The Portcats- PORTAL 2
Talking about Portal 2
controller1.com
videogames and stuff
Review: Donkey Kong Country Returns
Reviewed ennui. Developed by Retro Studios. Published by Nintendo
So it must be time for controller1.com’s annual review of a Wii game. This year, it’s Donkey Kong Country Returns, brought to us not by Rare but by Retro (formerly makers of Metroid). A spiritual follow-up to the beloved SNES games produced by Rare during their ascendancy, DKCR is a 2.5D side scrolling platformer in the vein of New Super Mario Bros from 2009. Wii-mote held sideways? Yes. Lots of shaking the controller? Yes. Superguide in case you suck too much? Yes.
You’re Donkey Kong and you’re pissed off with the world. You just want to run left to right; jump over things; pound on the ground to destroy nearby objects or daze enemies and most importantly, collect bananas. You’re a big ape and there’s a little monkey on your back some of the time. Just like in the original SNES titles, you can have Jr. on your back. He gives you a little jet pack boost when you’re in the air for some additional maneuverability but if you take too many hits, he leaves you in peace albeit a peaceful state involving greater vulnerability for yourself. The fucker.
In addition to the standard platformer moves, you can occasionally cling to some grass covered surfaces, blow candles out by shaking the controller and be fired from one barrel cannon to another. You go from point A to point B, but in various ways and with various exploratory detours to collect bonus booty. Your rhinoceros pal is back, ready to charge the hell out of anything that gets in your way and smashing through rock barriers like an asteroid at a polystyrene sales conference. Every now and then DK has to take a ride in his hard to control rocket barrel, avoiding oncoming obstacles with all of the precision of a demented, inebriated ant. And of course, the evil genii at Retro have revived the mine cart levels. Evil, evil men and women.
How does it play? It starts off fairly gently. Then it gets harder than whatever the hardest thing in the world is these days. Which, funnily enough, turns out to be this game. So with that in mind, if you get too sick of constantly dieing over and over and over and over again, you get the option to have Super Kong run through the level and beat it for you. And of course, once you done that, there’s no point in playing the rest of the game since it’s unlikely get any easier. It gets harder and harder as you progress, and then you realise that you aren’t progressing and so you send in Super Kong. And then you come to the conclusion that YOU aren’t the one progressing through the game anymore and so you eject the disc, put it back in the case and list it on eBay.
It looks and sounds good for a Wii title with cartoon art style and a silky smooth 60 fps frame rate. It also has a lot of the same memorable tunes associated with DK (one of which goes all the way back to the first game in the arcade). You do get a lot of warm nostalgia glow for your cash with this game.
It’s a quality title, especially if you like games with a high difficulty level and fairly punishing gameplay. 2D fans will love what’s on offer here. I’m only marking it down because having the computer play the game for you is not a substitute for balancing the game better.
Controller1.com rating 2/3
Review: Medal of Honor
Reviewed on Xbox 360. Also on PS3, PC. Developed by Danger Close (single player, DICE (multiplayer. Published by EA.
After Saving Private Ryan was released in 1997, Steven Spielberg hadn’t yet gotten WWII out of his system. A gamer as well as adirector, he helped found Dreamworks Interactive to make games like Medal of Honor for the original Playstation. FPS’s had never really taken off on the PSX but the first MoH showed you could make a pretty good shooter on the hardware, even if the Germans looks more like Autons than Teutons. Both MoH and it’s first sequel, MoH: Underground were well received at the time and it is these games that laid the foundations for a franchise. Unfortunately for EA, that franchise just happened to be Call of Duty…
Several things happened. MoH was a hit so EA absorbed Dreamworks Interactive, then gave Medal of Honor to 2015 for them to make a PC game and the result was MoH: Allied Assault, which is still recognised as the series’ peak. After AA, several of the team left to found Infinity Ward making the original Call of Duty and the rest is history (and we know history repeats like a bad taco). Medal of Honor, as a franchise, floundered (as did 2015 who made a poorly received shooter Men of Valor and promptly disappeared like Amelia Earhart) through an ill-advised and badly executed foray into the Pacific Theatre; then slowly attempted to rebuild with various console titles such as European Assault and Airborne, all of which tried to alter the classic formula with promises of less scripted levels and open worlds; before we arrived back at Medal of Honor, now set in the present and so thoroughly copying Modern Warfare that it makes Dante’s Inferno look like an outstandingly original piece of art with no basis in God of War.
Ok, so you know how to play CoD right? Well close your eyes at the loading screens and pretend it is. It’s not hard and that’s obviously what EA were going for. The result is a CoD game that is locked at 30 frames per second on consoles (unlike the acyual CoD games) and using Unreal Engine 3 for single player and DICE’s own Frostbite engine for multiplayer though you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. So apart from temporal resolution, it still looks and plays like CoD.
You play as various soldiers in Afghanistan. Like Black Ops, you generally have someone with you for most of the game telling you what to do at each and every turn. Listen to his advice and be glad it’s not Sam Worthington. While the controls and missions are much like CoD, one thing is missing from most of the game and that’s the hyperbole and hysteria that the action in single-player CoD is now all about. Less bro, more schmo. MoH has its intense firefights but they really don’t get to the level of the latest from Activision (though they try). But while this lack of constant intensity is a nice change, it also means the game doesn’t have a tension that other slower shooters like older Ghost Recon games had. It’s like playing CoD on mute. It’s just missing that spark.
I did have fun with the single player as a sharp relief to the over the top wall of enemies I experienced in Black Ops but it seems for all of EA’s hype before the game’s release (a game they seem to be publicly disowning now), things like enemies facing the wrong way and other rough edges with presentation lead you to conclude it’s missing some of CoD‘s spit and polish as well a the charm. It has beards but so do the Taliban Opposing Force combatants so in some missions it’s often hard to know who you actually are shooting. To mix things up there are some turret levels, helicopter gunners and the like and occasionally you get to site weapons for air support, but this doesn’t give you much of a thrill since it’s doled out fairly regularly.
As I received my copy the day after Black Ops was released (I’m not using Zavvi again for anything I’m busting to play), multiplayer was a ghost town of 30 fps CoD-lite. It’s been described as being part way through DICE’s own Battlefield games and CoD. No, it’s CoD. It was good but with no one to play against it was a bit sad since the multiplayer was probably the strongest part of the package from what I could see. I played a decent game with the three others and I think they must be desperate for people to play against (I received friend requests from all three afterwards). Listen guys, never talk about marriage on the first date!
The graphics are mostly good and the sound is great but at the end of the day this is one of EA’s most egregious examples of “Hey let’s make a competitor to the market leader and just copy them exactly without offering anything new ourselves.” It’s an opportunity squandered as the talent was there but I get the feeling the pressure from above was just to remove anything that would scare off CoD fans.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with MoH. Multiplayer is a bust not because it’s bad but because it’s got less life in it that King Tut’s cat. The single-player (which is not all that long) may entertain you but you’d want to be getting this game supremely cheaply (ie when it comes down to Brutal Legend levels)
Controller1.com rating 1/3
Now Playing: Donkey Kong Country Returns, Floods
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).
Review: Call of Duty: Black Ops
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
So Controller1.com says the Game of 2010 was…
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.
Review: Punch Out
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
Review: Fallout New Vegas
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
Review: Vanquish
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
controller1.com © 2010.
Theme Squared created by Rodrigo Ghedin.