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  • Road Rash (EA, 1991)

    Road Rash (EA, 1991)

    Developed/Published by: Electronic Arts
    Released: 09/1991
    Completed: 30th September, 2014
    Completion: There are five different tracks and five different “difficulties” which loop endlessly. I made it to the highest difficulty and stopped. There’s no ending or anything so I’m going to count this one.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Why have I spent some time this last week playing Road Rash? On Mega Drive? On what possible whim? I really have no idea, but I guess I had a hankering to play one of these old-school, pseudo-3D racers, and I was always fond of Road Rash back in the day what with its scrapping racers and it’s EA, back when EA had that really cool logo, so it’s the one I went for.

    (In retrospect, I should have picked up one of the delightful Sega 3D Classics for Nintendo 3DS, probably Super Hang-On if I wanted a bike-me-up. However, I had forgotten all about those existing. More fool me.)

    So, Road Rash then. It’s actually pretty interesting! There’s not a lot of content, admittedly. Only five tracks—and to be honest most of them look the same—and your options are limited to eight different bikes. However, the game is wrapped in a “career” mode of sorts where you, unlike contemporary competition, don’t lose because you didn’t win (or you wrecked your bike, or were caught by the cops.) You just score some of the prize pot (or, pay for a wrecked bike or fine) and can have another go.

    Except there’s this weird twist where if you do rank at least fourth in all the tracks, you’re immediately bumped up into the next difficulty, meaning that you can find yourself (as I found myself) struggling to keep up in the next difficulty because you just haven’t made enough money to buy a bike that competes. You really need to be coming first.

    It’s flawed then. As is, really, the whole racing thing. Because the selling point is based on fighting the other racers, right? Fun! Except that you’re really not going to do that very often, because the tracks are tight, windy and you need to pay attention on the road, not on the other racers. It’s not the most nuanced racing system—you know, go fast, slow down for corners—but it’s actually a really nice engine, with a lot of things that these kinds of racers don’t include, such as cross-roads, significant gradients, and traffic moving in the opposite direction. In fact it’s the combination of the last two that make the game so challenging—nothing quite like cresting a hill only to smash into a car heading towards you.

    It is nice, however, that the other racers—as much as the game makes you work to keep up—feel realistic (perhaps intentionally, perhaps not) compared to contemporaries. They also find themselves slamming into cars, and there’s probably no better feeling than sailing past a two or three bike pile-up (only to slam into a static deer that’s five seconds down the road, probably.) There some rubber-banding, but it’s not that apparent; racers behind you struggle to keep up once they’re out of your rear view, and crash basically at all and you’re probably not coming first.

    So you don’t find yourself fighting very often, and are therefore mostly playing a very, very unforgiving racer. In fact I’d say past the second difficulty it’s really not very fun at all. If you were on Game Centre CX, where they’d probably say you needed to loop the game once to count it as finished, the best plan would probably be to just play the easiest level 25 times to raise enough money for the best bike and then try to grind it out. It’d be pretty painful though.

    It’s fun for a wee while, anyway.

    Will I ever play it again? No.  But I could easily be convinced to play the later 3DO remake because I remember that being pretty good, if different, and hey, it’s got Kickstand by Soundgarden in it! I used to think that was the coolest song ever.

    Final Thought: Is it wrong that I really want to play Skitchin’ now?

  • No Heroes Allowed: No Puzzles Either! (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2014)

    No Heroes Allowed: No Puzzles Either! (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Sony Computer Entertainment
    Released: 15th April, 2014
    Completed: 10th September, 2014
    Completion: Beat all the levels? I think there’s more levels in a hard mode, but I don’t care.
    Trophies / Achievements: 57%

    I’m stunned that I finished this, honestly. Stunned. Booted up shortly after I finished the PSP original, I imagined I’d play a few levels of this free-to-play match-three-me-do and hit the paywall and be done with it. 

    Perhaps admirably, there isn’t a hardcore paywall with No Puzzles Either! (God, that title’s annoying. Makes it seem like I’m shouting every sentence. I’m going to drop that exclamation mark.) Basically, the game tries to make you pay by being stingy with playtime. You can store a maximum of three “picks” without paying; each pick being one play of a level, each pick takes eight hours to be refreshed. The first time I saw this I thought it was eight minutes, and was like “man, that’s just annoying enough.” Eight hours is on a whole ‘nother level… except for the fact that it rounds up to 24 hours for all three to be refreshed, meaning that you can dip in and play this once a day. Which adds a rather ok rhythm, somewhat undoing any reason you’d have to pay up unless you were just desperate to play more immediately. I wasn’t.

    And yet… cumulatively, I played this for sixteen hours. Sixteen hours total of me playing three match-three levels and unlocking and raising the monsters that form the block types. Sixteen hours that included days where I wasted my three plays totally on either grinding to try and capture one of the many, many rare heroes that allow you to upgrade monster blocks in particular ways, or bashing against one of the brick-wall tough levels that you either have to be over-levelled for or spend one of the paid-for consumables (which you can also gain randomly, but it’s even more rare than the rare heroes.)

    Do I have any excuse for this? Not really. To be honest, it’s the odd side-effect of the fact that I could play it once a day and no more. It made sure that I returned to it, regularly, in a ritual—a low-rent Vesper.5—that also ensured I didn’t spend any money on it. Because what would be the point? The best thing to spend money on would be the consumables, but if I just kept playing long enough I’d win eventually. And why pay a tenner to unlock infinite playtime? I’d just play it in a sprint, and I probably wouldn’t even enjoy it.

    I mean, not to say that I necessarily enjoyed No Puzzles Either. It was just this thing I did every day, apart from those days I didn’t. 2-3 minutes, frittered away, across months. But it’s done now.

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: The only reason I beat this was because I used my last block-clearing consumable on the last level at a point where I was sure I would win. I would not have bothered grinding to get another consumable or beat the level any other way, so I should probably have had some hella endorphins because of the high stakes. And yet… I didn’t. Man, I really didn’t view this game as anything except a timewaster.

  • Desert Golfing (Blinkbat Games, 2014)

    Desert Golfing (Blinkbat Games, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Blinkbat Games
    Released: 7th August, 2014
    Completed: 2nd September, 2014
    Completion: Conceivably, you could class reaching 1000 holes as completing it, so I officially gave up on this one. I got to hole 69 (hurr hurr) and quit. 197 strokes, a 2.9 par.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    “To play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk.”—attributed to “the Allens” by H. S. Scrivener in 1903.

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: Here was me, worrying my time spent playing New Star Soccer, a game where you mostly aim an arrow to make a ball go a direction, would make me look a total fanny. Why did I worry?

    (Desert Golfing is the purest representation of the idea that if you stick some surprises in your game, game designers are going to lose their shit over it. Why create an ecosystem like Spelunky’s when you can just, you know, stick a bitmap rock at hole 300 and slightly and slowly modify the colour palette? Video games truly are art, in that Desert Golfing allows those “in the know” to jerk themselves silly while the average punter thinks “a kid could do that.” It is our shark in formaldehyde, although one I’d believe made without guile, now we just need some dickhead to spend £8 million on it.) 

  • Ultimate Ghosts ’n Goblins (Tose, 2006)

    Ultimate Ghosts ’n Goblins (Tose, 2006)

    Developed/Published by: Tose / Capcom
    Released: 29th August, 2006
    Completed: 23rd August, 2014
    Completion: Rescued Princess Prin-Prin.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    I’ve been watching Game Centre CX again! I’d fallen out of the habit, but recently I got off my arse and organised my collection of Iron Chef episodes and started watching them in order (can you believe they made fifty-six episodes of Iron Chef in 1994? That’s more than one a week!) and it put me in mood for some Game Centre CX too. And after watching the Kacho valiantly battle his way through Ghouls ’n Ghosts on Megadrive, I thought I might as well give this a shot, because it’s been in my collection for donkeys.

    You probably know the drill with the Ghosts ’n Goblins series: it’s absurdly difficult, and it changes from “Ghosts ’n Goblins” to “Ghouls ’n Ghosts” and back again confusingly. Most of the games are incredibly similar, differing only vaguely in terms of hero Arthur’s abilities and enemies. But then, plenty of series are even more restricted than that (you know, look at any side-scrolling shooter series) and it’s not like we complain about them (unless we do? We might!)

    Probably the most interesting thing about the series is that the very first hit right around the time of Super Mario Bros., so you have to remember that this didn’t come from a context where that was what platformers were. In fact, it kind of feels like a series from an alternate dimension where Super Mario never really happened.

    It’s a dimension where a locked-in jump is the done thing. It’s also one where randomly spawning and aggressively player-seeking enemies are the done thing. So while your jump is completely predictable, the enemies aren’t.

    Can you tell where this is going?

    I mean, you obviously can if you’ve ever played the series. The games just aren’t fair. You can do your best to deal with these enemies—and I’ve seen players far above my abilities perform absurd feats—but you’re going to commit to a jump, or throw a weapon at the wrong time, and you’ll die (usually by being knocked off a platform.)

    It’s not good! Or fun! In fact in level 3-2 of this—a level where you have to survive on a small moving platform for quite some time, while attacked from all sides—I was pretty close to breaking my Vita in half. I had to beat it twice, too (and in fact, to “fully” complete the game I’d have to beat it at least once more). The game doesn’t even really offer much in the way of the kind of streamlining we’ve come to expect from our masocore; no quick restarts, limited lives meaning you have to continue from the start of the level at some point and often struggle on with a lost cause number of lives, etc.

    The worst thing that Ultimate Ghosts ’n Goblins does however is that rather than previous games, where you just have to survive the levels, in this one you’re supposed to find all the hidden nooks and crannies (and I do mean hidden: a large amount of the game is about triggering chests by jumping in certain, totally unmarked, parts of the levels) in order to gain enough gold rings, or witch ingredients, or magic spells, to complete the game fully. 

    The game chooses just about the most uncomfortable twist on the unlock abilities design possible, by making sure you can’t collect plenty of stuff until you have magic spells that do things you don’t expect (the turn-things-to-stone spell that causes gravestones to explode is… alternate dimension logical I guess?) or very specifically have this one shield that allows you to fly.

    The shield’s a weird one, to be honest, considering the Ghosts ’n Goblins franchise has basically never involved this level of control in-air. It changes the game almost entirely from the minute you get it into one that’s not about the inflexible jumping but the much more flexible (if temporary) flying. It doesn’t make you die any less (well, maybe a bit less) but you’re much more in control. It’s an odd twist that the level design works around, and that doesn’t make you feel better about the levels you’ve struggled through to that point (and it doesn’t come until very late in the game…) In a game that’s otherwise A to B linear being asked to jump back and forth in insanely difficult levels that you feel, by rights, that you’ve completed, just to collect some things because you can now fly… it just doesn’t work.

    It explains why they re-released this in Japan with all of that stuff removed, though!

    Will I ever play it again? Uhh… I really did sort of want to collect all the rings and “fully” finish it. But the hidden bits are so annoying that life is just too short. If you could download the Japanese version to Vita, I would maybe consider it. But… no.

    Final Thought: I’m not really sure what excuse I have for, ultimately, not having a bad time playing this, though. Not that I liked it, but that I didn’t feel that it was a total waste of time. The nice PSP-era graphics, which are maybe in that sweet spot of dated for me right now? That as stiff as the game is and unfair the enemies are, there’s this responsiveness that means that it feels good, and you want to succeed even in the face of frustration?

    Probably that stuff?

  • Street Fighter x Tekken (Capcom, 2012)

    Street Fighter x Tekken (Capcom, 2012)

    Developed/Published by: Dimps, Capcom / Capcom
    Released: 19 October, 2012
    Completed: 3rd August, 2014
    Completion: Beat the arcade mode a bunch of times (twice on the hardest setting, actually) and played a bunch of the other modes. It’ll do. 
    Trophies / Achievements: 40%

    Well, if a wee guy from France can win Evo by playing Rose with a PS1 controller, I’m sure I can stand to play Street Fighter x Tekken with a Vita, even though it’s only got four face buttons and they’re tiny.

    No, I can’t.

    Will I ever play it again? Nope.

    Final Thought: Well, obviously I played it for ages, but it’s horrible. What’s with this gem thing? Gives you bonuses or something for playing in particular ways, or being weak in others? But you’ve got all these menus to navigate to select them, and they’re totally incomprehensible in the moment, like, you have no idea what you’re opponent’s packing and how to deal with it?

    Just a total abomination. 

    However! I will give them a lot of points for making people who suffer through this game some utterly absurd cut-scenes. Abel, obsessed with petting the bear from Tekken, or Zangief and Rufus’ amazing transformation.

  • New Star Soccer (New Star Games, 2012)

    New Star Soccer (New Star Games, 2012)

    Developed/Published by: New Star Games
    Released: 11th June, 2012
    Completed: 3rd August, 2014
    Completion: Won the Scottish cup and Scottish Premier League titles (twice) and won young player of the year, club player of the year and division player of the year at 21. 
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    How about that Kim Kardashian game, huh? Something something free to play, something something did she even look at the game lol, blah blah stupid people zzz zzz whales? yawn yawn “video games” fart.

    Everyone’s an idiot, and I’m here to tell you why.

    Now, I haven’t played that Kim Kardashian game. In fact, like most people, I don’t ever think about Kim Kardashian, other than possibly a brief period when it turned out Kanye West married her which isn’t so much thought as much as it is “information going into my brain, pointlessly.” To be honest, I’m astounded that I know how to spell her name off the bat. Haven’t had to rely on the spell checker at all, not that it would help (it’s got a red line under it even now, and I stuck it into Google to make sure after the second time I wrote it.)

    The point is this: even in all the defensive articles I’ve read about her game—made in Toronto, fact fans, and I genuinely think it’s got great art in the context—people mostly blether about how it’s a time-waster, but in a different context.

    Here’s why people play these games and why they’re successful—and why it surprises me there aren’t more of them. They’re story generators. Stories in which you (or the character you’ve chosen to make) get to be the star. Now sure, these stories aren’t massive, or deep. In fact, they’re mundane. You aren’t saving the planet. But they’re your choices, and you invest, and you remember them.

    Take New Star Soccer, right? Here’s me, chucking it on the phone while in the depths of World Cup football madness (as it’s been officially designated by the World Health Organisation). I make me, well, me who is sixteen and has enough of a talent for football that I get hired by Dumbarton.

    Across my first season, I play… not particularly well, but I’m alright. But I notice we always get beat by East Stirlingshire. Every game we play, they pump us. I start to pay attention. I try harder in those matches. It comes down to the last match of the season… they beat us. 

    I’m traded up, joining Stenhousemuir in the second division. I play poorly. I’m subbed off several times. In disgrace I’m traded off to Raith Rovers; I start playing incredibly well. I feel bad beating Stenhousemuir, but I do it anyway.

    My character—me—gets a girlfriend. But I’m always training, or trying to improve my standing with my teammates. She badmouths my manager in the press. I immediately break-up with her. The next time I date, I’m in a better financial position, I’m in a better place with my manager and team. I make sure to spend time with her.

    New Star Soccer is simplistic and—certainly in comparison to that Kardashian game—ugly. Based almost entirely around short football matches that occasionally ask you to aim the ball in a quick football scene (you’re looking at a 90’s Football Manager-like text stream otherwise) it sounds like there’s really nothing to it. And when the game is tied to an awkward energy system requiring you regularly quaff energy drinks to keep playing (once every three matches or so. I originally thought you’d get energy back over real-world time, but you don’t) the “actual” story you’re telling is one of an insane addict, forced to pay more and more for their next fix to avoid crashing as they become a bigger and bigger star (it’s not long before your next energy drink costs more than your designer suit did.)

    But it’s all sort of easily overlooked because you’re in the cup final, and you’ve just—gulp—been given a free kick that can win the game. You haven’t been training in free kicks. Should you pass to the player to your left, or try and chip it over the wall?

    The game-literate will forever wax lyrical about the story telling possibilities of something like Dwarf Fortress or rogue-likes, or even rogue-like-likes. That sensation that you’re not just playing someone else’s story, but creating your own.

    You might sneer at Kim Kardashian’s game, or New Star Soccer as a time-waster, or a way to suck money out of the gullibles’ pockets. But they’re offering players something other games aren’t. Sneering isn’t going to change that.

    Will I ever play it again? I really wanted to win the World Cup as Scotland, but it’s two years of in-game time away. I’m stopping playing this, but god knows I might go back to it in a weak moment.

    Final Thought: I spent two dollars on this—one to turn off ads, which weren’t actually annoying enough to force it, which was good honestly—and another dollar to get some weather effects (which was super not really worth it.) You never actually have to spend real money otherwise, though; getting stuck as a substitute isn’t the worst thing in the entire world and if you’re sensible you’ll save up enough money to buy a stable as soon as possible, then race horses for a steady income. Sounds mental but it works.

  • Time Hollow (Tenky, 2008)

    Time Hollow (Tenky, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Tenky / Konami
    Released: 23rd September, 2008
    Completed: 21st July, 2014
    Completion: Finished it!
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    This has been lying in a pile of Nintendo DS games forever. Probably don’t ask me why I decided to play it now, I’m not sure I actually have a reason. Maybe that I’d went to see Patlabor: The Movie and its sequel in the cinema and felt like something anime-ey? I have no idea.

    Anyway, Time Hollow is… is this what a visual novel is? I mean, I honestly don’t know. Is the Phoenix Wright series a visual novel? If it is, this is one too, because they’re… similar. Ish. In that you wander about, collect clues (sort of) and watch talking heads talk to each other for a pretty lengthy period of time. If they have another name, it’s probably something like “visiting locations over and over and clicking the screen everywhere until you hit the right trigger for the story to continue novels”.

    Remarkably, however, I quite liked Time Hollow. It’s short (taking about as long as an average young adult novel to read, probably) and there isn’t really very much game to it, but it’s charming. This is the kind of thing where the story has to keep you interested enough to put up with all the “is it this? Is this what you want?” clicking, and for me, it did! 

    You control Ethan Kairos, who ends up in a timeline where his parents disappeared some years ago. Given a magic pen that allows him to open portals to the past (quite honestly the weakest excuse to use the DS’s touch screen ever, and you only do it about eleven times) he sets out to solve the mystery.

    It sounds pretty… anime, and the start—where you’re introduced to his school chums and the specky lassie that fancies him—sets alarm bells ringing, but written by Junko Kawano of Shadow of Memories non-fame it’s far more interesting than that. Rather than being one of those time travel things where the hero does a bunch of stuff, time changes for better or worse and he goes about fixing it if it went wrong, here it’s delightfully mixed up by giving other characters the ability to change timelines, meaning that as soon as you “fix” something, someone else might pop in, break that and leave you in a new reality that you have to get your bearings in before you can even work out what to fix.

    It’s all scripted, of course, which does mean you’re not really doing any actual work to make any of this stuff happen, but it’s all pretty logically consistent for a time travel plot, even if it doesn’t wrap up quite as neatly as I’d hope (as usual, the characters are never as smart as the players.) It’s frankly far more entertaining than it has any right to be.

    Will I ever play it again? Nah. Although I’m adding it to my collection of DS games, not just getting rid of it, so there’s that.

    Final Thought: Entirely possible that I liked this just because a pet cat is a fairly important character in the whole thing. Well drawn, cute meows, A++ cat would cat again.

  • Sid Meier’s Civilization: Revolution (Firaxis Games, 2008)

    Sid Meier’s Civilization: Revolution (Firaxis Games, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Firaxis Games / 2K Games
    Released: 13th June, 2008
    Completed: 16th July, 2014
    Completion: Beat it with every possible victory; once on Chieftain, twice on King and twice on Deity. Done with it.
    Trophies / Achievements: 595/1000

    I’ve written before about how important Civilization is to me, and—suddenly in the mood for the series—I decided to give Civilization Revolution another shot after hating the iOS version (mostly because it was so ugly I couldn’t get past the initial learning stage.)

    I’m a huge fan of the original Civilization; it’s got what you could charitably describe as workmanlike pixel art, but within that it’s got bags and bags of charm. From the city view (nothing more thrilling than seeing a wonder appear) to touches such as the evolving styles of your advisors (modern despotism!) it’s wonderful. Just looking at some screenshots now make me casually debate stopping writing this and playing it for a while (I won’t.) 

    Of course, it isn’t perfect (I remember Gary Penn complaining in Amiga Power about how prescriptive it was about the path of a civilisation; your story might include Greece conquering the English, but you can’t decide you’re not going to invent the wheel, something the series has never really felt comfortable messing with) and I’ve probably played Civilization II more (which more or less jettisons all the charm for just generally being a bit more polished.)

    Anyway, I then didn’t like III, or IV; didn’t play the Call to Power side-stories, and while people do like Alpha Centauri, my ability to care if my space peoples have built a “hab complex” or not is zero.

    Civilization V is great, though. Still lacking that original charm (though I do like the deco stylings) but actually fixing a ton of the problems that Civilization has had since the first one—stacking units tiresomely to make armies that bash against each other tediously, most importantly—the only issue being that dipping back into it now with all the expansions felt like a bit much for me. And so, as described above, I decided to go with Civilization Revolution.

    So here’s the thing. When you get down to it, Civilization Revolution is a very slightly streamlined Civilization with modern-for-2008 graphics. That you don’t have to use settlers to upgrade the areas around your cities is about the biggest thing I can really note, to be honest. It adds some stuff from the later games—culture wars and great people—and adds some stuff that doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense (like the ability to make armies of three units, which you can stack anyway.) 

    So why don’t I like it? When I think about playing the original, doing my own version of the “one city challenge” without really knowing I was doing it—in fact, using it as a way to tutorialise the game—I wonder, would a new player be doing the same thing? Would they fondly remember the (in my mind) irritating Sim-like advisors after they’ve graduated to Civilization V? Would they thrill as they see their cities evolve directly in the game world rather than a few menu levels down?

    Is it actually fairly successful at what it does, it’s just that I’ve been there, done that, and I like pixel art more?

    Probably.

    Will I ever play it again? I could hoover up the rest of the achievements easily but no.

    Final Thought: Here’s something quite important, though. You don’t have access to any of the levers that allow you to endlessly generate new scenarios. While in big boy Civilization you can generate a small world made up of islands with seven opponents, or a massive world with just one, here you’re stuck with pre-made scenarios. And the AI, as far as I can tell, is terrible (it doesn’t actually seem to exist until you discover it, which makes winning even on Deity rather simplistic.) So you’re probably not going to want to return to this 23 years later just by seeing some screenshots.

  • PES 2014: Pro Evolution Soccer (Konami, 2013)

    PES 2014: Pro Evolution Soccer (Konami, 2013)

    Developed/Published by: PES Productions / Konami
    Released: 20th September, 2013
    Completed: 9th July, 2014
    Completion: Won the World Cup as Scotland (on penalties versus Uruguay in a 0-0 nailbiter.) That’s all that matters, really (though I did also play Be A Legend as Messi, lazily, for a while.)
    Trophies / Achievements: 38%

    Football! Yes, we’ve gone football mad here at exp. Towers, what with the World Cup and everything (though that’s finished by the time you’re reading this, which means that we’re no longer football mad and are instead football sane.) 

    Whenever there’s a big international tournament (because the Old Firm has led met to basically distrust and fear club football) I tend to like to play a footy game, and it’s almost always Sensible Soccer (I usually go to the bother of finding the most recent update files and everything.) However I decided to actually try a “modern” football game for the first time in years and years, and it was this one!

    Note I put “modern” in quotes there, because the weird thing about PES 2014: Pro Evolution Soccer is that—and this is probably not news to people who buy football games every year, or whatever—it feels like a game that could have come out on PS2. I mean… it looks like one too, sorta. shonky animations, character faces that—unless they’re a star—are generic, crap crowds, awful, repetitive commentary…

    It’s sorta weird! And retro! But not in a good way, like Sensible Soccer. In a way that makes me think all the way back to this series when it was International Superstar Soccer on Nintendo 64, except faster? 

    In fact, after playing a few quick exhibitions I decided to scale back my ambitions from “I’m gonna download all the fan-made real team information and play this seriously!” to “let’s win the World Cup with Scotland and call it a day.”

    It’s important to note, however, that if you look past all the surface stuff, PES 2014 still plays a decent game of footy. Don’t play it on Beginner (at all) otherwise you’ll spank every team like they’re Brazil (a sentence that now makes sense after this World Cup) but on Regular, it’s fun! You know, football. Passes, through balls, that sort of thing. It’s not very exciting, you’d probably call it workmanlike, but scoring a goal still feels amazingly rewarding, so there’s that.

    Will I ever play it again? No. Next time (Euro 2016, probably) maybe I’ll pick up a FIFA. Those feel “new” right?

    Final Thought: I didn’t really discuss why I put PES 2014 down so fast, did I? Indeed, I’m sure there are many, many people out there who want to moan about my surface take on this, after all the website crows about the game’s “trueball tech” and the “M.A.S.S. (Motion Animated Stability System.)“ Even if that was all incredibly apparent, there’d still be the UI.

    This is a game where, in the flagship modes are “Be a Legend” and “Master League”, you spend a lot of time in menus. It’s also a game where literally every screen has a loading screen after it. Where information that could all be on one screen is spread across two or three. Where getting from one football match to the next—even if you don’t touch or change anything—can take two or three minutes.

    It’s gash; it takes all the imagined fun of “being a footballer” or “managing a football team” and replaces it with all the fun of “watching loading screens” and “turning off the music because there are only six songs” and “stopping playing this forever.”

  • ModNation Racers (San Diego Studio, 2010)

    ModNation Racers (San Diego Studio, 2010)

    Developed/Published by: San Diego Studio / Sony Computer Entertainment
    Released: 25th May, 2010
    Completed: 7th July, 2014
    Completion: Finished the campaign.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    If you have a question, it’s probably “Don’t you mean ModNation Racers: Road Trip?” and it would be a fair (if surprisingly specific!) question; I’d expect nothing less. However, I’m actually talking about the PSP version, which I chose to play for two reasons: one, I was able to download it on my Vita thanks to apocalicense 2014 (where Sony accidentally let you download all PSP games on Vita, even the ones you aren’t supposed to be able to) and two, because this one has cut-scenes and I guess I was interested in the “world-building” of a game largely sold on its level creation/sharing?

    Anyway. I remember this being announced at E3 in 2009, and the general feeling being that, yeah, vinyl toys are a pretty cool thing to crib for when it comes to character creation, but that in comparison to “Play, Create, Share” stablemate LittleBigPlanet… well, no matter what you tried to make in ModNation Racers, you’d end up with a racetrack.

    It’s true, and kind of an interesting framing of how we think about games. A side-scrolling platform game level? That could be any number of things! But a kart racing game racetrack is always a racetrack.

    The thing about LittleBigPlanet, of course, is that a LittleBigPlanet game level… is always a LittleBigPlanet game level. If you want to start designing a platform game, you want to decide how your hero moves. In LittleBigPlanet, your hero moves like total garbage. With possibly the floatiest, worst jump in any game that’s ever been taken seriously, along with that “three Z planes” thing that literally everyone hates, there’s a good reason that every story I’ve ever heard about someone who makes LittleBigPlanet levels getting hired in the industry, it’s onto the LittleBigPlanet team.

    (Absurdly, of course, for LittleBigPlanet 3 they haven’t unlocked the levers of Sackboy’s movement, instead adding more characters with their own specific quirks; The “create” part of the “Play, Create, Share” slogan is something that has been paid lip service at best, let’s all be honest.)

    But my point is this: if ModNation Racers was a solid kart racer, being able to build a good race track should teach you more, much more than building a LittleBigPlanet level, in terms of pacing, challenge, excitement, all those other things you want to know when crafting an experience for a player.

    Nae luck, ModNation Racers is crap as well.

    Will I ever play it again? Nope.

    Final Thought: “But!” you cry, “You played the PSP version, you lunatic!“ I could install the Vita version! but I’m not going to, because Mario Kart is still good on the Nintendo DS, dig? I’ll give the series this, it’s way way easier to build a racetrack than it is to build an LittleBigPlanet level.

    Which probably makes it extra weird that the pre-made tracks in ModNation Racers are so boring.