Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts again.

When I play this game I can't believe that I have still not bought or played CoH Tales of Valour.

This is a link to a previous entry I made about this game:

http://therubbishgamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/company-of-heroes-opposing-fronts.html

Since I bought the new PC, even though I have signed back in to the same Relic account, I cannot continue the campaign from where I left off, which was near the end, and I have to start from the beginning.  It doesn't seem too much like a chore as I can only remember it vaguely, though there are one or two battles which I remember as being a real pain.  I am definitely playing better than I did first time round.

A burning house in St Lo

The game is beautifully made with a lot of thought put into it.  The fact that even when I get hammered I don't feel hard done by makes me think that things are always working how they should and I am being given every chance to win, if only I wasn't such an idiot.

It would make the game more interesting if I did not play so slowly.  Some of the initial battles are almost unloseable, but it might still take me an hour to get around to making a serious assault on an enemy base, only to discover that it is actually quite vulnerable, and the enemy only seemed strong because the AI had taken a lot of territory and attacked my base boldly with almost everything it had.

There will be more of this played in the near future and I will be looking out for Tales of Valour in forthcoming Steam sales.

Resistance: Fall of Man

This is a Playstation only shooter and for £4.21 on ebay was a fantastic buy.

It is set in the UK.  Most of the soldiers our hero fights alongside are Brits but our hero is, of course, American:  the yanks come to our rescue in a game again - what a surprise.  Never mind, story and character rightly take second place to excellent shooting action.

The enemies are the Chimera.  I'm not completely sure as to whether there is an extra-planetary influence at work, but I think that an infection turns humans into the humanoid type of this creature.  However, there are other kinds which are not at all human and which we see hatch from eggs at one stage.  I should probably pay more attention.

Explosions!

Visually, as the pictures show, the game tries to be in keeping with it's era.  It is set in the early 50s and the colour is largely washed out of the game world, leaving a gloomy but effective, sepia tinted look.

The very first part of the game was tough and I kept dying but after a short time two important things happened.  Firstly, I earned a skill point and after that any of the health bars (bottom right of the first picture), which were partially reduced would refill after a short pause without damage.  Secondly, I started to find health restoring serum about the game-world.  Playing on Medium difficulty, serum and ammo are both scattered very liberally and I have only had one low ammo crisis.

I played through the game for quite a while, including a whole section set in Grimsby, without a single death.  There was then a section set in Manchester and the difficulty level increased a bit but the first couple of deaths I experienced were still mainly down to my stupidity.

A not bad representation of Manchester Cathedral.

On reaching Manchester Cathedral the game gets harder still and death goes back to being an occasional feature of it (if you're me).  There are still plentiful supplies of the necessary equipment for survival, though.

So far new weapons and enemies have been introduced throughout and this has kept the game interesting and extremely playable.

Lost its Edge?

I was disappointed to read the article in Edge 243 about the forthcoming Tomb Raider game.  It agonised at length about two brief moments in an E3 trailer where you could see directly down Lara's top.

I watched the trailer today and could just about identify these moments but they were so brief that I doubt they were put there for titillation.

There was also much wailing and gnashing of teeth about Lara being portrayed as weak and a victim at the start of the trailer.  Even since E3 2011 this has been touted as a game in which Lara makes the transition from being an ordinary girl to being a strong woman capable of overcoming adversity.

For Gods sake Lara, put a jumper on.

There is an interview with art director Brian Horton and all he is asked about is the way Lara is portrayed.  I think this is a shame as the games jungle scenery looks great and this might have been a chance to learn more about it.

Just over the page there is an article about Far Cry 3.  In the second paragraph is a reference to Hitman Absolution's "'sexy' nun murdering spree".  This also refers to an E3 trailer and I have also watched this trailer today.  The scene is not the one sided massacre that Edge's description might have us believe.  The "nuns" instigate the fight by firing an RPG into Agent 47s Motel Room.  He does then kill some of them silently from behind but then a fight breaks out and the sisters fight back viciously.  47 is the eventual winner but it is not a one sided affair.

I find all this apologetic squeamishness a bit tedious.  The same Edge issue contains a great piece by regular columnist Steven Poole railing against censorship in games, but I can't help feeling that the magazine as a whole is coming across as being against censorship in theory but a lot more cautious about specific cases.  In a different issue it banged on at length about portrayals of women it didn't approve of in Saints Row the Third and gave a 6/10 rating to a game which was widely applauded elsewhere.

There is one other thing about Edge which is starting to wear me down: the endless analysing to the nth degree of the social, cultural and economic significance of games.  I love games and I can't stand obtuse games journalism (of which there is loads) but sometimes I just want to get excited and blow things up.  I have bought PC gamer this month and I think I might be sticking with that from now on.

More Uncharted Drakes Fortune and Colin McRae Dirt

I was looking forward to a weekend of playing Drakes Fortune and was surprised to finish it on Friday Night.

I think that the linear nature of the game takes the player through more quickly, even though there is plenty of content.  In an open world game I spend so much time messing about and exploring that the total playing time is extended massively.

The more I played, the more prescribed the climbing and jumping sequences felt.  I am going to give them a bit of credit, though.  There is a sequence in the game where Drake has to jump from place to place inside a temple along a particular route to reach two levers which give him access to the next area.  It is a lot like several sequences in Assassin's Creed II.  There are no comparable section in the first AC game, and Drakes Fortune pre-dates ACII by a year.  Though the Uncharted version was not so extravagant, and although there have been a lot of ledge hanging and swinging and jumping sections in plenty of games, not least the Tomb Raider games, I can't help feeling that this specific one might well have served as inspiration for the game which followed it.

Drakes Fortune was paced very well.  None of the sections were too long or short and the peripheral characters never tagged along for so that they got annoying.  The acting performances and script were pretty respectable.  Although I was surprised that the game finished when it did it seems with retrospect as though I had a full experience with lots of different types of challenge in contrasting environments.

I recommend that you play this game.  If you don't have a PS3, buy one and play this game.

This is a link to the previous entry I made about Colin McRae: Dirt:

http://therubbishgamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/nothing-dirty.html

Playing Dirt this weekend has probably improved my opinion of it, though not of the co-driver calls which are inconsistent and sometimes far too last-minute.

This is what a car soon looks like if I'm allowed to drive it.

I am now trying all the different competitions in Career mode on Clubman; the second easiest difficulty.  I have started to fail to win some races and my average speed for my career has reduced.  I suspect that I am rushing too much and crashing more often as a result.

The steering controls are pretty sensitive.  On a narrow road in a rally section you are ill advised to pull the stick all the way to the left or right for more than a split second at any sort of speed as you will be unlikely to stay on the road.  The occasions when I've gone too much one way then over corrected and got into a prolonged cycle of weaving all over the road are too numerous to count.

You can see what this picture is.  I don't really need to write a caption.

The races are still fun and the OTT vehicles like buggys and trucks are fun to driver on the uneven roads provided.  The rally stages can seem a bit dull when mixed up with these races though, so purists might prefer Championship mode where Rallying is still dominant and each stage seems vital.

I am surprised that I have not bought Dirt 2 yet.  Another Dirt game (Showdown) is now out and it is nearly a year since I bought the PS3 and I am not catching up.  There are just so many games.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

This game arrived yesterday and I played solid, consecutive hours last night.  Progress has been varied.

My early impressions are mostly positive.  It is a pleasant change to play a game with a good cover and shoot system as well as fairly consistent climbing and jumping mechanics.  I do have some reservation about the latter and was sometimes frustrated by Nathan Drake's refusal to climb things which even I could get over when at other times he was mildly superhuman.  More annoying was his inconsistency of action when hanging from ledges.  He is a bit inclined to reach for the ledge he is supposed to be going to in response to a sideways push of the left stick, whether it is behind him or off to his right.

Wow!  The colours, man!

The game looks great.  It is from 2008 and the graphics are not really ahead of their time but the use of colour and scale is very effective and makes the player feel they are truly on an adventure and made me seriously wonder if it was possible to become an treasure hunter and explore the world for profit.  An idiotic thing to think but a good indicator of how the game took me somewhere.

I have to gripe slightly about one section where Drake had to pass along a wooden walkway.  The game was slowed initially so that I could only move him at a walking pace.  When he reached a certain wooden slat it became unstable and the game did the obvious thing; it took control away from me and made Nate stand knock kneed and stupid on the wonky beam.  It then passed control back unannounced and started to swing the camera angle round rapidly.  Drake could now run again but having to compensate for the constantly changing angle of vision was very awkward.

When the Camera settled I was looking at Drake front on, the opposite of the normal angle, and our hero had to run along the walkway as it turned right then left, from the viewers point of view, then at the end there was a jump which was close to the limit of Drakes capabilities.  The fact that this was done at speed and under pressure made hard enough but making the camera angle first changing then settling on an unfamiliar view seemed to be victimising the player.

You might guess from my annoyed tone that I died several times trying this bit.

Killing people in the game works perfectly well.  Dying while climbing and running jumping is very possible but dying in a shoot out is normally embarrassing.

The plot seems acceptable so far.  It slightly gives the impression that a conscious effort has been made to cram in certain elements.  The same type of elements that make Assassins Creed or Indiana Jones a hit.  Legendary treasures, ruthless bad guys who are also after them.  As these are the elements That make for a successful Blockbuster one cannot be too harsh on the developers who put them in.  Sadly, the clean cut Nate cannot be any of the hero's of those series.  However many bad guys he pops off with casual comments he will never be as ruthless as Altiair or Ezio and he could only dream of treating his heroine with Indy's amusing off-handedness.  The guy is just too clean cut.

For all that, I will be putting in just as many hours tonight as last night, and will be just as delighted when I find a silver statue of an animal; and I'll have to admit that sometimes when I fall, it's my fault.

GTI Racing

What I played of this game was not all that great.

The game was made in 2007 (according to Steam) which was the same year as Need For Speed Pro Street and there is no comparison between the graphics of GTI Racing, which are very much of the previous generation, and those of NFS PS, which has much more of the look of the current gen.  I appreciate that this game would not have had the same resources put into it as an NFS game and would have been cheaper at the time of launch.  Graphics are not a serious issue if the game is good otherwise, so I don't see this as a serious problem.

The car was not really going as fast as it appears.

The one thing that makes it fun is the Germanic sounding electro soundtrack which gives it a lively feel.  Sadly the driving itself lacks Germanic precision, with the cars' reactions to bumping into things or going over rough ground being sometimes imperfect, though not terrible.

In one race I was infuriated to cross the line first, have it acknowledged that I had come first on the results screen but on the next screen be awarded a bronze trophy and given the third place prize money.  Aaaaargh, the injustice!

The game's main problem is that most of the races were plain road races and these are a bit much of a muchness.  There is some drifting, which to start with I found impossible because I started with a rubbish car and it was hard to drift through a corner and maintain enough speed to do a good drift through the next one, the corners coming one after another.  There are also some races were you had to drive cross country from one column of light to another, then another etc.  These reminded me sharply of the races in Assassin's Creed II and are enjoyable and more challenging than some of the road races.

Car approaches power station.

My own performance seemed okay, but that might have been because the game was a bit easy.  I am not going to give myself scores out of 10 because it was hard to judge how well I was doing.  I might drop this feature altogether, as I started doing it a bit impulsively and I'm not crazy about it.  We'll see.

I don't know if or when I will go back to this game, but I had some fun playing it.

Need For Speed: Shift...again.

This is a link to the first entry I wrote about NFS Shift, back in January this year.

http://therubbishgamer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/need-for-speed-shift.html

Note that I have lazily used the same pictures for this entry as for the earlier one.

I have not been playing Lost Planet, as I said I would, but have played NFS: Shift incessantly since my last entry.  It is a lot more fun and less serious than I remembered it being; the demolition derby that I have now unlocked and raced being an example of this.

I have made progress in the game and have now tried almost all of the Tier 3 competitions.  They are pretty tough and the speed of the cars makes them hard to control.  Going back and trying the Tier 1 races after doing these I wonder how I ever had any problems.

I have made several new observations about the game.  The first is that the guy whose voice reminds you of a few blindingly obvious facts (like telling you to go at the start of the race) is annoying.  Another is that the loading times for the races are very long.  I've been playing Colin McRae Rally 2005 on the PC today and loading is almost instant.

There is tyre smoke in Shift.  This might seem like a small point but I saw an assessment of a trailer for the new F1 game and the person reviewing it pointed out that this would be the first F1 effort to feature smoke during wheel lock-ups, so Shift beat them by four years, though I'm sure other games did too.

See - just the same as before, only bigger.

The AI controls some cars very aggressively and I have often been the victim of what can only have been deliberate pushes off the road by an AI competitor.  I do not often watch touring car racing but I suspect that this would be illegal in the real thing and for that reason Shift is not as much of a simulator as I originally imagined it to be.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  You can get points towards your career progression by knocking others off the track and it's good fun to do so.  You can get points for all sorts of things; some are for precision racing and some are for aggression.  My experience so far tells me that the dark side is quicker and more seductive.

Although I imagine myself to have improved in this game I have only just won a minor badge for winning 20 races (that's races only, other contests like time-attack don't add to this).  The game has masses of different minor and major badges you can win for achieving simple goals or very difficult ones, as well as Playstation Trophies.

And so to my performance.  I am going to mark myself very low for intelligence because I don't look often enough at the mini-map and then I look at it for too long and crash.  This is not bad observation.  Observation is about noticing things which my or may not be there.  I know the map is there and that I need to use it but still don't because I'm an idiot.  Speed through the game is also poor because it requires good performance to unlock the next level and move on and I'm usually rubbish.

Speed through the game:  3

Intelligence:  2

Reactions and Accuracy: 5

Observation:  5

I seem to score myself lower every time.

I don't yet know what I will write about next time.  I am bidding for an Uncharted: Drake's Fortune on ebay but I probably won't have that till the end of the week.