Saturday 29 November 2008
Game of the Year Awards
For the next month or so, we'll be running our GOTY Awards right here at Games You Should Buy. As long as the game has been released at some point, in some territory this year, it is eligible (for example Rock Band, which came out last year in North America). It can be on any platform, and we'll dole out the awards by genre before the final three games are named between Christmas and New Year (giving us time to storm through any possible Christmas purchases). Please remember, GYSB is mostly just one guy, who doesn't own every platform under the sun, so for now, PS3, DS and PSP games will have to go unmentioned (although some may be included if they recieve glowing report cards from said guy's friends and online hangouts). Each genre will have a best game and one runner up, but the final award will have both a second and third best. Let's get started!
Wednesday 19 November 2008
Paul's excellent (PSone) Adventures
The column so old - school it points out its own sarcasm... NOT!
You know Worms, right? Team 17’s invertebrate mascots hell – bent on the destruction of one another, their motives more mysterious than that of the American military?
Well, the trio of forays into three – dimensional territory (Worms 3D, Worms Forts: Under Siege, and Worms 4, all available for Xbox, Playstation 2 and PC) may have tainted your memory of the original. Their unrelenting shittiness may even have given you the impression that Worms, as a series, is no good. But, as those who have played the recent handheld versions will attest, this impression is mistaken. 2D Worms still delivers big on mindless explosions and multiplayer thrills with a design scheme which has gone through only the most minor of changes in its decade of existence.
For those of you foolish or stubborn enough to have missed out on Worms or Worms Armageddon, there is much to learn. Our scene opens on a randomly – generated, simplistic landscape to which the general laws of physics apply (Up is up, down is down, and the latter has priority unless you can break your fall with some scenery), with some notable exceptions. Things blow up with no regard to what they are made of – so a rock is as easy to break through as a tree trunk, which in turn has the same properties as a satellite dish – and everything which isn’t a player is treated as a single object, so that a ladder propped up against a tree will not fall over when shot at. It’s traditional turn – based action / strategy with a huge variety of ker-azy weaponry, and oil barrels, land mines and the like are thrown in for good measure. Got it? No, of course you don’t. It becomes intuitive when you begin to play it, though, so just get your hands on the game and stop wasting our time. Believe us, you won’t regret it.
Team 17 and Infogrames have done a commendable job of skipping daintily along the line of throwaway plaything and heart – capturing avatar with Worms. When Charlie uses his final few breaths to mutter “Oh dear” after being shot to pieces by your wriggly horde, only the coldest of hearts would fail to feel for him. But then he explodes, leaving behind only a modest gravestone, and it’s time to concentrate on finishing off his mates.
And why wouldn’t you? The game seems to have found the pinnacle realisation of man’s incessant desire to maim and destroy, and it lies in placing ridiculously overpowered weaponry in the hands of the most timid of God’s creatures. Suffice to say this wouldn’t work with humans – can you imagine anybody having gleeful childhood memories of sending a bad guy to his watery grave at the hands of a baseball bat? Well, of course you can, we’re talking about videogames after all, but can you imagine the BBFC letting all this pass under their noses?
In the end, it’s this balance between chaotic violence and hilarious irrelevance that makes Worms Armageddon an accomplished single player, and virtually unparalleled multiplayer experience, all these years later.
Worms Armageddon
You know Worms, right? Team 17’s invertebrate mascots hell – bent on the destruction of one another, their motives more mysterious than that of the American military?
Well, the trio of forays into three – dimensional territory (Worms 3D, Worms Forts: Under Siege, and Worms 4, all available for Xbox, Playstation 2 and PC) may have tainted your memory of the original. Their unrelenting shittiness may even have given you the impression that Worms, as a series, is no good. But, as those who have played the recent handheld versions will attest, this impression is mistaken. 2D Worms still delivers big on mindless explosions and multiplayer thrills with a design scheme which has gone through only the most minor of changes in its decade of existence.
For those of you foolish or stubborn enough to have missed out on Worms or Worms Armageddon, there is much to learn. Our scene opens on a randomly – generated, simplistic landscape to which the general laws of physics apply (Up is up, down is down, and the latter has priority unless you can break your fall with some scenery), with some notable exceptions. Things blow up with no regard to what they are made of – so a rock is as easy to break through as a tree trunk, which in turn has the same properties as a satellite dish – and everything which isn’t a player is treated as a single object, so that a ladder propped up against a tree will not fall over when shot at. It’s traditional turn – based action / strategy with a huge variety of ker-azy weaponry, and oil barrels, land mines and the like are thrown in for good measure. Got it? No, of course you don’t. It becomes intuitive when you begin to play it, though, so just get your hands on the game and stop wasting our time. Believe us, you won’t regret it.
Team 17 and Infogrames have done a commendable job of skipping daintily along the line of throwaway plaything and heart – capturing avatar with Worms. When Charlie uses his final few breaths to mutter “Oh dear” after being shot to pieces by your wriggly horde, only the coldest of hearts would fail to feel for him. But then he explodes, leaving behind only a modest gravestone, and it’s time to concentrate on finishing off his mates.
And why wouldn’t you? The game seems to have found the pinnacle realisation of man’s incessant desire to maim and destroy, and it lies in placing ridiculously overpowered weaponry in the hands of the most timid of God’s creatures. Suffice to say this wouldn’t work with humans – can you imagine anybody having gleeful childhood memories of sending a bad guy to his watery grave at the hands of a baseball bat? Well, of course you can, we’re talking about videogames after all, but can you imagine the BBFC letting all this pass under their noses?
In the end, it’s this balance between chaotic violence and hilarious irrelevance that makes Worms Armageddon an accomplished single player, and virtually unparalleled multiplayer experience, all these years later.
Tuesday 18 November 2008
Review: Mirror's Edge
Fundamentally, Mirror's Edge is a game about balance. During those tentative first steps, it's literally about not falling from the ledges, poles and bars that seem oh so daunting to cross. Once the controls have been acclimatised to, it's a case of keeping encounters in check and learning how to deal with disarms and hand-to-hand combat. Finally, as Faith's movements become muscle memory and the Speed Runs tower ahead, it's about balancing the insatiable lust for speedy shortcuts and risky jumps with the safer, more assured routes: go too fast and you'll inevitably fall to your doom and force a restart, but go too slow and you'll simply take too long.
Ignore the dissenting voices. When you're sprinting desperately down a corridor, pulse racing, palms sweaty, ignoring the wailing sirens and the bullets shattering the scenery around you, gaze fixated on that one point fifty yards ahead, it hits you like a brick wall. This is nirvana, the pure gameplay moment that so many seek yet fail to achieve. MMOs deliver something comparable, but it's drip-fed, for the patient and the patient alone. Perhaps Mirror's Edge's most astounding trait is that it can, depending on skill of course, provide that thrill within a matter of hours.
There's so much to praise in Faith's world. The arresting visual design, the pitch perfect score, the superbly realised level layouts, the tightest controls this side of a spaceship... but let's get some things out of the way. Mirror's Edge has been pretty heavily criticised by some quarters of the gaming press. They feel frustrated, cheated, and short changed. They are flat out wrong. Almost every single time something goes awry, it's the player's fault. Ineptitude is not a flaw. Secondly, the game's length is not an issue given the tremendous replay value. If anything it's as much Radiant Silvergun as it is Prince of Persia, the quest to repeat certain sections until they are hard-wired to the fingers; hours and hours can be sunk into this game if approached with the correct mindset. Last, and most importantly, it seems many have missed the point. The whole angle was to create a first person platforming game, not a Lara Croft reskin. It does what Portal did for the puzzle genre last year. The immersion is paramount to the experience, the player is meant to feel at one with Faith. If escapism is the reason we play videogames, Mirror's Edge hits the mark absolutely dead on.
Of course there comes a time in every single high scoring game review when the reader is informed that "___ is not perfect". This remains a truth for Mirror's Edge, obviously, but it comes within frightening distance of that Holy Grail. There are problems with Faith's characterisation. It's not a case of Masterchief syndrome whereby the player is meant to envisage themselves in the suit, because we already have a talkative, established character in place. This works for third person games, when we appear to be merely influencing what this preconceived avatar is doing, but one can't help but feel strangely detached from the character one is meant to be. This surfaces only during the jarring hand-drawn cutscenes, which in themselves add nothing meaningful to the storyline. They look out of place and infact serve to the detriment of the experience overall. Why could they not just be rendered in-engine, from the same viewpoint as the rest of the game? The plot is also a relatively throwaway affair, nothing that hasn't been done a thousand times previously, and the thinly veiled loading times so prevalent in modern gaming are by no means dispelled. However, dwelling upon these hangups becomes mind-numbingly irrelevant about thirty seconds into a level as the already slight feelings of ill will are washed away.
It's difficult to say whether DICE are aware exactly what they have created. Mirror's Edge is an incredible piece of software. The studio has nailed each and every crucial element with such considerable equanimity and poise that it truly sticks out like a sore thumb among the reams of first person action games that rely so heavily on catering to the atavistic urges of young men and little else. There are those who are afraid of change, but Mirror's Edge dares to be different, and incase you hadn't guessed, it succeeds in nigh on every feasible aspect. That is why it has earned the very highest accolade. That is why you need to play this game.
10/10
One-liner sum up: ...
One Year On
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
It's been interesting to see the criticisms of this third installment of Infinity Ward shit crawl out of the internet's woodwork over the course of this year. Cries of balancing issues, infinitely respawning enemies and a lack of fixes for some aspects of the online play have surfaced recently, and they aren't totally unfounded. However, it's not too much a stretch of the imagination to think of this as a not too subtle example of familiarity breeds contempt. It's not uncommon to enter a lobby of sixteen to hear at least half complain that they "hate this effing game", but a quick glance at their spot on the leaderboards and their playtime of the online aspect tells a different story altogether.
Yes, there are many out there who have been playing the same maps and the same modes, using the same loadouts and the same tactics, with the same perks and the same friends that they have been for a full twelve months now, and going back to play it objectively, as if one were someone who had never touched the game before, will indubitably display exactly why so many have suffered for so many hours for so few Gamerpoints. It's a thrilling, engaging, intense experience, one of a sort that only a select few games can claim to deliver. The visuals are gorgeous, creating a unique atmosphere in amongst all the dilapidated greyness. The sound is a symphony of chaos, as wood splinters around you and dust flies up into the camera amongst the thunderous cacophony of the perfectly weighted weaponry. All of these elements gel into what is a pretty exceptional whole.
Aside from perk imbalance with the online modes, Call of Duty 4 remains a glimmering beacon of concentrated insanity, a perfect storm burned to disc that stands out from the "Shoulder-Pad FPS" crowd not because it reinvents the wheel, but because it is such a refined vision of what one could expect from an action game. Call of Duty virgins eager for some blasting could do a lot worse than pick this one up at a knockdown price; for instance, pay £50 for its sequel, World at War. A year later, CoD4 still stands head and shoulders above its peers.
It's been interesting to see the criticisms of this third installment of Infinity Ward shit crawl out of the internet's woodwork over the course of this year. Cries of balancing issues, infinitely respawning enemies and a lack of fixes for some aspects of the online play have surfaced recently, and they aren't totally unfounded. However, it's not too much a stretch of the imagination to think of this as a not too subtle example of familiarity breeds contempt. It's not uncommon to enter a lobby of sixteen to hear at least half complain that they "hate this effing game", but a quick glance at their spot on the leaderboards and their playtime of the online aspect tells a different story altogether.
Yes, there are many out there who have been playing the same maps and the same modes, using the same loadouts and the same tactics, with the same perks and the same friends that they have been for a full twelve months now, and going back to play it objectively, as if one were someone who had never touched the game before, will indubitably display exactly why so many have suffered for so many hours for so few Gamerpoints. It's a thrilling, engaging, intense experience, one of a sort that only a select few games can claim to deliver. The visuals are gorgeous, creating a unique atmosphere in amongst all the dilapidated greyness. The sound is a symphony of chaos, as wood splinters around you and dust flies up into the camera amongst the thunderous cacophony of the perfectly weighted weaponry. All of these elements gel into what is a pretty exceptional whole.
Aside from perk imbalance with the online modes, Call of Duty 4 remains a glimmering beacon of concentrated insanity, a perfect storm burned to disc that stands out from the "Shoulder-Pad FPS" crowd not because it reinvents the wheel, but because it is such a refined vision of what one could expect from an action game. Call of Duty virgins eager for some blasting could do a lot worse than pick this one up at a knockdown price; for instance, pay £50 for its sequel, World at War. A year later, CoD4 still stands head and shoulders above its peers.
Tuesday 11 November 2008
RUJOOGWHP
Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball on Xbox 360
Ah, this old nugget. An argument that has raged for eons; who is actually cooler, pirates or ninjas? PvND sets out to finally put that to rest (along with robots and zombies thrown in for good measure), but does it measure up to the epic real life battles we're sure the two sides have had in the past (so what if they never coexisted!)?
No, it really can't measure up to these crazy battles that we talked about whilst tripping on some sugar-spliced variant of Acid. Infact, it's not very good at all...
The biggest issue here is the camera. It never seems zoomed out enough, and when a character runs to the edge of the screen the game's controls and ideed the player's senses aren't able to cope. Who'd have thoguht that placing something off screen would make it difficult to control?
Other than that, there's the overly vague nature of the play itself, which simply requires you point your stick roughly in the direction of your foe and mash some buttons. That said, there are some neat touches such as parries and catches, however once sussed they effectively break the game as no further skills are required.
There's a degree of fun to be had, the cartoony visuals are nice enough and dodging with the right stick never gets old. It's a shame then, that in the end, it's the frankly baffling design choices that hamper Pirates vs Ninjas dodgeball beyond repair. A lack of stages (seemingly just four) and little to discern between the three modes means this is one you should probably steer clear of, never mind waste Microsoft Points on.
One liner sum up: Thar she blows!
Ah, this old nugget. An argument that has raged for eons; who is actually cooler, pirates or ninjas? PvND sets out to finally put that to rest (along with robots and zombies thrown in for good measure), but does it measure up to the epic real life battles we're sure the two sides have had in the past (so what if they never coexisted!)?
No, it really can't measure up to these crazy battles that we talked about whilst tripping on some sugar-spliced variant of Acid. Infact, it's not very good at all...
The biggest issue here is the camera. It never seems zoomed out enough, and when a character runs to the edge of the screen the game's controls and ideed the player's senses aren't able to cope. Who'd have thoguht that placing something off screen would make it difficult to control?
Other than that, there's the overly vague nature of the play itself, which simply requires you point your stick roughly in the direction of your foe and mash some buttons. That said, there are some neat touches such as parries and catches, however once sussed they effectively break the game as no further skills are required.
There's a degree of fun to be had, the cartoony visuals are nice enough and dodging with the right stick never gets old. It's a shame then, that in the end, it's the frankly baffling design choices that hamper Pirates vs Ninjas dodgeball beyond repair. A lack of stages (seemingly just four) and little to discern between the three modes means this is one you should probably steer clear of, never mind waste Microsoft Points on.
One liner sum up: Thar she blows!
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