Jachap's Least Wanted Games #1

The problem with shared accommodation is the sharing.

Particularly regarding the internet. One of my housemates organises ours. Well, his mum organises it. And his mum has decided to cut off our/my connection with the Information Superhighway (does anyone call it that anymore?) tomorrow. So this might be my last blog for a while.

Still, Nick will be around, writing stuff that actually gets read by the people mentioned in it. Seriously, Pratchett must be shunning me deliberately.

"Put some bloody effort in and dress like Rincewind next time you want a book signed, you twat."

Anyway, as a final hurrah for a month or so, I thought I'd clog the internet with some more of my opinions. Thus...

Jachap's Least Wanted Games
(Because, as my old Media Studies teacher used to say, Men Love Lists)

CRYSIS

Maybe its because after Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, a game I wanted for months and actually completed in a single day, I have a violent allergic reaction to hype which involves gouging at my own eyes with a spatula but I honestly don't think I have ever been less interested in a game.

My reason for loathing the mention of Crysis is because its [pretty much] a sequel to Far Cry. Another thrilling addition to this growing sub-genre of shooting games in tropical settings.

"Its not wartorn Normandy... Game of the Year!"

Far Cry was another devastating disappointment in terms of my personal gaming experiences. It was nice and diverting to begin with but as soon as the monsters turned up, it was utterly intolerable rubbish. In fact, even before the ill advised sci-fi slapped you right in the face, every time it channeled you inside, the quality of the game dipped considerably.

There is a running joke in PC Gamer where they use a game entitled Generic Shooter 3 to illustrate how the magazine's scoring method works.

In my mind, Generic Shooter 3 would inevitably include the following elements:

1/ Badly implemented stealth
2/ A stupidly macho main character "That was left handed!"
3/ A zoom ability of limited worth in lieu of genuine iron-sights
4/ A level where all your weapons are taken away
5/ An uninspiring story in which one of the periphery characters suddenly turns traitor at the last moment - TWIST!
6/ A fight against a helicopter
7/ The Essential Weapons Load Out of All Games: Pistol, Bigger Pistol, SMG... etc. This is so ingrained that the number 8 on my keyboard now directly corresponds with "rocket launcher" in my head.
8/ Explosive barrels
9/ Enemies who shout out stupid quips in the heat of battle. Like, "I'm going to shoot you IN THE FACE!"
10/ A fuckload of crates

Far Cry ticks a lot of those boxes. Its Generic Shooter 3: Life's a Beach And Then You Die Hard.

And, from what I've seen of Crysis... its almost exactly the same, only this time, they've got a whole load of PC-breaking technology! To make the leaves prettier!

"Take that, tree!"

Games journalists are always harking on about gameplay over graphics and yet, in everything I've read about Crysis, 80% of the space has been given over to what boils down to, "IT LOOKS GREAT!"

The best bits are the paragraphs given over to: "Its got depth-of-field!"

To my mind, there has never been a graphics feature more worthless than depth of bloody field. If its realistically implemented you don't even notice it. I mean, I don't walk down the street glancing at passing cars thinking, "Wow. Got some good depth-of-field going on today, slick."

In terms of the actual story, you're the stereotypical mute special forces soldier, investigating some alien crash site which the Koreans are looking at too.

"I love X-Files!"

And by investigating, I mean blowing the shit out of everything and killing everybody. Then, halfway through, the aliens lack of depth of field drives them mad and they start killing everybody and so you kill them.

Structurally, is this not identical to Far Cry?

Oh wait, I forgot. You have special powers.

And by special powers I mean you can decide to run really fast, jump really high or punch really hard. But not all at the same time. In the industry they call this Player Choice. It means, given any situation, the player can approach the challenges presented to them any way they choose.

If you want to rush in and jump over everything, you can.
If you want to rush in and hit people really hard, you can.
If you want to rush in really, really fast, you can.

Or, and this is where it gets really exciting, you can change your gun. That's right. In the future, the army will decide that what they want is to make the use, handling and operation of weapons much more complicated. Instead of using an SMG or a shotgun or a sniper rifle, you'll have one gun and just change all the bits to correspond which what you want it to do.

You'll also have to fill in a short questionnaire on the ethics of warfare before pulling the trigger.

So instead of rushing in and fucking everyone up with your superpowers (which stem from your amazing combat wet suit, breaking the popular gaming convention of Special Soldier Serum to explain away why everyone in spec ops has laser vision) you can hang back, fiddle around with your gun for a bit and pick everyone off from the distance in exactly the same way as if you had a sniper rifle.

But its the same gun!

The possibilities are indeed endless.

Sadly, the only picture that illustrates this significant facet of the gameplay which my half-hearted google image searches have turned up is this tiny screenshot:

Still, at least this shows off the depth of field. I mean, just look at it. That helicopter is well blurred. Awesome.

METAL GEAR SOLID 4

War. War never changes. Bloody Hellboy said that. Well, Solid Snake, disagrees. Within ten seconds of the Remastered Trailer for MGS4, he says war has changed.

Yes, indeed. For a start, there are now robot cows in Lycra trousers everywhere.

"Moo!"

Robot walkers with very manly legs and very manly toes.

That's not all that's changed. Oh no. This chap:

The eyeliner was ill advised.

is now like this:

OLD!

That's right. Its Metal Gear Solid: Space Cowboy.

I have watched three trailers for this game and, Essentially, the general gist of them seems to be: "Snake is well old, bro." You'd think that they could have illustrated this with a nice minute and a half trailer, perhaps with a couple of jokes at his expense to begin with, then a nice montage of him being one bad-ass OAP to show he's got it.

That would have been good.

But, of course, this is MGS. Hideo Kojima is incapable of saying something deftly in a few powerful moments which he could say in 45 minutes of exposition heavy codec conversations.

Un many ways, the information is not even that relevant.

I'm going to hazard a guess that, under all that skin-tight combat suit regalia, Snake is still pretty buff. He won't handle any differently. In fact, he'll probably be even more hardcore than he was before.

It certainly seems unlikely that he'll have to pause for little breaks every now and again to rest his aching knees, use a zimmerframe to walk, piss into a bag and have to stop the mission at 4 every day to watch Deal or No Deal.

Its bad of me to dismiss this game out of hand before ever playing it but, you know, that trailer tells me everything I need to know.

It tells me that Kojima still has no idea of how to tell a story properly and he's still shoe horning ridiculous amounts of pretentious seriousness into an action title with a character called Big Boss. I mean, for God's sake...

On top of that, to play this, I'd have to get a PS3.


HALO 3

I want to make something clear at this point. This blog post is not some stupid attempt to bait every fanboy in the entire world. It is not me listing games I think are going to be bad. I am merely putting forward some titles that, well, I hear about probably more than anything else. There's this whole aura around Crysis (I'm a PC gamer, so its the one on my radar more than the others) which games sometimes get, this ridiculous messianic halo of hype.

More Depth-of-Bloody-Field

I'm fed up to the back teeth by it. I think a lot of committed gamers are. I certainly hope so. There is only so many times you can hear pre-release bollocks like, "groundbreaking AI" before wanting to chisel someone's teeth off.

When was the last time AI in a game was really ground breaking?

I think my absolute break off point was Half Life 2. The promises about AI that was made there... the previews that said, if you boarded up a door, the amazing Combine would be able to find a window and clamber in. That stalkers could analyse their surroundings and react on the fly.

It was all utter nonsense, as far as I can tell.

As Nick has said in an earlier post, that stuff about Starcraft, "As you can see, Starcraft still does big battles..." is typical producer-speak hogwash. Big battles? Rome: Total War does big battles, mate. Yours are just piffling.

Its all worn me down a bit. I find, with a lot of games, I simply cannot summon any excitement whatsoever. I'm completely apathetic.

I will not buy MGS4 or Crysis. I don't want them. They don't interest me.

Still, I know I'm not completely over my love for games, because TF2 makes me giddy at the knees.

Oh man. I spend hours a day wondering what class I'll choose first.

I won't buy Halo 3 either.

Now, Halo was a respectable game. Best console shooter since Goldeneye, I'd say. Purely because consoles have shit shooting games.

Uh-oh. Here come the fanboys.

Seriously, though. I'm a PC gamer with an ailing PC. Let me have this one sacred bastion of pride. We do the FPS genre pretty well. Its not my fault that games companies think all you have to do to make a FPS good on a console is port it over from the PC with some control changes. Ironically, this sub-par treatment is reversed in the case of Halo.

Halo felt like the designers really had the console in mind. Its ideal for the XBox.

The second one, though, a lot of people agree... not so good. Now, though, the third one. A chance to refresh and revive the series. I've read that a couple of times.

It saddens me when a series needs reviving by the third installment. Really, it does.

But my reason for not wanting this game is more deeply rooted than a simple fear the production team can't deliver, based on their previous efforts.

Because, even if they do deliver, I won't be interested. I cannot actually stand Halo. The multiplayer, against experienced XBoxers was the single most frustrating gaming experience of my life.

Well, the second most. The single most frustrating gaming experience was playing my friend on the original Unreal Tournament, on Facing Worlds, with no idea what to do. He got a sniper rifle, sat on the top of the opposing tower, and killed me about 300 times in two hours. Oh, and there's also playing my housemate at Mario Strikers... anyway. It was damn frustrating.

Frustrating.

Also... the game... I don't know. There's something about Halo and Halo 2 and it may very well be something to do with the controller to end all controllers on the XBox but... it didn't feel intuitive to me.

Not in a religious, "Mouse and keyboard for life!" sort of way, there was just something detached and sterile about the experience. The weapons felt light weight. When I used the butt of the gun to hit people it didn't seem like there was any real impact.

I know, obviously, there was no real impact but some games are good at faking it. I remember Call of Duty had an awesome feel to thwacking of the enemy across the skull. You could even lash them in the face with the grenades.

Halo and its sequel, by contrast, felt neutered or hollow. Hollow 2. Heh.

Maybe I'm going mad but Halo felt to me, and will always feel, like FPS-lite. There's no weight to it.

Also, Master Chief is a bloody stupid name.

"Get him, boys!"

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Jachap is a gamer. Honest.