Is there one true definition of a video game? For me, it's an entertainment piece whose medium of experiencing it is through player interaction, as opposed to experiencing a piece by listening, or reading, or viewing. Can we not go any further than that? Can we not exclude and isolate perfectly serviceable games simply because they don't fit a bracket? That way, we miss out on a lot of great games that otherwise wouldn't exist. In that regard, Gone Home is actually more **** than GTA5 or The Last of Us or COD: Ghosts. It doesn't have cinematic cutscenes which feel more like a movie than a game, it doesn't have high-end motion capture with professional actors. It doesn't have elaborate set pieces with Frostbite 3 engine. It tells its story through playing; through the basic tenant of video games: interactivity. You experience the story, not by cutscenes, but by playing it. Just because it doesn't have combat or violence doesn't mean it's not a game. In fact, it's even more **** than most triple-A games we play today; it utilises the potential of the medium. It shows what we can do with minimalistic gameplay meaning a lot. It's up to the player to decide how deep they want to dive in to Gone Home. With all that said, it's capable of delivering a story so powerful and unique that you can't help but be impressed with its sheer bravery. It shows what we can do with gaming, and it shows the power of gaming over other media, like film or literature. Therefore, Gone Home is as true a game as you can hope for.
I don't see why people hate this game so much. It's certainly not a bad game, but it's certainly not a great game. The story and the general themes seem quite racist, with every non-white character (apart from Tony Todd) betraying the pure, hard working white characters seems racist, as the idea of killing white people will make Treyarch run for their safety blanket. But the story seems like it has some deeper meanings, as it has room for exploring the theme of unmanned military and how it greatly effects war, but most of the time it just wants you to lose yourself in shooty action xenophoby-fun. The bog-standard shooting remains intact and the level design has been changed up from 'run down this corridor, kill the under-privileged' to 'go down these optional, slightly non-linear paths and kill the under-privileged whilst also being able to optionally man turrets and drones'. The choices have been fleshed out pretty well too, even though they are made fully explicit. I like how you can choose to shoot Tony Todd in the head or shoot him in the leg, but if you wait long enough the black guy will just knock him out for you. That's pretty neat. I like how the choices effect your future game, and it a great new take on a series established as being a linear conveyor-belt of linear linearity. The strike force missions are definitely the best part about the game and are heavily replayable, I just wish there were more of them. But I cannot praise competence as if it's excellence, as there have been more meaningful shooters that have come out this year that are generally more risky. Black Ops 2 is by all means safe, it doesn't try to challenge the player mentally, but is above average which is surprising because all other COD campaigns have been bog-standard at best. Overall, it's a refreshing game, and if you're a fan of multi-player shooters or zombie games, this is a must play. It's pretty much 3 passable games in one, and for $60, what more could you ask for?
A quirky, original and astounding platformer, and it holds up 8 years later. It's got the most clever, funny writing I've seen in a game, and with innovative ideas, like sortings ones literal emotional baggage and jumping into peoples brains that match their personality, that are executed perfectly. Granted, the platforming itself is a bit off, as this is Tim Schafers first stab at puzzle platforming, but the characters, writing, aesthetic, adventure and story are completely pitch perfect, and it's one of the best 3D platformers of all time, even though the platforming isn't as tight as other platformers. It's a shame this didn't sell well, because if it did, more developers would be focusing on story and characters than xenophobic shooty-fun.
What is Assassin's Creed 3's core mechanic? Is it stealth? No, because if one enemy spots you, all enemies are instantly aware of your position somehow. Even though there's an indicator for how much an enemy can see you, and it's plenty fun to sneak up behind an enemy, sometimes my character would do something stupid because I didn't press the buttons contextually enough for the games liking, and most of the missions don't involve stealth but when they do it's controller- snappingly obtuse. Is it hack and slash combat? Maybe, because there are plenty enemies in one vicinity at once and jumping in there taking them all out Arkham-style is really fun, but the game wants you to be unnoticed, you know, with the big inconspicuous hood and all, so killing everyone that looks at you funny isn't the optimal solution. Is it the naval missions? No, they're awesome in their own right and I love them, but they only appear in two of the story missions. Well done! You've done a story mission! Now you have the pleasure of being able to do something absolutely **** tedious. So no, AC3 has no core mechanic and remains an unfocused and buggy game throughout. The sidequests are dull too, with the hunting not being rewarded with anything but being pretty cool despite that. Let's just take a look back to Assassin's Creed 1, where it's core mechanic was Assassinating, hence the title. It was repetitive and you spent too much time faffing about, but at least it was a game about assassinating with just a set of tools and a target so you can find your own way to take out the enemy, whatever way you would like too. Over the years, the series has added so many more useless gimmicks that the series has become completely unfocused. I guess I should give credit where credit is due, the combat system being fast, fun and intuitive, the graphics are incredible, the aforementioned naval missions are extremely engaging and I really loved them, the new Assassin's Armour is the best one yet, the overall historical accuracy being, well, historically accurate, the writing is excellent, even though the story is conveluted and barely connected to the original Assassin's Creed story-line, the menu's are really well designed, the free-running is the best I've seen in a game, even though it does get a bit too contextual at times, and it's a fresh departure from the series that takes away the scrambled **** from the previous games. However, the scrambled eggs it took away from the previous games that made them less intuitive and focused, it completely dropped the assassinating bit, so this just becomes an unfocused generic action game, whereas its predecessors were quite original at the time and remained fun whilst also being a bit too easy. This one suffers from being a bit too easy as well, I died most of the time because Connor did something stupid. For an open world sandbox game, this needs to be less contextual, because it gets on my nerves when I cant climb up a wall unless the contextual 'Climb up the wall' button shows up. This was a problem with the previous games as well, I just want to be able to run freely without needing to press the correct button at the correct time. As an Englishman, I felt uncomfortable killng my own men, but I just got used to it over time. See, this is also a problem about the game, its set in a war that's only interesting to American Patriots and to no one else. Connor brutalising Englishman because he's not wearing the same colour as them makes Connor look like the biggest monster of them all, especially when you can't exactly demonize people sodding off later on because they couldn't be bothered any more, or maybe I'm just biased. The French renaissance would of been a much more interesting setting, because in 1775 America, there aren't any big buildings to go free running on and the whole running part is a lot less fun. But at the same time in France there are heads being chopped off, the peasants vs. the Aristocracy, there's a much more believable side you can take without being gung-ho American patriot or gung-ho French patriot. Civil wars are much more interesting, oh, what about the American civil war? Where enough time has gone by for there to be cool buildings to jump around on, war is becoming industrialised, and it's the brutal slave-owning savages of the south vs. the freedom fighting civilised north, and there's a war on so there's plenty of killing for your liking, and hey, they could of had mid-19th century Connor bump fists with Lincoln. Sure, the north outnumbered the south 2:1 but it's better than the boring old redcoats. This game is overall a pretty mixed bag, and if you do consider playing it, don't go in with your expectations too high, like I did. If you go into it with the knowledge that it's an average game, you'll come out feeling satisfied.
What is Assassin's Creed 3's core mechanic? Is it stealth? No, because if one enemy spots you, all enemies are instantly aware of your position somehow. Even though there's an indicator for how much an enemy can see you, and it's plenty fun to sneak up behind an enemy, sometimes my character would do something stupid because I didn't press the buttons contextually enough for the games liking, and most of the missions don't involve stealth but when they do it's controller- snappingly obtuse. Is it hack and slash combat? Maybe, because there are plenty enemies in one vicinity at once and jumping in there taking them all out Arkham-style is really fun, but the game wants you to be unnoticed, you know, with the big inconspicuous hood and all, so killing everyone that looks at you funny isn't the optimal solution. Is it the naval missions? No, they're awesome in their own right and I love them, but they only appear in two of the story missions. Well done! You've done a story mission! Now you have the pleasure of being able to do something absolutely **** tedious. So no, AC3 has no core mechanic and remains an unfocused and buggy game throughout. The sidequests are dull too, with the hunting not being rewarded with anything but being pretty cool despite that. Let's just take a look back to Assassin's Creed 1, where it's core mechanic was Assassinating, hence the title. It was repetitive and you spent too much time faffing about, but at least it was a game about assassinating with just a set of tools and a target so you can find your own way to take out the enemy, whatever way you would like too. Over the years, the series has added so many more useless gimmicks that the series has become completely unfocused. I guess I should give credit where credit is due, the combat system being fast, fun and intuitive, the graphics are incredible, the aforementioned naval missions are extremely engaging and I really loved them, the new Assassin's Armour is the best one yet, the overall historical accuracy being, well, historically accurate, the writing is excellent, even though the story is conveluted and barely connected to the original Assassin's Creed story-line, the menu's are really well designed, the free-running is the best I've seen in a game, even though it does get a bit too contextual at times, and it's a fresh departure from the series that takes away the scrambled **** from the previous games. However, the scrambled eggs it took away from the previous games that made them less intuitive and focused, it completely dropped the assassinating bit, so this just becomes an unfocused generic action game, whereas its predecessors were quite original at the time and remained fun whilst also being a bit too easy. This one suffers from being a bit too easy as well, I died most of the time because Connor did something stupid. For an open world sandbox game, this needs to be less contextual, because it gets on my nerves when I cant climb up a wall unless the contextual 'Climb up the wall' button shows up. This was a problem with the previous games as well, I just want to be able to run freely without needing to press the correct button at the correct time. As an Englishman, I felt uncomfortable killng my own men, but I just got used to it over time. See, this is also a problem about the game, its set in a war that's only interesting to American Patriots and to no one else. Connor brutalising Englishman because he's not wearing the same colour as them makes Connor look like the biggest monster of them all, especially when you can't exactly demonize people sodding off later on because they couldn't be bothered any more, or maybe I'm just biased. The French renaissance would of been a much more interesting setting, because in 1775 America, there aren't any big buildings to go free running on and the whole running part is a lot less fun. But at the same time in France there are heads being chopped off, the peasants vs. the Aristocracy, there's a much more believable side you can take without being gung-ho American patriot or gung-ho French patriot. Civil wars are much more interesting, oh, what about the American civil war? Where enough time has gone by for there to be cool buildings to jump around on, war is becoming industrialised, and it's the brutal slave-owning savages of the south vs. the freedom fighting civilised north, and there's a war on so there's plenty of killing for your liking, and hey, they could of had mid-19th century Connor bump fists with Lincoln. Sure, the north outnumbered the south 2:1 but it's better than the boring old redcoats. This game is overall a pretty mixed bag, and if you do consider playing it, don't go in with your expectations too high, like I did. If you go into it with the knowledge that it's an average game, you'll come out feeling satisfied.
The biggest complaint I have against Dishonored is that the story-telling (not the story, the story is great) is rather bad. I ended up skipping all of the parts where lord **** was blabbing in my face in fallout 3-esque fixed eye contact. It also suffers from most characters not having any personality whatsoever, they just exist to provide you quests and level ups. I can
It will disappoint veteran max payne fans, as it is a huge departure, but this huge departure and a new, exciting aesthetic, a new method of storytelling, and updates the gameplay so it is smoother than a syrup enema and sets the bar for third person shooters. I acknowledge that it
So happy to see a strategy game like XCOM to be on consoles too, they're usually just for PC only, you know, for the PC master race. It's an incredibly organic game: if you **** up, that's your own fault, not the games. Your tactics and strategies will effect your outcome. Also, winning isn't inevitable, you can put 20 hours in to it and lose to the aliens. The turn-based combat is very engaging, and the base management makes you feel like an actual commander. It's all very absorbing, and it's rather cheap now, so definitely pick it up when you can.
For 30 years, games have been held back by the idea that 'fun' is a defining factor. Sure, I love fun, and it is one of the most powerful ways to engross a player, but imagine if all films fit under the category of fun? We wouldn't have films like Schindler's List, Hurt Locker, Apocalypse Now, and the Godfather. Our medium has never had our own Citizen Kane, or it's own Godfather. Until now. If Spec Ops: The Line was the Apocalypse now of gaming, and Skyrim is the Lord of the Rings, The Walking Dead is the Dead Alive, and even that isn't doing it justice, as Dead Alive is the best zombie film ever. Look past the glitches, and we have a near perfect game. The puzzles are tricky and take a fair bit of though, the art style is the best use of cell-shading I've seen, the characters are well-written and have arcs, its atmosphere is very tense, and you have the urge to play it to the very end once you've picked it up. The episodes themselves were quite short, 3 hours at best, but the retail release actually makes it seem like one coherent game, instead of playing parts **** months apart. Actions have consequences. The littlest choice has the hugest effect at the end of your game. Talk to another person who played this game and, most likely, his outcome would of been entirely different. All of this makes the Walking Dead compulsively playable, but not fun. It's not about the thrills of killing zombies, this game focuses on the realtionships between characters in a zombie apocalypse scenario, and makes you see how ordinary people can get along (and indeed fall out) in this scenario. Play it because you like Telltale, play it because you love zombies, play it because you love point and click adventure games, play it because you love substantial choice in games, play it because it's cheap, play it because you're sick of Halo, the bottom line remains the same: DO NOT MISS THE WALKING DEAD.
For 30 years, games have been held back by the idea that 'fun' is a defining factor. Sure, I love fun, and it is one of the most powerful ways to engross a player, but imagine if all films fit under the category of fun? We wouldn't have films like Schindler's List, Hurt Locker, Apocalypse Now, and the Godfather. Our medium has never had our own Citizen Kane, or it's own Godfather. Until now. If Spec Ops: The Line was the Apocalypse now of gaming, and Skyrim is the Lord of the Rings, The Walking Dead is the Dead Alive, and even that isn't doing it justice, as Dead Alive is the best zombie film ever. Look past the glitches, and we have a near perfect game. The puzzles are tricky and take a fair bit of though, the art style is the best use of cell-shading I've seen, the characters are well-written and have arcs, its atmosphere is very tense, and you have the urge to play it to the very end once you've picked it up. The episodes themselves were quite short, 3 hours at best, but the retail release actually makes it seem like one coherent game, instead of playing parts **** months apart. Actions have consequences. The littlest choice has the hugest effect at the end of your game. Talk to another person who played this game and, most likely, his outcome would of been entirely different. All of this makes the Walking Dead compulsively playable, but not fun. It's not about the thrills of killing zombies, this game focuses on the realtionships between characters in a zombie apocalypse scenario, and makes you see how ordinary people can get along (and indeed fall out) in this scenario. Play it because you like Telltale, play it because you love zombies, play it because you love point and click adventure games, play it because you love substantial choice in games, play it because it's cheap, play it because you're sick of Halo, the bottom line remains the same: DO NOT MISS THE WALKING DEAD.
When I play Missile Command, I think about the moral implications of it. I have to make hard choices in real time, to choose to defend the cities or bases which fire the missiles. If you lose a base, your chances of protecting the cities are severely hampered. Do you sacrifice the few for the many, or the many for the few? That's not the crushing part though. When all 6 cities are destroyed, instead of saying 'Game Over' like most arcade games, it says 'The End'. It crushes me every time. It's pretty much a perfect game.
It's made some vast improvements since Black Ops, with non-linear level design, choices that effect the future of your game, and some RTS missions to do once you get bored. I found the story quite engaging. If you haven't played the first one to the end, you'll be lost, no doubt, but I still cared about the characters and the writing is largely believable and actually quite funny at times too. Yes, the general gameplay is quite dated, it doesn't feel as organic and as free-flowing as some other shooters do, but it still runs at a consistent 60 FPS. The aesthetic is also consistent, and it's quite effective too. You really feel like you're in the future, and you get immersed in the world you're in. To those who think this is just the same thing over and over again, you're largely wrong. It has the same shooting gameplay, but that doesn't mean it's the same as previous ones. You can't say Black Ops 2 is the same as Black Ops 1 because you're shooting people with a gun in first-person. If you were to come up to me and say that Half-Life 2 is exactly the same as Duke Nukem Forever because in both games there's first-person shooting, I would be forced to kick you in the balls. I would say it's audacious for Treyarch to do this, but they knew that COD was going to sell regardless, so they mixed up the formula and the end result is actually quite surprising and really good. The level design means everything to me; I love different branching paths in which you can clear out enemies, and I like having one set area in which I can run and gun and have a **** great time. People are just giving this game a low score because of prejudice, I'm sure many of the people that rated this haven't even played it yet. Their theory is: Call of Duty is popular, therefore it is **** I had this prejudice too, I was expecting an aggressively linear, nonsensical, poorly paced, piece-of-**** retread of the previous COD games, because what else would you expect? You weren't expecting a masterpiece, nor did we get a masterpiece, but we did get something that is entirely different from its predecessor and also something I would recommend. Up to this point, I've hated the Call of Duty series, with MW1 being the only good one (it was actually quite fantastic) and all the others being rather **** and boring. Black Ops 2 is a huge turn around for the series, and to those people who say it's exactly the same, you obviously haven't played it.
Now, I don't usually give a 10 if the game isn't perfect or close to perfection, and this game is full of flaws, but I just feel like balancing out the average score, so here it is. It's a very haunting, visceral and real game. It's the most realistic game (in theming) I've ever played. Gameplay wise it's sub-par and generic, but that was the point. The point was to have overtly game-like play, stocked with genericness and cheap deaths, pushed through the filter of a seriously grim and haunting story, to emphasize how disconnected modern war shooters are from the real thing. It's unfair to say that the game is bad because it has a bad multi-player. Come on, don't do that. Don't perpetuate the idea that all shooters need multi-player. Did BioShock need it to be better? Did Half-Life? Did System Shock 2? Exactly, Spec Ops: The Line is up there. Go watch Extra Credits video on it, you will understand.
Warning: this review is a blatant rip-off of Yahtzee's review of QC because I can't be asked to write my own. Quantum Conundrum is a game available on Steam that comes to us from Kim Swift, ex-Valve luminary who brought us the gameplay behind Portal. But it means that an immediate comparison is drawn between Quantum Conundrum and Portal, both being quirky first-person physics puzzlers with repetitive environments, a voiceover of ambiguous motivation, and an almost fetishistic approach to the concept of science; although Quantum Conundrum takes a slightly more circuitous route that overlooks The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. You are a small boy who's been sent to stay with his inventor uncle, Professor Quadrangle, but arrives to find him absent in all but voice and needing you to rescue both him and the house from a strange dimensional flux. And after a few dialogue lines, I realized that the eccentric, morally questionable genius with a prominent Q in their name was voiced by John de Lancie of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame. Blimey, that's about as typecast as you can possibly get. So the puzzles are driven by a handheld device called the Portal gu - oh, wait. Actually, a sort of Power Glove thing that allows you to shift between four alternate dimensions (read: screen filters) that alter the physical properties of the objects around you. It's kind of like a glove-mounted **** dispenser except it alters the physical properties of things other than your own legs. There's the piña colada dimension, where everything is light and fruity; the Black Russian dimension, where things sit much more heavily and you start clutching your head complaining about your ex-wife; the absinthe dimension, where everything floats off into the sky to come crashing apocalyptically down the following morning; and the slow motion dimension, where this analogy kind of breaks down. Combining these four states of matter, you must use the available loose objects to depress switches, bypass hazards, and transport yourself to the exit door. But unlike Portal, the nature of the four dimensions makes it a lot easier to find multiple solutions to complex puzzles. And by that I mean, hope you've played a lot of Feces Tetris, because it's time to stack **** Since you're all so crushingly obvious, you're probably thinking: "A comedy puzzle game by a Portal creator voiced by Q from Star Trek? My money could not exit my wallet fast enough." But slow down, moneybags, because I don't actually like Quantum Conundrum. And considering the decent writing and talent, it had to work pretty hard to reach that point. Quantum Conundrum is a game that wouldn't have gotten very far into its elevator pitch. Four words in - "first person precision platforming" - and the CEO will be hammering on the call button like it will somehow make his heart start working again. Jumping on really obnoxiously small platforms from a first-person perspective where your feet exist in some hypothetical netherplane is like successfully penetrating a really splintery glory hole blindfolded and with a ten-foot run-up. But QC just loves making us jump from one flying piece of small, uneven furniture to another to cross its deadly pits. What's especially obnoxious as that you need to get through each level without dying to 100% the game, and you might glide through 90% of the puzzles in a level like a diarrhea surfboard before dying fifty times at the end trying to jump onto an inflatable sofa held aloft by a giant fan and crossed fingers. On that note, if you are basing a precision game around a physics engine, then it would be nice if that engine could be relied upon to do the same thing each time. There's one bit where you have to use zero gravity in slow mode to make four boxes hover at the right height to make stepping stones, but they only fell in a pattern that would allow such a thing about 20% of the time, usually rolling merrily around for a while like D20s on a fat nerd's primary flab shelf. An object thrower might have flung end tables in a consistent arc ninety thousand times, but the moment I activated slow motion to jump on one it caught on a ledge and went spinning off into a ring of hungry wolves. Sometimes buttons wouldn't work 'cause the power would get most of the way along the wire to whatever it was supposed to activate and then stop and zip right back. That's right, my frame rate was so bad that it was literally interfering with the speed of light. "Wait a minute," I hear you rudely interrupt, "if you suspected your frame rate was sticking its **** up the physics engine, did it not occur to you to lower the graphical settings?" Of course it occurred to me. Just a shame it didn't occur to Airtight Games, 'cause there are no **** graphical settings. And who the **** needs motion blur? Anyway, I've got to score this so I guess I should give it a 4 out of 10.
You see Quarter to Three's review on the left? Quarter to Three are just used to being spoon-fed action, they have no nuance, they have no subtlety or pacing or sense for atmosphere. They're used to roaring guns, massive explosions, and awesome actions sequences. If you want to be spoon-fed action and have more patience for repetitiveness than tosspots, who only care about a competent multiplayer and are only satisfied when they're wielding a gun the size of a car with an alien willy bouncing off your space helmet, I would strongly recommend you to any Triple-A shooter in the past 3 years. If you want a carefully crafted experience, with elegant yet simple gameplay and stunning visuals, and with some of the most meaningful multi-player I've ever played in a game, get Journey. You know that feeling, that feeling you get when you play certain games, the feeling that makes you realize why you started playing games in the first place, and the feeling that reminds you why you still play games? Journey is that feeling. Without one single word of spoken dialogue, it tells a compelling story, a compelling essence that many games fail to convey with pages of script. That's the most impressive aspect of Journey, go buy this game. Maybe in the first playthrough, you might not understand it, but play it again, and you will see. You have to drop pretenses of what a game is, because what is a game? Why do we play games? You have to get that feeling, and for that particular feeling, play Journey.
Suda51, the quirky mind behind Killer7, No More Heroes and Shadows of the Damned, returns with another **** zombie outbreak. Hey, I'm going to make a zombie game of my very own. It will be an apocalyptic survival game in which you and a small group of desperate survivors with complementary skills must navigate a deserted city without being crushed under an avalanche of zombie games, movies, and reinterpretations of classic literature. I'll call it 'Enough with the **** Zombies Already'. Honestly, at this point you people just won't be able to cope if civilization ends any other way, will you. But that's neither here or there, what is here is some fun hacko-slasho-button-masho combat, and there is some fun, quirky humor that Suda51 is so fond of. Juliet is so much more likable that Lara Croft. Lara Croft is a sassy action girl who flips arbitrarily between the two, Juliet is just an over-the- top, sexy and violent action hero. Of course, the chainsaw has been used more on zombies in games more than trees in real life, and it is really over the top in Lollipop Chainsaw, but it's balanced with Suda51's desire to make the funniest, quirkiest game ever. If you loved Killer7 or Nomeroes then you will certainly love this. It is certainly a spectacle, but that's not a problem because the gratuitous, sexy, bloody violence compensates. I have a few gripes with the game; Juliet is an example of how poorly women are treated as a main character, Bayonetta was an example because everything Bayonetta does was **** I know Suda51 isn't trying to make a true female character, he was intending Juliet to be over-the-top, and it certainly delivered. So yeah, I **** loved Killer7, though it was a completely different game, but the humor and quirkiness is still here. So if you want a fun weekend, I would recommend Lollipop Chainsaw
I am not going to talk about the ending, because that doesn't matter. I'll just say one thing: First impressions are everything. I rented the game, and played at least 10 hours of it. It was boring. I didn't think it was worth it. The cover-based shooting mechanics were bland, and compared to Uncharted 3, ME3 was a load of old ****. But, it's not a shooter, it's an RPG, so how is that doing? Well, too many cutscenes. I. Hate. Cutscenes. You should be able to tell a story without interrupting gameplay, that's how the whole 'game' thing works, you have to weave exposition into the narrative, not hand the audience a **** glossary as they walk in. The conversation thing works pretty well, it has some good writing, and the character customization is hilarious, but you can get all this in the demo. I highly recommend getting the demo instead of the game itself. I'm not one of those twitching, instant-gratification gamers who are never satisfied if they haven't killed anything in 5 seconds, I love 'games are art' games, but ME3 just feels unpolished as RPG, I would also recommend Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning over this (though I do hate EA) or even Fallout 3 over this. The best WRPG I've played is either Fallout 3 or Skyrim, so take your pick instead of this one. I'm a new-comer to the series, this was the first time I've played a Mass Effect game, so whether this is inviting to new-comers is up for debate. EA released an unfinished game, and released the rest of the game, the full version of it, as day-one DLC. Think about that. EA went to far with it, they tried to **** our wallets as much as they could, and since I hate the EA marketing department (how they marketed Dante's Inferno and Dead Space 2 was despicable) and the **** company in general, this deserves all the hate it gets.
Brown, boring, repetitive, poorly paced, poor production value, poorly made, poor story, stale, not challenging, bland characters, poor story, and only 7 hours long. A brown, boring, repetitive, poorly paced, poor production value, poorly made, poor story, stale, not challenging, bland characters, poor story, and insultingly short game was the biggest entertainment launch of all time, yet games like Resistance 3 aren't even given the time of day because Tommy **** is killing another brown person. Resistance 3 is a great shooter, it has no regenerating health, no cover mechanics and 10 weapon slots, capturing the spirit of the by-gone age of shooters (Half-Life 2, Serious Sam, Painkiller) with a great story, brilliant multi-player and a truly unforgettable story, is shunned because MW3 came out within the same few months. Now I don't hate MW3 because it's brown, boring, repetitive, poorly paced, has poor production value, is poorly made, has poor story, is stale, not challenging, with bland characters, a poor story, and only 7 hours long, I hate it because of what it represents. 'Hey, Infinity Ward, do you mind if I don't play the multi-player and instead play the single-player only?' 'No! Because we spent all our 6 months of hard work on changing the textures, character models and programming routines of COD4's multi-player and releasing it again in MW3, and if you only play the single-player you will realize that you spent $60 on a handful of multi-player maps, so do you mind if we force you to play multi-player?' 'Kind of do, Infinity Ward' ' I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of all my MONEY!' I can tell you this: there are two kinds of games in this putrid world of ours, those who are made mainly because developers thought it would be a lovely thing for everyone to play (Limbo, Bastion, Psychonauts) and those who are made mainly because the developers thought it would be lovely to add another ballroom to their golden money palace (BioShock 2, Dragon Age 2, Kane and Lynch 2). And you know how I can tell MW3 is in the second camp? Because it has a '3' on the end of it. It's a sequel to a sequel that never needed a sequel, it was fine on its own! But because Innovation to Infinity Ward is what cheeseburgers are to a lactose intolerant Hindu, we are left with this pile of old **** that got an 88 Metascore and we're all left scratching our head. You know, sometimes things our popular for a reason, because they're good, or because Will Smith is in it, but because MW3 is neither of those two, I am left wondering why MW3 was critically acclaimed and on top of that, was the biggest entertainment launch of all time. It saddens me, there have been so many better games, and it still would of angered me if MW3 was at least decent, because decent games don't deserve this much money thrown at them as if they are linked to the pneumonic plague, and after playing Resistance 3 and that Hard Reset thing which is like Painkiller if they chose one of Phillip **** most incomprehensible plots, it mystifies me how people think MW3 is a better shooter. If you want to spam me with hate, here's my Twitter (@chujfugh)
First off, there's a lot more variation. That's what you need in **** aroundy makey super murder-like games, you need many ways to kill someone. In the first one, you had this extremely over-powered, long-ranged whipfist that just made every other super power useless, but in the second one, you do certainly need other attacks to take down different enemy's. You can jump up in mid air and either: Slash kill, fisty spike attack, spikey spike attack, blade hammer attack, and the tentacle of death, making the thing you're targeting absorb everything around it and blow up. On the ground you can: smash attach, spinny blade attack, whipping blade attack, pointy blade attack, tiger claw pounce, tentacle of death, tentacle of death without touching them (you grab them then bio-bomb them, it's complicated), grab them and throw them, grab them and eat them, or you can use guns if you're a boring mother ****er who brings his own cutlery to KFC. This is awesome, and makes ****ing about all the more entertaining, instead of having 'we like electric types' for every single attack in inFamous. Secondly, there is a lot more characterisation and depth towards characters. You're not Alex Mercer any more, no, you're just Alex Mercer in all but name, skin colour, dead family and sexy accent. The story is a lot more straight forward though, you are a Sargent who got his wife and kids killed by Mercer, went to hunt down Mercer, got his helicopter smashed to **** and get transformed into a pile of spaghetti carbonara just like Alex himself. Then you go on to destroy your creater. Come on, this isn't a spoiler alert. Alex Mercer being characterized as an anti-hero is a lost cause, so he just becomes a Saturday morning cartoon villain. And I thought anyone can predict a plot along the lines of 'the bad guy dies'. And the story in the first one went downhill from 'It's about a guy with amnesia'. The most annoying thing about Prototype 2 is that it keeps trying to take itself seriously. One minute you're grimacing over the death of Father Guerro (Spoiler Alert: Father Guerro dies) teary-eyed and filled with anger and emotional frustration, then the next he sprints up the empire state building, slices 20 soldiers in half and eats a scientist. It does get away with it at some points though. In the first game, Mercer just seemed like a skinny white nerd seeking mass destruction with no evident goal, so it just seemed kinda silly. In Prototype 2 you are a black guy who talks like a cynical badass who eats people for a larf. Prototype 2 seems all the more sillier when you have to get to the bottom of the Blackwatch nebulous agenda, Blackwatch being the most saturday-morning-cartoon-evil PMC I've ever seen in a game, so evil they might as well be called 'Kitten Stranglers PMC'. You can find these voice notes (Blackboxes) that contain the Blackwatch talking about how much they love to throw toddlers into jet turbines and rub the greasy remnants into their prostate, and you begin to wonder where Blackwatch seem to find this inexhaustible supply of emotionless psychopaths - Liverpool maybe? It just makes it all the more sillier and it takes a fair amount of grinding to do all the //blackwatch missions, especially when you get a mutation upgrade but only have a certain amount of upgrades available for each category and it requires an awful lot more amount of though that just spewing upgrades on a list, getting EP and upgrading them when you need them. I went into Prototype 2 thinking it would be a knock off piece of **** (BioShock 2) or an expansion pack (Mario Galaxy 2), but it did just about enough to see like an actual sequel rather than an expansion pack. It didn't take any pages from the Crackdown 2 school of ****-about sandboxing, which is to have less features and building your game only on ****ing about, rather than having missions that distract you from realising all you're doing is ****ing about (Just Cause 2). Visually, meh. When you get Heller facing the wall and turn the camera around so you can see a close up of his face, his facial animations would of embarrassed the 5th generation consoles with a pick-axe lodged in it. But flying around at 50 mph, darting through the air, landing on a dime of somebody's baby, you don't need ****ing visuals to enjoy the addictive elegance of transport in Prototype 2. Looking at stuff, what games have been built around for the past few years (Syndicate, Ninja Gaiden 3, Final Fantasy 13), cannot possible compare to running up stuff, jumping onto stuff, and sliding down stuff with pedestrians attached to your shoes.
I love this game, 9 years ago I loved it, and love it to this day. The graphics are subpar against new releases, but good for a HD Remake, much better than Silent Hill 2's failure to preserve the original for newer generations, and the art direction is truly beautiful. Rayman has always had a great art direction, even in the PlayStation era, but Rayman 3 is where is really stands out from the crowd. The levels are varied and there are different and unique ways to get from A to B. The combat is unique. There is an auto lock-on feature and you can kill an enemy in many unique ways, using your propeller hair, different fist types, unlocked by going over cans, but bugger all else. There's plenty of variation in gameplay mechanics. I think the best part of Rayman 3 is that it makes little to no sense. The story, like all Rayman games, are barely there or make no sense, being in its own special way, unique. Globox swallows a Black thing, they go to the Doctors to get him out before the Black Thing kills him. It's not an emotional roller-coaster from start to finish, but it starts to get really funny as it goes on. Some attempts at humor are a bit dry at times, but what I love about Rayman 3 is the lack of cutscenes, it doesn't interrupt gameplay, much, and when there are cutscenes, it's usually just a framing device to link you from one level to another, which is fine. It's much better than Rayman 2, the lack of brown and unlikeable, forgettable characters, it stand out. The set-pieces are fantastic, the gameplay is varied and it has some of the funniest humor I've ever heard in a game. Although I am yet to play a perfect game, which of course will be Half-Life 3, obviously. The gameplay is a bit grinding at times, especially on the same level, it's fun to circle strafe and the comic-book style death-sequences are entertaining, but sometimes you feel like you're grinding through the levels. The '5 star' point system at the end of every level is arbitrary, it has no relevence, Rayman doesn't need 5 stars, he needs limbs. Also it's pretty short, I completed it in 10 hours, but then again I completed Half-Life 2 in 10 hours, but I'm just nit-picking now, there's nothing else like it and it's one of my favorite PS2 titles out there. It well preserves the original, and Rayman always seems to be under-rated. Only 50,000 people bought Rayman Origins on the opening weekend, and Rayman MCing that Rabbit's business wasn't doing him any favors either, huge disappointments. I love this HD remake, not as good as Team Ico's HD remake, but still one of the best one's out there. I'm just waiting for them to remake the first Silent Hill, Rayman 2, Half-Life and GTA3/San Andreas, maybe Max Payne and PaRappa the Rappa too, but oh well, I'm happy, and you should throw your money at UbiSoft once again.
