Best of 2011, Games, GOTY, Xbox

Best of 2011 #10: Gears of War 3

Leave a comment

My enjoyment of the Gears series up to this point is such that Gears 3 is deserving of a position on this list, even if the overriding impression that I was left with was disappointment. That’s unfortunate, because it wasn’t the fault of the game itself – that was as strong as ever – but rather the anticlimax of a finale. In retrospect, both its predecessors ended on notes that swung between frustrating and insultingly simple, so perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, but to leave so many unanswered questions was just messy and felt like a lazy setup for inevitable returns to this universe.

Frankly, though, who plays Gears for the story? Its narrative accomplishments can be counted on one hand, and one of those is serving as a mildly distracting vessel for what is still the benchmark in this third-person cover shooting sub-genre. Although I didn’t think that Gears 3 was the series’ high point, mainly thanks to some flirtations with almost Halo-style, more open battlefields that really didn’t work for me, it had a lot of great ideas and a mercifully more diverse graphical style. The latter went a long way towards making the game feel like less of a stereotype than its characters frequently did.

With three of these games in a generation, though, I don’t feel like there’s more to be said with this franchise for a while. It’s the right time to leave it alone until there are some worthwhile new ideas, hence this one’s diminished standing in this list when compared to its predecessors. Still one of the best action series of this generation, then, given a send-off that slightly underwhelms.

Best of 2011, Games, GOTY, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2011

Leave a comment

For what has been hailed as a vintage year for gaming, 2011 sure took a long time to get going. It was only a couple of months ago that I’d purchased a grand total of two games that didn’t come from the App Store, and then we had a big game a week for a while there, putting ridiculous strain on the funds of any gamer. There was recently a comment from Activision’s Eric Hirshberg on the entirely manufactured and unnecessary ‘rivalry’ between Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 that I think the whole industry could take note of:

“We shouldn’t be tearing each other apart fighting for a bigger piece of the pie – we should all be focused on trying to grow a bigger pie.”

Not everyone has the money or dedication to spend hundreds in a single month to play everything, and it’ll suck the industry dry for every company that doesn’t have a billion-dollar marketing budget. So how about spreading the love a bit, even if it means making the spring into Christmas-lite?

As always, any game that was released somewhere in the world and was played by me for the first time in 2011 is eligible for the list, starting tomorrow, even though there are a few notables that are excluded on this basis. And for reference, here are my lists for 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Games, Impressions, PlayStation

Uncharted 3 is Way Overrated

5 Comments

This is an industry with a media that seems built on hyperbole, and the embarrassment of riches that the last month has brought us has taken it to new heights. Arkham City was one example, even inspiring some hacks to further undermine review scores with hyperbolic trash like this, but I found it hard to get too riled up when the game turned out to actually be bloody amazing.

When it came to Uncharted 3, though, I just don’t see it. Perhaps the urge to come out against it is a reaction to the utter insanity provoked within the community by some very reasonable criticism of an apparent sacred cow, or maybe I’m right, thanks to having the unusual ability to look beyond the phenomenally pretty graphics and be put off by PS2-era design issues that have no business being in such a supposedly polished, modern game.

Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception

Opinions, eh? Yeah, fair enough, but I’d love someone to argue in favour of Uncharted’s pathetic enemy AI. I thought that old trick of all enemies suddenly gaining omniscience as to your position as soon as one of them is alerted had died out around the time of Metal Gear Solid, but it apparently stowed away on the trip from the 90s when Naughty Dog was dragging Indiana Jones into the present. Otherwise quite competent stealth sequences take a nosedive if you’re spotted, as laser sights converge on your hiding place after someone caught a glimpse of you 20 feet from your current hiding place. Dive under water and swim away, climbing up on the far side of a boat where no one can see you should help, right? Nope. They all know where you’ve gone.

But, hey, if the fight descends into carnage you can always just shoot them. Oh, wait. The gunplay is shit too thanks to inconsistent aiming and enemies who seem to shrug off headshots before dying from a bullet to the arm. The janky aiming has been acknowledged by Naughty Dog and will supposedly be changed to something more like Uncharted 2 – I’ve never been a fan of the shooting in these games, mind – in a patch, but how does it even make it into the final game? What wasn’t great has been broken.

One other complaint is one that’s more endemic to the game, though. Uncharted 3 is extremely linear, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing because I love a rollercoaster ride of a game as much as anyone, it does a terrible job of hiding the tracks along the way. It’s inconsistent in corralling you onto the right route, making what looks like a viable path – or evenslightly to the left or right of the one true path – result in a quick trip back to the last checkpoint. I’ve even had bits where an attempt to drop an entirely safe distance to the ground results in instant death, while scripted falls from much higher are taken in Drake’s stride. I’ve always treated Uncharted as a bit like the post-2003 Prince of Persia games, being great platformers once you get past the annoyance of substandard combat, but I felt like Uncharted 3 wasn’t nearly as solid in that respect as its predecessors.

My last complaint is a spoiler, so I’ll keep it brief and advise anyone who hasn’t finished the game to stop reading.

Besides the fact that fighting Ghost Rider is frustrating as hell when piled on top of the issues with the game’s combat, am I the only one who thought the game’s final act was Uncharted 2’s all over again? Swap the train ride for the admittedly awesome horseback chase; throw in another the lost city that’s somehow never been spotted from the air despite sitting in the middle of a perpetual sandstorm – an able substitute for Uncharted 2’s blizzards – full of annoying, apparently supernatural enemies; and then the escape by the skin of your teeth as it collapses around you with all of its treasures. Haven’t we been here before?

I didn’t hate Uncharted 3, as much as I might seem down on it; maybe it was inevitably going to disappoint after such staggering highs as Uncharted 2. I can’t escape the feeling that this was somewhat rushed, perhaps with Naughty Dog working on its new project, which, based on its existing pattern, will surely be Unkarted.

Books, Impressions

BioShock: Rapture – A Review

Leave a comment

BioShock: Rapture Tasked with lifting a story saddled with Ayn Rand philosophy above the levels of mediocrity that many videogame tie-in novels can only hope to achieve, it’s hard to believe that John Shirley had a chance.

The tale of Rapture’s inception, construction and fall contains some interesting moments, but the best of them have already been heard in the game’s audio diaries, only stretched beyond the breaking point to fill a chapter rather than a 30-second audio clip. By the end almost every event has been taken from them, even going so far as to paste the dialogue from them in verbatim, leaving few surprises for anyone who was paying attention when they played through the original.

Characters who worked as enigmatic cameos feel like parodies when they and their philosophies are expanded like this; a feeling only enhanced by the author’s bizarre insistence on rendering every verbal tic and dialect on the page. Bill McDonagh, for example, is a working class bloke from Lahndahn, and then you’ve got the guido stereotypes for New York gangsters and, just in case you forget that the book is set in the 1940s, it’s loaded with deliberate archaisms so that people actually use words like ‘swell’.

Even if Andrew Ryan was less a nuanced personality and more a… well, an Ayn Rand character in the game, here he’s a pantomime villain. He takes every single opportunity to start monologuing about parasites, taxes and the Great Chain™. Within the first chapter he compares, completely without irony, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to socialism, and it’s downhill from there.

Fontaine, too, if he has a moustache would spend every scene twirling it. His character is built from the big book of villainous cliches, with an uncanny gift for disguise thanks to being brought up in the circus. No, really…

One thing the book does share with the games is that the true star is Rapture itself, and for those who gorged themselves on the details in things like the BioShock 2 ARG, the material here will delight. It still doesn’t make much sense if you think too hard about it, but moments like seeing the undersea city for the first time are nearly as potent as they were when you saw it for yourself. The game’s opening is still one of the best ever, and the book enjoys some of the reflected glory.

It’s not enough, though. The narrative and visuals in the games were strong enough to make you forgive some occasionally clunky mechanics, but this is just a bad reprise weighed down by dialogue and character development from a bad fan fiction. Fans will find a lot more canonical depth by spending a few hours exploring the BioShock Wiki.

Games, Impressions, PlayStation

LTTP: Heavy Rain

Leave a comment

Like many people who played it, I really enjoyed Fahrenheit, David Cage’s previous attempt at fulfilling his noble ambition of moving storytelling in games beyond the infantile nonsense that it defaults to. That is, I enjoyed it until it went completely off the rails.

That game’s most impressive achievement was the speed with which it tossed aside a brilliant opening, brimming with possibilities, and completely lost it. As far ahead of most games at the time as the cut-scene direction was, it didn’t take long for me to stop enjoying them because I had to spend their running time staring at two little on-screen prompts, and don’t even get me started on the plot machinations. Just baffling.

Heavy Rain

My disappointment with Fahrenheit was perhaps the main reason why I skipped Heavy Rain on its release. I’d heard all the promises before, and even today I put Cage, up there with Peter Molyneux on the scale of bullshit. I’m so used to being let down by their unfulfilled promises that I have a mental filter on everything they say, treating it as a joke that I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it turns out to be even close to reality. It’s like the racist uncle who you just nod your head and smile at, because you stopped actually listening to them years ago.

Once I sat down to play it, though, I quickly realised how much better this is. Some odd pacing and a flawed interface aside – how about telling me what a given selection of stick motions are going to do instead of giving me one chance to make the ‘right’ choice? – it’s more mature than Fahrenheit and seems to be evidence that Cage has finally learned some restraint.

I’m still not convinced that this is the future of in-game storytelling, however. Putting aside the actual content of the plot, which is admittedly better than most games but still far below the standard of the best available in other media, Heavy Rain is still far more of an ‘interactive movie’ than it is a game. You can spend all the time in the world on brilliant animation, voice acting and careful choreography, but it does nothing for games when all of these awesome action sequences are QTEs. I’m not entirely averse to this mechanic – God knows I go on about Shenmue enough – but I’m not going to pretend that it does anything for gameplay design, which is the reason we’re playing games rather than watching movies.

Quibbles aside, Heavy Rain is well worth experiencing. It’s just that it reinforces my opinion that while trying to advance narrative in games is certainly admirable, copying the conventions of Hollywood too closely simply dilutes what makes games special. And for all its ambitions, my recent playthrough of the Half-Life 2 games suggests that maybe it’s barking up the wrong tree.

A decent game, but it would be a better movie. Pick one and stick to it.

Editorials, Games

Losing My Religion

2 Comments

Even beyond the mediocre showings from the platform holders, this year’s E3 was bad. It’s the first time in many years that I’ve come away from the show without a single new game added to my wish list for the year, and although my preorder list for the rest of 2011 is impressive, they’re all in the September-November window and are never going to command my full attention with that much competition. We’re now more or less halfway through the year and I’ve bought one new retail game.

Without a gaming PC to take advantage of the resurgence there I’m in a console generation that feels like it’s running on fumes when the last one was producing some of its best stuff, and we’re firmly in the transitional period between the introduction of new hardware, which seems to be getting a tepid reaction so far, and unwanted attempts to keep the older systems on life support. Announcements that would have had me dancing in the streets a few years ago now barely register, and a big number on the gaming folder in my RSS reader will have me reaching for the ‘mark all as read’ button rather than settling down to pore over what’s new.

As silly as it sounds when games like Uncharted 3, Skyrim and Dark Souls will soon be upon us, I really feel like I’m falling out of love with gaming. It’s something that’s been an important part of my life for a couple of decades and it just seems to slowly be slipping away with barely a whimper.

Those certain classics might salvage something for this year, but it feels like papering over the cracks. It’s like Transformers 3, ending with something spectacular to make people forget the shitfest they just sat through and leave with a smile on their face.

Is it just me, or is something broken? Maybe I’m just too close to things now and I liked it better when I was on the outside looking in? Maybe everyone’s decided to write this generation off and try harder next time? It certainly feels that way when well over half of my purchases so far in 2011 have been bargain-priced games from the last few years that I missed out on when they came out. I like Civilization V, Undead Nightmare, Heavy Rain and Half-Life 2: Episode Two, but they’re not going to fill up my GOTY list come December and they certainly what I was expecting to be filling my gaming time with at the turn of the year.

I hope I’m just being dramatic, but still, the next generation can’t come soon enough.