Beaten – Round 4

The hits just keep on coming, don’t they? Three games down and we’re still not at the end of the list. I can tell you’re impressed. Let’s get this round underway then:

Second Sight (PS2)

When this game first came out it found itself being incessantly compared to another psychic-powered action adventure – namely Psi Ops : The Mindgate Conspiracy from Midway. Now, as it happens, I ended up buying, playing and enjoying and beating that game at the time of it’s initial release. However, beating that game leaves a sour taste in my mouth as it has one of the worst narrative endings in all of gaming. I am only saving you pain by telling you that the last thing you see before the credits roll is “To Be Continued…”. Awful. Fun whilst it lasted but cheesey as hell.

Now, understandably, I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Second Sight over the last year and it’s been my intention to check it out for a little while now. Glancing around the web I see a fair bit of love for this game and a solid appreciation of it’s method of storytelling. Having beaten the game I can confirm that it really is something quite special for a commercial console game to have achieved. In a nutshell, the story and the storytelling method manages to break linear structure, shift the player’s perspective, maintain interest and deliver a clever wallop at the end.

You are John Vattic: confused guy. The game starts as you wake on a surgical stretcher in a laboratory. You soon realise you have psychic powers allowing you to move objects from a distance and heal yourself. So begins your quest to discover who you are and how you got that nasty bruise on your head.

As the game progresses other powers are made available to you such as the ability to move unnoticed, to fire a wave of psychic energy and, later on, to posess others. Some of these powers become more powerful during the game.

The game plays as a third person action adventure using either a fixed or player-controlled camera. The targeting system is smart and allows for ease of use and for that all important headshot accuracy when you need it. One thing that works absolutely brilliantly is the use of cover. It may take a bit of time to get used to the controls but there’s some superb events in the game when you truly feel like you’re making the most of your environment and ducking out to take precise shots at your targets. They nailed the look and feel of this element absolutely brilliantly and my only gripe is that there weren’t too many areas in the game that really showed it off.

The game offers the player a choice of playing style in most situations. It is possible to run and gun but you will almost certainly want to use a bit of care and stealth (and psychic power) to make the best progress. The mechanics of the game sometimes feel a little contrived in that it’s quite possible to find yourself tripping an alarm and facing endlessly spawning bad guys with no real way out other than to return to an earlier checkpoint. Checkpoints are fairly frequent in the game so it’s not too much of a pain, just a little un-subtle.

The game keeps things fairly simple. You have health and psychic energy. That’s about it. Your psychic energy gets used as you use a power and refills of it’s own accord at a satisfyingly quick rate. There’s enough going on to keep you wanting to use your powers and the fact you can heal yourself to full health doesn’t mean the game is a pushover.

A good example of the game giving players options is a scenario where you’re in some tunnels. You could try to kill patrolling guards with ammo and psy-powers. You could try to sneak past using the psy-power that makes you invisible to others (but not CCTV cameras) or you may prefer to posess on guard and gun down the others.

Later in the game, although your options still remain fairly open, you’ll have probably got a preferred tactic you like to employ that works best for you. I mentioned earlier that the execution of firing from cover was brilliant but under-exploited, the game offers lots of scenarios where you get to flex your psychic muscles however you wish.

The celebrated storytelling takes the form of distinct chapters top and tailed with engine based cutscenes. The game tells two stories at the same time – the story from where the game opens with John Vattic searching for his identity and The Truth and, in every other chapter, the story of events taking place 6 months ago when John Vattic was assisting a military team in Russia. The present-day chapters tend to have a stronger sneaking gameplay in them whilst the 6-months-ago missions feel a little more brazen and action based.

Needless to say, just as you get a juicy morsel of information in one timeline that increases your interest in that part of the story further, you’ll be returned to the other timeline to pick up events from there. It’s not uncommon for the relevance of events in one area of the story to make you question some of the things that you learned elsewhere. In fact, there are some areas where the game appears to out-and-out contradict itself. This is the game narrative trying to mess with your head a little (which it succeeds with great effect in the final chapter) but the final series of revelations make sense of it all and give motivation to review the story all over again to see where the developers were being particularly clever.

If anything, I found my desire to want to know more of the story too strong as I binged on the game over a bank-holiday weekend and beat it in two sittings! Second Sight should be celebrated for making a very enjoyable playable and accessible action game without going down overly cliched routes or spoon-feeding everything to the player. In fact, you may get to the game and still have questions but, with a little bit of thought you’ll find all the answers are there.

For the age and the limits of the hardware, the game looks great. Everything moves at a smooth rate and many of the special effects are really eye-catching. The psychic effects are great and many of the incidental effects (such as when you’re dangerously low on psi-energy or when a camera spots you through your psychic cloaking) are really superb. I’ve also always been very fond of the stylised character designs in the TimeSplitters games and this continues in Second Sight delivering interesting looking, distinctive characters with some brilliant animation. The twitchiness of the main character really helps set the tone at the start of the game.

One thing that I particularly liked throughout the game was the use of computer terminals. It would be very easy to just go to a screen showing the information. However, when you use a terminal in the game, the camera stays in the game engine and the texture on the computer screen depicts a basic windows, pointers and icons type interface (in truth there’s a variety of styles used throughout the game). You use your controller to use the mouse and, assuming you’ve used a PC in the last 15 years, the rest is pretty obvious. What’s really great is that you remain IN the game. You can pan left and right and you’ll see the area around the computer. Your suspension of disbelief isn’t broken and neither is the tension of you feeling you’re on borrowed time standing in one place using a computer terminal when someone might spot you. It could have been a very easy thing to just go to a separate screen or deliver the information through some menu-based PDA but it’s really great to see this choice being taken and I believe it really helps to keep the player ‘in’ the game. I’m not sure it’s something that everyone would care about on the surface but I think the game would have suffered somewhat without such a thoughtful means of delivering important information that was thematically correct and well executed.

I’d encourage everyone who cares about stories in games or appreciates those things that show off extra effort and attention to detail in their games rather than gaming-by-numbers to play through this game. It’ll be cheap as chips these days or, if you prefer, you can probably work your way through it in a single renting.

Unlike Psi Ops, the game delivers a satisfying and clever conclusion that really shows that games, although they may often be filled with death and carnage, can actually be really smart and thought-provoking. A theme I hope we see more of in the future.

Beaten – Round 3

Well, round 2 was satisfying (for me, at least) but time marches on and so, it seems, does my gaming progress. Here’s another one that I managed to cross off my ‘to do’ list:

Titan Quest (PC)

Titan Quest is a Diablo clone. Or, more accurately, it’s a Nethack clone. I don’t see why Blizzard should get the honours for a genre they merely polished. (For other examples, see Starcraft, WoW and their entire portfolio). Anyway, misplaced honour aside, I really enjoyed Titan Quest.

I like a tasty dungeon hack but the last one I made any headway in had it’s progress wiped during a hard-disk crash and I couldn’t get motivated to slog through the start of it again.

So, Titan Quest sees your anonymous character click’n’kill a myriad of mythological beasts in Greece, Egypt and China. It doesn’t re-write the rulebook in any way, it just does what it does solidly. Unlike more recent dungeon-hacks the viewing angle cannot be altered beyond zooming in and out. This makes the gameplay feel slightly more linear and initially felt compromising but it took no time at all to get used to it and to feel that I was always seeing the visuals as they were meant to be seen.

The quality of the graphics are superb. Like any good hack, your avatar wears his armour in accordance to how you’ve kitted him out. Your enemies also display any extra armour they may be wearing. The environments look fantastic too. Initially you start in greek farmlands and whole fields of swaying crops react to your movement. Although it must be, none of the envrionment graphics appear very modular. The changes in ground texture from larsh farmland to barren waste to marshes to snow is never too jarring. The exception to this tends to be caves which do tend to look a little formulaic in their appearance – then again, there’s only so much you can do with caves I guess.

There are six different disciplines of magic to choose from at the start of the game. You’re offered to choose one of them near the start and, later on, you can enroll in a second discipline also. Each discipline can be mastered in it’s own right and contains spells and sub-spells that can be levelled up too. To be honest, I didn’t really explore too much of that. I mastered the two disciplines (which makes spells more effective and also significantly boosts your health and mana stats for your character) and then maxed out two spells which saw me through pretty much all of the game. I won’t criticise the game for that as it let me play the game how I wanted to. I’m sure if I’d explored that side of it more I’d learn more of what it has to offer.

One of the most satisfying aspects of the game is the enemy deaths (and considering you’ll be seeing a lot of them, they should be good to look at). The moment an enemy dies, rag-doll physics take over. No big deal, right? Fair point. But if you’re a lot stronger than your enemy they get thrown back by your finishing blow. If you warp back to an earlier area where you’re many levels above those of your enemy then carving through them is great to watch as you’ll have bodies flying about all over the place. Nice touch!

There’s some other useful stuff in the game. Later on you can meet merchants in towns that will allow you to spend money and buy back character points that you spent on your spell development. This way, if you wish you hadn’t levelled up one spell because you want to boost another to beat a boss you can do so. Titan Quest also allows your avatar to have two weapon/armour configurations on the go at once. So you can swap your short-range sword-and-shield configuration to a long-range bow configuration with a key-tap during the action. This works well in many situations.

Dungeon hacks always tend to suffer from the problem of players grabbing all the loot around and then needing to go back to town to free up inventory space. Titan Quest is no different. Towns have warp portals. You can create a 2-way portal anywhere in the game so getting back to town, selling your loot and going back to where you just were is easy – but it’s still an annoyance. There’s huge amounts of loot and treasure in the game. You can hold down ALT to make it easier to collect the items (doing so brings up colour coded item labels – easier to click on). The colouring of the text helps you to know if an item is rare, enchanted or relatively worthless. Either way, you’ll still have loads of cash and loot by the end of the game.

The story, such as it is, is just the usual dungeon-hack mechanism of ‘go here’ type mission which sets you with a target and lots of meanies to kill along the way.

There’s a great variety of well produced bad guys too. Higher level versions of a particular speices are usually larger and more decorated than their more humble siblings. All of them look great and animate brilliantly. In the first chapter (Greece) the game seemed to be recycling the characters a little too much but the later chapters keep the variety going and the theme appropriate to the environment.

I found bosses looked great and were imaginative but were never much of a mental challenge to defeat. More often than not, a circling tactic punctuated with long range attacks and a bit of patience would see them off. Stocking up on potions helps too, of course.

Although I got to the end of the single player campaign I’ve not tried the level editing or online modes – nor the two higher difficulty campaigns that become unlocked. If anything I found the single-player campaign marginally too long for it’s own good and I just wanted the game to be over and my investment in my character not to have been wasted.

It’s not often I beat a game on the PC though – so I’m happy to have played through Titan Quest and may indulge in the addon pack (Immortal Throne) that is available. I’m not aware of any other recent, big production dungeon hacks other than the distinctly different flavoured Marvel Ultimate Alliance from Raven games. I’d certainly recommend the game if you’re a fan of the genre.

Beaten – Round 2

Yesterday I talked through my experiences with Zelda – having played the game from beginning to end I felt pretty qualified to comment on it. Things take a change of tone with a game that some of you might have heard me talk about before..

God of War 2

It goes without saying that I was keen as mustard to get my hands on the full version of this game. I’d played through the US demo a few weeks before release and it told me all I wanted to know. Everything I’d enjoyed so much in the original would return in abundance.

One of the most joyous things with God of War is that is eschews all this self masturbatory talk of ‘innovation’, ‘pushing the envelope’, ‘never before seen..’ stuff and just says “Fuck you. I ain’t pretending to be new I’m just the best at what I do”. In fact, this mentality is pretty much the tone for both games. Now, if they were false claims then you could mock but, frankly, GoW1 was the best at what it did until GoW2 came along.

Once again, let’s not bother to set the scene with the narrative. Greek mythology is a rich seam of ideas that can be exploited for videogames. But at the end of the day, you’re a bald, angry man with a mean set of cutlery. You run, you jump, you slice, you dice, your grunt an awful lot and the game glorifies everything you do every step of the way.

Everything in God of War is epic. The scale of Kratos’ challenge. The heat of his anger. The herculean struggle to open a treasure chest. It’s all gloriously over the top and communicated to the player in perfect effect. The sense of empowerment, the sheer bad-assness of the protagonist gives the game incredible momentum.

Another of GoWs skills is taking this momentum and doing all it can to keep it running. Loading time is almost non-existent. Saves and interface interruptions (such as spending your power-ups) are less intrusive than before. The game flows beautifully. There is no time where you feel “This is the end of level 4 and the start of level 5” – it’s all one flowing experience. This is easiest to spot in the sequel’s new modes of gameplay – the Pegasus (actually, Pegasus was the name of a winged horse, not an entire breed of horse.) Most games would have a clearly defined beginning and end transition between regular gameplay and the transition to this new mode. GoW handles it seamlessly and, before you really know what’s going on, the majestic camera has swooped around the scene and you’re up in the air. Likewise, the end of this gameplay mode literally throws you back onto your feet and the pace of the game continues without missing a beat. The constant pace of the game really enforces Kratos’ determination and unrelenting nature. It’s brilliantly executed and, in the best possible way, something most gamers simply won’t notice.

As we all know by now, technically, GoW2 appears to have little regard for the technical limitations of the aging PlayStation 2 and coaxes the silicon into doing things it simply shouldn’t be doing. A lot of this is present in the depth and detail of the environments. Some of these are mind-boggling inventions of pure fantasy. One particular point is when Kratos finds himself scaling a titan – we see him clinging to a rocky surface and, as the camera pulls away, further and further and further we can see that Kratos is actually clambering across the bridge of the nose of said titan and will continue to run around it’s face and other areas. Such over-the-top, huge-scale, impossible concepts are what videogames used to be all about. Doing the crazy, impossible, unheard of things that most of us couldn’t even imagine. Over the years we’ve done a lot of that and found solace in driving real cars or pretending we’re great skateboarders – but here’s a game where they’ve managed to think up some stuff that is so wild that, even with the best descriptions in the world, you simply have to play it to do it justice. Credit here goes as much to the imagination of designers just for the concept as much as the technical and artistic skill for realising it.

As I mentioned yesterday, a game that surprises by delivering something more or different from expectations is what makes me remember it. In that regard, even though GoW is a sequel and therefore has a huge degree of familiarity to it, there are countless times when I was just bowled over by things I simply did not expect to happen.

The game plays much like it’s prequel. The mix of lateral thinking puzzles and over-the-top combat is handled better than in the original and, no, there’s no rotating columns of spikes in this game. Having said that, those infamous spikes never game me much trouble in the original.

God of War 2 is for fans of the original. It does everything a sequel should do. If you’re not a fan of the first, this won’t convert you. Then again, it’s belligerently not trying to convert you. It knows what it is and if you don’t like that then it doesn’t give a damn.

As Penny Arcade said: Every other game is the joke. God of War 2 is the punchline.

I look forward to an equally confident and playable sequel.

Beaten

It’s been a while since I’ve made a hearty update here. Partly because my worktime is kept pretty busy and partly because, shock horror, I’ve been playing games in my free time.

I’m happy to say that I’ve been able to beat a handful of games already this year. For me, that’s a big deal as I could easily go 12 months without finishing a single game!

Zelda – Twilight Princess

At Christmas time I was playing the 8.8 revolution that was Zelda – Twilight Princess. I was playing it as it was meant to be played: on a Gamecube with a control pad.

Where some (many?) would say the game succeeded I would say the game failed in that it was precisely what I expected. You see, for me, a great game or a memorable one is one that has the ability to surprise you. I mocked Zelda TP months ahead of it’s launch for being just another cannon in a lengthy franchise with merely a graphics update. I expected block-pushing and I got it. I expected whimsical shallow NPCs and I got it. I expected paper thin ‘plot’ and I got it. I expected all the old staples of every goddamned Zelda game I care to recall (such as ‘earning’ your sword) and I got it. In short it was Zelda by numbers with pretty graphics..

..although, having said that, the quality of the graphics was pretty inconsistent. The enclosed environments were nice but the large overworld vistas disappointed. The texture work on the Gamecube was pretty rough and the design of the NPCs was hugely inconsistent in both theme and quality.

All the good things about previous Zelda games were present and, like previous Zelda games, you already know about them so I’m not going to repeat them here. Where the game fell down was in the areas of challenge (both mental and reflexes). After the well designed Water Temple all subsequent dungeons were, almost literally, a walk in the park. They tickled the grey matter but solutions to problems were instantly evident and executing the solutions was never an issue. Sure, fighting Gannon (what a surprise! Gannon’s there too!) was a cute difficulty spike but it was far too little far too late. It certainly didn’t make up for the labourious portal warping the player uses throughout the latter half of the game which is made wearisome by the over indulgent need for the game to force you to change from human to wolf in order to warp and then, more often than not, change back to human form to continue your quest once you’ve warped – making the ‘short-cut’ warping mechanic unnecessarily slow and cumbersome and, by extension, self defeating.

And the less said of the weak-ass narrative ending the better. Making a smug nod to Link’s over-cliched muteness was not charming in the slightest and just highlighted, to me, another of the game’s shortcomings.

It was all terribly predictable. Content. Delivery. Outcome. I think 8.8 was generous and playing Zelda almost straight after Okami really shows how tired this franchise is becoming. And don’t give me that “Ah, it’s an homage to it’s predecessors – it’s MEANT to be overly familiar” excuse either.

And what the hell happened to some of that action portrayed in those early screenshots? Like the one with Link fighting three or so highly detailed and nicely textured lizardmen? I saw block pushing, I didn’t see that though. Strange…

Do you feel I’m wrong? Play Zelda as though it’s some game instead of a mighty, holy-of-holiness Zelda game and you’ll see what I see. The mere mention of Zelda gets people so distracted that they totally fail to see a game for what it is – well produced but bland and overly formulaic. Nowhere did I see innovation or originality – just shinier graphics and a painful over-reliance on the status of the franchise. Same game but better graphics – from a company that preaches innovation and disruptive attitudes. As usual with Nintendo, I remain unconvinced. The moment you actually challenge a lot of their claims instead of swallowing them without thinking you find they don’t stand up to much scrutiny at all.

Seriously, go buy a PS2 and get Okami. Bigger game. More heart. More originality. More charm. MILES better ending. Oh, and no IP-whoring either.

Meh.

OK, that was quite lengthy so, instead of deconstructing the other games I beat recently I’ll leave it here and talk about one of the other three games on my list tomorrow.

Feel free to comment or discuss.

Vanilla

Following a recent post I’ve been having a bit of a discussion with a commentator via the comments section (duh!).

Well, it’s worth pointing reader’s attention to the top menu bar at koffdrop.com and, in particular, to the item called “Discussion“.

Clicking on it will take you to the discussion area of this site (duh!, again) which is a type of forum. The forum software is quite different from many that are seen on the internet but it’s simple appearance shouldn’t be regarded as a mistake.

I’ll be looking at how these two areas of koffdrop.com can be integrated in the future but, for now, if you’ve got something lengthy you wish to discuss then why not give it a whirl?

http://www.koffdrop.com/vanilla/

Gamers and the internet : EPIC FAIL

So, for two years, those of us with reason and objectivity have had to watch as screaming babies waved their arms around and told us how amazing it is to wave your arms around and play games. Or how fucking great it was to download a movie trailer and pay a subscription so you can pay a bit more to download an old game.

Sure, the PS3 has had hiccups and the whole of the internet trying to hate on it. Sure, most of those people seemed to go pretty quiet when they actually stopped hating on something they’d never tried (and hypocritically bleated that criticism of the Wii if you’ve never tried it is blasphemy)…

..so, allow me to gloat to all of you windbags that reckon you’re important and that your endless bitching on forums actually means ANYTHING in the real world because it doesn’t, it never will, and here’s why:

Record-breaking 165,000 PS3s sold at UK launch
18:45, Mar 26th 2007 by Neil Long

New format becomes fastest-selling home console ever over its debut weekend.

ChartTrack has confirmed that 165,000 PS3 units were sold during the console’s launch weekend.

The figure is three quarters of the total 220,000 UK launch stock for day one, and makes PS3 second only to PSP in the overall launch weekend sales stakes. The Sony handheld shifted 185,000 in its opening weekend back in September 2005.

PS3’s record-breaking debut for a home console comfortably beats the previous top seller Nintendo Wii, which sold 105,000 after its frantic launch weekend in December last year. Fellow format rival Xbox 360 racked up an estimated 70,000 at launch in December 2005.

The figure also means that Sony has not sold all of its opening weekend stock, something the platform holder claims is part of its overall strategy at retail.

MCV UK

In other news: God of War 2 is everything I hoped it would be. It’s glorious

I never thought I’d see it..

Colour me stupendously excited!

Aparrently, the latest 5 minute trailer of Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300 has a secret image embedded at that 1:52 point.

The image is of Zack Snyder’s next project, the cancelled-so-many-times-it-may-still-never-come-out Watchmen. Now, I’ve got to tell you, I’m a Watchmen fanboy. I think it’s awesome and I think Rorschach is a kick-ass character. So I’m practically dizzy with excitement. I really want this movie to happen and to be good.

300 opens in the UK at the end of March.

Here’s the pic – click for the massive version.

That game, that music

No doubt, those of you with an interest in games will now be familiar with a forthcoming title called LittleBigPlanet that appears to be creating considerable buzz.

I don’t know about you, but I found the footage shown to be very appealing and I think that a lot of that is down to that great soundtrack.

The music’s by a band called The Go! Team and is taken from their album Thunder, Lightening, Strike. If you want to have a listen to the ditty in question just push the button below.

Get it Together – The Go! Team

Awesome platform skills

Who said February was a short month?

I’ve been fairly busy at work recently and only been making minimal posts onto koffdrop.com. I suspect you’ve noticed that.

Games-wise, I’ve not been playing much. I’ve had a stab (literally) at the God of War 2 demo and, I’ve got to say, it lives up to my expectations. There’s a fairly cool “Road to E3” documentary on the demo which gives a little insight into what it’s like trying to get something like a demo together for a big event. There will be more of these style of features on the final game (a 2 disc release) and I’d encourage any potential ‘developers are lazy’ critics to look at how shattered Cory Barlog is in this video (or in any recent appearance). Crunch time is a killer!

Anyway, to cheer some of you up and in keeping with the positive news of a DS sequel to Ouendan (which will, I hope, retain the best parts of Elite Beat Agents without the insiped track selection) I offer you the complete soundtrack to the original Ouendan game. Don’t kill the server please.

Whilst you’re here you can have a look around my little discussion area. It’s different from the sort of layout and featureset you may be used to – but that’s very deliberate.

Finally, you’ll have noticed that, due to popular opinion, my older theme is back in place.

I’ll be making an interesting discussion point soon – honest.