New and improved, Colin McRae: Dirt 2

I’ve been thinking for the past few months that I don’t have enough decent racing games and I could really do with something to tide me over until F1 2010 finally rears its head.  I was tossing up a few options when Matt solved all my problems by shipping me half a dozen different racing titles on Steam.  Colin McRae: Dirt 2 is the first cab off the rank, so to speak.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the game probably could’ve been called Ken Block: Dirt.  Colin McRae died tragically in 2007 so he obviously played no active role in the game.  Respect is paid to him at various points but it’s the current stars of the X-Games circuit that you’ll be racing and interacting with: Tanner Foust, Dave Mirra, Travis Pastrana, a bunch of others and of course everybody’s favourite sideways shoe salesman, Ken Block himself.  That’s right, there’s hardly a Finn in sight and it’s almost like the WRC doesn’t exist which makes you wonder, really, just how serious a rallying game this is?  We’ll get back to that question later.

I’ll get the main gripe out of the way first.  I had a lot of trouble with bugs in this game.  For the first couple of days it’d take half a dozen or more attempts at starting and then restarting the game to convince it to run without crashing in the first race.  This issue eventually sorted itself but ever since there’s been regular visual glitches and random crashes.  I consulted the forums, couldn’t find any reasonable fixes but did note with interest that plenty of other people were complaining about all sorts of different bugs of their own.

The whole thing is a massive pain in the arse, to the point where I almost chucked the game in.  I’m glad I didn’t though because once you’re finally behind the wheel of a car this game is a hell of a lot of fun.

(more…)

Marine, gun and gimmick? Check.

I’ve always had a little bit of a soft spot for Raven Software ever since they released Heretic, the fantasy inspired Doom clone.  The game established Raven as a company who weren’t afraid to make something original in an unoriginal format.  The Star Trek nerd in me enjoyed Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force too, another of Raven’s creations, which turned out to offer not only a good fan service but also a highly decent Quake-inspired shooter.

So I was fairly optimistic when I picked up a copy of Singularity, Raven Software’s latest first-person shooter, as it seemed to tick all the boxes for an interesting game.  First-person shooter, with temporal puzzles and effects, set in a mutant infested Russian military research facility.  Unfortunately, upon playing the game, I was left with the lasting impression that ticking boxes was all Singularity did in the hopes of creating an imaginative new title.

The story surrounds Captain Nathaniel Renko, your typical US space marine Black Ops soldier, who’s been sent on a recon mission to the supposedly abandoned Russian island of Katorga-12 after reports of a massive electro-magnetic pulse.  After crash landing, Renko finds himself thrown back through time to 1955, where the facility is self-destructing.  While in the past he saves a scientist from a burning building, and after returning to the present day finds that time has altered radically.  The scientist, Nikolai Demichev, has used the power of Katorga-12′s experimental Element 99 (or E99 for short) to overthrow the government and has proceeded to conquer the globe.

(more…)

Previously titled (Gears of) War for Cybertron

It’s a little difficult to describe the feeling you get when you first start playing Transformers: War For Cybertron, but it must be something akin to finding a $100 bill in an old pair of dirty underwear.  It wouldn’t have occurred to you to ever look there for a $100 bill, but when you accidentally find it you’re so happy that you don’t mind the company it’s been keeping.  The entire Transformers property has fallen on hard times recently, with some questionable movies and some truly hideous games based on those movies.  That’s why it’s such a delight to pick up War For Cybertron, a game I’d only been vaguely aware of up until the week of it’s release, and find out that here is a Transformers game that doesn’t suck.

Set before the original animated series, the game chronicles the ongoing battle between the Autobots and Decepticons over their home planet of Cybertron.  Although players can choose to play either the Decepticon or Autobot campaign first, the narrative begins with the Decepticon’s rise to power and concludes with the Autobot’s scramble to defend themselves.  You can play the game solo or online co-op, with each level offering a selection of three Transformers to control.  Transformers are split into different classes, each of which have their own vehicle form and selection of special skills.

The game plays out as an over-the-shoulder shooter, and to say that this game shamelessly plunders elements from Gears of War would be putting it nicely.  Many elements of the control scheme are identical, as is the feel of both movement and shooting, and both games share a penchant for oversized bosses.  During the section of the Autobot campaign where you take on a corrupted cyber-slug, all I could think was: “Hey! Sure is Robo-Corpser in here”.  But the brilliant thing about War For Cybertron is that you won’t care.  The Unreal Engine works so perfectly in the Cybertron setting that it’s almost impossible to feel any ill will towards recycled mechanics.  Personally I felt like they could have borrowed a little more, in fact, like at least a basic cover system.

(more…)

Ah, the ubiquitous Final Fantasy artwork

Games like Final Fantasy XIII come from a pedigree not unlike a royal family. It has elements of all the JRPGs that have come before it, including the bastard children that are never really mentioned and improvements made through breeding out negative elements. You get duds and revolutionaries, bigger wars, bigger guns and prettier women in less clothing. But after a little while, you realise that you’re looking at breeding cousins and that the faces are starting to all look a bit samey. You start to notice grandiose loopholes in the history and it all gets a bit convoluted in parts, trying to figure out which country in what timeline affected which scantily clad lovestory.

FFXIII is trying to be an elegant game, with high concepts. It’s nonlinear story is rife with terrorists and freedom, enemies and victims, death and fear. We start off on a train of rounded up ‘tainted’ people (called l’Cie), who are undergoing a Purge. But that’s really all the information we get before being thrown into a fight, which crashes the train and sets in motion the events which lead to the main characters being infected with the brand of the mysterious and supposedly evil fal’Cie. They must now complete their focus or mission, or risk becoming Cie’th – twisted agonised creatures who were once human l’Cie. If they complete their focus, they have an eternity of being a giant naked crystal to look forward to.

(more…)

Remember when Billie Joe had really cool hair?

Harmonix is one of those developers that always seems to have made the right moves when it comes to their games. When they originally split from the Guitar Hero franchise and started Rock Band, they put a lot of thought into their product, introducing both the vocal and drum tracks into the music genre. They focused on bringing both quality and upcoming artists to their track lists, and built an expansive library of downloadable content that worked across multiple titles in the Rock Band series.

You’ve always been able to describe them as Guitar Hero‘s more mature older sibling. While Guitar Hero was releasing disc after disc of band or genre themed full retail titles, Rock Band continued to support it’s core titles with optional track packs and community events. And when Harmonix did decide to release a band-themed stand alone title, The Beatles: Rock Band, they put so much effort into making it a unique experience that the result was one of the most critically acclaimed music games of all time.

Which is why I’m a little bit disappointed this week as I play my way through Green Day: Rock Band, Harmonix’s second band-themed stand alone title, and surely the low-light of their development career to date.

(more…)

Two barrells of fun, coming right up!

In the unlikely event that Red Dead Redemption doesn’t pick up any Game Of The Year awards, then it must be a shoe-in for the Most Anticipated Title of 2010.

Before I kick this review off, I’d like to tell you about the craziness that was release day here in Australia.  To begin with, five of around seven major games retailers broke street date a day early, much to the delight of gamers country-wide.  When I went to pick up a copy at around 11AM, the Big W store I visited hadn’t even had time to shelve the game’s boxes, and had sold over half their stock just over the service counter.  Leaving the store, the 50-something gentlemen who validated my parking smiled when he saw my copy of the game and pulled out a copy from under his booth’s desk.  As he explained it: “My son wanted me to bring him home a copy, but I think he’ll have to wait until I’m done with it”.

Rockstar must truly be the kings of the hype machine.  Unsuspecting console gamers (who didn’t even know they liked Westerns) have been either playing this game recently, or broke.  They were apparently the only two options on hand.

So then, for a title that everyone simply must have, how is Red Dead Redemption once the hype wears off?

(more…)

I can't believe this name was shouted down by the press club

Xbox Australia has officially announced today a new official partnership with Foxtel (one of Australia’s major pay-TV networks) to deliver pay-TV via the Xbox 360 console.  Officially.

The move comes mere days after Sony’s announcement that they will be providing their own Movies-on-Demand service (spanning all the major movie studios no less) for the PlayStation 3 later in 2010.

Microsoft’s announcement basically continues the two consoles conflict as to who can provide the better media hub.  Xbox already has it’s own pay-per-view movie streaming deal in Australia, while PlayStation owners freely get to make use of ABC’s wonderful iView catch-up program.  Packages for the new Foxtel partnership haven’t been announced yet, but the announcement confirms that you will need both an Xbox Live Gold subscription and a seperate Xbox Foxtel subscription to recieve the service.  So if you’re staunchly a Silver account holder, you’ll have to go Gold if you want your new pay-TV.  Pricing is also yet to be announced, but I for one would keep in mind that these are the people who’d ask you to pay 200 wooden nickels MS Points for a single music video.  Something to consider.

The new Xbox service is creatively titled “Foxtel by Xbox Live”, as if that was seriously the best name they could come up with.  Why not BoxTel? Or FoxBox Gold?  Anyway, if you’re interested you can head on over to the official announcement for full details and PR approved quotes.  The word “innovative” will probably be used in there somewhere.

Both 360 and PS3′s new entertainment offerings will be available later in 2010.

What IS the square-root of Lost Planet, anyway?

Harry Nilsson once famously sung “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do”, and if you ever have the misfortune to play Lost Planet 2 singleplayer then you’ll discover all too well what he was singing about.

Yes, I’ve been having a mixed experience back on E.D.N III this week, homeworld to any number of warring humanoid factions and a wide variety of enormous deadly fauna.  Lost Planet 2 is the sequel to Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions, and features multiple protagonists from different backgrounds to tell it’s story.

What that story might be, who it pertains to and why we should be interested is a matter of debate at this point, as most of the game appears to be centred around not being squashed by a giant animal with glowing orange weak spots.  There were only a few chapters during the game’s campaign that seemed to book-end properly, and even then it was a little difficult to figure out who these people were or what they wanted to achieve other than survival.

But who cares, right?  This game isn’t about compelling characters or intriguing plot, it’s just about fighting sky-scraper tall beasts and living to tell the tale.

(more…)

It's wall bustingly good!

It is with a sad heart that Matt and I must announce that our band, The Afternoon Frolics, is breaking up.  We had a whirlwind time recording 5 albums and doing countless world tours since the creation of the band in mid-January.  Unfortunately, when living in close proximity with one another certain facts cannot be overlooked.  For us, it was that Matt, as band leader, refused an octopus the right to be our drummer.  I found this unacceptable and we have agreed to go our separate ways.  However, more about the break up of what many people referred to as “a modern day Herman’s Hermits” later.  Now it’s time for me to talk to you about what made our career possible: LEGO Rock Band.

Let me start by saying that I am a huge fan of the Rock Band series.  Anyone that read what I wrote about it in our countdown of the best games of the previous decade would know my feelings about Harmonix and it’s rock creation.  From the outset they put out a strong product that showed that they were serious about what they were doing.  All the while LEGO had been turning it’s hand to games with the creation of the LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Indiana Jones thanks to the fine people at Traveller’s Tales. Harmonix, most likely to compete in the family friendly Wii market, teamed up with TT Fusion to create a LEGO rock spectacular.  Apparently only half of those at TT Fusion were on board with the concept, who wanted to make sure they “weren’t just skinning one franchise on another”.  Once their fears were allayed production was begun in late 2008, with release in November 2009.

And apparently we’re so lazy that we only bothered to pick it up in 2010.

(more…)

Bayonetta? I hardly knew her!

Bayonetta is, from my perspective, a button masher’s dream game. Just like in the old Street Fighter games of yore, if you learned 4 moves through mashing trial and error, you are set for the rest of the game. Add to that some amusingly thought up moves, gore, unlimited ammo and some decently executed quick-time events and you have me hooked.

I am not the finesse player that the guys are, sadly. As I’ve said before, I primarily like games for their storylines, not how many achievements I can get for twisting my fingers into arthritic pretzels. Over-intricate gameplay and punishing difficulty often get in the way, same with sidequests, achievements, leveling up and poor writing. Fuck that shit, man. Too hard.

Or that’s what I would be saying, if I hadn’t been converted. Sigh, I am just too easy.

Though, please don’t take that ‘easy’ comment as some kind of lead-in/segway to how trampy Bayonetta herself is, because Bayonetta, as a game and as a character, has attracted some fairly heated discussion on the nature of female protagonists and sensuality in games. Although certainly not the first over-stylised female character in gaming history (remind me to pick up Dead or Alive: Paradise when I get the chence), she has drawn the wrath of feminists, those supposedly rare, idolised ‘girl gamers’ and the politically correct. Her overtly sexual nature, the way she is presented in the game and even the dimensions of her body are apparently an affront to women everywhere.

However, my problem is that as a female, I just don’t get it. Why is she so offensive?

(more…)