Simspons Hit & Run

Grand Theft Auto Springfield (as it should be called) is a delight.  I have been playing it on the PS2 for much of the last week and have been having fun the whole time.

The game is supprisingly challanging which is a bit of a relief and suggests that the creators wanted this to be a genuine game, not just a cash in.

There are many other ways in which it is clear that effort and love has gone into the project.  The voices are acted by the real performers from the show and the phrases and speeches they are given to say are absolutley in keeping with their characters.  Most of the off the cuff phrases are straight from episodes of the show.

The parts of the game I've played so far (which are the first two levels and feature Homer and Bart), have involved mostly driving challanges.  In Homer's, the plot was not entirely convincing.  He was trying to uncover a plan by Mr Burns and usually I would have though him far too lazy to do this and would have expected Bart and Lisa to do it.  Still Lisa's section is starting next so perhaps she will take it up where he left off.

The plot of Bart's section was a bit random and, on reflection, I think plot might be the area that lets the game down but for gameplay fun it is unmissable.  You can buy lots of different cars to own yourself and pretty easily swap between them or just climb into any vehicle on the street.  The visuals might look bright and blocky but the cars have their own characteristics and the the game has plenty of subtelties behind it's cartoonish exterior.

When I played Resident Evil Code Veronica X (see previous entry), I wondered if the PS2 had perhaps not been a huge leap forward from the PS1 but in the three years RECVX and Simpsons Hit and Run it seems that leaps forward were made in the way games played.  In this game the camera follows the character as they bound dynamically around the game world, swinging into line behind them when they change direction, and the right stick can be used to look around though 360 degrees.  In other words, the controls are like the controls of a modern 3rd person game.

There are boonus missions and races you can take part in and items to collect and loads to do and everyone should visit the game version of Springfield.

Resident Evil - Code Veronica X

After a few days of playing RECVX its mechanisms are very apparent.  You find one key or item in one area which allows you to access the next and so on.  In any wider section there are always rooms left locked which you know you will have to come back to and unlock once you have found the right item further on.  Along the way you have to kill zombies and other monsters and eat plants and use first aid spray to prevent you from dying.

None of this transparency prevents Code Veronica X from being engaging.  It did take a while for me to get accustomed to the controls: the character rotates left and right with a corresponding push of the left stick, and walks forward or back (from their own perspective) with a likewise movement of the same stick.  Backwards walking looks a lot like Moonwalking.  For a long time I just expected to see Claire (Redfield, the protagonist at the start of the game), walk up the screen when I pushed up, go right for right etc. and was frustrated when it didn't happen.

I have now just about got used to the way things actually are and as have become completely immersed in the game; for days not thinking about other games I might like to play   I even had a dream about being hemmed on all sides by zombies and not being able to get away.

I am now at an awkward stage in the game.  I think I have explored all areas which I can currently access except one.  To get to that one I have to go through a room where there is a puzzle to solve to reveal a secret door.  As soon as the hidden door opens a monster leaps into the room through the window) and attacks Claire.  She is already in the worst possible state of health (except dead), has no health giving items and there are none more to be picked up anywhere.

This monster is pretty tough and if it hits her once she goes down.  I cannot keep her out of the way of it for long enough to kill it so the only escape is to get past it without being hit and get through the secret door.  This is do-able.  There is a blue plant just through the door which Claire does have time to stop and pick up but she's got to be pretty quick as the monster can follow her or even whip his elasticated arm through the opening to kill her.  She can then progress through another door and up some stairs which lead to an area patrolled by two of the same type of monster.  What waits for Claire if she get through this next area I cannot report.  She has not much more ammo than she has health and her situation looks grim.

I have recently read in the manual that my ranking at the end of the game will be based partly on how many retries I have used (you retry after you die).  This section has presumably made my ranking quite a lot worse.

Assassins Creed Brotherhood and Crysis

Well, I've been neglecting my duties again.

I played about half of Assassin's Creed II before the AC Brotherhood that I had ordered arrived in the post, by which time I was a bit Assassined out and wanted a break so I've played some Crysis which I got for £2.49 in a Steam sale and was a total bargain! It has beautiful scenery splendidly rendered and the gameplay is fantastic.  Playing it does not actually give me any pleasure because I die all the time but if you are semi-competent at games you won't have this problem so please, please play this: just remember to save every time you get through a group of enemies!

Despite all the killing (of me), the world of Crysis is a glorious place.

Crysis happens in North Korea where the army make up the early enemies.  My progress has been so slow that I have not fought any alien types yet but there have been distinct signs of creepy things to come.

Having played some Spacechem and not been as immediately hooked by it as I remember being in the past I have now started Brotherhood, and I have numerous complaints.

Ezio will not always defend himself properly when I tell him to.  I am aware that stronger guards can get through his defences but even weaker ones seem to hit him sometimes - it seems to happen more often at an earlier point in any fight.  When it happens I think, well, perhaps he is not engaged in combat so I press L1 to engage and he immediately becomes unengaged and is attacked from all sides.  This process gets me extremely riled and so I lose all control and have been beaten senseless and forced to take 3 bottles of medicine all of which I strongly resent before I get into the fight.

I do approve of the new class of guard which is tough and did not appear in AC II.  The fights did need to be made harder - though only by fair means.

The other way the controls have let me down is that I can often not persuade Ezio to attack when he is not yet engaged in combat.  He might be strolling across a rooftop and be a dead cert' to slash at an archer before the guard even sees him, never mind shoots him, but I am likely to press square four times to no avail and Ezio will have been shot twice before he decides to retort.  I don't mind if he slashes at the air and misses, I just want a sign that he's paying attention to what I want him to do.  I have had no problems with the controller in other games, so it's not that.

I have now bought Hitman 2 for £1.49 in a Steam sale and am pretty curious about that but I am distracted from it by another new purchase which arrived in the post today.  It is a PS2.

I have several 2nd hand PS2 games which I am selling and I can now play / test them.  The first I'm trying out is Resident Evil Code Veronica X.  I have only played the first couple of minutes so far and am already swearing at the old style view and controls but I am determined to give the game a chance.

That's about all the news I've got for now and this time I absolutely promise to write more sooner.

Assassin's Creed 2 Yet Again!?

I thought I'd finished this game.

(Please see my previous entries about this game which came in December 2011 and April 2012.)

Well I did finish it but it's so good that I kept thinking about it and have gone back to it's beautiful depiction of Renaissance Italy.  I wiped my previous saves and started from the beginning.  I was worried that my trophies might also get wiped but no such problems.  I looked through to see which ones I did not get and was amazed at the ease of some of them.  They were just for things which I did not attempt much.  One was for hiding five bodies in piles of leaves.

I am going to try harder to find feathers this time, and to find as many treasure chests as I can without the aid of treasure maps.  I think I got fifty-something feathers last time so I would like to try to get at least 70 this time, though that does not sound too ambitious now as I type it.  Let's say at least 80.

While I has playing I had the thought that I would be sorry if I did not play this game at least five times in total.  Then I realised that by "in total" I actually meant "before I die".  This made my think two things.  The first was, will I really be playing this or any other game when I'm an old man?  Of course, I don't know the answer.  Perhaps I will have terrible arthritis and not be able to play.  I might even have gone blind.  The second thing I thought was: am I measuring out what is left of my life and imagining what I can do in the time.  I am only 40.  It is extremely plausible that a man of my generation might live to be 80.  Isn't it a bit soon to be planning ahead like this?

Since I last wrote an entry I have finished Red Dead Redemption which was great except for the end.  The event to which the plot had been leading happened in a cut scene and then the game just banged on for w while with some really boring tasks to do until another significant event happened (which this time felt crowbared in).  It was possible to continue playing after that but only to finish off any unfinished tasks and I didn't feel too incentivised so I left it.  But I don't want to end on a sour note because I had great fun with this game and would recommend it too all.

I went away to a family wedding and talked about games with my ten year old cousin once removed who was of the confused opinion that the Xbox 360 was better than the PS3.  That naivety aside I was not sure how to feel about the fact that he had played many games which were rated 15 or over.  I suppose it is really his parents decision but there are things in some of the games he mentioned which I would not want to think of a ten year old being exposed to on a regular basis.  Still, he seems to be a normal, emotionally healthy and even quite sensitive kid so I suppose these games have not corrupted him.

I have started playing Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing lately and it's great fun with plenty of content but does my head in because of the high speed and high levels of camara movement so I can only play for a bit at a time.

I have bought both Supreme Commander Forged Alliance and SpaceChem with its DLC when they were on offer on Steam and have played quite a bit of Forged Alliance already and it is great and though I have not played SpaceChem yet I did play a demo of it which came with an copy of PC Gamer a while ago and I know it will take up days of my life.

I bought Rage cheaply in the supermarket and although I do not like to pass judgement too directly on games I was dissapointed by this one.  It is like Borderlands with the fun taken out.  Everyone in the towns tells you what a great guy you are (the most wince-making thing that ever happens in any game and it happens to excess, here), and then you go out and shoot some bandits.  Repeat.  The vehicles drive quite nicely, though.

I'll write again sooner this time.

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.