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

Dawn of War: Soulstorm

The last in the original Dawn of War series, before Dawn of War 2 and maybe the best of the series. Now that I have all of the games because of the greatness of the series boxset, I felt it was time to finally review one of them. For those of you that don’t know what the DoW series is, it’s a Real Time Strategy series revolving around a set of conflicts involving progressively more factions and races of differing military uselessness. The entire ‘story’ is told from the perspective of the human forces of the Imperial Guard and reads like it was written by a futuristic version of  a certain Mr Griffin of Barnet, London. Soulstorm has 9 different factions, the usual hordes of the Imperial Guard, Chaos Space Marines, Eldar, The Necron Tomb, Orks, Space Marines and Tau from the pervious game. As with the previous titles there are new factions for this one, the very originally named Dark Eldar and the Sister’s of Battle. The Dark Eldar are probably the most evil creations in the video game world and the Sister’s of Battle are a completley female combat force that are just as rubbish as the Imperial Guard.

The gameplay is almost the exact same as the older DoW games, but then again why fix something that isn’t broken. The same buildings and research arcs as before mean that playing as the older races is much easier than the new ones because you already know the units and the research so it’s much more intuitive. Each race has a new aerial unit for the first time, and they’re almost identical in ability and only the look of them is different. New abilities have been created for the 2 new races involving the collection of additional resource types and allowing the races to rain down destruction upon their enemies in a  new and imagination way.

The difference in the gameplay in Soulstorm compared to it’s older brothers is that the conflict spans over an entire star system instead of individual planet. The amount of battles are almost the same as the Dark Crusade, however there are different victory formats instead of simply kill everything not you shaped – the planets all have Webway Gates, which allows travel to the neighbouring planets and requires a ‘Capture and Hold’ victories. Saying that, the stronghold battles are all the same – you start seeing the mainbase, then at least two forward bases appear which you have to destroy to stop production of the pain in ass vehicle de jour.

To sum up, despite being the same as it’s older titles the relative cheapness of it these days it’s a definite buy. It’s much better than any of the Warhammer 40K games, including it’s replacement: Dawn of War 2.

CraigE

Bioshock

Last time out I said that I’d probably review Bioshock next in order to keep to my style of being about 2 years behind the bandwagon’s of gaming, and guess what that’s exactly what’s in store for you here today. The game is the spiritual successor to the System Shock series, which are based around the same principles of lonely existence, powerups, shooting and of course a wrench. I haven’t personally played the SS series so I can’t compare the two sets. This time the game follows the life and times of yet another aggressively silent man, big fucking shocker. However this time he’s not battling hordes of murderous aliens, oh no this time out it’s hordes of murderous humans. Well they were human and after a particularly huge drugs binge they’ve all gone a little bit bananas and spend they’re days shooting up and trying to kill you and some little girls, not a nice crowd really.

The hordes of inhuman murderers does really give you some indication as to the game’s genre, this isn’t you average typing tutor, it’s a full on action-horror game – with much more emphasise on the action rather than the horror unfortunately. That’s not saying that the game is bad and to start with the atmosphere of the game is very good, but after a while you become so powerful and the same lines of enemies become so repetitive that any sense of horror melts away. Saying that, they are a few scary moments – for example the first time I encountered one of the teleporting buggers he just appeared behind me and cast his shadow on the wall in front, which was a slightly pant wetting moment but after a swift turn and a couple of whacks across the head with a wrench and he was taken care of. Also your Irish support character, who sounds like Colm Meaney, doesn’t help with the atmosphere issue.

The actual story of the game is pretty original and very well delivered, with you not really knowing what the hell is going on for most of the game and then suddenly the pieces start to fall into place and the intriguing-ness of the whole thing shines through. I knew it was obvious that the aforementioned Irish lad would betray you but still when it happened I was shocked to see just how evil he really was and he stops doing his Colm Meaney impression and instead starts thinking he’s Al Capone or something.The game is built around a moral choice system, you can choose either to; murder little girls, or help them – I choose to help them because I’m a beacon of all things good in this land. The point of making you choose whether or not to kill the little girls arises because they hold a special compound called ADAM, which helps to power you up and you get less of it if you save the girls. So you can choose to save them all and have a clean conscience or you can simply remember the fact that they’re not real and therefore nothing you do to them is evil or cruel.

The choices you make determine what ending you get, but as there are only two (well three techniquely, but two of them are the same but with a less angry voice-over) there isn’t much choice. Moral choice systems in games have been around for ages, why can’t they give the player more options? I mean Silent Hill 2 worked around the same thing and that game gave you six different endings and that came out 8 bloody years ago.

The most disappointing thing about the game, however, is the simple fact that you don’t get to kill either of the main ‘boss’ characters in the story. The first is Andrew Ryan, founder of Ryan Industries and creator of the City of Rapture. The character kills Ryan by smacking him over the head repeatedly with a golf club, but this happens in a cutscene. The second is Frank Fontaine, who is the real bad guy of the story and your former Irish friend, sure you get to fire enough bullets at him to wipe out the entire French Army, but he is then finished off in another cutscene.

Now then, would you kindly go away now.

CraigE

From the Top Now

Well lets get this underway with a double serving of tough armoured faceless heros shall we. Earlier this week I took purchase of my brand new and shiny XBox360 with a copies of Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST and I couldn’t have been more excited unless it came with free chocolate and my very own robotic killing machine, however 10 unsatisfied hours later and both games are now completed. When I say ‘completed’, I mean that the campaigns have been finished and there’s no way that I’m going to sit around and unlock every single fucking achievement for the games – not when some of them are awarded for the walking forward or picking you nose or something. If XBox are going to ask it’s audience to ‘achieve’ things then at least make them a little harder, although of course the hardest thing for most Next-Gen console owners to achieve would be turning off the game and getting a fucking life. Anyway lets crack on and get good and personal.

Halo 3

After playing Halo:Combat Evolved on my PC I thought that I could really get into the whole Halo franchise after hating it and everyone involved in it’s bastard creation for years previously, and I’m happy to report that after playing Halo 3 that I should have stuck to my guns. Halo 3 is everything that is bad about mainstream Next-Gen titles, it’s pretty, it sound’s good but it’s agonizingly short and about as deep as a swimming pool on Mercury. Developers seem to have this over fascination that everything they do has to look the best instead of playing the best, treating they audiences like magpies by giving them lovely shiny things to distract their poor cola dissolved minds from the truth. The characters in the game seem to have all taken fierce bonks on the head and suffered memory loss from the first game, as they all seem to now trust the annoying flying robot that tried to kill them all during the events of Wombat Evolved. Talking of the NPC’s in the game, the same tiny amount of ‘actors’ voice almost the entire armed forces of the planet and the guy with the dodgy Australian accent appears so often that it’s easy to think that the Aussie’s have in fact taken over the world at this point. There are a few amusing moments involving the cast of the Red vs Blue series and cameos from Jonathon Ross, Nathan Fillion and the other male leads from the short lived SciFi series Firefly. Other than these however, the NPC’s will simply quote the same old one liners again and again until you want to snap the controller in half and stick one half in each ear just so you don’t have to hear them. Saying that it is hard to actually hate the NPC marines because they’re all so useless that hating them seems picking on the clinically stupid. Saying that however, at one point a set of marines driving a Warthog whilst I manned the turret and he drove straight into a cliff and then sat there reving the engine, after a while I got bored and tried to take the wheel and the moron ran me over and I had to start the battle again. Which was in no way extremely aggrivating! The shortness of the campaign mode is probably made up for with the multiplayer mode but as I haven’t spent £50 buying a wireless adapter I can’t access XBox Live as of yet so it doesn’t get any marks for it.

Halo 3 ODST

Set as a prequel/simultaneous storyline to Halo 3, ODST follows a similar character to Halos’ normal cyborg killing machine but this time you play as the world’s most useless, nameless, faceless, voiceless killing machine that is knocked on conscious right at the beginning of the game and misses all of the action. Instead of fighting epic hordes of Covenanents you retrace the steps of your team-mates and somehow piece together everything they’ve done instead. I don’t quite understand the logic of the game, at one point you find a used remote detonator and somehow discover that your teammate helped to cover a bridge in them, detonate them and then kick some ass in the Marine headquarters then blowing the ever-loving-crap out the building. Almost the whole game is set like this, it’s like shooting a film with every major event happening in flashback instead of at the time it’s set and when you do it out of the order the game would prefer you to do then really will need help to piece things together. The whole point of the mission that your team is on is just some random quest to find an alien creature that hasn’t been previously mentioned or seen and the whole thing is just a bit of a mess. I was really looking forward to playing ODST but again being far too short I was once again unsatisfied with the situation. One of the only good elements of the game is when you jump, quantum leap style, into your team mates as they do at least have voices and continuing the theme of guest voices, the Firefly guys re-appear to voice your team-mates. At the end of the game you escape the city just before the Elites melt the entirety of Africa in order to stop the Flood, this is the middle of Halo 3 but this dramatic escape was so obvious because heaven forbid that developers should kill off people when the chance of a sequel and more money is available.

Overall then, both games were a massive let down although I’m not sure if I’m more disappointed with the games or with myself for caving in to hype and live action trailers, that at no point showed anything to do with the game’s story. Anyway, I’ll probably buy Bioshock next as it’s a much longer game, apparently, so stay tuned for that review.

CraigE