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?

Editorials, Games, Impressions, iOS, Tech

Apple’s Game Center

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It’s become a fixture of any Apple conference involving the iOS devices that there will be some chart explaining how it’s a bigger portable gaming platform than anything from Nintendo or Sony, and more often than not it’s laughed off. Just because a phone and/or MP3 player plays games, that doesn’t make it a games console, after all, no matter how impressive the numbers might be.

With yesterday’s release of iOS 4.1 and with it Game Center, Apple’s made quite a significant move, issuing an admittedly limited but still promising gaming network, and the first on a portable gaming system that comes close to the ubiquity of Xbox Live and PSN. It’s arguably even more so, given that you have an essentially permanent connection through which to manage your friends and achievements – the current PSP and DS hardware wouldn’t be able to equal it in that respect even if they tried.

At this early stage Game Center is pretty bare bones, below even existing third-party attempts like OpenFeint and Plus+ in features and support, but it’s the ubiquity that makes it a big deal. That and the fact that it’s really Apple’s first ever move into the gaming market. Now every one of those 230,000 new iOS devices activated each day has a bona fide gaming network built in, and although not everyone will use them for games, the 120 million iOS devices sold since 2007 shits all over the records of any console ever – going by these figures, only two consoles have ever exceeded that mark, and both of those did it with more than a decade on the market.

Many gamers will, of course, never take it that seriously. Gaming on iOS is a secondary feature, and it’s a secondary feature on a portable, which some stubbornly refuse to give the credit of the ‘real’ consoles no matter what huge franchises turn up on them. I can definitely see that perspective for iPhone games, as many attempts to cram existing games onto the touch controls make early attempts at putting an FPS on the PSP feel like a mouse and keyboard, but it’s still the first go-anywhere system with an always-on Internet connection and a proven digital distribution model – it’s the kind of thing that only a few years ago we’d fantasise about future consoles doing, and it got in by the back door.

Is the iPhone going to kill the 3DS before it even gets to market? No, of course not. It’s going to be a serious player, though; I’m sure of it. It’s already everywhere, it’s been shown to be a graphical powerhouse, and games are dirt cheap. You won’t see its impact in the charts, which makes it something of an oddity, but expect impressive graphs when Steve Jobs steps out on stage in January.

Games, Impressions, iOS

DoDonPachi Resurrection

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Although I’ve got a handful in my collection, I’m far from a shmup maven like some of my friends are. It’s one of those things that I just don’t ‘get’. Things like Radiant Silvergun are at least fair, but shooters of the bullet hell variety – check out this example from Mushihime-sama – are pure masochism. I can’t see where the fun comes from in something like that.

Nonetheless, I picked up DoDonPachi Resurrection at its special launch price for the iPhone version, having been impressed with the demo of Espgaluda II, and I must say it’s blown me away. This is a relatively recent arcade game that’s due for an Xbox 360 port later in the year, and the kind of thing that hardcore players would have complained that fairly recent systems couldn’t duplicate, and I’m playing a fine version with online leaderboards and assorted playing modes on my phone. I’ve made such an exclamation whenever the iPhone does something remotely impressive, but it still keeps managing to surprise me.

Even at its new price of £5.49, I have to recommend this as one of my favourite iPhone games. It’s a wonderful conversion of a really brilliant game, and even at that price, this is a game that’s good enough to justify a full-price 360 release in November. Even for people who find bullet hell shooters impenetrable, this version manages to be extremely accessible thanks to the 1:1 touch controls, making fine movements easier and your ship capable of much faster motion than will be possible with a joystick. Purists might complain that this makes it something of a Fisher-Price version, but as someone who, you know, plays games to have a good time, you’ll get no such grievances from me.

Look me up on the OpenFeint leaderboards if you’re a fan – the name is, as always, NekoFever.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Limbo

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Limbo is one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. You could pick any number of arty independent games to compare it to – Braid is the lazy, obvious one that I bet will turn up in countless reviews, but I think And Yet It Moves and Rorschach are closer to the mark – but take a moment to just look at it…

It’s gorgeous. Dark, bleak and atmospheric, feeding the sense of foreboding with the visuals as you’re never quite sure whether that movement at the edge of the screen is just smoke or the limb of a giant spider.

It’s a hard, almost impossible game to finish without dying, but that’s like a learning experience. It’s even more intrinsic to the gameplay than, say, Demon’s Souls; whereas that was an arse about it, it’s a joke in this game, which will gleefully trip you up and put you back a few steps with no penalty and the knowledge of how to bypass the next trap. The perfect example comes about a third of the way in, when what looks like a suspiciously obvious plunger beneath a large press – obviously that’s going to trigger it to drop and crush you, you’d think – turns out to be the safe spot as the innocuous-looking ground turns out to be what will kill you.

That’s funny to me, but what made me laugh out loud was that this mini-puzzle was immediately followed by an almost identical one, except on this one the plunger was the trigger, crushing you if you made the obvious assumption that both were set up the same. It’s emblematic of the dark humour that permeates every aspect of the game, from its visuals to its gameplay.

Limbo isn’t a long game, but it’s only a bit over a tenner, and I don’t have a problem paying that much for such a great, unique little experience. I highly recommend it because, like Braid, this sort of thing deserves support. A lot of love – and a bit of hate, quite possibly – went into this game.

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 →

Editorials, Tech

The iPhone 4 Reception Issue

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I queued up early in the morning of its release to get my iPhone 4 on day one – the first time I’ve done that for anything. Let that be a measure of how much I wanted this phone, the proper successor to the iPhone 3G that’s become an extension of me over the last two years. I’m an Apple fan in general, typing this on my faithful old MacBook Pro that will probably be replaced with a newer model of the same thing later this year, but I’m not big enough of a fan to drink the Kool-Aid on this one.

There is clearly an issue with the iPhone 4’s antenna design when it comes into contact with human skin, and while it has a negligible effect in places with a strong 3G signal, anywhere that doesn’t show up the full five bars – like, say, my flat, or anywhere that isn’t Cupertino – runs a serious risk of dropping the signal completely.

I was willing to wait on a firmware update that could mitigate the problem somehow, even as the possibility of that looked more remote with each controlled test that demonstrated the problem, and I would have accepted an admission that the design was flawed and a free bumper, but Apple’s head-in-the-sand attitude was taking the piss, and the recent press release on the matter was a joke too far.

Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don’t know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

To fix this, we are adopting AT&T’s recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone’s bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area.

Obi-Wan Kenobi would be proud of Apple’s attempt to hand-wave the issue away there. It’s admitting that there’s a problem with the iPhone’s reception and promising a software fix, but ignoring the fact that holding the iPhone 4 in the ‘wrong’ way will still drop the connection if you’re in less than ideal conditions. Whether I’m going from four bars to none or a more accurate two bars to none, I still end up with none. That means no calls, no texts, no email, no Internet, and a pretty crap phone.

But hey! Spend £25 on a ring of plastic – already a significant hike on the $30 US price – and Apple will solve the issue for you. Brilliant…

I know it’s embarrassing, and I know it’s potentially expensive, but this is an unacceptable design flaw that could have been solved without any aesthetic ill-effects with something as simple as a coating of nail polish on the metal parts – and I’m sure that Apple could come up with a less kludgy solution. I like Apple’s products, but I hope that one of the inevitable lawsuits forces it into addressing the fundamental problem with its new phone. The handling of this debacle has been nothing short of appalling, and when word of mouth gets around about how bad the iPhone 4 is at sustaining a workable signal because you had the temerity to touch the outer casing, I hope it does some damage to the iPhone brand. Tough love is apparently the only way that corporations will learn.

I’m going to wait and see for now. It’s under warranty and if there’s a fundamental problem it will come out soon enough. Let’s just hope that it doesn’t take as long to be solved as the red ring of death did.