Category Archives: Xbox

Best of 2012, Games, GOTY, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2012 #7: Sleeping Dogs

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Sleeping DogsChalk this up as the year’s biggest surprise, for sure. A troubled development and ambitious designs on a genre that few developers are talented enough to pull off rarely equals anything worth shouting about, and I don’t think any tears were shed when it was dropped by Activision and looked to be destined for a life spent filling retrospective articles about what might have been.

Frankly it would have been a surprise if Sleeping Dogs had come out at all, so the fact that it appeared and was as good as it turned out was shocking. It also subverted the received wisdom that urban crime games have to be set in the US to be a success, topping charts around the world.

It deserved it too. It was polished, the city made a nice change from New York or LA again, and both the hand-to-hand combat and gunplay took a dump on GTA’s routinely flaky equivalents. Really, if GTA comes out and is content to recycle the mediocre-at-best shooting of previous instalments – and there’s no excuse considering that its immediate predecessor in the Rockstar oeuvre is Max Payne 3 – it’ll deserve every negative comparison to Sleeping Dogs it gets.

United Front’s invention and love of genre film is continuing with the DLC – Asian horror and classic kung fu respectively – and hopefully this series will continue where its original home, Activision’s True Crime, looks to be left to die. There’s a joke in there about exploitation cinema somewhere.

Best of 2012, Games, GOTY, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2012 #8: Hitman: Absolution

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Hitman: AbsolutionFor its failures as a Hitman game, Absolution still tickled me as a stealth game. Splinter Cell – one of my favourite franchises of last generation – has made a habit of disappointing fans with ill-advised re-imaginings, Metal Gear hasn’t been about the stealth for a while now, and the late 90s fad for the genre had faded, leaving stealth fans as high and dry as hardcore Hitman fans must be now.

I wouldn’t class myself as one of them, having only played the superb Blood Money, so perhaps I was detached enough to enjoy Absolution for what it was rather than what I wanted it to be. It nailed the compulsive pursuit or perfection that I loved from classic Splinter Cell and threw in a handful – but only a handful – of the murder puzzles of previous Hitman games.

Credit is deserved as well for going against the disappointing trend of six-hour single-player campaigns with no replay value. Over 20 hours first time through is practically unheard of these days, and this genuinely does boast multiple solutions that are worth experiencing for the wealth of Easter eggs and humorous conversations to overhear. And you don’t even have to pay for DLC to get it all. Bravo, IO.

Even so, let’s have a proper Hitman game next time, though, eh?

Best of 2012, Games, GOTY, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2012 #9: Darksiders II

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Darksiders III hold up the Darksiders series as an example of the kind of game we don’t get any more. Both the games are solid, fun, polished B-tier adventures loaded with content of the sort that was ten-a-penny a generation or two ago, but the way the middle ground of developers has fallen out with increasing budgets required for a project of this size means it doesn’t happen any more.

Sadly, Darksiders II may end up going down as an example of why this is a dying breed. Unrealistic sales required to turn a profit coupled with THQ’s precarious finances will likely put paid to future instalments. A shame. But at least we have an Assassin’s Creed game every year to scratch that adventuring itch, right? Hey, come back!

Putting aside my opinion that a healthy industry needs more games like this, Darksiders II was a great game. Derivative, yes – it’s Zelda with Prince of Persia’s platforming and a loot system, essentially – but polished. It’s not as good as the original, though. I went through them back to back, and in that circumstance it’s glaring how the tight, focused adventure of Darksiders gave way to a stretched, bloated quest; the first world of Darksiders II is packed with things to do, and subsequent ones become increasingly sparse as you get the impression that the realities of having to populate a world this big caught up with the realities of Vigil’s ambitions and budget.

And then you hit Earth: one of the most ill-advised changes of tack in gaming history that would have been annoying even if it had been competently designed.

But this feature is about games I liked, damn it, so I need to stop being so negative. I really did like Darksiders II, despite the impression that the last couple of paragraphs might have given you, and it will be tragic if this is another planned series that got me invested before leaving me high and dry after only two. God, I’m having flashbacks.

Best of 2012, Games, iOS, Nintendo, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2012

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This really hasn’t been a good year for gaming. Not completely without merit, as I’ve discussed, but to call it barren would be an understatement, and what we got was often the safe, boring blockbusters that herald the closing months of a console generation. An artificially extended generation spreads them that much more thin, like butter spread over too much bread. Sorry, I’ve got Tolkien on the brain.

As always, to be included the games must have been played by me for the first time and released somewhere in calendar 2012. A few regrettable omissions that I’m yet to play, including Journey, Borderlands 2, Dishonored and Max Payne 3, but such gaps can be filled by some fantastic indie games that might not otherwise get a look in. Those games aren’t going to be lacking for GOTY awards.

Check out my lists from previous years while you’re here. I stand by them.

Games, Impressions, iOS, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

The Walking Dead

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It always seems to happen this time of year. There I am, happily whittling down my annual game of the year list, and then something comes along and throws it all off. Usually it’s a Christmas present or an acquisition in the new year sales that now seem to start at some point in mid-December, but occasionally it’s a game I overlooked that is suddenly being showered with accolades. I’d heard good things about Telltale Games‘ adaptation of The Walking Dead, but with its previous adventures frequently falling short of the promise of the subject matter – some being significantly better than others – I was content to wait for the inevitable Steam sale appearance.

The Walking Dead

The recent plaudits pushed that schedule forward, however, and I’ve been playing through an episode at a time over the last few days – as with watching a TV series on DVD, I find that to be a much more agreeable way to experience an episodic story.

It’s strange, because all those point-and-click classics are known for enjoyably obtuse puzzling and a great sense of humour, and this doesn’t really have either. There are puzzles and there are funny bits, sure, but neither is the main impetus behind progression. This is one of the great modern examples of pure interactive storytelling, as if a point-and-click adventure got spliced with one of those visual novels that occasionally makes it over from Japan. Continue reading The Walking Dead →

Games, Impressions, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Hitman: Absolution

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I adored Hitman: Blood Money. That it took this long to get a follow-up when the series hit so frequently last generation has made the wait almost painful, and the occasionally mismanaged PR campaign that only recently actually, you know, started showing something resembling Hitman, has sometimes twisted the knife.

Now that I’ve finished it, I can say that it’s not a very good Hitman game.

Hitman: Absolution

That said, it’s still an excellent game. In a generation when two other previously prolific stealth series, Metal Gear and Splinter Cell, have been frustratingly quiet, this is one of the best examples of that genre in ages.

In response to criticism that Absolution didn’t look like Hitman, IO released demos of two levels: King of Chinatown and Streets of Hope. These raised expectations because they genuinely looked like proper Hitman, and when you play them you’ll see that they are. You have targets, a small area to run around in, and countless ways to improvise murders – the archetypical ‘murder puzzle’ that have enraptured so many fans. They’re brilliant.

However, they also pretty much represent half of the traditional Hitman levels in the whole game. Every other one has you being hunted by police, mercenaries or, yes, sexy nuns. Some don’t involve killing at all unless you’re playing it wrong. One starts off with you having free run of the level and having to find creative ways into a restricted area – so far, so good – after which you’ll have to sneak your way around crowds of corrupt police before mercenaries arrive and you spend the rest of the sequence fighting or avoiding them.

The way certain enemies can see through them leads to ludicrous spells of spinning on the spot to break line of sight from all directions. On one level, enemy mercenaries will see through your armour with a full face mask unless you burn instinct to blend in, but in another you can nick the clothes of the defendant in court and impersonate him, with the police, judge and clerks oblivious to the fact that a guy who they’re evidently familiar with completely changed appearance in the five-minute toilet break. Being kitted out like one of hundreds of mercenaries will be seen through as soon as you run out of instinct, but dressing as a scarecrow and hanging yourself from a cross is an apparently impenetrable ruse. It’s frustratingly inconsistent.

But like I said, it’s a great stealth game, and if that sounds appealing you’ll have a great time. After all, if your objective is to hide from enemies and disguises are reduced to a last resort, it ceases to be much of a problem. IO also deserves credit in this time of £40 six-hour epics for crafting a game with a huge amount of content, with a campaign that took me over 20 hours on hard, a ton of levels, ridiculous quantities of Easter eggs and incidental dialogue that are frequently genuinely funny, and all without even touching the promising Contracts mode. A meaty single-player game without shoehorned-in multiplayer? Whatever next?

I just hope that now that IO has the need to tell this story out of its system, the next one will be content to plonk Agent 47 in an interesting situation and tell him who to kill.