Bioshock Infinite

I remember when I met the film director Quentin Tarantino we spoke about the film Jackie Brown and his belief that the film was more fun to watch the second time round because you were freed of your obligation of having to follow the plot and could just enjoy the dialogue between the characters.

Actually now that I think about it that might just have been a DVD extra I watched.

Anyway the point is that on an initial run through I found my feelings while playing Bioshock Infinite fluctuated somewhere between enjoyment, boredom and feeling rather overwhelmed.  On a second play through its difficult not to praise the scope of the game’s ambition, even if ultimately the much hyped story gets rather confused and the world it creates is not quite as immersive as it could have been.

There are undoubtedly moments of highly polished gameplay, although these sit alongside the occasional incomprehensible moment that might have been clever in the late 90s but now sticks out like a sore thumb.  To be honest once I’m hurling fireballs through the air and riding a skyline firing rockets at motorized automatons of George Washington that can be conjured into existence out of thin air then my excitement threshold has already been stretched to a level that is unlikely to be exceeded by every toilet in the game excitedly telling me “PRESS SQUARE TO FLUSH!”

The skyrails themselves are an original idea but poorly integrated.  You need to be looking in exactly the right place to use them and this is almost impossible to do quickly.  When the difficulty steps up this makes them at best redundant and at worst frustrating as you are repeatedly battered to death while apparently frantically studying every inch of the world above you.

I also encountered as many bugs with this game, which received universal praise from critics, as I did with Aliens Colonial Marines, which was universally panned for being bug ridden (no pun intended). 

Which makes me seriously question just how much in the pocket of the manufacturers the games journalists really are.

For those of you who are au fait with this concept feel free to skip ahead.

Games magazines and ‘independent’ games websites have huge influence over the video game market. Websites that review video games and give the illusion of independence are many people’s first port of call to catch up on the latest games news because they have the most recent trailers, appear top of Google’s search engine hitlist, and publish the first reviews.

In practice should a bad review be written by one of these websites then the company responsible for the game can withhold future demo releases from the website, refuse to give them trailer videos and so on.  The effect of this is that the reviewing website won’t have the latest news, reviews or videos and people therefore won’t go to their website which causes a drop in website hits, the reduction of advertising on the site and the collapse of the website.  Even simpler than this the games manufacturer might not pay the website their annual ‘supportive’ donation.

I will no doubt in future wax lyrical about Deus Ex, Fallout 3 and Knights of The Old Republic and I would like to thank the billion dollar behemoths responsible for those games for sponsoring me during a recession in an industry which is not exactly known for its financial rewards.

And obviously expecting a balanced review of a PS3 game in PS3 Magazine is like trying to decide whether you should buy a Honda Civic by reading the brochure.

To be fair Bioshock Infinite isn’t the best example of this I could have picked.  If you liked the previous instalments then there’s a fair chance you’ll like this one.  I base this on the fact that I thought the others were alright and I’d say the same about this one too.  A better example of an awful game given rave reviews would have been something like Final Fantasy XIII, but the thought of having to replay that snoring festival of horse piss still keeps me awake at night.

Bioshock Infinite just doesn’t feel like quite the immersive experience that the game is striving to be.  For example I had moments where every time I crossed an invisible ‘new area’ line, the enemies around me would inexplicably pop in or out of existence.  Which just reminds me that I’m playing a game that is essentially a series of hoops I’m expected to jump through as opposed to a living breathing world I can pretend I inhabit.

If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it then does it make a sound?

Well if I knew it didn’t then I would have much less interest in the world around me wouldn’t I?

Halo 4

I like art.

I also like oxygen and the smell of my own farts.

Halo 4 at times feels like walking through an art gallery – albeit one full of hideous alien creatures firing plasma rifles at you.  Games like this can sometimes become a sensory overload of stunning visuals and fast paced gameplay thrown at you too quickly for either to be fully enjoyable.  Take note Assassin’s Creed 3; expecting me to read instructions at the same time as fighting ten enemies in your beautifully rendered environments to a time limit just makes my head hurt.  Thankfully Halo 4 paces itself to give you time to enjoy the spectacle.

Halo 4 is perhaps not as good as previous Halo games, with the exception of Halo ODST which I disliked for reasons I don’t actually remember but possibly because its title sounds like a newly discovered sexually transmitted disease.  A large part of the reason Halo 4 perhaps compares unfavourably to its predecessors is because the new enemy, the Prometheans (yesfuckingreally), just aren’t as much fun to slaughter as the Covenant.  It doesn’t help that they’re all robots that don’t say anything.  I know that listening to those little Covenant twats squealing “Enemy!” was kind of annoying but you know what, at least it gave them character.  Remember how shityourpants scary an SS guard booming at you in Wolfenstein 3D was?  Or the roar of those pink centaur ‘Baron’ fuckers in Doom?

The key success of the Halo series has been founded on slick, fast paced action.  It nails the shooting genre better than anything since the original Doom games and doesn’t try to be anything more.  Halo 4 is comfortable in its own skin while other games have tried to be clever and ape Deus Ex when they have neither the writing talent nor the gameplay mechanics to support such ambition.  For another example of this idea read something I’ve written and then read Milan Kundera.

Halo 4 also has something Doom didn’t have, namely a story, although to someone like me who reads books at about the same speed as it takes a well established television corporation to out known paedophiles, it is fairly baffling.

As far as I could make out the sexy lady Sat Nav in your head is suffering from some sort of AI deterioration called “rampancy” – a fact that she seemed at pains to remind me every 10 minutes.

And in this respect I’ve got to applaud Halo 4 because as far as sexual fantasies go having a symbiotic relationship with an AI who sounds like she could overpower and rape my brain at any second is one that I have neither contemplated nor indulged in.   Yet after the fortieth time of hearing the words “Chief you need to hurry, my rampancy is increasing” I found myself sporting the same type of lustful smirk usually only seen by the most unfortunate girls in my local area.

This Halo round there’s a villain, though you only see him twice before he dies in a horrific quick time event.  SPOILER ALERT!  Oh damn, sorry.  Just as well that telling you the fate of the bad guy at the end of Halo 4 is a bit like telling you what happens to Spot at the end of Spot The Dog i.e.:

NOTHING MEMORABLE

The only thing I do remember about the final cut-scene of this game was that it was self-congratulatory, smug and made me feel uncomfortably like I had just walked in on my best friends shagging and made eye contact with them seconds after they’d came.

Oh and we also find out that the character you’ve been playing all this time is called John. 

John Spartan. 

As in the guy out of Demolition Man.

It is most definitely not to the credit of today’s video game writers that I was left pondering if this was a deliberate random name-check apropos of nothing or a genuine case of nobody on the development team having ever watched Demolition Man before.

And I’ve got no problem with the name John being used for mere mortals but why not call this superhero kickass guy something a little more exciting?  Kimbo* for example.

Anyway Halo 4 is pretty good and the bit where you get to hop off and on of an enormous moving Landrover base was so exciting I kept on forgetting to go to the toilet.

Lucky I like the smell of my own farts really.  

*  this is almost certainly what I am calling my son/daughter when I adopt/steal a child as a single parent in the future.  Just a heads up Mum.  Kimbo Cook.  Write it in your diary so you don’t pull a face in 20 years time. 

Ass In Ass's Creed 3

There’s something terribly wrong with the world.

Film directors appear to want to be video game designers and video game designers appear to want to be film directors.  And what we, that is those of us who are neither video game designers nor film directors, are left with is either films that have little or no story or video games that have little or no gameplay.

There should be a way to sort all this out.                                        

JJ Abrams should just be put back where he was found – presumably somewhere outside Ubisoft’s offices with a sign around his neck reading, ‘Will Make Wing Commander Games For Cash’.  And the ‘multicultural team of various religious faiths and beliefs’ ™ that made Assassin's Creed 3 should be given a camcorder, some period costumes and a handful of unexceptional GCSE Drama students.

And David Cameron, who incidentally is the spitting image of this game’s antagonist, should just join the Navy so he can fulfil his dream of sailing boats.  Over the River Styx.  While clutching the coins of the dead.

Assassin's Creed 3 is the latest instalment in the Assassin’s Creed series and you’d be forgiven for thinking that we reached this point in 2010 with the release of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, or in 2011 with the nigh on identical Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.

But it’s okay because the developers have found a way to reinvigorate the franchise.  They’ve removed assassinations from the game.

Yes, it is a strange move.

Instead what we have here is a series of cutscenes and loading screens lasting for roughly 10 hours and linked by gameplay that is largely reduced to ‘climbing things’ or ‘walking to things’ for decreasingly necessary or comprehensible reasons.

Like previous games the movement system still maps ‘run’ and ‘jump onto the nearest wall’ to the same button, which is a pity when a core part of the game mechanic requires you to ‘run’ away from mildly suspicious guards who go absolutely apeshit at anyone who ‘jumps onto the nearest wall’.

When the game is in full flow the free running over treetops can be exhilarating, the combat has been 

improved to flow nearly as slickly as the Batman Arkham series and the naval battles are nothing short of breathtaking.  If the next game was based around these naval scenes it could be spectacular.

But do games not have editors?  Like books have editors.  You know?  To stop them being shit?

It’s almost like the game designers made a brilliant game, the story writers wrote a brilliant story but the person responsible for co-ordinating those two departments was a disinterested chimpanzee who distrusted the notion of interactive entertainment and had been strapped to a chair for its entire life and forced to watch trashy American civil war TV shows.

The pacing and balance of the game is seriously flawed.  The enjoyable side missions of Assassin’s Creed 2 have been ‘tweaked’ back to the incomprehensible mess of Assassin’s Creed 1.  The protagonist is voice acted by someone who has had all their emotions removed.  I might have empathised with him on this point if he wasn’t such a cloying arse.

Clearly a lot of work went into making Assassin’s Creed 3 but unfortunately it’s rather like a U2 song.  Expensively produced but with little enjoyable substance and made even more frustrating because you suspect they could do better if they just took a step back to re-examine what it actually was they were meant to be doing.

As it is there’s no motivation to DO anything in the game.  The side missions are optional and devoid of 

purpose.  If you win you gain nothing.  If you lose you lose nothing.  You won’t ever unlock any more weapons.  You won’t ever learn any new abilities.  It must be what it feels like to be Robbie Williams.

Diary entries in the previous games were ingeniously integrated to provide you with real historical information on the Renaissance architecture you were scampering over in the game.  This made the whole experience feel borderline educational and briefly enabled me to fantasise about a utopian future where all educational and teaching needs are delivered purely through a series of checkpoints in a Need For Speed title or maybe delivered by the idiotic bray of Andy Townsend as a reward for scoring a goal in Fifa:

“And it’s 1-0 to Watford!  What a goal from Deeney!  The Magna Carter was signed in 1215 by King John 1.  Terrific stuff!”

Unfortunately in Assassin’s Creed 3 diary entries only pop up when you find a fox or a badger.  And frankly if I want to read something that’s dull, uninformative and trying but ultimately failing to be funny then I can just read my own Blog.

FIFA 13

I am not a racist. 

That’s what I always thought. 

But on closer self-analysis it appears I do become a racist when I play football simulation games. 

No I don’t make monkey noises when I pass the ball to Jermaine Defoe or spit at the screen every time it suggests I select a white player for the South African national team.

I do however have a team selection policy which, were I a real football manager, would be considered at best inappropriate.

Let me explain.

A large part of my enjoyment of playing FIFA comes from knowing and utilising the specific strengths of my players.  So if I know the ball is heading for Zlatan Ibrahimovic then I can make a quick decision for him to flick the ball on, use his strength to hold the ball up, go for a 1-2 pass or do something else that I wouldn’t otherwise unfairly force Gareth Barry into attempting.

So an important part of my enjoyment of the game becomes about being able to recognise which player is which.  And because the game is fast it’s important to be able to do this as quickly as possible.  And anything I can do to make that easier improves my enjoyment of the game…

So unfortunately the other white centre forwards I have in my squad simply aren’t going to get any games, lest I think I’m controlling Zlatan Ibrahimovic before realising with horror that I’m actually controlling Andy Carroll.

Andy Carroll is therefore sold, meaning I will need to scour the transfer market to find a black centre forward to replace him.  Preferably a small one.

Nothing controversial there.

But for some reason the game doesn’t allow you to conduct player searches based on a player’s ethnicity.  

Nor can you specifically send your scouts out with the remit of finding you a black defender, or a white red haired playmaker, or a little distinctive looking Asian chap who can play on the wing.

In the end my FIFA teams resemble the kind of regimented multicultural ideal you’d expect to find in the fantasies of a forward thinking OCD sufferer having a mental breakdown in 1960s Alabama.

And in doing this I am made to feel uncomfortably similar to Ron Atkinson, the ex-football manager who once referred to Marcel Desailly as a “fucking lazy thick nigger” and then went on a series of TV chatshows complaining about the criticism he was receiving and dismissing any allegations against him with the FACT that he's managed black footballers - in what I think is as close to a dictionary definition of a cunt as I can think of.

And really I’m an even bigger cunt than Ron Atkinson because I simultaneously practice negative discrimination and positive discrimination.  At least you knew where you were with Big Ron.  He’s a racist and a cunt.  The players in my Fifa team must just be confused.  When Florent Malouda asks me why he’s not in my first team I’ll have to reply “Because I can’t tell you apart from Ashley Cole” which, frankly, makes me feel like I’m the bad guy. 

Which is how Ron Atkinson would feel if he was able to comprehend the concept of shame.

I also doubt many managers in real football have signed as many players on the basis of the novelty of their haircut as I have in FIFA.  Liverpool’s managers aside.  Conduct a quick Google search of Andy Carroll, Djibril Cisse and Abel Xavier and you’ll quickly see why these players are among the finest to ever establish themselves in my FIFA teams.

Abel Xavier deserves special mention here.  An average player, but when the ball came near him I would sure know to pass the ball on to someone else. 

You see it doesn’t really matter how good the players in the game are because FIFA 13 is only as good as the person who’s holding the controller.  And in my case there is absolutely no correlation between ‘time spent playing FIFA games’ and ‘ability at playing FIFA games’.

It doesn’t matter how good Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen are in the game because if I play them together I will end up attempting through balls with Owen and trying to spring the offside trap with Rooney. 

Then I’ll lose possession and rely on Paul Scholes to break up the attack with a perfect sliding tackle before using the creativity of Gareth Barry to play a killer ball for David Beckham to use his pace and dribbling skills to run onto.

Although anyone who has watched England in recent tournaments will recognise that this pretty accurately describes the last 10 years of international failure.

Maybe the England national team could do with following my FIFA formula.

After all Arsenal only dominated English football when they had Henry and Bergkamp up front.  Newcastle enjoyed their best period in recent history by partnering Alan Shearer with Les Ferdinand.  Manchester United have based much of their recent success on the rock solid defence provided by Nemanja Vidic and Rio Ferdinand.  And Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea dominated domestically by relying on Michael Essien and Frank Lampard to marshal the midfield.

You can prove anything with facts can’t you Ron?

DishonOred

My first impression of this game was soured by the fact that whenever I searched for it on the net I would get a message telling me “The game Dishonoured does not exist” which I found annoying for two reasons.  Firstly because I was certain that the game DID exist – or at least about as certain as I was that anything in this world exists, and secondly because it highlighted my inability to retain crucial information in my brain for longer than 5 seconds.

It wasn’t a good start.

DishonOred professes to be a ‘stealth / action’ game but in truth does neither satisfactorily.  The stealth system has no easy way to work out whether you can be spotted or not and instead relies on rather shaky guesswork.  The combat is frankly so easy that, even on the hardest setting, every level can be cleared by just getting your gun out and shooting the handful of guards that run straight at you from some distance to attack one at a time with their swords.  Having a gun would be fine if ammo was scarce enough to make it feel like a treat but the fact ammo is relatively plentiful just makes the game feel unbalanced.  Throw into the mix the fact that you also have magical ‘powers’ enabling you to teleport, stop time, conjure up rats to gnaw enemies to death, blow enemies away with a wind and so on and it all smacks of the developers desperately trying to jazz up a stealth game they realised half way through production just wasn’t going to work.

Well you can’t have it both ways.

Without challenging combat the stealth system becomes redundant as combat carries no fear or reason to be avoided.  Once combat is initiated every guard in your area runs to your location to line up to be shot (or gnawed to death by rats, or eviscerated or whatever) leaving you to walk casually around an empty level to the exit lamenting the numerous, now redundant, hiding places you’ll pass on the way.

In the end I had to role play this game as a master assassin who has a crippling fear of blood and human interaction – crushing guards like ants only when I absolutely had to and then running away like a girl to hide from the next human punchbag that came running after me.

And while this allowed me to fully appreciate the interesting level design (which is pretty great) it made the whole experience feel slightly pointless.

The game is filled with potential that just doesn’t pay off.  Early on you pick up a device which allows you to hear secrets and background information about each character you meet in the game, from lowdown thugs to allies to bosses.  This is a great idea, and if I was immersed in the world it would be a really interesting additional layer of depth.  Unfortunately the characters and world are so bland and uninspiring that any attempt to fully engage yourself in the story or the world is about as enjoyably immersive as joining your dog in running after sticks and chasing down cars.

In the end DishonOred doesn’t deal with stealth as well as a game like Splinter Cell or Thief.   It doesn't handle combat as well as a game like Condemned or even Skyrim.  And it doesn't handle magic as well as pretty much any Ultima game you’d care to mention.  Add to that a bland world and confused storyline and frankly in hindsight my first impression that this game didn’t exist perhaps represents the zenith of my opinions.

If they made the combat harder, constructed a more original and interesting world, gave the characters greater depth and focused on improving the stealth system then the next DishonOred game could be really great.  Indeed the last level of this game almost serves to represent what could have been.  The guards are plentiful enough to make for a bit more of a challenge and your only goal is to get to the top of a small island, leaving you to discover the numerous routes to get there and choose different combinations of your powers along the way.

The ingredients are right – they just need to work out how to put it all together properly to make a LOVELY PIE.

Skyrim

Skyrim

For all its faults I had a pretty big soft spot for Morrowind, the game that was the precursor to Skyrim and recently celebrated its 10 year anniversary, presumably with some Nords over a bottle of mead and a Mudcrab pie.

The combat might have been about as satisfying as wanking yourself off to an episode of Footballers Wives but at its heart it gave a masterclass in immersive gameplay.

You begin the game with no memory or past and are thrust into the middle of a large imaginative world and left alone to discover the creatures, the peaceful fishing villages and the plague ravaged towns.

Skyrim by comparison has a dramatically improved combat system but fails to be anything like the same immersive experience.  While technically an open-world game you are never really taken off the leash and allowed to explore it.

First of all you spend the entire game being told to go somewhere which makes your character feel like something of a gimp.

To make things slightly more annoying while you are 'exploring' you will see several hundred little indicators appear on your compass all clamouring for your attention and shouting:

“Walk this way!  There’s something of minor interest over here!”

It’s rather tiring.

In fact the game more accurately replicates the subtle stresses of doing the Christmas shopping as opposed to the wonder of discovering an imaginative fantasy world.

And once the gameplay becomes established as walking to your destination knowing that little else of interest is going to appear because your compass isn’t telling you anything then the game becomes largely about staring at your compass.

See that interesting looking abandoned hut up on the hill over there?  Yes.  Is it marked on the compass?  No.  Well in that case it’s empty.  Move on.

And just remind me how in a fantasy world my compass is telling me all this anyway?  Is it hooked up to my I-phone or something?

Why am I carrying this wooden shield and club again?

To top it all off the quests in Skyrim are just fucking tedious.

You will for example, be expected to travel to the other side of the map to drop off a pie for someone to eat for their dinner.  I can’t remember if that specific quest was in there but it is a measure of the game’s blandness that I suspect nobody who’s played the game would either.

If I wanted to simulatenously experience mundanity and altruism then I could just ring my friends and ask if they want anything from the supermarket.   (You don’t have any friends yes I do shut up).

Playing Morrowind I spent the entire game trying to work out who I was and what the hell was going on.  As this mirrors my attitude towards reality I rather came to empathise with my on screen avatar.

Skyrim by comparison constantly waves its disjointed, dull and uninspired storylines in your face like they’re manuscripts from Dostoevsky, initially by thrusting you into the execution of a rebel leader, a civil war between two slightly different types of cunts and a returning race of dragons before you’ve even picked up the gamepad.

What’s wrong with a bit of foreplay?  Maybe I want to build up to my orgasm rather than just do an orgasm right now.

You know?

Now hold me as I play this.  Do I go right or left here?  It doesn’t matter.  Oh that’s nice.  Wow what’s that up there?  It’s a church!  I wonder what’s in there? 

Yes okay Morrowind that’s lovely thanks but I’ve got to try Skyrim now – its jumping up and down shouting about how it’s got 200 churches I can see at any one time.  

Aliens Colonial Marines

Aliens Colonial Marines

Well yes if I paid £70 for it I’d be unhappy too, but frankly if you were stupid enough to pay the absurd pre order price for this game then you should just look upon this as a valuable life experience on the value of money.  As a 10 year old I spent the £10 I’d been saving for what felt like my entire life on The Wrong Trousers VHS and I imagine the crushing sense of disappointment I felt when I finished a barely 30 minute long video is something those of you who pre-ordered this game can relate to.

However as you might now be able to tell I didn’t buy this for £70, I bought it for £10, which is more or less now the maximum price I’m prepared to pay for anything since 'The Wallace and Gromit Incident’.

And I liked Aliens Colonial Marines.  I liked the fact it wasn’t trying to be anything more than a pick up and play alien annihilation fest.

Don’t get me wrong I like Half Life 2 as much as the next sociophobic recluse but frankly I could do without every shooter since trying to mimic it.  As far as I’m concerned there is still a market for mindless ‘shoot anything that moves’ games like Doom – even if that market does just consist of myself and other like-minded desensitized chimpanzees prone to bouts of aggression.

So where is this review (ha!) going?  Are all the poor reviews this game received simply down to its style being out of fashion and therefore not considered cool by today’s media who can’t stop banging on about how much they love anything that Valve has dripped long lines of hot spunk over?

Well not quite.  Even I can’t honestly say the graphics at times aren’t far off early PS2 level.  We’re talking flamethrowers that fire 4 increasingly large orange oblongs and explosions in space that wouldn’t look out of place on an early Wing Commander game.

And then there was that bit where I had to punch a large alien to death with a powerloader, only this proved impossible because the large alien had the ability to hide from my punches by clipping in and out of a wall.  And the times my squad mates would stare directly at me without so much as batting an eyelid as I mowed down the horde of aliens that swarmed in from behind them.

Apparently the story was also shit, but then again I wasn’t paying it any more notice than I might pay an attention seeking 3 year old child.   And since 99% of video games contain shit stories I honestly can’t mark down Aliens Colonial Marines on that account.  Frankly it’s a GAME and if I wanted a good story I’d read a BOOK.  If I was expecting to get any insight about the human condition from an Aliens video game then I’d probably be the same kind of idiot who’d expect to get meaningful insight from watching an animated cartoon about a plasticine man and a sarcastic dog.