Tag Archives: Xbox 360

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, 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, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox

E3 2010 Conference Review

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It’s E3 again! That means broken promises, broken hearts, betrayal, disappointment, and that’s just when there’s a World Cup match on. For reference, check out my report cards for 2007, 2008 and 2009.

So without further ado, in chronological order…

Microsoft

To be honest, I got exactly what I expected from Microsoft. We all knew that there was going to be a huge focus on Natal Kinect and that was borne out. It’s undeniably technically impressive, but the lineup doesn’t interest me in the slightest so far. My antipathy towards the Wii is no real secret, and so it’s going to take something special, likely from an established developer known for great ‘normal’ games, but for the time being I’m happy to be an observer. I can see people who are in the intended audience being really impressed by it.

If we’re talking stuff outside hardcore games, ESPN was the most impressive thing. It’s almost certainly not coming here, but it’s potentially the definitive way to watch sports, and it’s included in an existing Xbox Live subscription. I’m a football fan, and having a library of classic matches as well as HD streaming live stuff with all those community features would be fantastic. Imagine getting a similar thing with the BBC iPlayer, for example.

As for the real games, there weren’t really any surprises for the most part, but what I saw impressed me. Gears 3 looked like Gears 3, and Halo: Reach really looked like a proper next-gen Halo game. Crytek is apparently making a God of War game as well, and MGS: Rising looked decent, albeit like it’s reviving something that should now be finished with. That interests me still, as even if it’s part of a genre that I don’t often get on with, those cutting mechanics look incredibly cool. Could be some real potential there.

Echoes of Sega’s E3 1995 Saturn announcement with the unveiling of the new machine, which perhaps isn’t the kind of memories to be dredging up, but you can’t deny the effectiveness of showing off the reduced size of your redesign by having it on stage inside the old one the whole time. It’s been much-needed on the technical side for a while, and I’ll certainly be tempted to upgrade at the next price drop. I’m liking the look of it, actually.

But the overall impression was underwhelming. Halo: Reach was the only game that really got me excited, and that’s… well, Halo. A Halo game that was announced over a year ago and that most of us have already played, in fact. I’m writing this section on Monday night before either of the other two conferences so I could be proven completely wrong here, but I expect Nintendo and Sony to blow away the paltry number of new announcements to appeal to gamers, and they’ll almost certainly be exclusives, which Call of Duty and Metal Gear Solid aren’t. There was a lot of flash there for really not that many new games for 2010 and 2011.

So a fairly unimpressive line-up of new games with some intriguing but unproven technology means that this conference scores a…

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Games, Impressions, PlayStation, Xbox

Rockstar Redeemed

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I finished Red Dead Redemption yesterday, and wow, Rockstar’s outdone itself on that one. I loved GTA IV and its expansions, but Red Dead was more mature, more beautiful, more poignant, and something that I want to see more of. Free-roaming games of this type are wasted on yet another modern crime spree, and I hope that this is enough of a success to see more interesting historical periods mined for their gaming goodness.

It’s stunningly beautiful at times, as striking as any of the great vistas thrown up in the open-world games this generation. Towards the end I saw a sunrise over the water at the town of Blackwater and had to stop and admire the view, and there are countless little places to sit on your horse and do so – the hints of the landmarks of Mexico that are visible from Rio Bravo, the view across all of Cholla Springs from the cliffs of Hennigan’s Stead, taking in the entirety of the plains from the summit of Nekoti Rock. I’ve loved the imagery of the Old West since the days when I’d visit Frontierland at the Magic Kingdom and Blackgang Chine right up until I discovered Sergio Leone, and Red Dead evokes it all as knowingly as GTA does the same with modern pop culture.

Up until the end – there won’t be any overt plot spoilers here, but I may allude to certain things – I’d been enjoying the story, but as it reached its finale it really turned into something special. The end of a certain stranger’s quest that runs through the game was the point where Rockstar upped its game, in my opinion, and from then on it turned from what was essentially a GTA story into the tale of redemption that the name was hinting at, while touching on themes of destiny and civilisation. Marston was a brilliant protagonist who you grow to care about, and the change of pace for the final act, although I’m sure some will dislike it, formed an important bookend and provided an emotional anchor for the finale proper.

And when I say ‘mature’, I don’t just mean blood, sex and bad language. The lawless Old West arguably fits the GTA template better than the heavily policed modern day; there’s none of Niko complaining about his inescapable life of crime and poverty as he sits there with $1 million in his pocket because, unless you go out of your way, you’re probably not ending the game with more than a couple grand in cash. Similarly, there’s less dissonance between Marston’s character and his actions when you decide to ‘play’ the character because he’s a former gang member being forced to do these things in a lawless world rather than someone who claims to want out but has an unfortunate habit of accepting hits from mob leaders for money anyway.

In short, Red Dead is a magnificent game. I think it’s a better game than GTA in every respect, raising the bar on the game that owns this sub-genre and plucking a game series from obscurity – really, does this have any relation to the distinctly average Red Dead Revolver at all? – and deserving praise just as much. I just hope it’s successful enough to spawn some follow-ups because I’m excited to see what’s next.

Games, Impressions, Xbox

Splinter Cell: Conviction

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It’s rare to find a game that’s gone through as many delays, redesigns and overhauls as Splinter Cell: Conviction has and still turns out to be any good – it’s not called ‘development hell’ for nothing – so imagine my surprise to find out just how good this game is. My main complaint is that it’s not Chaos Theory, which remains one of my favourite games ever – I lost an evening to it just the other day – and while I can forgive that because very few games are that good, the fact that it doesn’t try to be is my problem.

I guess it’s the same thing that has happened to Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, both once unflinchingly realistic and now barely recognisable near-future Hollywood blockbusters of games. I’m still waiting for a ‘proper’ Splinter Cell in the vein of the Xbox games, because both Double Agent and Conviction have tried to do something new. Sam Fisher has slowly changed from a Solid Snake knock-off to his current form as an amalgam of Jason Bourne and Jack Bauer. Not the most original character, I’m slowly realising as I type this, but regardless, the series has always been a favourite of mine and now it’s barely recognisable.

But taken on its own merits, I had a brilliant time with Conviction. It was a short time, admittedly – seven hours or so by my estimation, without starting on the co-op campaign – but I stand by my conviction (sorry) that I’d prefer a great 6-7 hours to the same thing stretched out to fill 12 or more. I was satisfied by the end of it.

So it’s not bad; it’s just different. There’s no non-lethal option here beyond avoiding encounters entirely, so it’s far more of an action game, and indeed some sequences, whether a foot chase through Washington DC in broad daylight or a straight shooting sequence in Iraq, simply would not work within the framework of the original trilogy. As long as you can forgive the fact that this is not your usual Splinter Cell, but rather a new take on the same story that’s a good game in its own right, you’ll find an interesting experience. Really there’s nothing, least of all the official Bourne or 24 games, that makes you feel like such a hard bastard.

Regardless of your opinion of Splinter Cell old or new, I guarantee that you will crack a smile when you get the drop on a room of five enemies, mark four of them, and then quickly follow a headshot on the fifth with a tap of the ‘execute’ button to take down the others before they can react. It’s incredibly satisfying when it works like that, and even without the impetus to push for perfection in your playthrough that always pushed me through the previous games and the best in the genre, it’s good to finally have Fisher back.

Now let’s just have a proper new one, okay, Ubisoft?

Editorials, Games, PC games, Xbox

Game Room

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It occurred to me recently how hard it is to legally obtain old games. Whereas almost any film from any year is probably readily available on DVD within a few clicks, and the same goes for music, the way that a previous generation of games is almost discarded every few years means that the only way to play, say, an old favourite from the Amiga is either to get lucky on eBay or a car boot, or to just go the illegal route and download the ROM. For all the bad that piracy does in this industry – and it does, no matter how overblown the claims may sometimes be – it’s doing an infinitely superior job of preserving gaming history than anyone with the publishers’ blessing.

Microsoft’s new Game Room is far from exhaustive, of course, but the plan is to grow it rapidly with games that are often otherwise unavailable elsewhere. To be honest, the vast majority simply serve to remind you of how far we’ve come and that it wasn’t any better back in the day, but they’re all available for a free play and there are some classics to be (re)discovered. Personally I’m a fan of Tempest and Crystal Castles, and I think that a quid or two is a reasonable price for them in this context.

It’s certainly a cool implementation of retro gaming with modern technology, and I think that if we can get some other big names like Capcom, Sega, Midway and Konami in there – somehow I don’t think even the biggest optimist expects to see Donkey Kong – and expand the selection up to the 16-bit era, it could be a big hit. I already enjoy visiting my friends’ arcades, but let me do it with games that I actually remember playing with them – the likes of Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Golden Axe, etc – and the nostalgia factor is broadened beyond that 40-year-old creepy guy who hangs around in Gamestation. Although I can appreciate the historical value of Adventure and Asteroids, I would argue that I’m not the typical under-30 gamer.

But even so, I love how clearly Game Room is designed for fans. It’s so cool to wander into your friend’s arcade and see 80s gaming decor and a Bentley Bear sprite walking around in three dimensions, Paper Mario-style, and then to have a crack at their high scores. Everything from the way that rival high scores attack your pride with red neon to how the rewind function maintains the retro theme with a VHS rewinding effect is made to provoke a smile, and it usually does.

A good start, then, to a promising new system. I really hope that Microsoft can expand it and resist the urge to nickel and dime us too much on ultimately pointless tat like the decorations, but hey, I want to be an astronaut too. Let’s just hope that it can do the former.