Space Marine Review

I'm am entirely sick of games petering out. Why oh why, in this modern age of gaming do developers concentrate on the first half of a game then give up for the end.

This time I'm talking about Space Marine, the new hack-n-slashing-shooting-squishing game from THQ. As I have stated before, I am a massive Warhammer 40k fanboy. So I was more than excited when I heard that they were going to be making a game letting me be a proper Space Marine in all it's stompy glory. Especially so because it was THQ who was making it (let's forget about Dawn of War 2). I pre-ordered the collector's edition, I don't care if it was overpriced, I now have a pure fridge, with it's very own purity seal.

I played the Space Marine demo when it was released about a week and a half prior to this review. I absolutely loved it. It captured every boyhood fantasy I had about being a Space Marine. It was delightfully visceral. The Space Marines moved as if they were in several hundred kilos worth of armour. The close combat weapons were nice and meat inducing, and it was the first game I've encountered that properly represented what a bolter should shoot like. The demo was great.

Cue this morning (yes I know I got the game and completed it in a day, I'm a sad individual, I went to the pub before I completed it so at least that kind of evens it out right... please?) I was awoken by the sounds of my house mate doing his morning ritual of brushing his tongue and making noises like a fish trying to swallow a brillo pad... I wish I was joking. I opened my door to see a nice big parcel for me on the window sill. I chucked it in my computer and after a long install time (2 disks! In this day and age) I was in the game, all giddy eyed and happy mouthed (I'm not very good at metaphor).

The first few hours, amazing. Exact experience as I had in the demo. I was cutting up Orks left, right and centre. It felt good, it was fun. I was playing the game on hard and it was the perfect difficulty, I died a few times but it felt challenging yet enjoyable. That all changed when the Chaos Space Marines were introduced. The entire pace of the game changed. This was mainly due to the fact that meleé was made almost entirely redundant by them. Their aim, along with the cultists, which I'll get to in a moment, those bastards, was so perfect, and the range of their weapons was so huge that if you tried to charge in and kill them, you died almost instantaneously. The majority of levels from the point that the Chaos Marines joined in were designed in a way that either put you at the end of a very long corridor, or in the middle of some low ground in which your enemies encircle you entirely. Now, Space Marines are known for their tactical prowess, but I'm starting to doubt it, the amount of times I was forced to walk directly into what was clearly an ambush astonished me.

I was forced to stand as far away from my enemies and pump rounds and rounds of bullets into my enemies in order to thin their ranks. The game went from a beautifully fast and exciting combat game into essentially a point and click adventure. “But Badger”, perhaps you're saying, unlikely unless you're prone to talking at your internet browser, “maybe your aim was just poor?” Well fuck you random reader! My aim was fine, depressingly so, seeing as I got the 250 headshot achievement about an hour into the game. The Chaos space marines merely take around 2 clips from your go-to bolter to go down, I spent the majority of the second half of the game with my hand off the keyboard, just holding down the shoot button and thinking about something else.

Maybe I am slightly to blame, I do have a confession. There is a section in the game where you get a Thunder Hammer for the first time, for those of you who don't know, a Thunder Hammer is a massive two handed mace, that looks like a block of metal on the end of a lamp-post that some GENIUS decided to pump electricity through. I have to say, this point of the game was possibly the most fun I've ever had. My house mates could hear me cackling throughout the house, to the point where one of them decided to come sit on my bed and watch me whilst playing Pokémon (one at a time ladies this is the Casanova house I know). It was due to this extreme amount of enjoyment that I developed a kind of neuroses, a separation anxiety disorder with my hammer if you will. Nothing could make me put the thing down. Even when the Chaos Marines showed up and I couldn't even get close to them I still held it aloft in my hands and persevered through, but why should I be forced to, why is it that the second half of the game has been decided as being ranged only? There were also sections of the game where I couldn't get rid of the bastard thing when I'd actually had enough. Seeing as you need to replace the hammer with either an axe or a chainsword, you can't just drop the fucker, apparently Captain Titus has separation anxiety too.

There are other things that these Chaos Marines ruined as well. Whilst fighting the Orks I was entirely engaged. The combat was so intense and as realistic as I presume it could be without genetically engineering some humans, putting them in concrete/steel armour and finding some Orks. When the Chaos Marines appear this feeling was completely removed. I know they're supposed to be tough gits, and plated in some futuristic armour, but if you get shot in the face, you're bound to react slightly, I know my character did whenever it happened. They just stood there, firing at you as if nothing was happening. Even when they got dazed and you kept firing at them, they just looked down, then as they died, stood up, then disappear into the warp. (Which by the way, they shouldn't fucking do, I know this is nit-picking but Chaos Space Marines are not demons, when they're killed they don't get banished to the warp, they die, they're flesh and bone.) The entire process of fighting with them feels so disjointed that I just didn't care about the game at all. Usually when I get sucked into the game I can't tear myself away from it, but with Space Marine, on the last level I went downstairs and decided to go the pub instead.

Enough about the Chaos Marines for now, let's talk about the worst enemy I've ever faced in recent times, the Cultist. In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, cultists are the bitches of the Chaos massive. They do all the bitch work. They make things, they get used as sacrifices, it seems in this game however, they are the hardest things in the universe. They would randomly teleport in and instantly I would groan and hide behind something. Cultists, float in the air, they have a seemingly massive amount of health. They also have what appears to be an infinite range attack, that is completely accurate and does the most damage of anything else in the game. If one appears and you're out in the open, have fun looking at the loading screen, because there is no way to defend against it. The amount of times, where I would die after a large fight just because a cultist destined for the next area would appear and shoot me through some railings was infuriating.

Now, I appreciate I've been ranting quite excessively in this one, but bear with me, I'm nearly done, just one last angry outburst. Oh and a mild warning for anyone who is planning to play the game, there will be spoilers in this upcoming section. Why, oh why, do developers seemingly have this train of thought:
“Getting a bit bored of this game now, nearly finished, started well... dum de dum, how should I end it? Epic boss fight? Massive encounter with the villain you've been chasing since the... 'twist' (OOC: And if you play this game and don't work out the twist you're a moron). Seems like a lot of work... Quick Time Event? Yeah Quick Time Event will do.”

ANOTHER game that ends with a mediocre QTE. After your enemy becomes amazingly powerful, after spending the game literally disabling you using just his mind, you... push him off the cliff and have an aerial fight with him like Gandalf and the Balrog. It's not even a particularly epic one, it's about three animations looped over and over again, until you eventually crush his head. It looked amazing, I'll give it that, and I know I haven't talked much about how the game looks thus far, but it does look fantastic, the graphics are phenomenal, the animations brilliant, but that wasn't enough, it was a glorified cut scene of a final boss and was the shit covered cherry on top of the mediocre icing on top of an amazingly promising cake.

Hiatus!

Hey all!

Sorry about the extreme lack of posts in the past month or so, I'm going through a period of development. I'm having a new site being built and I'm writing a few articles/blogs that should make visiting here (or the new site should I say) far more interesting! Watch this space in the next month or so, I promise there will be a tonne of reviews/articles/other bits of joy being uploaded in the not too distant future.

Badger

Review: Terraria

Terraria, a Minecraft-a-like that's not much like Minecraft. Confused? Because I am.

Terraria is a strange phenomenon to me. No matter how much I tell myself I dislike it, I keep playing it. Terraria is a game in which you have a small pixellated character who starts of simply with a pick axe and an axe. You start mining, you start cutting down trees, you make yourself a house, NPCs start moving in, you go exploring.

That's the gist of the entire game, wondering about mining, finding things, building houses and killing things that give you stuff. It's so simple it just works. The game doesn't have an ending, it has very little point. It's slightly more engaging than Minecraft but doesn't have the same epic feeling of architecture that the 3D brings.

I call it a Minecraft-a-like because you mine and it's an open world, it's also got a crafting system, but that's actually better than Minecraft's. The entire play style is very different. It's a 2D side-scrolling game, which is an interesting new way of playing a RPG/Exploring game, something that hasn't been done in my memory at least. This is a pretty good idea to some degree as it's very difficult to get lost, there's nothing more depressing in Minecraft than making yourself an epic settlement/bastion/citadel/farm then going off for a while and getting lost and losing your home forever (or at least until you stumble upon it again in a Planet of the Apes style). In Terraria you can go left, and you can go right, it's hard not to find your way home unless you occasionally turn your monitor upside down and are easily confused. It also makes it harder for enemies to sneak up on you.

The first night I played it after I quit I thought "Well it's all right I guess, I've not really been sucked in", it was at this point I realised that I had been playing for 8 hours straight. The next day I promised myself I wouldn't play it any more, then a friend of mine started playing and we played together, adding a whole new layer of fun. I've recently started playing with another friend who is... let's say chaotic, which has added even more fun, as I feel I have to goad around this wound of ball of crazy and try and prevent him from dying. (More on that later!). I keep thinking I'm going to get bored of the game but for some reason I don't. I don't feel elated whilst playing it, but it passes the time and if you've got some mates to play with it can be huge amounts of fun.

I realise this has been something of a short review, but it's a short game (in a pathetically crude metaphor kind-of-way!), there's stuff to do, but not much depth, it's fun, but not hugely. This also means I can talk about some other news!

I know a few days ago I posted that a friend of mine and I would be putting together a little video play through of Final Fantasy 14, with various HILARIOUS (debatable) banter. Well that's still going to happen, it's just my friend is in the West Country and their internet is atrocious so it's taken him 2 days of downloading just to patch the thing, so that's in the works. In the mean time we've been playing Terraria and had a little recording session of us just mucking about. I've got about an hours worth of recorded material that needs to be edited down to about 15 minutes of anything usable, so that's happening as we speak. I thought that I would put up a little teaser so you can see what we're like.

For those of you who have never met me, quiet shout out to my 5 American fans (five!), I'm the one with the excellent enunciation and Oxford accent, he's (Colrum/Joe) the one who sounds like a farmer.

Fucking cat...

I've been plagued by a cat recently, it comes into our house and just sleeps everywhere, we can't get rid of it, it doesn't want food (apart from our cream) and is generally just pretty neutral... But it's getting irritating. This thing is like a ninja, doesn't matter if we weld the windows close, this fucker will get in.

This inspired me to adapt a song for it (with help from Merlin)


Here's the lyrics:

Well here we are again
You keep on invading our home
Remember when you tried to eat our cream?
Oh how we laughed and laughed
Except I wasn't laughing
Under the circumstances
I've been calm as a stream

You want your freedom? Take it
That's what I'm counting on
I used to want you dead
But now I only want you gone

He was a lot like you
Maybe not quite as Purry
Now little Chairman Meow is gone as well
One day you woke me up
And ruined all my bedding
It's such a shame the same
Will never happen to you

You've got your short sad life left
That's what I'm counting on
I'll let you get right to it
Now I only want you gone

Goodbye my furry friend
Oh, did you think I meant you?
That would be funny
if it weren't so sad
Well you've not been replaced
A cat is not required
When I eat the cream maybe
I'll stop feeling so bad

Go make some new family
That's what I'm counting on
You're someone else's problem
Now I only want you gone
Now I only want you gone
Now I only want you gone

Tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVVZaZ8yO6o

(written by Badger and Merlin)

Coming soon: Badger is dragging himself into the 21st century!

A friend and I have been, in past months, trying to find a way to break ourselves into the youtube market of jovial/satirical game reviewing. We were going to do a weekly Rift sort of podcast/videocast but we got bored of that.

So we came up with an idea. I found Final Fantasy 14, the latest MMO from Square-enix and noted god awful game, for £5 on Amazon, I bought a copy, as did my friend Colrum. We're going to try and play a week of it, without killing ourselves, and record our progress, hopefully engaging  in various chuckle-worthy antics and banter. It's also vaguely free as well! As Square enix can't bring themselves to actually charge for it yet, joy!

Colrum is patching at the moment but I imagine we're going to begin recording today, add in some time for editing and our first episode should be out within the next few days to a week, watch this space!

Working title: Badger and Colrum Play the Worst Game Ever.

Final Fantasy 14 BONUS REVIEW!

Don't get it.

Brink Review

I've been looking forward to Brink for ages now. As soon as I saw the first video for it I was excited. It looked fun, innovative, exciting and best of all, for the patriotic, tea-drinking, empire-building, war-winning Englishman in me, was British. I was ready for it's release, stayed up for it, preloaded it, booted it up when it was ready. Unfortunately, Brink wasn't ready...

I booted it up, it ran beautifully on the menus, showing off my character model and the various weapons in beautiful detail, I was excited, it was all so pretty. I booted up a game, keen to get into the action.

Then my face melted off.

Never before have I played a game at release that has been so utterly unplayable, in almost every aspect. Brink decided that ATI cards were spawns of the devil and wanted nothing to do with them. The game looked terrible at any graphical setting. Everything had hideous grids on it. This was irrelevant however, because the game was unplayable no matter how it was set up. Frame rate was stuck at around 7 fps, which for a multiplayer FPS (which it is, it is in no way a singleplayer FPS, but I'll get to that later) is really no use at all. It took me 2 days to get it vaguely playable, and it's still running pretty awfully.

In order to get it to work I had to do the following:

Uninstall my up-to-date graphic drivers
Reinstall an old graphic driver (yes that's right, an out of date one)
Install a 3rd party programme that allowed me to change the actual fucking settings of the game
Turn off everything from shadows to motion blur and everything in between.
Force the game to actually use my fucking multi-cores.
Put the texture graphics up to full (That's right, it runs worse on lower textures)

It's still only running between 12-28 fps. Considering I've been running Crysis 2 on high settings with 60~ fps, this is unbelievable.

But this isn't the end of the poor release. Let's go through them all.

The Parkour:

This was one of the main gimmicks that Brink is based on. The ability to seamlessly manoeuvre through your environment with parkour, hopping over ledges, jumping off walls grabbing different ledges, and other ledge based nonsense. It is however awfully implemented. It feels awkward and is generally useless. It's been compared to the Assassin Creed movement, with one glaring difference. The Assassin Creed movement works. It's fun, it's useful, it's a fundamental part of the game. Whilst conversing with a friend of mine who also has brink he said "The Parkour either needs to be polished up, or just removed completely." For a major aspect of the game that the developers have been bragging about for months to be dismissed in such a way is not good.

The AI:

My housemates are starting to get worried/scared of me (well I say starting, it's merely just gotten worse). The AI in this game is so infuriating that I have had to turn off the game and leave the room on more than one occasion to stop myself from throwing my various peripherals across the room. It's frustrating for two reasons. The friendly AI is a team of inbred morons who seemingly spend all day attempting to eat their own elbows, they don't do any of the objectives, they stand around in the open getting killed, they are easily confused. This is except for medics, in a brief window of every game. Whenever you're incapacitated every medic on the map decides that you are a combination of the Queen, the Dalai Lama and a reincarnated Michael Jackson. They must keep you alive, no matter what, you are all that is important in the world. Screw the objectives, screw their own lives. They. Must. Save. You. It's not like there's a respawn sy... oh wait.

The medics immediately run directly towards you. Ignoring enemies. I sat, watching in disbelief for about 5 minutes yesterday, watching medic after medic run out into the open in front of the entire opposing team trying to revive me. I counted 37 medic deaths before I choose to respawn.

This is made worse by the fact that the opposing AI plays like the SAS. They work together, they use cover, they get objectives effectively. They're an unstoppable force of nature. Whilst you're dragging along the lobotomised children of Kerry Katona and the wank rag samples of Karl Pilkington. This makes the "singleplayer" missions disgustingly frustrating. Oh well, that doesn't matter, it's a multiplayer game and the singleplayer option is just the multiplayer campaign with bots. I'll just play multip...

OH NO WAIT TWIST: Multiplayer Lag:

Multiplayer is essentially unplayable as the lag is absolutely terrible. You elastic band all over the place, weapons take ages to respond to you actually shooting (at which point your target has elastic banded round a corner) objectives don't respond to your repeated attempts to capture/build/pick them up. You could just say that this is just a small detail of a release, that every game has lag at the beginning, but this is worse than any other release I've played in. Which is a lot, I don't have much to do in my life.

There's also no server browser, you just have to join random servers, which is another irritating console development.

Campaign:

The campaign is short and uninspiring. A lot of escort this bot here. Open this door there. Escort that NPC over there. Rinse repeat. I felt no connection to the storyline. I didn't feel like I was "saving the Ark". There's two versions of the campaign, representing the Security Forces and the Rebels struggles, but it's just the same maps in a different direction. It's a multiplayer FPS, you don't need to tack on a bad storyline and campaign just to make it reputable. You failed to anyway.

Gameplay:

Where to start. The actual combat is dull. People have a lot of health and it feels more like a point and click adventure as you whittle it down. The majority of the weapons are useless, with everyone opting for SMGs. The game tries to make it feel like you have to adapt to each occasion by changing class, but then contradicts itself by making you spend points in specialising in a certain class, so half the time you're running around with sub par abilities. The challenges are frustrating and feel more that a chore that you have to do to access all of your weaponry, not a fun challenge.

Vague Conclusion:

I realise this hasn't been much of a review, more of a series complaints, but that's all that Brink makes me feel. I was so excited about this game that I've wanted it to be good. The past few days I've been making excuses for it, trying to believe it's a good game, but when it comes down to it. It just isn't. The game is unfinished. At the current quality the game should be in Alpha testing, not released. It feels like they didn't test it at all.

This reminds me of a literary saying (I'm a writer don't you know) called "Murdering your darlings." It's a saying, coined by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, that means anything that you think is amazing, that you think is the greatest thing you've ever written, should be edited out, as it's most likely self-indulgent prattle. Writers start off thinking that everything they've written is the most profound thing in the universe, 99% of the time it's not, it's rubbish, it's very Mary-Sue-ish. (Apart from me of course, everything I write is gold). Brink smacks of a lack of this. They came up with an idea and ran with it. They kept adding things they thought were amazing, then thought "That's it, it's done, don't touch it".

Which once against proves that games developers need to be snobs like me who spend their time learning about literary sayings.

Portal 2: Review

I've been putting off this review for some time now, mainly because I realised I didn't have a huge amount to say about in a critical, let alone amusing way. Portal 2 is everything a computer game should be in the modern age.

It is perfect in almost every way, and that is a statement I used to describe the original Portal, finally the year of the cursed lacklustre sequels has been vanquished. Portal was an amazing game. When I first saw it I thought nothing of it, then a friend made me play it. He didn't say much, he just said: "Play the game through in one sitting, don't go on youtube and ruin the ending for yourself." and lent me his account. I played it through. I ended up laughing my arse off, having a fucking amazing time and generally finding my life improved at the end.

In fact, I'm going to pass this along, if you haven't got Portal, tell me, email me at:

thinkaboutmalc@hotmail.com

I have a spare copy, AND I will purchase an additional 2 copies for any individuals who have not played it. I'm deadly serious.

Now if this was made by any other developer I would have been worried by the idea of a sequel to this great game, however, we're talking about Valve, a company who in recent years have an impeccable record in games and support, just look at Team Fortress 2 a game that is constantly updated essentially free of charge (I know they have an in game store where you can buy items, but you don't have to, and in no way do you have to). They also reassured me with their masterful PR.

Valve began by bringing out a series of faux-adverts from aperture science, advertising their various products, which would be puzzle elements in the game, each of these were injected with the same comedy and excellent voice acting as Portal, so that was two points checked off. 

They also, starting in March 2010, created an ARG (Alternate reality game), a series of puzzles and cryptic clues implanted in Portal itself and media surrounding it, that snowballed until about a month before the games release, when the potato sack was released. Valve approached various indie developers and tasked them to introducing Portal elements to their games, along with potatoes and brought up a website (which is still active at http://www.aperturescience.com/glados@home/) that requested that "Testers" help re-initiate the Aperture Science facility (the setting of Portal 1/2) by playing these indie games, thereby increasing the hype of Portal 2, introducing thousands of players to these games (some of which really are excellent, I will inevitably end up review Amnesia: The Dark Descent when I stop being a coward and get over my paranoia that my housemates are going to terrify me whilst playing it, as I did to them) and also giving amazing value for money considering the low price of the pack. I was up for days, staring at this screen, playing the games and finding potatoes to get this game out as quickly as possible. It's also sad to say that I woke up at 5 in the morning the day of release (30 minutes after it was released... My body forced me up) and had completed the game 5 and a half hours later, much to the pity of my house mate and his girlfriend (They were having sex apparently, losers). 

And thus ends my journey up to the release of Portal 2, now onto the actual game. The game starts with the usual First Person game opener of teaching you how to look up and down like you're a toddler who's had a stroke, but in this case not because it has to, but as a way of poking fun at the entire system and injecting it with comedy, stating it's part of the government sanctioned mandatory aerobics. This a theme that runs through the entire game, highlighting with comedy the clichés of modern games. 

The game also expands on the excellent voice acting of the first game by voice actress and opera singer Ellen McLain, adding two big stars (or one if you're American), J. K. Simmons (of Spiderman, playing J. Jonah Jameson, and Juno) and a personal favourite of mine Stephen Merchant, playing a character similar to one of my favourite comedic characters ever, Darren Lamb from Extras, the bumbling agent to Ricky Gervais' character. 

Stephen Merchant plays Wheatley, your stalwart idiot companion for the game. He is the perfect antithesis to GLaDOS's dry, evil genius. He is bumbling, moronic, endearing and generally terrified of everything, including his own flashlight ("They told me if I ever turned this on, I would die! I don't know why they gave me half of this stuff if they didn't want me to use it.") He is such a deep, interesting character which develops through the game that it's impossible not to love him, with all of his character flaws, such as the inability to hack a security panel whilst you're looking to his constant terrified ramblings as you start to do something, immediately changing to encouragement when it turns out you were right, you don't care that he's not much help and all of his plans don't work, it's just good to have him along for the ride. Stephen Merchant's voice acting does in no small part contribute to this, rather than the flat delivery of most games today, he pours emotion into the role, with the perfect comedic timing that made Extras and The Office a hit. Plus you can't help but be endeared to a West-Country accent. 

J.K. Simmons plays the bat-shit crazy owner of Aperture in a series of prerecorded messages, detailing the downfall of Aperture. His lines are brilliant, playing the ultimate crazed millionaire. (Billionaire? I don't know) Throw in a metaphor of his life being connected with the companies and you've got yourself another interesting character that brings light to the lore of the company. 

GLaDOS makes her return, despite the fact you "killed" her in the last game, which has made her... bitter. This leads to some of the subtlest and most elaborate insults I've ever heard in a game, along with more sadistic experiments. 

And oh what experiments, the first game had a few brain teasers, especially the challenge maps. However, this new game takes it to a whole new level, with some exceedingly difficult tasks, requiring a lot of thought and practice. At a few points in the game I, with no sense of irony, sat scratching my beard (I knew I grew this for some reason) and felt like I was solving Fermat's Last Theorem. A true sense of accomplishment  washed over me whenever I finished a particularly difficult one. It was interesting watching my house mate play the game through and see how he solved certain tasks and realising the various different ways to get to the goal. It was also fun acting like some sort of enigmatic genius giving him cryptic clues. Even I felt pretentious when I proclaimed "Merlin, think in trigonometry". 

They have embellished the puzzling aspect of the game with a few new additions. These are different coloured paints that add properties to any wall they touch (bounciness, speed and the ability to place portals on the surface), hard light bridges (which gave me a Red Dwarf flash back), Aerial Faith Plates (a cartoon-esque spring board), Thermal Discouragement Beams (lasers) and the Excursion Funnel (a tractor beam made out of liquid asbestos (healthy)). These add new dimensions to the puzzles without distracting from the titles ideals. It is still definitely all about portals. 

This review is getting more and more difficult to talk about without revealing spoilers, which I definitely don't want to do, just like my approach to the first game. However the storyline is excellent, it follows quite a basic standard storyline, but with a new spin to it and some hilarious and intelligent insight into all the experiments and their purposes. The games world starts off a haggard, run down establishment but slowly evolves into a fully working, evolving environment and it's scale is staggering. The entire place is huge and you get to see a vast amount of it, it's gargantuan. You location changes through what feels like the history of Aperture and your actions feel like they are actually doing something as you witness huge events happening merely because of you. Add a ridiculous and hilarious ending (I actually told my screen to fuck off then burst into laughter) and you've got yourself a great story.

The game also comes with a excellent co-op campaign in which you and a friend play the part of robotic test subjects who are treated like rubbish because... well you're robotic test subjects. This campaign is develishly difficult, but this could merely be due to the fact I was playing it with a moron, apparently I was bellowing at him whilst playing it... I don't remember, all I remember is it being very difficult and laughing a lot. 

If I had to complain about the game, it could use some additional features, some challenge maps or the ability to jump directly into a test, but these are petty gripes that don't really matter. People have complained about the loading times, but to be honest I didn't notice, I think my brain was glad for the respite. The campaign isn't the longest one, but who cares, it was 5 hours of my life where I had a great time. It was 5 hours of gaming that has been better than any other game I've played before. It was the original, short Portal, with a more robust and embellished storyline, more diverse puzzling and more great voice acting. They didn't reinvent the game, they took what worked and made it bigger and better. 

Computer games are always getting the stick for not being an art form, well someone better tell Valve that, because Portal 2 is up there with some of the greats.

Crysis 2

I'm genuinely upset.

I just finished playing this game and it was great... Right up until the end. I was playing it whilst talking to someone, I looked away from the screen for about 5 seconds, looked back and I had completed it. I don't think I've ever been so disappointed by a game ending. I feel like a parent who just caught their son doing drugs for the first time. I'm not angry... just disappointed.

But before I start crying and pushing toddlers over let's talk about the game in general.

My friend asked me a simple question today, "How's Crysis 2?"

I replied with: "Good, different, it's not really Crysis 2..."

The ideals of Crysis have stayed but almost everything else has changed. The suit is different (more on that later) the characters (bar one) are different, the alien enemies are completely different, it's a confusing concept. The game hasn't gotten worse because of this, but it does feel as if Crytek have just made another game using the Crysis brand whilst changing everything.

Let's start with the suit. This they at least have an explanation for the change, the Nanosuit 2. Upgraded! Except that it's tactically worse in almost every way to the first suit. Gone are the days where the suit's normal state is Armour mode and the player can choose to switch to Speed, Strength and Stealth mode. The suit has been streamlined. Now your normal mode is 'Delicate Flower' and you can change to either Stealth or Armour mode. This has greatly affected the combat philosophy of the game. You are no longer the powerhouse you were in the original game, the game concentrates on hit and run tactics (as the helpful text told me EVERY TIME I died (which was a lot at various parts of the game)). Armour and stealth modes drain energy passively and Armour mode gets drained rapidly when you're under fire. You can no longer just wait for your energy to regen whilst sucking up bullets like porridge, cowardice is more than embraced in this game.

When I first started playing the game I fucking hated it. I'm a giant man, I liked wading into combat and tearing apart things with my hands to make up for my abject inferiority in life, I could no longer do this. I'm ashamed to say I rage-quitted a few times at the beginning. The only reason I kept failing so horrendously was that I was playing the game wrong. I've gotten lazy in FPSes, I'm used to running around in cover, shooting things, hiding and generally being a passive observer (Curse you Call of Duty franchise!). I kept on forgetting to actively use my suit's capabilities just relying on the standard suit settings (Curse you Original Crysis!). The first game got to the point that the armour mode was the best mode, so you just spent all your time in it and forgot that you had a nanosuit altogether. Crysis 2 wants you to be in control of everything you do, including your suit, so by playing this game without using the suit to your full advantage you're essentially playing with a handicap.

I then embraced the suit, constantly shifting between armour mode and stealth mode becoming the digital equivalent to a Mongolian Horseback Archer (I don't care how fucking cheesy that sentence is Colrum, it's staying in). Crysis 2 is the thinking man's FPS. Rather than just running through a corridor and shooting whatever came near me, I spent time thinking about my approach, flanking, silently killing enemies, distracting them, ocassionally just powerhousing through and sometimes avoiding enemies altogether. The whole time I spent playing I was constantly stressed out, at first I thought this was a bad thing, it wasn't until I quit the game that I realised I was craving that stress.

Onto the aliens! They confused me immensely. They still have the same cephalopod heritage but have disgarded their floating bodies and tentacles for a more humanoid form, possibly to make the transition of assimilation a more personal event, how kind of them. The original game went slightly down hill when the aliens were introduced (the space ship section of Crysis is possibly the least fun I've ever had playing a computer game), they were dull and repetitive, only redeemed by the epic last hour or two of the game.

The new aliens, are terrifying. They're very intelligent, darting around and flanking you. The first time I fought them I nearly had a panic attack. Crytek have done an excellent job at making the game feel like cinematography, I don't mean the same way that the Call of Duty games have attempted to, by making a film with the occasional shooting between scenes. Crysis 2 makes you feel like you're actually in the action. I'm not sure what they've done with the motion blur in the new engine, but every movement looks natural. Explosions are amazingly detailed. Your vision blurs out things that aren't in focus and when something dashes through your view the engine manages to show enough detail to scare you, whilst also keeping the suspense.

Unfortunately, Crysis 2 has also gotten on the Call of Duty bandwagon that most FPSes seem to be clinging to these days. It's been dumbed down from the first game in a few very fundamental ways. To add a bit of spice to this review I'm going to add a feature!

Badger's Top 3 Ways Call of Duty Has Ruined the FPS Genre in Recent Years (Eg. Modern Warfare Onwards!)

1) Videos of Action

I don't know what the trend of this is in recent years. Videos of your character killing things, from the first person perspective. Call of Duty does it all the fucking time and Crysis 2 has some of it too. Taking your hands off the keyboard and watching your character start killing things is completely arbitrary. I've spent the time up until this point doing it alright, I'll be continuing the actions right afterwards, why can't I do the action? It's a flaccid attempt to make computer games into films. We don't need to see a hero do things. We're supposed to be the hero, let me dream ok!

2) Quick-time events.

ARGARHGGHGHGGHGHERAHRGAHGGHHH! That is a literal representation of what I feel about quick time events, especially in FPSes, especially completely pointless ones that serve only to "build tension", ESPECIALLY ones that just make you crawl by pressing "Left Mouse button, Right Mouse Button". Crysis has stolen these directly from the Modern Warfare games, and they were shite in them too. There are a few occasions where you have to apply your own defibrillator, which I think is a generally fucking crazy idea, by pressing the space bar over and over again. The awful ending to this game involves a quick time event.

3) The Idiotic Character Who is CONSTANTLY BETRAYED

Ok, so this is a bit of stretch, but I needed three, it's not just CoD that does this, but FPSes recently have had a trend of everyone being a treacherous cunt, then having the switcheroony, so the cunt was actually good! The main character for Crysis 2 is a fucking moron. He's just the epitome of an American grunt, never thinking for himself, just takes order and runs around and does what he's told. Apart from when I was hunting about, not thinking about the storyline, I felt like a supporting character of the game. The character has no leadership at all. Fair enough, he's got a bad case of Gordon Freeman syndrome, being that he doesn't say a word for the entire game, but he's such a follower it's unbelievable. There's one section of the game where you're hunting a bloke who has just betrayed you, you corner him, he says "Ok you got me, now here's a syringe... why don't you take it?". You immediately jam the fucking thing into your chest and essentially pass out. The first game made you feel like you were the main character and a hero, this games storyline fails to do so.

The storyline in general makes little sense. You're thrown into the game, where everthing has changed from the first, some confusing things happen and you just sort of run with it. Enemies become friends and revert back so quickly that it's pointless getting attached to any of them. The only character that was genuinely interesting  helps you and hurts you so much, I felt like I was in a domestically violent relationship.

However, these CoD like tendencies are easily overlooked by the fact that the game is amazingly fun and interestingly diverse to play. It is a different, fresh approach to FPSes that was desperately needed in the current market. Coupled with a very fun multiplayer (if you can access the fucking thing) Crytek have brought out a bloody good game.

They just need to learn how to fucking end the bastard things...

Dragon Age II Review

I don't know if it's because this game is disgustingly immersive or I'm getting more and more perverted, but this game made me push back my chair, stand up, point at a character on the screen and shout "I will fuck that!" just because I could.

Probably the perversion...

Dragon Age 2 is a very, very good game, as long as you stick by a few golden tenets.

1) Dragon Age 2 is not Dragon Age or Dragon Age: Origins

2) Do not expect a cerebral storyline

3) Do not try to take any of the ingame writing to be serious

4) Don't try and force the game to be an old school role-playing game a la Baldur's Gate

5) People will try to fuck you.

Dragon Age II has gotten a shit-ton of flak since the release of its demo a few weeks ago. The hunchbacked denizens of the internet have come out in force, voicing their disgust at the game, just because, as far as I can see, it's not the original Dragon Age.

It was at this point that I realised the childbirth had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

It appears that the people from the internet don't like change. A phrase is getting thrown around (and I know I tend to throw around the phrase thrown around a lot but bear with me) at the moment is "consolification", a lot of PC gamers view that companies are dumbing down PC games to cater to much more lucrative console gaming market. However, this is being applied to EVERY aspect, of EVERY game at the moment. 

Dragon Age 2 (Electric Boogaloo) has indeed been made slightly easier, I'll concede that. The combat has been made a lot faster and slightly "button bashy". This however is not that bad a thing. It's still quite challenging at high difficulties and in my view the benefits of having much more exciting combat vastly outweigh the price of lowering the challenge slightly. Dragon Age 2's combat is amazing. It's exciting, gory, visceral, ridiculous and various other adjectives used to describe the more brutal aspects of games that the media is claiming are turning me into a serial killer (I found her like that...). It feels almost exactly how I imagine picking up a girder and laying into a corridor of people would feel like. The original Dragon Age's combat got very dull. The mobs just had so much fucking health and you seemingly did absolutely no damage at all. It got to the point with some bosses that the only difficulty came from the fact you were essentially flamboyant dandies throwing used tissues at them in a vague attempt to get the enemies to leave you to eat your aperitifs. 

The tactical view (in which the camera goes to a quasi-bird's-eye-view has been removed as well. This means positioning your squad is slightly more difficult as you don't get a full overview of the battlefield, but all it really means is you have to change through your characters are have a look around before making decisions. I hardly used the tactical view in the original personally, so it may be worse than I'm putting it out to be.

Graphically, Dragon Age 2 (Liverpool 1) is beautiful. The character models look realistic and crisp, the engine is smooth and runs better than the original game in many cases. It continues the trend from the first game by making everything as gory and grimy as possible, with every battle ending looking like you've had a seriously bloody sneeze, which is fine by me. The only downfall on this front is the environment. Most of the game is spent in a city, but whenever you venture away from this, you are presented with the same map over and over again, maybe with certain paths blocked off (but still showing on the minimap) to try and trick you it's a different place. This is especially apparent underneath the city when you go in the sewers and warehouses. There are about 3 maps that are constantly reused and do get very boring. 

The storyline does also leave much to be desired. You are running away from the evils that are plaguing the lands from the first game. You go to the city of Kirkwall. You build yourself up; be it your income, your reputation or just your social life. The story isn't great. It's not a new idea. But it's just a vessel for the game to play through. The real gold of the game comes from the interaction with the characters.

Dragon Age 2's characters are great. They're engaging, amusing, you actually care about the majority of them. They're not the usual featureless heroes of most modern games (see Bulletstorm review). I felt actual emotion for my party of brigands and renegade mages. This is all helped by the fact that each character has amazing voice acting. My party, which included Merrill (Welsh accented Elf Blood mage who is constantly trying to overcome her defeatism by envisioning kittens are claiming muggings are just a "welcome to the area") , my sister (renegade mage who is constantly trying to live up to her brother's image) and Varric (Dashing dwarf scoundrel who is showing far too much chest hair, is essentially every blokes best mate and is constantly talking to his crossbow which he names "Bianca") stayed with me through most of the game, not because they were the best characters for the job (Especially fucking Varric, I have to essentially keep him on a drip the amount of times he's knocked out) but because I liked having them about. They banter together, they contribute differently to decision making, it's like a little family to plug up the hole of loneliness of my real life.

I found myself wanting to do the silly side quests your companions give you just to see how they adapt to you as you become closer allies. This happened for all the quests to be honest. I didn't feel like I had to do them, I felt like I wanted to do them. I did every side quest I could find (apart from one where a male elf tried to get me to pay him to have sex with me... *shudders*) just to experience the quests and improve my party. 

Of course, it wouldn't be an RPG without a twist death in your party, so I had to replace a party member (I won't say who just in case anyone is going to play it) with a dick head called Anders, who is constantly complaining and hitting on me, merely because I needed the heals. I moped around for a while after finding out my party member had died and there was nothing I could do about it, but the quest had to go on!

This connection with the character reached a height today when Varric was knocked unconcious yet again, and myself and my character in game shouted "They got Varric! The Bastards!". I had to take a little break after that, I shouldn't be getting this involved in games. 

They scripting for some of the dialogue is comically poor at times, but I think it's been written that way, I've chuckled at quite a few abysmal lines such as:

"The caravan came back and everyone was dead, I don't know what happened, the only survivor was a horse, AND HE CAN'T TALK!"

Whereas other times I've been amused by the quick-witted main character's quips, as I've essentially chosen the "Funny" response in every given situation, there's been quite a few.

There were quite a few occasions where I was made to choose between certain groups throughout the game which have effected how the city was controlled which seemingly have had huge effects on how I've played the game. I don't know if it's because I'm a complete bastard, or if the game is supposed to be like this, but almost my entire family have been killed off, and there have been two city-wide genocides of certain ethnic and caste groups (they started it!). It's probably my fault...

It all adds up to a very enjoyable experience however, the game feels like it tailors itself to your choices, not the bullshit "karma choices" that Peter Molyneux insists on jamming down our necks, in which you can either been a holy angel or Lord Cunt of Kittenpunt, but just general decisions that influence political agendas and change who comes to help you in the future and who comes to kill you. 

Overall this game takes the world and ideas of the original Dragon Age and makes them more exciting and changes the pace completely. You not fighting to save the world most of the time, you're fighting just because you can. You can be as selfish or as benevolent as you like. The fighting is quick, gritty and fun (an aspect that was missing from the original). The characters are wonderful. The story is shite. But you can't have it all.

Rating 13/7

(That's not 13 out of 7 by the way, it's more like approximately 1.85714286 I haven't come up with a system yet, try and apply your own to this arbitrary number!) 

Rift Review (My friend has more money than sense and is lonely so has bought me it!)

I have something of a disgusting obsession with MMO's, it's most likely due to the bottomless pit of free time I have. No matter how bad it sounds, I will want to try it, I can't help myself.

My current hit-list stands at: World of Warcraft, Lineage 2, Final Fantasy XI, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, Aion, EVE Online, RF Online, a few free or god-awful ones that I can't remember the names of and now Rift.

Now to preface this review, most MMORPG players categorise themselves (or someone else does it for them) as either a WoW fan-boy or what many self-important fuckwits call themselves "hardcore mmo-ers", or something to that effect. I am neither. I played WoW, a lot, far too much, it was a good game, but it was not the be-all and end-all, you have tip your cap to Blizzard though, they know how to make a fucking MMO. I like other MMOs however, I like trying them, I hope they're good. They're usually not.

People usually quote MMOs as either "WoW-Killers" or too like WoW. World of Warcraft has completely dominated the market to the point that it makes everyone playing, developing or reviewing the games develop some sort of crazy complex about the size of WoW metaphorical genitals. They either claim there's are bigger, or seemingly worship it.

So onto Rift, or as I like to call it World of Aioncraft in a War of Reckoning. Believe it or not however, this mockery is a good thing.

Trionworlds (the developers) have taken all the good parts of various successful (and not so successful) games and jammed them together into one game. It is, and I cringe saying this, very much like World of Warcraft, but World of Warcraft's styling came from earlier MMOs. It has the same smoothness of WoW. Most MMOs feel like you're using your keyboard through a joint of pork. It's taken the group quests idea from Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, the greatest part of that game, the items also have a similar feel to the WAR ones. Similar maps too. The animations are quite similar to Aion. All these products together have created what can only be described as a very fun game.

The main fun in Rift is the Rifts. Which is one of the stupidest sentences I've ever typed, but it's true. Rifts are what the game gains it title from, if you haven't realised by the amount of times I've typed Rift... rift. Rift.

The game employs a mechanic where random... rifts open around the world and monsters pour out of them. These monsters are killed for reputation rewards and currencies which allow for shiny new items for your shiny new character. However this isn't the main incentive of them. They're... fun.

For anyone who hasn't played an MMO this may sound like a trivial statement. Most MMOs aren't fun most of the time. A lot of my friends who I've had conversations with often don't know why they play MMOs. This could be because all my friends are emotionally damaged wo/man-children, or it could be that all MMO players are. MMOs suck you in by the idea of constantly improving your character, progressing onwards merely for the point of progress. Rift breaks this normality by making this a secondary value.

The Rifts get worse (in a good way!) when an invasion happens. Rifts open everywhere. Invasion-teams run rampart. Monsters set up footholds. It's fucking mental. Everyone stops everything and tries to stop the towns getting destroyed and NPCs being killed. My friend and I spent hours running around killing things, dying and generally saving the world.

There are faults in this game too. The Class/talent point/soul/duck/god knows what else system. It's trying to be innovative and it's trying too hard. In the first 6 levels you have to choose 3 different classes with arbitrarily small text blurbs about what they do. The idea is to give each player their own individual, hybrid class, but with the fact that lots of spells are copied over trees and the majority of the spells are useless, the classes feel weighty and overly complicated A lot of the classes are completely useless as well.

Other flaws include, gear feeling useless, with current level being the most important factor when doing anything, this may change at the top level however, boring environments which are too large, making a lot of the quests just feel like an endless trek across the map, depressingly boring character models and weapon/armour models.

All in all, this has been quite a boring review. There isn't too much to criticise but also there isn't much to praise. The Rifts are amazingly fun, but that could just be because they're a new gimmick, they may become boring. It is an amalgamation of other MMOs which may work towards it's fall or rise. It all depends what the developers do with it. If they add lots of end game content (read: RAIDING!) and don't try and concentrate on PvP like every other fucking MMO on the market at the moment they should do well. If not, they'll join the pile of Free-to-play MMOs that have failed in the past few years trying to cash in on the rising market.

Coming soon: Shogun: Total War 2

Coming soon: Fallout New Vegas' DLC; Dead Money! (Merlin bought it!)

Nevermind! My friend is poor and I remembered I got bought Dawn of War 2: Retribution for my birthday!

Maybe I ask for too much.

I should add context to this sentence. I fucking loved the original Dawn of War.

It was brilliant. The perfect RTS in my books. It was challenging, fun, diverse. It was well written. It had the occasional hilarious voice acting. It was accurate to the original fluff (That's right I'm disgustingly geeky, I could debate for hours about the finer points of the Warhammer 40k universe, and I'm not ashamed about it... Ok I'm ashamed).

Then Dawn of War 2 came out. I remember it clearly. I actually had to drag my computer to my friend's house to activate it as I was in halls of residence at university and they had the Steam ports blocked. I did this because I assumed THQ (the developers) would have created the same gold they had with Dawn of War and it's three expansions. Gold with better graphics.

Those bastards did not.

They raped the Dawn of War franchise. Taking away all the finely crafted RTS elements and turning it into a Company of Heroes clone. A badly constructed "Squad-based strategy game" in which the player does the exact same thing over and over again. Walk through a map, capture some strategic points. Kill a boss that throws explosives around. It was the most tedious game I had ever encountered. It was poorly written. It was limited. I hated it.

A few months later I bought the expansion. I don't know why I did. I took a big old bite of shit sandwich with the first game, finished it, painfully, then decided to order another one.

A year or so passes! Our hero (me) is growing a year closer to his inevitable demise. A friend approaches him.

"What do you want for your birthday?"

I panicked, and pointed at steam. I got Dawn of War 2: Retribution.

I'd like to say it was an accident, just like the story I tell about how I got my iPhone (It was a fucking accident!) but I don't think it was. I had read previews. They told me that the game was going back to it's routes, giving us back the ability to create troops again, build buildings, have epic battles. I was excited again.

Why does everybody lie to me?

Retribution is possibly worse than the original shit-covered Dawn of War 2. This is because they gave me what I wanted... The ability to create troops...

Hence my original statement about wanting too much...

You can build troops again, joy! Except they kept everything else the same. It's still squad based, you just can have more squads. Well I say more, it's gone from 4 squads to 6-8. Not a patch on the screen full of troops you would encounter regularly in the original games. You can't build buildings. You just find strategic bases, that let you build troops. This has made the game disgustingly easy. You find resources everywhere. Boxes no longer give you supplies, those are now unlimited, only costing energy, again making the game easier, instead the boxes are full of Energy and Resources, which you use to buy squads. Once you've gotten these squads you just walk through the level, destroying things until you get to the inevitable final boss of each level, in which you right click it, occasionally move out of exploding things and tediously await the next identical level.

It has no character. Each level has just been written differently for each race, so while it seems you're getting five (5 FIVE!) campaigns, you're getting one, with different skins. The Tyranid's (my favourite race) campaign writing is particularly awful, with the writers completely missing the point of them. You're no longer fighting characters and getting involved in the storyline, it's merely killing a group of unnamed troop choices. It feels like multiplayer gaming, without the human contact.

The levels are again the same. Monotonous. The original games had amazing levels. Levels in which you had to capture generators to power a Titan's (giant robot) arm to destroy a trench-full of enemies, and other epic sounding events like that.

The problem with this game is they tried to be like the original games again, in the easiest possible way. The entire game needs to redone in order to get back to what made the original games great. The writing needs to be reworked massively. The gameplay needs to change radically from the awful squad based pit of despair it is currently in. The levels need to change completely so it's not the same thing over and fucking over again. I ended up watching television whilst playing this game just to get through enough of it so I could write this review. It was painful to do. Games should not be painful.

To sum up. I hate this game.

Bulletstorm Review

Never before have I been in such a state of ambivalence whilst playing a computer game.


Bulletstorm is fucking ridiculous. Now, I expected this, the developers seemingly approached the game with a mentality of ridiculous...ness, but it's worse than that. I think they may have gone too far.


Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, I think I need some sort of structure in these reviews after reading the minefield that was my Minecraft review. Let's start from the beginning.


Long ago (about a year ago I think) a company called People Can Fly (who were recently bought out by Epic Games, the company that brought us the "oh-so-fun" Gears of War games) announced a game called Bulletstorm. They released trailers, in which the player was seen generally fucking people's lives up. Mutilation and dismemberment were sprayed across the screen and the player seemed to be rewarded for such acts by highlighting different ways of expunging the glorified pixels and awarding points accordingly. This lead to Americans going mental and claiming that everyone who plays this game will become a rapist (http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/02/08/bulletstorm-worst-game-kids/ I wish I was joking). 


Of course, being the mentally unstable individual I am, and due to the fact I'm now banned from parks, I pre-order this title, knowing that it would be an amusing journey through my own, and indeed the developer's warped psyches. 


After waiting an inordinate amount of time for the game to unlock on Steam (another way in which Americans have annoyed me today, seeing that I had to wait for the American time zone release for some unbeknownst reason, seeing as it was released in America two days ago (but again, I am going offtrack)) I was finally able to enter the game and give it a go. 


So let's being with the story...


Right this might be difficult. I have just stopped playing the game for a short break to start writing this review and I have already forgotten every single characters name bar one, and he's not even the main character. This is not a good sign. Almost all characters in this game are completely unmemorable. I feel no attachment to any of them. I feel connected to none of them. The only one who is vaguely three dimensional (also the character I can remember the name of "Ishi") is literally turned into a fucking robot, so he no longer shows emotion. You could see he was the placeholder "nice guy" as he saves a little girl who was plopped directly into the plot for no real reason, only to show that... Ishi was the nice guy. 


The game starts with you, the main character, who I will henceforth refer to as Captain Wolverine McBadAss, as that is clearly the inspiration for said character in a nutshell, and his stalwart companion, who shall be referred to as Lieutenant Biker O'Cares'not (it doesn't matter what he's called he dies pretty sharpish anyway) "interrogating" a bounty hunter on your space ship. I say "interrogating" because you're drunk, your friend is drunk, the bounty hunter has a bottle of nondescript booze duct taped to his head and you don't care what he says, he's going to be sucked out of the air-lock anyway. Which turns out to be a bad thing, as you were too drunk to check if the dude had a grenade the size of his fucking head on him and somehow swims round the side of the ship and blows up a window. You close it, and still drunk, act nonchalant and tell your crew to run away into space. You then appear at a big ship, containing your NEMESIS and decide to open fire then drive your ship into the big ship seemingly killing everyone including yourself (despite Ishi telling you you're a drunken madman, oh Ishi why do they never listen? Perhaps it's a commentary on the subversive racism of modern society, probably it's just because you're the sensitive pussy of the ship and no one cares don't worry soon you'll be Mecha-Ishi).


CUE FLASHBACK SCENE


Of course they show you, in a 3 minute scene, why you are a misunderstood alcoholic and not just a cunt. A scene in which you kill an innocent man, then look on his computer, where Ishi (god bless him) shows you that , OH MY GOD! You've been killing innocent men. How could you, General I'm Clearly the Bad Guy Look At My Fucking Teeth!? You then save the innocent man's daughter, well I say save, you tell her to put her head down as people are shooting at you, then you leave her in the building and get the fuck out. Heroes, one and all. 


CUE BACK TO THE FUTURE


You're alive! Crashed, but alive! But Ishi is hurt! Not Ishi! Wolverine McBadAss seems genuinely distraught, and is sent out by Doctor Threelines (guess how long he survives) to find a battery to make Ishi even more of a Japanese cliché. You do this, come back, and watch Biker O'Cares'not and Doctor Threelines die as you all protect Ishi. WMBA (as he shall henceforth be called) is seemingly unfazed by this but concentrates all his attention on Mecha-Ishi, who has lost all emotion and is essentially being controlled by a vacuum cleaner, a vacuum cleaner of DEATH, who tries to kill WMBA on multiple occasions.


The rest of the story is just getting off the planet. WMBA goes from yelling encouragement to his own genitals and weaponry at killing people, to telling their newly acquired sexy-lady-companion to forgive Ishi, for he's not a bastard, just part toaster. He switches from telling Ishi how sorry he is about the fact he now has a hard drive in place of some of his brain, to singing a song to the robot dinosaur he finds about how it's a better robot that Ishi because it's 50 foot tall and shoots lasers. (I'm running out of the electrical component gags now).


It's impossible to feel anything but disdain for the characters, storyline and writing, oh god the writing. The "script" of this game is apparently the love child of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Duke Nukem and Little Britain. There are rarely any conversations, only people screaming insults at each other. Now I'm British, so I love a good bit of swearing, but there's something about Bulletstorm that seems so dull. It's like a kid who's found it's big boy words for the first time and can't help but use them whenever possible. This is genuinely a conversation between the main character and his sexy female counterpart


SFC: "If you follow me I'll kill your dick!"
WMBA: "Kill my dick? How the fuck are you going to kill my dick? I'll kill your dick!"


Why is it that computer game writing is getting worse and worse, it's like someone tipped the bottom of the sitcom barrel out onto a computer.


Now, surely, you're thinking, "But Badger! I thought this game was supposed to be ridiculous! You've got to ignore the storyline and concentrate on the ridiculously fun game-play!"


Well, firstly, I doubt anyone is actually reading this so you're probably not thinking that, but if you are, there's one problem with that...


It's not that fun.


I mean... it's a bit of a laugh. The kicking people into cacti is fun for a bit, or using the laser lasso to pull someone off a cliff is enjoyable to a point, but then you start slogging through the game and it soon loses it's pazzaz. The weaponry just doesn't have enough kick to it. You standard assault rifle shoots what feels like pebbles at your hordes of enemies, the shotgun feels like it's just tickling the enemy most of the time and I felt that I spent most of my time just going for headshots to get through the drudgery of the levels. For a game that prides itself on it's crazy point scoring game-play it does little to encourage the player to score points. Racking up a big combo is a fun for a while, but the gimmick, like the rest of the game, grows tired, quickly. It suffers from a mutation of the dullness of Gears of War games, the disease of running down grey coloured corridors with lots of chest high walls, killing the same thing over and over, only this time, at least, the scenery isn't a dull, chaotically changing from waterfalled city, to desert wastelands, seemingly at random. 


There are other hints that this game spent too long on the gimmick, little details that don't matter on there own, but together destroy the illusion of immersing yourself in a game. Such as the fact that whenever Captain Wolverine McBadAss checks his wrist radar, he changes back to his default weapon looks at his other wrist, puts wrist away, changes back to the weapon he was holding originally. This may seem like nitpicking, but it's just an example of bad coding that distances the player from the gaming experience. 




Along with the PC version (the version I have) being a console port and various useful settings being removed from the interface, requiring some .ini file tinkering. The game feels unpolished. Pretty, yes. Gimmicky, yes. Fun, for a while. But this game gets too dull, too quickly, and gives you no incentive to look past the faults.

Minecraft Review

I know this review has been done to buggery, but this game is so fucking peculiar and seems like a good place to get back into reviewing that I have to do it.

I don't know how I discovered Minecraft, maybe it appeared to me in a dream, maybe I actually created it and just forgot about it, sold the rights to a Swedish man and fled into the night, probably I just discovered it on the internet. All I know is I found this obscure indie game long before the masses clung onto it and made a certain Swede a very rich man.

The first time I played Minecraft was back in alpha, when all you could do was run around and place blocks. I fucking hated it. I played it for ten minutes, thought life was too short, and went back to playing another game in all likelihood. I just didn't understand the concept, I ran around, I put down a block, I made a little house, I got bored. I don't think Minecraft was in a stage where it knew what it was either. It was sort of like lego, but far less interesting. (You can make a fucking death star out of lego now! Kids these days)

Months passed and I kept hearing more and more about Minecraft, it had change, evolved I was told, but I'd been lied to in the past so much (I still don't forgive Warhammer Online for getting my hopes up so much), I wasn't sure I could take another heartbreak. But nevertheless I dove in and pre-ordered it, it cost me €9.00 I believe, about £7 of my hard received student loan, so I thought what's the worst that could happen?

The worst happened, I fell in love, I forgot to shower, I'm not ashamed to say I shat myself.

The first night playing it, I found out how to make stuff, I made myself a little pickaxe, I ran around punching trees, for of course that is the first thing any man who wakes up in a strange world must do, I was a king of my own world, Lord of the Sheep Emperor of the Cows, HIGH WARLORD OF THE... Oh hey there little buddy, what do you do?

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

This was my first encounter with the horror, the terror that is the Minecraft creeper. Minecraft is a game which has some of the worst graphics of any game released in recent history. This is not a criticism, it's just the design that the developers have gone for. It works, everything is pixelated and blocky and that's fine. What I want to know, is how these sadists have managed to instill such fear in me merely by arranging pixels?

The Minecraft creeper is a metaphor for everything that is brilliant and terrifying in this game. It is a strange creature. It has four legs, the pixelated face of a double stroke victim, and a penchant for eating explosive materials and generally fucking up your life. Everything about it is terrifying, the simple coding of the game adds to the pure horror of these fuckers. You walk towards it, thinking it's just ambling around, until you reach it's aggro range. The second you step over this horrifying threshold the creeper's entire body cracks round and faces you, it's face, looking like a green turd that someone has crudely scribbled a clown's face on with their fingers staring at you. It doesn't run towards you, it merely approaches you, in the shortest route possible. The first time this happened I was a bit creeped out but I wasn't scared as such, more curious. It walked towards me and uttered a simple sound, a sound that now terrifies me to my very soul.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Then my face exploded, I was instantly killed, thrown downwards into the crater that this creature had created, showered with all my belongings which miraculously survived the ordeal and was presented with a Respawn screen.

What the hell are those?

Oh god it's seen me...

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU!?

HOW DID YOU EVOLVE INTO THIS!?

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU EAT THAT MAKES YOU DO THAT?!

I THOUGHT THIS GAME WAS FUCKING GLORIFIED LEGO!?

After this event, I instantly developed a phobia for these walking bastards. This world I had created and explored was tainted, the creepers had found me. I left it. Deleted the game. Cried for a while. Then started anew.

In the new world I was paranoid. I got into the game and was worried about nightfall. I had to find shelter, I had to find light, I had to survive. I punched a tree, made a pickaxe, dug into a cliff face, found some coal, made a door, and cowered. The first night was the hardest. The creeper brought friends, skeletons, zombies, spiders. They all hated me, but they couldn't get me, I was safe. I was better than they were.

After this night, I realised how good this game was. Never before had I been so invested in a character. This was not glorified Lego at all. It was something far better.

This is where my obsession began. After that first night I was prepared. I mined down, I found iron, I created tools, I collected stone and I built. I built a tower, it had walkways and arrow holes and a grand staircase leading up to the doors. I carved out rooms inside, I built it higher, I made it into my actual fortress, away from the evils of the outside world. My obsession grew.

I discovered just how far my obsession went when I began playing Minecraft at my friend's house. I was just showing him what I was doing on his computer. I made a little tower and he looked on, vaguely disinterested. I again made my tower bigger, then I made a mine, I mined over to another location, built another tower. He then started giving me suggestions, and one of the strangest conversations I've ever had in my life occurred.

"Made a glass walkway between your two towers"
"That's crazy, they're like two miles apart it'd take me ages, I'll have to make all the glass and I'll probably die whilst doing it"
"Fine"
*ten minutes passes*
"What are you doing Badger?"
"Making a glass walkway"
*two hours later*
"Walkway is done"
"Great, I'm off to work, you going to get a train in with me"
"Nah, I've got something to do on here, I'll hang out with your housemates"
*one hour later*
"Badger what are you doing?"
"Minecraft, check it out, I'm thinking of doing something else"
"Make a ballroom"
"Seems kind of girly don't you think?"
"Fine"
*three hours later*
"Ballroom is done, wait everyone is in bed... It's four in the morning... I need to seriously think about my life"

I then went to bed ashamed, my friend returned from work later and we talked about the game the next day. He suggested I split the continent, creating a new river. I said this was ridiculous, the continents are huge.

Three days later I had fucking done it.

This game is quite possibly the most enthralling game I have ever played... but I don't know why. Having read this review most of it seems like gibberish and not much of it sounds like fun at all, but it is, I have wasted so much time making things in this little pixelated world that it seems ridiculous that I can't explain why it's fun.

Minecraft is a game you have to try for atleast an hour, it looks like shit, the concept is shit, but when you play it, it's so much fun, and isn't that what computer games are supposed to be?