of the time the game was punctuated by sections I thought I would dread only for them to turn out to be not so bad. I was never a fan of Chapter 10 at any stage, though, mainly because that was the level that featured the regenerator creature. Any parts where you have to worry about a monster that can’t be killed whilst piles of other necromorphs are launching themselves at you are cause for concern.

But once through that nightmare section then the remainder of the game was not too bad at all. By the time I got to the last level I had fully upgraded my Plasma, my Force gun, my Rig and my Stasis module, and had enough to throw a Line gun into my arsenal and get that souped up. It was a wise move. The extra power of that gun saved my bacon where the plain old Plasma might have run out of ammo before it took down all the nasties.

The end boss was also refreshingly easy. I think it killed me once, but that was due to a mix up with me pressing the wrong button for my health when I got hit and hit again. A second go around and I had the thing taken down pretty swiftly.

It was so easy, in fact, that I could scarcely believe I had actually done it when I had done it, and it was only when the end sequence was occurring and the two last trophies of the game flicked up on the screen could I congratulate myself.

100%! Trophies all obtained! I have well and truly completed Dead Space. It’s an excellent game and makes me really look forward to the sequel due out early next year. Now, I suppose, I need to turn my attention to some other games that require more Trophy focus. . .

Facing My Fears

2010-11-13T11:16:00.000-08:00

The ongoing quest to complete Dead Space on Impossible mode continues. . . slowly. There’s no question that it’s a tough old slog, but not quite the ‘impossible’ label so far advertised!

I have just completed Chapter 6 which was definitely one I was not looking forward to. Having been through the game a few times there are a number of sections I can remember playing previously that weren’t exactly a joy on easier levels, on the Impossible mode my sense of dread was greatly increased. And Chapter 6 marked the appearance of the Leviathan boss.

I did it on my first go, though that’s really the only glorious statement I can make about it. I had no health packs left and had fired off a fair old whack of Plasma ammo at the thing to take it down. Indeed, during the last throes of the battles, I had almost consigned myself to having to do it again – and then the thing was dead! Luckily I have got supplies of ammo and health stored away so I am not completely stripped of assets after this encounter.

There have been various other tough moments. Encounters with a Brute were no laughing matter. . .

. . . particularly with a weak Plasma gun. That took all my Stasis and about two ammo clips. Again, further encounters with them aren’t anticipated with relish. And the section where I had to make a run through an air vacuum passed all kinds of nasties, including the regenerating beast, wasn’t fun going either.

But on the plus side I have been otherwise pleased with my progress. I feel like I have totally learned how to handle myself against all the monsters, keeping myself composed to try and make every shot count and positioning myself well when multiple enemies were around to ensure I wasn’t surrounded, or that I could even get a few multiple hits in (courtesy of my Force gun, the only other gun I am taking with me through the game on account of its effectiveness against the wall necromorphs).

I am really enjoying the game, though. Dead Space has, ironically, come to life by playing it through on the hardest difficulty. I don’t take anything for granted, and am thankful for every pickup and well-executed battle that takes place. Every Power Node is a Godsend!

And I am now halfway through. . . Oh there is much to dread yet!

Dead Impossible

2010-11-10T13:51:00.001-08:00

I’ve been meaning to take it on for ages. Ever since I completed the one-gun trophy challenge, and had gone through the game and got every other kind of Trophy that can be got, there was just one last trophy standing in the way of me and a 100% Platinum of Dead Space: completing the game on ‘Impossible’ mode.

I was under no illusions that this was going to be easy, and that became very quickly confirmed. My first encounter with a basic monster revealed it took about six shots to kill it. And that wasn’t me firing wildly – that was accurate, limb dismemberment with every shot counting. Oh yes, Dead Space on Impossible mode was not going to be a peace of cake. And you know what? I absolutely loved it.

Suddenly the game instilled some genuine tension and intensity again, like how it was the first time I played it. Now every time a necromorph appeared it was once again a genuine cause for alarm. Having to seriously watch my ammo meant every shot mattered, and if I could get away with using Stasis and melee attacks to save bullets then all the better. In Impossible mode it takes about two attacks from regular monsters to kill me. That’s brutal, and doubly makes every encounter a terror-inducing experience.

I recall playing the game on easier levels and having to backtrack to collect weapons and items having stashed some away at the Store. Not so this time. By the time I very nervously managed to get to the end of Chapter 1 my inventory had not been full once.

But as stated, I loved it. I loved how this fine game had been given a new lease of life and make me experience it (genuinely the right word, experience) anew; wide-eyed, senses primed – proper survival horror. And like a true horror, I dread having to go further in and face the worst – but if I am going to make it (and get that Trophy) then it’s what I’ve got to do. . .

In The Wars

2010-11-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

I wasn’t intending to be writing about this game, Mushroom Wars. See, Mrs. Comet (now on the brink of giving birth to my first Cometeer) has been sat around at home, bored and fed up, and wanted another type of simplistic, strategy game in a similar vein to Pixeljunk Monsters.

So I dutifully downloaded a few demos off PSN of potential games and, having had a quick go on some of them, landed on Mushroom Wars as being a decent game for Mrs. Comet to get to grips with.

And that was my intention. Leave her entirely to it. A whole game just for her. That was the plan.

Day one I returned home from work to a slightly exasperated Mrs. Comet who talked of how she had rattled through the first few levels and then had hit a difficult level which struck her as impossible and it had pissed her off. I told her she obviously must have missed something, to which she retorted that she’d like to see me play it and watch how I fared.

And that was how I got pulled into playing Mushroom Wars.

It is a deceptively simple game that houses a nightmarishly tough streak. Basically it’s a real time strategy war campaign – and that it utilises cute mushroom and alien-type figures only masks that truth. You start with a base mushroom that slowly generates soldiers, which you then send out to either capture unoccupied mushrooms, or enemy mushrooms. The more mushrooms you have, the more soldiers you generate. The more soldiers you have in a mushroom, the more options you have to change it into a tower that shoots approaching enemies, or a forge that improves the stats of your army.

The only hitch is that the enemy is doing the exact same thing, and they are hellbent on overwhelming your army and capturing all your territories.

The early tutorial levels do teach you the basics of soldier generation and attacking enemy territory, but where things get tough is in defending to build morale, or watching the enemies movements to spot weak points you can exploit; tactical positioning of towers, and striking the right balance between attack and defence are all crucial.

It’s compelling, if somewhat simplistic and occasionally frustrating, particularly on the tougher difficulty levels. How the enemy can somehow generates stacks of enemies, swarming on your strongholds and wiping out all your plans whilst you helplessly throw your soldiers into the mincer in a futile attempt at thwarting them. . . It's the stuff of despair. But, fundamentally, it’s about getting the tactics right, and some levels require the right approach – and only the right specific approach – to succeed.

Mrs. Comet, having seen me press on where she could not, soon picked the game back up and continued with the campaign. Occasionally she’d get stuck, and then pass me the controller to take a crack at it. Invariably I would get through. The last level, even on Easy, was a seriously tough undertaking, though. Trying to take down a giant spaceship that generated a hundred enemies every 10 seconds or so was not easy. It took a lot of attempts, and a lot of trial and error, to finally crack it – but I was ever so proud of myself when I did (not least of all for the gloating rights over Mrs. Comet at bettering something she had been unable to manage!).

There’s still plenty of game in there left. Completing the campaign on harder difficulties is one. And then there’s the game mode Skirmish, with its varying levels and game types, to be tackled. And the not insignificant matter of the two player game – pitting me against Mrs. Comet. We’ve played it a few times – me winning slightly more rounds than she. It’s basically a recipe for falling out with each other; it’s just soul destroying to see your efforts and armies become overwhelmed and conquered and then suffer the gleeful chuckling of the person who did it sitting right next to you!

Slave To The Machine

2010-10-31T06:30:00.000-07:00

A new first for me. The first time I have ever played a game brand new and set the difficulty on Hard immediately, and finished the thing. But that’s exactly what I did with Enslaved: Odyssey To The West. In terms of difficulty I would pitch the game on ‘Hard’ at a moderately challenging ‘Normal’ level for other games.

I wasn’t far from the end when I stopped my last session. Once I had control of a giant Mech (which did, admittedly, involve one heck of a long slog fight against countless Mechs as they tried to stop the power towers from working) it was a march into the desert to encounter a big pyramid and one last major boss fight against a massive scorpion-like beastie.

It was a very good last level, actually. Once I got to the final fight with the big bad monster the various stages of the battle were gruelling. I actually felt that sense of despair when the various tactics employed to defeat the thing kept failing. The sequence generated a real feel for urgency and crisis and overwhelming odds, and under that kind of pressure then making the crucial shots took some nerves. Trip and Pigsy yelling about how the shields were fading and the damn targets moving around and blocked from my aim, with each shot diminishing my limited ammo. . . Sheesh, that was some tense shit!

And then the ending. The ‘Epilogue’. (There are SPOILERS abound from here on in.)

I liked how the extended cutscene sequence at the end came completely out of left field to usher in a totally new dynamic to the plot and the game. The mystery behind Andy Serkis’ vision flashes was revealed, with it basically turning out to be that the slave headbands were used as a means to enslave people into existing in a Matrix-like way within the memories of this one man.

I was confused about whether the creepy old thing at the controls actually was once Andy Serkis, or whether it was something else that had adopted his memories. And I was also confused about how the Mechs were involved in this. Were the Mechs rounding up and enslaving humans to house them in the pyramid, placated in this dreamworld?

Maybe the Mechs didn’t just wipe out the human race as a means to annihilate everyone, more just to whittle them down to manageable numbers? Or was it that Andy Serkis’ character somehow managed to enslave the human race using the Mechs? Did he create them? And destroy the world?

Clearly there is scope left over for a sequel, but that will surely depend on how successful this game is. I did read something that likened Enslaved to the first Uncharted, and how it was that that Uncharted 2 came about in leaps and bounds superior than the first game. Such a concept could apply to Enslaved, where a refined and enlarged sequel could totally take the mechanics and styles applied here and really make something special.

I've not got my fingers crossed, and I've enjoyed Enslaved for what it was, but once I am done with the orbs and the masks to be collected then I can see little reason for re-play. So it's a good calling card, but whether this odyssey continues is a matter of 'to be continued'.

Slaving Away

2010-10-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

A second healthy session on Enslaved: Odyssey To The West really saw me making significant strides towards the finish line. In terms of plot I have discovered that Trip’s father is dead and this has shifted the mission objectives to one of revenge. I like the way that Monkey and Trip’s relationship has slowly evolved to the extent that he hasn’t flipped out about being forced to go with her even further to fulfill what she demands.

This relationship has taken a bit of a hit with the introduction of a third member of the party: Pigsy. There is some good interplay and simmering rivalry between Monkey and Pigsy which is entertaining to see, but it has come at the cost of lessening the development between Trip and Monkey – almost to the point where she has become a bit of a background character. I’m sure the game will address the matter, and it’s only a little niggle.

Because, let’s face it, it’s the game that matters. Enslaved hasn’t particularly thrown up anything to blow me away, but it’s sustained itself with that continued balance of fighting, platforming and shooting. I am still of the opinion that the jumping and fighting action isn’t as tight as it could be – particularly annoying being in ‘fight mode’ general running around isn’t as fast as it usually is – instead limited to hitting X to make pitiful dodge jumps away should you need to get some breathing room. I just think that’s an unnecessary pain.

The game has continued to be littered with great set pieces, though. A good shooting section, like a bit of a competition with Pigsy to take out enemies, saw me running around to grab ammo and cover and pick off the enemies strategically. It wasn’t easy (but then I am playing the game on hard!) but it was challenging fun in the right way. If I got shot and killed it was because I made mistake, not because the game mechanics unjustly cost me.

There was also a tough fight against a Rhino boss that culminated in a chase sequence (the second of these in the game) that had me looking at the game over screen plenty of times. Such moments, as well as an on-rails shooting sequence on a boat, serve to break up the action very well. It’s only in a recent trawl through a giant Mech factory, where I am up to now, that has become a little bit of a grind between jumping and climbing past pipes and fire vents that all feels a bit samey where the game has felt a bit tired, but there’s a lot more to like than there is to criticise.

And I still don’t know what the hell Andy Serkis’ face has to do with the whole thing.