Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PC, PS3, PS3, Wii, DS. Developed by Treyarch. Published by Activision
Mock if you must but for the next few days at least I’m going to party like it’s 2008. I saw a couple of cheap games that I’d been interesting in playing during a lull SO LONG AS THEY WERE CHEAP. The other week I saw Quantum of Solace and 50 cent Blood on the Sand for cheap (AU $30 ea) and I thought “why the fuck not?”
I needed something relatively simple to cleanse my gaming palette after the majesty that was Uncharted 2 and before Modern Warfare 2. Something cheap, short and can’t be looked down as anything other than dumb fun. Quantum of Solace fits that bill quite well. I like James Bond films but I still don’t really know what to make of Quantum of Solace the movie. The title comes from an Ian Fleming short story where Bond is told a story by some stuffy diplomat-type over a cognac, a story about some couple who grew to hate each other. And it’s really quite dull. If I was Bond in the story I would have shot the guy telling the story for being boring. So the movie QoS followed on from 2006′s excellent Casino Royale movie. And then proceeded to ignore all of the lessons of Casino Royale. People didn’t want far fetched Bond plots in 2008.
Why is this important? Well, this game is actually two thirds a Casino Royale game and one third a Quantum of Solace game. A bit of context doesn’t hurt. So you take the Call o Duty 4 engine, give it to Treyarch who were making the better-than-everyone-was-expecting Call of Duty World at War at the same time as this and what do you get? Something that’ s okay rather than great.
As so many games from movies do, any location that appears in the movie is fair game for a full on corridor shooter fest that takes 20-30 minutes to complete. The final scene from Casino Royale is turned into the intro level to this game. Move through level, kill enemies, pick up cell phone’s convenient dotted around the map for intelligence useful (but by no means vital) to your mission. So despite this using the CoD4 engine, it doesn’t necessarily play just like Call of Duty. You run and gun in much the same way but you don’t have melee in the same way. If you get close to an enemy, you can click on the right stick and to trigger a quick time event where you have to press a face button (a different one each time) to takedown an enemy in a nicely animated unarmed
attack.
It feels as though this game took a lot of cues from the first Uncharted game, especially with 3rd person cover and action scenes. You can balance on beams (looking like Treyarch re-purposed some manual meter code from one of their Tony Hawk ports) jump over things and make leaps of faith just because the game says you can press ‘Y’ to jump. You have some hacking minigames which aren’t anything special but then this is a game designed for a very casual audience. That’s code for saying Normal is actually pretty easy.
So how does it actually play? Well it’s fun for a bit and it is thankfully fairly short. In so many ways you think you are playing a game from five years ago in terms of design and quite often the visuals. It also doesn’t run at Call of Duty 4′s standard 60fps frame rate, so it’s hard to see where the extra fidelity is going.
Presentation is fine for a licensed game but it isn’t going to wow anyone in this day and age. We have many of the cast members from Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, including a bored Dame Judi and Dame Daniel. Gunfire sounds are somewhat lacking, however, but at least the James Bond theme is used in a more restrained way than some of the EA games on PS2.
So overall- cheap filler when you want something quick to snack on in between the ‘great’ games but there’s no reason to go out of your way to play it.
Controller1.com rating 1/3
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 360, DS. Also on PS3 Developed by Firaxis. Published by 2k Games.
I’m not going to waste your time by talking about the history of the Civilization franchise or the in-depth workings of how turn based gaming works for everyone out there who thinks ‘strategy’ is deciding between the chain gun or the chain saw in Gears. Short version: Sid Meier’s Civilization is the biggest video game ever made. You start at the dawn of human civlization with a motley tribe and work your way up to the modern day, all the while trying to take over the world. It’s incredibly detailed and incredibly awesome.
It’s also slower than Keyser Soze taking a jog and more detailed than a relief map of Michael Jackson’s face.
So, we now have Civilization Revolution. The big difference, despite it being on consoles, is the speed. A regular game of Civilization IV (the latest iteration of the PC game) takes about 30 hours from start to finish and if you really want you could push it to at least 80. I haven’t played a game of Revolution that’s taken longer than 4 hours and believe me I was trying to stretch it out as long as possible because it’s BRILLIANT.
I love Civ. I mean, really, really dangerously bordering on looking at it through its bedroom window at night kind of love. When Revolution was first announced everyone thought it was going to just dumb the game down but it’s not like that at all – it’s the same game at heart but now built for speed. Think of it like the difference between reading the original text of Romeo and Juliet and watching the movie version. Purists can scoff at the movie all they want but it’s got Claire Danes in it so purists can go jump for all I care.
For example in Revolution you start with a heap of base technologies that in the PC game you had to spend your first half an hour researching. This means you can get to the interesting techs a lot quicker and start to build your empire your own way in the first few turns. Researching also takes less time and it’s a lot clearer what each thing you can research ‘does’.
Oh speaking of building things your own way another cool feature of Revolution is that there are now four clearly defined win conditions you can aim for on each difficulty setting. I prefer the Financial win condition since I’m not a warmonger and it’s great that the game gives you the scope for that – the PC game always felt too dead set on war breaking out for me.
This game was released on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and DS. The 360 and PS3 versions (as far as I can make out) are identical and amazingly the DS version is near as damnit identical to the console versions. This easily makes the DS game one of the best DS games ever made. There were a couple of UI problems I had with the DS game that made me make some ill informed decisions (you can’t tell how many units you have in a city easily unless you activate them and them refortify them, aaaagh) but overall this is the console game in its entirety. It even has the downloadable weekly challenge packs! An incredible achievement.
Ultimately Revolution and regular Civilization are different enough that die hard fans like me should really get both versions. X-Wing and Star Wars Arcade are vastly different games but if you’re a Star Wars fan you’d want both, right? Right. An easily awarded 3, regardless if you’re a fan of the franchise or not.
PS: GO TO HELL GANDHI STOP TRYING TO NUKE ME YOU SON OF A BITCH!!!
Controller1.com rating 3/3
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on: DS, PSP, PS2, Wii, PS3, PC. Developed by Traveller’s Tales. Published by Lucasarts (NTSC)/Activision (PAL)
It’s the third Lego game based on Lucasfilm source material. And probably the best so the pressure’s on Lego Batman. Lego Indy takes the storylines from the first three movies and turns them into plastic heroin.
Maybe that was pushing it a bit far but what you have is a charming (if
sometimes obtuse) action game with puzzles, combat, vehicles and Short
Round able to destroy metal barrels with his bare hands.
Lego Indy has refined the formula laid down in Lego Star Wars but reducing the number of characters in your party (usually 2, sometimes three in some of the Temple of Doom levels) and very occasionally 4 (as in the final level of Last Crusade) but without characters who only have one talent that is occasionally used and is otherwise a drain on the fun (ie C3PO). Of course now you have phobias (Indy can’t go near the snake pits, Elsa won’t go near the rats, etc). You also don’t have unlimited ammo in guns and can only use weapons dropped by enemies (when they have them). A few shots and you’re empty. Of course any character can pick up a spanner to fix a machine or a shovel to dig up Lego treasure and small characters have their hatches leading to secret areas but on the whole this has refined the approach. There are puzzles based on Simon Says provided one of you characters has a blue book that’s usually sticking out of their pocket and some boss battle where its not immediately apparent what the fuck you have to do to progress (the worst was the thugee on the rock crusher)
That said there’s still some annoying crap such as often respawning on the edge of the cliff you fell off anyway, areas where you are constantly overwhelmed by enemies, some of whom now wield RPG’s that blow you to Lego bits with one shot. Obscure puzzles and boss battles are annoying but you’ll generally work stuff out without too much drama. I scratched my head a bit, but then I’m not very bright. But I think the Comedy 64 is more over-rated than Kristen Bell so I can’t be all that dumb.
Graphics don’t really matter much as they look the same on most platforms but they are quite pretty on 360 with background textures of non Lego items being rather nice. Lego is Lego and as such Marion looks like a tranny, but one without a penis so its not all bad for Indy. Lego Indy, of course has no genitals either so….
The Score is great and It’s nice to hear the music from Temple and Crusade since you can’t buy the fuckers on CD at the moment. The sound effects are also crisp, but many of them are the same as the ones from Lego Star Wars.
So I loved Lego Indy. Would I buy Lego Batman? Well, One Lego game a year is enough and I love Indy and Star Wars so much more than Batman. But I would be up for a Kingdom of the Crystal Skull game, just so I can hear people trying to popularise “nuke the fridge” and be burned like a goat’s bitch. Oh wait.
C1 Rating: 2/3
