Reviewed on PS3. Also on Xbox 360, PC Developed by Bizarre Creations. Published by Sega
The Club is a 3rd person shooter that incorporates elements from other games such as BC’s own PGR series and Tony Hawk games amongst others. The premise is so slight (its usually the sort of premise you get when a programmer has to justify the setting)- you are a bad ass who gets trapped in a Club where you basically have to kill or be killed. Its one very small step up from “in the future violence is televised so here’s arena combat.”
You pick one of the available characters and compete with him, unlocking new levels as you go. Each setting has a few different game modes you need to beat in order to progress. They generally start with ” just get to the end of the level,” then “get to the end of the level before the timer runs out” (with extra time granted for stunts, kills, etc), “survive in one area until the timer runs out” and variations of the three.
So its really a simple third person shooter than controls OK with super macho characters in a silly story mode that’s just an excuse to do time attack in a shooting game. Its all about best times, high scores and rankings. Tony Hawk style shooting tricks, score multipliers and lots of shooting. This is a game where you could in theory beat the story mode in an evening but the replay possibilities with the different characters mean the game can last you as long as you’d like. Of course, having been out for some 18 months and not made that much of an impression on the larger market, you might find online a bit of a graveyard here but the reason this game is actually import ant may not become apparent for a few years.
Namco released a game called Kill.Switch back in the PS2/ Xbox era. It didn’t do all that well, but when its main shooting mechanic of stop and pop was popularised by Gears of War and Uncharted, there were many disgruntled fanboys who bubbled to the top of the forum pages to point out that Kill.Switch did it first. The Club wasn’t a hit but it is a game that developers mention a lot as an influence on their latest game: “It’s a bit like The Club.”
What’s this got to do with the price of NAND chips in China? Well, The Club is dirt cheap and for a small outlay, my friends, you can be one of the first to post on GAF how a new Xbox 720/PS4 shooter is just The Club. Or you could just play The Club as a cheap date now and have fun with it.
Controller1.com rating 2/3 (if it is cheap)
My recent DLC binge netted me the Lost and the Damned and the CoD World at War Map Pack 2. I had intended to skip the GTA DLC since I had not come close to finishing GTA IV before getting sick of it and moving on to fresh gaming pastures. I think the reason I got it was some need to use up my Internet Bandwidth quota since 25GB a month goes a long way if you aren’t into Bit Torrent. Infamous also made me feel that going back to the slower moving GTA IV engine might be a step backwards but I tried it anyway.
I like it so far. I’m only a few missions in but it seems to be a nice take on Liberty City without feeling like a simple retread of IV.
The storyline with the bikers seems a lot easier to get into, less introspective than Niko and Roman, played less for laughs and more for drama. The guys of the Lost MC are fucking assholes of the first order but they make great videogame characters. Of course as a member of a motorcycle gang, you will be riding around on a hog for most of the time and unless you preferred these in GTA IV, they take a while to get used to riding these and firing a shotgun at the same time. Its also got that custom GTA difficulty about it but then I’m finding I’m enjoying it in this post-infamous world.
Johnny Klebitz, your hero for want of a better word, is a little more obviously fucked up thank Niko. He’s a biker and he just wants to keep to business. The leader of the gang, Billy, has just come out of rehab after being busted and is aching for action, such as starting turf wars with rival gangs etc. This being a GTA game, there ares no tea parties, group hugs and wondering if this is what its like When Doves Cry.
Also, despite me saying I’d had enough of WaW with a PC playthough, a 360 playthough and months of multi on both systems, I got the extra maps anyway. And because I’d been away from the multiplayer for so long, I immediately sucked more than a Wii game called Let’s Tidy Up After Ourselves in the NPD top 10. But after relearning not to suck, I’ve started to enjoy the new maps and not just stick to the three zombie maps. We have Corrosion, which seems to be some sort of refinery level where its Soviets v Nazis; Banzai, aan outdoor jungle level with a wooden bridge, waterfalls, tunnels and bamboo huts; and my favourite, Sub Pen, a really nice US verses Japan level that’s small and intimate but large enough for small or medium size groups.
Its interesting to note how in both of the map packs released for WaW so far, Treyarch have shied away from the larger tank based levels which were the more popular ones in CoD3. The tanks in WaW are just irritating since they dominate the levels and the anti-tank options are limited. The jury is still out on dogs but they are preferable to fucking helicopters, which is what I dread most about the upcoming Modern Warfare 2.
Just as a site update: The site has had fewer updates due to my work moving offices this last week. My studio is in disarray so there’s nowhere for us to record a podcast yet. Hopefully we can have something for you by next week. The first one might be a tad echo-ey.
Reviewed on DS. Also on PSP (eventually) Developed by Rockstar Leeds. Published by Rock Star.
So GTA 1 and 2 could have easily been ported to the DS but Rock Star tried something different. They designed and made an entirely DS-focused game from the ground up. Chinatown Wars manages to cram everything you loved about the full size console GTA games without the empty feeling that the PSP entries left you with.
You play as Huang, a young rich punk whose daddy, a Liberty City crime boss is brutally killed. Huang arrives in Liberty City with revenge and ambition in his heart. After the first cutscene, you know they haven’t dumbed this down for kids. This game has a wickedly delicious and decidedly adult sense of humour.
So the mission structure is the same as every GTA since GTAIII. You travel to the mission briefing, then travel to where the mission takes place. Except here, you can skip cutscenes and skip the travel back to the mission area after you’ve been killed. HALLEFUCKINGLUJAH!
You control this with a mix of D pad + buttons for some actions and stylus for other things. The stylus is used for menu stuff, managing your email and GPS devices as well as minigames such as hot wiring cars, filling molotov cocktails with petrol at the filling station amongst other things. It generally works pretty well though I found (on my DS Phat at least) that I found driving smoothly quite impossible and my giant alien spannercrab-creature hands were cramping during any driving sections. I found this to be a challenging game, but not because its a bad game. Its just hard.
Graphically, its a quite simple 3D engine with some weird choices in regards to scale (pedestrians are as large as cars) in order for the models to be discernible. The sound suffers somewhat on DS but manages to make you feel you’re playing a GTA game. There’s a not great deal of dialogue, but there is some. No talk radio, of course and cutscenes are static images with text to move the story along. And the text is disarmingly funny and very biting in way I don’t remember Liberty City Stories was.
Chinatown wars plays well, is funny and is essential to any DS owner over 15 years of age. Handy for commuting or travelling.
Controller1.com rating 2/3
Reviewed on PS3. Developed by Sucker Punch. Published by Sony.
Infamous, in a nutshell, is an amalgamation of Sucker Punch’s earlier Sly Cooper series, infused with a healthy dose of Crackdown and a little Force Unleashed. You play as Cole McGrath, a courier who’s at the heart of a massive energy release in Empire City. Surviving the deadly blast, Cole finds himself infused with super powers the same way warm water is infused with tea leaves. Hmm. Time for a cuppa.
skip ahead 10 minutes
So begins Infamous, with its great comic book style cutscenes and an open world city with game play ripped from Crackdown. You play, gather XP every time you beat a mission, defeat an enemy or perform an act of cruelty or kindness. As you get more XP, you can level up your powers, becoming more and more badass. You can also play good or evil, with the game giving you lots of opportunities to decide on your path. The story, though very well done, drags on a bit longer than you’d like. This is perhaps unavoidable on longish games like this, but what the hey- it’s a fun game. You have a Karma meter which has Infamous on one end and Hero at the other. Kill a pedestrian or drain the life force of a vanquished for, you get evil karma points. Heal a citizen and merely lock up a defeated foe, you get positive karma. There are both good and bad story missions- beating the good mission will lock the bad mission, encouraging multiple playthroughs if you’re into that thing. I always tend to play these games as a good guys since I’m such a cunt in real life.
The game structure is fairly familiar. You start off in one section of the map with the rest blocked, in this case a third of the city and you progress by completing the story missions that appear on your map. There are also side missions which ask you to do things like, remove all surveillance devices off the side of a building, defend an area or clear and area of enemies, pose for photos, etc. These are mostly good missions that enhance your Karma but there are a few evil missions in there as well. More on that later. Each side missions you complete will mark the map in a way so that enemies don’t respawn in that area so there is a very real reward for side missions since in some areas you can’t walk down the street without some asshole shooting at you. All of the collectibles are woven into story so there are no blue orbs floating arbitrarily at the top of a building. There are blast shards you collect to up your electrical storage (fragments of the device that explodes at the start of the game).
Its an open world but not really a sand box. You don’t drive cars so vehicular stunts are out but you can climb almost anywhere within the map if that’s your thang. And I mean almost anywhere and straight out of the box. Your climbing powers are pretty much the same from the start, you just get the gliding ability later. Want to climb up that building now? You don’t have to wait until your level is maxed out in Infamous. You can climb up most buildings just by tapping X a lot. A lot. For a game that’s not about climbing, Sucker Punch didn’t make the climbing a limiting factor in the game play. Some areas require special attention to climbing (like in Uncharted) but these are very much in the minority. You can go where you like in most cases.
Your powers are what the game is about. You start off just shooting electricity as your ranged attack and a simple melee attack for CQC. Since the powers are based on power, you will need to restore underground substations in each area to progress. These conveniently hold the key to you gaining new powers so you will need to do these a lot in order to beat the game. Its funny how some of the powers you have in the demo are those you would have fairly late in the game. You do get one power that slightly overpowering but you do get that so late in the game that its not like the gravity gun in HL2 where you just have a win button. It also doesn’t help against the final boss.
On criticism is that the game does have some annoying boss fights with specific methods required to defeat them, which is where Crackdown shines- the rules are the same. You just shoot them more in the 360 game- you use the same rules as the rest of the game. AI in the game is another mixed bag with NPC’s with pathfinding, both good and bad. But then you’re in world where the equivalent of a small nuke has gone off and everyone is just going about their business as if nothing as happened. There can be major battles going on and the citizens of Empire city are not running and hiding, panicking as they soil their pants in terror- they are just milling around, walking into your zone of fire.
Graphically the game is a mixed bag. With its fantastic comic book-style cutscenes, the game has a boold style. But then you get in-game cutscenes with horrendous models with off lighting. The animation is definitely very ordinary. Its adequate, but you can’t call it good. Sound is quite well done with very good voice acting from the cast. Cole McGrath has a 50 a day habit by the sound of him. Must make being a bike courier hard.
So Infamous. The best PS3 game since MGS4. Its better than Resistance 2, Motorstorm 2, Little Big Planet and Killzone 2. Its the type of game you would buy a PS3 for.
Controller1.com rating 3/3
After returning from a holiday and trying three different local stores, I finally found a copy of inFamous. This morning I have been having a great time playing it and feeling kinda sad for Prototype. Its also killed any chance I had of ever replaying Crackdown. Infamous is better in some ways. Its making Protoype look like an also ran and Uncharted 2 look limited by comparison. Sly Cooper 4 Infamous also has its problems, such as really ordinary animation but overall its probably the best PS3 game so far this year, easily eclipsing Killzone 2 for fun.
Its a free roaming game set in an open world where you play as a guy who has suddenly developed all of these cool powers, mostly to do with Electricity. You don’t shoot guns, you discharge electricty and you consume electricity in order to fire off more electricity. The guy’s got some serious rubber shoes on his feet and its a lucky thing his head is shavd otherwise he’d be a dead ringer for one of the Jackson 5 circa 1974. Infamous has everything Crackdown has apart from a Halo 3 beta invite.
So if you like Crackdown like controller1.com’s very own Cameron, you will like infamous. So what does Infamous do better and what does it not do as well?
Better than Crackdown:
Movement and climbing is so easy and therefore fun. You don’t feel like you’re fighting the controls (as you do in the god-awful-to-control Prince of Persia). It manages to make Assassin’s Creed movement seem clunky (which was one of its better features) and now I feel Uncharted 2 will feel more restrictive during its platforming sections after the total freedom afforded in Infamous. Of course, restricting movements to paths is a gameplay decision. Infamous doesn’t make platforming difficult since its not a platformer- you just need to get places and the game doesn’t make it too hard to do that.
Story: The actual storyline is more involving that Crackdown’s simple “cleaning up the streets” mantra. It also has fantastic comic book style cinematics (even if they are just a modern version of those flat cardboard rod-puppets children have)
Not as good Crackdown:
The in-game animation is really, really ordinary. Even bad in places. Combat is a bit less fun (at least initially). This Sly Cooper in a new skin. Really. Not a bad thing but oh boy is it obvious the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
You have the time-trials and equivalent of the agility orb hunting as well, though they are more neatly integrated into the story, rather than just being collectibles. So play this while we wait for Crackdown 2. I would hope the guys at Ruffian games have a good look at this
This is really the best PS3 only game since MGS4 (yes better than KZ2, Resistance 2, Little Big Planet, Singstar AB- huh?). If you have a PS3 and don’t have this game yet, what are you waiting for and if you don’t have a PS3, it means you haven’t played this, MGS4 or Uncharted. I hear there’s a price cut brewing around the launch of Madden 2010
The recent E3 show revealed the existence of several games to be released later in 2009. One of these was the sequel to 2008’s smash hit PC/ Xbox 360 shooter, Left 4 Dead.
Rather than fans of the original jumping for joy at the prospect of a full-blown sequel (these are Valve fans- they’re used to a more deliberate timeline for releases), the many fans of L4D are in fact running a petition to focus their anger on what they see is Valve’s ditching of L4D1 so soon after release.
There are two ways you can look at this…
The first way is how the fans are seeing this. LFD is not even cold in its undead grave, with only a few minor DLC releases and here’s Valve trotting a full (priced) sequel in a year. It means they’re either pulling an EA/Activision and moving to yearly updates to franchises- which rarely has an upside to quality whilst at the same time inducing gamer fatigue faster- and going from the altruistic company that many PC gamers imagine Valve to be into another money hungry company.
It took 10 years to go from Team Fortress to TF2. In 2009, we are still waiting for HL2: Episode 3 (more than 18 months after episode 2). TF2 is still getting updates (free ones) two years after release). Hell, even Day of Defeat is still getting updates alongside TF2. So people feel Valve will abandon the free stuff and long term support of their titles.
The other beef is the splitting of the community between those playing L4D and LFD2. One thing online games need in order to thrive is a lot of people. Its what makes TF2 memes more recognisable than Quake Wars: Enemy Territory. Well, if you split the L4D community between those playing the sequel and those playing the original- they will have less people to play with. The problem with that argument is L4D is not a game that requires a lot of people to play, and in a smaller, more dedicated gaming community, you’re more likely to find people more serious gamers, better games, etc. Did TF2 players start a petition of the original L4D pilfering their player base?
The other way you can look at this is : COOL! More LFD! Yippee!
If it were an Activision title, I would be worried about the quality. I still have enough trust in Valve that L4D2 will be worth the price.
Read C1.com’s review of Left 4 Dead
Focus Test for L4D
I’m currently on holidays with the wife. To sate my gaming desires whilst on the road, I’ve bought my DS Phat with GTA Chinatown Wars and my PSP 1000 with God of War: Chains of Olympus. Of course, I can’t charge the PSP battery enough so that CoD CoO can update the PSP’s firmware (one nice thing about the original DS and the Lite is that you don’t have to worry about this bullshit). So Chinatown Wars is the game du jour.
GTA:CW is Rockstar Leeds making a 3D GTA game from a top down perspective. Its got all the colour, edginess and humour of a full console version without the feeling that something is not quite right, as was the case with the two PSP iterations.
Your stylus is used appropriately, to manage your menu items, emails, GPS map, etc and the traditional dpad + buttons used for driving, moving and combat. This being a DS game, there has been an attempt to add stylus gameplay into the mix, such as using touch screen actions in minigames- such as hot wiring cars.
It works, mostly. Maybe its because I’m sill playing on the original DS, but I’ve found using the dpad to be somewhat painful after a short time. The game is still fun, but jeez it is hard. Its not easy to pin down why, but I found myself having to replay missions again and again.
Happily, the makers have taken one of many people’s criticisms of GTAIV to heart. If you fail a mission, you see the mission briefing (skippable, of course) and then you have the option to skip the travel to the missions by pressing select. Hallefuckinglujah!
So if you’re going to make your game hard, at least make retrying easier. Thanks Rockstar Leeds. Theeds.
Lisvender has sent us this review for your reading pleasure. You remember reading, it’s like listening to a podcast, except with with your eyes.
So we’ve got Wii Vitality Sensors and Jesus Christ even MORE Rock Band crap and Tonight on Alan Wake Prime-Time Dramas and motion-sensing cameras with motion sensing paintbrushes and creepy little Milos staring and for God’s fucking sake the bottoms of avatars’ shoes coming at us this year, and now I want to kill myself in even more horrid ways than I did after last year’s E3. With all this disillusionment pouring down on me like a rockslide, I had to ask myself: is there even one game I still like anymore? Is there still a game out there that can excite me and keep me entertained for hours on end? What game should today’s games be emulating? A few seconds later, I thought of the answer to those questions.
I thought of burly, muscley men with oversized guns blasting the shit out of mutant terrorists. I thought of air-to-surface missiles pounding into nuclear reactors. I thought of babbling dictators, heat-seeking missiles, and throngs of bloodthirsty beasts. I wasn’t thinking of Gears of War, though. I was thinking of Total Carnage.
Total Carnage, a Midway dual-stick shooter that is the spiritual successor to Smash T.V., is my favorite video game of all time. Honestly. I can play through it over and over and never tire of it. E3 ‘09 didn’t have a single game that looked to match the verve and balls of this 1992 arcade title, and the gaming world is all the worse off for it. Even recent dual-stick shooters like Geometry Wars can’t compare to Total Carnage; they lack the character, the spirit, and the joy that this game sports.
The story of Total Carnage is a mockery of the first Persian Gulf War. The mad dictator of Kookistan, General Akhboob, has been building an army of mutants and holding Americans hostage in his “Baby Milk Factory,” and that’s just not cool. In response, the Pentagon dispatches “the Doomsday Squad,” two guys named Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem, to find and bring the bad General to justice. They’ll shoot their way through three giant battlefields, killing hordes of mindless drones spawned from toxic waste, grabbing weapons and powerups that materialize from thin air, rescuing chained-up women in bikinis who shout “My hero!”, dodging heat-seeking missiles that telegraph their launches by muttering “Excuse me!”, and disarming time bombs that drop in from outer space. Yes, it’s stupid. It’s really a big joke. The whole game is unapologetically corny, campy, violent, bloody, stupid, silly, and worst of all, patriotic, but as was Midway’s style at the time, there’s always a grin and a wink behind the nuttiness.
The game is gorier than an 80s horror flick, with crowds of baddies that burst into a goulash of goop and flying limbs, and it’s sure to satisfy anyone’s bloodlust. The first boss, Orcus, is a screen-filling behemoth with cannons for arms, a giant, grinning face for a body, and a devil’s head on top, and he can only be taken down a piece at a time. It takes at least five minutes of constant firing to beat him, and watching his parts explode and fly off, as he cries “My arm!” or “My eye!” or even “My head!” is an experience hasn’t yet been matched in video games, not even after seventeen years.
Things only get weirder after that. At the beginnings of the second and third battlefields, players are tasked with weaving their way down long highways, taking down passing armored missile transports with an infinite spread gun. All through these segments, little Captain Carnage and Major Mayhem are hooting and hollering “Woo!” and “Yeah!” with thrill and excitement. The only reason I can imagine that these sequences were included was that, during testing, the designers recognized how much fun it was to simply shoot large targets with the spread gun, and decided to devote huge chunks of the game to it. There are other bonus sequences in which players must level a fleet of parked fighter jets by calling in airstrikes, and all while dancing about a sea of moving land mines. The second boss of the game isn’t a boss at all, but an endurance mini-game where the player must rapidly hit the start button to help his soldier break free from a torturous electric chair. Carnage’s body is twitching and burning, his eyes are tearing up and bulging from their sockets, sparks are flying, the gigawatts are mounting, and the strength meter is dropping. Mash that button and be free! You get a huge bonus if you pull it off.
The final stage is a real corker, one that will make “Your puny head swell,” as the game says. It’s not especially long, but it’s strange. The battle with Akhboob is extremely long, extremely difficult, and extremely goofy. I know the game is pretty damn old now, but I don’t want to spoil its craziness for anyone who hasn’t yet played it. Get this game and play it yourself, or, if I can’t convince you to play it, go to YouTube and watch some gameplay videos. Akhboob is not who you think he is, and if his identity doesn’t surprise you, then the final challenge, not to mention the game’s true goal, certainly will.
Anyone who’s beaten Total Carnage will likely agree with me when I say that it is the meanest video game ever made. It’s really quite rude. For one thing, it’s a quarter-vacuum. It’s very hard. Though the stages always play out in the same way, the timing and movement of the enemy hordes are unpredictable, and the only solid strategy is to keep moving and grab any powerups you can. Practice will reduce a player’s death count, but complete mastery is next to impossible. What’s more, the game is more than happy to taunt players, and berate their performance. General Akhboob will occasionally interrupt the chaos with messages that are hilariously similar to any given terrorist video, and which often end with him blurting “You suck at this game!” Candid text will flash onscreen warning Smash T.V. fans to flee from the arcade machine. The game calls players dufuses if they fail at certain tasks, tasks that they probably weren’t even aware of until they failed them. Even its best ending closes with a venomous lie, one engineered to encourage more quarter-feeding, and to generate gamer gossip about just how in HELL the game is to be beaten properly. So even if you earn Total Carnage’s best ending, the game won’t tell you that you’ve earned it. It won’t admit defeat. It wants you to come back, angry and determined to root out that last little secret, but you’ll never be able to.
I know I’ve made Total Carnage sound like a game made by assholes and for assholes, but the whole daring nature of it is what impressed me as an arcade-dwelling youth, and what keeps me so deeply enthralled by it as an adult. Many folks avoided it in the arcades because its brutal difficulty emptied pockets quickly, but nowadays it can be had on the cheap thanks to its inclusion in Midway Arcade Treasures 2. It’s worth every cent. It is a sensation, one whose feast of explosive outrageousness should be enjoyed over and over for years uncounted. This is what video games should be.
Final Rating: 3/3. Must-play. Find it. Get it. Play it until you beat it, and then play it again. They just don’t make games like this anymore.
Lisvender
Homebrew. It’s not a dirty word. Fecal Figs- now that’s dirty. Cam explores the wonderful world of playing old games you already own on a different system on a newer system in preference to games on said newer system.
We Focus Test UFC 2009 and Fight Night Round 4. Clint tells us why these games about sweaty men touching other isn’t suspicious, how the fact they spend most of the game in the same positions as Bruno and Eminem isn’t remotely odd and which of these games is the shiz. And then he explains what a shiz is.
