On holiday

I'll make no attempt to hide that this post has been written in advance and then scheduled to publish today. The reason for this pre-record (as I'm told they call it in radio and TV circles, and I figured that if I start comparing the games industry to radio - instead of movies - I might be at the forefront of some exciting new stupid internet arguments this year) is because I'm on holiday.

Which means that as you're reading this I should be spending some proper time with the DS games I've bought but haven't got around to looking at beyond the tutorial levels - in particular PicPic and Soul Bubbles. Though it all kind of depends on whether my DS manages to survive the beach, since about six months go the little plastic ratchet things that keep the lid open at certain angles snapped off. Now I have a floppy DS.

So I might not be playing much DS. Being away from the gaming comforts of home (if you imagine that I won't have my iPod Touch with me either, though I'm not sure what the score is with chargers where we're going, and playing games on that eats the battery faster than a PSP) will be good in other ways though. I will hopefully get around to reading some books I've had on a pile next to my bed for ages (the Design of Everyday Things, Richard Herrin's Bye Bye Balham, and Charlie Brooker's Dawn of the Dumb).

And finally I can try out a new gadget, which is always good. I bought myself a waterproof digital camera. So hopefully I should come back with some ace pictures of fish from my snorkelling.

Non-holiday stuff I have been up to recently...

I finished Gears of War 2. Even at the end it left me with the feeling that yes, it was all very exciting, but it was still very bitty, with each section having its own special new rule or element that you have to pay attention to. It also seemed to focus quite a bit on vehicle sections that I thought were rubbish for the most part, and downright confusing in sections. It wouldn't surprise me if, even though it feels like a longer game than the first Gears, it turned out that measured section for section, there is less time spent doing the core "in cover, shooting enemies" gameplay that I bought it for. Really nice blood effects at the end of the second act, though.

And finally, for this update, I watched the Hitman movie (based off the IO Interactive game series, if you didn't know). Timothy Olyphant wasn't vey good at all in the lead role, he looked far too young and his voice was just odd - for half of his "menacing" lines he sounded like his voice would crack and he was about to cry. The love interest angle seemed very out of place too.

47's bodycount in the movie is also surprisingly high, which doesn't really fit with the intention of the games that you should be able to finish each level by only killing the target and leaving other people with a headache at worst. But after thinking about it I realised that the film matched what tends to happen when I play Hitman - a disguise eventually fails, and from that point on I have to shoot my way in and out. Usually about five minutes into a level.

Falling out

(To give a bit of background, this is a post I made to a message board when I was asked how I was finding Fallout 3. For something that's been pretty much roundly given the game of the year award, I thought it was interesting to look back on my early game experience - I think at this point I was around level 8, had just found Rivet City in the main quest, and had done a couple of side quests with my character, who was generally leaning towards good karma and small guns for combat. I've edited it to add more detail where I thought I was being too brief.)

I seem to spend a lot of time not managing to shoot things even in VATS (in fact, that seems to make my accuracy even worse a lot of the time, and I can't move while I'm shooting, so I often get mauled if there's more than one enemy), and running low on ammo and health (though I just got a perk that gives me more ammo, and I've started getting better weapons more reliably).

Having to carry around 5 of the same weapon so you can repair yours when it turns to dust in your hands is great fun. (At this stage I wasn't finding assault rifles regularly, so my hoarding instinct was kicking in.)

It's incredibly brown and grey. The entire main city bit is build like a fucking maze linked together by dull subways, so you can't just look at the map at a place you want to go, fast travel to the nearest place, and head straight there, because chances are the place you're heading to is in some stupid isolated pocket surrounded by unclimbable wrecked road.

Super mutants are shit. I wish it would fuck off with them. If you wanted to put orcs in your sci-fi game, just call them space orcs and be done with it. Same point can be made with the zombies, I'm feeling very let down by their reliance on staple fantasy enemies.

That perky bitch in Megaton who's writing a book is the only funny thing I've encountered so far. Megaton itself is a horrible maze of a place that I can get lost in, which might be atmospheric, but I find deeply annoying when I just want to find a specific person or building.

When VATS does let me make a good shot and I take a raider's head off with one bullet, that feels ace. Some of the dynamic camera stuff the targetting thing does is nice too.

The core of the whole thing is a very outdated RPG with pages of numbers that it never really explains to you (and I know I should expect to have to read the manual for a role playing game, but urgh I just, like, can't be bothered, you know?), and daft experience / levelling up that has no relation to what you've done in the game. I need "lockpicking" 50 before I can even attempt to pick some locks, and "science" 50 before I can attempt to crack the code of some computers (even though they both use the same mechanics as lower versions). Oblivion wasn't nearly as backwards thinking as this - I can only guess they did it to stop Fallout fans from killing them for making it more FPSish.

The main inventory / HUD thing uses a horrible font and colour and cramps everything into the middle of the screen for no good reason other than to fit with their explanation of the gadet in the game world. Although it doesn't fit because it makes no sense that a thing on my arm knows how many assault rifles I'm carrying, what "perks" I have, or how many luck points I have. So it would have just been nicer to use well designed and laid out menus that I could read more easily.

It will let you give things away to shop keepers for free without properly warning you that they can't afford to pay. When you do that, the shopkeeper doesn't even call you a sucker or make any comment afterwards.

So yeah, basically I'm not entirely sure how much fun I'm having with it, despite having logged around 13 hours (at least, since that doesn't count the reloaded save from when I started doing a side question then halfway through realised I was nowhere near leveled up enough for it, but was too low on health and ammo to fight my way back out past the giant scorpions again). I keep expecting for it to break into its stride and really wow me with something cool.

iTouch myself

If you own an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you might be fooled into thinking there aren't many good games for it. The decent to crap ratio of games on the app store is frightenly low, and when adverts are heavily pushing the frame-rate impaired Crash Bandicoot Kart Racing (or whatever it's called, research has never been high on my list of editing priorities), it would be easy to think everything is rubbish.

To help you out, here are some that I like (with the store links, if I can work out how on earth to make that work).

TanZen (link is to the free Lite version). A simple puzzle game based around placing geometric shapes to fill in an outline. I had a non-computer version of this as a kid, which is probably why it appeals to me. The author keep spublishing updates with new puzzles in too, which is nice.

Enigmo Another puzzle game, in this one you have to direct the flow of liquids using a limited set of pieces.

Solebon (link is to the free version). Solitaire.Not a lot else to say really, though the presentation and controls are nice and slick. It would have been easy to go a bit mad and royally cock this up.

SPiN A fast paced puzzle game. You're given a 3d object, and an outline of that shape in a certain rotation. By using the intuitive touch screen controls, you have to rotate the shape to fit the outline before the timer runs out. Another game with really excellent presentation.

Hero of Sparta The simplest way of describing this is "God of War lite, on the iPhone". A great example of how the gadget is capable of more than just quick hit casual games.

Snail Mail Like the bonus stages from Sonic 2, only with tilt controls that actually work.

It's not a time for kids really, Christmas

I do like Christmas. Lots of lovely holiday to catch up on games, punctuated at regular intervals by stuffing myself silly with food and booze, and meeting up with family. And the weather's so bloody cold nobody thinks bad of you for staying inside all day. I've had a couple of weeks off so far, mostly dominated by Fallout 3 which I'm enjoying more now than when I started (due to the incredibly amateur way I have ordered things for publishing I think the post about that won't have gone up yet. I am great at this, me), but still feels oddly hollow, like I'm just ticking off quests so that I can say that I've done them. Still, do them I will. And every now and then something happens that I enjoy a lot, such as killing everyone in the Republic of Dave for not letting me vote.

I have also managed to get a few hours on co-op Gears of War 2. I really enjoyed playing through the first one's story campaign because I did the whole thing with a friend. So far (just on the second main level at the moment) it's good, though doesn't feel as focussed to me - each encounter feels engineered to provide a different combat experience, or introduce a new weapon or element. Which is an odd complaint, I know - they would have been mauled by critics if they'd just left it as 5 levels of the same run and gun action as the first. But nevertheless it feels slightly "bitty".

While visiting family my Lego mad nephew found out that his uncle worked on a game based around Bionicle. At the time I hated the stuff, but looking at the sets he's been given by Santa, it seems that they've started to make some real effort with them. Anyway, the bits and pieces of information I could remember from five years ago paid off, and I was able to wow him with my knowledge of Toa names and elements. Then I got told there is a Bionicle game on the Lego website which is much better than the one I worked on, which might have been an innocent but cutting remark, if I didn't view our game as the worst thing I've ever done. So I just laughed along and later added another five seconds to my internal "how long have I spent feeling bitter about those six months" timer. Seven hours so far. You could play Bionicle from start to finish seven times in that!

Just before Christmas Free Radical Design went into administration, which must be a blow to their hard working staff. There are interesting stories coming out now, though, which often happens in these situations - people who kept quiet before for fear of losing their jobs are telling all now that they have nothing left. I'm sure the good guys will have no trouble finding new employment.

Right, I'm off to hunt through online sales and see if there are any bargains. I was expecting Left 4 Dead to be cheap by now, so I could add it to my pile of as-yet-unplayed stuff. But it doesn't look like it.

PS - Game of the year (since every website and blog is contractually obliged to provide such a thing) was Fable 2. Everything I was expecting it to be and more.

PPS - The banner image is from Kristmas Kombat, which is about the true meaning of the holiday season. No idea if it's any good, I just liked the picture.

Mediocre-At-Best Company, More Like

Hello chums (the seven of you that StatCounter informs me reliably visit every day). I've been a bad blogger again. I know. I had the best intentions, but work and home life still conspired against me. Whatever time I got to jot down thoughts on games I had been playing and news I had been reading, resulted in bullet point lists. I put the lists into blogger for editing into proper posts at a later date, but I never really found that editing time, and when I did, the posts were so out of date it started to feel a little pointless. So, in the New Year I'm going to try again. Honestly. But before then (and probably during then, since there are a few of them) I'm going to do a quick editing job on the handful of posts I'd already written, and publish those (unless the editing job consists of "what the hell was I thinking?" and I delete it). Just keep in mind that some of these are quite old. And now on to your scheduled content...

I had been playing Battlefield Bad Company on the Xbox, borrowed off a colleague. It was something that I'd been interested in, but had always thought might not be worth shelling out for myself (what with me not really being into playing endless hours of zero sum competative multiplayer). I was right. When your first bullet point issue with a game is "not sure if I'm enjoying it" you shouldn't be too surprised when you stop being bothered to play as soon as something else comes along (I think it may have been a Lego game that stole my interest).

The player can die in the single player, but if you do you just respawn slightly back from the combat with full ammo again. Given that I spent a lot of my time in firefights running low on ammo, it ended up with the very odd situation of dying being a blessing, since I'd get restocked in both health and weaponry, and any enemies I'd killed would stay dead. I'm sure there's a good game to be made around the high concept of killing yourself to progress, but this isn't it -  the resulting missions became a monotonous slog of taking out a few enemies, dyinging, walking back to the combat, and repeating.

The open levels are probably great for multiplayer, but were bad for single player. They are pretty but sparse, and the levels drag on for ages. Each one is a series of combat set pieces in a small area of the map, linked together by a boring journey to the next rendezvous point.

The guns and explosions are very nice. Great sound effects. Cutting down trees with explosions & gunfire is ace, especially in the rare occasions when a falling piece of foliage lands on and kills an enemy.

The USP of blowing up buildings is cool, but limited. You can't totally flatten a building, and buildings that will be needed later in the mission are impervious to damage. Buildings have pretty much no furniture in them so by midway through the second level I was getting confused and a bit lost going between identical looking shells of buildings, trying to remember which one had the heavy weapon I needed to pick up in it.

A major game crime in my opinion - No subtitle option. So late at night with the sound turned down to avoid waking up my wife, and the jet engine in my 360 blaring, I can't follow what the characters are talking about in the cutscenes.

And in a similar vein, there's also no brightness setting. Seriously, fuck off with "adjust your TVs settings for this one game", I'm very clearly not going to do that and screw up the settings for every other game I play am I?

Fable 2

Fable 2 is a wonderful game. Absolutely riddled with minor glitches & bugs*, but still everything I was expecting, and it is brilliant.

I will say at this point that I was a fan of the first Fable (possibly because I never listened to the hype before it came out, and then pushed through the fairly boring first chapter at the hero school). Fable 2 is a classic sequel - it includes everything from the original, and expands and improves on it in every way.

One of the main things that I love so much about the game is how focussed it is on leading the player by carrot instead of stick. It's literally impossible to die in - the worst that happens is you get "knocked out", respawn back on the spot, lose some experience, and any experience still lying around is lost too - so the consequences of getting in above your head are pretty much non-existant. Another great touch is that after spending experience to improve your character you have to option to sell the upgrades back, and reclaim some of the points. This gets around one thing I always hate with RPGs - that they expect you to pick skills and attributes for your character at the start of the game, when you don't know what might be useful. To take Fallout 3 as a recent example, "Heavy Weapons" sounds like it could be a good skill, but before playing the game for some time you have no idea how prolific the ammunition you need to make use of it actually is.

But back to Fable 2 - it's very charming, with interesting and funny characters throughout and a massive amount of great lines for the villagers and enemies. Hearing foes lament their comrade's death because he owed them a pint, or walking past a house at night an overhearing a child's nightmare really help to draw you in to the world and make you smile. The cutscene dialogue is also good, though often let down horribly by what I can only assume is a limitation of their scripting system that has resulted in some terrible pacing that leaves huge gaps between sentences.

The only bit that annoyed me was the obligatory arena quest, and that wasn't hard, it was more of a "oh fuck's sake, why does every fantasy game need some osrt of arena where you battle increasingly difficult waves of monsters for the entertainment of the general population?" frustration.

Finally, the online implementation of seeing "orbs" that show where your friends (or any number of other players, if you want) are in game is cooler than I thought it would be. Someone gave me a huge warhammer, which was nice, and to "pass it on" I gave a friend a very good sword that I had no need for. You could probably break the game's balancing very easily in this way, but it really doesn't seem to care since it gives you enough other ways that you could break it yourself if you wanted to (the economy and sales seem almost deliberately designed for this). As I said before, I've never seen an RPG be this free and easy with its boundaries, and carrot not stick before.

The worst thing about Fable 2 by far has been that I have Fallout 3 to play, and it feels so stuck in its RPG ways, and so dour, and brown, and humourless, that I've been put off playing much of it at all.

* I know there are a lot of people out there who had much more than minor bugs, and with the game's limited save files I can see that being deeply annoying. But I never experienced anything outside of the minor visual category in over 30 hours of play. I guess Fable loves me too.

A Complete 360

My replacement Xbox turned up a week ago. Thankfully this time I've been sent an entirely new one, rather than a refurbished one. It's much quieter than any of the Xboxes I've owned or borrowed from work, and hopefully that's a good sign.

So, after two weeks of being Xbox deprived (so deprived in fact, that I even resorted to playing Haze on the PS3) I have finally been able to dive into Fable 2, which is amazing (but more on that later).

I just need to get the time to crack on with Fallout 3 now. And Gears of War 2. And Saints Row 2. And Little Big Planet. And FarCry 2. And Midnight Club. And finish off Lego Batman.