Wheelman: First Impressions

I've been having a little run around Tigon Studio's latest game for a while now. For those who don't know what it's about, there's a brief gameplay trailer here:


It's supposedly an open world game but, rather like Far Cry 2, it focuses on one aspect of that world. In this case, the driving. There are sections where you shoot people but the game tends to stumble at those points, only picking up speed again when you get back on 2 or 4 wheels.

Here are my observations.

1) The graphics really aren't very good.

I do quite like this, it means that people who like the game won't be doing so because it looks pretty ala Call of Duty 5 (which is honestly the only reason I can think of to like that particular piece of shit)

2) The Engine is a little dodgy

The car physics and so on are pretty good - it feels rather like the Burnout games... very arcadey, not realistic at all. On foot, things feel less well put together.

3) It's good fun.

The cars and bikes are great to drive and there are more than a few bells and whistles to make car chases interesting. You can ram sideways with the left and right cursors and, if you build up enough focus, you can pull a 180 in your car and shoot people whilst driving backwards, which is awesome.


4) There's a fair amount of variety.

This is a tricky one - as with Far Cry 2, the gameplay of Wheelman is basically the same excellent 30 seconds of play time repeated over and over and over and over again. Like far cry 2, though, there's variety in the side missions. Some will see you evading the cops whilst getting to a special location, some will see you playing courier, some will see you causing as much damage as possible.

It all boils down to driving from here to here whilst avoiding these people but that's pretty much what every driving game is anyway.


So what's actually wrong with it?

Well the shooting sections are rubbish, as I said earlier. They're like the shooting sections in GTA 4 or Saints Row 2 - IE totally generic third person shooter. They're not worse than those two games, by any means, but they're as basic and generic as you can get really. There are more than a few AI holes in the shooting sections, as well.

There aren't too many shooting sections though, which is nice.

Should you buy it though? That's a tricky one. I do like the driving sections - they feel quite fresh in spite of the limitations of the engine. The plot is quite good, I just wish it would get to the point a bit more rather than having you run around doing errands.

Should you buy it.... Well.... it depends how much it ends up being. It gets released on Steam tomorrow and if it's £20 then I'll be getting it. If it's over that, probably not.

It's a solid game and there should be a fair bit of replay value but it's not a stellar title by any means. Worth checking out though, especially if you think (like I do) GTA 4 & Saints Row 2 were mutton dressed as lamb.

Wallace and Gromit: Fright of the Bumblebees

Anyone paying attention will notice I'm playing absolutely every game I can get my hands on at the moment in order to stave off depression. It hasn't been a roaring success- until now.

WaG: FOTB is an adventure game from Telltale, the geniuses who gave us the new Sam & Max Games. In it, Wallace and Gromit have built a new thing and it's causing problems.

I'd describe the plot further but every time I've tried, I've either spoiled things or i've inadvertently spoiled things so I'm not going to. Just trust me that it's a very good W&G plot that could fit nicely into the canon if Nick Park deems it to be so.

The graphics are also very nice - it looks and feels very similar to Sam & Max but they've made the surroundings, characters etc. LOOK like clay, which is pretty remarkable for a computer game. Characters have authentic hand moulded scratches and fingerprints on them, everything has that stylised look caused by being fashioned out of putty...

I wouldn't say that you feel like you're actually moving little clay people around your screen but it comes nicely close.


So what else? There is quite a nice level of humour - it's not as funny as Sam & Max but it's not trying to be. The puzzles are very much in the telltale mould - IE intuitive and well thought out. You're never trying to work out what you should be doing, just how to do it.

This is partly down to Telltale's excellent hint system which makes a welcome return and partly because you are given a little plot summary and objectives list in the menu screen. That's a nice touch and I'm quite surprised no-one's tried it before.

It's also quite a long game, by episodic adventure standards. It also doesn't fall into the:

Single Objective,
Three pronged Objective,
Single Objective,
Coda,
END

Structure that many Sam & Max games used to. It comes perilously close at one point but then swerves and goes off at a new tangent.

So what's wrong with it?

Not much, to be honest. The voice acting is... okay. They got the stand ins for guys who voiced the cartoons, so at first the voice acting will feel very slightly wrong. As is the way with these things, though, this feeling vanishes as you go through the game.

That's the only criticism I've got, thinking about it...

So yes, it's very good value (£20 gets you all four episodes in the series) and it's all we're likely to get as far as decent adventure games go for a while...

Get it.

Turning to ash in my mouth

So I've had two pretty severe disappointments in about half an hour and what is the Internet if not a place to vent so here we go.

Disappointment #1: Chuck

So Chuck has never exactly been BSG but at it's best it was a fun show with an appealing sense of humor and more knowledge about the genre it fit into than I am accustomed to from TV shows.

Things haven't been quite right recently, though. The show has been more concerned about its over arching plot than ever before. This would be okay were it not for the fact that it stolidly refuses to change the setting.

Having an over arching plot would be great if I believed for a second the story might actually move on as a result of it but no. Chuck will always work at the Buy More, he will never actually go out with Sarah and he will never get rid of Morgan. I know this because the makers of the show own that Buy More location so it doesn't make financial sense to move the show on so they don't need it any more. Never mind that that fucking location is slowly draining the life blood from the show, please, that only affects people who watch the fucking thing.

Things came to a head when watching the latest episode where Chuck tries to track down Orion and gets attacked by a predator drone. There are three things badly wrong with this episode (or at least the 20 minutes I watched before I couldn't take any more)

A) They've got a budget now. Oh dear. They can make CGI planes fly over whatever town this is set in now. That's never a good thing. Only once can I equate an increase in budget to an increase in quality and that was with Battlestar Galactica and anyone who's watched it knows that show follows very special rules.

B) The constant moaning of the CIA and NSA that Chuck isn't doing what they told him to do or is doing stuff they didn't know about is getting very annoying. This ties into what I was saying earlier about the series never moving on. The CIA doesn't employ Chuck. As far as I know they never even pay him for constantly putting his life in danger. It was okay to never address this question when the series was a bit of breezy fun but now they're trying to get all Story Arc on us, they can't get away with it any more.

They'd also have much more of a right to complain if it wasn't really obvious that they don't give a shit about Chuck or his situation.

C) The chemistry between the characters is just gone. Jeff and Lester are no longer charming, they're just dicks. Morgan isn't fun, he's annoying and Sarah isn't sweet, she's a mindless tool working for idiots.




Disappointment #2: Call of Duty 5: World at War

I'm unemployed at the moment so I badly need stuff to do. I've completed CoD 4, played more Left 4 Dead and Far Cry 2 than can be good for me and so on. I acquired CoD 5, though, because I've heard that it's a tolerable if uninspired shooter.

It's not, it's fucking awful.

It's like a really bad mod for CoD 4. The weapons are meh, the levels feel much more linear than they ever did in CoD 4, it's derivative, the story feels more racist than anything else and the whole thing just feels cynical.

There's not a whole lot more I can say about this. If anyone told you it was good, they were lying. Either because they work for Activision or they feel stupid after spending £30 on the same Medal of Honour/Call of Duty stuff that's been being released for the last eight years.

The Path: updated impressions

If you look for information about The Path on the net, you'll find a lot of blogs saying two things:

1) I have no idea if I'm playing this game right, it's really fucking confusing.
2) I'm not exactly sure I enjoyed playing it, but I'm glad I have.

The annoying thing is that these are the only two things you can really say about this game. So much of the experience comes from discovery of strange events in the woods that to describe any of them would be a disservice to anyone considering playing it.

What I can do, though, is describe the visual style so that people can get a better impression on what the game is.

Most of the game is experienced at a walking pace, as you walk through the woods, bits of your vision distort - stylised images appear for fleeting moments. A wolf's paw, a leaf, the face of a girl, a black miasma...

You can run through the woods, as you do the camera pulls pack, your vision darkens, the music takes on a more sinister tone...

Whilst I'm on the music, incidentally, they've taken more than a few pointers from the Silent Hill soundtrack, which is always a good thing. The style is quite similar to this.

I can't say a whole lot more about The Path without spoiling bits of it. Also, it would be kind of pointless because it's one of those games where you can pretty much grantee that no two people will have the same experience playing it...

It's not perfect, I don't like the interface at all and the graphics aren't what you'd call stunning but for £7, it's excellent value. Even if you don't end up liking it, I'd recommend buying it because you won't have experienced anything like it and originality needs to be rewarded if it is to flourish.

The Path

So I downloaded the indie game The Path because I read about it and decided I couldn't not have it in my life.

So you pick one of six girls of varying age and gothy dress sense and are then told to go to grandmothers house and to stay on the path.

And if you do this, you fail the game.

It's that sort of game.

Describing it is almost impossible because it all relies on atmosphere, extremely bizarre visuals and so on.

If I had to argue that games are a legitimate art form, my first example would be Portal. My second would be Braid. My third, would be The Path.

It's such a bizarre game, I've played it through twice and seems to genuinely change whenever you do. You're also left with no clear idea of what's happened or whether you were supposed to do whatever it was that you did.

And I rather like that.

If a film or a book did it, I'd find it immeasurably pretentious but there's something about performing all these actions yourself with the sense that if you were just a little bit more clever, you'd be able to work out what the hell is going on to drive away the cynic in me.

So yes. It's cheap, it's pretty, it's astonishingly confusing and it's unlike anything else you've ever played before. Get it.

Merchants of Brooklyn

Chris Livingston, one of the best bloggers on the net, recently wrote a piece about an indie PC game called Merchants of Broklyn. Read it here.

So pretty much entirely on his recommendation, I downloaded it. I did consider buying it, briefly, but then I looked at a trailer and thought... let's try it out first.

First the good stuff: It uses the Cry Engine 2, which is one of the best engines currently around.

Bad stuff: Pretty much everything else.

It's an extremely generic FPS which doesn't use any of the potential given to it by the fantastic setting. The worst thing about it is - your guns have infinite ammunition and don't over heat. This means there can be no subtlety to the gunfights...

So yes. If you read Chris's post and were thinking of getting the game, don't.

The All Seeing Eye

On the advice of Rocket Boom, one of my favorite Internet news/commentary sites (see here if you haven't heard of them) I downloaded a firefox plugin called Add-Art.

What this plug in does is takes Internet ads and replaces them with works of art. Nice, I thought. I do run addblock plus, though, so I don't think I'll notice. I installed it about a month ago then promptly forgot about it.

Time passes. About two weeks. I have completely forgotten about the plug in at this point.

Suddenly, I start noticing a trend. I, as do most people of my age, tend to just not see advertising any more as there's so damn much of it but I saw this one add that I was sure I'd seen before. It was a really, really, really creepy eye. There was no branding, no link attached to it. There was no name. Nothing. Just an eye.

This eye followed me from Cracked to Cheggit (which is a torrent site devoted exclusively to somewhat adult material.) which I found very, very fucking creepy.

To illustrate just how creepy it is, imagine seeing this everywhere you go on the web:




There's no real end to this story, I eventually worked out that the plug in I'd installed x weeks ago was spawning the eye everywhere in place of advertising but...

Could they not have picked some LESS CREEPY art? The art is supposed to rotate every two weeks and I'm counting the days. Having said that, if it's a choice between staring at a scary eye and having another of those bloody ad's look at me, it's creepy eye all the way.

Far Cry 2 DLC

By rights, I should be asleep but I'm not for reasons too long and complicated to go into here. To pass the time, I downloaded Far Cry 2's DLC.

First things first, the DLC cost £4. I'm not entirely sure if this is worth it or not... On the one hand, it's a rip off. Three new weapons? Is that it? On the other hand, I've spent that much on Wispa bars in the last week so maybe I should re-analyse the way I spend my money.

Anyway, I'm glad I bought it.

And it's not because the weapons that come with the game are especially fantastic. They're not. They're okay. What's nice about them is....


Okay, I have to go off on a slight tangent but bear with me.

Why I love Far Cry 2 almost as much as I love Crysis Warhead is- There's so much variety in the play styles. Both the aforementioned games are masters of varying gameplay. Crysis does it through unparalleled (for an FPS) levels of user interaction with the environments. Far Cry 2 does it by providing you with a huge arsenal but limiting you to three of the superb weapons at a time. There are no perfect combinations, you always have to make sacrifices.

From that point of view, you aren't buying individual things for Far Cry 2, you're expanding one section of the game, the section that makes it truly great - the weapons. You're adding another chunk of variety to an all ready very varied game.

What's quite nice about all these weapons is, once you've bought the DLC, that's it. You have them - they're in a box in all your weapons warehouses. I was kind of expecting to have to buy them in game, which would have been a bit cheeky. As a result, I can see these being really useful early in the game before you've unlocked the serious gear like the automatic grenade launcher and the sniper rifles.

So, what are they like?

1) The Sawn Off Shotgun

This fills the small weapon slot and is therefore competing against the Uzi, the .50 cal and so on. From that point of view, it's quite good. Both barrels are wired to fire at once, which is nice. The re-load time is quite long so if you miss you're pretty screwed but it's quite a nice alternative to the other weapons on offer.

Especially as if I want a gun for the small guns thing, I always take the UZI, never the .50 cal. I never see the point. So it's nice to see more guns on offer for a relatively gun-lite area.


2) The silenced shotgun.

Now, as someone who knows practically nothing about guns, I think the idea of SILENCING a shotgun is utterly ridiculous. The silencer would have to be the size of a house. But if I'm wrong about this, I'm wrong. Screw it.

This is probably the weakest of the new weapons - it's another shotgun, woo. That makes four available for the medium weapon slot alone. I don't think I'll be using it much but what I do like about it is- it expands the game's quite scant stealthy weapons selection. It's a welcome addition for that at least.


3) The Crossbow.

A crossbow. Woo. Talk about bringing a knife to a gun fight.

That's what I thought when I read the word "crossbow" in the same sentence as "far cry 2". Then I played with it and discovered that the cross bow bolts EXPLODE. How? I don't know. Maybe they're magic but they fucking EXPLODE. That's awesome.

This gives you a precious addition to your arsenal - a silent blowing things up weapon that's not the remote mines....

It carries 5 exploding bolts which is quite a fair number. The reload time is also considerably less than for either of the RPG's so I can see it taking the place of those for some missions. It isn't heat seeking like the big arse RPG but that's what this game is about - balancing pro's and cons.


There are new vehicles as well in this pack and they're quite nice I suppose. I'm extremely apathetic about them. If they're around, I use them. If they're not, I don't. I also don't give two shits about the extra multiplayer maps as the multiplayer in FC2 really isn't very good.

So what conclusions can I take from this?

Well, I quite like the DLC. It does wrankle slightly to be paying for stuff like this when I'm used to Valve providing it for free but screw it, it's Ubisoft. Ubisoft have been very good to us over the years and are one of the only games companies out there still producing games that could be called in any way original...

Can I recommend it to other people....

Well that's a tough one. It depends how much of the game you've played. If, like me, you're on your third play through and things are feeling a little stale, definitely. It doesn't breathe new life into the game but the new weapons definitely make you approach missions differently to how you'd otherwise be doing them.

To people on their first or second play through... I probably wouldn't recommend it. There's more than enough kit in the game to entertain you. From a practical point of view, there's almost certainly more of this kit incoming and if you wait to get hold of it (as is quite sensible as none of it is jaw-droppingly awesome) it'll be cheaper when the new lot comes out.

Trailers

So a red band trailer for Crank 2 got released today which made me happy, view it here...

Another one was released though.

Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

Other than the fact that it has Anna Farris in it, I know this:

It is about a magnificent inventor who finds a way to convert water into food. Naturally, he uses this power to make it rain hamburgers, create a house out of Jelly and crush a school with a giant pancake.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that the only sector of the film industry that shows any real originality is the kids bit. Look at Wall+E. That'd never have gotten made if it was for adults, the suits would be too concerned about demographics.

In a way, that's the magic of kids films, they have to be out there, they have to be interesting or they just won't get watched.

There's also this trailer for FAQ about Time Travel. Which looks... inventive.

Empire: Total War - One more nail in the coffin

Okay, so I know I'm not going to get on with this game but I'm unemployed at the moment and a bit starved for stuff to do. As a result of this, I loaded up Empire again last night and gave it another go.

Things went very slightly better this time - I was the Russians again so I wouldn't have to deal with the naval stuff until I was well settled in. However, I couldn't get the building/research automanager to work. Which left me frantically checking every single building in my empire every turn to see if there was anything I should be doing to it. I'm pretty sure Tsar Nicholas II never did that. Mind you, that could have been why he ended up being executed in a basement.

Anyhoo, I have been able to put my finger on what's wrong with the diplomacy:

In Empire, research is very important. You have to research the three field system (look it up) before being able to use it in your farms, thereby increasing the amount of food and money your empire gets. Same thing with armies, mining, philosophies etc. etc. etc.

Now, I conquered a couple of countries again because I'm Russia, that's what they do. I then tried to trade these countries for a couple of bits of farming know how. Whoever I went to, I got turned down.

I want to re-iterate that. I was trying to GIVE a country to some nation I'd never heard of who I was all ready allied with in exchange for information about crop rotation and they said no.

Now, I get that information is important. But I was offering these people a fucking COUNTRY.

This shouldn't reeeally matter - Empire just works on a different value system than the real world does... but it really does matter. When small pieces of info are more important than countries, all pretence to realism has been abandoned.

Ah well.

American TV Scheduling

I do like to gripe about American Television. This is partly because there is so much of it out there so there's ample material but mostly because despite having many gems, a lot of it is the worst bullshit ever considered legitimate by the mass populace this side of Star Wars.

I should point out at this point that one of my two FAVOURITE SHOWS EVARR is the new Battlestar Galactica which is very firmly American, despite having more than a few Brits and Canadians on the cast.

Anyway, there are two things that really annoy me about all American Television and both of those are to do with their scheduling.

1) Their insistence on calling their runs "seasons"

Now, in Britain, we call things "series" which makes a kind of sense. Americans call theirs Seasons, though, and that bugs the hell out of my inner English student. Pointing your gaze at this page:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/season

will reveal that the word season is defined as being a period or time of year. This is all very well for some American shows, specifically the short ones like Dexter but for Battlestar, Chuck & the other ones worth watching, their 22 episodes are nearly always spread out over about six months. That is not a fucking season, that's half a year.

I do get the reason for this, by the way, it's so they can gather feedback on the first half of their... whatever you want to call it and finish filming their second half based on this.

But if that's the case, why the hell not just call them two separate series. That's what they essentially are anyway.

This shouldn't really bother me because when Battlestar breaks in October to come back in March the next year, it's still annoying whether it's being advertised as a Christmas Break or a gap between series... my point is merely that calling them different series would add some basic honesty to the process.


2) Their shows don't run week by week

Now here, In Britain, we usually have six episodes of a TV show. You may think this is short. Whatever, that's not what I'm worried about. The point is that we get one episode per week. Right? Now, In America, for some reason best explained by someone who knows whatever fucking sporting event or national holiday is happening on that day, will occasionally not air an episode for up to four weeks at a time. Mid series. I was getting in to that, you bastards.

Occasionally, a show like Chuck will have a week off. Why? Well... because.

Probably the most ridiculous example of this is Supernatural that had it's mid series break, aired five episodes and then had another month's break for "sweeps". I don't know much about whatever Sweeps is but I do know it's where a show frantically tries to be popular to avoid cancellation. If you'll forgive the extremely tasteless analogy, it's like in the concentration camps where the guards would come through and execute the workers who weren't healthy enough to continue - all the people who didn't want to die would cut themselves and smear a small amount of blood on their faces to give themselves more colour.

I've forgotten where I was going with that, I'm just a bit depressed by how horrible concentration camps were.

As bad as things are in the world now, we don't have concentration camps.

In Europe.

Elsewhere, they do.

I should really become a proper political activist. Is there anyone out there who can teach me how to make bombs? Comments below, please.

Empire: Total War

In general, I blame the consoles for a lot of the stagnation that can be found in gaming. If the resident evil franchise had developed on the PC, you could bet your arse that you'd be able to MOVE and SHOOT at the same time. I hate to generalise console owners as teenagers who can easily be placated with the latest whatever in the Halo/Gears of War series but the sad truth is: Whilst the majority of console owners are well out of their teens, the ones with all the disposable income are school kids and students who wouldn't know a good game if it sat on their head.

Having said all that, the most stagnant genre currently in existence is the RTS, a genre almost exclusive to the PC despite a few misguided attempts to bring it to consoles. Halo Wars anyone?

Anyway, if I was to pick a word to describe Empire: Total War it'd be just that. Stagnant.

I loved Shogun: Total War back in the day. It was a revolution in RTS games. No real time base building so you could focus on the tactics of war. High Ground and choke points actually meant something (unlike in, say, Total Annihilation, where such features served only to look pretty).

As the games went on, though, it became less about the strategy and more about diplomacy. I can kind of roll with that- I even completed Medieval. I would have completed Rome but I was a student myself at that point and didn't want to dedicate the couple of hundred hours the game seemed to be asking for in the pursuit of a "well done" screen with a Centurion wearing something fetching in red and white.

There's nothing wrong with diplomacy sims, though. Especially not ones where you have to fight as well. The problem comes when all subsequent games to is expand the battle map. Rome, Medieval 2 and Empire are all essentially Medieval: Total War with larger maps, better graphics and various bells and whistles added.

This wouldn't be too much of a problem were it not released in the same month as Dawn Of War 2, which has taken the RTS genre by its geriatric shoulders and shaken it until the bones have cracked and broken to the point where the pointless pensioner is now in the shape of a cheetah and would you believe it, there's life in the old girl yet. Girl Cheetah. That last sentence was far too long.

Anyhoo, I did quite enjoy Empire for the first hour or so that I played it. Yes, it was the same game I've played twice before but I kind of enjoyed it then as well.

Problems started arising when I entered the second hour of play. Suddenly I wasn't doing as well any more. I discovered that this was because, as well as upgrading my cities, I needed to be upgrading my towns, villages, settlements, farms, mines, fur markets etc. etc. etc. as well. After I had discovered this, the amount of time I had to take for each round increased massively.

I should point out in the games defense that you can automate all this upgrading farms stuff but I got this damn game so I could play it, not have the computer play it for me.

So that annoyed me.

The combat seems to have taken a beating as well.

I was trying to wipe Sweden off the map so I could divide up the spoils between my Russian empire and my mates in Denmark, who were having a bit of a rough time of it. This was all well and good for the first few battles - I got St Petersberg no trouble, Ker-Ching. But taking Stockholm... fuck me that took ages.

The battle itself was over in about five minutes because the only people defending it were peasants with flintlocks but getting my troops there - oooh that was another matter.

I don't know if there are troop transport ships I could have used - the tutorial didn't say - but I had to walk my guys all the way round the north end of Scandinavia. For those without a map, that's a very fucking long way. It took about ten turns.

Now, I know that this is all quite realistic and you shouldn't be able to destroy civilisations easily but the fact remains that by the time my first army had gotten to Stockholm, I'd built another two of equal size. Something's not right there.

So yes. The micromanagement gets annoying, the area of play is huge so the game becomes a massive time sink, the AI is sporadic, the diplomacy feels broken and the battles just don't feel fun any more.

Back when I used to play these games regularly, height gave you a massive advantage and you couldn't fire muskets in the rain, that sort of thing. I don't know if these features are still present, they may be, but I saw no evidence of them at all. The one nod to realistic battles was that my canon troops couldn't see very far when the weather was foggy, which was a very nice touch. Although I could have liked it if they could have just fired... somewhere over there and kind of hoped they hit something.

There are naval battles, as well, but I didn't really experience them. I started off as the Russians, who have far too much to be worrying about even without going to war on the oceans. I became impoverished, though, due to my destruction of Sweden and the fact that I hadn't upgraded anything so I started again as the British.

Aaaaaaaand I took one fucking look at the map with its ultra complicated trade routes, colonies off in America, my advisor telling me to invade India before the french did and prevent the Spanish forming an alliance with anyone and I couldn't hit the ESC key fast enough.

I like that there are games out there that are this complicated and this in depth because it weens the MMO crowd off their bullshit "Pay £10 a month to throw coloured light at AI sprites" games but for me... no. No, no, no. My life is far too complicated as it is without giving any thought to this kind of crap.

I really enjoy games that challenge me mentally - especially adventure & puzzle games but this sort of thing? Nah, I'm good. Thanks.

Fallout 3 & Me

So I'm on my third attempt at playing Fallout 3 and for the first time, I've managed to get more than an hour into the game without giving up in disgust.

I've made it further this time for two reasons. Firstly, I've turned down the difficulty so I don't have to plug every single creature with an unreasonable number of bullets before they hit the floor. Secondly, I found a way to modify the game so you move above a crawl.

With these two modifications, I thought the game would be much improved. And it is... It's still a cavalcade of small frustrations and scant rewards though.

Let's start with what I like about it.

1) The characters are... quite good.

I've had a run around Megaton & Rivet City so far and whilst some of the characters were quite fun to talk to... they all seemed fairly generic. I've certainly not come across any characters to rival Vampire Bloodlines ones' which is my current character benchmark for RPG's.

2) I like the way you gradually acquire radiation, often without really noticing.

3) There are plenty of things to do

Okay, I'm scraping the barrel now.



What annoys me?

Well:

1) The layout of the game world seems designed to annoy the player.

The wasteland is filled with arbitrary barriers, forcing you to take long and highly annoying detours. And if you think this is essential to the pacing of the game, you're wrong. Oblivion managed to create a massive open world without this sort of bullshit.

Each settlement is also laid out in the most annoying way possible. Megaton especially. Bethesda seem to think it's fun to wander around on identical looking catwalks for ten minutes every time you want to find the bar.


2) The combat system is terrible.

Now, as much as I hate the combat in Fallout 3, it's still miles better than it was in Oblivion. Having said that, the combat in fallout 3 makes me ask questions. Questions such as:

Why is hitting someone with a baseball bat more effective than shooting them?
What sort of raiders are these that can take five shots to the head without dying?
Why does the condition of my weapon affect how much damage it does rather than affect the rate at which it jams?

Fallout 3 doesn't seem to grasp what litterally every other game with guns has for the last 5 years (ignoring Deus Ex 2) that shooting does not become more fun the more you do it. Arbitarilly increasing the number of headshots it takes to drop a Rad Scorpion increases frustration, not fun. It breaks immersion.

My first rad scorpion soaked up an entire clip of assault rifle ammunition. Or, to be more technical about this, it absorbed over thirty pieces of metal traveling through its head at over two hundred miles per hour.

That's just fucking stupid.


3) There's still far too much mindless trekking around.

This wasn't as painful as it was before I hacked my running speed but even so... I get that the game is largely about exploration but guess what- so was Oblivion. In Oblivion, you could fast travel between all the major cities from the word go. Did this break immersion? No. It just meant you didn't have to spend 90% of your time "finding" places. Exploration is only fun if you chose to do it. If you're forced to, it's a chore.


4) The world is far too monotonous and dull.

Yes, I know it's supposed to be post apocalyptic but a nuclear war doesn't remove every colour from the game world other than grey and brown, does it?


5) Story? What story?

Now. There are nice bits of story. Very small nice bits of story. I like the guy that pops up in Megaton that asks you to blow up the city. I quite like the family of blood sub plot. But the other sub quests I've come across in the game fill me with nothing but apathy. They all seem fairly lifeless... not least because the characters themselves are falling over themselves to get you involved in side quests.

I know RPG's are based around the idea that you're the only competent individual in the game world and it's therefore up to you to sort absolutely everything out but this has been handled much more subtly in most other games. Case in point, I went to Rivet City on a quest for some woman who was writing a book. I came across this guy who wanted to do some drugs with me. After that, literally every conversation I had with anyone there had a question about this guy and how terrible it was that he was addicted to drugs.

Seriously? Is it that hard to get people to engage in the side quests that you have to take one that sounds really rather dull and force it into every conversation in a square mile radius?

Compare this to Oblivion where the Dark Brotherhood sub plot was only accessible after you'd murdered a civilian. And it was perfectly possible to go through the entire game without doing that.

RPG's live and die on their sub quests - that's where the character of the game world can really show itself. In Fallout 3, it's confused. It's desperate for your attention and will do anything to get you involved in what are supposed to be the voluntary aspects of the game.


So that's basically it. I hate the graphics & gameplay and I'm less than impressed by the story. I'm going to go and play something else.

Updates

Watched Watchmen today - really fucking good film. Visceral action, a good plot, very good characters.

I especially love it because I've never read the comic book (I hate comic books) so it was pretty much all a surprise to me. My one problem with it was the end was far too expositiony. It could have easily have had ten minutes lopped off it.


I've also been playing too much Dawn of War 2 (co-op campaign is fun) and Far Cry 2. Playing that whilst your girlfriend watches series 1 of Gilmore Girls downstairs is slightly surreal.

Also, the Left 4 Dead DLC has been detailed. It's a mixed bag. Yes, we get the two other campaign maps for versus, that's nice. The least they could do really....

The more interesting thing comes in the form of survivor mode. There are a bunch of maps from previous campaigns and one custom made one. It sounds like a blast - especially as they don't expect survivors to last more than five minutes. I can see that one going down with my little Left 4 Dead posse (which at the moment consists of myself, my brother and two of my friends) who occasionally hanker for bite size gameplay rather than the epic nature of the hour long campaigns.

So yeah, been a good day really. The theory is the DLC should be out before the end of April, which is also the time the new Riddick game should be out. HUZZAH!

Dawn Of War 2 updated impressions

I haven't posted anything in a few days as my contract with Channel 4 came to an end on friday last week and when I'm not at work, I have much less free time. Heh.

Anyhoo, I've been playing a hell of a lot of Dawn of War 2. I have the following observations.

1) It's incredibly addictive. Each battle lasts between 8 and 15 minutes, which means you're constantly left wanting more. This is especially pleasing after playing Dawn of War 1, where battle would last hours and leave you feeling drained rather than exhilerated.

2) I wished for more variety in the squads. I won't give it away but I fucking got it :D

3) The strategy is very good - although your tactics are usually dictated by your choice of squads, there are more than a few tricks you can use to break stale mates etc.

4) This is the evolution of the RTS genre.

Yahtzee moan

I really don't like Yahtzee as a critic - he approaches things in the same way Maddox used to, by going: I have something here, what can I not like about it. Charlie Brooker, on the other hand, who Yahtzee claims is his inspiration, seems to at least try and approach things from an objective viewpoint.

Anyway.

His latest review as about Spiderman: Web Of Shadows. I'm going to politely ignore the fact that it's march 2009 and Web of Shadows is a game I myself happen to have reviewed in November last year.

A bit late then, never mind. The review itself is the usual mixed bag of not particularly funny jokes and pretentious snobbery but one thing annoyed me more than it usually does.

He claims, about half way through, that you get an attack that is so useful you never need to use anything else. The combat is therefore rubbish.

Now, I know which attack he's talking about and he's right. You probably could go through the game using just that attack... My problem is- it's a game. You play it to have fun. Why the hell would you go through the game just using that attack? The other attacks aren't so weak you are forced to use it so what is the problem?

It's such a shit criticism because it's clearly coming from the point of view that playing the game is somehow a chore. It's not, games are fun. They're games, that's how you can tell.

If that criticism made any sense at all, every player would go through Far Cry 2 with the 4 cylinder grenade launcher, the uzi and the flame thrower because it's the best combo and no other combo is as effective.

NO ONE DOES THAT, you're supposed to play the game in various ways, to challenge yourself to try new tactics. Games aren't films, you're supposed to put a bit of fucking effort in as well you know.

Yeesh.

Dick head.