My favourite five games of 2012. Why five? Don't know. In order? Not really. More questions? Probably not.
1)Sleeping Dogs. If you've dabbled in the wonders of Hong Kong for any length of time (or China in general) you'll have had a whale of a time with Sleeping Dogs. The acting was top rate, and though they didn't push the policeman / triad schism far enough it still did enough to be one of my entries here. Shame the DLC looks to be the all too common "cheap pricepoint and little content" so beloved of most games around these days. Fighting tournaments and "spooky" Halloween events? Bleh. You have a rock solid storyline to flesh out, guys. Don't waste it.
After a wonderful experience on console, this game almost soured me completely due to the infamous hkshop.exe error on PC (go Google it, then weep). In fact, this sounds more like a rant about things I hate than "my top games" so I'll shut up now.
2)FTL. A powerhouse of decision making and random luck blessing the brave. Best thing to come out of Kickstarter? It might well be. Anybody with the mildest Star Trek hankering needs to have this on their PC. Also here's a few tips (I'll also add to those that Drones are essential).
3)Hotline Miami. If you ever wanted to pretend to be Professor Pyg while powerdrilling the heads of those who truly deserve it, then this is the game for you. I keep seeing "Drive: The Game", but "Professor Pyg: The Tribute Album" would be more appropriate. Not so much what your character does, as the overall feel of what takes place keeps reminding me of him for some reason.
5)Spec Ops: The Line. This shunted a fair few titles out of this spot quite late on, as I only recently played it. The campaign is around six hours on normal difficulty and probably closer to ten on hard. It's powerful, it's bold, it's dramatic, it doesn't shy away from the horrors of war and almost everything it does is very, very smart. In fact, something it starts to do later on with a common videogame "thing" will slowly but surely start to freak you out a bit. And that's before you get to the plot, and the multiple interpretations it bears the weight of. A phenomenal title, and something that everybody should play.
It also doesn't contain a single QTE, and that's quite remarkable in this day and age.
The rest of the best of the bunch
I haven't done much with Torchlight 2, but it seems like a lot of fun. XCOM probably got doinked off the above list by Spec Ops, but is a really rather sensational game. Legend of Grimrock would have booted FTL or Hotline Miami out of the top spots, but again - not enough playtime. Borderlands 2 is phenomenal, but somehow it doesn't quite squeeze into the list. I guess I might just be a sucker for the first game.
And, me being me, I couldn't let this blog post finish without a closing complaint so I'll just come right out with it: my biggest gaming disappointment was Far Cry 3 which - I've come to realise - isn't as good as Far Cry 2. Blog post incoming, release the hounds and happy new year.
Here are my FTL protips (buyer beware, I've died horribly on the seventh wave every single time so maybe I'm not the right guy for the Protip job). Having said that:
1) Comb as much of the first map as possible, because you won't be able to hang about on later sections of the game. At this point, the enemy ships chasing you are fairly weak and you can afford to get caught by them once or twice as you forage near the exit.
2) For the first few levels, passing through a red area isn't quite as bad as it seems. It's worth passing through them if taking the "safer" route means you'll end up in a bunch of nebula sections which almost always mean instadeath later on in the game.
3) When upgrading the ship, a lot of players start powering down the medbay because other bits of the ship need to be up and running (you know, like oxygen and guns or whatever). Don't neglect the medbay! It'll stop you getting dead (important) and you can also use it to fend off ship invasions. How? PULL UP A CHAIR, but first: the doors.
4) Upgrade the doors as soon as possible. On later stages your ship will be on fire pretty much all the time, and if you wander into bug / mantis territory you'll be dealing with ship invasions every couple of hops. Patching up your doors will allow you to deploy some tactics. Position your least favourite redshirt in the vicinity of the invaders (next room over should do it) and shuffle one or two extra guys in the medbay.
Can you see where I'm going with this?
The redshirt will lure the invaders to the medbay where they'll be greeted by three or more shipmates who can lay out a smackdown while being constantly regenerated. There is a downside to this tactic, in the form of the next tip...
5) The moment the invaders look like they're going to die, start filtering your guys out of the medbay asap. The reason for this is the same reason you don't do what I did and get into the habit of healing everybody at once - I lost my entire crew bar one guy when an attacking ship teleported a big explodey thing into the medbay.
Unless you're in a gambling mood (or need to smack up some invaders) then only heal your crew two at a time, max.
6) Always target the enemy weapons, then go for the engines so they can't run away. After that, it's a case of juggling those two and hammering the bridge. I've never really seen any benefit to blasting away at their oxygen supplies.
7) Luck plays a part in this, but when you're on the run and desperately trying to get your hands on supplies, a defence drone will work wonders in fending off attackers long enough to be able to jump to safety. Hands up anybody who ever bothered to use a drone. I'll wait...
8) There is no 8. That's everything, it's all I have. I'll probably remember a few others and update the post but feel free to drop some more in if you have them.
I finished Sleeping Dogs today, and I'm here to tell you that you should probably go out and buy it.
If you ever wondered how Shenmue 3 would pan out, this is pretty much it assuming Ryo turned into Jackie Chan: Supercop and started mashing heads into freezers. As someone who has spent a reasonable amount of time wandering around Hong Kong (and also wrote an altogether too long dissertation on the politics and symbolic imagery of 90s HK cinema back in Uni) I was dying to see how this would pan out.
After an hour or so of playtime, I was close to being overwhelmed at how damned Hong Kongy everything was. That first walk around the market? INCREDIBLE. I think the devs went for trips to HK to record the sound and capture general observations, and it shows - everything from the ding ding the shops make when you walk in / out to the perfectly replicated noise of the pedestrian crossings is all here. My opening game highpoint was jumping up onto some rooftops and suddenly hearing a class of kids singing a song from off inside one of the buildings, complete with instruments. I just stood around for ten minutes soaking it all in.
The scene setting here is phenomenal, and the moment a downpour hits with those neon signs on either side of you (and passers-by covering their heads with their newspapers), there can be no doubt you're in Hong Kong. I even heard ringtones on phones that were blazing away when I was over there last. Or how about the way your guy nods his head while walking around in a club. Or how clubs will be empty save for the odd floor sweeper at morning time. Or how secluded spots may have a hobo sleeping rough if you venture there at night. Or how I winged a pedestrian in my car only to find passers by had whipped out their phones and started filming me. Or the time I escaped a car chase by popping a wheelie and driving over the top of an oncoming car which smashed into my pursuer.
Or. Or. Or.
I could go on, but it's better to discover a lot of this stuff for yourself.
The Gameworld
It isn't huge, divided up into four chunks that try to give a flavour of various zones of Hong Kong - this isn't a replica, because that would be crazy. However, it's a little bit of a let down to find that parts I was dying to see in the game were pretty much AWOL.
There is no Kowloon. There is, amazingly, no Tsim Sha Tsui. You won't find the famous waterfront with the Star Ferry, the walk of fame or Chungking Mansions.
These are all 100% iconic chunks of Hong Kong cinema and it's jarring to find them absent. There was also no MTR. As an additional method of transportation and also a place to have some dubious antics happening, it's a shame this wasn't included.
I also need to mention the crushing blow that was Victoria Peak. When I saw it was on the map, I was practically salivating at going up on the tram, maybe walking around up there at the top and basking in the view.
What you get, is a series of ugly high gates made up of bars with a little gated door to walk through. You go through about two of these, and find the view, the money shot, the show stopper is a poorly drawn skybox (hidden behind more bars!) that doesn't even appear to be fully finished down on the bottom right hand side. You can read a bunch of people similarly crushed here, along with a video that shows the peak minus the hideous railings - so much better.
At one point I heard the ding ding of the tram and got my hopes up, only to find it went chugging past inbetween the two sets of fences. So that was crappy.
Other than that, this is the closest virtual reproduction of Hong Kong that you'll see for quite some time. Even accounting for the (required) differences, you'll be running through a slice of street or driving past an area and think holy crap, I know that bit! It's a lot of fun.
The Characters
Special mention to the voicework and script here - the lead character, Wei Shen, is brilliantly acted and the majority of the supporting cast are very well done. You can even go on a date with Emma Stone, and Lucy Liu puts in an appearance at one point. I can't recall anybody major flubbing their lines, or anbody else for that matter. Even the random people on the street are well done (with one "invisible" exception - more on that later), and most of the places you live in usually have a few characters hanging around who have their own little stories acted out as the game goes on. Another nice touch.
The Story
You're an undercover cop looking to rise in the ranks of the Triads and take them down from the inside. What this means in practice is a story that picks up a lot of the main beats from the best HK action films around and makes them its own. The Big Brother / Little Brother dynamic is quite important in this one, and any number of memorable scenes set in hospitals and docks to cemetaries and tea houses are all in here. It covered most of the things I'd want to do myself from my HK action movie checklist, so I'm entirely satisfied with that.
It's tight, it's focused and it gets to the point. I found myself blitzing the main missions just because I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen to Wei next. Well played.
The Gameplay
Everything is tied into your character's skillset, from dating to finding in-game objects to selecting clothing to wear (which gives bonuses, but can only be worn if your "face" level is high enough).
The fighting is great fun, slamming a dude's head in a car door or a spinning fan never gets old and the bullet time triggered by leaping over an object while shooting is THE BEST THING EVER (tm). They also develop the "find an item" gimmick from open worlds, making you return them to a Dojo where you can (again) select moves to learn. Makes things a bit more interesting. There's also car racing, gambling, debt collection and a heap of random "help me please" missions along with various in-world happenings.
Rounding that off is a set of multi-tiered undercover cop missions that loosely skirt around the main story. Drug busts don't end well - after beating the goons and hacking CCTV, you're supposed to mark the dealer and have him arrested. What this means in practice is you wait for a shield to appear over a guy's head and press the button. Bit of a waste, guys.
The Music
Oh man, the music. I already mentioned it here, but there's a definite 70s vibe to a lot of the OST. I've come across so many musicians I wasn't familiar with. To name a few, Burn Out by Cinematic Orchestra, Emika, System by Terry Lynn, Art of Xen by Jay Price....amazing, amazing stuff.
The Bad Things
There's always some. Here's my list of "could have done better":
1) Camera issues. This tends to be a problem in open world games, but there's somethng....not quite.....right about the viewing angle when driving. It seems rather low, and a common solution seems to be holding up on the thumbstick a little to gain a better view of your surroundings.
2) YMMV on this, but the first selectable option is "new game", with "continue" below it. I'm willing to bet cash money that someone, somewhere accidentally did this at least once. I've no idea if that would wipe your saves or not.
3) When leaving a clothing shop, the immersion is suddenly broken by a terrible disembodied voice that for all the world sounds like someone in the Wu Tang clan yelling "TAKES GUTS TO WEAR THAT".
What the Hell?
4) Characters in the game world will just straight up vanish if you turn your back and walk away a little bit. This seems to mostly affect "story" characters, ranging from main missions to smaller favour jobs but it's annoying all the same.
5) Police. I like that the game is built with the notion that you're an undercover cop in mind; no GTA style rampage here, if you go gun crazy (assuming you can find one) or just start running people over your ass will be grass in no time at all. The problem is that the cops teleport in right behind you (and in some cases in front of you!) and start letting rip with a volley of handgun and shotgun fire.
If they're chasing you on foot, they'll never....ever....stop or grow tired or lose the scent. It doesn't seem to matter if you bust some parkour moves or not. The buggers are just...there, somehow. Car chases are much the same. Other open world games at least have the cops roll in around a corner or come in waves to give you the chance to escape; what's in the game here is silly, but it's another YMMV moment.
In Conclusion
I've put about 20 something hours into the game, and that's allowed me to complete the main storyline and a chunk of side content. I'm still only about 60 to 65% towards total game completion though, and it'd be interesting to play through again as an actual undercover cop instead of "oh well, nobody will miss the ten pedestrians I bundled into my car boot and drove off the pier when nobody was looking".
Despite being shunted from one publisher to another, this is absolutely a game you should play if you're even remotely interested in martial arts, Hong Kong and stabbing a dude with a fish while dressed up in the yellow Game of Death jumpsuit.
Sleeping Dogs is a very good game indeed. The music is phenomenal, and a curious mix of jazz, classical and straight up Bruce Lee 70s vibes. You haven't lived until you've staked out a drugs bust with that tune playing in your car while sizing up the best way to take down 18 or so heavily armed goons down the nearest alleyway.
I wasn't familiar with the artist linked above, and did a little Googling. Sure enough, the album containing that track (and a bunch of others from the game) is available to buy for 69p in the UK, and (from the looks of it) $9.99 everywhere else.
What's amazing about the latest videogame fiasco isn't so much the latest tipping point ("girlfriend mode", just in case she holds the controller upside-down HAHA) as fact that it keeps on happening over and over again in the first place.
Steps for success:
1) Say something anybody with ten seconds experience in talking publicly about stuff could tell you is a bad idea on the grounds of it being a) silly b) offensive to a decent slice of your paying audience and c) silly
2) Watch as it becomes the focal point of said article, exploding across the internet at a million screaming people an hour
3) Ensure the head guy says something that suggests he hadn't actually seen the article in question before weighing in
4) Dig that failtrain all the way down to Chinatown in a horrible, horrible example of "it's broke, so I did the exact opposite of fixing the shit out of it".
There is a time and a place to use the "...but, but..." defence, and this sure as Hell isn't it.
When you raise legitimate questions in the minds of people who potentially buy your stuff (or just wonder why person x said silly thing y), you don't repeatedlydismiss them as "sensationalists", especially when most of the objections I saw flying around were entirely reasonable. It's also probably a bad idea to retroactively throw in the term "boyfriend mode" after the lightning strikes, despite it never being called that and only focusing on females in the original context.
This is the president of the company, and everything he's tweeting in response to the fallout is only making things progressively worse, not better (no, it's not a good thing when you're the #1 trend on twitter if it's because lots of people think you did something silly). Add this to the original comments in the Eurogamer piece, and I'm once again reminded that - just like in the Mass Effect 3 prmeltdown extravaganza, this stuff wouldn't keep happening if game devs selected to be the mouthpieces of the industry were actually trained in the art of talking about things and stuff.
Like...where is the PR rep in the interview gently correcting the clearly soon to be disastrous direction the discussion has taken? Where is the formal prep talk before the interview takes place? If there had been one, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have been talking about girlfriend mode. Why do people in the games industry keep doing this? Even the "pro" industry talking heads like Cliffy B skirt dangerously close to the edge of the pit, and despite being mostly positive here it still comes across as somewhat.....hmmm.
Let's put it this way, when people are suggesting that a sane solution is for the supposed-to-be-impartial gaming press to advise the people they are interviewing that their words are poorly chosen, something has gone horribly wrong. The gaming press should do their level best to not be doing something like that at all times.
I mean...look at this. Here's the Eurogamer news editor having to ward off claims of "sensationalism" and all the rest of it, in admirablefashion I might add. On the other hand, I guess there's no danger of Eurogamer handing out free pr tips anytime soon.
So far, there's been a reasonably sensible post on Kotaku about this and not much else. However, given how these things tend to go down I'd almost be willing to bet cash money that this thing just gets worse when the inevitable "No, people are wrong because..." articles appear on gaming sites starting from tomorrow.
My advice? Take the lumps, apologise, give up and move on. Anything else will result in generous helpings of failure and pretty sweet jokes.
If you told me I'd be doing nothing but grumbling about a new Max Payne game, I'm not sure I would have believed you. However, here it is and here we are. If you don't want to read this long dissection, then you can summarise a lot of the frustrations by clicking this link.
If you're still with me, then here comes a rather long, somewhat spoilerish ramble. I also spoil the ending to Splinter Cell Conviction, but I don't think anybody will care about that. I should also add that the soundtrack for this game is fantastic, and well worth buying.
Where is Max and what have you done to his bullet time?
Anyone familiar with the early games knows Max is not a guy to screw around with - a quick tap of the button and he dips into bullet time which is typically the most efficient way to take out a room full of goons waving uzis. Max Payne 2 deepened and enhanced bullet time by making Max plunge into a more bullet timey state of mind the longer you blasted bad guys, culminating in that sweet 360 degree spinaround cam when reloading.
All in all, bullet time lasted quite a while. Yet I can't help but think Rockstar seemed to view bullet time, the key mechanic of a Max Payne game, as a hideous instant win button and nerfed it completely. As a result, Max is in bullet time very, very briefly compared to the other two games (to say nothing of how long he takes to go into his shootdodge jump, being shot to pieces while VERY SLOWLY PREPPING HIS LEAP). Worse, the meter seems to refill quickly if you go into cover (!) or if you kill a dude. What this means in practice is lots of hiding behind walls while AI flank into positions you can't recover from but more on that later.
Let's put it this way, something has gone very wrong when Max Payne, MAX PAYNE, king of bullet time spends less time in that mode of action than random characters in other games that aren't Max Payne. And yet...bullet time, even the copious amounts of it in MP2, doesn't come close to an instant win. Skillful use of the more open, non-linear environments (no need to jump in this game, because you're mostly running around on a flat surface unlike the heady heights scaled throughout MP2) combined with a wonderful reload ability are the way you get through a level. Simply running around in bullet time will get you whacked.
Even the slo-mo reload animation is functional and not simply a graphical gimmick, because it gives you the breathing room to keep track of where all the goons are while the camera spins. Yes, a spinning camera becomes a tactical gameplay mechanic. How cool is that?
I was extremely excited to see how bullet time developed from 2 to 3. The answer is, "it got downgraded and if you press a button you run around slowly for a bit".
Of course, you have all the bullet time you can eat but only when the script demands it - see the plunge through the window of the nightclub or the ride on the trolley in the police station for proof of that. Otherwise, Max is spectacularly unspectacular.
This is not a good thing, especially as the ever present targeting dot from the first two games only appears when you aim, leading to precious seconds of bullet time wasted as you continually correct yourself.
I hope you like three hours of unskippable cutscenes
Oh God, the cutscenes. If you want to play through this game on the higher difficulties and maybe try some of the other modes out, think about this - no fewer than nine hours of your life have sailed by while a fairly mediocre (and occasionally nonsensical) story play out on the screen with no way to get rid of it. The old games let you whizz through the comic panels, and let you stay in control of Max while the rest of the story progressed. Here, you'll come to dread that most terrifying of enemies - your walk slowing to a grind as you wander up to a door, triggering Max doing something like going through the door, looking at the door, rambling to himself by a door, walking to somewhere, hiding behind something, so on and so forth.
The art director must have had a thing for Kane & Lynch too, because the shaky cam and streaky effects presumably there to indicate drunkeness and withdrawl symptoms are MIND BOGGLINGLY ANNOYING and do not help when bolted onto three hours of waffle.
Why can't I shootdodge through the door? Why can't I open it myself? Why can't I get into cover myself? Why couldn't half of this stuff left me in control of Max? Why is it frequently used as a crutch to manoeuvre Max into stupid situations the player wouldn't have put him in?
Frustration Galore
I've killed my fair share of dudes in games. Specifically, I've killed my fair share of goons in Max Payne games. This one doesn't know whether it wants to be a cover shooter, or Max Payne. It sends out mixed messages and the gamer is punished for it. People will tell you you're playing it wrong; "Oh, you're not supposed to play it while hiding in cover", even though the mechanic is all-pervasive and comes with an endless stream of waist high cover. More often than not, playing as Max Payne and attempting to use bullet time will get you killed in seconds.
Poor scripting, baffling design choices and cutscene incompetence all compound this and leave you reeling. Here's some of my low points. I'm not sure if they're in order, but you'll get the idea. A couple of these, I could have handled. But the below isn't even the full laundry list of issues and there's only so much you can take before suspecting the game dev is going out of their way to punish you for not playing the game their way. I'm just not sure who would want to play it like this:
* Alarm bells start ringing once the stadium level begins and you're swarmed by goons in overtly CoD military gear. And they start throwing grenades. And you can't throw anything back (Max must have lost the use of his throwing arm since MP2). I hope the game doesn't take me into a jungle setting fighting paramilitary CoD-lite goons with gunboats and rocket laun.....crap.
* Ammo collection is erratic and makes little sense. Often I'll be low on ammo but instead of picking up the bullets on the ground in the form of "matching gun x", I have to drop the gun I have with the 3 bullets in favour of the new one. This doesn't happen all the time, why does it happen at all?
* After every cutscene, the game auto defaults back to a single handgun - even if I have no ammo in it. Oh look, I'm now dead. Thanks for that. This also happens in multiplayer, even if I'm carrying dual handguns handing an instant advantage to anyone with a two handed machine gun.
* Gun pickups are also illogical. If I'm running around with a uzi and a handgun and the handgun only has (say) 6 bullets but the uzi is full, trying to pick up a replacement weapon often results in Max DROPPING THE FULLY LOADED GUN IN FAVOUR OF ANOTHER HANDGUN WITH LESS AMMO. Now I have less bullets than when I started out and I'm still packing the nearly empty pistol. Oh look, I'm dead again. Thanks for that.
* You quickly realise that Passos is perhaps the worst AI companion of all time. I think in the entire game, he's scripted to kill maybe 3 guys and you can take those guys out yourself if you're quick enough. Otherwise, his game plan is to shoot like a stormtrooper while whining at you endlessly. Who thought that was a good idea? Worse, the game rewards you at being awesome by punishing you with instadeath. The level where you have to storm a sort of military museum and you're pinned down by about ten dudes shooting right at you?
If you manage to get to the entrance before everyone up top is dead, running inside to creep up and kill the goons won't work because you're treated to a cutscene of Passos running out and dying horribly. Remember when Mona Sax killed a bunch of dudes in the MP2 funhouse? Yeah, that worked fine guys.
* Some cutscenes lead to total stupidity, in the form of the game handing you back control as Max runs towards a group of enemies WITH NO COVER. The inside of the boat on the Panama level is a perfect example of this presumed attempt at "excitingly cinematic". Similarly, the level on the roof of the collapsing hotel - you fight your way through an incredibly annoying set of goons as the building crumbles around you, reach the end and can only trigger a cutscene by running out of cover.
Surprise, you get a cutscene of a fully body armoured bad guy waving a chaingun from a roof above you, and control is handed back with Max standing IN FRONT OF THE COVER, and defaulted to a handgun. Which, in my case, had no bullets in it.
* Your guns are endlessly taken away from you, often with no reason behind it. When you first emerge onto the upper portion of the hotel, you've planted a bunch of C4, killed everybody and stocked up your guns and ammo in an armoury. You clamber up a ladder, and...the next section starts and you're back with the silenced pistol from the start of the level and a machine gun nearby with about 8 bullets in it. Words cannot express how infuriating this is.
* The last stand mechanic is broken when combined with a slow, ungraceful Max. Going down on the floor often means you kill the dude who shot you, get up incredibly slowly (while taking damage), fall over again, kill the dude who shot you, get up incredibly slowly (while taking damage), fall over again and die. This renders the feature all but meaningless on hard or above.
* More of a storytelling thing, but in the brothel we see various couples having sex in a rapid-fire cutscene. All of the women are naked; the men are of course either fully clothed or wearing boxer shorts, because heaven forbid we see a penis, an actual penis, in a videogame. Right bro?
* Laser sighted guns. Late in the game, you're given a reduced selection of weaponry and the bulk of it ends up being these laser sighted guns. These weapons may have the worst wobbly useless aim in the history of gaming. The moment you aim, the sight vanishes and when it's actually onscreen, it jerks all over the place. This isn't what you need when taking on those police station rooms full of SWAT officers. Protip: switch the sight off with the back button on the xbox controller, I'm assuming you can do this on other platforms.
* Almost everything Max does is stupid. Even after he decides to "confront his demons" by, uh, shaving his hair off and wandering into the favela the very first thing he does is listen to a small child and walk down a SUSPICIOUS LOOKING ALLEYWAY. Cue ambush. I know Max is supposed to be at a low ebb here, but I was practically screaming at the TFT by this point. Similarly, the build up to the favela rescue of the sisters was built up heavily, and when the inevitable cutscene kicked in I was ready to see Max burst in through the window and slow-mo shoot those assholes in the face.
What actually happened, was that Max walks through the door, yells a bit then hands over his guns and someone dies. Let's not even get started on his "those poor, poverty stricken people" observations on sighting the favela before walking in and turning it into an orphan holocaust. Or the insanity of Max blaming himself for not being able to stop an entire military outfit from burning his employer's building to the ground when everyone else in Brazil seemingly had the smarts to hire an entire military outfit. Max is at fault because is boss is too stupid to realise that two guys aren't enough? Okay.
Random questions: what happened to the handcuffs Max was wearing in the police station? Why does the cop appear in the sex club Max walks into, making sure he vanishes via the magic of cutscene before the shooting starts? Why does Max call himself fat when he looks like a big guy with muscles? I have lots more of these. I'm going to stop now.
* You get an achievement for not shooting [a guy] at the end. Why? I have no idea. Is this some sort of redemption for Max? Probably not, because he then goes on to kill a ton of other dudes. Plus [this guy] was a massive asshole, why wouldn't you kill him? All the while, a rambling dialogue plays in the background while Max talks about him becoming the thing they wanted him to be. It's all very serious until you realise the next section is firing infinite rockets at jeeps and an aeroplane.
* When it wants to, the game straight up cheats and breaks the established rules of the game to further the direction of the story. I have issues with games that resort to breaking your skillset because that's all they have left to throw at you. Splinter Cell: Conviction, pushing you into a final level where narrow corridors and indestructible light sources take away any of the stealth powers you thought you had while turning it into a straight up gun battle, is particularly guilty of this (and don't get me started on the final cutscene, where - spoiler alert - Fisher decides to rescue his friend by exploding what sounds like half the building and shooting everyone in sight with non silenced weapons).
Wait, where was I? Oh yeah, rule breaking. In the church shoot out, Passos tells you a guy on the balcony above needs to be killed. Try as you might, the game wants you to go upstairs to kill him so a bunch of goons can appear downstairs where you were originally. Dip into bullet time - doesn't matter, his asshole whack-a-mole head will slide down faster than you can pop him. The moment the reticule goes near, down he goes into hiding.
After this, you're left wondering how many other times the game will arbitrarily decide to break your bullet time and Max seems even weaker than before, because now he's not only dealing with strange controls and gun mechanics (hey, why don't you do an awkward roll which puts you out of cover when picking up a gun, instead of just picking it up), he's also dealing with the heavy hand of scriptwriters who decide when your powers work and when they don't.
* The game constantly feels like it's making shout outs to levels from earlier Max Payne games, yet the newer versions aren't as good or as interesting. The sniper mission in MP2? Navigating Mona across the construction site, while getting into different positions, taking down the goons and sniping the waves of bad guys chasing Max. Here? You're in a fixed position, don't do anything other than shoot 2 or 3 slowly moving guys at a time and Passos even tells you the exact location of each gunman.
The escape from the apartments in MP2? Multi tiered building, some simple puzzles, a little bit of platforming, collapsing fire escapes, that AMAZING cavalcade of goons on the rotating staircase which becomes a flying body frenzy in bullet time. Here? You creep past windows of goons with laser snipers, the building explodes a bit and you run off to the rooftops. It's better than the Brazil levels, but it isn't a patch on the original incarnation which had more meat to it.
The police station in MP2? It's great, you can walk around and listen to calls, annoy the guys watching the TV, observe a line-up, wander down to the cells, flesh out the story. Here? Your cuffs magically vanish after being taken in so you can shoot the place up. And that's pretty much it.
Did you ever hear a guy in the toilet? You can jump up and see him reading a paper. It's that attention to detail that generates new discoveries, even now.
Finally, for sheer inventiveness nothing on offer here tops the escape from the hospital mission in MP2 where Max has to arm himself before the lone gunman, formerly less than nothing on the "severe threat index" becomes the single biggest problem he's ever faced due to not having any weapons. What use is bullet time when you have no bullets?
"I'm coming for you!" and that single crack of thunder. Brilliant, panic inducing terror. Compare to the panic on offer here which usually comes from the game auto selecting a handgun with no bullets while standing out in the open. This level also wisely rewards the player with a stairwell escape packed with an endless supply of mooks to mow down. You haven't lived until dipping into bullet time, slow-mo blasting your way through and coming out of it right at the bottom.
Or how about chasing Gognitti in MP1? Come to think of it, where are the goons with actual personality talking about things before you crash their numerous parties? The bad guys here are just pincushions to be filled with lead, non-speaking, non-interesting, non-anything bad guys that will pipe up in a cutscene if you're lucky.
* Where is the weirdness of the storytelling? The same game that used to reference Norse mythology is just a straight shooter with Max swearing all the time. The storytelling device using the televisions has gone straight too, replacing the handful of shows that not only told their own story but reflected aspects of Max and his journey with "blah blah here's a news broadcast".
It's like playing Alan Wake feels more like playing Max Payne than Max Payne 3. This is a strange sensation to have.
MAXIMUM REDEMPTION
Well, sort of. Did you roll your eyes in amazement when you saw that the increased difficulty levels reduce your bullet time? Because the thing we really want in a hard Max Payne game is reduced bullet time and more bad cover shooting!
Roll no further, because should you manage to complete the game on Hard - and I did, while mashing my face into a desk - a glorious sunrise will appear, in the form of Old School Mode. I'm not sure why this wasn't the default mode or at least available from the start, but it's a mode that keeps difficulty high while removing the broken last man standing mode, upping the pills (as far as I can tell) and increasing the bullet time / meter refill.
You know, so you're actually playing the game like Pax Payne.
Ultimately, it's the developer's biggest mistake that this wasn't the default setting, because the extra boost in bullet time just about cancels out the majority of the design flaws that cause so many BUT THAT'S NOT EVEN FAIR BECAUSE moments.
It's still a challenge, but the game suddenly feels like it's playing fair and Max is on an equal footing with the dozen or so heavily armed and heavily armoured goons flooding into each location.
Max Payne 3's greatest tragedy is that a good chunk of people who played it will never actually unlock this mode. I reckon the reviews and general feedback would have been much better. Instead of setting out a million words above raging about the design decisions that broke my brain, this entire review would (for the most part) say "Yeah, that Max Payne 3 was a blast and you should pick it up".
Instead, I'm saying "If you can deal with the crazy difficulty spikes, frustrating design and endless blah blah cutscenes twice over in an effort to unlock Old School then you'll probably want to buy it".
I was hoping I'd have a ringing endorsement; instead, it's a cautious thumbs off that occasionally gets torn off in a doorframe to make myself feel better.
I just finished a game that had been sitting on my "to do" pile for months and months. That game is Binary Domain, and I was horrified to discover that it only sold 20,000 copies at launch. The videogames industry is bad and you should feel bad.
The last time I came away from a game feeling this pumped (mixed in with absolutely nail biting moments of OH MY GOD THEY'RE DEAD THEY'RE ALL DEAD NO WAIT THEY'RE ALIVE YAY) was the finale of Mass Effect 2. Everything you do here can get your team killed, and I'm still not sure if it's possible to save everyone / get the whole team horribly murdered.
That alone is replayability you can take to the bank, especially as my first runthrough chalked up a considerable list of casualties. I got the end I wanted for my character, but I have a feeling I could have done so much better for the team which becomes a primary concern as the game winds to a close. I mean, nobody is a Mordin or a Zaeed but you won't want to see anybody get smeared across a wall.
Despite looking like a fairly generic shooter, it mixes a fairly intelligent plot concerning transhumanism bereft of the "I'm so smart and angsty, look at me" trappings of Deus Ex (doing a better job of it into the bargain) and mashes it up with the Suicide Mission of Mass Effect 2, stretching it out over the entirety of an eight or so hour long campaign.
The bare bones of it are that you lead a team against an endless army of increasingly large robots, managing your team mates, their abilities and their loyalty levels. Everything from your (frequent) interaction with them on the battlefield to how your orders pan out (and associated daredevil antics) will decide how the game challenges you, how the team operates and even who lives or dies. Levels are varied, the numerous setpieces veer between spectacle and odd bouts of timer countdown tension and a couple of excellent vehicle levels break things up nicely.
Typically you have a squad of three or four with you, occasionally walking into absolute fragfests where your entire team goes up against what seems like every robot on Earth at the same time. The QTEs are well done and the plot seems to delight in throwing curveballs at you - there were a number of occasions where I sat rolling my eyes at the direction the story was telegraphing, only to be pleasantly surprised when it pulled the rug out from under me.
One particular character's trust level seemed to take what was going to be a rather frustrating cliche - that I couldn't even physically influence as it took place in a cutscene - and turned it on its head. One of many "fuck yeah" punch the air moments. Binary Domain has a few scenes like that, and beyond shooting things in the face (while arguing with your antagonists at the same time) you really don't know which direction the story will go in towards the end.
It sometimes felt like playing Vanquish from the perspective of a team of regular grunts, instead of Dude Mc Awesome in his robocyber ninja suit - especially when fighting the (often massive) enemy bosses, who'd certainly give some of the cyborgs from that title a run for their money. I never felt threatened by the enemies in that game - here, you're powered down appropriately and the team is absolutely crucial to evening the odds. That may not be for everyone, but I loved the Hell out of it.
Unfortunately, this game had no fanfare, no marketing and (from what I can gather) came out at the same time as Mass Effect 3 which is a great way to launch your ship and set it on fire at the same time. It's entirely possible there won't be a sequel, which is a horrible, horrible shame and it takes pride of place on my shelf alongside Alpha Protocol as "things that should have another go but probably won't get one". And this is a hell of a lot more polished / fun than AP. If you were hoping for some sort of Suicide Mission 2.0 in Mass Effect 3 and were given three month's worth of PTSD as a result of what you ended up with, you could happily wash away some of that nasty aftertaste with what's as close to the next best thing as makes no difference.
If you wanted your suicide run a little longer and decked out with a bigger team onscreen, there's absolutely no excuse to delay buying this game any further. It's big, it's colourful, it carries a nice line in humour, the characters aren't douchebags and the tension of endlessly making decisions / looking after your squad as they walk into their worst day ever is pretty much through the roof near the end of the game. If I can somehow work out how to juggle the team throughout the six chapters in a way that gives everybody enough trust / loyalty to survive the finale, you can bet there'll be a few more rounds of punching the air in celebration.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I have robots to slaughter in a manner befitting a group of big goddamn' heroes.
[Note: I'm surprised to find that this semi-rambling commentary on my not so good experiences with Arkham City got lost in the Posterous edit pile. I'd forgotten how much this game annoyed me, so better late than never. Looking back, I think my initial "what are you even doing" response to this game still rings true for me.]
Arkham City is one of the most user unfriendly packages I've ever seen in years of gaming. I'm more than a little surprised given how good the first game was.
Peeling open the tin reveals...uh....some flyers with DLC codes and a promo leaflet for another game. Where are the instructions? Oh well, the game must tell me everything I need to know.
Confusingly, the game begins with Catwoman. There are a few basic fight prompts, but no indication of how to do takedowns, keep bad guys down permanently (come on, I don't remember given I played the first game an age ago) or anything else. When you switch to Batman, you realise that no - the game dumps you on a rooftop and it is not actually going to tell you the first thing about what you have to do, how to play, how to fight, how to keep the bad guys down, how the new gadgets work, how the old gadgets work, situational context for using said gadgets and etc.
This is the first time in a long time I've been pretty baffled by a big release. Worse, I started on Hard so about fifty pastings later I thought I saw a menu telling me I could change the difficulty at any time. Either I imagined it or the menu was wrong, because all I could do was start again on Normal.
This is not going well.
I decide to take a break from my opening game fiasco and redeem the other DLC code - a "store exclusive" piece of content called the Joker Carnival. So of course, I type in the code on the dashboard and am told the "Code has already been redeemed".
What.
If you're going to butcher one of the hottest sequels to one of the hottest games in recent years by chopping up single player content into DLC, you better hope the damn things work. As it turns out, there's four pages worth of complaints about my issue on the official forums and forty plus on other DLC problems. Nobody is helping or assisting those with problems as far as I can see.
Well, no problem - I'll contact Rocksteady technical support. Except - the game didn't come with instructions, but their website says to contact technical support via the method listed in the game package.
So hey, this is going well.
I ended up sending two emails asking who to contact about the problem to their info@ address - of course, I didn't get a reply because I was asking about a problem instead of sending them a drooling missive or asking where I could buy something.
I also pinged their Twitter feed, but it's too busy promoting 10/10 review scores and launch parties.
In the middle of all of that, I discovered a rather long thread wondering where the instructions were due to people not actually knowing what the controls were, how to do Riddler challenges and everything else I already mentioned.
It seems Rocksteady didn't know where their instructions were either, because the only way I was able to find them was via a random forum post saying "here they are" posted a few days ago. Hilariously - or not - there are apparently errors in some of the commands listed too.
Am I the only one that thinks this is at least a little bit unacceptable? Exclusive content that doesn't work, DLC code issues galore, missing instruction manuals and a lack of any kind of tech support to assist with those problems?
But of course, who cares because the box has a 10/10 sticker on it and best game ever so run out and grab it, kids. I don't think I saw a single review for this game mention there are no instructions. How is that possible? Surely not everybody was issued some strange instructionless review copy?
Wow, I haven't even got to the game yet. Well okay: the raging "best game ever" style 11/10 reviews all seem horribly over the top. The intricate focus and stealth / planning aspect of the first game have been replaced by a city that is effectively dead and contains no content, unless your definition of content is "beat up the same bunch of guys over and over again as you go from location A to location B".
Because you're in a "prison city", there are no random pedestrians to rescue (unless you count the "political prisoners"), and absolutely nobody in the entire city besides goons to beat up.
That's it, that's the entire city content. I was hoping for a lot of deep city based interaction, but all it is is a dead zone populated by goons that you'll quickly get tired of flying over while trudging from A to B each time you decide to do a main story mission. Oh, you can perform some OCD style collect em up nonsense if you want (pop 10 balloons, shoot 15 security cameras, smash six penguins or whatever) - but I can only imagine the sort of skull cracking boredom you'd have to be suffering from to want to actively do that.
The actual story missions? Yeah, those are good. I have a horrible feeling the "city" aspect of the game is going to severely reduce the amount of main mission content and it's going to feel quite short by the time I'm done. There's also strange moments where the game arbitrarily decides things for you - early on, I was finding locked security consoles that I couldn't hack because I needed to download "Municipal access codes" or something. Okay, fine - I guess I have to go look for those codes. But later in the game during a main story mission, I'm trapped in a room, need to hack a console and Batman says "I need to download Municipal access codes" and then just goes and does it. Hello, immersion breaker.
Let's put it this way, it isn't a good sign that I'm enjoying the Predator room challenges more than the main game.
You have to hand it to a marketing department that can come up with something like this. One of the ballsiest marketing ploys I've ever seen...this is how you make monocles pop out and launch themselves into orbit.
Here is my money / time no object rejig of Mass Effect 3. Some things to note:
I don't mention Starchild (much), Suicide Mission 2.0, choices not reflecting in the third game or the ludicrousness of basing your entire game solution on "Here's a magic space weapon, we don't know what it does or how it'll stop the Reapers and we'll keep drumming this into your head throughout the game because we literally have no sensible solution other than a magical off switch. If we tell you this enough times, hopefully you'll just accept and roll with it. Love, the writers". I already covered lots of those things here, so just assume all of that has been magically replaced - with space magic - by something that makes sense. Also Xzibit memes.
And here we go....
Don't place important plot points into optional DLC
1) As it turns out, the exploding relay in the Arrival DLC has caused lots of confusion with regard the ending of ME3 (did the relays blow up? a) Yes b) No c) Space magic). Worse, the supposed "trial" is completely absent from the start of ME3 so they can get to the shooty bang bang quicker. As a result, the start of ME3 makes little sense if you were expecting, you know, a trial sequence. There's no explanation whatsoever of why Shepard is even sitting in his room eating those three square meals a day.
Remove the railroading from ME2
1) "If you can keep up, great. If not, I'll stop the Reapers without you" I knew I'd end up going toe to toe with The Illusive Man when my totally Renegade Shep, who just gave TIM the Collector Base had the option of telling the guy he just gave the Collector Base to to "shut up".
My expectation before this happened would be that ME3 would have Paragon Shep working with the Alliance and Renegade Shep would be with TIM. The only possible reason you'd be forced into an artificial conflict with TIM would be if Bioware couldn't work out how to depict a conflict between small puny humans and 100 foot tall death machines in a satisfactory manner. I'm almost certain I won't be making this point later.
(Don't) take back Earth
1) "Take Earth back" is a great way to convince Dudebros and those unfamiliar with the series to jump on board because they're more likely to get that than "Take Thessia back", but as far as Mass Effect goes my Shepard has the familiar sensation of being railroaded into being some other Shepard again. Renegade, space born Shep who sent most of the Batarian race to their grave without a second thought and killed a bunch of other dudes in various hilarious circumstances couldn't give two tits and a monkey about a planet you've never seen for the duration of the series.
Also: it makes no sense that Shepard would be so desperate to have every species battle the Reapers on Earth unless there was some poorly telegraphed plot point from near the end of the game that would require them all to be there, despite them not possibly knowing at the start of the game that this would be the case.
I'm almost certain I won't be making this point later.
Hold fire!
1) Having the invasion kick in right at the start of the game is a nice distraction for anyone wanting to shoot things, but the amount of exploration and questing related to your search to find a way to stop the Reapers is severely limited as a result. Everything boils down to "here's a big shooty battle, and now here's another big shooty battle". They should have taken the "up against the clock" mechanic of whether you saved your crew by going through the Omega 4 relay in ME2 and really thumbscrewed the player into making some desperate choices. At no point did I ever feel any dramatic tension, because it was clear from an early point in the game that I was just going to railroad through a bunch of main missions in an order I couldn't alter.
How much more interesting would it have been if you'd been on a set of smaller, more intimate missions as you travel to places like Thessia and Palaven to come up with some sort of solution to the Reaper threat? Instead, I got a moon that looked like Tuchanka with a colour swap and a railroaded chunk of Thessia that looked like it used Ilium assets without the purple light.
Intermission: Don't reduce dialogue to background noise
1) Not really relevant, but then again maybe it is. There's a whole chunk of game on Palaven's moon where you're just running through endless bland rock corridors to reach the next objective. The whole time, Vega and Garrus are talking and you're just running....and running.....and running to get to your next objective. In previous games, they'd have taken the time to take a breath, have characters stand around and just talk. Instead, the player is focusing on running - and this scene seems to take so long that I end up focusing on "Are we there yet?" instead of listening to the conversation. This is an awful attempt at giving dudebros something to do instead of immersing themselves in conversation.
The enemy of my enemy doesn't matter, have some Cerberus
1) Well, looks like I'm bringing up that whole thing about Cerberus after all. Not only does it make no sense as to why my Renegade Shep is instantly plunged into conflict with Cerberus in ME3, it also makes no sense that the "protectors of humanity" spend their entire time trying to kill the one man in the Galaxy who has proven himself capable of killing the Reapers.
How much of this game do I spend fighting Cerberus, being distracted by Cerberus. being foiled at crucial points in the story by Cerberus instead of, you know, doing something about Reapers? Why does this game have no primary antagonist outside of TIM? Why does Harbinger have this great build up in ME2, only to spend the entire game mute with a brief cameo, even though the original voice actor is in the game? "Harbinger speaks of you", says the Reaper on Rannoch. Well that's good, because he sure as Hell doesn't speak anywhere else. Tell him Shep says hi.
2) I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that having 100 foot tall death machines as a foe is only a good idea if you have numerous interesting ways to combat them. Given that the sole fight you have with one involves rolling around like an idiot while a Reaper with an aim so bad I can only assume he's a Stormtrooper, it would seem nobody quite knew what to do with the things. They're great at smacktalking you; they're good at telling you their goals are "beyond your understanding" (lol kidding); having a satisfying showdown, not so much.
See also: the Benny Hill chase on the Galaxy map. I was expecting something other than a game over screen to appear should you be caught.
So what do you do? Yep, have some Cerberus.
3)Kai Leng. You don't even get the satisfaction of winding up TIM throughout the game, because you get this lamer thrown at you instead. Bad enough he recharges shields by sitting out in the open, he only even takes out Thane because a) Shep & co have a bad case of cutscene incompetence and b) we're supposed to believe that the deadliest assassin in the Galaxy decides to go close quarters with a Ninja waving a sword when he's armed with a gun?
Oh God. No....just no.
Intermission: "They were gunned down while having drinks and watching the game."
FULL BODY ARMOUR AND SPACE HELMETS.
Multiplayer and variety
1) There's no way to know this for sure, but I tend to suspect that even accounting for basic reskins in ME1 and 2, the variety of enemies in ME3 is reduced because it's a lot harder to balance things in multiplayer if you have an endless amount of different bad guys, skills, stats etc. Better to have few guys from each group and be done with it. Of course, while this makes things more straightforward in Multi, it impacts on singleplayer. And it doesn't help that every other mission seems to be fighting Cerberus goons.
2) Hey look, another impact of multiplayer on singleplayer: poorly thought out battles. When almost everything in the game is shooting stuff, you'd better make sure the combat isn't predictable. A shame then that the combat in singleplayer often boils down to "fight three waves of goons", or "one of your squad has to fiddle with this button so now it's two versus about twenty".
Don't even get me started on that final shootout with the seven or so Brutes and the handful of Banshees.
3) As far as I can tell, most if not all of the N7 missions are just multiplayer levels with - you guessed it - horde style attack waves. Get rid of all of this.
Intermission: The Citadel is not the Normandy
Remember the Citadel in the first game, and how it was one big area and you could get lost? And how in the second game it was reduced in size to a sort of intergalactic shopping mall but still had a decent feel of "I could get lost here, and there's still a bunch of staircases"?
I've yet to see anyone point out that the Citadel in ME3 is pretty much the Normandy in structure and layout: a small collection of rectangular shaped boxes. I could be wrong, but off the top of my head the Citadel even has the same amount of floors. What went wrong here?
Intermission: What have we done so far?
1) Allowed you to side with TIM, or not.
2) Kept Arrival in the game rather than made it optional.
3) Delayed the invasion.
4) Kept the trial in the game, instead of starting it with a confused setup
5) Removed the focus on Earth because your Shep might not actually care, also horribly foreshadowed plot development.
6) Removed the conflict with Cerberus whether you side with TIM or not, because however you look at it this does not make any sense. This siding with one over the other should have affected gameplay and resource choices, not who you spend most of the game shooting at.
7) Made the Reapers relevant again by giving Harbinger his voice back.
8) Freed up resource by ditching the awful N7 missions. Goodbye forever, horde mode.
9) Ditched multiplayer, while I'm at it. I could be wrong, but I've yet to see Bioware mention that you need to do multiplayer to see Shepard survive at the end of the Destroy ending. This is all I can find.
Phew, that's a whole bunch of nipping and tucking. What now? Well, we assume the start of the game has better pacing and makes more sense. The first half of the game is Shepard & co finally getting to see all of the homeworlds you've wanted to explore since day 1 (with no corridor shooting, bonus). Then when the Reapers finally come knocking, the game would play out much as it did before I started typing because the "recruit the funny looking aliens" campaign worked fine despite my endless complaints over too much shooting.
Wind forward to the end of the game, which isn't focused on the Reapers anymore because in a brain straining effort on the part of the writers to try and think up a way to kill them we got that stupid kid, horribly circular logic and the knowledge that while Rannoch Reaper is allowed to comment on your (at that point) failure to unite the Geth and the Quarians, Shepard isn't given any dialogue option to point out that he did unite them both when the Starchild gives his speech.
AMAZING.
But anyway. You heard me right, the Reapers should not have been the end of the game, the end of the game should have remained the Dark Energy threat raised in ME2. Everything would have come down to letting the Reapers harvest and look for a fix, or take them down then try to fix it yourself.
Rather than the "high level" Starchild, they should have been killed off with the somewhat more mundane (yet infinitely more believable) military might of your assembled armies. When I had to choose between Krogan and Salarian, I thought this is how it would go and my eventual alien race ally choices would save or doom the Galaxy.
Well, we know how that panned out. All the same, your choice of eventual allies should have been the dealbreaker. Not enough tech strength? Shepard doesn't beat the Roopers. Not enough brute force? Shepard doesn't beat the Roopers. A decent mix of the two but maybe one or more species had to bite the bullet to reach this stage? SHEPARD BEATS THE ROOPERS.
If you screwed up, everybody should have been squished in a tube and 50,000 years later we should have had a cutscene where some dude discoveres Liara's "warning: Repears galore" recording under a rock somewhere. If you got it right, you had a bunch of missions to solve the Dark Energy problem as per the ditched leaked script. Maybe there could have been an additional bonus where even if you allowed the Reapers to reap, they may have found a solution themselves after turning everybody into fishpaste based on if you'd done certain things throughout the three games. I mean, there's so many directions they could have taken this.
Oh right. This. This is what could possibly go wrong.
I'm not sure if the icing on the cake is where she reveals she hasn't finished the game in question herself, or where she just invents words like a genuine Willy Am Shakespeare ("Babsolutly")?
Actually no, calling the fanbase of a game she appears in "entitled whiners" while working for a company whose job it is to review videogames would be the icing on the cake.
Eventually the post was simply deleted instead of updated with an apology, which arrived here. Then you have this frankly amazing "I'm closing my blog / no I'm not" emofest here.
See Bioware? This is why you don't put people in games who write about games - even if they write things like "Babsolutly".
It's telling when one of the most articulate commentaries about the whole end of game fiasco on a gaming site is written by a structural biologist rather than any number of videogame wesite staffers, who (based on the previous half a zillion entries seen so far) would more likely ramble on about how gamers are entitled, how they need to shut up. how they wanted a "happy ending" or how a game is a work of art (because as we all know, nothing screams artistic integrity like a game finishing then popping a "Buy DLC" prompt immediately afterwards).
Or hey, let's go over that Moriarty drama again. Is he still throwing a hissy fit on Twitter? I have no idea, I blocked him in advance so I never have to risk seeing any of his cutting insight.
Games journalism is a sideshow. Many years ago, I sent a review of Silent Hill 1 to a major "official" publication when they advertised writer positions. I went there, had a face to face, walked around the office and the offshoot of the interview was that I was "too critical" (isn't that people are supposed to be paying me for?) and I should consider writing about movies instead.
It didn't take me long to notice a good portion of the staff there were walking around in what had to be free promotional clothing for [insert game of the month here].
THIS IS AT LEAST TEN YEARS AGO.
Can anyone tell me what major changes have taken place in games journalism since then? Because the next time random games writer guy accuses gamers of being "entitled" and being at fault for simply wondering where the "sell sell sell" promo blurbs of publishers ended up in the game: you may want to ask yourself if you paid for that cool dudebro free hoodie, the guest pass to all those VIP parties and the six free games your company let you keep.
Meanwhile, one of the best sources for critical thinking in gaming right now seems to be the Forbes Gaming section. Not only does it make a lot of sense, there's also zero risk of seeing the word "Babsolutly" which I'm pretty sure is missing an "e".
There are people out there who think the ending to Mass Effect 3 is actually one big fakeout, and from the point where Shepard is hit by the beam onward nothing is real and its all a piece of attempted Indoctrination by the Reapers.
A lot of debate is framed around whether or not That Stupid Kid(TM) at the start of the game is real or not.
For example, why is Shepard the only one that reacts to him? Why did the kid go from the roof of one tall building, climb up the inside of another tall building in a VENT, say "you can't help me" then crawl back down again?
Okay, that last one could just be bad writing but anyway.
While the below doesn't solve the supposed mystery of indoctrination theories, this does perhaps address the question of whether That Stupid Kid(TM) is a real stupid kid or a pretend stupid kid.
I was wandering around the Citadel and decided to take a look at the tribute wall. I'm not sure if the pictures there change over time, but this is from the start of the game:
Click to Enlarge
See anything? Sure you do. Directly to the right of my FemShep there's two framed photographs.
Click to Enlarge
Boom, one stupid Vent Kid. "Last seen on Earth". I did wonder if I had a case of mistaken identity, but that stupid face (first picture down) is forever burnt into my brain as the ultimate symbol of how to trash a franchise in ten minutes or less so there we go.
On the bright side, this probably means Vent Kid died horribly in the introduction.
So hey, there's a bunch of unused Mass Effect 2 music lurking over on Bandcamp from one of the composers. Track 1 is fantastic if you liked the Suicide Mission material.
End game spoilers galore for Mass Effect 3 here. If you haven't completed it yet, move right along. Seriously, go. Get out of here. Okay.
I completed ME3 a couple of days ago, fully aware of the furore over the ending as I made my way closer to it, thinking "can't be as bad as everyone is making out, surely".
Only to complete the game, sit back and think yep....a game that did almost everything right apart from the ending (and to be clear, I mean from the moment you go to retake the Earth). While most of the point I'd probably make have already been made, I want to make a few comments about the actual design of the finale (which is terrible). First the recap, which itself highlights some pretty bizarre scripting. Destination: Citadel
The Citadel turns out to be a crucial part of your large space weapon that can kill the reapers. Shepard and company need to get on board. Rather than hide it in the middle of nowhere, the ancient and terrifyingly intelligent Reapers decide to place it directly over the homeworld that the deadliest Reaper killing son of a bitch in the galaxy is heading right for, with an army consisting of every tooled up species in the galaxy. Worse, the transport beam - used to place humans onto the Citadel for harvesting - is not only left switched on in the middle of Shepard's full scale assault to reach the Citadel, it is guarded by one solitary Reaper who doesn't stick around for the ten seconds afterwards to make sure that the biggest single threat to their existence - that would be you, Shepard - is actually done and dusted.
Apparently this same Reaper is Harbinger, who actually has some experience with Shepard refusing to die unless turned into a smoking pile of ash. Yet not only does Harbie not raze the ground with a few more blasts just to be sure, he sails off leaving their last line of defence to some husks and the brave Marauder Shields, who gave his life so that you may end up not seeing the horrible ending.
So of course Marauder is shot to pieces and Shepard reaches the beam.
What follows is an ending that replaced the original conclusion to the trilogy, and unfortunately doesn't improve upon it. You know when you played ME2 and kept hearing about dark energy, and even played through a mission that involved stars aging prematurely?
The original ending had the Reapers being the last ditch attempt to prevent advanced races from tearing the universe apart or harvest them and keep things ticking over until the next cycle.
This is a good explanation, it harks back to earlier games, it gives you one hell of a tough choice to make.
Then the writer left and they ditched it, and replaced it with....I don't even. "We are a race of AI machines who must protect organic life from inevitable slaughter at the hands of their synthetic creations, and we shall do this by slaughtering them."
Now place this alongside their actions in the first two games - you know, when they're controlling the Geth. Now it reads like this: "We are a race of AI machines who must protect organic life from inevitable slaughter at the hands of their synthetic creations, and we shall do this by slaughtering them with the aid of their own creations because our irony capacitors need calibrations."
If you're going to make man Vs machine the lynchpin for your Reaper invasion of everything, it would probably help if it made a lick of sense. The dark energy route has an elegance and a "yeah, okay, that works" about it. The "We heard you like..." motivation is the first of many fumbles at the conclusion of a trilogy years in the making.
Worse, the Reapers are controlled by Space Casper, the horribly annoying child littered throughout the game that you're supposed to give two hoots about. I'd pay $15 for a DLC that allowed me to stick a nailgun dart between his eyes. Game devs: there's a reason the "make children killable in Fallout" mods are extremely popular. Kids in games are always annoying. Magical space children that randomly end up being controllers of the Reapers - controlled from on board the Citadel at that - is a recipe for disaster.
Speaking of which: there are non essential characters in ME2 who I can have up to ten lines of conversation with for no other reason than "just because". Yet you place this batshit insane AI in front of me, at the culmination of the story, and Shepard just accepts everything he is told without hesitation and isn't given an option to question any of it. I can't ask where it came from, who made it, why I might want to do my own thing instead of jump through Casper hoops...nothing.
Not only does this not fit with the character, it doesn't mesh with the supposed design philosophy of the series. Shepard is about to make a decision that will reshape the galaxy or end everything, and he isn't going to take five minutes out of his busy workaday schedule to drag some answers out of Casper?
Really? Three Way Failure
So yeah, claims of "It won't be anything like ending A, B or C" aside, that's exactly what you get.
Except...the design of your defining moment is awful. The developers try to influence your choice, not so gently nudging you down the path of what they feel would be the best ending - they have "control the reapers and let them live" as Blue (Paragon), and "kill the reapers" as Red (Renegade) and "magical galaxy wide biology alteration" in the middle as glowing white ("pick me! pick me!") At this stage in the game, the player should not feel the additional burden of a developer breathing down their neck and saying "You want this one...don't you?"
The end result of whatever decision you make - all the mass relays destroyed, presumably billions killed in the explosions, the Turians, Salarians and Quarians trapped in the Solar System (and at least two of those species can't eat human food, so enjoy your slow horrible death) and a Universe plunged into the dark ages isn't mentioned, isn't explored, isn't given a second thought.
If that had been presented as one of the options, you'd have probably just picked a "Let the Reapers squish us all, thanks" ending and walked into one of the darkest finales ever. Which would have been amazing.
So of course, the game doesn't actually have a "Reapers win" ending, nor does it have a more traditional "Shepard wins, but at some cost" ending.
All you have is SPACE MAGIC, now in three colourful flavours. Turning everybody into synthetic / organic hybrids by....I don't know how....is as bad as "A Wizard did it", and has no place being dropped into the last ten minutes of a series based in fairly standard sci-fi lore trappings.
Of course, there's no explanation how this is done. And in an amazing slice of asset reuse, the developers give everybody an identikit ending based on three space magic choices that has absolutely nothing to do with any choice you've made so far (this is all so lazy, the movie files are actually listed by colour in the game files). Even Fallout 3 managed a couple of different slides depending on the choices you made throughout the game. And New Vegas is a great example of how to do it (go check the End Game Wiki page).
This places all the eggs in a very lacklustre FMV basket and leaves it at that.
An interesting result of the identikit ending (accounting for pretty colour variations, of course) is that I'm seeing lots of people lose interest in a second playthrough because the endings are so similar (hey look, this one is green instead of blue!) that they couldn't be bothered. I'm guessing Bioware are noticing something is going horribly wrong in their stat tracking, hence threads such as this (I've read that a number of Bioware writers didn't like the ending given to them, but one guy had an override button and dismissed their concerns. If true....whoops.)
Now, there is a counterpoint to the "these endings are terrible", and either misread the complaints as "crybabies demand a happy ending" or something in a bit more detail. To address some of his points: 1) It's Confusing: No, they're not being "preserved" despite what Space Casper says (and you taking that view seems to suggest you believe what this AI - who controls the Reapers - is saying at face value. The AI is hardly going to say "Kelly Chambers in a jar, lol" is it?)
They're being turned into mush in the most horrendous way possible then turned into some sort of mass intelligence fishpaste that then goes off to fishpaste everybody else. For the first two games, they even used synthetics created by the organics to shoot the organics with laser guns and rockets. Are all of the victims of the Reaper controlled Geth slaughter throughout the galaxy "preserved" too? Because you might want to look into that.
If the Reapers are so smart - and they apparently are, given their commander has a space magic button that can change biology across the galaxy - why don't the Reapers avoid all the hassle and simply turn up every 50,000 years to kill all synthetics? 2) Lore Errors and Plot Holes: Sorry, but if you openly admit you don't know what happens when a Relay explodes (despite that being the thing that ends the Arrival DLC, places Shepard on Earth at the start of ME3 and is actually detailed in the Codex) you probably don't have any business snarkily comparing some of the many, many batshit crazy plot holes listed above to Star Wars nerds obsessing over the length of a Star Destroyer. Speaking of which: leave your explanation as to how Joker is flying through a relay when you make your choice and how the squadmates on Earth with you are also on board at the door, thanks. 3) Player choice is completely discarded: Glad you mentioned this, because it's more of an issue with the underlying game mechanics that the third game is supposedly built on, rather than anything to do with the plot. Shall we race towards the home stretch? Building your fleet has never been so pointless
All throughout Mass Effect 3, you're told to recruit allies, build a force capable of stopping the Reapers. You negotiate with morons to grab some assets for the Earth battle, you talk down species from a two way holocaust to have their fleets aid you as you reclaim the solar system, you fiddle with gene cures to get this guy to help that guy and did you save the Rachni because they'll come to your assistance in your darkest hour...
....except none of this actually happens when you finally have your fleet and go to "take back Earth".
I assumed Bioware had expanded the mechanics of the suicide mission in ME2 - that is, your choices both in the build up to the finale and the choices inside of that finale would shape the course of your last stand.
Everything points to battle readiness and the strength of your fleet. The first thing you see when you load the game is the battle map, locked at 50%. The first thing you see after a mission is the War Room, and your increasing supplies of decision making allies. Everything you do pops up a little "your military might has increased" with a little picture of a Krogan on it or whatever.
You upgrade the Normandy, because you guess that based on previous experience when the space battle begins you'll probably lose people unless you upgraded.
LOL NOPE.
Any visions you had of telling certain fleets to attack certain Reapers, protect various support lines or planets or holding points while the Alliance punched a hole through to Earth, any hope you had of calling in Turian air support while faced with 6 brutes and an instakill Reaper, any notion of seeing certain sections increase / reduce in difficulty while duking it out on Earth are all gone.
Because none of this happens. Instead, Bioware take all of your assets and fishpaste them, Reaper style, into a number and a text blurb on a "build the crucible" diagram and that's it.
This is a massive, massive disappointment after seeing what they did with the suicide mission. More of a let down than letting the council die in the first game only to see it populated with what look like the exact same aliens on the Citadel in ME3. More of a let down than choosing to not save the Rachni, only to run into an "artificial queen" (dear god) dumped into the game anyway. More of a let down than having made all those choices in earlier games to get to the stage where you could save both the Geth and the Quarian, only to watch the Geth potentially die as a result of hamfisted "either / or" choices on the Citadel (why do regular synthetics die alongside the Reapers anyway? For all intents and purposes, the synthetics are the evolutionary equivalent of a tomato next to the Reapers so why would the space magic beam wipe them out too?)
As a final nail in the coffin, the only impact the battle fleet / war readiness has on anything is a few (slight) modifications to the FMV, and should you desire to see Shepard Commander wake up at the end you need to play multiplayer to increase the score. And of course bolting "Shepard survives" onto the "bad" renegade ending ensures that all synthetic life dying for him to live is the trade off, even though he should be dead too because his entire body only works because of Reaper tech.
Plot holes? Holy shit, yes. Finishing the game and seeing the "Continue the legend with downloadable content" popup is the final icing on the cake.
The majority of this game was fantastic. The cast had some great lines, the injokes were actually funny and using music and locations from the first game made the whole thing very nostalgic.
Even the increasingly tiresome "survive fifty waves of enemies" in the London sequences and the "here's six brutes, a Reaper and two banshees because we're starting to flag a bit now" didn't faze me in the long run.
But for a game based on choices supposedly making a difference, only for those differences to end up at the bottom of an exploded set of space relays based on three space magic options given by a last minute introduction that you can't even debate with or question, there's only one thing to say.
Yep, the continuing adventures of "How many mods I can add to a game before it explodes and takes half the street with it". This time around, I've mostly focused on adding extra clothing, armour, quests, building interiors and a stack of extra people. There doesn't appear to be any real impact on the game as yet, and there are only two things I simply cannot get working (only head retextures so no big deal really).
In no particular order, here's a bunch more mods I'm running. I'll cover some of the others mentioned above (like additional people and buildings) next time, as I haven't actually come across all of the content I've added yet.
Not gonna lie - this might be my favourite armour in the entire game, modded or not. You do a little quest to grab it (there's two versions, actually - the other comes with a rebreather but it's surrounded by about a million high level enemies so I don't have that one yet). It's the kind of thing I expected to be in the game from the start, but the closest I could find was the hideous ghoul brotherhood robes.
And nobody is going to wear that.
Combine with some form of eyewear and the "face hidden" mode from pimp my scarf and you're going to look pretty badass.
I really like this one, because it gives you a base of operations East of the Mojave Outpost, somewhat South of Nipton.
You get a shack with a ton of storage, an RV you can sleep in, a chemistry table to rid yourself of addictions and a dog.
Word of warning - you're not far from a place where Viper gang members spawn, and I was not entirely impressed when my dog exploded due to a sudden raid. Alas poor Yappy, I knew him not at all.
3)Portable Campsite. Another one for the "how was this not in the game" pile. You buy the bed and the campfire from random shops:
Then you throw them on the ground and activate both items. You can now sleep anywhere and cook some food whenever you feel like it.
Nice, simple and immersive mod. Sometimes the bed gets stuck in the ground or hovers ten feet in the air just like real life.
4)The Books for Bullets Program. Trading in books in Fallout 3 was great fun (no really, it was) and it blew my mind the first time I saw a ton of pre-war books in Vegas, thinking "I'm gonna make a fortune out of these" before realising they didn't carry the same worth that their DC cousins did. No matter, I'm sure you'll get to do something cool with all these books lying about the place. Right?
Wrong. You didn't do a damn thing with books, and I was somewhat let down by this. I also thought the whole crafting bullets skill was a nonsense due to never being able to find the parts I needed.
WOULDN'T IT BE AWESOME IF SOMEONE WHO CAN CODE THINGS HAD A SIMILAR IDEA AND FIXED MY PROBLEM.
Step right up, person who made this mod. It adds a "books for bullets" machine to a police station, and gives you the crafting components you need depending on what type of pre-war book you feed it (yes, the mod changes pre-war books into things like Fiction, Spiritual, History etc).
This is genius - a smart way to give your character a home (of sorts) in Goodsprings at the start of the game in a way that doesn't break the story with an unrealistic "Five minutes into the game and now you live in a mansion" mod. You know the alleyway at the side of the saloon and the store? Yep, you're going to set up there.
It's pretty simple, and you get some XP for each part of the alley that you sort out.
I was worried that me dicking around out in the open might attract a passing Deathclaw and cause a massacre but it hasn't gone horribly wrong so far.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could cook with ovens? Well, now you can.
Depending on your Luck stat, you may find lots of working ovens or you might have to fix them before using. And then it might be out of fuel, so you finally have a use for flamer fuel (admit it, you never bothered to pick it up because you never bothered with flamethrowers). Great mod.
Science. Everybody loves science, especially when it involves insane death robots. And you'd love to build your very own insane death robot, wouldn't you?
Of course you would.
Well, GET READY FOR THE SHACK ATTACK, BY WHICH I MEAN THE WOODEN SHACK BELOW.
Inside, you'll find one of the most interesting and fun mods around. Behold the metal things!
Finally, there's a reason to collect all those bits of junk and scrap lying about the place. Fire up the machine at the end of the room and you can pick your weapon of choice:
This is what I ended up with:
They'll follow you around like a regular companion, and you can repair your robot if they get too messed up. My robot died horribly, so I ransacked him for parts. Easy come, easy go.
