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Tag: 2008

  • Gravity Bone (Blendo Games, 2008)

    Gravity Bone (Blendo Games, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Blendo Games
    Released: 28/08/08
    Completed: 05/07/25
    Completion: Completed it.

    Before we get into the article: you can pre-order a copy of exp. 2602, my brand new zine, right now. If you haven’t picked up any issues yet, there’s a discounted bundle of all three zines! Patreon members get an even bigger discount: subscriptions start at just $1!

    Blendo Games’ Skin Deep was released this year, and as is often the case, a new game makes me go “oh yeah, I haven’t really played much or anything by that developer” and I therefore feel like I have to start from the beginning. In this case, I’d previously played this and Blendo Games’ Flotilla (which I believe I still have on Xbox Live Indie Games?) but Gravity Bone only takes twenty minutes so I thought I’d run through it again (I don’t think I’m going to get the Xbox out for Flotilla, though it’s also still on Steam.)

    Anyway, Gravity Bone is still well worth running through in 2025 (you can too if you like, and then come back.) It worked fairly well for something made in 2008 even if it did crash consistently if I went into the menu and I was never able to get the graphics looking right in full screen (I wouldn’t even bother trying to get it working on a Steam Deck. But, again, it’s twenty minutes long.)

    What strikes me about Gravity Bone now is actually similar to what Kieron Gillen said about it way back in 2009–the confidence it has. A tiny spy thriller with blocky characters, designed with intentionality. The janky nature of playing it now could be detrimental, but the work shines through–like pulling up a scratchy digital transfer of an old short movie that was never matched.

    To get into spoiler territory (again, for a game that’s twenty minutes long) I love that the game breaks the “rule of three”. You complete your first easy mission. Your second mission is a little more complex, featuring tools to use and in a very “2000s FPS” way, some tricky jumping. And then, before you can move on
 you get shot.

    Suddenly everything you expect from a game is broken. You can’t just follow what you’re being told to do. You’ve got to get up and chase your assailant, surely you’ll catch them. But then
 you die.

    But as you die, you “remember” everything that brought you there. Suddenly you are no longer just  in control of an avatar doing as you were told–you understand you were playing a person, as you see their life flash before their eyes. It’s
 surprising. And then? Truly? It’s actually quite moving.

    You are taken from a pure video game experience to an emotional one, something that few games have managed in experiences that number in the tens of hours. I don’t want to oversell it too much, but while they say brevity is the soul of wit, Gravity Bone has wit and soul in its brief run time. 

    Will I ever play it again? If you haven’t heard, it’s only twenty minutes. But even at that…

    Final Thought: Spoilers: in the time between starting to write this article and finishing it I did in fact decide I just had to play Flotilla after all. What am I like.

  • Valkyria Chronicles (Sega, 2008)

    Valkyria Chronicles (Sega, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Sega
    Released: November 4th, 2008
    Completed: 9th August, 2015
    Completion: Finished the story mode, including the bonus missions.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    Negativity is rubbish, isn’t it? I feel bad that the previous review topped the page for an extra week (I’m trying to stick to one update a week, every Tuesday, unless I ever have a huge, huge backlog) so I’m quite happy I now get to gush endlessly about Valkyria Chronicles. Because I loved it.

    Valkyria Chronicles isn’t a perfect game—there are some issues with its tactical battle system, and I’ll get to that—but it’s a deeply surprising one. Set in an alternate universe going through a vague approximation of World War II (drawing design elements from WWI for good measure) it crosses real-time movement with turn-based tactics that removes grids and simplifies things like overwatch (as enemies and you just shoot on the opponent’s turn if they happen to be running past.) Oh, and it’s all done with a heavy coating of “anime”, with loads of cut-scenes and stuff that keep you up with the goings on of your militia troop. It’s not quite anime XCOM, but it’s close.

    It’s an odd one this, readers. On one hand it was largely developed by the team that worked on the never-translated Sakura Wars series (the originator of anime x tactics, as a cross between robot battles and dating simulation) and you can tell—there are plenty of pretty anime ladies, the game is mostly seen from the lens of a “will they, won’t they” love story between the protagonists and it’s often light and even funny. On the other, it’s more mature than I’d generally expect from any video game. Being an allegory (of sorts) for World War II, it deals with racism against a specific group, goes as far as representing concentration camps, and even reflects upon the use of nuclear weapons (in an abstracted fashion, but it’s quite obvious what they’re showing.)

    Indeed, Valkyria Chronicles managed something which I didn’t think I’d be susceptible to, which is that I was genuinely surprised when a main character died. In fact, I was stunned, couldn’t believe they’d do it. It’s the closest I can imagine to experiencing the “Aeris” moment (which I felt nothing for, like all cool video game dudes) and unlike that one it did actually make sense (as characters can die in Valkyria Chronicles).

    Not to mention that by the “militia” nature of the player’s squad, the characters you use are a fair mix of gender and sexuality (if not race, as such, unless you count the game’s made up Darcsen race) all of whom are as capable as the other. To some extent it was probably to allow male players the “harem anime” feel of something like Sakura Wars, but for me it was
 nice (?) to see men and women fighting in a war together as equals.

    (Although, I do admit sniper Marina Wulfstan was 100% my waifu. Pretty much nothing better than selecting her and using her amazing sniper skills to wipe out most of the enemies on the map in the space of a turn if you can keep feeding her ammo. Maybe even better than using Banshee in Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars. And anyway, I fancied her because of her amazing capability, not her nice hair and cold attitude. I think.)

    (Although, to be honest, the game does include some bonus segments like a “Squad R&R” that’s absolutely, totally one of those “beach episodes” from an anime, in that it’s mostly an excuse to see the girls wear swimsuits.)

    (Although, the one character that’s clearly coded as gay, Jann, is, let me say
 stereotypical. I loved him and used him every mission, but I can totally understand people having difficulties with this.)

    Basically what I’m saying is that there are definitely some things about Valkyria Chronicles that aren’t totally defendable, but there are also loads of things about it that make it more thoughtful than most other games out there, even if I’m pretty sure that’s sometimes entirely accidental. The game really does try and make you think about the cost of war, even when one of the character is, like, ranting about how much they love vegetables or something. It can be broad, but the characters and world draw you into it.

    And it is great to play! The real-time/turn-based mix keeps you close to your troops rather than a distant overlord which increases your engagement, and upgrading your squad and tanks is rewarding (even if it is a little slower than I’d like.) If there are problems, it’s that certain game mechanics, like “potentials” (bonuses based on certain conditions) trigger so infrequently when they beg to be planned around, accuracy is too low across the board (outside of snipers, expect some frequent reloading if you need to hit something) and I’d have preferred more, shorter missions than the 20-odd often epic missions (expect them to take about 2 hours a piece). But those are all pretty quibbly, to be honest.

    Valkyria Chronicles took me a while to beat—I took a big break in the middle for some reason, I can’t remember why—but I loved it and wouldn’t change anything. In fact I’m raring to play the sequel now. Couldn’t recommend it more if you have any interest in tactics games with a side of anime. Which I realise now is, uh, specific.

    Will I ever play it again? Valkyria Chronicles has one of those classic, epilogue heavy Japanese endings where everything is wrapped up as tightly as possible (including, confusingly, telling the futures of a few characters who weren’t even that involved?) but which, as far as the main characters were concerned, made me go “ah, that’s nice” in a way where I’d put it down and just enjoy the memories. But I can see coming back to this as it’s got a “New Game+” mode and I didn’t actually fully level everyone up. So yeah, maybe, when I’m an old man.

    Final Thought: I liked this enough I’m going to buy the art book, because apparently it’s got lots of stuff about the development in it. I have literally never done this before. Anyway, Valkyria Chronicles is regularly like $5 on Steam or whatever, you should buy it.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Super Stardust Portable (Housemarque, 2008)

    Super Stardust Portable (Housemarque, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Housemarque / Sony Computer Entertainment
    Released: November 25th, 2008
    Completed: 31st May, 2014
    Completion: Beat all the planets in arcade mode. Not in one go or anything, mind.
    Trophies / Achievements: N/A

    I must have bought this bloody forever ago and just never played it. Here’s why I didn’t, I bet: I was sick of twin stick shooters when I bought it, but it’ll have been on sale so I was banking it for a rainy day.

    I can honestly remember when the only twin stick shooters for years were Robotron 2084 and Smash TV (well, and Total Carnage, but it’s pish.) Then after Geometry Wars they were bloody everywhere (though wasn’t Mutant Storm before that?) and even though I’d put Robotron 2084 on my desert island disks, I was definitely burned out on them.

    The why of that, of course, is that so many of the new wave of twin stick shooters are totally flavourless. Geometry Wars isn’t, but I’d definitely say Mutant Storm is a perfect example of platonic blah. Games where none of the enemies stick in your mind, where there’s just no visual style, where there’s probably some tactics for high scores, but it’s impossible to care enough to try for them.

    Can you guess where I’m going with this? Why yes! Super Stardust Portable is one of those games. The one thing that makes Super Stardust HD stand out—the actually neat playing-the-game-on-a-rotating-planet aspect—is totally missing from this because they’ve zoomed the view in (PSP couldn’t handle it, or whatever.) And without that, this game could not be more generic.

    Which is a bit odd! Because if you go back and look at the original Stardust and Super Stardust on the Amiga there’s bags of weird Euro-game charm. Actually, they were much more purely Asteroids-inspired; I wonder offhand if they could have made a rotate and shoot-em-up instead of a twin stick title, or if that kind of thing is just too old hat (I’m going to say
 yes. But they could maybe have gone the Time Pilot/Luftrausers direction.)

    The graphics could be totally bonkers, just look at how it looked on the Amiga! Then look above, and feel yourself falling asleep. Of course, the game is a bit more intense than that, what with all the asteroid bits flying about, the three weapons (each better at different things) and multiplier shenanigans. 

    But it’s still boring.

    Will I ever play it again? I really can’t see why I would.

    Final Thought: There were some cool tunnel shooter bits in Stardust/Super Stardust, too, that are totally missing from any of these later games. I’d so rather have spent a few hours playing one of them rather than this on my Vita, honestly.

  • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (Intelligent Systems, 2008)

    Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon (Intelligent Systems, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: Intelligent Systems, Nintendo SPD Group No.2 / Nintendo
    Released: February 16, 2009
    Completed: 10th March, 2014
    Completion: Got all the way to the final level, gave up and watched the ending on YouTube.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    It happened! Yes, this is a rare occurrence—admittedly one that’s more usual with Japanese games of an RPG or strategy persuasion, of which this is all of the above—but here’s a game where I got to the end boss, clunked against it without any acceptable way to progress, said “fuck that” to reloading an earlier save and grinding or some other tiresome solution, and just watched the ending on YouTube.

    And I was so proud of that time I toughed it out and beat the end boss of the original Persona, too.

    It’s sort of a shame! Because there was this
 well, I’ll be honest and admit it was brief, but there was this brief period where I was sort of into Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon. In fact I was thinking “heck, everyone likes Fire Emblem: Awakening so much, and this is actually ok, so I’ll probably play it some time.”

    Now? I doubt that. Because nothing dredges up all the mistakes a game has made than a bad ending. So let’s discussing!

    Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon is the DS remake of the very first game in the Fire Emblem series, which made it feel like a pretty good place to start (especially as it’s the introduction of Marth, the first Fire Emblem character that was seen outside of Japan, albeit in a Smash Bros. title.) Unfortunately, it’s obvious that as a Famicom game originally, the first Fire Emblem was pretty basic. All the things it seems people mention about this series, like characters talking to each other in missions, are missing here. That of course shouldn’t be a problem, because the strategy core—very similar to Advance Wars—should be what you care about, right?

    Hmm. There’s a quirk! And if you’re familiar with the series, you know it already: if a character dies, they die forever. This is clearly intended to give weight to the strategy, but sadly, it doesn’t really work. You aren’t going to care about the characters, you care about how much you’ve levelled them up, and while the game does feed you new characters quite consistently—obviously to shore up your forces—you are never going to want to use them because they are never going to be better than a character that’s been with you for a while.

    So what this means is that you’re going to grind up your characters to get them to the point where it’s going to be hard for them to die (to the point, likely, where the Advance Wars-style “lances beat swords, etc.” rock paper scissors aspect become totally pointless.) Which means doing what I did, which is carefully sending your favourite characters into the arenas that are found on certain levels, and repeatedly fighting until they’re over-levelled.

    It’s boring! But, and here’s the but: once I’d over-levelled them just enough, the game became pleasantly strategic. It wasn’t an Advance Wars, no (I thought the graphics were ok, too, then I saw how beautiful the GBA Fire Emblem animations were recently and that took the shine off a bit) but it was fine. I can’t begin to imagine how unpleasantly hard the game would be if you were letting units die noble deaths or not abusing the arena, however.

    Or maybe I can! If Marth dies it’s game over, so I hadn’t been using him on the front lines, and he was woefully under-levelled by the end. The final boss? Well
 The only person who can use the ultimate boss-killing weapon is Marth. Who would die after one hit, while my other once over-levelled heroes were barely able to keep on top of the constant reinforcements. So I should actually have never stopped grinding at some point earlier, removing all the strategy/challenge from the majority of the game just so I could finish the final, ludicrously unbalanced level. Great.

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: Pretty sure I could get lots of responses here about how I could have used a particular other character to kill the boss, or do some particular combo, or whatever. Or maybe to promise me that Awakening, with the ability to turn off permadeath, is worth playing. It’s too late, folks!

  • Mirror’s Edge (DICE, 2008)

    Mirror’s Edge (DICE, 2008)

    Developed/Published by: DICE / EA 
    Released: November 12th, 2008
    Completed: 23rd February, 2014
    Completion: Completed the main game without shooting anyone. (I felt zero urge to mop up any other achievements.)
    Trophies / Achievements: 410/1250

    Mirror’s Edge is one of those games I was sure I had to play. I definitely felt that peers had recommended it, and was certainly aware that some folks were super disappointed that it never got a sequel (only there is one promised now, so it’s ok.) Except now I’ve played it and
 hmm.

    It’s been five years since Mirror’s Edge came out, and playing it now is probably the first time I’ve been aware of just how long the “last” generation was. Because it feels dated. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the fondness people feel (or felt) for Mirror’s Edge feels more like the way you might be fond of a cheap, scrappy sci-fi movie that sounds great, but really isn’t (at all.) You know, a Robot Jox or something. Something that’s super hard to get through without chewing your own face off, but you sort of want to like it anyway?

    Actually: that’s not how I feel about Mirror’s Edge. Because it’s just so bloody boring. The core seems like a decent idea! A parkour FPS! And it almost sort of works—when you are under pressure to jump and run, and the level design supports that, there’s a kind of pace that keeps it interesting. The problem is that pace isn’t maintained—I’m not clear if that it could be, admittedly—with frequent moments when the entire game slows down and you’re expected to carefully puzzle out how to climb up (or get down from) somewhere high.

    It doesn’t feel right. Parkour, every time you see it happen in one of them there action movies, always seems to be about characters being in the moment. They scan the rooftops while running, they see the next thing they need to jump off or over, and they do it. They don’t stop, walk around a bit, try jumping off a thing, realise the next thing isn’t quite close enough, die, and then repeat the whole thing about sixty more times till they get it. They just go for it.

    Now, I’m not sure how much EA got involved—I could believe this had a turbulent development, but have no idea and can’t be bothered to do any research—but the cynic in me tells me that Mirror’s Edge coming out a year after Portal might have influenced the decision to make it all a lot more puzzley. (People probably are more intent to blame the gunplay on EA, but it’s crap, obviously not how you’re meant to play the game, and likely not an arm grafted on but a vestigial one that you couldn’t snip off for fear all the patient’s guts would fall out on the floor.)

    So what Mirror’s Edge is supposed to be it is occasionally and it therefore works infrequently. Maybe that would be ok, but there are so many aspects that I’m pretty sure games are long beyond by this point: levels full of painted-on doors, guidance systems that are either spotty or unhelpful (this is the first game in years I’ve been lost in a small room in, and “runner vision” is bizarrely neutered) and challenge replaced with a determination to kill you over and over till you grind out a success by jumping just right or surviving being shot from every angle at once.

    Oh, and I lied about not doing any research: I checked out if the generally lauded game writer Rhianna Pratchett was ashamed of having worked on this, because the story is absolute pish. She is. Pratchett claims her work was butchered by EA, but I’m struggling to see even a glimmer something better in it: there’s four characters in the entire thing, one goodie protagonist, one doomed goodie mentor, one a goodie who is obviously going to turn out to be a baddie (literally the second you see them, you’ll think “well they’re going to double-cross me”) and one is a possible baddie who turns out to be a goodie. You could write the entire thing on a back of a fag packet, crumple it up and throw it in my face and I’d have a deeper emotional experience.

    The stark white cityscape looks quite nice though.

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: Mirror’s Edge will have been deep in development by the time Portal came out but going on to make the credits song of your puzzley FPS with a female protagonist caterwaul “STILL ALIVE, I’M STILL ALIVE” over and over again is just asking for trouble, EA.