Reviewed on PC. Also on PS3, Xbox 360, Wii Developed by Treyarch. Published by Activision
A year after Modern Warfare 2, which was either the worst game ever or the besterest, depending on to whom you are talking, their age and the pitch of their voice; we have another Treyarch CoD game. But a funny thing happened on the way to the web forum. BLOPS isn’t all that much more than World at War, yet the internal combustion at Infinity Ward has guaranteed BLOPS would be released without being in someone else’s shadow.
The Single player campaign starts off in the early Sixties’s during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. You play (mainly) as Alex Mason, a bland Australian actor posing as a CIA agent (which is ironic since that also describes Mason’s voice over artist Sam Worthington) as he recounts, seemingly under duress, a number of his recent missions (it’s right there on the menus when you boot up so it’s not really a spoiler). With action splintered across several locations such as Cuba, Vietnam, some icy place in the USSR, some shanty town in somewhere or other; it follows the hyperkinetic story-telling techniques as used in MW2, but without the most important story info imparted to you in boring-as-plain-cardboard loading screens. The game never lets up on the excitement. It’s quite a contrast to the rather muted and serious MoH reboot.
There’s nothing particularly new in terms of movement or combat (you can swim now and then, but only when the game wants you to) but this is a formula adhered to by every clone game (Medal of Honor) so why shouldn’t Activision? The use of flashbacks and disorienting graphics perfectly complement the all-over-the-place story (i.e. it covers the silliness with a veneer of credulity like dressing a clown in a tuxedo). Does it make any sense? No. It’s no worse or better than MW2 it seems, but it is a pretty cool roller coaster ride if you don’t think about it too much. Even if every mission has someone to tell you what to do every step of the way. Even though the action is scripted you have giant HUD elements pointing you in the right direction and NPC’s reiterating your current objective as nauseum. Even more action and even more jam on the lens!
But because it doesn’t mess with success, it plays really well and Treyarch have managed to produce a great set of levels with less of the overt me-too rehashes of IW’s more successful missions. One new element pushed to the fore here are the missions where you control a vehicle such as a chopper or gunboat. They control as well as the rest of the game (something too many FPS’s don’t get right when they add a new element for one mission-think of Alan Wake‘s awful driving) although the controls don’t let you get into too much trouble. Yyou can’t crash your chopper, for instance. Thing aren’t as finessed as the vehicles in Halo:Reach for example). I rather enjoyed these almost fail-free missions a lot more than the skidoo/ seadoo levels of previous CoD games.
WaW’s standout contribution to CoD was always the Zombie mode that is unlocked once you’ve completed the single player campaign. It makes another appearance here and although I won’t spoil it for you, I will say it is definitely worth playing through the game to get to it. The character you play as nearly made me soil my pants from laughing so hard.
Of course, being a CoD title, there is a large proportion of the game’s playerbase who don’t care and just want Multiplayer. It’s probably the most balanced MP of any Call of Duty game to date with only a few Killstreak rewards ruining the game for the rest of us (those damn attack helicopters turning a close game into insta-lose!). I’ve had quite a bit of fun with MP though I can’t say I’ve had the burn I’ve had where I’ve NEEDED to play it a lot (ie several times over the course of a day, every day). I still anticipate playing it for a few more weeks at least (though I am tempted by the Vietnam expansion for Bad Company 2), but then I can’t see much else in the short term that’s going to compete with it. One nice thing- PC gamers get dedicated servers back (albeit heavily controlled) and gosh wouldn’t it be great if more devs took Epic and EA’s lead to introduce dedicated servers on more console games. CoD on consoles always had one thing going against it and that’s IW’s peer to peer networking code/ matchmaking is awful compared to Bungie’s. Bungie doesn’t have radio controller explosive cars, though. I love me some RCXD.
The presentation looks as good as previous CoD games (or as decent as my gaming rig can handle. Word on the streets is that the 360 version is slightly prettier than the PS3 (probably in such a small increment that it hardly matters) and the PC, if it’s beefy enough, would probably outshine the console versions, particularly the Wii (at least Treyarch caters for Wii owners). CoD sound has always been great. Stirring music and sound design is only let down slightly by a lead actor who hangs on to his accent with such a tenuous grip that you feel like giving him some supaglu. Enunciate, Sam.
So overall, it’s a good to great game (though not quite excellent). You will not lose sleep if you don’t play it, but if you have any interest in shooters, BLOPS has much to recommend it. If you think the score is low, get a life. It’s a very good game just not a must-play.
Controller1.com recommendation 2/3
The nominations for our Game of 2010.
I’ve weedled out titles like God Of War III (Lisvender gave it a low score) Crackdown 2 (because this isn’t game of 2007), GT5, NFS and Just Cause 2. I still have plans to play Donkey Kong Country Returns, Fable III and Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood but too late for me to include here. In fact some of my favourite 2010 gaming experiences were holdovers from previous years (AC2, Saboteur, Batman AA). You might also think it a bit sad that all but Heavy Rain and Alan Wake are games built on the foundations of earlier games, but then “cheer up, dude, these games are good!”
Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360) review
This was a great game that was a hell of a ride. So the RPG elements were simplified (though they weren’t particularly great to start with). It was a fun roller coaster ride with almost all of the extraneous fat from the first game removed. Except for the planet scanning, which bored more than a blood-lusting tick, ME2 was fun squared.
Heavy Rain (PS3) review
It was certainly the most different game of 2010, though it was also in turns: great, terrible, silly, wonderful, sexy, sleazy, brilliant, dumb, gripping, boring and more. You should play it at some point (and try and get past the opening few hours that make you long for the days of scanning planets) just to see how what ending you get. Mine was stupid, but the middle of the game is brilliant.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (PC) review
The PC fans were let into Bad Company and they went ape/ Of course, they’re still waiting for a true BF3 but who cares this is the only multiplatform shooter that could tear a sizeable population of players away from CoD or TF2.
Splinter Cell: Conviction (Xbox 360) review
Shorter than Herve Villechaize as a toddler and sharper than an incredibly sharp thing, SC:C was a welcome return to Sam Fisher’s universe of Hyperbole. The latest game is more “24″ than stealth sneak-em-up but was polished more than a floor polished by a cleaner with OCD and a very short memory.
Alan Wake (Xbox 360) review
Good game, a bit dated.
Read Dead Redemption (Xbox 360) review
Lisvender loves this more than I, but ultimately despite everyone else falling in love with DRD, I was merely”in like” with it. Pressing a button to run when you have an analogue controller is still stupid (and there’s no PC version for this to be present. The world Rock Star have created is fantastic, though I wasn’t sold on the worth of the various side missions.
Plants Vs Zombies HD (iPad) review
I had a lot of fun with iOS games this year, but this was the best by far.
Halo Reach (Xbox 360) review
The best single player Halo game ever. Every criticism you might have had of Halo 2, 3 or ODST’s campaign is gone. Multiplayer is as polished as ever and just as much fun with the additions. Its loses points for not adding players to a match when someone leaves leading to the inevitable 8 vs 1 matches that nobody over the age of 11 finds fun.
Fallout New Vegas (PC) review
So amazingly expansive. So fucking buggy. Oh how I love you, you buggy bitch.
Call of Duty Black Ops (PC) not yet reviewed
Does nothing new but does it better than Treyarch have done in the past without a tenth of the frustrations of MW2′s multiplayer. Room for improvement but for now this will do just fine.
And the Winner…
SUPER MARIO GALAXY 2 review
Yes, you could argue its just a mission pack for the first game (same as most of the games here), but it’s so sublimely beautiful that whenever I was frustrated enough to stop, I picked it up the next day and tried again. Every time. So few games have that element these days (and I include NSMB Wii as one of those) that it has to be number one. I have a number of games I had been highly anticipating and all had to wait until I beat SMG2. loved it.
So that was 2010. A very good, but maybe not spectacular year. Why not spectacular when the games were so good? Perhaps because the best games tended to be evolutions instead top revolutions. Will 2011 be any different? We shall see.
Reviewed by Lisvender
Available on Nintendo Wii. Developed by Next Level Games. Published by Nintendo.
I hate fighting games. They’re archaic, frustrating things that only elitist enthusiasts appreciate anymore. Punch-Out!!, however, is not a fighting game. In fact, you could argue that it’s not even a boxing game. Punch-Out!! is to boxing as NBA Jam is to basketball: it’s a simplified and exaggerated caricature that takes only the most exciting moments of a sport and condenses them into one hell of a video game.
after lots of scrolling, a SFW image from Punch Out
Little Mac, a junior from some Bronx high school, has teamed up with retired fighter Doc Louis to claim the championship of the World Video Boxing Association. It won’t be an easy trip, as the WVBA is quite possibly the worst-regulated sporting association in history. It has no weight classes, and no rules against flagrant cheating. Most of Mac’s fourteen opponents are twice his size, and could probably snap his neck like celery. Thankfully, they also have about half of Mac’s intelligence, as they all announce their punches with peculiar tells.
Your challenge is to recognize these tells, avoid the incoming punches, and then respond with a flurry of counterpunches. Little Mac can make left and right jabs to the face and left and right hooks to the gut. He can duck down, dodge left and right, and block jabs. If you manage to slug the other guy at an opportune moment, you can earn stars that can be used to throw a powerful uppercut. Knock him down three times in one round for a TKO. This is the way of the Punch-Out, as it’s been known for decades, and though it appears simple, it’s amazingly addictive.
this one, not so much
Mac will take on thirteen fighters in order to become champion. That may not sound like very many, but once you have the belt, you’ll have to defend it. All your old foes will line up for a chance at the new champ, and they’ll come at you with new tricks and techniques that will trip you up and make you search desperately for openings.
Since Punch-Out!! only involves Mac and his opponent at any given time, a lot of effort is put into making those opponents interesting. Next Level Games must have a platoon of expert animators under its employ, because they’ve done an amazing job at filling the fighters with personality. Your opponents preen, strut, taunt, and smirk like God’s gifts to video games, and you’re going to like some of them in spite of yourself. Glass Joe, the lovable wimp, displays a delightful mix of haughtiness and fright, while Aran Ryan, known only for being indistinct in his SNES days, has been turned into a wild-eyed madman who smuggles weapons into the ring. Even the speechless Little Mac is likably determined. The voice acting is excellent, with Doc Louis providing mostly useless moral support from the corner, and your international opponents firing threats in their respective languages. Strangely, the game’s Subtitles option only works for Doc, but not for your opponents. You’ll have to be multilingual to understand their lines.
The incredible soundtrack boasts catchy Bill Conti-style tunes with electric guitar, piano, and lively brass. You’ll hear a lot of rearranged versions of the NES Punch-Out!! theme, but they vary enough to keep you from getting tired of it. Some of the themes, like those of Russian soft-drink guzzler Soda Popinski and the monstrous Mr. Sandman, are iPod-worthy. This is some of the best music I’ve ever heard in a video game.
Here are some outrageously homoerotic pics of Nintendo’s Fellate Out!!
The only aspect of Punch-Out!! that makes me shake my head is the control. The game offers three options for control: using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk for motion-controlled punching, the Wii Remote turned on its side for button-controlled punching, and then the same two options combined with the Wii Balance Board for motion-controlled ducking and dodging. I don’t own a Balance Board, so I can’t give an opinion on it, but I’ve heard that using it sucks. I used the Wii Remote and Nunchuk successfully through most of the game, and I personally prefer it. Like other games that use motion controls for canned animations, the game doesn’t register a “punch” until you’ve a made a sufficient motion with the controller. Mac’s punches are so quick, though, that by the time you’ve extended your arm, Mac’s fist is in his enemy’s face. The motion controls work well up until the last few Title Defense matches, when beating and countering your opponents requires wicked-fast speed and reaction time. Even the split second that it takes to make a punch motion can ruin your timing and cause you to lose. You’ll have to unplug the Nunchuk and resort to old-fashioned button control to win here.\
Especially against that Bald Bull. God, I hate him.
This is the disappointing thing about Punch-Out!!: it demonstrates the faults of motion controls in video games. They’re only effective and responsive when the onscreen action corresponds to the player’s real-life movements one-to-one. Unfortunately, this drops the capabilities of the game character to the limits of the player’s big, flabby body. Contrariwise, games in which characters can do amazing things, like knock out a giant Turkish boxer, force the player to move in very specific ways in order to trigger canned animations that are more easily controlled by buttons. With games like Punch-Out!!, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Kirby’s Epic Yarn, all of which are played with archaic, NES-style controls, Nintendo is more or less apologizing for the steps they’ve made, and admitting that video games really work better with buttons. It’s too bad that Microsoft and Sony didn’t get the message.
Despite this embarrassing backpedaling, Punch-Out!! is a ton of fun. The give-and-take of the fight is timeless, and far more logical and enjoyable than the overblown chaos of Street Fighter. If you or someone you know expects a Wii beneath the tree this year, be sure that a copy of Punch-Out!! winds up beside it. No matter how you choose to play it, you’ll find it’s one of the best games on the system. If more fighting games and sports games followed Punch-Out!!’s ways, it would be a merrier world. This is one of the best games on the Wii.
Controller1.com rating: 3/3
Reviewed on PC. Also available on PS3, Xbox 360. Developed by Obsidian. Published by Bethesda
War never changes and neither, so it seems, does Fallout. Released in what some would say is a ‘broken’ state, it’s been patched numerous times already in the 6 or so weeks it has been on the market, upgrading the games status to be slightly less broken. But when it’s not “forcibly making you spend more quality time with your desktop,” AKA crashing, its great.
Fallout 3 came out in 2008 and proved that the combination of Bethesda’s experience and tech from their acclaimed Oblivion title was the recipe for a great RPG, albeit one with a few rough edges that occasionally conspired to stab you in the eye. New Vegas takes the assets and codebase from F3 and lets the team at Obsidian run amok. NV takes the balls, runs with its, plays a rough and dirty game but ultimately wins. It’s like a genius doctor who keeps dropping his cigarette ash on you while he operates.
Set several years after the events of Fallout 3, New Vegas tells the tale of a Courier who’s attacked by some hoods from New Vegas and left for dead. Revived by a kindly small town doctor, The Courier sets off to find the men who shot him/her down. Along the way, the Courier will carry out several missions for various people, faction and towns. Choice is big in this type of game, and it’s not just the number of choices that can change the story, it’s the breadth of choice that’s available to you. You can be whatever the type of person you want to be from a saint to a sinner to everything in between; up to and including robiality (sex with droids), near-necrophilia, cannibalism, addiction, treason and more. It’s an open minded game when you want it to be. It doesn’t judge you, but I do, you sick puppy.
New Vegas’s fiction is set in a completely different part of the country compared to Fallout 3, so the factions and towns are mostly different, apart from some members of the Brotherhood of Steel hanging around. The big doggies here are the NCR (New California Republic) and the Legion, a group of Roman Empire wannabees with New Vegas as the sandwich filling both sides are looking to control. Of course, the big boys controlling New Vegas aren’t interested in being ‘looked after’ by anyone, though they’re happy to do business with either side. One of these interests is the reclusive Mr House who drives a lot of the action, particularly towards the end of the game. You can do more or less the same missions from two entirely different motivations (ie attack the cannibals, or procure them “raw materials.” Occasionally when I would need to restart a section, I would try a different approach and the story outcomes can vary wildly. It’s undeniably one of the game’s strengths. Also, Obsidian can do this without going on and on about it in interviews (you listening, Lionhead-head?)
Just like the first game, you start by walking around Vegas but once you’ve found landmarks, you will be able to fast travel between them, eliminating the tedium of too-much backtracking. In games like this, I generally spend a large part of the early game ‘mapping’ the world to get those landmarks and then being able to whiz between them quickly to churn out missions. The Mojave Wasteland is full of fun places to visit and things to do, and in hindsight seems a lot more interesting to traverse than the decaying ruins of Washington DC depicted in Fallout 3. There are casinos aplenty, factories, saloon, bars, brothels, prisons, camps, bases and more casinos. And when you’re done you can go play cards with random traders. I actually felt it a little better laid out than Fallout 3 (I spent much too time in the subway tunnels in that game) and apart from having to fight wave after wave of those damn giant flies whenever I ventured across the wasteland, it’s mostly fun.
It looks and controls like an FPS for the most part with a well-presented menu system. You spend lots of time in the menus and Bethesda set up a very good scheme that works well on PC and consoles. From trading, managing your inventory and stats, it shows other games how to manage a fairly complex system with ease. It doesn’t hurt that the Pip-Boy is rather iconic. The speech options are also well handled as are those for combat which can either be shooter style or use Fallout 3‘s VATS targeting system. I found I used it a lot less in NV for some reason, perhaps because I better understood it or maybe I prefer shooter controls. Also, I had a lot of fun playing NV on PC using a 360 controller so you can tell these guys know how varied the audience for this game is these days.
It’s also a game that’s both easy and hard to spoil at the same time. You can’t really describe what the game is without giving away something that may be key in any playthrough, but by the same token, the choices offered by the game are such that no two playthrough will be the same. I found the intrigues in New Vegas to be fascinating, each new twist was like reading a thrilling novel- a page turner in fact. It’s interesting to see how similar it is to F3. New Vegas is a refinement of that and perhaps the more frivolous Las Vegas setting has allowed a stronger humourous streak to come to the fore.
Presentation is Fallout 3 revisited though bear in mind I’m comparing my experience of F3 on the 360 and NV on a PC. The ageing Oblivion/ Fallout 3 version of the hopefully now defunct Gamebryo engine (thanks Scott). I found the voice acting to be mainly good for main characters, less good for lesser characters. There are a few stars in there such as Ron Perlman, Felicia Day, that guy from Battlestar Galactica with poor depth perception and they put the right amount of emotion into their readings. Where it falls down is in some of the lesser characters such as ‘Generic Guard A’ or ’2nd Mutant Whore Father’ who are either flat in their delivery or just plain repetitive. There are lots of lines they can say but for some reason everyone seems to say “Patrolling the Mohave makes you wish for Nuclear Winter” a lot. Obviously Fallout has nice sound effects and the music, used sparingly, is really fitting.
And it breaks a lot. You can’t review the game without talking about bugs. There were small things like some weird animation issues, physics bugs, mesh issues, floating or skating characters, etc. But they don’t stop the game being good. What’s less good ares the sidekicks who stop following you and the constant crashing to the desktop. It crashed a lot. Probably more than any game I can ever recall playing. But the game is so good, I just reloaded the game to continue. F3 may have hung on me three or four times over 40 hours, whereas New Vegas would done likewise on close to thirty occasions over 50 hours of play.
In all, New Vegas is a great title but a game where the only thing wrong with it is the stability. It’s close to being my personal game of the year as I can say I enjoyed it more than nearly everything other than Halo and Mass Effect 2.
Highly recommended but be patient.
Controller1.com rating 3/3
Available on XBox 360 and PlayStation 3. Developed by Platinum Games. Published by Sega.
The Japanese video game industry is in a weird place. Big western studios backed by big western publishers are directing the gaming climate these days, and aside from Nintendo, who stubbornly blaze their own trail, Japanese developers are making weak and flailing attempts to fit in. Vanquish, a fast-paced, third-person shooter, tries to pin the slick, melodramatic style of anime onto the desperate, cigar-chomping badassery of Gears of War, and ends up with something occasionally hot, but far too short and silly to be more than a forgettable distraction.
You control Sam the DARPA scientist, who smokes, speaks, and spits jargon just like Solid Snake, and who wears an experimental suit that provides him with some nifty abilities (also like Solid Snake, now that I think about it). Like most anime mechanical designs, the suit is powerful to use, but silly to look at. Seriously: the helmet features guards over the eyes and a visor over the mouth. The wearer will be blind, but his squad will be able to tell if he’s smiling.
Anyway, San Francisco gets cooked by some microwave ray fired from some space station hijacked by some Russian guy. The President of the United States, played by Joan Allen, sends a Team of Grizzled Marines (and for some reason, Sam) up to the station to rescue some scientist and take back the place. The details aren’t really that important. The important parts are the firefights, which are usually set in large open areas with lots of opportunities for Sam to take cover, gather weapons, toss grenades, yell at his squadmates to get out of the way, and blast a lot of red robots. I don’t call them that because they’re Russian; most of the enemies in this game really are colored bright red.
The graphics are quite good. Everything is sharp and sterile-looking, with lots of chunky white surfaces to make them look techy and futuristic. Since there’s only one setting in the game, though, you won’t see much variety in the environments. It’s just a lot of windows and catwalks. The cylindrical shape of the space station means you’ll see structures curling up from one end of the horizon to the other, like Halo’s ringworlds. A lot of stuff is burnt up and smashed, of course, and the particle effects on display here look great. The explosions are fantastic, and it’s a joy to watch the bad guys crackle and burst after you’ve pumped them up with lead. Bullets, blood, smoke, sparks, and bits of busted robot rain over every battle, creating a terrific sensation of chaos.
You might be tempted at first to play Vanquish in the same careful manner as you would other cover-based shooters like Uncharted or Gears, but the powers of Sam’s silly suit mean you don’t have to. The suit comes with built-in boosters that allow Sam to slide about like a baseball runner on a luge, only faster. This incredible mobility means you can play the game on your own terms, and flanking bad guys, dodging incoming fire, and sweeping up collectibles is a snap.
The other big feature of the suit is its “synaptic-reflexive augmentation,” better known as Tequila Time. By executing a rolling dodge and then holding the aim button, you can snap Sam into Max Payne mode at will. Some of the more agile robots, as well as the weak spots on the bosses, are nigh impossible to shoot while moving at normal speed, so the bullet time is a necessity.
These two suit powers are neat additions to the third-person shooter kit, but even though they can only be used for brief periods, the advantages they offer you are so great that the game becomes extremely easy. You’ll never feel pinned in place when you can literally run circles around your enemies. When your health is critically low, your suit’s bullet time kicks in automatically, giving you ample time to retreat and recover. What’s more, if you pick up a weapon that you already have, and its ammunition is at full capacity, the weapon will upgrade, Ratchet & Clank style. It will increase in ammo capacity, damage, or firing rate, tilting the scales of power even further in your direction.
There really isn’t much more to tell here. The battle for the space station lasts for a measly five hours, so there isn’t much room for variety. The designers took a few chances: there’s a gunfight on a fast-moving monorail that requires you to blast all the bad guys within a time limit (which, of course, isn’t a great challenge when YOU CAN SLOW TIME DOWN), and a small scene that requires you to shoot out some spotlights. Everything else is one big, open gunfight after another, with melodramatic voice acting filling in the gaps. You get a lot of what the Japanese think is just so damn cool, like super slow-motion, goofily gruff man-banter, inappropriate smoke breaks, and a hot blonde standing in a ring of minority report screens over at control, telling you what’s going to happen next. The girl is usually shown from a creepy, upskirt angle.
Probably the weirdest, and most irritating thing about this game, next to the awful acting, is that between fights, the camera will sometimes zoom into Sam’s helmet, revealing a first-person view. This usually means that you’re about to briefed on something, so you’ll have to endure what amounts to a mildly controllable Codec conversation. You can move Sam around as normal, but his speed is reduced, and you can’t use the boosters or pick up items or fire your guns. You can’t advance or accomplish anything until the talking is done and the camera zooms back out to the standard third-person view, so I have to ask: WHY AREN’T THESE JUST REGULAR, SKIPPABLE CUTSCENES?!
What the hell is going on? Gears of War, Uncharted 1 and 2, Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption: they all have these endless scenes where you drag the characters around for minutes on end, while they all just jaw at each other. No action, just yakking! What happened here? Aren’t these shooting games supposed to be the pinnacle of thrilling, overstimulating entertainment? When was the walk-and-talk deemed hot video game action?
I complained about this in a comment to a Kotaku article a few months ago, and some jackass replied by saying, “It’s called a story, which most games tend to have. :/” I say, hey junior, maybe you’re too young or too busy watching Naruto to remember, but there was a time when video game stories were nothing but blurbs in manuals, and though they may have been paper-thin and dumber than a dimestore novel, they never immovably forced themselves into the game experience to pad it out. I say this shit has gone on for too long, and it’s time to go back to the tried and true rule of years past: if you can’t die in a scene, make it skippable.
Maybe that jackass is the kind of person Vanquish was made for. The game is loaded with laughable, over-the-top action and testosterone so the kids playing it can feel cool and powerful, but it also has a lot of unnecessary story and jargon so they can feel like they’re playing something smart and meaningful. Being a grown-up, I’d rather have a game that goes one way or the other.
Vanquish is neither smart nor meaningful, and it’s too easy to be considered worthwhile. It’s like a sweet but unsatisfying soda: briefly stimulating, but not made to fill you up. The characters and story are the definition of “disposable,” and the game ends without challenging or exploiting your suit’s unique capabilities. I can appreciate that you have to create most of the golden moments yourself by way of quick thinking, like when you boost past a phalanx of robots that’s holding your squad back so you can blow them all up with a single grenade, but your character is so powerful, and the levels so simple and straightforward, that you rarely need to use this sort of strategic maneuvering. The game is shockingly short, and doesn’t even offer a multiplayer option to extend its lifespan – not that multiplayer would have worked well with the bullet time mechanic.
With Vanquish, Sega has only succeeded at imitating its betters, and it doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson: next year, it’s gracing us with Binary Domain, ANOTHER game with meatheaded marines yelling at each other and gunning down gaily colored robots. Let me know when the storm is over; I’ll be in my den playing Just Cause 2.
Controller1.com rating: 1/3
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.
Is this the best game Pop Cap have ever released? The answer is yes.
At its core, PvZ is a tower defence game where you defend your house from the zombie onslaught. Outside your front yard, zombies semi-randomly lurch towards your property along six lanes and it is up to you to plant defenses to stop them. If one zombie reaches your door, it’s game over, but if you can hold out long enough, you can progress to the next level.
How do you defend against the zombies with plants? Well, you have to plant the rig kind of plants. Plants need sunlight and this is provided naturally, if slowly in daylight levels but you need more sources of light, namely sunflowers. Plant enough of these and they will provide you with enough points to plant increasingly more powerful and specialized anti-zombie defenses, from mushrooms that spit venom to peashooters to killer chillies and more.
As you progress through the levels you get more plants at your disposal, though you can only choose a few at a time. The zombies also get smattering and they have some specialists who can overcome your defences if you’re not careful. There’s generally a plant counter for each type of zombie specialist and you may need to replay some levels once or twice until you get the hang of the right counter measures.
The game does alter the mix by having levels set at night (where the only light sources are whatever sun plants you’ve established) and other levels set in your swimming pool. There are also bonus levels in between each stage that modify the core mechanics for a bit of fun.
And it can a be insanely addictive. When I first got my iPad, I got this and Angry Birds HD and played PvZ a he’ll of a lore more.
The presentations is both cute and great with a perfectly fitting soundtrack and cartoon graphics that suit the game and it’s great senses of humor.
Plants Vs Zombies is a great experience whether you play on PC, iPhone, iPad or XBLA.
Controller1.com rating 3/3
Reviewed on PC. Also on Xbox 360. Developed and published by Valve.
Valve’s first annual sequel caused a ruckus when it was first announced in mid-2009, but here we are close to year after release and what happened? Left 4 Dead 2 is a good game but one that wasn’t perhaps the smash hit the original was (funny that).
Like its antecedent, Left 4 Dead 2 pits you as one of four survivors of the zombie apocalypse and it’s your job to stay alive until you reach the safehouse at the end of each level (or extraction). There are several campaigns, each with several chapters and you can start at any chapter. Billed as a co-op shooter, L4D2 can be played online with friends or on your own (how I played it).
L4D2, available on PC, 360 and astromech, manages to pull off a neat trick. It is almost exactly like the first game with only a few minor tweaks, so perhaps the angry L4D fans had a point in felling miffed. What it does add is the option of replacing your pistol with melée weapons such as baseball bats, guitars, golf clubs, swords, chainsaws and more. This alone makes the game worthy of your time, it is also the main reason the game was banned in Australia. Melée adds gore, and lots of it to the mix, but it’s so hectic you rarely notice what it is you’ve done unless you’re taking copious screenshots.
There are more options for thrown objects and health pickups than the first game. You can also collect vials of bile that you can throw to distract zombies, defibulators to kick start your heart. Whoa. Yeah. I found these less useful than the returning pipe bombs and molotovs. One actual gameplay enhancement are the objectives in some missions. No longer limited to getting to the safe house at the end of the level, now you have missions where you need to activate to deactivate machines, which are needed to progress, but might also attract the horde. A few missions ask you to collect gas cans to power up a motor of some description, and they crop up a few times, but every little enhancement goes some way toward making this a better game than the original.
There are a few new enemy types in the mix but they’re generally on par with what has returned. Overall, its not the enemies, but their placement thanks to Valve’s AI director. The game will give you breaks before ratcheting up the intensity. And each time you play through a level, the enemy placement will be different.
The presentation seems to have been. Improved, not that L4D was an ugly game, but now it’ even nicer. Dynamic music and sound effects set the scene for a survival horror experience that manages action and chills.
Overall though, Left 4 Dead 2 is not a must have. If you didn’t click with the first game, then there’s nothing here that will make the follow-up change your mind. If you did like the first, then I definitely recommend the sequel, and now that the game has popped up in the odd steam sale, you can at least know its possible to get it for not much more than an iPhone game.
Controller1.com rating 2/3
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Developed by Bungie. Published by Microsoft
After five Halo games, Bungie are riding off into the sunset, off to work on multi-platform games with Activision. Reach is their swansong to the franchise that took them from a Mac game developer to makers of the defining console FPS franchise. Bought by Microsoft and later gaining their independence, Reach is the best thing Bungie have done, and that’s no mean feat.
A prequel of sorts to the Masterchief starring trilogy of Halo 1-3, Reach puts you in the suit of Noble 6, replacement trooper in a squad stationed on the planet Reach. At the start you think you’re dealing with rebel colonists but things get shitty very quickly when you find yourself defending against a Covenant invasion. Being a prequel, it’s not a spoiler to say things don’t end well for Reach, but Halo Reach is a game where the journey is its own rewards.
Being a Halo game, you can shoot and melee opponents, drive vehicles (and steal them from foes), activate the odd switch and take control of some turrets. Reach adds new weapons and new vehicles to the Halo formula, but also adds armour abilities such as jet-packs, sprinting, holograms (to draw fire away from yourself), shields and armour lockdown (and no, I still can’t work out what the hell that last one does). If you’ve played a Halo before, you know pretty much what to expect. Bungie have given fans what they expect, but added new elements to the mix.
Each Halo game seems to have fun in rebalancing the weapons in the game. Reach gives us the DMR, which is more like an M1 or M14 semi-automatic rifle than the battle rifle of old and occasionally the grenade launcher which fires a bouncing shell. There’s still the standard assault rifle, a scoped pistol, sniper rifle, rocket launcher and a new grenade launcher on the human side, but it’s the Covenant who have received the most munitions upgrades. Easily my favourite is the Needle Rifle which is like the Needler but with a slower rate of fire, a scope and longer range. The Beam rifle and the carbine don’t seem to be in Reach in any form but the plasma rifle now has an automatic rifle version in the form of the Plasma repeater. The energy sword from Halo 2 and the Gravity Hammer for Halo 3 are back. Like ODST, there is again no dual wielding of pistols.
The above-mentioned new things include being able to drive more prosaic vehicles like Forklifts and trucks as well as Covenant Revenant (which replaces the Choppers from Halo 3) but the big ticket item are the Space Battles. Yes, you get to fly a starfighter and for about 20 minutes the game becomes Ace Combat or Rogue Squadron. While the game seems to made it very easy for you to hit anything, it is very well done and just shows that Bungie have taken the “cut and paste” design criticism over the years to hear and taken positive action.
So that’s the single-player. There’s this other thing that I hear the kids are into called co-op. Four friends can apparently play through the single-player campaign as a team, though with difficulty that scales with the extra players. I haven’t tried Reach with coop but I did find Coop useful for beating tough areas in Halo 3. There’s also Firefight which is an extension of the mode from ODST (really the only new thing ODST brought to Halo’s multiplayer), now with matchmaking.
But while I ignore most games’ online components, Halo isn’t one of them. These days, most games offer ‘new takes’ on multiplayer but in the end, most gamers stick to one or two favourite modes. Reach, whilst keeping the best of earlier games in the series, has a fair few new modes worth investigating. The beta introduced players to the objective-based Invasion mode, which pitted Spartans Vs Elites for the first time in Halo multiplayer. There’s also my new favourite, Headhunter, which is like a mix of Team Deathmatch, Headquarters and Capture the Flag. Each time you kill someone, they drop a flaming skull. To actually score points, you have to collect the skull and head to the randomly appearing collection zones for your score to be counted. Of course, if you die, those skulls fall wherever and you score nothing. And anyone can collect your fallen skulls and claim them. This is fun until all the kiddies start stealing your skulls. Mates don’t steal Mate’s skulls. Mate!
There has been some criticism of the number of maps included, some of which are all created on Forge World (bundled tools allowing you to build your own levels) but at the end of the day, whilst MS probably have designs on selling a few map packs, they are also allowing you to play other people’s maps for free (hi, Activision). Bungie have, by far, the best console network code outside of games using dedicated servers and the matches I’ve had have all been lag- free so far, even when my connection wasn’t always optimum (ie- my wife watching streaming videos on her computer-”Honey, I’ve taken out the trash but you may possibly be lagging me, dear”). A large local player-base probably helps reduce lag as well and I hope MoH and CoD developers remember to add those filters into their matchmaking solutions at launch (it took Infinity Ward several months to patch MW2 with that ‘feature’).
So whilst the gameplay in Halo has always been lauded, on area that hasn’t always had an easy ride was graphics. The first two games looked great on the original Xbox (though Halo 2 did have that horrid texture pop where the high resolution texture would load a little later than was optimum), but Halo 3‘s graphics had a far more mixed reception with horrid looking human characters. Reach looks, in a word, superb. Every model looks great, every texture detailed and apart from a few minor framerate hitches, the game runs near perfectly. And at 720p (Halo 3 was derided by pixel counters for its sub-HD resolution). The particle effects have also had a noticeable jump in quality and apart from a motion blur effect that takes some time to adjust to, this game looks better than not only all previous Halo titles, but almost any other Xbox 360 game. Gears of War, with it’s corridor based gameplay, still has the edge but without having to draw the vast open-air vistas as seen in Reach.
Sound is again great. We have an almost totally new score from Marty O’Donnell which only occasionally cribs from the Halo catalogue and some top-notch voice work all round. But the sound effects, always a high point of the series, sound beefier here than any previous game. Also, the low-gravity level has some serious audio processing that gives that space so much more atmospheric than you’d normally find (despite the literal lack of atmosphere in that level).
After playing it, you can’t help feel this is what Halo 2 needed to be, a Halo game that everyone felt beat the original game. I didn’t feel the buzz that I got when I got the first Halo game, but I didn’t feel shortchanged in the way that some fans felt they were by Halo 2, Halo 3 and ODST. It offers an excellent single player with replayability, co-op, firefight and excellent multiplayer. You sure get a lot out of your $60 (OK- add a few bucks for XBL Gold).
Controller1.com Rating 3/3 (Get this unless you really dislike Halo for whatever reason, or you can’t stand shooters)
