Moved

Hi guys, I’m no longer going to be updating this blog. But worry not, I’ve simply moved. Follow me at: http://sycs.tumblr.com/ for the latest in gaming rambling

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

Yet another out of touch game review from me today, this is largely because of the fall of the games developers Pandemic. What happened was, after a couple of unsuccessful games those morons at EA decided to axe poor old Pandemic Studios causing all of the servers that held the Xbox Live and Playstation Network content for Mercenaries 2 to disappear. This was a problem because the game, when connected to said online networks, automatically tried to sign into the servers, causing the game to crash. At least this is the wild theory that I arrived at after both my brother’s and my own copies of the game repeating crashed whilst trying to sign on to the Playstation Network and Xbox Live respectively.

Needless to say then that my early experiences of the game were extremely poor. When I first actually got the damned thing working, I was less than impressed. The gaming world seemed just too big, I had the same problem when I owned Just Cause – it just made the game so tricky to play because of the sheer size of it. It was difficult to find the same place twice and hard to navigate. Come to think of it Grand Theft Auto 4 had a similar problem. After a while I gave up and it sat in a box in my room gathering dust.

However, it’s rebirth into my life happened only a couple of days ago after I’d gained all the achievements for Fallout 3 and all but two that I can’t get for Fable II. I was left with my favourite two games that I had nothing more to achieve with either of them, it was a sad moment. Then I thought to myself  ’I really feel like blowing a lot of shit up’. Mercenaries 2! perfect. I loved the original, probably my favourite game on the PS2. I started a new game and commenced my single handed destruction political realignment of Venezuela.

This time around, I just got over the early navigation issues and got on with the first few missions. After a while the navigation gets a lot easier because you simply get used to the map and in game world – also you almost trip over helicopters everywhere you go. I can say that using a high powered tactical strike to blow up one building, and in fact taking out several city blocks in the process, is the most fun thing to do ever. Possibly even more fun than Portal. After a couple of missions, I moved on to taking out key targets and any VZ military bases that I happened to stumble across. The story is very similar to that of the first game, you get betrayed then you use three factions to kill and destroy everything in the world. The factions are even backed by the same people and have the same hatreds of others from the first game. The Russians are backing Jamaican Pirates for some reason, The Chinese are backing the People’s Liberation Army of Venezuela again for some strange reason, and of course the Yanks are backing the big oil company Universal Petroleum. They all wanted you to capture each others bases and personnel and generally just kill any members of the VZ Army.

I haven’t got around to completing the game at the time of reviewing, but I can safely say that all the bad guys are going to get a rifle shoved where the sun doesn’t shine and walls are going to be redecorated very much in their personal image. I can’t wait to keep playing, but after about 7 hours of constant playing I’ve decided to have a break for a while, besides my girlfriend’s just got back from work and I’d rather spend time with her to be honest. Nevertheless I’d still rate Mercenaries 2 8/10 I think.

CraigE

Portal

Finally my inane browsing of gaming sites such as the Escapist and Gametrailers seem to have paid off. Whilst browsing the Escapist’s excellent user forum I came across a post about Valve realising Portal for free on Steam, I clicked the link with some scepticism but a little hope and lowe and behold it was actually the case. Needless to say, I promptly downloaded the Steam interface and got my greedy little hands on a free copy of one of the biggest cult games of the last 5 years. It’s just unfortunate that my laptop has the gaming capability of a brick or a Virtual Boy.

The game itself, for those of you that don’t know, involves the completion of 19 ‘testing rooms’ which require the player to use special gun that fires blue and orange portals to solve a variety of challenges. Of course the challenges get increasing more insane and require a fair bit of time and thinking in order to solve them. You may be thinking that this sounds a little bit like homework, but the level of humour in the game, primarily from the voices and dialogue of the super computer GLaDOS and the little sentry bots more than justifies any of that. The sheer level of drug induced ideas that went behind the creation of the game makes you question just how many chocolate biscuits were eaten during production.

There’s this one room where the player has a use a ‘weighted companion cube’, which is in essence a normal cube but with hearts on it, to deflect missiles and jump on ledges. For some reason I rather liked the weighted companion cube and was dismayed that GLaDOS made me euthanize the poor little cube at the end of the challenge – she then used this fact in insult form during the final showdown. From this point onwards the game starts to take a rather sinister turn, the introduction of small hidden rooms with “Help!” written across the walls, warnings involving cake and a nice splash of blood here and there. Oddly you never come across the bodies of these poor souls. However, because of links to the Half-Life universe the lack of people may be down to the Xen or GLaDOS – neither side is stated, although both hinted at.

After completing the final testing room GLaDOS tries to kill you by feeding you into a fiery pit, thankfully with a quick portal or two and well timed jumped you’re neatly out of that little problem. However you quickly find that shit really has hit the fan at Apature Science and the player must work their way through more challenging rooms but with a lot more insto-kill traps. Proof of how much the shit has hit the fan comes when the player portal’s through a small vent into a trench filled with what sounds and appears like a river of faeces. Once you escape the river of shit your faced with a room filled with roughly 30 armed sentry bots at varying levels. This was a fun bit.

Eventually you stumble across GLaDOS herself and after a brief insult or two a part of her falls off. She tries to convince you that the part is useless and that you should just leave it alone, well bugger that my dear you’re going the way of the weighted companion cube! Several insults, missiles and lungs full of neurotoxin later the old girl is beaten and it’s time for cake and a sing-song. The closing credits of Portal have replaced my previous favourite credit sequence of all time (Devil May Cry 3 – where you see how many enemies you can kill before the end of the credits), the song is a joy to listen to and very funny. It even hints at a sequel, which has since been announced – can’t wait for Winter, Fallout: New Vegas, Fable 3 and now Portal 2.

I can’t recommend Portal enough to everyone that has an Xbox, PC or even MAC. Get it on Steam whilst it’s free and have yourself a few hours of good honest fun. 10/10!

Also in gaming, it’s the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man’s release. People think that gaming is becoming less suitable for children, look at this guy – popping pills and killing things for 30 years now.

CraigE

Banjo-Kazooie

Yes, yes, yes, yes! This is exactly how to make a fun platform game. Released for the N64 in 1998, it was the first great leap that showed the greatness of the console. 10 years later and it was re-release on XBLA and was subsequently downloaded by your’s truly. In the 10 years since I first played it many things have changed, including my allegiance of gaming consoles, but the greatness of the Rare’s magnum opus still shines through – even if they have completed balls it up with Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts.

For those who have never experienced one of the greatest games ever released I’ll fill you in. At the beginning of the game Banjo (a bear) and his friend Kazooie (a wise cracking bird) are sitting about when Gruntillta (aka Grunty the Witch) swoops down and kidnaps Banjo’s sister, Tooty. Grunty has just had a little bit of bad news, apparently she isn’t the most beautiful women of all (no shocker there) and has built a machine to steal the beauty of Tooty and thus make herself the most beautiful women ever. Banjo and Kazooie then set off into Grunty’s mountainside lair and travel to different game worlds to find an array of different objects in order to save Tooty and defeat Grunty. This does seem a little bit early 20C Disney, but to be honest this isn’t a book – it’s all about the humour and gameplay today.

The gameplay hasn’t changed at all in the game’s reincarnation on the 360, but this is just a re-release not a remake or a god awful attempt to make the lightning strike a third time. The game itself is simple enough but challenging at times with some levels being just absurdly murderous. In each level there are 100 musical notes, 2 honeycomb pieces, 5 creatures called Jinjos and 10 Jigsaw pieces and the aim is to collect all of everything (obviously). This has been made easier in the XBLA version because they tweaked the game slightly and now instead of it collecting musical note ‘high scores’ for each level, you just collect the notes and they disappear. This means that if you die or exit the level there is no need to re-collect the same notes again, this makes it a hell of a lot less frustrating.

The characters in the game are all voiced by strange repetitive noises rather than actual voice actors, but this isn’t that bad – it’s better than some of the truly terrible voice acting in some other games. Along the way Banjo and Kazooie meet different people that either need help or are willing to help, two of the support characters in the game are Bottles the mole and Mumbo-Jumbo the shaman. Bottles helps by teaching you new moves – somehow, he doesn’t exactly look the most sprightly of people – and Mumbo helps by transforming the player into various different animals and in some cases a washing machine.

The in-game humour is top draw, with subtle digs at the developers and the Vogon-esk rhythms that Grunty always speaks in. Although it has to said that the sequel ‘Banjo-Tooie’ developed on this even further and is truly hilarious, it is surprised just how many gay jokes Rare managed to get into a +7. Then again Rare are very well-known for this sort of thing, just look at Conker’s Bad Fur Day for instance.

Overall then, I’d easily give Banjo-Kazooie a 10/10 just for all the hours and maybe even years of enjoyment that it’s brought to me and many others.

CraigE

Burnout Paradise

I went into Burnout Paradise with massive hopes and dreams after playing it’s older brother Burnout Revenge on the PS2, a game that I still hold as being in the top 5 games on the PS2 release sheets. After hearing ‘Paradise City’ by Guns and Roses as the title song, my hopes were boosted to new levels – but as Lynwood Giacomini once said: “what goes up must come down” and so my hopes did. Very shortly after starting the game I realised that the bean counters at EA have called upon Criterion to royally screwed the pooch and instead of creating the next golden step towards the heavens of driving games, they created 50ft pit with spikes at the bottom.

Driving games are fun because they allow you to drive at insane speeds around a city or circuit without having to look at the fucking Satnav every 20 seconds to make sure you’re going the right the way, but that’s exactly whats happened here. It’s supposed to create an open world ideal to the driving game setup but it’s shit, it’s only really open world to the player because the CPU drivers are already programmed to use the quickest possible routes to get to the finish, and therefore are constantly going to win. Do you remember when the Ordinance Survey brought out that game that tried to be like World of Warcraft but more focused on map reading skills? No of course you don’t, because it would have been really fucking boring.

Another thing problem with the game is the car selection; in Burnout Revenge you got a choice of a few cars at the beginning and you could swap and choose the most appropriate for each event and the CPU cars would always be in the same sort of league – however in Paradise you get one car and it’s a heap of junk and it feels like the CPU drivers get the fucking USS Enterprise. The developers also thought it would be a great idea to remove one of Revenge’s best features and not allow you to ‘check’ same way traffic in an attempt to make the game more realistic, but all it does is create yet another thing to crash into and trust me you’ll be doing that a lot.

In and attempt to smash two ailing series together, EA thought it would be great to bring ‘DJ Atomica’ from SSX Tricky and SSX 3 into the Burnout world – and although he was pretty funny in the SSX series his writing seems to be a little forced, quite like the last time Lazlo appeared in the GTA universe. It is sad that not only are EA constantly remaking, and ruining, their old franchises but to try and use parts of a dead one to help bring a dying one back to life will hopefully reserve them a their own special circle of hell.

I think that’s enough of a beating for one day, oh no wait – EA also stole the idea of using ‘Unique Jumps/Stunt Jumps’ from almost all open world sandboxes (for example GTA 3, San Andreas and GTA4 as well as Saints Row 2) in order to elongate gameplay. Yet more proof that EA needs to put down their pens and step away from the desk and just take a quick look at what they’re doing to the industry. The only good part of EA was the Pandemic group (Mercenaires: Playground of Destruction, Red Faction) and they’ve all been giving their pink slips and thrown out.

Overall then I’d give Burnout Paradise a 3/10 at best, for completely ruining the series and wasting £10 of what little money I have.

CraigE

New Header

Right, last week I asked you guys for help to design a new header for the site and after a complete lack of any volunteers, I’ve designed a couple myself and want to know your opinions of which one to have.

Also, please if you can design and want to help me then it wouldn’t take too much of your time to lend a hand – because I clearly suck at this.

Design 1

Design 2

Please vote for your favourite

*Additional* After a day of voting and a massive 4 votes, I’ve decided to go with Design 1. That is until either someone helps me design a better one or I get sued for using international gaming corperations logos without their permission.

CraigE

Saints Row 2

Bugger me, finally a game with a protagonist that can actually verbalise his feelings towards something. In fact Saints Row 2 even goes so far as to let you pick the voice your character has, so naturally I went for the good ol’ Cockney lad. Although it has to be said THQ didn’t really think this through, it just seems a little bit wierd having a Cockney crimelord in America surrounded by proper gangstas brov! He just sticks out of the crowd like Wally at a nudist camp. The voices are good though, with all the gangs having very distinct voice sets and the guest appearance of Michael Dorn (if you don’t know who that is, then I suggest you look it up or we may have to take this outside).

Right I’m not going to beat around the bush, I’m just going to come out and say it. Saints Row 2 is like GTA, in so much as eating Chocolate Ice cream is like eating a bowl of mud – they may look similar but only one will leave you actually feeling happy. Saints Row 2 is roughly x900500065 better than GTA 4, which is a boring grey vomit pile of a sandbox game. THQ remembered that gaming is supposed to something that people do to unwind after a hard day of bunking off work, and there’s nothing fun about having to pick up your cousin and go bowling 5 times a day. There is something fun however, in grab a defenceless old lady and hauling her off the top of the nearest skyscraper, or taking off all your clothes and running around the city trying to avoid the angry boots of those you offend.

The storyline of the game revolves around the same character as Saints Row 2 (conveniently nameless, encase you pick a girl this time) some years after the explosion that was supposed to kill him. At this point you may be thinking “oh god, looks like this has a case of the Bioshock 2′s” but no this time the story actually gets better. Put simply, you have to kill your way back to the top of the city that you once controlled – which is now run by evil corporations and new gangs. Although, before you can do the missions you have to complete little mini games that earn you respect – some of these can be laborious but most are good laugh, such as the mini game that allows you to fire shit at public property. The story is much simpler than GTA 4′s and there’s no alternate ending, but it’s a good length and damned sight more fun and colourful.

The option of co-op play is present and it could be fun, if people weren’t such assholes. I was playing with some kid for Finland or something, and he just turned around a blow me up and then he did it again and again and again. For no reason, I then booted the little fucker. If you played co-op missions with a mate then it could be more fun but until I try it it won’t gain any marks from me.

Although I completed the game ages ago, I’ve put off finishing the review because of my petty nature – you see I did a load of missions for one of the DLC’s and then it crashed and I lost it all, since then I haven’t played it. For this I’m only giving it 8/10. But it’s a fantastic game and you’ll have hours of fun.

CraigE

Fable 2

Well shit! I promised myself that I’d never play a Peter Molyneux game, especially Fable II – but after several months of constant and relentless hints, I have finally allowed a copy to enter my beloved console. I have to say that my preconceptions of the game may have be slightly unfounded but most of them are spot on. The game starts with a cliché and then continues to steam down the same line throughout. You start out a poor scallywag in a standard fantasy city and then after some horrible murdering, you’re taken in by some old women that doesn’t seem to age. 10 years later your back for your revenge.

Of course revenge isn’t going to happen anytime soon, in fact the people of Britain, sorry I mean ‘Albion’ seem more interested in helping you in almost every department other than actually helping with the plot. The story has the same problem that so many other RPGs have, in that the NPC’s in the game know that you’re trying to save the world in which they live but will only help you after you do some menial task for them that they could easily do themselves. Talking of the NPC’s, Fable II has the same issue that Fallout 3 has with the same 5 clones of people repeating the same things so often I often thought “Christ! is this how the annual convention for dementia patients sounds like?” then I’d turn the safeties off and go on a killing spree. Of course one of the big points in Fable II is that you can use a wide range of emotional responses to every NPC in the game, however the range to stupidly large when you can just use the same two to get people to like you or hate you. The voice ‘talent’ for the game has the big problem of a select three or four voices for the entire world, with West Country and Cockney accented people being pleasant and the Scots are the bandits and insulting gargoyles. Just goes to show that Peter is English I suppose. Saying this, guest appearances for Stephen Fry, Ron Glass and Zoë Wanamaker are a pleasant inclusion.

The gameplay is limited due to the 360′s controller, with the A button performing the majority of tasks and this can get very frustrating and I often found myself standing around for 20 flow breaking seconds whilst waiting for yet another door to open. Having to use the same button for everything can make things tricky and frustrating. The lack of a jump button means that this sandbox game is actually pretty compressed and linear, there’s a massive and to be honest very beautiful world around you and your only allowed to travel on the paths like there’s a fucking ‘keep off the grass’ post every 5 feet. Fable tries to combine the standard RPG classes of ranged, melee and mage and actually does it pretty well – afterall with the lack of clothing effect abilities like in some RPG’s makes it easy to use the three sets of weapons at your disposal. Saying this, just putting all your experience points into one area effect spell can break combat when your foes are completely obliterated before than can get within 50 yards.

There is the option to co-op play locally with a friend, enemy or kidnap victim or in fact whoever you want to play with (not like that!) – but to summarise the co-op play very briefly, it’s shit. It is essentially the exact same as playing alone, but more unbalanced and frustrating. It isn’t a local split screen, oh no, both players are constrained to the same few feet of space and must travel together at the same pace. It’s like having two people attached by bungee cords around the waist. Of course the co-op is completely broken, with only the ‘main’ player actually allowed to interact with anything whilst the other player just sits there stealing half your XP and gold. It’s only real value is that it’s allowed me to play on the 360 without generating vast degrees of hatred from my girlfriend.

Of course the most annoying thing in the entire game is that fucking dog that you get and can’t kill. The Fallout 3 way of being able to kill your canine friend was a much better system. In Fable II your dog will constantly, and I can’t over state how constantly I’m talking about, bark about finding a shitty piece of treasure whilst you get your arse handed to you by some ancient monstrosity. Of course, saying this dying isnt the same inconvenience that it is in real life and you’ll be up on your feet in a couple of seconds with a random experience deduction.

All of this said, I do very much enjoy being sucked into a fantasy world like Albion. Must be that nostalgic and childish part of my little English mind. I do like the choices that the player can make too, although I do wish that there were a few more along the way. Saying this there are choices to make that can either help a town or plunge it into economic ruin – you get this choice three times with different towns, but by the time the change happens 10 years pass since the event that you caused happened so no one remembers. I’ve played through the game being very evil, neutral and very good and completed all the different quests and got all but two of the achievements, and you know what? I’ve just started playing again anyway. I can’t wait for Fable III to come out in The Fall, as you may have noticed.

Overall I’d say the game is a must get, but for any people who have life’s and important projects to finish then you should be cautious when buying because it can ruin your life. 9/10 for this one.

CraigE

Bioshock 2

It’s time once again for me to take a deep breath and dive into the City of Rapture, many things have changed since my last adventure into the land of the great, some 10 years ago now – mainly that the old girl isn’t looking too healthy these days what with almost all the inhabitants being too spliced up to get on top of the repairs.

As I just said this time it’s 1969 instead of 1960 and once again you play a faceless, voiceless hero – however unlike last time you don’t play as an ordinary human, oh no this time your first generation Big Daddy. This brings me to one of my biggest annoyances about the game; your pink and squishy precedisor could withstand enough bullets to bring down half the US Army, and this time you can just about withstand a strong breeze. Your supposed to be a huge armoured killing machine, but one stubbed toe and your fish food. So you’ll die, you’ll die a lot but thankfully those handy Vita-Chambers are still functioning after all these years and you’ll be alive again in a few seconds. I know that making the game harder makes it more of a challenge and it can be enjoyable, but when you compare it to Bioshock 1 it just doesn’t make sense.

The story leaves you with the sense this really is a sequel, with an almost a desperate attempt to crowbar characters into the Rapture story – characters that were never mentioned in the original but tried to overthrow Andrew Ryan (one of the main characters from Bioshock, and leader/founder of Rapture). Of course Bioshock 2, being developed by 2K which is half American and half Australian, the main protagonist hails from the shores of good old Blighty and sounds that special sort of evil that only normally Hollywood can get out of British voice actors. Although I’ve just mock it, the story isn’t too stupid – well if you accept the story to Bioshock, wherein a specially grown child of a main character is brainwashed into hijacking a plane and kill his father, then it seems pretty normal. Although saying that Bioshock 1 had a tight and deep storyline that didn’t need a sequel. This time you play a Big Daddy who was physically linked to one Little Sister, Ellenor Lamb – daughter of the oh so British Sofia Lamb. One day Sofia finds you and makes you blow your brains against the nearest wall and takes back her daughter. 10 years on and your somehow not decomposed and your back for revenge, thanks to the help of new Little Sisters and rather powerful Ellenor. Turns out that old Sofia has gone a little bit mad and decided to try and create the first ‘Utopian’, being a person with no sense of self but with huge intelligence – much like the main character from Bioshock. This has made Ellenor quite powerful and she wants nothing more than to break free and reunite with the ‘Daddy’ that she lost.

Without doubt the biggest disapointment with the story of Bioshock 2 has to be the fact that 2K saw how great the first game was then decided to make it more linear. Instead of being able to jump to and fro between sections of the city in the Bathyspheres, you have to use a big train called the Atlantic Express which conects only the oldest parts of Rapture. So if your going for acheivements then this is a massive potential fuck up awaiting you, because you can’t go back and get tonics, Little Sisters or audio logs.

Throughout the game you get to decide the fates of a few people and of the Little Sisters and your decisions affect the way which Ellenor behaves once you free her. If you save those that deserve it and rescue the Little Sisters then she’ll probably be less madly aggressive and not feel the need to murder about 10 little girls. However, because I accidently harvested one of the Little Sisters she was quite mad. You really to have to be slightly evil do actually kill the people you can save, one is an elderly lady with a cane and the other is cowardly little shit – the latter being responsible the capture of both yourself and Ellenor, but I still let him survive.

One disappointment that I had; was the lose of the trusty wrench from the first game, instead you get a Big Daddy drill and it can be strangely satisfying to plant the drill into the skull of a particularly annoying spilicer but you constantly run out of drill oil meaning you can only hit folks with it. The best weapon of all though has to be the massively over compensating Spear Gun, which can pierce and pin spilicers to the nearest solid surface at 50 paces. The other weapons are the general assortment of shotguns, machine guns and missile launchers – nothing new in that department.

Overall then, I’d give it 7/10 – a good game, but has a definite sequel feel to it.

CraigE

Resident Evil 2

Now that is taking the piss with the delay between release and review you may be thinking, but… yeah ok it is but I want to review it anyway and if you don’t want to read it then I suggest you leave. To put a number on the gap between release and review, I’ve had to go to good old Wikipedia – the exact number, if you care, is 4015 days ago (not taking into account leap years).

Of course, being on the Nintendo 64, and in fact being one of it’s earliest titles, Resident Evil is never going to win any beauty pageants when compared to the games of today. Although what it lacked in general graphical detail, it more than made up for with it’s gameplay and story. I’ve read and watched many reviews that involve the early Resident Evil series and every time they are mocked for their story, but I’m sorry if your making a Zombie series perhaps it’s a good idea to have actual zombies in them instead of possessed dirty foreigners like the latest games do. One review went so far as to say that RE 4 was the first in the series that was scary, what a lot of tripe – now I was far too young to remember Resident Evil in great detail the first time around, but Resident Evil 2 was a game that gave me nightmares (I was only 11-ish at the time).

Anyway moving on, Resident Evil 2 is set in the nuclear crater that used to be Raccoon City before the events of Resident Evil 3 lead to it’s demise. You play as rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy, a cop on his first day, or Claire Redfield, sister of Chris. Both are stupefyingly prepared mentally for a city full of zombies, whereas most would turn tails and leg it these two seem to take overwhelming joy in mowing down legions of the undead as they wonder through the city, the police station, the sewers and a massive underground lab. Also amazingly they know instantly exactly what each item does, although the game does give those first timers a helping hand with it’s ‘cryptic’ clues to how certain insanities work. It does have to be said that Raccoon City Police Headquarters has to be the most poorly designed building ever with many locking mechanisms that would need a clairvoyant to to figure out in reality.

The inventory system is a tough one really, your player only has 8 spaces but you do get the good old fashioned TARDIS-esk item chests that can store enough herbs to kill Bob Marley, again. This does however mean that there is a lot of running back and forth between the objective de jour and the nearest item chest, of course if you’ve played the game a few times you’ll quickly learn what you need and when you need to use it. As hinted at the main item of healing is the trusty ‘green herb’ which can heal all, unfortunately this idea didn’t seem to penetrate the skulls of anyone else in the city. Another inconsistency is the fact that in the cutscenes the police empty entire clips of high powered automatic weapons into zombies and they still don’t die, however in game most zombies can be killed by the player with about 5 handgun rounds making Leon and Claire the most unstoppable force since the last time God took too many laxatives.

Talking of Leon and Claire for a moment, I know that I just stuck up for the game’s story but one aspect (and it’s a biggy) is the actual speaking parts of the story. The animation department must have done some research into everyday movement physics outside an Essex nightclub, with the characters flailing their arms about long after they’ve finished talking – much like the average drunken moron. Also the actual voice acting is keeping on par with the original and is truly awful, long pauses for no reason and truly gobsmacked exclamations to revelations that the player worked out about 3 hours before the character did.

Saying this, it is unlikely that you’ll actually be playing the game for more than 3 hours. To get the best grade at the end of the game, the player must complete it in under 2 hours. Assuming for a second that you’ve got 1 functioning brain and 2 functioning arms then this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Taking this into account, the total play time could only last for a about 8 hours in total (completing the A and B missions for both). People, including myself, complain about the shortness of Current Gen games, but some of the our ‘classic’ and much loved retro games were just as bad. Although, they didn’t have massive hype and pretty graphics with not much else going for them – this does include my beloved Halo series.

Finally, like the majority of Resident Evil titles there is the small matter of annoying secondary characters – most of whom have stupid high pitched voices and lack the common decency to just fuck off and get eaten. In Resident Evil 2, the annoying secondaries are Ada and Sherry, although Ada isn’t too bad especially as she comes into the plot at other points in the series. For once old hand Albert Wesker doesn’t make a show stopping appearance in this game, he was probably too busy updating his big list of betrayals to notice the outbreak.

When all is said and done, Resident Evil 2 is a very good game for the N64 and a good addition to the series and I recommend you lay your hands on it in anyway possible. Note that it was also released on the PS1, Gamecube, Dreamcast and PC.

CraigE