Christmas!

So christmas is nearly upon us, and I'm away for a break. There will be large hills, possibly mountains and hopefully snow. I'll be back in the new year.

In the meantime there is much to do, including DS multiplayer over Christmas with the family, getting past Bayonetta's annoying hypersexualisation, and ludicrously over the top cutscenes to find the clearly great game that's hiding behind it all and compiling a best of the last year, since everyone else seems to be doing it.

I'm the sort that tends to be late to the game, so a lot of my best of will probably wind up being games years old. I'm not going to apologize for that and I'm not even going to try to make it 2012 releases only. The plan is, if I played it in the past year and it was memorable in any way it's going in. I'm going to slip in an early  honorable mention to Star Wars Racer on the N64 for reminding me that Star Wars isn't all bad and also that splitscreen after beer rocks. After that you probably already know to expect to see some oldies.

So, a Merry Christmas to one and all. I hope you all get exactly what you wish for. Thanks for helping my blog take off and soar. Here's hoping for greater heights in the year to come!

A guest post! About a not quite shambling corpse.

Today sees the blog’s first guest post. One by a friend of mine. He’s offering up an alternative view on The Walking Dead, and while it differs with the correct perspective one should have upon such things (ie, my own) I'm going to serve it up in the spirit of balance, and also, because he's my mate.

So, here it is:

You know what really grinds my gears (of war)? People whose opinion was subconsciously swayed by the last 10 minutes of The Walking Dead and now think it’s the best game ever.

An old photo of myself and my guest blogger.

So, a little about myself, the guy who has now made himself about as popular as the perpetrators of the ending of Mass Effect 3 with that comment. I’m a frenemy of our resident blogger and have known him since we were kids. We’re something like Sonic and Knuckles circa Sonic 3, before the countless annoying allies multiplied out of all control, like how I imagine Cream's offspring would. Yeah. Anyhow, I’m here to provide an alternate (better) opinion to that of our resident blogger.

Things start off well in The Walking Dead. I would go as far to say that episodes 2 and 3 provide some of gaming’s greatest moments. The decisions you were forced to make were compellingly horrifying, enhanced by the believable reactions from a group of fellow travellers that you could never ever fully trust.

So it’s such a shame that it goes downhill from then on. Episode 4 introduces some rather bland characters to replace those that we bonded with from the first 3 episodes. Is it possible that Telltale Games realised this and thus overcompensated with too many action sequences? This ended up with several zombies being annihilated with ease and thus losing the feel of earlier episodes which generated enormous fear when you were faced with even one of these vile creatures. Did Telltale Games forget that it was the harrowing outcomes from your impossible decisions which provided a psychological onslaught on your soul? Because if not, then why did we have to sit through overly laboured scenes like that burial? 

To be fair, the end of episode 4 did leave a superb cliff hanger which left me willing to forgive the discretions of that episode. That was until I played episode 5.

Episode 5 was always going to be a difficult feat to pull off. However, I feel that Telltale Games dropped the ball here. Episode 4 was too long thanks to those action sequences and felt more bloated than a Boomer from Left 4 Dead.  Episode 5 overcorrected that by being far too short. The kidnapping cliff hanger was a huge disappointment and merely served to give you a dull summary of some of the decisions you made earlier on. There was also a lack of tough moral choices to make and the complete lack of robust gameplay in the series was especially highlighted in this episode, a sin which escaped scrutiny in previous episodes.  However, the most frustrating aspect of the episode was the feeling that the majority of those decisions you made over the last 15 hours or so were never meant to have the sort of impact you dreamt it would have on the story. It’s certainly not as unforgivable as Mass Effect 3 (Marauder Shields, we will NEVER forget you!) but given the compellingly amoral nature of the game, I had hoped for much better.

With all that said, I still really enjoyed The Walking Dead, especially the earlier episodes. The voice acting was of a high quality and the script had some truly powerful moments, some of which our resident blogger has already highlighted. The relationship between Lee and Clementine will go down as one of the greatest in video gaming history. Our resident blogger doesn’t have a heart of stone – Princess Peach is more of a man than he is. I, however, do possess a heart of stone, and I’m not afraid to admit to the tear that rolled down my cheek in those final 10 minutes of episode 5. Upon reflection on writing this blog, maybe that ending was incredible enough for me to forgive all the mistakes Telltale Games made in episodes 4 and 5.  Maybe.

All I can say is roll on Season 2.

An Honorable Mention

I did something amazing the other day, I finished a game less than six months old. I’m usually way behind with playing the latest releases, simply because it’s hard to find the time to play them all, but I saw Dishonored at half price, and well, you can’t pass up an offer like that can you?

I have to say I’m really, really impressed with Dishonored, both with the game itself and the developers for taking a chance on an ambitious new IP like this. It’s that rarest of beasts, a single player only adventure and a new name on the shelf. And while Dishonored is not quite a masterpiece, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute I spent in the whalerpunk city of Dunwall. After Fable’s Albion, Dunwall is the most English feeling fantasy world I’ve ever set foot in, game, book or movie. It feels like a hyper industrialised Dickensian London, complete with rats, dingy alleys, an uncaring aristocracy and English accents throughout. A fact made even more astounding when you discover that Dunwall’s creators, Arkane Studios, are French.

I say all the time that a great setting helps to make a great game, and it seems that Arkane agree with me. Advertisements for refined whale oil and whiskey are posted to the sides of houses. Propaganda booms over the loudspeakers. Notices about tax and the rat plague appear on street corners, and there is art everywhere. Landscapes of Dunwall, images of whaling ships, portraits of the great and good of the aristocracy pepper abandoned and flooded mansions, and in the Golden Cat , a ‘bathhouse’, portraits of women of ill repute dominate the walls. The art is universally fantastic too. I found myself stopping to get a closer look at many of the paintings I passed on my way through the game. Also scattered around the city are notes and books that help flesh out the history and culture of Dunwall. They can range from the lyrics of “What shall we do with the Drunken Whaler,” to excerpts from plays, to notes on the occult, to Bioshock style audiologs. You can see all the thought and all the work that has gone into giving the game a sense of place. It all serves to make Dunwall feel less like a construction of polygons and textures and more like a lived in, and dying, city.

I get the feeling that Bioshock was quite the influence on Dishonored as it developed. From its first person viewpoint and watery setting, to a couple of pivotal game mechanics. Like Bioshock, the left and right triggers control your left and right hands. In your right hand is a fairly conventional sword. You swing it about in the conventional manner, stabbing people in the conventional way. To me, first person sword combat often never feels like much more than swinging your virtual arm around, hoping to hit something. In Dishonored, the sword combat is slightly better than that. Enemies react to where you hit them, and Corvo, the game’s lead, will often grab his assailants and execute them in a satisfyingly gruesome manner. The left hand is where the Bioshock influence comes. Corvo has supernatural powers, gained from collecting runes, and can augment his abilities with bone charms. Switch Runes for Adam, Bone charms for Gene Tonics and Powers for Plasmids and you will understand everything you need to know about what the left trigger controls. Even the health and mana bars in Dishonoured are the same colours as Bioshock’s health and Eve bars.

The powers aren’t a straight rip off though. Where Bioshock’s plasmids were mostly offensive, Dishonored’s powers are more neutral. They tend to be aimed at helping you traverse Dunwall as quickly and as silently as possible. Key abilities such as the short range teleport, time manipulation and the (brilliantly fun to unleash) Rat Swarm can be chained with offensive moves to create some really interesting and fun combat options. Personally, one of the reasons I’ll be replaying the game will be to experiment more with them.

I had a few minor gripes, the main one being that the game actively encourages a quicksave and retry style of play that might work fine on the PC but is a bit of a pain to do on my Xbox. Frequently flicking in and out of menus to save after a particularly difficult section really breaks the flow of the game and the it breaks the immersion too. I also would like to have been told that my style of play would affect how the game ended after I had finished the game. Being told this in the loading screens meant that I automatically held back on the carnage to make sure I got the good ending. After all, who doesn't like a good ending? I would have preferred to have been surprised. Really though, they are minor things and didn’t affect my enjoyment of the game so much as to ruin the experience. My main issue with Dishonored isn’t a gameplay issue at all. I found my immersion in the world Arkane have created was slightly broken by the wooden animation of the NPCs, particularly the facial animation. Okay, it's leagues better than the typical Bethesda dead from the jaw upwards work, and in freeze frame it can look quite good but it isn’t great, especially when you compare it to the stellar animation in games like Uncharted 3, Enslaved or Final Fantasy XIII. Hell, Portal 2’s personality cores were more expressionate than any character in Dishonored, and personality cores don’t even have faces.

Also, while I’m ranting. Why on earth is Corvo a silent protagonist? He clearly has a personality. You only have to look at the way he treats Emily to see that. He even has lines of dialogue, to a degree, in the options that flash up on screen when you interact with somebody. I would have felt more for Corvo, if he had a voice and a personality, if I understood his motivations and his relationships with the other members of the cast. Denying him a voice seems to be missing a trick. That said, the rest of the cast, and the excellent voice work provided for them, help to deliver a very enjoyable story. It’s simple, yet effective, with a satisfyingly organic and human final act. You can understand why the antagonist has done what he has.

All in all, despite the rant, Dishonored is a fabulous game. My issues may not necessarily be a problem for you, and in the grand scheme of things they aren't a problem for me either. I enjoyed every moment I spent in Dunwall and I’ve been recommending it to everyone I know who plays games. I’ll be playing it again, and I think I’d like to see a sequel too, if only to visit Dunwall again and see if Arkane have given Corvo a voice. 

Now, I'm finally going to get round to starting Bayonetta. I've only had it for six months...

You had me at WipeOut

Those who know me know I like WipeOut. I mean I really like WipeOut. I love the graphics, the handling, the sleek, minimalist aesthetic, the consistently fantastic and bang on trend soundtracks, the lot.

It’s responsible for a lot of snap decisions to buy a console that in the past have wound up being pretty fruitful. I decided on a Playstation when I first played WipeOut 2097 at a school friend's house and it’s a decision I feel I will never regret. Mainly because Wip3Out came out two years later and glued itself into my disc tray. To a lesser extent, the same goes for WipeOut Fusion for the PS2, which I never really mastered, and WipeOut HD on the PS3, which I most certainly have mastered.

Recently I tried WipeOut HD in 3D and I was sold instantly. After years of scepticism over 3D cinema, suddenly it made sense. Somehow there wasn’t even any of the ghosting which puts me off seeing a 3D film at the cinema. It was smooth as silk. Vineta K looked beautiful as it stretched into the distance, and watching my quake disruptor disappear into the screen was just incredible Admittedly one race at Rapier Class did completely fry my retinas and melt my brain, but I was so blown away, I told myself I could get used to it. I probably couldn’t, and I'm yet to try a Zone race, but I can't help myself. I get such a buzz out of WipeOut that it just makes my mind susceptible to a dumb idea or two.

WipeOut suckered me into buying a PSP. And while I love WipeOuts Pure and Pulse, a lot of the games on that system never really did it justice, even though I built up a fairly decent sized library of games. On release of the PS Vita, Sony nearly got me again. My local Game store had a demo unit running Wipeout 2048. It was beautiful. It was awesome. And holding the Vita gave me cramp, but I still wanted a Vita there and then, and I very nearly bought one, but I'm an adult now and I can be objective when that amount of money is going to fly away from my bank account. I took a step back and had a look at what other games the system had to offer, and with the exception of Uncharted: Golden Abyss, the answer was none.

There was next to nothing on the Vita on release that screamed, “BUY ME,” apart from those two games, and even now, it feels like most of the games on it are home console conversions. Don’t get me wrong, conversions are nice, but I already have them to play on my big screen at home, where games like that belong. With the exception of Gravity Rush, there is still nothing on the Vita that makes me want to own one, and I can’t abandon my sanity and spend that much on one to play three games. I made that mistake with the PSP. I don’t need another slab of plastic gathering dust on my games shelf.

I know it’s been said already, but this is an issue Sony really needs to address. A system lives and dies on the standard of its games, and it seems that everyone, publishers, developers, consumers, everyone, is ignoring the Vita. Without the games, the Vita will go the way of the 3DO. And even if we do see some unmissable content arrive for Vita, with the way its life has started, it could go the way of the Dreamcast instead. Loved by the few, ignored by the many.

So this goes out to Sony. I want a Vita, I really do, but I can’t justify buying one yet. Not until you give us games that only Vita can do. Games like Tearaway. If there were more like that, I’d buy one tomorrow.

Another Wipeout might help too.

After the multiplayer rant, time for some multiplayer love.

After last week's rant about not wanting to pay for tacked on multiplayer I got thinking. Online multiplayer just isn’t as personal as it was before the advent of the internet. It brought on a reflection on my gaming past.

Multiplayer for a few means one thing now. Howling obscenities through the headset while playing this week’s Call of Battlefield. Something about the relative anonymity of gamertags just seems to bring out the worst of people online. Angry teens spray out the kind of stuff that would land you in hospital if it were overheard in a pub.

Remember when a multiplayer session was you and three mates huddled round your fourteen inch tv playing Micro Machines Turbo Tournament ’96 on the Megadrive? That is of course unless you had a friend with really accommodating parents who let you hook up to the twenty-eight in the living room. I had a session like that the other day. We sat around my mates fifty-two inch LCD, playing an eighteen year old Megadrive whose graphics looked a whole lot less like ass than we had any right to expect and had time comparable in greatness to any I have experienced in the twenty years I have owned a console. Seriously, it was mental. And while bullshit was called on many occasions, once by myself after one of my own unjustified wins, not once did the banter degenerate into the kind of racist, sexist, homophobic, jingoistic filth that gets streamed through my headset from the mouth of the last person who beat me down in Halo. Something about having the person you’ve just beaten sat next to you puts paid to that kind of thing, you know?

But really, this isn’t a rant about the state of online gaming. This is a love letter to what the young ‘uns call ‘local multiplayer’.  It wasn’t just eight hours of Micro Machines and its infamous Sponge track though. In that same session we played Powerstone 2, Sonic Adventure 2 match races, the insane Chu Chu Rocket and Virtua Tennis 2 on the Dreamcast. After all that, the PS1 was busted out for a round of Crash Bash. The only thing that stopped the whole thing slipping into endless races on Circuit Breakers and Crash Team Racing was time.

It really slammed home how much fun games that are ten, twelve and in some cases up to sixteen years old are in comparison to what is about today. Part of it I suppose is all the old rivalries that we were carrying between ourselves on those games. There was the same old rush for Tommy Haas and Tim Henman on Virtua Tennis and the same endless wars on the sponge in Micro Machines.

Helpfully, since the openly hostile attitude of online multiplayer was nowhere to be seen I was also able to manage the realisation of something of an age old gaming dream: To bring my significant other into the fold, and miraculously, she had as good a time as the rest of us. It helped to show up how the most accessible games are the most fun. You are instantly good at Virtua Tennis as soon as you return a shot. Chu Chu Rocket’s barely contained insanity bought the laughs and howls of despair at having a cat dropped in your rocket seconds before the lead was translated into victory. Sonic Adventure 2 is admittedly less than accessible, but since we only played that to settle a simmering old rivalry from the last time we had the Dreamcast out, it’s a moot point.

The high point of the session was undoubtedly Crash Bash. Its collection of quickly understood yet downright silly mini games just clicked with my girlfriend for some reason. She beat three seasoned vets of Crash Bash hands down in Polar Push, Pogo Pandemonium, Crate Crush and Ballistix. We all had a laugh and she left feeling great, having her first multiplayer victories under her belt. I doubt I’ve ever seen that online.

It left me thinking that the only one of the big three that gives local multiplayer a look in now is Nintendo. Think about it, the 360 can connect to up to four controllers, the PS3 can take seven or eight, but can you remember the last time that actually happened? If you own one of the more ‘hardcore’ consoles, multiplayer all but confirms the stereotype of the lone gamer sat in the dark in his bedroom. And that seems like a step backwards.

In positioning the Wii as a family friendly machine, Nintendo found a ton of local multiplayer games forthcoming. But for every light hearted game like Mario Kart, Mario Party or Smash Bros, it seemed like there were a dozen lightweight mini game collections that got it all wrong. There’s a difference between the two. The lightweight stuff doesn’t need much in the way of thinking and the gameplay boils mostly down to the Wii Waggle. There’s no satisfaction in victory from that. The best multiplayer games are light hearted and accessible to the n00b, yet still need you to think. The thrill of a good multiplayer game comes from the feeling of outsmarting your opponents, not waving your arms in the air. Supersonic games understood this when they made Micro Machines Turbo Tournament ’96. That’s why they included the sponge track. You can joust on it.

There was another feature of Micro Machines that made it a great multiplayer game. Pad sharing. Eight people sharing four pads and eight cars on track at once, with all the mayhem that came with it. It’s a feature that seems to have disappeared altogether, now that multiplayer seems to have lost its sense of fun and gotten serious.

And fun is really what multiplayer should be all about. It really is worth tracking down some of the multiplayer Greats for a session at a mate’s house. Those who have played Bishi Bashi, Crash Bash, Crash Team Racing, Circuit Breakers, Micro Machines, Smash Bros, Goldeneye, Mario Kart (even though it’s an irrational personal pet hate of mine, don’t ask why because I couldn’t possibly tell you), Mario Party (better without the boardgame element), Micro Machines, Tekken, Street Fighter, Timesplitters, Dancing Stage and Rock Band will tell you that competing together, in the same room, is the best part of gaming as a whole.  

I’ve probably missed one or two there, but with a few mates and a few drinks they make an amazing night in. I have a feeling there is a yawning gap in the market for games like these that isn’t being filled. Ok, we get the odd release like the recent Sonic and Sega All-Stars, but a lot of the time, multiplayer in a new release boils down to a tacked-on online mode. I might be right, or I might be horribly wrong on that statement, but split screen games bring people together in the best possible way. Online is at its best when you’re in a closed party with people you know. And in that case, why not get everyone together in one room?

There might be beers.