I’ve finally managed to bust out DKCR on the Wii. My average of one Wii game a year continues unless I decide to pick up Goldeneye at some some stage on the cheap. I’m currently enjoying the hell out of it though I can see how I’m going to find it incredibly frustrating down the track much in the same way I found New Super Mario Brothers similarly frustrating back in 2009. One measly checkpoint in the middle of a level may not counter the fun to play levels.
It’s colourful and vibrant too look at, sounds wonderful and plays like the older game, but more fluidly. It’s like if in the first Back to the Future, Marty McFly had scored with Lorraine after all. I still don’t get very far whenever I try to play the original I bought through WiiWare. But I just sat and played through the whole first world in or DKCR this morning.
I was holding off on playing DKCR for a few reasons. One, I was too involved with Fallout New Vegas and BLOPS on PC but those single player campaigns are now finished. I still had Medal of Honor and Enslaved to play on 360 but MoH has also been finished and Enslaved just isn’t enough fun to make me keep playing. Lastly, my 46″ Samsung HDTV has a small issue with it. It doesn’t switch on immediately (it will eventually activate after about 5 minutes of trying to switch on by itself) and I’m expecting it to be carted off for repair under warranty (once things locally get back into swing). The plan was to cart out one of the older CRTV’s in the spare room to play DK in SD.
So floods. Lots of rain. It has been fairly wet here for several months, much more than usual for the time of year. Brisbane is split in two by the Brisbane River and it’s this river that has flooded many suburbs near to the river and parts of the Central Business District.
Now the last time we had floods of a similar magnitude was in early 1974, when I was just a few months old. My parents lived in a low lying area not far from the river and their house WA swamped. They lived in a typical house in that area- older, wooden single story cottages, but raised about eight feet off the ground. You would park your car underneath and maybe your laundry appliances. My parents tell stories of having hearing the floating washing machine bounce against the floorboards, which signalled to them it was time to get out. After those floods, my parents and most of their relatives who lived in nearby suburbs all moved to the newer housing developments on the southside, a long way from the river. There had been flood mitigation works carried out by governments for years yet we flooded again, almost as badly (but probably not as bad as it would have been had those mitigation works not been carried out).
So I and most of my family are some way from the flood affected areas though my wife has not been able to go to work in the city due to the flooding. As far as I know most of my friends are unaffected. One thing I have to say, there doesn’t appear to be a lot to criticise about the way our governments have handled the situation. Our State Premier, who was considered highly unpopular before this event has shown her worth as being compassionate and on top of things. Our Prime Minister, on the other hand, is a robot and hasn’t done her reputation any favours by spouting the same platitudes over and over.
Julia Gillard, Australia’s first Fembot Prime-Minister, surveys the flood damage from a safe distance lest she short circuits
On the brighter side, the TV coverage has provided us with a drinking game by their constant use of the same few words OVER AND OVER again. Now, everyone is going to use, misuse, overuse, abuse and misspell the words inundate and vision (as in ” we now have vision from the scene” ie- video footage).
Forget God of War, Mass Effect 2, Fallout New Vegas, Final Fantasy XIII, Halo 3, GT5, Kinect, Move or Donkey Kong. Black Ops is the biggest game of the year. And it’s here.
Biggest doesn’t mean it’s the best, just the biggest. But that statement doesn’t exclude it from being good. It is good. Very good. And a lot of fun to boot. With the implosion of Infinity Ward, Treyarch no longer have to toil in the shadow of the series’ originators but can release a game that is as anticipated and enjoyed in its own right. Black Ops shown how much they have grown since making PS2 versions of CoD games.
Black Ops manages to build on the hyperactive action sequences that Modern Warfare 2‘s single player campaign seems to be vilified for but managing to make the story somewhat rooted in reality. It’s still aimed at the same target market and pushes the same buttons (i.e. giving 13 year old boys something else to do with their hands) as MW2, but in a way that seems credible. Make no mistake, it’s still bullshit. Just more believable bullshit.
What mistakes have Treyarch learned from MW2? Dedicated servers on PC, for one, even if the lag so far seems about the same as you’d get on a 360. Also, the killstreaks seem to have been reigned in somewhat so it’s not camp-and-nuke like MW2 had degenerated into. OK, the radio controlled car with the explosives is going to become annoying for all, but you at least have to control it in order for it to be effective. The single player story still has the Michael Bays about it, but that’s no reason to hate it. Treyarch still relay a lot of their story via cutscenes during loading screens but they aren’t the dry snoregasms from MW2, but explosive cinematics in their own right.
Are we getting sick of annual servings of CoD? Black Ops says not yet.
As someone who occasionally seems to really enjoy good Western RPGs so long as they are sci-fi based (ie Mass Effect and Fallout), Fallout New Vegas was kind of a no brainer for me. I really loved Fallout 3 and this proved intriguing enough for me to pull the trigger on a purchase. I seem to have the time on my hands.
While I would preferred to grab this on a console (specifically 360), the ultra low UK price of the PC version meant insta-import for me. By instant, it took two weeks to show up but it’s here, it’s installed and it’s less than half the price if I had bought it on Steam. I’m about 2-3 hours into it, right at the beginning and it’s starting to come together. I know when an RPG has sucked me, I want to sit down and play it for hours at a time. New Vegas and I haven’t quite reached that point yet but signs ar elooking positive. Of course, I have yet to come across the well-publicised game-breaking bugs and maybe that’s one pleasant side effect of having the PC version- quicker patches. Still, playing on the couch would have been my preference. Earlier DLC for 360 is also a concern, but I’m unlikely to picking up DLC for New Vegas anytime soon anyway.
Obsidian have a weird rep for picking up the IP and tech of another company and making a quick, brilliant but buggy as hell sequel. Open world games are notoriously difficult and laborious to QA but I’ve vome across nothing worse than a floating coyote so far. Of course, here’s a pro tip, the earliest parts of a game get the most QA. I expect by the time I reach the final conflict to be seeing gravity-defying rats, robots bouncing around like polystyrene and people clipping through walls as if they were in the Matrix.
Usually in RPG’s like this you spend the first few hours dieing a lot until you can work out what the hell you are doing in combat, remember to quicksave around every corner and collect weapons powerful enough to defeat your early foes. I remember finding a particular weapon in Fallout 3 that made a big difference to my ability to progress faster so here’s hoping I can find another downed UFO.
So I like it more than Fallout 3? Again, it’s too early to tell but it’s looking to be a similar experience but a different enough one to make the journey worthwhile.
Just to piss PC gamers off- Playing it on Win 7 Boot Camped on a Mac with a 360 controller. I played Fallout 3 on a 360 and I liked the Controller, that and I can recline in my office chair and play this thing for hours so I want to be comfortable dammit.
So after a work-induced week away from gaming last week, I’m back into it. And by it, I mean Crackdown 2.
There’s something about the game that isn’t gelling with me. It’s either open-world fatigue after Just Cause 2, Saboteur, Assassin’s Creed 2, Borderlands, etc or it’s just a little lacklustre compared to the original. For me it’s not the similarity to the original, it’s the lack of similarity that gets me. I loved having to work my way through the waves of gang members before attacking the boss in the original and here, the ‘enhancements’ aren’t as much fun. The games’ fun, it’s just not as compelling. I’m a fair way through the game and fully intend on finishing it soon (certainly before Halo Reach), but I’m not getting the urge to play in the morning before work (my metric for HOLY FUCK THIS GAME IS AWESOME).
I live in Australia and of course, aren’t able to buy the same version of Left 4 Dead 2 as the rest of the world due to classifications issues. A friend gifted it to me after it was more or less being given away by Valve in a sale. I mean they almost paid me to download this game. Somehow receiving the game from someone with a US account means you can DL the normal version in Australia and play it without Zombies disappearing before your eyes.
It’s also a case of too little to add to the first game and I do agree with the critics of L4D’s releases so soon after the original- apart from a few enhancements- why wasn’t this DLC or an expansion like HL2 episodes? The new crew don’t have as much charisma as the original crew and yada yada yada.
Grumpy George continues grumpily with a some Grumpy Theft Auto IV. I’ve perhaps played 90 minutes of the PC version multiplayer- and seem to play once every few weeks. I like a bit of structure. this has none. There are several modes and for some reason they always end up with everyone having Bazookas or Helicopters, even if it’s a race.
So two weeks before Halo: Reach and I’d loooove to play some Halo 3 or ODST in the meantime. Approximately two weeks after H:R turns up, I’m off overseas for a few weeks so chances are I won’t feel like playing Halo when i get back. When you were a kid, did you ever have this thing that any fads or lunchtime activities would always be bookended by holidays? In Year 6 Term 2, everyone was into Marbles but gave up in Term 3. In Year 9, everyone was playing cards on the bus after Easter but that stopped the next holidays.
I therefore expect two weeks of concentrated Halo Reach from mid September. If you hate Halo, this site might be one to avoid till October.
My Crackdown 2 review by Cam (aged 35)
To nobody’s great surprise I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Crackdown 2 in those horrible, cold hours that are the time I am not playing Crackdown 2. It wasn’t until Ravi forced me to explain my rabid defence of the game that I was able to really wrap my head around how I feel about the game. And it is thus:
Crackdown 2 magnificently succeeds in the areas that are the most important to me. Thus, to me, it is an absolutely incredible game.
All I wanted, at the end of the day, was more Crackdown. Now for different people more crackdown means a lot of different things. All I wanted was jumping off buildings, COLLECTING ORBS, and blowing people up with a homing missile. That’s it. To me, Crackdown is the never ending joy of finding an enemy, jumping, pressing LT to lock on and, while you’re still in mid air, pressing RT and watching the enemy blow up real good like. I swear I have a Povolv-ian reaction to this, just sitting there like an idiot drooling doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. And then to top it off I jump off a building and get vertigo and land SO HARD on the ground that NEARBY CARS EXPLODE.
That’s Crackdown to me. Crackdown 2 has more of that. Therefore it’s great.
Crackdown (left) compared with Crackdown 2 (right)
For the life of me I couldn’t understand the backlash. It’s bad because it’s more of the same, but different? Who the hell complains about following up the best steak you’ve ever had in your life with ANOTHER STEAK BUT THIS TIME WITH EXTRA SHRIMP IN THE MIDDLE OF IT?
I have to admit Ravi had a point. For a lot of people ‘more Crackdown’ is about watching different factions fight each other for control of a city, or it’s about watching a working, vibrant city that is desperately trying to cling onto normality getting screwed up by crime. Some people spent most of their time in the vehicles, which I never really was interested in. And…OK, I’ll admit, Crackdown 2 doesn’t have that. The visually unique areas are replaced with a uniform desolation, and because everywhere is so broken you can’t enjoy being anywhere as much. I thought the Peacekeepers, Cell and Freaks would be the three factions that fight each other, but they’re all just everywhere and you never get the sense you’re in Freak territory or whatever. Everywhere is the same as everywhere else really, and that’s a shame. The city isn’t what it used to be.
I kind of miss it.
But, like everything else in life I miss, I try not to think about it and just play more Crackdown 2 and start grinning like a God damn lunatic again.
Editor’s Note: A less mentally unstable review of Crackdown 2 is coming in a few weeks
Mario is just one of those things in gaming. I’ve always enjoyed Mario platform games (right back to Donkey Kong being one of my top 5 arcade favourites), but I have gotten to the point where I’m just not finishing them. Sunshine on the Gamecube was the last Mario game where I faced the final boss, and that was by getting the bare minimum shine requirement.
I may have only gotten half way through the original SMG and barely 25% of the way through New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii. But I still bought SMG2. Thankfully, I am enjoying it.
I felt that although SMG was a good game full of ideas, too much of it felt a bit like they were reaching for new things to do. SMG2 (so far) feels organic. It feels right. It feels good. wait, that’s caffeine. well, anyway, it’s a good game.
There are two wrinkles to me getting too far into this game. One, is Crackdown 2. Having only played the demo and the first 15 minutes of the game (Most of which is the demo), I think I can say it’s comfort food. But then, most of my gaming is comfort food. Mario games and platformers USED to be my comfort food, replaced first by shooters and now it seems by open world mayhem games. Games like Heavy Rain and Mario are me straying outside those confines.
Crackdown 2 is that burger I have from Grill’d every Friday lunch. I order the Bombay Bliss Veggie Burger most weeks, and occasionally have a Beef Burger with egg and bacon (To make any fast food ‘Australian,’ add egg. Don’t ask me why, just be glad it’s not vegemite)
So Crackdown 2 is expected to offer few surprises, but then, I didn’t really expect it to. I didn’t expect a Mass Effect style rewrite where the developer took to heart any and every minor complaint from the original and offered up a massively different sequel. SMG2 feels like Miyamoto and co may have looked at the feedback from the original (and sales figures- while healthy- were under expectations for a marquee game like a Mario platformer) and tightened up the graphics on level 3 as well as the gameplay. Ruffian havn’t done this, possibly down to a very short time constraint and likely small budget. I’m guessing the guys who replayed the first game and/or hunted down the collectibles will be the ones who notice the similarity more. It’s the same city, which is the kicker, unlike say, Vice City which was GTAIII tech with changed art.
The other big news, I have my iPad. I didn’t expect to pick on up for another week but as my Wife and I are heading interstate for a few days, we thought it would be a good opportunity to see if an iPad would be all the computing we’d need away from home in preparation for an overseas holiday later in the year. That said, I’ve got all of my iPhone games to try like Canabalt, Attack Force and Poker Smash and have picked up Angry Birds and Plants VS Zombies. I’m considering Mirror’s Edge as well as some Popcap puzzlers. I’m open to suggestions…
I used to be adverse to really long games. I’d play at best maybe one RPG and one open world game a year. In the last year I’ve played through and loved Assassin’s Creed II, Red Faction Guerrilla, The Saboteur, Red Dead Redemption (and to a lesser extent, Borderlands) and am looking forward to Crackdown 2 more than any man not named Cameron. I was looking forward to Just Cause 2 based on the positive word-of-mouth and fun demo- despite me hating Just Cause 1 when I picked it up cheaply on Steam earlier this year). I waited to get it cheap and in the end got it on PC. It’s a great game in what seems to be my new favourite genre.
And I’m just not feeling it.
So your job is to destabilise the government of south Asian country Panau. Armed with your grappling hook and parachute, you can go almost anywhere, carry out missions for various factions and cause chaos (i.e. blowing shit up). So the shooting is a bit simplistic and the blowing shit up and using the grappling hook is fun. What’s not is constantly running out of ammo, being shunted back literally miles when you die far away from a checkpoint and the generally long travel times, possibly even more monotonous than those in RDR.
After finally adding a wired 360 controller to the mix (a Play and Charge kit doesn’t turn a 360 into a wired controller, merely a wireless controller powered by a wire), things improved. But not enough. It’s just not that compelling experience. And at the time of writing, I haven’t touched the Crackdown 2 demo. Speaking of which, let’s wrap this up so I can go and give that a try.
LATER THAT NIGHT….
So Crackdown 2. Hmmm So I love the gameplay. It’s seems so much more immediate (probably due to the fact the gameplay arena is so much smaller). Agility orbs are back and there’s Crackdown Dude’s voice. It’s like sipping on a comfy pair of slippers. The game doesn’t look that pretty though. It looks rather ugly in fact, but it runs smoothly and that’s more important when you’re pumping as many characters on screen at one time as they are doing here. It’s hard to know what exactly is going on with these infected guys so hopefully that will be made more clear in the full game. Not long to go now…
If you see this article twice, it may be due to some wordpress upgrade shenanigans. Or not.
Alan Wake, five years in the making and slowly turning into a joke the same way Too Human, Daikatana and GT5 are, is finally out. Remedy’s first game since Max Payne 2 shows these guys have still got it. While most people would have been happy with a clone of Max Payne, the funny Fins have instead given us with their take on Stephen King.
Mixing shooting with burning things with light, as you do, Alan Wake shows Xbox gamers something they rarely see these days- a slow paced game that’s as exciting as the more action oriented titles on the console. It’s central mechanic takes some time to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a pretty addictive game. If you enjoyed Resident Evil 4, you should have some fun here, but the game is its own beast.
I don’t know why I like, I just know I’m enjoying this game much more that I expected to. It’s deliberate pace is probably soothing after all of the faster-paced games I usually play, not boring in the way the travel in RDR turned me off.
It’s a pretty game and sounds fantastic. Voice acting is either ordinary or genius, possibly due to the writing and whether you think Stephen King is a great writer or not. I have met in real life the guy they based Rusty, which is kind of neat, so that’s nice in a personal way.
What’s not the greatest? Lip Sync in cutscenes is atrocious and while the part of the story unfolds in the form of manuscript pages you collect (similar to the logs in Doom 3, Bioshock, et al), you have to go to a menu to play them, rather than just press a button to read them while you keep playing. One thing about working on a game for so long is sometimes developments pass you by.
Thankfully I have a long weekend coming up that will be used to savour this game. Like a fine wine.
Also released at the bargain price of a buck or two is XBLA title, Poker Smash for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. It’s great, providing you have an iDevice made in the last year or so. I managed to compare the performance of this on my 3G iPhone with Cameron’s newer and not quite superceded 3GS and the 3GS flies while the 3G is a little sluggish. Only one music track is included but then, you have a frickin iPod!
Get it! Stat!
Next up is Just Cause 2 (PC) and SMG2 (Wii)
It’s fair to say that GTA has become a little stale of late. And since the engine developed for RDR was later used in GTA IV, you can see how the improvements to the open world genre suggested by games such as Red Faction: Guerrilla have bypassed Rock Star. But it has at least learned some of GTA IV’s lessons in not forcing man-dates on you.
So after about 6 hours, I’m not quite ready to render a verdict, nor am I ready to hang up my spurs. But after going to a mission start only to find it is literally a cowboy misson, the influence of Nico and Roman can be felt everytime you realise you’ve been gazumped into a side mission that involces no mayhem of any description. Side missions in this game include races (grrr), herding cattle, breaking horses, following a dog around, hunting animals, skinning animals, looking for herbs and bounties. The missions themselves features large periods of riding to a location, often having to have a conversation with someone along the way.
Thankfully, fast travel turns up later and makes a big difference. Of course, being Rockstar, you can’t just select fast-travel from a menu, you have to wait for some nice motion capture work to play out. It’s atmospheric to be sure, but the point of fast travel is I’M IMPATIENT!
Shooting controls, important in a western are mostly well done, even if the auto targeting makes it a mite easy (at least in the first third or so of the game). You have your dead eye mode (bullet time) which makes this game automatically better than the just plain broken duels which totally ruined Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood
It’s an attractive game with great presentation. I’ve also decided the story is unimportant so I’ve taken to skipping most cutscenes. I don’t know why because Rockstar usually does these well. But they just seem to drag out to the point that skip button looks so attractive. So very, very attractive.
RDR doesn’t regain Rock Star’s crown for the best open world games. The world has moved on from San Andreas, even if Rock Star sometimes forget the fun bits. If you’re an OCD type, then you have many collectibles and challenges to keep you entertained.
This week, I have played a little bit of the multiplayer beta for Bungie’s Halo Reach.
It’s Halo 3 with some enhancements. Apart from one small thing, for the life of me, I can’t really tell what they are yet.
Reach is a prequel to the Halo games starring MasterChief and as many know, it’s Bungie’s last game for MS and the last time they visit the world they unleashed on gamers nearly a decade ago. Halo redefined console multiplayer for many, made console FPS acceptable to all but a few cranky people with superiority/impotence issues and despite several iterations, hasn’t changed all that much. You still have a red team and a green team, with some customisations of armour available. You can change your armor’s color yet you always end up as red or blue in a team game but there’s not a huge visual difference in classes, which is a bit of a shame these days.
But here’s what’s new, armour abilities. You pick one of five nearly identical loadouts but you can access camo- which sends you semi-invisible in the same way as the camo powerup from the earlier games; a powerful ground attack which locks you do the group while you let off a powerful shockwave attack; a super sprint move; and jet pack. Jet pack is the most fun, and the one open to the most early abuse so be prepared for lots of shouting. Unless you’re like me and mute everything.
I find Halo a relaxing game to play since I never have been great at it. Since I never expect to do well, I enjoy it more. No headset means I don’t listen to all the whining brats and hence the game is fun. If I stick at it, I will generally do better but I expect final Halo Reach will be something I play online for a month or so until Medal of Honor comes out a month later.
I’m also playing Splinter Cell Conviction with its annoyingly vocal guards. They’re even tweeting GuardFromSCC
The game is brief. ODST brief. I’ve barely touched it and seem to be close to the end. It’s also very good. Since the end is near and the review won’t be far off, I’ll leave it at that.
Medal of Honor’s trailer, showing an emotionally mature storyline seems to have confused many weaned on Infinity Ward’s teen-baiting shenanigans of late, but MoH was always po-faced and reverential of soldiers when you consider it came out of Steven Spielberg’s continuing fascination with World War II even after making Saving Private Ryan. CoD 7 looks to be more of the same- no bad thing for fans, but the law of diminishing returns will hit Activision’s franchise the saw as it did for EA years ago.
Also, we’ve got a Podcats coming tomorrow. Don’t clap just yet…
