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Category: Every Game I’ve Finished

  • Mass Effect 2 (BioWare, 2010)

    Mass Effect 2 (BioWare, 2010)

    Developed/Published by: Bioware / Electronic Arts
    Released: 25th January, 2010
    Completed: 26th March, 2015
    Completion: Everyone survived the suicide mission.
    Trophies / Achievements: 860/1355

    A few weeks ago I had a dream—one of those sort of generic dreams where you find yourself doing a test, but you can’t read the pages—but something about it involved me starting Mass Effect 2. I can’t remember in what context or why. So, not one to go to war with destiny, I booted it up.

    Here’s an important fact: I didn’t like Mass Effect. My main memory of Mass Effect is that it was boring. Boring shooting. Boring dialogue. Boring bumping around on boring planets, before boring missions in boring, samey (sometimes exactly the same, I remember) spaces.

    However, I’d made it through the whole game so I imported my hero into Mass Effect 2 (after changing his face significantly, because he was a rum looking chap and that’s no mistake) and got down to work of saving the galaxy again or whatever.

    Now here’s where the article gets a bit… I don’t know. It’s the kind of thing I think can easily be discounted as sort of fannish complaints (despite the fact I wouldn’t consider myself a fan) relating to one of the biggest factors of the Mass Effect series and (in general) Bioware’s output—the romance system.

    You see, something I definitely respect about the Mass Effect games is that adherence to the idea that your choices stick and have consequence. In terms of game franchises that go to some effort to tailor the experience via the player’s actions from one game to the next I can more or less name this and… The Walking Dead? I’m not even sure if that’s true for The Walking Dead offhand.

    So here’s me, playing the game. I’ve shot up to my cabin on the Normandy, I’m wandering about… and I’m like… “that’s weird. Why is there a picture of Liara on my desk?”

    Liara is one of the cast in the first game; I didn’t romance her. Actually, I had sort of unintentionally conspired with the game with a really retrograde past for my hero—I’d romanced Ashley Williams (the one other possible romance target) only to, at one critical point of the game, let her die because—I can’t remember actually, but it was critical to the galaxy or whatever.

    So there’s my hero with his sad and clichépast—the woman he loved, dead because he chose the galaxy over her… except the game has decided that actually I’ve kept a torch for Liara instead.

    And it didn’t make me particularly happy that on meeting Liara during the game, she made out with me. I didn’t consent to this. I feel… genuinely uncomfortable.

    You might consider that a massive overreaction. After all,  I actually recollect the Mass Effect team—at some point, possibly while doing press for 3—discussing that Commander Shepard isn’t the player, but a character the player is guiding (this was in contrast to a more traditional RPG like Dragon Age.) It’s something that’s kind of reflected in the weirdly fuzzy dialogue, where, for some reason, it gives you lines of dialogue to choose from, and your character then might say something almost entirely different (I’ve never understood why they didn’t keep the selections down to verbs: “comfort” vs “admonish” etc.) Yet it’s a tension I ignore—Commander Shepard is me, whether they like it or not. So when something as important as my past is altered, when decisions are made for me that I have no input on, my trust has been violated.

    And this got me thinking about consent in these games. Because romance is treated as a system, and I know what they’re aiming for—that action movie scripting; the hero, the admiring female (or male! Shepard can be played as a lady) who falls into your arms before the suicide mission. The problem is—and many people have commented on it, I’m not pretending I’m somehow extra insightful—that your potential paramours basically just stand about and wait for you to force their interest. Talk to them, say the right things enough, and get some action. Push in compliments, get out sex.

    The women in this game stopped being characters, or people (and they have to be people, they have to be characters) and became playthings. Here’s me sitting, leading all three up to just the point where I have to “commit” to one—not really sure that I will commit, because I’m still annoyed about Liara—and in fact, I’m probably more interested in “Yeoman Kelly Chambers” who offensively doesn’t even get to be a real romance option because she’s not a main character.

    It actually gets to this point where two romanceable characters—Jack and Miranda—have a fight. Now, for a little background, Jack is the survivor of abuse. She’s a character that I’m not sure of the quality of, to be honest—the classic “survivor of abuse that’s really mean and difficult but also promiscuous and risk-taking, because she’s so damaged”—but when given the option of defending Jack—abused by the corporation, Cerberus, Miranda represents—or siding with Miranda who (for no good reason) chose to make a point about how “it wasn’t really Cerberus” I sided with Jack, rather than take the special magic “everyone is made happy” Paragon option.

    As a result, I could now never romance Miranda. That’s it, the algorithm decided I didn’t play the game right. I’d pushed in enough compliments but I made a nuanced choice. No sex for me!

    This kind of interaction has none of the pleasure of… you know, actually interacting with another human. The idea that I could at least make Miranda “loyal” (important to the wider, non-romance game system) again if I made all the most goody-two-shoes choices to eventually unlock a dialogue choice… it’s ridiculous, boiling Miranda down to a vending machine I have to reset my pin code to use. And consider that I clearly engaged with the story and characters to the point that this bothered me. Why put systems in place where I have to “game” my interaction with characters I saw as people to the point where I see them as robots?

    And if you engage with the “game”, the romance narratives feel dangerously naive. Have sex with Miranda and you’re treated with the saddest, 80s soft porn sequence, but your sex sequence with Jack is the culmination of the story where your interest in her “validates” her and she cries as you penetrate her with your magic penis that makes people move on from decades of abuse. That’s awful.

    Mass Effect 2’s romance system feels like… well, it feels like a joke about a programmer’s idea of how love works. The kind of thing someone with absolutely no experience would make if they tried to boil it down to the most basic systems. And as a result, consent gets lost in the shuffle. You can make that beautiful woman like you if you just say the right things, whether she’s interested or not. You decide. They don’t. And one dialogue choice “switching off” romance doesn’t make it any better; it’s still my action that made them perform one way other the other, and the system breeds entitlement of the player to the character they want; you just reload rather than role-play.

    (And look. It just doesn’t work the way it does in an action film anyway, unless we’re talking about something as stupid as a Bond film, because not every woman you see in an action film immediately has a lob on for the protagonist, and then waits for him to fire into her passively. Yes—I’m actively claiming your average action film has women with more agency when it comes to romance than Mass Effect 2. Things are different if you play as a female character, and I’ll even admit your average action film doesn’t have as many women in it as Mass Effect 2, but the issues of system and consent exist even if you’re a female Shepard firing into Garrus or whatever.)

    I didn’t romance anyone in the end. Before the suicide mission, Mathew Shepard stared longingly at his picture of Liara.

    “For fuck’s sake,” I said.

    Will I ever play it again? No, but I’ve already started Mass Effect 3. While I have very specific complaints, Mass Effect 2 is a pleasant diversion; bad narrative pacing, but nice enough shooting and a grand enough finale to make me want to keep going quite happily. Goodness, it’s almost like you can still enjoy media while acknowledging it has problematic aspects, eh?

    Final Thought: I’m cheating here but lets talk about Yeoman Kelly Chambers. At the end of the game, if you’ve romanced no-one, she’ll do a sexy dance for you in your cabin! Anyway, you can meet her fairly early in Mass Effect 3 and she’ll note that she was so disturbed by being kidnapped by “The Collectors” earlier in Mass Effect 2 that she’s suffered serious trauma about being on the Normandy and can never set foot on it again.

    That’s right! Sexy dance from a traumatised woman. Probably should have thought that through a bit.

    This essay is featured in Every Game I’ve Finished 14>24.

  • Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars (Ubisoft, 2011)

    Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars (Ubisoft, 2011)

    Developed/Published by: Ubisoft Sofia / Ubisoft
    Released: 25th March, 2011
    Completed: 16th March, 2015
    Completion: Finished campaign mode on Veteran!
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Fancy pillaging a bit of personal history? Well, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars might be interesting because it’s a Julian Gollop-designed tactics title (he of X-Com, Laser Squad, Chaos, and so on) but this write-up is interesting because I believe (though don’t quote me on it) my review of his previous Nintendo tactics-me-up Rebelstar: Tactical Command for Eurogamer is the first game review I was ever paid for. I’m like “2005! Not that long ago” but then I’m suddenly like “fuuu… ten years ago.”

    Anyway, give it a read if you want to read a review of a Julian Gollop game that I enjoyed, but was a bit disappointed in because there wasn’t much to it other than the pleasantness of the core systems. Er, before you read me outline roughly the same thing about Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars.

    Actually, that’s unfair! Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars was a game I found totally entertaining. I’d say it overstays its welcome a bit in length, and it’s interesting to consider how harshly simplified it is even from Rebelstar—for example, your characters have no action point systems, it’s just one move and one shoot, unless you get up to certain shenanigans—but it’s still a perfectly fun diversion if you’re looking for a tactics-em-up.

    The biggest problem—and probably the main reason it gets a bit tiresome towards the end—is that it’s saddled with the whole “Tom Clancy’s Tom Clancy” thing. As a result, it goes out of its way to be super boring. There’s a plot that’s pretty much ripped from the headlines before they knew what the headlines were going to be (Russia invading Ukraine) but it’s about as exciting as if the game had come in a brown paper bag labelled “video game” and everything in the game was a cube (note: that is probably actually more interesting.) Yes, there’s some (mild) banter between your squad, but they’re rarely ever more than their class to you.

    That’s fine though! The classes are fun, from exploding a whole squad of dudes with a rocket launcher to (my personal favourite) manipulating “command points” to allow your stealthiest Ghost Banshee kill several enemies in a single turn (I think my record was six or seven enemies, which felt amazing.)

    When it comes down to it, talking up Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars feels sorta like trying to talk up a puzzle game like Sudoku, or something. It’s like… it’s fun! But how to make it sound exciting when the wrapper is so—intentionally, in some respects—dull?

    Wait… I hate Sudoku. Forget that. Basically: I enjoyed Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars and I’m glad I played it. There.

    Will I ever play it again? Nope!

    Final Thought: You don’t see it in the game, really, but if you look at the top-screen art for the game in the 3DS menu, you’ll see that the character models have a really cool, low-poly style. Really made me sad that wasn’t more on show.

  • OlliOlli (Roll7, 2014)

    OlliOlli (Roll7, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Roll7
    Released: 21st January, 2014
    Completed: 19th February, 2015
    Completion: Finished all the challenges in career mode.
    Trophies / Achievements: 50%

    About half-way through OlliOlli’s playthrough—by which I mean, as I was reaching the end of the “amateur” section of the career—I was thinking to myself “god, I’ll probably never finish this. It’s so demanding, dexterity-wise. I’ll get tired of it, and put it down, and come back to it months later, and having lost all of my muscle memory, I’ll just be immediately frustrated.”

    I was sort of imagining I’d write an article here about these games that require this kind of dexterity—memorisation if not of exact moves, of movements and flicks and combinations of presses—and how they live in this dangerous space where if they’re too hard to learn or to master you give up, but if they’re too easy there’s no challenge, and no point in continuing.

    Anyway, I was imagining that, probably ultimately moaning that OlliOlli just overshot it, when the strangest thing happened. Right as I finished OlliOlli’s “amateur” mode—which I absolutely struggled with—it ‘clicked’. I was in pro mode, and I finally felt like a pro at the game.

    Now, that’s not to say I breezed through the rest of the game. I’ve actually been super ill with a crummy cold/flu, and one day, in the depths of it, I spent what must have been about five hours just trying to beat the last couple of challenges I had in the game. Five hours or something spent on the same, tiny, repetitive two levels of a wee game. And I didn’t even notice the time passing (pro tip, kids: podcasts, radio shows… they are your friend.) I was having fun.

    Of course—whose to say when this game would click for you, or for any other person? Maybe you’d give up long before I did, or maybe you would end up putting the game down for a while thinking you’ll come back to it. But here’s the thing I’ve forgotten to say! Even if you did, I think OlliOlli’s totally worth it. It’s the pleasant lovechild of a messy ménage à trois of Uniracers, Canabalt and Tony Hawk (yes, it’s true, Tony Hawk once got drunk and shagged an SNES cartridge and his iPad) and whatever time spent it is totally worth it, I think.

    Will I ever play it again? No, but I’ll happily play the sequel. I didn’t originally expect I’d want to but I would.

    Final Thought: Of course, I can say “whatever time spent it is totally worth it” but what if I’d spent five hours trying to beat those two levels and still not managed it? Weird thing is I think I’d just have kept trying. It always felt within reach. I think Roll7 know what they’re doing. Thumbs up.

  • Wario Ware D.I.Y. (Nintendo, 2009)

    Wario Ware D.I.Y. (Nintendo, 2009)

    Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems, Nintendo SPD / Nintendo
    Released: 29th April, 2009
    Completed: 10th February, 2015
    Completion: Finished all the Nintendo-developed Wario Ware games and read all the 4-koma!
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Aye, so… I actually started this in, like… March 2014, because that was around when Nintendo had announced it was closing the servers for a whole raft of Nintendo DS and Wii games, and this was one of them. I was all “oh no! I’ll need to download all of those good levels people made and save them to my cart!”

    However, turns out that while my Nintendo DSi will connect to my router, a lot of these (all?) of the Nintendo DS games don’t actually use the on-system wi-fi connection (or something?) and so couldn’t actually connect to my modern router. I could have faffed about with my router settings, but I wasn’t actually bothered, so I forgot all about it after finishing Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (which I finished, ok, shut up.)

    Without the ability to upload levels I’ll be honest I didn’t actually bother my arse trying out the level creation stuff, and anyway that’s my actual job so fuck that for a game of soldiers. And without the ability to download levels, I was stuck with the pre-installed ones, which, much like Wario Ware: Touched! all use the touch screen, so they’re crap compared to the brilliant ones on the GBA. Totally forgettable and dull.

    But at least there aren’t too many of them! The best thing about Wario Ware D.I.Y. is, however, the weird inclusion of loads of 4-koma. If you’re not familiar, 4-koma are a very Japanese style of four panel comic strip, usually super absurdist and often quite wordy compared to your usual, western style of three panel comic strip. These are great. They’re all super funny and you have to unlock them by playing Wario Ware D.I.Y. every day, which sucks, but it’s something to return to, which I did every time I remembered, which, apparently, was rarely, because it nearly took me a full year.

    However, the 150-odd 4-koma were worth every penny, even if nothing else about this is particularly good post server shut down.

    Will I ever play it again? Nope.

    Final Thought: A brand-new game idea!

  • Tomodachi Life (Nintendo, 2013)

    Tomodachi Life (Nintendo, 2013)

    Developed/Published by: Nintendo SPD / Nintendo
    Released: 18th April, 2013
    Completed: 3rd February, 2015
    Completion: Unlocked all the places on the island, I guess?
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    I went home for Christmas this year—as I am wont to do—and before I went a read a funny tweet by my, yours and everybody’s beardy pal Brandon “tha B-dogg” Boyer, where he said “I’ve been playing Tomodachi Life for 7 months & no one has ever even expressed vague interest in dating my Mii and it’s incomprehensibly sad.”

    Now, I’m sure most of you took from that “ha ha, his Mii is such a sad bastard” and went on with your life, but I went “Christ, he’s played it for seven months? I should really give this a go after all.”

    It’s weird, because I was so, so, so excited for Tomodachi Life when it was announced. If you watch the early trailers, it seems so incredibly full of potential. Like it’s just going to be super, super hilarious and fun to play.

    But then people I knew got it, and they were all like “no, this is quite boring, actually” and put it down after a few hours, maybe a few days. So I just didn’t bother to try it.

    And now I have! Trading it off with Fantasy Life in the ol’ 3DS slot. I dutifully checked in on my wee Mii society, every day… except I realised a couple of days ago that I haven’t even looked at it in nearly a month. I didn’t even notice that I wasn’t playing it. It was so uncompelling that my brain just, more or less, erased Tomodachi Life from my memory.

    So I guess I have to say I’m done with it.

    “But wait!” you ask. “What is Tomodachi Life?”

    Well, my confused friend, it’s a video game where you put all your wee pals on an island, with personalities that sorta correspond to the Myers-Brigg types (I think) that you sort out yourself, and wait for the magic to happen.

    What this means is that you click on the apartment they live in, and they say something like “I’m hungry” so you give them a crème brûlée. Or they tell you someone they want to be friends with, or they’re asleep, or they give you something like a bath set so you can watch them bathe (uhh…) You can also decorate their apartments and dress them up, that sort of thing. But mostly, the game is “click on apartment, resolve need, click on other apartment.”

    Occasionally they do stuff! like have funny dreams, or interact with other Miis in a silly way. It’s cute, but in that way where you go “heh.”

    The problem with Tomodachi Life is that the interaction with the game is so stupefyingly repetitive and uninteresting. It led me into this long thought on why EA had never just straight up done a Sims game with Miis, which then reminded me they’d actually done a game called “MySims” which was Mii-like but not actually Miis. What’s up with that? I’m going to say it’s corporate hubris, because when I think of Tomodachi Life but instead it’s, you know, a basic “The Sims” with Miis, and it’s got a lot of the wackiness of this, it seems like a real winner. Like something that would actually be good. Stupid corporate hubris!

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m actually glad that they went out of their way to localise this game. But it seems like there’s something cultural about this game that doesn’t translate, and it’s the (likely stereotypical) idea that Japanese people aren’t very open in public, so seeing friends and loved ones acting crazy is really, really wild. I feel like I remember someone describing the game as analogous to a Japanese variety show, and that sounds spot on. It doesn’t translate because seeing people do strange things just isn’t enough—as in The Sims series, we need context to make it really hit home, as being openly silly isn’t transgressive or shocking in the same way.

    Anyway, Tomodachi Life is bad, and I don’t know why tha B-dogg has played it for seven months. It’s joining that ignoble list of games where I’m straight up deleting my saves. Sorry, wee dopplegangers of my pals.

    Will I ever play it again? No, but I still hope they make (and localise) sequels.

    Final Thought: tha B-dogg, in my game, successfully dated Nikki, the wee lassie who used to be the mascot for Swapnote. So he can have some success… with fictional characters, in someone else’s copy of the game.

  • Doug Dug. (The Electric Toy Company, 2014)

    Doug Dug. (The Electric Toy Company, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: The Electric Toy Company
    Released: 5th July, 2014
    Completed: 18th January, 2015
    Completion: $39,000, 621 meters depth.
    Trophies / Achievements:18/31

    January has been a tough month here at exp. Towers, with little to report in the “completed games” stakes. Of course, when I say “tough month” what I mean is “I’ve played Fantasy Life more than anything else, and I’m enjoying it, and ‘finishing it’ isn’t something I’m really bothered about doing, so…”

    Doug Dug. is an “endless digger”! I know there are some other versions of this idea—there’s that game I Dig It, isn’t there?—but this one feels like they said “I’d like to make an endless Spelunky, sorta” and went ahead with doing that. When I started playing it, I hated it. Basically, your wee guy (Doug, I guess) digs his way down, but dirt has several strengths. if you dig under blocks and leave them supported by blocks that are less strong than they are, they fall and will almost certainly squish you.

    To begin with, it’s really, really hard to grasp the system that leads to blocks falling. In fact, although I’ve grown to very not-hate Doug Dug., I’d be lying if I said I understood it well enough that I’m not usually killed by this happening. There is one solution (a bit like Spelunky): extreme caution.

    That’s what makes this game a bit more fun than the other endless-me-do that I played recently, Crossy Road. Crossy Road isn’t interesting after a while because as you get good at it, moving forward for quite a while isn’t challenging, and collecting coins doesn’t offer enough of a reward to be worth the risk. Here in Doug Dug., you’ve got two high scores (depth and cash) and you kind of need to keep pushing both upwards, so you’ll, even in the first 100 meters, find yourself pushing yourself into dangerous positions to get some cash.

    (And if you don’t—and I’d be interested if the developers have confirmed this is coded or just random—the game eventually spawns stuff in your way so you don’t cheaply just dig down, down, down, to avoid anything falling on you.)

    I don’t like that there’s a randomness to dying (in particular, you’re much much safer if you happen upon a helmet which protects you from one cave in, but you don’t always) but I do like that there’s a reason to keep playing… up to a point.

    Because once you’re past 500 meters (I’d say) the early levels do lose their lustre, and the game introduces some pretty unfair baddies, including a huge troll that seems to be indestructible apart from that one time I happened upon him and he was already dead (dynamite, maybe.) And it’s at that point the “I didn’t understand exactly why that fell on my head” thing starts to feel really annoying, not just unfair, and you stop.

    It’s still good for a while though.

    Will I ever play it again? Nah. Quite comfortably done with it.

    Final Thought: You know what’s a good series? Mr Driller. I should play one of those again.

  • Woah Dave! (MiniVisions, 2014)

    Woah Dave! (MiniVisions, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: MiniVisions / Choice Provisions
    Released: October 30th, 2014
    Completed: 5th January, 2015
    Completion: A high score of $2.20 in the main arcade mode.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Woah Dave! cost me a dollar (well, $1.04 with tax) and I can’t recommend it. I really want to give Woah Dave! a kicking, especially at the $5 it’s supposed to cost, but I’m going to try and be nicer than that? A bit???

    Here’s what’s up with Woah Dave!. It’s a tiny arcade game that’s very (very) much in the style of Super Crate Box. Only instead of shooting baddies with a range of weapons, basically you pick up anything you run into (that’s not an enemy) and can throw it. Enemies hatch from eggs, and there are also skulls that explode. Enemies that run off the bottom of the screen jump to the top of the screen as a more powerful evolution. Occasionally you get a “woah” block that kills everything on screen, and later on flying saucers appear that destroy platforms. But that’s pretty much it.

    Woah Dave! is, you know, interesting as a case study, because it’s like someone looked at Super Crate Box and decided to get it all a bit wrong. For example, are you a fan of Super Crate Box’s crap jumping? Well, please enjoy Woah Dave!’s “Unity test project”-quality game feel! Then there’s the enemies respawn; where in Super Crate Box they simply appear again from the same spawning position, in Woah Dave! they leap back up the screen and can kill you during their leap. It’s the kind of thing where you’re like “was this actually a game design decision?” Being killed by enemies shooting up the screen is zero percent fun.

    There’s also the cool times that involve your “weapons” the eggs and skulls. Yes, they start to flash right before they change/explode so you know you need to throw them, but because you pick up the first thing you walk into every time, there are many fun experiences where you pick up things right before they change/explode or you simply mistime a throw because of how subtle the timer is.

    I can hear the designer moaning “but that’s the design! That’s the core of the whole game!” Perhaps, but it’s… not a good design? There is no excuse in an arcade game in leaving the player feeling frustrated because their character picked something up they didn’t want to pick up (particularly fun when things get piled up, as there’s no obvious rule to what your character picks up, so congrats on picking up the about-to-explode egg hidden behind that fresh skull) or killed because things aren’t clear enough.

    Could you fix Woah Dave!? Maaaybe. Respawning enemies not killing the player and a much more clear timing on bombs and eggs (not quite sure what, but even a timer would be better) would do some work, but you’ve still go the problem of items piling up, so don’t let eggs and skulls layer? But then you have to improve the jump so you can get to the thing you want to pick up if it’s between other things you don’t! Thing is, I totally get how Woah Dave! is playable as is; how you could get to this point and be like “pretty good! Ship it.”

    It just crumbles completely if you play it intensely for a few hours. Frustrating.

    Will I ever play it again? I shall not, no.

    Final Thought: It’s weird because the game is close to one of those “expert player game loops” that you get in things like Geometry Wars etc., where you’re supposed to let enemies evolve to the point the screen is crowded and then wipe them all out with a woah block. But it doesn’t work because the jump is so crap and eggs/skulls change so imperceptibly on a crowded screen that past the first woah block you are much better off keeping the screen clear as things get faster and more dangerous anyway. $2.20 isn’t much to write home about, but I got the score by playing conservatively past a dollar.

  • Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft, 2008)

    Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Ubisoft Montreal / Ubisoft
    Released: October 21st, 2008
    Completed: 15th December, 2014
    Completion: Finished the main story missions, saw the ending. I did some of the other missions, but not to any particular end.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    So! I’ve already written an entire article about Far Cry 2 in this space here, just before Christmas, actually, but I’ve deleted it now because I didn’t like it. The article that is. Far Cry 2?

    I also did not like it.

    As you can probably tell, what with this being the second article I’ve tried to write about Far Cry 2, it’s a difficult game to write about. There’s several angles, you know? And when I try and tie them all up together, well, they end up a half-formed mess. Like Far Cry 2!

    Let’s look at it this way. You know when you watch a movie, right, and then some character does something obviously, stupidly illogical, or there’s some gigantic idiotic plot hole? You know, when you’re watching, like, Prometheus (for some god forsaken reason) and you’re like “how is the guy with mapping robots lost” or “why is that guy touching and annoying a creature that’s so obviously dangerous?” You know, those things?

    Whenever I think of these things, I always sort of imagine my dream job, which is to be the person who, once everyone has decided to make a film, reads the script and says things like “how is she running around after just having abdominal surgery?” or stands on set and stops things to ask “why don’t they just run in a different direction from the giant spinning wheel of death?”

    If they doesn’t get a satisfactory answer, well, they stop production until they get one/changes are made.

    I was sort of thinking about this job while playing Far Cry 2, to be honest. Now, I’m well aware that game development is different from movie development. In game development, I feel like it’s harder to spot errors that are going to come up at the earliest stages, and frankly, when you have big ideas (and it’s clear Far Cry 2 is a big idea) you’re obviously going to fall short in some ways and have to patch things over as best you can and hope it doesn’t fall apart. (This obviously happens with big studio pictures too, but I’m already way off topic here.)

    Far Cry 2 is a game where you are driven into town by a civilian, past checkpoints, and then afterwards, you never see another civilian and every checkpoint is psychotic. Why?

    In Far Cry 2 you have malaria, but you can’t buy malaria pills or get them off the factions you have to help the underground resistance. Why?

    Your target, the Jackal, doesn’t only spare your life but save it repeatedly. Why?

    You never actually do anything that leads you to the Jackal, and no one ever promises you information on him outside of a loading screen tool-tip, despite that supposedly being your aim. Why?

    Both sides try to kill you at all times, even when you’re doing missions for them. Why?

    And so on (and I could go on.) Look, I can hear the arguments people would make against what I’m saying—in fact, I’ve heard them before, because people have long had arguments about this game over things like the checkpoints respawning, going on about how the game is systemically interesting anyway, etc.—but my point is here that these kind of things are never explained in a way that makes them make sense to the audience, and that kind of thing is important to me as a player, ok?

    Playing it, I got the sense—or maybe I wanted to believe—that Far Cry 2 started as a game with a dynamic war happening across the game’s map, where when you sided with one faction they’d treat you as an ally (i.e. you can pass through their checkpoints, etc.) and conquer map zones back and forth (likely pointlessly, as is in line with the game’s ‘point’ as far as I saw it.) A game where every battle was chaos, with crowds of civilians trying to avoid getting shot. A game where malaria was something more than an annoying timer until you had to do another short, pointless mission. Something a lot more open ended, actually. But they had to cut it all down because that’s hard to actually do. I want to believe—I genuinely want to believe—that the answer to every “why?” is just “because it’s what we ended up with, ok?”

    Or, maybe, as is often the case, it’s the fact that game development, like movie development, doesn’t have “why-men” but producers and CEOs and the like who say things like “no, we can’t have civilians being shot” or really any number of things that make this game less than what it feels like it could be.

    Far Cry 2 is one of those games where you feel like “the only way to win is to not play” but not in a clever way where you’re like “ahhh” but in the actual way where you’re better if you don’t bother.

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: The fire looks amazing, though. Is there another game/series where fire looks this good? I should have played the entire thing as a pyromaniac instead of my usual decision to roll stealth. It’s so good!

  • Rygar: The Battle Of Argus (Tecmo, 2008)

    Rygar: The Battle Of Argus (Tecmo, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Tecmo, Team Tachyon / Tecmo
    Released: 11th December, 2008
    Completed: 4th December, 2014
    Completion: Finished the story mode.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    I played this for an hour, right? I played this for an hour and I was like “this is absolute garbage. Real ‘kusoge’ and not even in a particularly funny way. I should stop playing this.”

    And yet I went back and I finished it. While I was finishing it, I was like… will god forgive me? When  my life is over, and he (or she) looks at how I spent my precious time on earth, they’re going to be like “you spent five hours of your life, precious time you could have spent with loved ones, playing Rygar: The Battle of Argus?”

    What am I going to say to them? That I multitasked, watching some episodes of Scot Squad on the iPlayer, and that I listened to the very first radio play featuring Adrian Mole (then called Nigel Mole) but I didn’t like it very much (I loved those books back in the day, but listening to someone read their diary isn’t very fun.)

    I guess I could say some stuff like that? I could mention that occasionally, very occasionally the voice acting is funny? (Surprisingly, it’s not on Audio Atrocities, not even for the peach of a line “I pledge my victory to this feather!”)

    I could bring up that the game is sort of really funny because it’s exactly, as in 100% exactly, the same as the PS2 game it’s a “remake” of (Rygar: The Legendary Adventure) with the only change being that the hero looks utterly ridiculous? That Tecmo had the audacity to announce this for Wii as “Tecmo New Style Action Game” according to Wikipedia and then title it, amazingly, Warrior of Argus: Muscle Impact in Japan?

    I could say some stuff like that I guess… but would god forgive me?

    Will I ever play it again? Maybe my punishment in hell will be to play this again.

    Final Thought: Once you’ve beaten the game apparently you can play it again, but your hero’s weapon is a pizza instead of a ‘diskarmour.’ Fair enough.

  • Crossy Road (Hipster Whale, 2014)

    Crossy Road (Hipster Whale, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Hipster Whale
    Released: November 20th, 2014
    Completed: 23rd November, 2014
    Completion: I got a score of 248 and was like “yeah, good enough.”
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Crossy Road is really good! I completely, totally recommend that you download it, if you’ve got an iOS or android device or whatever, and play it. It’s completely worth it, what with it being free and that.

    Now, that said, down to the business of pulling the game apart, such is the way of this blog.

    Shall I start with something basic, like the controls? Yeah, let’s do that. If you’re not au fait with Crossy Road (because you didn’t, just that second when I recommended it, download and play it) it’s an endless Frogger. It’s complete ingenious, in that way that when you see it you’re surprised no one ever thought of it before. In fact, I’m suspicious that someone must have. Seems like the kind of thing there are loads of on the app store, only they’re all ugly and crap, looking like Unity test projects. Maybe not loads. At least a couple (only now I’m sure they’d be impossible to find, as every shitehawk clone merchant starts to pump out Roadie Cross, Angry Bird Cross, Ridiculous 2048 Cross Wings, etc.) 

    Anyway, Crossy Road is isometric and lets you tap to move forward, and swipe to move left and right. Can you guess? Yeah, it’s super easy to throw yourself into traffic as you try and adjust your position by a swipe being read as a tap. Super easy, and every time it happens it sucks. A lot.

    That’s annoying, but it’s not what made me stop, actually. What made me stop was… well, I’ve been playing TxK, right? (Which is also great, and you should totally get it even though it’s not free at all.) Anyway, some years ago Jeff Minter had the amazing idea (at least, I think it was his idea and I’d rather type this caveat rather than google it) that his games could “save” your highest score as you progressed and let you start again from it when you died. Not in an infinite continues way, but in a “this was your highest score, and this was how many lives you had at the time.” The idea being that rather than having to go through all the boring easy levels again—that you’d probably perfected—you can just start at a point where you know you’ve mastered it and continue from there.

    (TxK does over-egg it a bit by giving you a save after every level. I’d prefer a single save at the first level you died, so you could always start from a “perfect” run, but that’s another article entirely.)

    Anyway, I was thinking about this because Crossy Road is about, well, getting as far as possible, but that means once you’ve got a sufficiently high score—over about 100, I found—it’s super super annoying to have to do that first 100 moves. Now, Crossy Road doesn’t seem to have a particularly intense difficulty curve (it definitely gets harder, but it’s subtle) so I’d imagine that giving you checkpoints would allow players to easily climb into the thousands, at which point what would be the point? After all, Minter’s save system removes something that can easily be argued as important to old arcade games—the endurance test. You’re not at 100% the whole time, you’re going to lose concentration, or slip due to tiredness. I know, having played in enough 6+ hour Netrunner tournaments (not the same thing, but, you know, educational on endurance, anyway.)

    Thing is, that doesn’t remove the fact that once you’ve got a decent score in Crossy Road climbing back up there is just boring. I don’t want to do it. So I don’t.

    Will I ever play it again? Nah.

    Final Thought: If you want an interesting comparison, however, there’s Canabalt, which I’m happy to play every once in a while because it’s so rhythmic and fast, or perhaps even more comparable there’s Jetpack Joyride, which I played, as the kids say, the shit out of. Crossy Road made some waves for being “indie” but including loads of free-to-play business, and yet it didn’t include any of the stuff from Jetpack Joyride which makes it so compelling (to the point where I rarely cared about my high score) in terms of unlockables that significantly (well, sort of) change the game, and everyone’s favourite, the coin doubler (which I never paid for, but I’m surprised that Crossy Road didn’t ship with it.) 

    Anyway, wasn’t the original Frogger endless Frogger? It was just cut up into levels rather than one long experience. Really makes you think, huh.