Here’s a quick look at the demo of the first episode of Wanted (PSN tested). Operation Winback on the N64′s lawyer called and they want their game back.
Based loosely on last year’s movie Wanted which you control a main character who doesn’t look like James McAvoy or Angelina Jolie, but could be the result of a transporter accident, so we’ll call the playable character Tuvix.
Wanted is a third person title that makes you think of a 10 year old n64 game rather than Gears of War. Why? It doesn’t look all that bad, but it doesn’t look all that great either. How does it play? It plays ok as a game where you sneak up an press the melee button, but as a shooter, its kinda painful. I couldn’t recommend it.
A demo is obviously meant to make you buy the full game but when your whole game is merely an episode, the demo for this game is at least a substantial experience, enough to say: this is shash.
The look is kinda fizzy though the framerate holds up well. Sound is fine to be sure but its somewhat lacking charisma.
Reviewed on PS3. Developed by Guerrilla Games. Published by Sony
Killzone 2 has come. Let there be rejoicing in the streets. It is far better than the PS2 original. But it is not perfect. What the hell?
Ever since the notorious “target renders” of E3 2005, Killzone has had as many people waiting for it to fail as they have been willing its success. KZ2 falls somewhere in the middles, not because of its graphics, which are gorgeous, but for its gameplay, which is very good, but not great. For all the shading tricks and spectacular lighting, there’s a solid, if pedestrian game underneath. If only the design could match up to the presentation, we’d be onto a winner.
So now that the legion of PS3 fans with no sense of humour have gone off to post on NeoGaf, we can talk turkey. If the intro paragraph makes out I didn’t enjoy Killzone 2, its because my last experience of the game was rage-quitting whilst trying to beat the game’s final encounter. Overall, I’ve liked the game a lot but its not the be all and end all that many, including Sony, were hoping for. It ranks along CoD 4 and WaW as the best shooters on PS3 but it doesn’t eclipse them in my view (as a CoD fan, so make of that what you will).
So let’s talk about how it plays. Its a first person shooter where your character, Sev is a sergeant in the Space Marines plays alongside an AI NPC, even though there’s no co-op. Rico- loud mouth black guy; Natko, sarcastic Marcus Fenix- the teenage years and Garza, a guy with a cap. You run, you have melee, can jump (slowly), zoom in and have one rifle and one pistol. It plays like a slightly slower version of Call of Duty, which is the standard of how to do FPS control on consoles if you don’t have a lead character whose name rhymes with Pasterchief.
For the most part you can summarise the gameplay as mainly consisting of either:
1- Kill all the enemies in a locked area .
or
2- Keep moving forward in order to reach thresholds that stop enemies from spawning ad infinitum.
What Killzone does well, it does very well. It just doesn’t throw you many surprises. And most of those are in cutscenes. But when you’re in control of the game, you can almost feel deja vu as there’s nothing in this game that feels unique to Killzone. That’s a shame. Its doen well, just not particularly innovative or original. I don’t say those as a criticism, just as an observation after playing this game. Its a short game (My stats said about 7 hours, but I doubt that tracks the bits I had to replay so let’s say 8-9 hours).
Moving from the single player campaign to multiplayer and things look up. While there’s nothing original in multi either, its just about perfect in its implementation. You can pick a server and jump in. And it works great. In the rounds I’ve played, I noticed no lag (I’m assuming servers are hosting the game rather than peer to peer- god please Activision host servers for the next CoD game) and the gameplay was fun for anyone to be able to jump in and enjoy the game. Most of the servers available to me featured a constantly evolving playlist within each map. You might have capture and hold, the 5 minutes of assassination, 5 minutes of search and destroy and then Team Deathmatch until the timer runs out.
Unlike R2, where it was a game Insomniac concentrated on co-op and multiplayer at the cost of a mediocre single player experience , Killzone 2 pushes the single player into the spotlight yet manages to offer a fully featured and polished multiplayer component. KZ2 multiplayer is obviously going to be the game to beat on PS3 multiplayer for a while. Its likely to be where you find all your friends on PSN at the moment.
So we all know the graphics are fantastic but the game’s sound is fantastic. The effects are top notch with DSP effects that make this the best sounding PS3 game at the moment. Metal Gear was good, Uncharted was better but KZ2 raises the bar higher still. The music score is suitably epic with the cinematics utilising a full orchestra (though not during ingame for some reason). The voice acting is good but the script is on a level of Gears of War 2 silliness. So if you found “10 shitloads” to be laughable, then you might find KZ2′s cheese to be of a similar bouquet.
So you see, this is a video game for the Playstation 3. So if it doesn’t walk on water, sell 19 million copies in a week or shift 3 million consoles, it doesn’t make the game any less enjoyable.
Controller1.com rating 3/3 (its not perfect but its a very good game you need to play if you own a PS3. Give the Dark Knight Blu Ray a break)
The Belgians are notable for many things: Easy access to France for the Wehrmacht and some other things I’m sure. But they aren’t well known in terms of originating truly great gaming hardware. That almost changed in the early 90′s with the release of the world’s first portable disk based gaming device, the Disk Fellow by Floppe, formerly a manufacturer of nappies and diapers and latterly a manufacturer of nappies, diapers and incontinence pads. As I said almost, but not quite.
The Disk Fellow was a IBM PC compatible Laptop with an early CD ROM drive mounted vertically, rather than horizontally due to a design flaw. This left 40% of the disc area exposed to the elements at any one time and obscured the bottom centre of the screen from the user. Floppe maintains the decision was made ‘on a dare” rather than aesthetic, practical or indeed, sober reasons. The LCD screen was the same sort of panel as used in some electronic typewriters of the day, meaning it could display images of 100X15 pixels and makes ASCII art look like 1200 dpi by comparison. To say the graphics were crude is an insult to oil rigs.
The system came with a number of games. Due to the dimensions and limited system specs, many games could not be ported very well. Space Invaders didn’t work very well so new games were made specially for the system including a spiritual forerunner to games like Space Giraffe, Space Iguana (screenshot below). No other games have been recorded as having been released on the platform.
The original title in French “cum l’utilisateur phallique gargling de perforateur de poteau,” translates rather poorly as “cum gargling pole puncher phallic user” was obviously changed as Floppe prepared for a worldwide simultaneous launch in both Brussels and Antwerp to receive the machines on June 12 1991 and the rest of the world in May 1997. Their strategy of hiring a former Head of Marketing from Sega as their CEO proved disastrous and soon Floppe’s baby had flopped harder than an Xbox1 falling onto a small child’s head. The Disk Fellow was quietly removed from the market and the small child is learning how to speak again.
Episode 23. We talk about stuff. Games mainly, but for some strange reason the work of Keri Russel is discussed.
Activision have started the PR for what looks to be Infinity Ward’s next Call of Duty game. Whilst other companies seem to have learnt their lesson about yearly updates, Activision obviously haven’t. EA seemed to have stopped the annual release of Medal of Honor games, id aren’t churning out yearly updates to Quake and Doom. Halo, Gears, Resistance and Killzones aren’t being squeezed out every year. But Activision seem content to have a Call of Duty every year, as well as multiple versions of Guitar Hero annually. But curiously enough WoW is still the original with only two expansions in nearly four and a half years.
Iterating till doomsday has seen a lot of game series being ruined, but you can predict when this going happen very easily- People start referring to it as a franchise as if its a frozen yogurt stand in a mall. The more often you make the same game with only minor upgrades, the more likely you are to suffer from boredom and deja vu. With games like Madden, there’s evidence to suggest that many football fans buy the game every couple of years, rather than every installment. With Madden, there’s also no other choice if you want an NFL game.
With shooters, its perhaps more perilous because there is so much more choice. Call of Duty has to compete with Resistance and Killzone on PS3; Gears and Halo on 360; Tom Clancy shooters on all systems; Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress on PC as well as the ancient juggernauts of Counterstrike, Battlefield and Unreal games. Valve didn’t release TF3 a year after TF2, they added new content (free or not) but Activision took the success of Call of Duty 4 and threw it away by release the almost as successful Call of Duty World at War a year after. If there’s a new CoD game every year, how long before people get sick of it? You can argue that they sold a large number of CoD4 boxes and then a year later sold a large number of CoD WaW boxes. But they also had to devote two of their best teams to making a new title in two years, rather than smaller teams making expansions or DLC.
You can tell the tide of the Guitar Hero Rock Band style games has turned a little bit. People seem a little less enthusiastic about those games these days. Perhaps the lure of being a Rock Star fades after a while? Or the sight of fat geeks rocking out gets old after a while? You know how everyone groans about “another WWII game?” That’s because there was a time when you had Medal of Honor, Commandos, Brothers in Arms Wolfenstein, DoD, CoD, plus dozens of strategy titles and smaller PC games set in the same settings. There are dozens of SF or fantasy based games but the difference is they have freedom to make up new worlds whereas games based on actual events or settings (such as WWII or Modern Combat games) have to adhere to a certain aesthetic and conform to real world experience and expectations. You couldn’t have Gaz pull out a BFG and keep a straight face.
Look at Battlefield. First there was a WWII game and some expansions. Then there was Battlefield Vietnam a few years later, the Battlefield 2 with its mini expansions and console versions and then Battlefield 2142. The SF sequel fizzled pretty much and now the series is drifting backwards in time like some kind of ass-backwards Buck Rogers. Bad Company is back in current times and Battlefield Heroes and the new downloadable games are in WWII (ish) times. EA tried to iterate by innovating but really what they needed was space in between releases.
We’ve already mentioned Blizzard and WoW. But look at Starcraft. It was a huge hit in the late 90′ s but here we are, a decade and change later and we’re still waiting for the sequel (Just suppose EA had bought Blizzard in the past. We’ve have had Starcraft 2-5, Diablo 3, 4 and Origins and Warcraft 4-6 before EA shut them down). Of course, they are releasing SCII in three different versions. Kotick, you magnificent bastard! The clamouring for new SC is such that people will buy the three versions and not bitch too much about triple charged. WHy? Because Blizzard let the demand for a sequel build organically over time. Maybe 11-12 years is overkill, but its worked.
Personally, I am happy to have a new CoD game each year. But I know the series probably won’t be what it is if it starts fatiguing gamers to the point Activision mandate harmful changes in order to fix the malaise. “Have you guys considered adding giant robots?”
I don’t usually have much of an up-to-date PC gaming machine. Over the last few years, I’ve only really had a work PC that was semi recent. My latest work PC is a screamer with a 1GB videocard, that also thankfully restarts itself when some new games get busy and has firewalls blocking everything but WoW, CoD4 and Steam. So I’ve been playing Day of Defeat Source, which is a remake of the original DoD. I hear there’s another graphical revamp of DoD (though I’m not sure if its official or unofficial) in the works.
Well, its the saviour of the PS3 and very pretty but how is it as a game? Very good. Before I started this, I had the last level and a half of Mirror’s Edge to complete since my backflip. That done, it was time for some Killzone. Being sceptical of the lacklustre original, I was very pleasantly surprised (I knew the positive critical reaction wasn’t down to people being blind fans of the original but the first one didn’t leave me with much hope the sequel would play well).
So in essence:
The Good: Looks great. It does lighting and particle effects very well, even if the textures aren’t always that crisp (apart from when they want to show off something in extreme closeup in a cutscene. It makes the flat-looking mess that Resistance 2 look like a PS2 game. Oh wait, Insomniac already did that. Sound is phenomenal. Online is very smooth.
The OK: The gameplay is very, er “tried and true.” That means its not only familiar, but a little too familiar and unadventurous. Large parts of the game consist of two standbys-
STANDBY 1: Kill X number of enemies (sometimes its X number within a timeframe) to progress
STANDBY 2: Infinitely respawning enemies until you reach a certain point on the map
We will give grief to a licensed game for using the rinse-and-repeat level design cliches so its appropriate to mention it here. The game is still fun, you just realise that it doesn’t change very much while you play. Its not full of gimmicky tech like the god awful mess that is Resistance 2 (Yes, I went there).
Multiplayer was very good apart from one gripe. The gameplay mode would constantly change from simple Team Deathmatch to Control points to Assassination, etc, making it hard to get a rhythm on one mode before it changed again. I’d rather have shorter rounds.
The Bad:
Control is not particularly tight. It is rather loose and hard to target (If R2 and Battlefield can do it on PS3- why not this?). The field of view is rather narrow, meaning enemies are right on top of you before you know it. Story is barely there and makes the criticism of Gears 2′s story and dialogue seem as bad. The dialogue is just as macho cheesy. One character looks familiar though…
His name is Farcus Menix.
One thing KZ2 did was make me wish I was playing CoD WaW. So after going about halfway through the single player campaign and a few rounds of MP, I popped this into the 360, patched it, DLed a free map and hopped online. Yes, I still get stuck on servers where everyobne else is in North America, which kinda kills my ping, but it didn’t seem as bad as it used to be. I hope to play a bit more of this before I put it away. I think the world has to live with the fact that I seem to respond to CoD multiplayer more than anything else, console or PC.
Before KZ2 was begun, I finished Mirror’s Edge (PS3 version). I had to add parts to my original review since I felt the break from it made me want to finish it so much. Game has problems to be sure but it was a worthwhile experience.
Lastly I bought Peggle for $3. Popgame games website, coupon code blitz1. That is all.
I recently started the most recent Prince of Persia game and very shortly into it I realised how much I wanted to go back and give Mirror’s Edge another try. I had given up around the 60% mark, sick of the trial and error approach to platforming. Here’s the review written after I had grown weary of the game and Fallout 3 was fast becoming an all-consuming addiction.
Coming back to Mirror’s Edge, it gelled a bit better than the first half of the game. There are still thing not quite right about the game, with waaaaay too much trial and error and combat that’s more frustrating than catering for a Vegan at a Barbecue. But I seemed to enjoy it a lot more, perhaps without the distraction of Fallout 3. The story wasn’t anything much but I did enjoy the cutscenes ending the game. Of course, Portal’s end credits song called “Still Alive” is better than Mirror’s Edge’s end credits song called “Still Alive.”
Would this game be better if it was a third person game? I don’t know, its pretty good as it is and a third person perspective would be a different kettle of fish altogether. Combat in third person would probably be better but then the game would then just be Uncharted. DICE are still to be commended for trying something so radically different from Battlefield and I hope the sequel (we can but hope) takes a lot of the criticism seriously.
Make no mistake, this is a hard game. Since I was so much wanting to see the end of the game, I bumped the difficulty down to easy for the last two chapters. As far as I can see, it made absolutely no difference in terms of making the combat less painful or the jumping (especially the penultimate leap) more predictable.
I’m glad I made the effort to go back and finish the game, despite its difficult last few levels. Even though the levels all seem to be variations on the same thing, it never felt boring apart from those occasions where you are trying a difficult jump. Usually it comes down to you doing it wrong.
I’ve amended our original review to reflect the change in thinking. Its rare that I quit a game because of frustrating gameplay and come to finish it later and actually like it.
Every week a new game is released based on a licensed property. Be it Madden, which licenses the NFL; Iron Man, based on the movie; or 50 Cent Blood on the Sand, which is based on a tool, licensed games are everywhere. Sometimes they flop, sometimes they are huge hits and sometimes they’re even good. This week demoes for a whole slew of them were released, with titles based on Wanted, Chronicles of Riddick, the WWE, Watchmen, etc all giving us a taste of what passes for entertainment in these recessionary times.
But often licensed games are forgettable and hence largely forgotten. Here are some that deserved to be remembered. For various reasons….
DAYS OF OUR LIVES
Days of Our Lives for the Atari 2600 (1984). Follow Marlena, Roman Brady, Stefano Di Mera and the Salem Strangler on an adventure though 20 levels. Based on the long runnong Soap Opera, DOOL 26000, not to be confused with the lame Amiga sequel in 1988, offered a degree of freedom seldom seen in games based on daytime soap operas. The gaming media of the day heralded DOOL as far better than that quickie General Hospital game which came out the same year (most copies of which are laying underneath the ET landfill). Though it was later surpassed by Falcon Crest for the NES, DOOL showed that games for people who don’t play games have always been with us (See also Myst, Puzzle Quest, Final Fantasy)
FROST/NIXON
Based on the play, Frost/Nixon for the Super Nintendo. Billed as your opportunity to cross examine the former President, the only trial Nixon would ever face. Not the greatest game, but then Nixon’s appearances in games have been fleeting.
A PC port was scuppered because Windows wouldn’t let you load a file called Frost/Nixon.exe without first looking for your Frost drive.
ANDRE RIEU HERO
There’s been a well documented phenomenon of older people playing Guitar Hero along with their grandkids during the holidays, usually on Beginner (pfft, noobs). So one smart publisher decided to tailor a version of the game that would appeal to the older generation. And who’s the most popular living musician with the Geriatric Gamers? Andre Rieu, of course. In this game, with the plastic violin controller, you play as Andre Rieu’s understudy, when the man himself is attacked by enraged seniors after playing electric. There’s also a sim game built into this when you see how many live DVD’s you can release and sell in Convenience Stores, Gas Stations and Post Offices around the world before anyone notices its the same songs each time.
Well, Resistance 2 came and went without causing too much gaming happiness. In this post-Fallout 3 gaming environment, it was an incredibly disappointing game. The other two left over games on my pile have been getting a work out. First up Nuts and Bolts can be occasionally good and fun but often ends up being not fun and more frustrating than an email that says “Scarlet Johannson Nude” that ends up being a virus that destroys your PC.
Nuts and Bolts is a game that I find I can play only in small sessions of about 10 minutes. Then I get to a bit that frustrates me and I rage quit. Then the next day, I turn it on again and play happily for 10 minutes before… blood pressure rising… rage building, etc. One initial source of frustration- the interminable loading times- is dramatically reduced by installing to the HDD. Unfortunately the vehicle-based gameplay can’t be reduced. The only solution Rare has (and this shows up as a text tip during some loading screens) is to buy the original Banjo Kazooie on XBLA. I will persevere a little longer.
So after a “happy 10-minutes followed by a 30 minute cuss-fest” I popped in the new PoP game. WoW. I’m not sure If I love it but i seem to be happy with these new style platformers more than the traditional type. Time will tell. The graphics are gorgeous but god damn those voices are lame. I absolutely loved Sands of Time, particularly the voices of the Prince and Farrah. Here the Prince sounds like Nate Drake from Uncharted and Elika sounds like generic American heroine #4. The auotmated control system seems a little too automated with it almost predicting what you want to do next, even if you don’t, making for a frustrating tutorial.
I haven’t picked up Killzone2 but will do that in the next few days. It’s being spoken of very highly by my PS3 owning colleagues so I might even get some my MP fix with it (still currently being served by DoD Source on PC after work). Resistance being a colossal disappointment for me may work in Killzone 2′s favour. Or the fact that nothing is good after Fallout 3 may make me into one of those guys who writes about games but doesn’t necessarily play them, for the next few months at least.
UPDATE: Playing Prince of Persia again this morning made me think “hey I like these types of platformers,” and actually made me pop the half finished Mirror’s Edge back in the PS3. I’m fucking nuts.
