Mega Derived

Shambles is a horrible term to apply to something, so I won’t use it.  I have to be frank here, though, so I’ll have to go ahead and admit that Assassin’s Creed is an absolute abomination of a game. I’ve just spent three minutes running around picking up flags - which have spawned for little discernable reason - to be told that my assassination target resides in his personal shitting tower? This is perhaps the most inept and disingenuous piece of level design I’ve run across since I got the 360, and I’ve played some absolute tripe.

Looking back, it’s clear that the game was a mess from the beginning. Instead of showcasing the game, Ubisoft funnelled its PR budget into transforming Jade Raymond from dishy gaming producer woman into cum-gargling dorky sex-on-legs developer superstar. Which lead to stuff like a comic, a backlash and a pretend lawsuit.  Ubisoft are exploitative bumholes at the best of times, so flogging the game as a veritable Jade Raymond Presents: Assassin’s Creed was just another step on the executive ladder to corporate bastard utopia. So, yes, damn Ubisoft. They’re probably the worst gaming studio around today, consistently pumping out lacklustre, uninteresting games with no soul and Assassin’s Creed is no exception. It’s just all so very average, yet unfortunately made heaps worse by the fact the game was hyped beyond reasonable proportions and was billed as the second fucking coming. Whilst we’re on the subject of Jesus, the developers have chronologically sandwiched their game smack bang in the middle of the crusades, only everyone involved with developing it is so desperate to be friends with everybody that even the loading screen reminds us that the whole affair was “produced by a multicultural team of various faiths and beliefs”

Let’s get things straight. You play an Arab assassin with an American accent who goes on a mission to kill people. They don’t use the word jihad, but it’s certainly implied. You think IO had this problem with subtlety when they managed to anger pretty much every religious clique in their Hitman series?

Which is pretty much where my main comparison will lie. IO’s Hitman series is an unappreciated little gem where you skulk around in the shadows, taking in the elements of your murderous playground and then land the killing blow in secrecy. Your victims are all bastards, and by the time you cut off their air supply with piano wire you’ve encountered more than enough evidence to see why, all without being hampered by tedious cutscenes that take the action away from the player. In Assassin’s Creed, you sit on a bench and eavesdrop some boring conversation then stalk up to the target and press one button to kill him and then run away. There’s just nothing to Assassin’s Creed to make it worthwhile. The assassinations are undoubtedly the best moment of the game but even if you stitch all of them together you’ve got less than an hour out of that. So the game, instead, revolves around simple uninteresting mini-games that are endlessly repeated because the developers just couldn’t think of anything better to add. Almost everything you see and do in the game has been tacked on. Buildings are endlessly recycled. The sci-fi element tries far too hard and works with much too little. Regular swordfighting is insultingly easy. The script is tame. The dialog repeats itself over and over. The cutscenes are dull and unskippable. The soliloquies of your victims do nothing to give them any character. The negatives just go on and on. Other, superior, games create atmosphere in their design; the mark of a great development studio. Ubisoft Montreal are, however, not a great development studio. The game has potential, but the execution is flawed beyond belief.

Basically, Assassin’s Creed is weak.

Quick update.

These are the games I am currently playing:

• Crysis
• Blue Dragon
• Rez HD
• New Super Mario Bros.
• Command & Conquer 3
• Zelda: Link to the Past

That’s six games, and I’ve put that in bold to emphasise just how very many games that is. I have, however, recently received Devil May Cry 4. This game has such an emphatically humongous grip on my entire cosmos that if you snatched my copy of DMC4 off me and told me you’d only give it back if I buggered my way through half the sheep of Wales I would (admittedly begrudgingly) agree. I have to play this game. I need to play this game.
However, that’s only because I’m a raging DMC fanboy with a bigoted metaphorical hard-on the size of the Eiffel tower. At least I’m aware of my bias.

So, let’s be honest, I’m probably going to have to abandon playing some of these games. The first one to be abandoned is easy: Command & Conquer 3. I just don’t really like it. It’s a bit ho-hum, really. The cut-scenes are cheesy C&C fare it’s just amazing how little I give a toss. I’ve been plodding along in Blue Dragon for far too long now, and I’m pretty much ready to give that one up. But I’m so desperately close to the end that I just want to get it finished, unless I want to get all 1000 achievement points for it; in that case, I have at least another fifty hours to go.

I really enjoy all the other ones - including Crysis - so I’m going to put them on the back burner and come back to them when I’ve got all the DMC out of my system. This is a promise, and this post is evidence of that.

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.

I’m an honest guy. People who meet me often take a few precious seconds to reflect on how authentic I am. This is, of course, not true. Which is why I’m such a bitter critic, shamefully deciding the fate of games long before they’ve actually been released. I’ve come into a bit of money lately, so I booted up my 360 and shopped around the demos on Marketplace to see what wonderful summer games I could waste my earnings on. Overall, I think I’m going to save the money, maybe use it to ply unsuspecting women with alcohol so I can lure them back into my sweaty, nerdy basement and cry to them about how nobody loves me and why it’s so hard to get a girlfriend.

Here’s what I found:

Stuntman: Ignition

It’s like they took those “Hot Laps” - where you had to memorise each corner and the entire track layout to get gold - from Burnout and made it into an entire racing game about performing stunts over fields of lava and stuff. That’s pretty cool!

Will buy second-hand in three months when it’s really cheap.

Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights

The title is clearly a product of crossing pornography with a lousy racing game. Hell, if it had more titties in it might be a little better. Car customisation is tedious, having you choose which set of neon lights you want beaming out from the underside of your car doesn’t make it any more fun.

Will never buy.

Flatout 2: Ultimate Carnage

You know, I imagine the fans of this series will say that comparisons with Burnout aren’t really fair and that Flatout deserves to be seen as a quality racing game in its own right. When the developers of Flatout are even ripping off their menu interface straight out of Burnout, however, I find it a little hard to be impressed.

It might be worth a tenner.

Those who know me, know that I love DMC3, adore DMC3:SE and that I think DMC1 is pretty good.

DMC4 is coming out on 360, too. I can’t read Japanese, either, but I figured I’d post the official link. First thoughts?

• I can get 1000 achievement points in it, to prove just how much I love DMC.
• Rumble.
• Oh god, I’m a 360 fanboy now.

I don’t know if I should be happy or sad. Tomorrow I’m going to play DMC3:SE again.

God, I only went and did it again. I haven’t updated in, well, too long. I must look like a terrific jerk. It’s not out of choice, I can assure you, I’ve just been busy pondering the big questions. Which, coincidentally, are thus:

1) Early twentieth-century literature was witness to, and participated in, 
a realignment of ideas of gender. Discuss with reference to your chosen texts.
2) How does Heart of Darkness question or change your idea of narrative and what might the significance of this be for your reading of the novel?

This is the world I live in. And, I came down with the flu. Look, I’ve just been busy, okay?

But, here’s the good news. Four weeks of Easter break, starting today. Hooray! We can all enjoy my new-found intense boredom and inevitable blog flood. I’m also now guest (that means I can get fired at any time!) blogging over at intellectual powerhouse Curmudgeon Gamer. Which means I can just use this blog for stupid, crude posts that belittle various design studios. That reminds me, I haven’t made any libellous posts about Blizzard or Valve in months.

I’m currently playing Twilight Princess, which is great. I haven’t played enough to really write about it yet, though. Just know that it is great. I’ve also acquired a DS Lite. No doubt I will write about that later, too.

It’s a good game, and all, but it’s rather unlikely. Unless illegal immigrants think it’s a documentary - and they’re part of the Volk - I just think it’s going to do little more than sell more copies and be well-recieved as a video game.

After you complete all the hundred-odd races that you can see at the start of the game, the game unlocks another hundred-odd races. Only these ones are ball-achingly hard. I’m no expert at racing games, and it really shows. I have a lot of difficulty in winning pretty much all of them. I’ve won two races on the expert circuit, after a good thirty attempts.

This game is hard

The more you put into Dead Rising, the more you get out. That’s just the way it was made. Multiple play-throughs are its bread and butter; your initial run-through is just practice. As of writing, I am on 43 (out of 50) achievements. I’m on my fourth trip through the game, now, and each one has proved nothing less than fascinating. What is interesting, for such a popular game, is how very few people have actually indulged themselves in the sheer volume of content that Dead Rising has to offer. If the average achievement score for Dead Rising is indeed 275/1000, then it’s pretty likely that most people don’t even go back for a second run.

For the record, I think Dead Rising is an absolutely perfect example of the Achievement system, with the game and its fifty achievements effortlessly woven together creating an entertaining and enjoyable whole. It’s the achievements, not your position in the games storyline, that determines your completion of the title. How many other games can claim that? Only Viva Pinata (which shares an identical achievement system), I think.

Part of me thinks that people choose to deny Dead Rising a second playthrough because of the intrinsic belief imbued in many gamers that more is infinitely better. Why devote another six hours, even if it would be a great six hours, to a game when you could be six hours into a different game?

Another argument is in the games ludicrous difficulty. It’s not a simple game unless you know what you’re doing, and you’ll only know what you’re doing if you invest a shed load of time or look up a FAQ. I’ve taken to using a bit of paper to co-ordinate my excursions through the game; a testament to the levels of foresight and planning that is required to enjoy what most of the game has to offer. My attempt at one achievement was destroyed when I overlooked one aspect of the game, reaching the mid-way point and not having enough survivors. Three hours wasted.

However, I find this game of game hugely rewarding. My satisfaction upon unlocking another achievement is immense and fulfilling and I would encourage anyone who has a penchant for slightly rustic, quirky games to check it out. Or, give it a second go if you’ve only completed it once. It’s worth it. Trust me.

I boxed up many of my games today and transported them to a big cupboard, which is their new home. My whole Mega Drive, Saturn, N64 and PS1 collections have now been hidden away from public view. In some respects, this is quite sad. Collecting games has always been a pretty major part of my life and it certainly hasn’t been an easy mental journey forcing them into a cupboard. The reason, my justification, is that in two weeks I will be leaving for university and that there is no point in littering up a room with things that will never be enjoyed.

But, at the same time, I don’t care for these games anymore. I have memories of thinking they were the greatest thing in the entire world and giving them a proud display in the corner of my room. I’ve often referred to my shelves of games as an army of little soldiers, standing valiantly and fighting my own personal war against boredom. This, however, is something that is in my past. Over the course of this year I’ve moved on and I don’t feel the same way anymore.

When I move in two weeks, I will not be taking any consoles with me. My computer is a Mac and therefore can’t run games for shit. For the first time in fourteen years, I will be in a world without games. This, I feel, is a much more exciting prospect than covering the latest gaming release or spending three hundred shitting pounds on an Xbox or four hundred shitting pounds on a PS3. I will be gifted with more time to read and more time to develop my other hobbies and interests. If anything, gaming has impeded my personal growth over the past eight months and I’m ready for that to stop. For Christmas I will probably pick up a DS Lite. Maybe. I intend to play FFXII over my Christmas break, too. But that’s about it.

It’s not that games don’t appeal to me anymore, I’ve just got off playing Valkyrie Profile for two hours, it’s just that I see no real need to hang around them at the moment. In five years I’ll pick up a 360 for fifty quid and a handful of games for a fiver each and play them all then. I couldn’t care less about the latest releases, or whether there’s some new downloadable content out, or what TV displays the best HDTV picture. I think that means I’ve transformed into a casual gamer.