KOTOR 2 vs The Witcher

Hm...

So I downloaded the leak of TSLRP.

I've been playing it for the past three days.

Hm.

As far as the game goes- it's okay. Bits of it are really good. I love the characters, the story and so on.

It does have some pretty severe problems though.

The main one is: The Witcher.

I haven't blogged about it, but I recently bought and played The Witcher through. I thought it pulled off the trick of allowing the player to make genuinely moral choices better than any other game has.

The reason for this is... The Witcher doesn't have a morality scale.

For me, every time a game says DARK SIDE POINTS GAINED! or PARAGON +2 etc. etc. they are ruining the concept of moral choice.

In the real world
1) You don't get told when your character has shifted/people think it has
2) You often don't know what repercussions your actions will have.

This simply isn't the case in KOTOR - whenever you make a decision in the game world, you always know how it's going to affect your alignment. Things get slightly more complicated when you're considering how your companions react to you but the relationships system is more than slightly nonsensical.

Fitting things onto a good/vs evil scale of any sort removes one very important thing: complexity. Morality is an incredibly complex and arbitrary thing. One of the tag lines for The Witcher was that there were no good or bad choices, there were just choices. It was taken as red that your character was generally moral (in that he wasn't a cartoon villain - more on that later) so whatever choices he took, they were justifiable. Support the order? Support the Scoiatel? Neutrality? These are all perfectly valid choices.

Problem number 2 with KOTOR is... the Star Wars universe has no middle ground. You can't play a complex character - only a cartoon villain who steals from the poor and murders anyone he can - or a sickly sweet paragon.

I wanted to be a dark jedi this time around because I hadn't been previously. So I went around killing people. But I was nice to my companions. Why? I liked them. The game balanced these equally. Apparently murdering people is balanced by being polite when talking to someone.

I shouldn't be surprised, really. This game is American and the Americans do seem to have a genuine problem accepting that right and wrong are just ideas and that often it's just a matter of perception. Hell, this is even the case in Battlestar Galactica a lot of the time and that's one of the most mature and well written pieces of fiction ever created.

With that in mind, it's very clear that there are two ways the game is *meant* to be played. Either as dark or light. You can mix it up by being dark on some planets and light on others but then you run into the - which characters do you want to play with - problem.

With that in mind, I'm going to play the damn thing again as it wants to be played. I'm going to be a light jedi and see what happens. I can't get a good feel for the game if I'm playing it in a way it doesn't want to be played.

So, out of KOTOR 2 and The Witcher, which is better? Well that's fucking obvious, it's The Witcher. No contest. The Witcher's gameplay is better, the moral choices are more realistic, interesting and poignant...

It's a shame really. I was getting all excited by the prospect of the KOTOR MMO and then I played KOTOR 2. KOTOR 2 is, I think, as good as a star wars game is likely to get as far as morality goes. It's a bar so low you'd trip over it but I doubt any Star Wars product will ever beat it.

Greatest Sequels Ever

Empire Magazine have produced a list of The 50 Greatest Ever Sequels.

Now, Empire have been getting a lot better in recent years but this list is really, really shit. X Men 2 is at number 11, Batman Returns is at number 13 and, most perplexing of all, Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix is at number 15. Hellboy 2 is in there, as is Return of the Jedi. Reh.

It's not a completely worthless list but it does do that classic empire thing of having twenty decent films, twenty films from the 50's/60's/70's/80's that no-one actually likes but are "classics" so they put them in to make it look like they're high brow, (deep breath) and ten films from the last three years so people will believe they're modern enough to counterbalance the high brow choices.

But here's the thing, they used the word "greatest" in their article. This means that they must be talking about sequels that are not just good but GREAT. Ones that improved significantly on the original...

Taken in that spirit then the list is completely fucking worthless but I thought I'd put my money where my mouth is and try and compile a list of great sequels.

The criteria are:

1) It must be a great or, at least, a very good film
2) It must improve significantly on the original


So:

1) The Dark Knight

This is the obvious one. Not only is it one of the best films ever made but it takes a great film (Batman Begins) and improves on literally every aspect of it.

2) Terminator 2/3

Terminator 2 and 3 are both good films and both improved significantly on Terminator 1. Personally, I prefer Terminator 3 but that's because I'm not trapped in the past as many film geeks are, and I think Nick Stahl is a fantastic actor. Even though I can't spell his name.

3) Aliens

This is another fairly obvious one. It's very good and wins out over Alien because Alien is fucking aweful. Sorry, Ridley Scott and film geeks everywhere but it fucking is...

4) The Ring 2

I love The Ring (I'm talking Japanese versions here, obviously) but if I had to watch one or the other, I'd watch Ring 2. Why? It's much, much scarier. The Ring has one moment which is utterly terrifying. The Ring 2 has three. Three beats one.

5) Hot Shots Part Deux

This may be an odd choice but it's a hilarious film and improves significantly on the original... the one liners are better, the plot is more fun and it has Rowan Atkinson in it. And whilst we're on spoofs...

6) Scary Movie 3

I may be pushing my luck a bit by saying Scary Movie 3 is Very Good but I think it is, dammit. It's funny, quite witty and is very short. It's also miraculous in that it's the only Scary Movie film to be even faintly worth watching.


There may be others out there but those are the only ones that spring to mind immediately....

Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Arc

I really am going to have to stop re-visiting old films. There are some films that have never been bettered. These are usually films that do something genuinely unique, or at least have never really been bettered. The Blues Brothers fits into this category, as does Hot Shots part 1 & 2. Top Secret fucking rules this category.

Sadly, action films tend to fare less well.

I just re-watched Raiders because I was interested to see if it was the seminal adventure movie. It's really not.

Let me just say something before I get to the meat of this... I don't care that Raiders was really ground breaking when it first came out. All I care about is what it's like to watch now. As a piece of history, it's invaluable but guess what, so's the original Star Wars and that doesn't stop it being incredibly lame when looked at next to the new Battlestar Galactica.

But anyway, Raiders.

It has several problems. The acting is really over the top, and not in a good way. Bits of it are supposed to be farce and these... tend to drift a little too far into pantomime for my liking. The serious bits are even worse. The Nazis seem to think acting either involves standing as rigid as possible or running all over the place waving their arms. The guy in the black mac is particularly bad for this.

The actions scenes are distinctly under whelming, with the exception of the scene where Indie shoots the sword wielding arab. That is still a fantastic moment. The fight choreographer really needed to be given a slap, though.

It's attitudes to women are also faintly disturbing. I'm going to gloss over the whole relationship with Indie and the love interest because whilst I think it's fairly clear that their previous sexual encounter was distinctly non-consensual on the part of the girl, I may be reading too much into things. What does definitely strike a sour note is how completely incompetent the female is. She can't even open a bloody aeroplane canopy.

Overall, though, Raiders has one massive problem that eclipses all others. That problem is The Mummy. The Mummy does everything that Raiders does a hell of a lot better. The story makes more sense, the acting is better, it's funnier, the characters are better defined...

The Mummy is to Raiders what The Good, The Bad, The Weird is to every western ever made. An update that takes the spirit of the original and does it with a 21st century attitude and budget.

Film making has definitely improved in the past thirty years and boy does it show. There are definitely films from the 1970's and 1980's that have never been bettered but there are far fewer than people think.

Fuck Team Gizka

No really.

Fuck em.

For those unfamiliar with their work, these are the chaps behind the Sith Lords Restoration Project. I've blogged about it previously here.

I mentioned in that post that the bug count these guys were supposedly working on was at 84, and had been for the past four months. This was in Febuary of 2009. It's now August. A quick bit of maths will tell you that they've been in the same position for ten months. Are they any closer to releasing their mod? No. Do they have a time frame for releasing it? No. Are they even working on it?

Well the forums are pretty dead. One beta tester is still posting his experiences and there are a few feeble discussions about the politics of Star Wars but it's not exactly a vibrant hive of activity as you'd expect from a mod of this type.

I've been waiting for this mod for ages, I've been patiently putting off replaying KOTOR 2 until it was out but no more. Fuck them. I'm downloading the leaked version of their mod because I have absolutely no faith that they'll ever release the fucking thing or that they're even still working on it.

Team Gizka should be a warning message to anyone thinking of starting an ambitious project:

1) Be honest with people about how the project is doing or they'll just leave.
2) If it's a restoration mod, add content gradually so that when you inevitably lose interest, the users still have something to show for it.

Psychonauts: Not as good as everyone says it is

Yahtzee famously blew the Psychonauts horn in one of his early reviews. but more recently Daniel Floyd (who I have infinitely more respect for) did the same thing.

I then looked at Metacritic and found that all these guys were likewise saying it was the dogs bollocks.

Clearly, I had to check it out with that list of glowing references. Given that we're in the middle of a recession and I have no money, I decided to pirate it rather than shell out the £10 it was being sold for on steam and fuck me I'm glad I did.

Now if you're reading this, I'm assuming you've seen one or all of the above links so It's pointless me telling you what Psychonauts is so it's best to dive right in.

Psychonauts is startlingly original, very witty and absolutely no fun to play. The meat of the game is set in characters minds, which are all tarted up platform sections. They're very, very clever yes. You have to unlock emotional baggage, for example. See Daniel Floyd's video for more examples of just how clever the game is.

The problem is the gameplay consists of nothing but jumping from one platform to another, swinging on the occasional bar and using bizarely underwhelming psychic powers. The game has so much charm that this is quite well disguised but you'll play it for an hour or so and suddenly realised that whilst you've been quite engaged the whole time, you haven't enjoyed a second of the damn gameplay.

The developers should be applauded for originality and the game is often genuinely funny but the producers are absolute idiots - there's no way a game like this would sell becase it's not very good...

So if you've wanted to check out Psychonauts for ages because of all the hype, stay back. Play Braid instead, that basically does the same thing (minus the humour) but is actually fun to play.

Batman: Arkham Assylum Demo

The world and its dog has been getting very excited about this game of late.

I haven't. Partly because it's being produced by Eidos and they haven't brought out anything good since Thief: Deadly Shadows but mostly because it's a Batman game and many successive movie Tie-ins have proved it's extremely hard to do a Batman game.

But what the hell, there's a demo out for the PC version prior to release and so I thought I'd check it out for rarity value if nothing else.

It didn't start well, I have to say. You lead the Joker into Arkham and he escapes in the most predictable and preventable manner imaginable. You are then presented with several goons to fend off. The controls feel... okay. They're quite consoley but a Batman game is one of the few circumstances where this might be appropriate.

The fist fighting is... okay. It's rather like Assassins Creed in that it's based around striking, counters and take downs. This isn't a bad thing, by any means. It's not original but it's much better than most other games that have hand to hand combat in them.


Things got much better when the game opened up a bit... I was presented with three guards with guns. Obviously I couldn't take them head on so I snuck round the back and took them all down silently one by one. This felt briliant, but very linear.

Things improved again when I got to the climax of the demo - a huge room with four armed men in it. I had to take them all down.

Armed with my night vision goggles (which register weaponry, targets' state of mind from information such as their heart rate etc.) batarangs and my bat rope thing, I swung around on gargoyles, dropped down behind one guard and Ju Jitsu'd him until he was unconcious. I then hung from a gargoyle until a goon passed below me, I strung him up by his feet.

His cries brought his mates, though. I glided into one of them, classic Batman style but the other ones shot me a few times. I was close to death but I managed to escape.

I dropped down to the lower level. The guard didn't know where I was so I followed him all sneaky like, watching his heart rate sky rocket.

Here's where I first really noticed the AI and fantastic animations. The guard walked heasitantly, looked around and, at one point, spotted the movement of the chap I'd strung up from the gargoyle and opened fire at it.

That, my friends, is fucking cool.

I used this distraction to climb up behind him and remove him from the land of the concious.

I am now completely sold. It's probably not going to be a briliant game but it will be extremely fun and diverting if the demo is anything to go by. Check it out :)