Mega Derived

Microsoft live firmly under the belief that when I’m not gaming, I’m probably out skateboarding and trying to live my life to the very extreme. At least that’s what their PR department tells me. In reality I spend most of my free time either at work, writing essays or meandering around looking for a deeper, more soul-enriching existence. My 360 is still running and it’s still churning out the over-stimulated, twitch-based adrenaline excitement of its continual drove of FPS and racing games. Unless my 360 decides that life is just too depressing and the only possible respite is to give me a two week break by packing up, there’s no end in sight. Seriously, it’s the most goddamn American thing in my life. It might as well come wrapped in the stars and stripes and puke hot dogs.

Since I last tried to keep track of what inconsequential and completely uninspiring FPS or racing game I’m currently being forced to play thanks to our society of imbeciles that won’t play anything else, I’ve completed eight games. For my next trick, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to crudely make a hatchet job of reviewing them all together in a couple of paragraphs.

I’m going to come clean. King Kong is a six hour joke of a game that I only played in the first place to throw another thousand points onto my gamerscore. It’s slow, it’s bland, it’s absolutely no fun and it should be because it has a giant ape and dinosaurs in it. Ubisoft must have built their head office on top of an ancient Indian burial ground or a radioactive wasteland or something because they’re being possessed by something evil and churning out nothing but garbage. If hype and people who work at Game are to be believed, Halo 3 is supposed to be the best thing about life itself but it’s hard to think of it that way because in reality it’s just a six hour trawl that’s basically Bungie giving themselves a big, long self-congratulatory masturbatory session. If it wasn’t for the epic soundtrack it would be about as beige as gaming comes.

The Darkness plods away in the background as a relic from the 90s where everything was set in dingy New York backstreets with a plot that’s been scrawled out on the back of a My Chemical Romance album cover by a mopey, sixteen year old Todd McFarlane. The crux of the game boils down to the protagonists love for his girlfriend but the bloke is such a unfeeling lump that he shows absolutely no emotion whatsoever for the other 99% of the game, even when he gets possessed by the devil or whatever it is that gives him his freaky darkness powers. Seriously. He doesn’t even say something about how “fucken fucked up” - which is about the peak of the ‘Mafia-like’ speech this game gives you - the whole situation is. Oh, and there’s a few levels in Hell. Finally you’ve got Bioshock which is an atmospheric triumph and a narrative delight but the actual gameplay part plods on a little bit.