Tuesday 29 March 2011

Jake 2.Whoah!

In my “early years” I was into the whole PC gaming malarkey, it offered something different to consoles, mainly clicking. Click, click, shitting click. You’d go out and buy a N64 or Playstation game, go home and immediately play it. If you were to go out and buy a PC game, you’d go home and spend half a day installing the game, find out you can’t run it, and wait two years until you can afford an upgrade. Two years later a sequel for that game is released and the cycle repeats.

This offers an unrivalled level of anticipation, but it also costs a hell of a lot money. I gave up long before Crysis came out. Crysis was infamous for its system requirements, roughly seven people in the world were able to play it. So it was strange not only that its sequel (aptly named Crysis 2) was released on consoles, but I also bought it.

It’s a first person shooter, and having played it for a few hours, that’s really the only way I can describe it because I haven’t got a fucking clue to what else is going on. Now the developer must know that no one could play it because there’s an achievement which references the very fact, so why did they make the story so impossible to follow. It’s like watching Manga backwards on mute with your eyes closed.

The story starts straightforward enough, you’re a marine, in a submarine. Then it gets complicated. You find out that you’re called Alcatraz, why have I got the same name as a famous prison? I’m already confused, then the submarine blows up! I’m in the Hudson river, there’s some sort of aircraft shooting lasers and scene. I wake up and I’m told I’ve been put in a nanosuit by a man who is dead. Before I can ask what a nanosuit is I’m being told by this dead man to run about and shoot some people. I don’t even know who these dudes are, but they’re shooting at me so I’m all too happy to oblige. Then the dead man stops talking to me and this other guy starts giving me instructions, and out of nowhere aliens appear and start attacking me. I had a 3D puzzle of the Millennium Falcon which was less confusing than this (note to self: must see if I still have this).

Nanosuit. Nano as in extremely small, suit as in a gentleman’s garment. So it’s a very tiny suit then? No, because playing as a microscopic man shooting the shit out of bacteria would be far too cool. Instead nanosuit just means a really cool suit which does some really cool shit. It’s all too easy to explain something technical by using the word nano, and in this case it’s just a bit like the hit TV show Jake 2.0 (remember that?).

As I’m shouting at the TV “WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!” I’m wondering why Alcatraz isn’t shouting the same thing. He’s just doing what the strangers are telling him, unfazed that he has a magical suit on, and there’s aliens running about. Maybe he knows something that I don’t, maybe he played the first game, if he has a nanosuit he probably has quite a good PC.

I’m still only a few hours in so maybe the plot will unfold and eventually make sense like Akira did after the third viewing. If I miss anything it’s not a game I want to play twice because despite the critical acclaim it’s not very fun. Sure it’s pretty and you can go invisible and that, but it all feels a little sterile. Without a comprehensible plot it all seems pointless, maybe those who understand what’s going on love the game, but for me it’s a bit too much like Halo in the sense that I’m only playing it because everyone else says it’s good.

All good FPS’s must have a good multiplayer, and 9 ranks in and I’m almost not bored yet. It has copied elements from COD but has made a few inspired changes. What makes it different is the nanosuits, it requires a different style of play which encourages players to avoid the dreaded art of camping. Not that it’ll stop nerdy morons developing their own styles to make it as fun as putting your dick in a toaster, which I sometimes do after playing COD.

Like almost every other FPS this is another example of how not to write a story, it’s over complicated and boring, and meandering through the pretty streets of New York might be a bit more impressive if I knew why I was doing it. I may never know though because if I trade it in with five English pounds on Friday, I can have the new Tiger Woods game, and you can’t argue with sex and golf.

Wednesday 9 March 2011

"I'm Gonna Kill Your Dick"

It was called the worst game ever, morally speaking (by people who haven’t played it), now Bulletstorm has actually been released have murder rates increased? Has there been a surge in youths kicking old
ladies into giant cacti? No, obviously.

The controversy surrounding Bulletstorm’s release was only ever going to be great publicity for it, why would anyone want to buy the most violent game ever? Maybe not a respectable lady but for fully grown boys it doesn’t get any better than the moniker “most violent game ever”. Not that we’re all sick in head, we can distinguish between murder and a pixelated animation ceasing to move.

There’s no doubt that Bulletstorm has received so much attention and hype because of its violent tendencies, yet the violence is the key to its creativity. In a world where all first person shooters look and feel the same, Bulletstorm attempts to push the boundaries and create something new. Where you would normally just shoot an enemy in a standard FPS, here you are asked to do it with style and are awarded points based on how creative you are.

While this sounds exciting and it initially is, in practice the number of ways to vanquish the pixels is quite limited, you can shoot, whip, kick, slide and shoot. A few hours into the game and it becomes a chore, the only new ways to kill arise in the surroundings, but once you’ve kicked an enemy into one thing, you’ve kicked him into everything.

This wouldn’t matter if the story was good, or even bad. Everything from the plot to the dialogue to the characters is just awful. I can’t remember the last time I played a game which didn’t have a flashback or 500 moments where my character wakes up on the ground disorientated (also known as COD shock).

I’m all for balls out punchy dialogue but somehow “I’m gonna kill your dick” just doesn’t do it for me. Its crude style is intended but where it could have been quite an amusing parody on dumb action movies (ala Duke Nukem) it’s just a bit shit and gets more irritating as you progress through the game.

Much of the dialogue or characterisation doesn’t make any sense, your character is tricked into killing innocent people so his retaliation is to kill, and kill, and kill some more, and while you enable him to do this he’ll come out with some one liners to show how much he enjoys it. Crime and punishment this ain’t. If games are to be taken seriously it’s not violence that will damage their credibility, it’s the quality of writing. Enslaved enlisted Alex Garland to write the story and maybe it’s time that other games did the same and nab an experienced writer.

It’s still a fun game with some great set pieces and bosses but maybe it’s best played with the sound turned down and cut scenes skipped. The inevitable sequel will inevitably up the ante to an inevitable cataclysm of gore and violence as all sequels do, and I’ll still be here to kill its dick.