Diary of a Ledger

Black Ops 2: Magma - Video Blog #9

2013-05-20T10:16:00.003+01:00

Halo 4: First Ever Game Online - Video Blog #8

2013-05-19T08:33:00.002+01:00

Just Cause 2 - by @timepoorgamer

2013-05-18T16:25:00.000+01:00

With a few exceptions, the single player games I tend to like usually have a deep, fairly engrossing story that can draw you in. Often, this story will be accompanied by some good voice acting. Just Cause 2 is not one of these games. That doesn’t mean I don’t like it – far, far from it.

Just Cause came out during the transition period from Xbox & PS2 to XBOX 360 and PS3, and came out on all four of those consoles, as well as PC. As far as I can tell, it was OK, and it must have sold reasonably well, as Avalanche Studios made a sequel. It didn’t register on my radar at all, until I downloaded the demo, while bored one afternoon. Once I’d played it for about 10 minutes, I knew I’d be buying it.

Just Cause 2 is an open world game. A freaking vast open world game. Seriously, the map is absolutely massive. It’s set on the fictional island country of Panau, somewhere in Asia, where your former mentor has disappeared, presumed turned rogue. You, as Rico Rodriguez (whose appearance appears to have been inspired by a young Antonio Banderas), have got to go in, investigate and do what is necessary to calm things down again, which includes neutralising your friend, if it comes to that. The best way to do this is to cause as much chaos as possible. You’ll meet three factions who are each trying to overthrow the regime, and can take missions for them – assassinations, courier missions, general carnage, that kind of thing. Plot-wise (which is definitely NOT the main reason for playing this), it’s like an 80s CIA mission in Central America, told in a B-movie style. Some of the voice acting is hilariously bad, but it just doesn’t matter.

As per most open world games these days, there are plenty of vehicles to commandeer – cars, bikes, helicopters, planes and boats all get a look-in here – but the greatest method of getting around the world is what you start with – a grappling hook and a parachute. This combination, once you’ve got used to it, is just a joy to use, grappling on to trees, rocks, buildings and vehicles. It makes no sense of course – you can deploy your parachute, release it, and then deploy it again during the course of one jump – but that doesn’t matter, the watchword here is fun. And fun is something that JC2 has in absolute spades. As well as the missions, you earn chaos for destroying stuff, and there is a lot of stuff to destroy: if it contributes to the islands infrastructure, then it’s probably ripe for demolition – fuel containers, radar bases, transformers, petrol stations, wind turbines, presidential statues, propaganda vans, oil pipelines and even entire oil rigs are there for your explosive pleasure. The grappling hook also provides great opportunities for causing damage – you can grapple a jeep to the underside of a helicopter, and use it as a wrecking ball, for example.

I have sunk over 100 hours into JC2, but causing chaos and blowing stuff up just hasn’t got old. You can pick it up for about a tenner on Amazon, but if you’re a PC gamer, hang around for a Steam sale – it’s been spotted for about £3.50 at times, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what this gamer calls insanely good value.

Let the chaos begin.

Black Ops 2: Encore - Video Blog #7

2013-05-17T17:09:00.000+01:00

Black Ops 2: Studio - Video Blog #6

2013-05-16T18:58:00.003+01:00

Hitman Absolution: The King of Chinatown - Video Blog #5

2013-05-15T17:21:00.000+01:00

Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (Saving a Nerd) - Video Blog #4

2013-05-11T17:53:00.000+01:00

Black Ops 2: Grind - Video Blog #3

2013-05-10T08:22:00.002+01:00

Mass Effect: This is the End?

2013-05-09T17:53:00.000+01:00

Spoilers contained in this post.

There's a small section in Mass Effect 3 where you climb to a really high point of The Citadel, a massive space station built tens of thousands of years ago and throw bottles into the air with a squad mate and try to hit them with a sniper rifle. You barely even play this section, apart from deciding whether to let him win or not and yet, without a doubt, it's one of the most touching moments I've ever seen in a game.

Later, you and your squad are fighting your way to a beam of light that'll transport you to the end of the story. A vehicle is tossed into the air and nearly crushes your team. You make them leave, deciding to go on alone and you're forced to say goodbye. In my play through I said goodbye to Liara, an alien my Shepard had been in a relationship with since the first game. Shepard's voice cracks with emotion as she tells Liara to go, genuine, well acted emotion and for only the second time in thirty years of playing games, tears stung my eyes.

The Mass Effect series is full of moments like this, the third game in particular, especially with the Citadel DLC, is almost a succession of them. It's one long goodbye to this brilliant trilogy and whilst I get some of the disappointment over the endings I think much of it is about having to leave Shepard and the crew of the Normandy behind forever. Goodbyes are never easy and this cast of misfits, aliens and cyborgs get under your skin and it's hard to let them go. There are some odd choices by the developers and although the actual end didn't leave me cold it fell short of the emotional punch they were clearly looking for.

I played the extended cut, yep, we have those in games now, having downloaded every bit of additional content and fought to get the best possible ending. Some of what happens after you make your choice (one of four choices available) is impacted by how much of the game you've bothered to complete. But the endings all have their own compromises, which, I'll concede I was very aware of before I got there. I really wasn't sure what I would want to do, but I went with what I thought my Shepard would do, what she'd been fighting to do since the first game and the huge reveal on Virmire. She destroyed the Reapers.

Mass Effect isn't just it's ending though, it's a hundred plus hours of gaming, a journey through a story where you craft your own character. I've never played anything quite so immersive, quite so much like a book. It's so rich in detail, so driven by the choices you make and the order you complete things that almost everyone will have had a different experience. There's plenty of games where that's the case but none I've played have had so much weight to them or so many characters I could invest in.

The action, once you get past the dodgy gun play of the first one, is pretty satisfying and by the third game it's been tightly honed and full of outstanding set pieces. There's one final, mad battle, the last boss fight in fact, where it feels like BioWare are throwing the lot at you, making you feel how impossible it is to win this war.

I hope BioWare, with the next game, go forward, not backwards. Pick an ending to Mass Effect 3 as the canon ending and move this brilliant, believable universe they've created, forward with a new cast.

I will miss Shepard and the rest of the crew of the Normandy, I certainly won't forget the first Mass Effect trilogy. I may have come to the titles late, but I'm glad I got there in the end. The best game I ever played had always been Final Fantasy VII, it's not anymore.

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

2013-05-08T17:10:00.000+01:00

“I can’t think of what I’m going to write this week,” I said to Gray on Monday.

“Don’t worry mate, you’ll think of something,” was his reply. And then, on Monday night, I see that Denis Dyack is starting a Kickstarter project for Shadow of the Eternals, what he’s billed as the spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, and - bing! - there’s my subject. Nice how things work out like that sometimes.

“Deep, into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering… fearing… doubting…” This quote from Edgar Allen Poe is the first thing you hear when you boot up Eternal Darkness, which was released for the GameCube about 11 years ago. At the time it was the first 15/M rated game that Nintendo themselves had published. The game, developed by the Ontario-based Silicon Knights, had had a fairly tortuous development cycle, and was originally intended to come out for the N64, but numerous delays pushed it back. The game is a psychological horror based adventure game, set with a cast of 12 playable characters, over a period of 2000 years. The principal character is Alex Roivas, a twenty-ish student from Washington, and she is your character at the beginning and end of the game, as well as all the sections that intersperse with the other characters’ contributions. The (very simplified) premise is that one of three ancient gods wants to cross over into our dimension and enslave the world. The three gods in question, Ulyaoth, Xel’lotath and Chattur’gha have been banished from our universe, and one of the characters you play is essentially possessed by one of them (which you pick) and spends 2000 years attempting to resurrect them, while your other playable characters are fighting against this over the same time period, some willingly, others less so.

There is clear Resident Evil inspiration here – plenty of zombies and other undead, as well as similar “tank” controls and camera system; what really makes the game stand out, is the game’s insanity effects: as the character you are playing at the time experiences more and more of the horrors they encounter, their sanity level drops, and the game starts to break the fourth wall: the effects start off fairly mildly – hearing footsteps, or screaming – but then they become more severe - you might walk into a room, and then your head explodes, the volume on your TV appears to get turned down, your savegame gets deleted, the game appears to end and invites you to carry on in a fictional sequel, or, my personal favourite – a blue screen of death. The effects usually only last a few seconds at a time, and then your character returns to normal, usually saying something along the lines of “this can’t be happening!” Naturally, there is great fun to be had in trying to keep your sanity meter as low as possible, to experience as many of these effects as possible.

By today’s standards, it definitely feels clunky, which is why the announcement that many of the original team are working on this “spiritual successor” is definitely exciting news, but I’m slightly nervous. This is a $1.5M Kickstarter project, which is certainly not small, a Silicon Knights’ output since ED’s release has hardly been prolific: they produced the excellent GameCube version of Metal Gear Solid (Twin Snakes), and then Too Human on the 360 (distinctly mediocre, even though it had been in development since the days of the PS1!) and an X-Men PSN/XBLA game, which was even worse. They’re using the Cry Engine, which is definitely a good start, but will I back the new one? I’m not sure yet. Time to hit Ebay for a replacement copy of the original, methinks!

Take a look.

ME3: Taking Down a Reaper - Video Blog #2

2013-05-04T20:59:00.004+01:00

Rockband

2013-05-01T19:16:00.005+01:00

On 2^nd April, Harmonix, the creators of Rock Band, released Don McLean’s American Pie as a new piece of downloadable content for Rock Band 3. The timing of this particular release can’t have been coincidental, as it represented the final piece of weekly DLC for the Rock Band series – it really was the “day the music died”. Since the first downloadable tracks came out for the original Rock Band in late 2007, Harmonix has pumped them out on a weekly basis for 281 weeks. Just think about that for a moment. That is some truly epic post-release support there (and yes, of course, they will have made money on that content). For the past couple of years or so, the content has only been compatible with Rock Band 3, but anyone who has a copy of that, can download any of those 281 weeks’ worth of stuff, safe in the knowledge it will work (apart from a few Metallica tracks which have just been removed for licensing reasons).

A few years ago, someone (I think it might have been Phil Harrison, while he was at Sony) said that he thought Guitar Hero was the ultimate example of a supremely casual game simultaneously being a supremely hard-core one. Harmonix, of course, created the Guitar Hero franchise, and then evolved it into Rock Band, and I would say that Rock Band goes even further in that encompassing embrace. Take Rock Band 3: if you’ve got the peripherals, you can have 6 mates playing/singing with you at the same time in a free-for-all party mode affair, where you can have a (usually drunken) laugh at someone’s attempts to do the backing vocals to Cold As Ice, and easily while away an entire evening that way (especially if you’ve imported the songs from Rock Bands 1 & 2, and grabbed some extra content along the way) as the variety of songs available is so great, you are bound to find stuff to appeal to almost everyone’s taste. Or, you could buy the Fender Mustang pro-controller, the keyboard controller, or the full Squier guitar, and really go to town on learning the full instrument parts – like the entire guitar solo from Free Bird for example. Don’t like the keyboard or drums Mad Catz made? Not a problem – they even produced an adaptor so any MIDI-compatible keyboard or drum pad set will work with the game.

There are some games that I’ve played where I’ve sometimes lost the love or the fun during the course of things (it doesn’t make them bad), especially if there’s a lot of grinding involved. That’s never happened for me with the Rock Band franchise; I know that if I fire it up (usually with at least one other person around) I will end up with a huge smile on my face. It’s also expanded my own musical tastes: without it, I would be entirely unaware of the existence of Kansas’ Carry on Wayward Son, Bang Camaro’s Night Lies, or even Alice in Chains’ Man in the Box, to name but 3. Thank you, Harmonix, for improving my life, and giving me, and a hell of a lot of other people, a huge amount of fun along the way.

Three Brand New GTA V Trailers

2013-04-30T17:37:00.002+01:00

Mass Effect 3: Video Blog #1

2013-04-28T09:54:00.003+01:00

Okami (Part 2)

2013-04-24T17:22:00.000+01:00

As Amaterasu, you travel across Nippon with your companion, the tiny celestial envoy Issun, who provides most of the comic relief, particularly if he's talking to a lady who's taken his fancy. The game's initial hook is its visual style, which takes traditional Japanese water colours as its inspiration. The animation of Amaterasu is wonderful, with flowers sprouting up behind her as she travels across Nippon. Over time, you will converse with various gods who will imbue her with powers that she has lost during her long sleep which, in true Metroid-vania style, will open up pathways to areas you have been able to see but unable to access. You'll meet a wonderfully varied cast of characters, the majority of whom who are unable to see Amaterasu for who she is, but will converse with the ever chattering Issun. Doing favours for these people, as well as feeding the friendly animals, will earn you praise, which can unlock more life, or alternative abilities, RPG-style.

As well as friendly characters, there are of course plenty of monsters to tackle, whose presence can be seen initially in the form of "demon scrolls" around Nippon. Touch one of these scrolls, and the enemy will appear, together with a force field which encompasses your battle arena. Vanquish the enemy, and you'll receive rewards based on the time you took to despatch the baddy, and the damage (or rather the lack of it) that you took in the process. This can give a somewhat stuttering feel to the game initially, but you'll soon get accustomed to it, having a feel somewhere between classic Final Fantasy titles and Chrono Trigger.

All the way through the game, you will be serenaded by an utterly beautiful orchestral soundtrack provided by a full orchestra, alongside some traditional Asian instruments. As is fairly common with Japanese larger games, there was a full 4-CD release of this soundtrack, which is beautifully packaged up with lots of artwork, as many of these Japanese releases seem to be. I have a copy of it myself – almost certainly the geekiest thing I’ve ever bought – and it gets aired a lot.

The game is definitely not without its flaws, however, and for me, the biggest is its recycling of its (mostly great) bosses - you'll see one of them three times, and another one as many as five times, if my memory serves me correctly. Zelda itself has recycled its bosses in games, of course, but not to quite the extent that you'll see here. It’s the only part of the game that seems rushed in its creation – as if they wanted to use alternative ones, but ran out of creation time.

So, why write about this six-year-old game right now? Simple: at the moment, the HD version is free to Playstation Plus subscribers. Sad as though it may sound, I bought it back in November on the day of release. “Seriously? You triple-dipped?” I can hear people saying already, but yes, I did. This is a game that I passionately believe in, and want to succeed, possibly more than any other. This may be because it’s never really had the success I feel it’s deserved, or just because of the overall package. Ōkami HD is normally £15.99, which is a snip for the amount of playtime it will give you, and when it’s free, it represents stupidly good value. If you’re a PS3 owner, a Zelda-style adventure fan, and you’ve yet to experience it, add it to your queue. You’ll thank me later.

Mordin Sings in Mass Effect 2

2013-04-23T18:55:00.000+01:00

Possibly one of the oddest moments in a game ever.

Yes, that is a glimpse of my FemShep.

Born Again in Mass Effect

2013-04-22T15:19:00.001+01:00

It was a tough break, the day my 360 died and took my Mass Effect game save with it, but after taking a deep breath and two weeks off I restarted my 'Mass Effect experiment' and began the trilogy all over again.

The first one is great fun, I played on the easiest setting in order to plough through, but as I've previously mentioned it is, from a menu system point of view, awful. You can read all about that from some one who's far more of an expert than I am at Game Design Reviews. To be honest though, despite all that clunky horror, the story is brilliant, forcing you to make hard choices and put yourself in Shepard's shoes.

Although I stuck with a female Shepard and remained Paragon (I played nice) throughout, Mass Effect allows you to navigate the game in a non linear way, so I took missions in a different order and generally mixed things up from my first play through. It took 24 hours to complete it and then I was starting the second one all over again.

For those interested, Kaidan and Wrex survived Virmire and Liara was the love interest. (I played the relationship thing differently as Kaidan was a bit dull.)

Game two, which I'm the best part of 38 hours into now, is truly epic. The story is almost ditched in favour of the recruitment of your new team and then obtaining (and retaining) their loyalty but it's so beautifully delivered I've not minded a bit. This could be one of the greatest character driven games of all time. The action in this one is just that bit tighter and graphically it just sings in comparison to the first one but the team are so well fleshed out can't help but want them all to make it.

I'm well past where I'd got to on my original play through but I'm guessing I still have at least another ten hours or more of gameplay until the end.

I've downloaded most of the DLC for it too and been slowly working my way through some of that. 'Lair of the Shadow Broker' in particular, where Shepard reunites with Liara is a stunning, unmissable addition to the game.

'Lair of the Shadow Broker'

I have the whole crew recruited and they're all loyal (there is still one gap left to fill on the squad) and I have the Normandy fully upgraded. If I get to the end with no characters having died, including the crew of the Normandy, I'll be so chuffed. There's a long way to go though....

via GameInformer

So having lost one Shepard to a system failure my 'new' Shepard is taking the Mass Effect universe by the scruff of the neck, being nice where appropriate, flirting with all and sundry and shooting the shit out of anyone that gets in her way.

And yes, I am now saving to the 'cloud'. Thank for your concern.

*launches probe*

Okami (Part 1)

2013-04-17T17:53:00.000+01:00

Greetings! I’m Toby, otherwise known as @timePoorGamer. Gray has kindly agreed to let me write the occasional column on his excellent website, so I’ll be chipping in from time to time with some kind of game related stuff. I’m going to be taking things in a more retrospective direction than Gray, so we shouldn’t crossover on subject matter too much. I have a tendency to write a lot, and he’s told me to keep them fairly short, so let’s see how this works. First up:

Ōkami (part 1 of 2)

Ōkami is the most beautiful game I have ever played. Yup, even in these days of high definition gaming, I have yet to see something that caught me in the same way it did. Sure, there are games now with better graphics – the gorgeous Skyrim being a great example – but with Ōkami there’s beauty in the entire package that’s not found in the same way anywhere else. It’s a game that gets frequently mentioned in the “Are games art?” debate; I’m not going to get into that here (do games even need to be art?), but if you are familiar with it, you’ll know why.

For those who haven’t played it, and there are many, here’s a little bit of information: Ōkami was created for the PS2 by Clover Studios, part of Capcom, and released in Japan and the US in 2006, and over here in February 2007. The game was met with considerable critical acclaim (including IGN’s Game of the Year for 2006) but poor sales figures. Its release coincided with the launch of the Wii, which had an established mega franchise going after the same kind of potential fan base: Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. So, a while down the line, Capcom, with Clover now disbanded, and the main talent behind the game having left to form Platinum Games, turned to Ready at Dawn Studios, and asked them to convert the game for the Wii. Given some of the gameplay features, this seemed like a good move. Again, the game was very well received critically, but still no-one bought it. Bummer. Despite this lack of commercial success, the game did spawn a sequel, Ōkamiden on the DS, but I’m not going to touch on that here. And last year, Capcom gave it the HD-treatment, with a lovely version on the PS3, complete with optional Move controls, to give you a reason to take your Move off the shelf where it’s been gathering dust for the past 18 months.

Ōkami borrows a lot from the excellent Legend of Zelda series; possibly not quite as much as the more recently released Darksiders, but gamers familiar with Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess or Skyward Sword will see some distinct hallmarks. The subject matter is a little unusual, to say the least, taking various elements of Japanese mythology as its starting point. You play as Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess, in wolf form. She is revived from a hundred-year sleep by Sakuya, a tree sprite, to help purify the land of Nippon, which has been over-run by the return of the demon Orochi, an enormous eight-headed dragon, who is intent on, amongst other things, devouring a maiden every year. Here’s a trailer to whet your appetite: more coming next week!

Flashback is Back

2013-04-12T17:41:00.000+01:00

One of the greats get an HD make over.

Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon Trailer

2013-04-11T20:34:00.000+01:00

Sweet baby Jesus this looks so cool.

The Day Mass Effect Died

2013-04-10T19:27:00.000+01:00

Some of you will no doubt have finished Mass Effect, had a reaction one way or another to the ending and moved on with your lives. Others among you won't have a clue what Mass Effect is or care remotely. For me Mass Effect began as an experiment. I'd not played the games that I'd heard so much about and I wanted to see what my reaction would be to the ending that caused so much controversy. So I started from the beginning with a six year old game and slowly fell in love.

The graphics were clunky and a little dated. It had a terrible inventory system that didn't tell you how much stuff you actually had and as a shooter it was awful. But what a story. I played FemShep as I'd heard the female Shepard had a better 'voice' than the male version and I decided early I would play Paragon and get as many of my ships crew to the end as we battled in the stars. About halfway through the first game I knew I was hooked and the brilliant innovation that I could move my final game save over to the sequel and eventually the whole trilogy thrilled me. I was writing my own FemShep's story.

The second game was even better. Graphically it leapt up in quality and menus were simplified (maybe a bit too much) and the subtleties of battle were far more apparent.

My three year old XBox decided about twenty hours in to the second game to die. Or to be more specific the hard drive on my three year old XBox decided to die. The very place where Shepard existed was now a worthless heap of nothing.

This all happened less than two weeks ago, the following day Mass Effect 3 arrived in the post and now sits on my game shelf mocking me for not saving to the cloud.

Can I start again? Well yes, of course I can but it's a massive investment to get Shepard back to where she was. Mass Effect doesn't play like most games do. The levels here are conversation branches with colleagues and adversaries not jumps to make or foes to kill. Those conversations define who your Shepard is, make him or her feel more alive than any game character I've encountered. She felt so alive I simply never considered she'd need saving to a cloud somewhere.

I will go back, soon probably, Kotaku's Mass Effect Week is helping to inspire me and I know I'm not alone in having a save file corrupt and die. I suppose I should be upset at all the other game saves that no longer exist, Far Cry 3 for example, but frankly I never had much time for the lead in that game. Mass Effect's story is great fiction and the way the game slowly lets you paint that lead yourself is one of the great joys of this generation of games. I'm glad I started my experiment but genuinely sad I have to start painting all over again.

The Last of Us - Extended Red Band Trailer

2013-04-09T18:34:00.002+01:00

This continues to look truly impressive.

That Bonkers Far Cry 3 DLC Trailer

2013-04-08T10:34:00.003+01:00

Initially it looked like an April Fools gag but now there are screen shots and apparently Michael Biehn is in it.

Here are the screenshots... looks like we're going back to the Island and it's 1985...

Thief - Stepping Out of the Shadows - Trailer

2013-04-07T12:12:00.001+01:00

Dishonored (sic) anyone?

Battlefield 4 - 17 Minute Trailer

2013-04-04T00:01:00.000+01:00

Ok, so this might tempt me from the dark side.