Category Archives: PlayStation

Best of 2010, Games, GOTY, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2010 #7: Call of Duty: Black Ops

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Call of Duty: Black OpsIt may be fashionable to hate this series and, frankly, quite sensible to hurl some well-deserved opprobrium at Activision, but there’s still nothing better when it comes to the Michael Bay style of action. While Halo is, I maintain, better at actually engaging the brain, Call of Duty is still the place to go for a shot of adrenaline.

And with Black Ops, Treyarch is the closest yet to creating a game that stands up to Infinity Ward’s offerings. The series’ high points, Call of Duty 2 and 4, still stand head and shoulders above the rest, and yes, the plot is spectacularly stupid, but I had a lot of fun with it. Even though I mourn the apparent death of the series’ realistic bent, the campaign is well put together and I’ve probably had more fun with the multiplayer than I have since those heady days when the scope of COD4’s popularity was becoming evident.

It even improves on Modern Warfare 2’s extensive package in areas where fans complained, showing that in Treyarch we might have a competent developer that mercifully lacks the hubris of its related companies. Dedicated servers? No prescriptive ‘we know better’ comments from the studio – Treyarch just did it. It’s almost endearing.

Even if I’ll never be happy with Activision’s insistence on “exploiting” the franchise on a yearly basis – maybe more in 2011 – if standards are maintained and the games can continue to move forward, I’ll be content to drop my £40 each year. Just please don’t make it more than that.

Best of 2010, Games, GOTY, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2010 #8: Pac-Man Championship Edition DX

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Pac-Man Championship Edition DXGiven that I had precisely zero expectations about this game, and that I only raised my head from my desk in the office to look at it after someone announced that they had unlocked all of its achievements within a couple of hours – I’m still a bit of a whore like that – it must win an award for being a stealth hit. Perfect scores and nights spent trying to one-up friends followed, making it probably the best and most-played score-attack game since the original Geometry Wars.

It’s simple and beautiful, and painfully, painfully addictive, and games like this make me thankful that this kind of thing has been given a revival in the era of online leaderboards, which is the most relevant they’ve been since the original Pac-Man was in the arcades. While the implementation of leaderboards falls short of the high water mark, Geometry Wars 2, this game rivals that one for content and certainly beats it for competitive high scores.

When I play Geometry Wars and look at the top of the rankings, I know I’m never getting up there. In Pac-Man, on the other hand, I’m only a few hundred thousand and, judging by the replays, a couple of eliminated mistakes and some route optimisation short of the top, so small are the margins for error. Let’s be honest: I’ll still never get there, but at least this lets me feel like I’m in with a chance of getting that carrot.

Best of 2010, Games, GOTY, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2010 #10: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

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Castlevania: Lords of ShadowMany talk about how unexpected this was, given the series’, shall we say, inconsistent relationship with the third dimension, but in reality there was no time like the present. The ongoing commercial success of the God of War series and a spate of critically acclaimed games in the genre showed that there was a viable blueprint to follow, and with that, all it needed was some talent.

That’s Hideo Kojima explained, so perhaps the choice of MercurySteam as developer was the big surprise. Regardless, the Spanish dev did what Rocksteady Studios did with Batman: Arkham Asylum last year by unleashing a game on the world that exceeded all expectations, both in its own right and as a reflection of the developer’s pedigree.

Lords of Shadow isn’t particularly original, liberally borrowing from myriad similar games and also anything else that took the designers’ fancy: Pan straight out of Pan’s Labyrinth, an extremely familiar battle against an Ice Colossus Titan that immediately follows, and nods like a trip inside the Great Dekuh Tree – and those are all within the first couple of hours. Regardless, it’s a highly competent game, dripping with atmosphere and putting those high production values that are the mark of Kojima’s involvement to good use for some stunning environments and quality storytelling.

Word on the grapevine is that a sequel will be announced in 2011. With the hard reboot stuff out of the way, give me this with an appearance by a certain dark lord and I’ll be queuing up to indulge.

Best of 2010, Games, GOTY, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2010

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That’s another year down, and the sixth since I started doing this thing. It’s hardly seemed like a vintage year for gaming, to be honest, but looking back on my highly classified text document in which I keep track of anything that might be worthy of this list from 1st January until now, I was reminded of the Call of Duty effect, which resulted in some of 2010’s best games fleeing the Christmas bloodbath to be equally squeezed out in the year’s early months. Hopefully it’s not a trend, even if this year looks similar. We just have to hope that Activision bleeds COD dry as quickly as it did Guitar Hero, I guess.

So anyway, usual rules apply: any game that was released somewhere in the world in the calendar year 2010 is eligible and… that’s it. In fact, I might be abusing the ‘somewhere in the world’ rule to sneak in a game that I neglected last year. We’ll just have to wait and see.

My lists for 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Editorials, Games, Impressions, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Black Ops: Dumbest Plot Ever

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Seriously, for a game that’s following Modern Warfare 2, that’s saying something.

When this was announced, and given its historical setting, I expected Treyarch to have a bit of fun with the story, but to generally keep it within the bounds of plausibility. Maybe use the Vietnam levels for all-out action, and then be a bit clever with the other ones, having you sneaking into Soviet territory for low-key deniable ops of the kind that the series has done so well before.

What I didn’t expect was full-on invasions of Russia involving deadly chemical weapons, JFK conspiracy theories, a gulag escape involving a minigun – with those in prison camp cupboards, it’s no wonder the Soviet Union fell – and what is essentially the plot of The Manchurian Candidate. And that’s without mentioning the dream characters.

For all the outrageous stupidity of Modern Warfare 2’s plot, that at least had the defence of a near-future setting, but a Call of Duty in a historical scenario has come a long way – backwards, in my opinion – from the days of COD and COD2, when the emphasis was on being a grunt in a unit of grunts, rather than a special forces superhero. That was what the series was supposed to be a move away from, because it’s what everyone else was doing.

Still, good game, isn’t it?

Games, Impressions, PlayStation

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

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The Metal Gear series gets a lot of criticism for its labyrinthine story and ridiculous plot twists – AIs controlling the world by filtering the Internet, anyone? – and I’m no huge fan of it either, but my time with Peace Walker has convinced me of something.

Like how Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is the real main character in Star Wars, the key player in Metal Gear is not Solid Snake but his ‘father’ and frequent antagonist Big Boss. Considering Kojima’s love of pop culture the similarities in structure can’t be a coincidence – great warrior with good intentions is manipulated into evil, while his son defeats the super weapons of the true villain’s powerful organisation before reconciling with the father shortly before the father’s death – but unlike Star Wars, I actually far prefer the prequels in the Metal Gear Solid series.

Snake Eater is the first stop, which is by far my favourite game of the lot. In its Subsistence form with a competent camera, at least – it’s not a coincidence that every MGS game since then has used it – it offers some restraint in its story, a Cold War setting where the series’ brand of nuclear paranoia makes sense, features some of the best boss battles in the series, infinitely more interesting environments than the generic warehouses of Solid Snake’s adventures, and, in Naked Snake and The Boss, has the series’ two best characters. Not to mention my favourite ending in any game ever.

The previous PSP game, Portable Ops, didn’t really do it for me, but Peace Walker is built as a full-on entry in the series that would be as at home on a home console as it is on the PSP. It was originally going to be Metal Gear Solid 5, in fact, but don’t let its demotion from the main series line-up make you believe that it’s any less than those entries. It’s up there with MGS3 in my opinion, and everyone should play it. Continue reading Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker →