Paul's Excellent (PSone) Adventures

Rejecting the fancy shmancy graphical sheen and technical whizz-bang of newer games consoles, Paul has followed the example of the amish and looked to the past for his technological fix. In a regular column, we'll be following his progress as he checks out decade-old cutting edge on the PSone. FIFA 2002



Imagine you walk into a small café during your lunch hour and, because you’re a sweet – toothed individual, take a chocolate cake to the counter along with a crisp fiver. The enthusiastic young man behind the counter tells you that your money is no good here, and that instead you are to engage in tribal dance with him for a few minutes, at which point he’ll be happy to let go of his chocolate cake.
The transfer system in FIFA 2002 is a bit like this – charming and pleasant, but makes absolutely no sense from a business point of view. You see, instead of the usual bid – reply – negotiation method which has become standard practice for all football games, not just management sims, FIFA in the early 21st century chose to operate a system which gave you far more freedom of movement. So long as your team has the readies to match the (exceptionally reasonable, as a rule) asking price for your desired player, the transfer is instantaneous and hassle – free, with Zinedine Zidane seeing no reason not to join Kilmarnock provided they can stump up the 15,000 credits (or roughly two of Killie’s mid – range midfielders)
Interestingly though, this is the same for selling players – other clubs never show any interest in your players; this isn’t necessary. Instead, whenever you find yourself landed with an over – priced flop, you simply select the team you want to sell him too and it’s done. This isn’t only true of the team you play as – every team is as malleable as this, a whole transfer market which stops and goes as you tell it, allowing you not only to manufacture the best team in the world, but the best league or continent too.
You may be thinking this all sounds a bit pants, but you’re damned wrong. Unlike today, games during the PSone era knew what they were supposed to do, and did it. LMA Manager had the realistic (if you can call it that) transfer market; FIFA removed all that obtrusive nonsense and gave you maximum bang for minimum buck.
This commendable dedication to doing what it does well continues throughout the front – end of the game, as it famously would in future iterations of the series. The soundtrack, though woefully threadbare by today’s standards, had some real standout tracks, most notably “19-2000” by Gorillaz, which I still hold to be the best title song for a FIFA game, ever (Kings Of who?).
Other future FIFA hallmarks seem to have made their debut around the turn of the century, too. The wealth and depth of teams and nations involved in this outing is enough to labour any statistician’s breathing (Anyone for the Israeli Premier League?), and even manages to put today’s portable FIFAs, not to mention a certain Pro Evolution Soccer, to shame. Scottish football fans outside of the Old Firm won’t find any joy in FIFA 2007 for the Xbox 360, but their teams are all present and correct in this primitive kick - about.
Have the gall to kick off a football match, though, and those familiar bugbears come a-flooding back, multiplied by an entirely unnecessary power – up function for shots, crosses and passes. Though this has passed into standard fare for football games today, what you are presented with in FIFA 2002 is a function which is rough and far from complete. Passes of any description take an age to charge up, which means to get any power into a lob, you first need to ensure you have a few metres of defender – free space. What’s more, link – up play of any kind is made completely obsolete by the incredibly weak passes produced by the button taps which have become second nature to a generation of football fans who have never had it so good. Trying to set up a one – two, are you? Don’t be so God damn stupid. This is FIFA on the PSone.
Add to this major pain in the backside any complaints you have about FIFA today. Treacle – like pitches, you say? Players today react like Sonic the Hedgehog in comparison to this sorry lot. What’s that? Nonsensical shooting physics? In 2002, players in FIFA were likely to fire balls into the crowd, tap them out into touch, and blast them into the air - essentially, anywhere but the back of the net.
Still, FIFA 2002’s saving grace is the simple fact that it’s cute. What would have you biting you cheek or mashing your fists in childish frustration today is easy to laugh off in a game produced 7 years ago. When Henry messes up a shot which looked destined for the honey pot, it probably won’t cause you to scream expletives at the screen. Instead you’ll turn to a loved one, guffaw and say something to the tune of “Look, honey – we thought this was cutting edge once!” The fact that you paid less than the cost of a Happy Meal for the privilege can’t hurt, either.
What’s more, play the game on its own terms and it yields a playable, if basic, tactical game of football. Put in the effort with the ridiculous power bars and you’ll find yourself occasionally creating beautiful through ball maneuvers, even if these are outweighed by scores of frustrating miscalculations. Mash triangle (that’s right, because why just hold in R1 to sprint when you can give you thumbs RSI at the same time? Honestly, did we never think at the time that the feeling of speed could be re-created in a more sensible – and safer – way?) for long enough and you begin to see a strategy to the use of pace.
The sad truth, however, is that FIFA 2002’s real party trick is making you see the good in EA Sports more recent outings.

Free Online Game of the Month

Off Road Velociraptor Safari



Off Road Velociraptor Safari is utterly awesome. It's a browser based, 3D game in which you try to run over or bludgeon the other 'Raptors in the area. All it demands is a plugin download, but don't be put off, it takes all of twenty seconds to download and install, and you won't even have to restart your browser.

ORVS is a very accomplished little game. The graphics are impressive, the area the jeep gets to roam in is pretty sizeable, there are built in achievements, and it doesn't take long to load either. The gameplay is somewhere between Total Overdose's kill chaining and PGR's kudos system. There are many things that help you nab a better score, and if you can keep up the combos by doing more stuff, you'll score a fuckton of points. Killing the dinosaurs themselves is where the most fun lies. Your jeep trails a mace of sorts on the push of the Spacebar, and using a bit of skill and timing you can swing it round to smash the oversized chickens and hopefully stick them to it at the same time. The big points are grabbed by "Teleporting" the dinosaurs in the orange terminals scattered around the landscape, and you can pick up dinosaurs you've left lying around with the mace to assist you in doing so. It all works very well and is pretty complex and ambitious in scope for a simple browser game. What the hell are you still reading for, don't you have some time to waste?

One liner sum up: Go go Godzilla!

Bargain of the Month: Riiiiiidge Racer

Kaz Hirai's wet dream at a cut down price on PSP




Ridge Racer On Amazon Marketplace

Ah yes, good old Kaz. Not content with thrilling absolutely nobody with his Ridge Racer presentation at E3 2006, he only had to go and make it the funniest, most cringe worthy moment in the event's history with his now infamous imitation of the series' signature quote. He may have become the laughing stock of the gaming community in a few depressing moments, but his enthusiasm wasn't exactly unwarranted.

The pick of the launch titles along with Lumines and WipeOut Pure, Ridge Racer was something of a mini-revolution on Sony's portable powerhouse at the time, effectively single handedly ushering in an era of console-quality 3D gaming on the go. Blindingly fast, with superb controls and an awesome soundtrack filled to the brim with both old and new, it was the sparkling gem in PSP's considerable crown. Although its star has faded with time, it remains an utterly compelling and immensely enjoyable racing game, and indeed a contender for best game on the handheld.

Much of this is down to the racing itself; a fast, responsive and slick balancing act that demands a deft touch and strategic use of drift and boost to master, but very little in the way of skill to enjoy. It is reminiscent of Sega's blue sky games in the visual department, and has enough challenges to keep you interested for months, especially as it's basically a "Best Of" compilation for the series as a whole. In layman's terms, Ridge Racer is balls out fun, and now that it's out there for little over a fiver, anyone in posession of a PSP and indeed a central nervous system owes it to themselves to pick it up.

One liner sum up: IT'S RIIIIIDGE RACER!

Games You Should Not Buy

Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC

The first Rainbow 6 Vegas was a superb, tactical crawl through Sin City's most glamorous spots. It has a strong campaign, excellent multiplayer, and at the time was one of the best games to grace the year old 360. Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 arrived little over twelve months later with barely enough time to make sure its shoes were tied and its hair looked alright...and by God does it show.

"Rush job" is not a title we especially delight in branding games with. In the past it was the sort of tag associated with EA (particularly their sports franchises) until they got their act together, and isn't bandied about often. There's a reason for that; to most developers, their games are labours of love, so they spend an inordinate amount of time polishing it and striving to ensure it's a well presented and slick piece of software before releasing it into the wild. This doesn't appear to have been the case with R6V2. Ubisoft Montreal have released what is essentially an unfinished game. Don't criticise just yet, allow us to elaborate.

We aren't saying the development team didn't do their best for the game to be a success. What we're saying is that they needed more time. It's understandable that Ubisoft management wanted their sequel out the door and onto shelves as soon as humanly possible, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that not enough time was afforded for the Montreal studio to create the best product possible. Simply put, Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 is not a good game. Infact, it just barely scrapes into the realms of average.

Essentially it's the first game plus one. Then minus ten. Some locations are recycled and the plot follows the same old thread from a different viewpoint, dragging the player through Vegas' less glamorous side, including downtown areas, junkyards and large, empty convention centres. Unfortunately, this is not why anyone visits the place in the real world, and it doesn't exactly let you lap up the sights like the original did. The gameplay remains largely untouched, bar a few features "borrowed" from Call of Duty 4, and to its credit it is still solid in that aspect. The biggest new addition comes in the shape of persistent character building through all the modes, and it works well, giving you a real sense of attachment to your soldier as you build up points in the pretty nicely implemented ACES system for XP and other rewards.

So far, so R6V.5, but unfortunately the glitchy nature of the first game remains intact in an even greater degree. Considering it was the main complaint last time round this could be pretty hard to believe, but once you've had to actually give up on the campaign because it's running at under 30 fps and skipping 90% horrendously, you'll know what we mean. What could have been a solid if unremarkable squad based shooter turns into an utter farce of broken single player and incomprehensibly laggy online play. Once you actually get into a lobby, a Herculian task itself, you're left to contend with the unplayable mush Ubisoft try to pass off for multiplayer. Bullets don't connect, disconnections are rife, and it simply doesn't work half the time. It's unfinished, and this is whatwe noted previously, there obviously wasn't enough time to get the core issues ironed out.

Yes, R6V2 has some neat ideas, but there's nothing worse than an utterly broken game, and although some fun can be squeezed out from Co-Op Terrorist Hunts, it simply doesn't justify the hassle. There may seem few grounds for complaints otherwise, but there's no doubt that a large chunk of the players have had similar experiences, and this is the kind of practice that turns potentially decent games into ones that come within a stone's throw of dire. It doesn't help that the graphics are dated, the environments are boring and the crux of the game is nigh on identical to the first, but sadly problems like those we experienced exist are unforgivable and result only in the wasting of a good thirty pounds.

One liner sum up: "This city has a few too many sins to overlook"

4/10

News: GYSB Podcsat

Our brand new podcast can be found here. Currently, there exists only a test episode that I recorded at the weekend, however we're hoping to do another one every Tuesday night. The podcast team will be revealed when tonight's episode goes live. Make sure you give it a listen!

http://gamesyoushouldbuy.mypodcast.com/index.html

RUJOOGWHP

Random Unqualified Judgments On Old Games We've Hardly Played



This is the first of a regular feature, in which we take a demo of a game we haven't played and attempt to base a full review on it, to be known as the slickly titled "RUJOOGWHP". Fun, but you should probably ignore the text and try it out for yourself if you have more than a passing interest regarding the game in question.

Dark Messiah: Might and Magic for PC
Demo courtesy of Steam

The picture above pretty much sums up Dark Messiah. It's essentially all about hacking into loads of fugly orcs, goblins and hard looking blokes in armour until they fall over in a big dead heap. You can hit them, hit them harder, crush them with planks by hitting the support, kick them, kick them onto spikes and kick them off the edge of various high up places. Well, you can zap them with magic and shoot them with arrows, but these are mostly peripheral to the core concept of chopping things with swords and then booting them while they're on the floor.

As you perhaps guessed from the above paragraph, Dark Messiah is a no nonsense game. The only unwieldy elements are the skill upgrades, which end up being neglected in favour of kicking more goblins off cliffs. At first glance it seems a bit like Bethesda's classic Oblivion, and one could do worse for one's inspiration, however the similarities are largely superficial. Where Oblivion had an enormous open map to discover and pretty deep Role Playing, Dark Messiah has linear levels and the aforementioned RPG-lite level up system, where Oblivion had beauty and finesse, Dark Messiah has dank environments (even the outdoor ones) and a slightly clumsy touch. Where Oblivion had bugs, Dark Messiah, has, well, more bugs.

Still, it'd be unfair to compare it in this way as it's clearly not trying to be an Elder Scrolls game. What it's trying to be is a game where you derive fun from twatting stuff with an ever expanding arsenal of increasingly huge weapons, and to its credit, it pulls it off fairly well. Fun was certainly to be had with all the hitting and kicking, but there was a niggling feeling that it was all pretty much the same thing over and over, with some needless fetch-questing in levels seemingly there not to break up the action, but to prevent the player from engaging in it whatsoever.

Overall, Dark Messiah looks quite nice, sounds quite nice, and plays smoothly. The combat is fun- after all stoving in big, ugly Orc faces with maces will never get old- however the game has more than its fair share of issues and there are a few niggling doubts about how much you really are enjoying yourself. Nonetheless, it's worth a whack, with the kicking itself worth the $20 alone.

One liner sum up: "Kick creature off cliff; repeat for 15 hours"

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Demo Impressions

Lucasarts' latest effort shows its face on Marketplace

Previewed on Xbox 360

Pleasing people can sometimes be difficult; hundreds of thousands of budding comics, authors, musicians and directors will tell you that without hesitation. Sometimes it can be very easy, by, for instance, slapping "Star Wars" on the front of pretty much anything, from lunchboxes and drinks to shoddy sequels and games. If the logo's there, the happy faces will appear alongside the cash.

That's not to say that The Force Unleashed is your typical lazy, Lucas-branded cash-cow. Far from it, the game impresses on many levels, even in the short segment of time the demo allows. Stylistically, it seems to capture the Star Wars universe to a tee, while in purely graphical terms it cranks out an expansive array of lighting effects, anti-aliasing and explosions. The touted Euphoria AI is every bit as astounding as it was hyped to be, and although there wasn't a great opportunity to test it out, the DMM engine for realistically breakable objects looks tantalisingly worthy of the claims as well. Pretty much all the tech going on behind the scenes packs a considerable punch.

Sadly, the same can't be said for character movement. Simply running around and jumping feels nowhere near as meaty as it should be, and watching Starkiller leap about in an almost cartoonish fashion jars with the surprisingly lifelike AI and Physics. The lightsaber combat also falls victim to this. There is no sense of power to be had from your supposedly deadly weapon, and although they feel less like shiny batons than in some games in the franchise, you can't escape the fact that it's little more than a glorified stick.

Force Powers, on the other hand, work fantastically well. Endless fun can be had from picking up Stormtroopers and lobbing them around with Force Grab, Force Push busts open doors with aplomb, while Force Dash neatly serves as a dodge function when locked-on. The only power in the demo that seemed lacking was Force Lightning, with no real consequence from zapping an enemy other than them falling over like a pole. This spoils the illusion somewhat and is evidence that Euphoria is great for some elements of the AI, but not so much for others, as a simple animation would have better suspended one's disbelief on these occasions. When it comes down to it, the whole point of The Force Unleashed is to make the player feel as if they're in a Star Wars film, and when the player doesn't have this sensation for more than a second, the effect is ruined.

Were this an unlicensed game, we'd be chastising it, calling it foul, but, for the most part, it maintains the feeling of "being in" the films pretty well, and for that it must be commended. Though the combat seems a bit on the unimpressive side, the Force Powers are well implemented, the technology running everything on screen is polished and the score is a rousing halfway point between the Trilogies. Some small criticisms include the lock on system, which is a little odd and distracting as the camera adjusts to an unhelpful angle and the game sometimes struggles to find what you want to be facing. Similarly, the awkward character movement is often the only thing on the screen that appears stilted and out of place, causing it to stand out even more than it should. Sadly, given the nigh-on complete code of the demo level, none of this is likely to be altered before release. Overall though, The Force Unleashed looks set to be a boon for dedicated fans, who will be so amazed by how legitimately Star Wars an experience it is they'll need to pick their eyes up off the floor when they see it in action. It doesn't come close to justifying how much hype it's had, but when it hits shelves it will doubtless be an enjoyable romp through some familiar territory, although one wishes that little extra spit and polish had been applied that would have made all the difference.

One liner sum up: "The Force is average with this one"

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