Reviewed on PS3. Developed by Insomniac. Published by Sony
Not being a pro site, C1 doesn’t have to try and rush reviews of games in time for the day of release. Although this review goes up just in time for the release of another big PS3 FPS it must be said that Resistance 2 was lost in the late 2008 Holiday release rush and for good reason. It offers absolutely nothing compelling over Gears of War 2, Little Big Planet, Fallout 3 or Call of Duty World at War. The sequel to the PS3′s first million-seller, R2 improves on the rather ordinary original in very slight ways, concentrating on online multiplayer modes and delivering an adequate gameplay experience. Merely adequate.
The game follows the protagonist of the first game, Nathan Hale, who has now found a voice in a n adventure with actual cinematics rather than a concept art montage. In this alternate history where the Earth was invaded during WWII, we have ridiculously anachronistic technology (the “cobbled together from the alien tech” argument makes absolutely no sense) such as Xbox1 vintage headsets, advanced projectile weaponry and vehicle design straight out of Starship Troopers. In the few levels set in smalltown America of the era, there’s less atmosphere than Fallout 3.
As far as the game itself, R2 continues with the rather ‘gamey’ and gimmick-laden weapons of the original. The controls are ok and none of the usual criticisms of the DS3 controller and FPS game really hinder your progress. But the level design, cheating AI and general difficulty (played on normal) made it a very frustratiing experience overall. I can sometimes swear occasionally during gameplay but the number of times I involuntarily utter the words “Fuck Off” after yet another cheap death might make anyone watching me through a hidden webcam think I have Tourette’s syndrome. It takes me back to Jak II (another developer). I made it halfway through the single player campaign before rage-ejecting the disc from PS3 (the boss battle against the Swarm if you must know).When the AI isn’t raping you, the level design instills a feeling of deja vu. You feel as though you’ve been here before. It’s like visiting a McDonald’s in a different city. It looks and feels exactly the same even though you’ve never been there before.
The game is not pretty to look at. Not ugly but not particularly impressive for a first party effort. Compared to the Ratchet and Clank, MGS or Uncharted games on PS3, this game looks nearly as ordinary as some third party movie lisence games. The visuals seem very flat, with really ordinary lighting in most levels. It does look slightly like a Wii game with higher poly models. The visual style is bland to say the least and derivative of so many better games. The sound is not up to the usual standard of a developer of Insomniac’s standing with nothing sounding crisp. I found the radio effect on voice particularly annoying. A guy who’s standing in front of you and not wearing a headset speaks to you as if you’ve picked him up by accident on HAM radio. What’s worse (and somewhat illogical), this radio voice is 3D and moves when you pan the camera. …. the fuck?
OK, so the clinical singleplayer and merely adequate presentation must mean that the multiplayer is fantastic. Well, no. It’s OK, but suffers from a lack of real direction as to what you’re meant to do and where your enemies are in relation to you. I jumped into a game and found it relatively easy to start killing foes so kudos to the online system, but after a while it was apparent that the maps were so big (R2 is one of those games that shows that more people per server, whilst a nice technical achievement, doesn’t make for a better game). I ended up in the last 5 minutes of the round wandering around with minimal health looking for someone to either shoot or put me out of my misery. There’s apparently a coop campaign that’s supposedly completely different from the normal singleplayer but I will never ever find out if its any good.
Insomniac have usually made games I have found very accessible and loved, but there’s something about the Resistance games that just doesn’t gel with me.
Controller1.com rating 1/3
Demographics is a wonderful thing. A TV show can rate poorly overall but rate very well within an age demographic that is attractive to advertisers. Gamer demographics are similar but aren’t necessarily age-based so lets have a look at some of the key gaming demographics
JAPANOPHILES:
These guys play every cutesy Japanese puzzle game, every esoteric weird game and of course JRPG’s. You can not only sell them a game, but they will also buy the orchestral recording of the soundtrack, the remix soundtrack, the covers album, recordings of the original NES soundtrack, the re-release of the game on PSP (and a PSP), all of the toys and any Japanese candy with pictures of the game on the wrapper. They also cosplay. So who wants these guys to buy their products?
PEOPLE WHO ONLY PLAY VALVE MULTIPLAYER GAMES-
There are dudes who ignore any big PC shooter that’s not from Valve. They play various versions of Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress 2 and now Left 4 Dead. They ignore Battlefield, Quake Live, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, et al. They will not leave those games until Valve releases another multiplayer game. They are very loyal and love Steam. So what can you market to these guys? Well, this is the USB Crowbar. (Note: Due to a design oversight, the non-detachable USB cable is only 3 inches long. The manufacturers of the USB crowbar do not offer warranties for any damage to you computer if you attempt to use the crowbar function whilst attached to you PC)
13-YEAR OLD ONLINE COCKBITES with headsets
Its a well known Internet FACT that Halo 3 players on Xbox Live are racist homophobes and that no dickwad teens at all play PC games like Team Fortress 2 and sing into their mike the whole time. Here’s a self help book for people who just won’t shut the fuck up and don’t get the hint that we don’t want to hear every random thought out of your mouth. Yes there’s some issues with latency with these guys and we don’t mean ping times.
Reviewed on Xbox 360. DLC also available on PC. Fallout 3 game required. Fallout 3 also on PS3, but without DLC.
Developed and published by Bethesda.
Our first DLC review on c1 and its Fallout 3′s first piece of DLC, Operation Anchorage. F3:OA is a side mission for the game based around the Outcasts you may have seen around the map. You agree to use your Pip Boy to interface with an old Virtual Reality pod and voila, you’re transported virtually back to the campaign to oust Chinese Army occupation of Alaska before the Balloon went up.
The DLC is a lot more linear than the rest of the game and more action oriented. Its more Mass Effect than Fallout. You take nothing in and take nothing out, so you can’t loot corpses since your vanquished foes vanish along with any weapons and ammo. You have ammo dispensers and health dispenses dotted around the map, not always where you need one and since you can’t carry meds, it does change how you play fairly significantly. You can’t go into a fight, shoot, heal, shoot heal. You have to heal when you see the dispenser and hope you can make it through the few throttled areas with enemies aplenty without dieing.
There’s a boss encounter at the end but if your speech stats are high enough, you may able to avoid altogether in a rather bizarre way. At the end of the simulation, you unlock some booty that you can return to at any point (though i’m not sure if items respawn- i’d doubt it). There’s nothing in the booty that you can’t get elsewhere but its nice to have it all in once place.
The other thing the DLC does is remove the level cap, so its definitely worth doing if you plan to do everything in the game. The actual F3:OA mission is not all that great and made me stop playing F3 once I was done. I would say its essential only if you are planning on doing EVERYTHING. There two more F3 DLC packs scheduled in the next few months but I think I’m done with this game. The levels here should take around 3-4 hours which is not bad for the price but you just need to know that it doesn’t play like the rest of the game.
Controller1.com rating 2/3
These past few days I have not booted up into anything at home. No real reason, I just feel like a few days air. That kind of makes for a boring videogame blog then doesn’t it? Oh well. Let me entertain you with some card tricks in the meantime. Why nowt? Well I’ve just finished an epic game and I sometimes get so wrapped up in these huge long games that after its done, I want a break. I’m writing a short review for the Fallout 3 DLC but after I beat it, I lost all interest in playing F3 any further. 40 hours was enough!
I played much Resistance 2 last weekend and have found it an OK game. Its playable, but not great. I’m about 40-50% of the way thrugh the single player but the fact I haven’t felts compelled to play this or Banjo (my two current games) means one of two things. Post RPG gaming malaise (which I also felt after beating both Knights of the Old Republic games and Mass Effect) or those game just aren’t that good. I feel compelled to give my games a good going over before I consign them to the shelf. But my metric might seem a bit mercenary, it does help me keep a lit on my backlog. If I’m being frustrated by it and I’ve met my value metric (an hour for each $10 the game cost me), then I feel ok in ending the game. Mirror’s Edge cost me $30 so when I shelved at the 5-6 hour mark, I felt OK about it. Not sure I want to finish it. R2 cost $50 and I’m about 5-6 hours in. So who knows whether I’ll play any more. Banjo is still only around the 90 minute mark so I’m kinda stuck giving that more time. That and I won’t start Prince of Persian, which has sad gathering dust underneath my TV since Christmas, until I feel Banjo has been beaten. Some, less charitable than myself, might say RARE has already done that.
So what about Killzone 2? If I bought it this weekend, it would be purely so we can Focus Test it. Even the most enthusiastic games need the odd week or two when they don’t feel compelled to play. It makes them appreciate games more when the feeling returns. Games you love helps. Meh just doesn’t cut it
Killzone 2 comes out this week. I hated Killzone 1. It was so try hard yet failed to make any positive impression upon me, its gameplay wasn’t anything special and its level design merely adequate when it didn’t suck. There were no highs and no particular lows but it was middling in every way. So I’m going to buy Killzone 2 when it comes out later this week.
I’m not a heavily invested in PS3 fanboy so there’s no particular reason why I cling to KZ2 as the PS3 saviour and poo poo any contrary opinions with such anger that counsellors will have a field day. The first game was just a fairly ordinary game so I don’t hold out hope that Killzone will be game of the year since, graphics aside, there’s no indication that Guerilla have done anything majorly different this time around. Time will tell.
So why am I buying this? Its a shooter, a genre which I obviously enjoy (if you’re reading this, then you’d have a fair inkling of this fact) and there isn’t much competition from shooters in the first half of this year. And its a well received one. Yes, there are lots of platitudes being spouted about this game, but I’m guessing they can’t be completely wrong. 80% plus on review sites is a decent indicator. And truth be told, its the comments about this game not being innovative, just doing the FPS very well that actually intrigue me. We have Left 4 Dead, Gears 2 and Call of Duty World at War late last year- all very good shooters. Even though Resistance 2 was not great, it is certainly playable. But there’s a bit of drought of these games in the early part of the year. We are promised Halo 3: ODSTDSTDTSTD and MAG later in the year, and probably a new Infinity Ward shooter. But who will fill the gap till then?
Or will we just go back to playing CoD4?
Since Fallout 3 is hard to FT without spoiling it for Clint, who’s just started, we’re playing through a mission of Operation Anchorage, the first DLC for this title.
A shorter than usual podcast for a game that can drain your life faster than a Mana bat with a drinking problem.
Nintendo has announced the pricing of the DSi for western markets. US$169 for the States. CA$199 up north. 149 pounds for the UK, AU$300 for Australia. Its a tale of woe and exchange rates up ending themselves because although many currencies have lost value against the US dollar, they’ve also lost ground again Asian currencies so new product launches are being used to “fix” up the exchange rate. Hence I now have the option of paying $300 to replace my dead and dusty PSP or $300 to replace my still working and still no less dusty DSPhat.
What do you get for the extra money of a DSLite, which still sells for $190 around here? Bigger screens. Two cameras, not Panavision widescreen but welcome nonetheless. An SD card slot in lieu of the GBA cart slot so its even easier to mod, media player anilities out of the box, firmware updates so its even harder to keep modded and DSWare. DSware is obviously limited to the DSi but if you don’t use it, the lite may still be a better investment. Or an iPhone, which adds a flexible mini computer and a telephone into the mix.
Now that Fallout’s done, itrs time to try and finish the remainder of the 2008 games that I never got around to. I was a huge Banjo Kazooie fan back in the day. I found the first game to be more fun than Mario 64 (I was LTTP with both games). I was not a fan of the first Resistance game. It defined blinkered fanboy over appreciation of launch titles and smelt nearly as bad as Perfect Dark Zero (which I found unplayable).
We’ll start with Banjo Kazooie. What the fuck is going on here? This game is busier than a brothel across the street from Blizzcon (First time caller, long time watcher). When you first boot thing game up it offers such a visual assault on your senses that you need some aspirin to continue. It does settle down after a bit though anytime you move five steps you get a stonking great “SAVING- DO NOT SWITCH OFF” message. But Rare, you use to make games you could just switch on and play. Why do you insist on making kid-friendly games so complicated? You’d think this was trying to use your PSP to do something weird and esoteric with your PS3. Viva Pinata and Kameo are both in the same boat. When the 360 launched I tried to play cameo with some colleagues and we spent ages wondering what the hell we were meant to be doing before giving up and playing Perfect Dark Zero, which we then gave up on because it was so atrocious. Oh Rare! I am slowly coming to grips with getting some fun out of the game. The building of the cars is quite interesting- so long as your vehicle design is quantized. But I still for the life of me can’t work out how to access my made up car outside of the garage. I kinda wished this was just Banjo 3 with 700 types of collectibles. Oh wait.
Resistance 2 is a hard one to describe. I didn’t like the first one at all. This one is both good and bad as far as I’m concerned. The gameplay is ok, if rather by the numbers but its not a spectacularly good looking game, merely good. Nor is the sound that great compared to say Metal Gear or Uncharted. But the single player has been growing on me somewhat and I’m determined to give it a good stab, if not completing it before Killzone 2 turns up in a week or two. The multiplayer is interesting. I played a one 40-player map and did quite well considering I didn’t really know what to do (apart from shoot the guys with a red arrow over their heads). But the giant map meant half the time I was wandering around trying to find something to shoot at. Big maps with lots of people don’t really work, especially if there are no vehicles. That’s why Team Deathmatch doesn’t work in a Battlefield game, you need focal points otherwise the game’s a mess.
The Fallout 3 DLC Operation Anchorage is now getting a spin. Its the first time I’ve bought SP-only DLC (unless you count Guitar Hero songs). It definitely is more action oriented but I’m having a hard time making up my mind whether I like it or not. I will see it through a bit more but it definitely doesn’t feel as great as the rest of the game. It also feels more scripted. We will be recording a focus test soon covering this DLC. Clint has just started the game on PC so the theory was this would be a good way to do the game without spoiling it for Clint. I’m not so sure its indicative of the rest of the game.
Broken street dates are a wonderful thing. Cam adds another notch to his SF purchase Tally, Clint mashes buttons with skill and george sits in the middle confused by all of the pretty colours.
reviewed on Xbox 360 Also on PC, PS3. Developed and published by Bethesda Softworks
There are two versions of this review- the short version and the long version. Short version: Best Game released in 2008
Long Version: Well, I finished this at around 32 hours with half of the game untouched and the DLC still to go. I will try not to spoil it for those who are still to playing it still going through it but there are literally so many possibilities that no one will have played the same game as I did.
We all know of Oblivion, which was THE single-player RPG (particularly for many PC users) of the last few years and Fallout 3 has surpassed that. I thought I loved Mass Effect but that game has nothing on Fallout 3. I’m generally not a big RPG player but of the ones I have loved enough to finish, KotOR 1 and 2, Mass Effect and Fallout 3, ther SF trappings obviously appeal to me a lot more than sub-Tolkien D&D fantasy.
Fallout 3 is set years after the nuclear holocaust in the ravaged wasteland of Washington DC. You star as Vault Boy (or girl), who leaves the fallout shetlter Vault 101, the only home they’ve ever known, in search of their father. Along the way you meet various mutants and factions of humans who you can ally yourself with or fight against, build up a character (to level 20 in the main game, higher if you have the DLC) and try and restore fresh water to the people of the DC area. It’s like DC Cab with more radiation. And no Mr T, Gary Busey or Adam Baldwin from TV’s Firefly.
The gameplay is in first person (or janky 3rd person) mode and you have all the fun of balancing stats with the semblance of an FPS (with similar problems to those in Mass Effect). Here, you at least hve VATS, which is an attack queueing system, expect here you can target individual parts of enemies. As you level up you can select where your stat points go and you gain a perk each level, the likes of which will allow you even more points in specified areas. There are even some strange perks such as becoming a cannibal or growing ears on corpses (all will be explained in game).
The story is superb and while it is the usual wrapper to send you on missions it does work rather well giving you choices along the way to be good or bad. I find that I can’t ever play these games as a douche and usually end up on the good path. So unlike real life but anyhoo. The writing and dialogue are excellent though some performances can seem stilted I’d say a large part of the fault is with the stilted animations rather than most of the acting. Liam Neeson and Malcolm McDowell lend their voices to some of the major characters and McDowell is particularly effective though his character’s animations when you finally meet him don’t need to be particularly dynamic. (SPOILERS- Its heavily motion captured lol)
Graphically, its a mixed bag. It runs very well on 360 (installed on the HDD) and the framerate is fairly solid 99% of the time with high quality textures and little pop in (YMMV on other platforms), but you do have the perfunctory animations that let the side down. When you are witnessing important events you veiw everything from your viewpoint and the important events feel a bit blah as a result. Sound is handled exceptionally well and the music is very well done (though the main theme reminds slightly of the Hellboy theme from the first movie)
If you own a machine capable of playing the game (though I understand PS3 will not be privvy to the DLC and hence the level cap stays in place), you owe it to yourself o play the best game 2008 had to offer. Yes better than Metal Gear, GTA IV, Fable 2, Gears 2, LBP, R2, Burnout or whatever.
controller1.com rating 3/3
PS- I never found the dog
Here are some clips from the Now Playing blog during our playthrough
“Fallout 3 has been started. Yes I envisage myself getting about 25% of the way through this game before I give up but since this game is so huge, I don’t think that will be a huge problem. It’s already more fun than Oblivion but that’s possibly down to the more SF backdrop. Cyrodil was a nice place to visit but I woouldn’t want to live there. Washington DC doesn’t look that much better but at least there’s no ‘Wayne’s World’ style zoom-ins everytime I talk to an NPC.”
“Fallout 3 is definitely not a hopeful game. You can’t save the world because its already been mostly destroyed. So there’s often a hint of sadness in a lot of your wanderings. If emo teens ever discover this game, there’d be a severe razor blade shortage worldwide.”
“So after a while I decided I would just map the thing. I literally spent about 3 hours walking around the map so that I can now fast travel anywhere and get to a location with a minute or two. I really want to go onto another game but F3 just does everything that Mass Effect didn’t.
One thing still bothers me about Fallout 3. There are many places where people make homes in various places that are still habitable. But no one has cleaned up. The war was years earlier yes people have lost many things: love ones, their homes and it seems their brooms.”
