First off, long delay on blog post, for which I apologise (maybe Joe could blog, OR NOT). I’ve been meaning to do this one for a while, but after having finished the Left 4 Dead demo, I couldn’t go to bed without exhausting all the good things I have to say for it, and other things.
Be the games season as it is (I.e. Heaven), there have been a multitude of new games, demos for new games, and trailers for new games coming out. Having sampled many of these through a variety of methods, I intend to briefly sum up why every single one is awesome, and how I need some crazy get rich quick scheme to afford them all (I think Christmas will be my get rich quick scheme for now). The brilliant games in question are (In no particular order):
- Left 4 Dead
- Fallout 3
- Farcry 2
- Gears of War 2
- Mirror’s Edge
- Pain: Abusement Park (Is he kidding? Yes, but it’s still awesome anyway)
All of these games have been fighting for my student loan to be spent on them, of which Gears of War 2 and Mirror’s Edge have fully succeeded, but only because of financial constraints. If I could buy every one these I would, as these games are all familiar yet foreign, conventional yet daring, and most importantly, crafted, not made. From what I can tell from the hype, and the admittedly short plays I have had of each of these games, they are games based upon the videogame conventions that have seen their predecessors sell the amount of copies they do, but still manage to push the envelope where I didn’t think it possible before.
So without further ado, my brief summaries of each game (I’ll follow the order I did before just so my brain can cope):
Left 4 Dead (Played one demo playthrough on single player on Xbox 360)
Only word I can use to describe it = Brilliant. Everything I’ve heard and seen up to today at 1:00am has been completely justified by simply one playthrough of a small portion of this game. As a current facebook status will atest to, I class Left 4 Dead as less of a “Survival Horror FPS”, more of an “Abject Terror FPS”. Seeing somebody playing a beta, and getting killed by a swarm of infected makes you go “oh, sweet!”. Playing it for yourself makes you say “oh, fuck!” (Rinse/Repeat). The inevitable second playthough may provide me with many more of those moments given that the AI director attempts to ruin your shit from slightly different angles with every playthrough. I’ll probably pick up the shotgun next time. I’ll probably play as Francis next time. I’ll probably get incapacitated at a different point of the game. But unlike other games, I won’t know when it’s going to come! This, I feel, adds TRUE replayability to an already brilliant game, which can only be a good thing
Fallout 3 (Played 2×1 hour stints of a flatmate’s Xbox 360 version)
Firstly, *Insert “Oblivion with guns” adage here*. There, now that’s out of the way. Now I can go on to tell you about how it doesn’t matter that it’s like Oblivion with guns, because the guns are awesome. Saying something is “with guns” normally amounts to “with guns (and therefore makes the game too easy)*, which I personally did not find to be the case. Walking round Hamilton’s Hideout with the world’s most useless flashlight to alert me to the presence of any radroaches around, the limited ammo I had for my BB gun wasn’t going to help me in the slightest, nor was it going to help me when I fast travelled and generated next to a supermutant with a chaingun. Oblivion itself was a brilliant freeroaming RPG, and building on that by crafting a world so bleak, yet so full of colourful charachters (Anybody who has met the lady in Arefu who greets you at the door with “are you here to deliver the catalogue?” will know this to be true), and whacking guns on the top is only a good thing. Same game mechanics, different world, and for an RPG such as this, the world is the key [/ramble]
*breathe*
Farcry 2 (Played 2×1 hour stints of the same flatmate’s Xbox 360 version (Recurring theme? Thanks Dean!)
I’m going to gloss over this game a little bit, because most of the 2 hours I spent was the tutorial, as well as driving/running between various gun battles in the game world (both of which are executed brilliantly, only interrupting your gameplay to show you your charachter has malaria now and again). The real reason I’ve wanted to buy this, is because of the freedom it gives you. Freedom to get in your crappy car and chase diamonds, or do some missions. The only time it doesn’t give you freedom is when you’ve got to either shoot up a load of dudes, and then blow something up, or NOT shoot up a load of dudes, and then blow something up. Then it ventures into “The Sims” territory, something which I think is a really interesting thing to mix with an FPS (Quite fortunate it combines with such a competent shooter as Farcry 2). The story exists, but given you can play as one of a handful of mercenaries, and after the tutorial, you’re told to go and Kill the Jackal, it seems somehow more open ended than most of your modern day (J)RPGs. I’m not going to get bogged down trying to argue that Farcry 2 is a true FPSRPG, but it’s certainly gotten close. (And I said I was going to gloss over Farcry 2, ha!)
Gears of War 2 (Endless hours of Online Multiplayer, 2/5 of the Single Player Campaign)
Ok, I might have gotten a bit caught up in my grant narrative of ALL these games in my intro spiel. Gears of War is not a game that is familiar yet foreign, it is a game that is just familiar. Nothing foreign here (except for the Americans on Xbox Live). The only thing that makes this game an essential purchase (at least for fans of the first game) is that it does everything Gears of War 1 did, but on steroids. As I’ve been saying to countless people, it’s actually scary seeing Gears of War 2 attempting story, as I’ve seen deeper story in the first 2 chapters of GOW2 than I did in the whole of GOW1. The single player campaign adds a wealth of new charachters (Anya isn’t just “that bitch what gives you commands in your ear” anymore! She’s a real person! A real, reasonably proportioned person! It’s a miracle!), and although Marcus is still the rough, tough macho hero with little time for anything except locust slaughtering, he’s backed up by Dom who now has/had a wife, Dizzy who reluctantly got enlisted so his family would be safe, and Ben Carmine, who knows bugger all, and you have to train him (while conviniently training the player, too). Not to forget the Cole Train, who was probably the most developed charachter in GOW1, who retains his (arguably racist but) street charm for the second outing. Anyway, I need to go to bed soon, so I’ll wrap up this so I can sum up mirror’s edge in 0.5 words. I’ll do this by adding that the already stellar Online Multiplayer mode has only been made better with the addition of a lovely noncompetitive, non-story mode (Horde), inventive reworkings of classic gameplay formulas (Submission and Guardian spring to mind), as well as a party and matchmaking system which has graced every other shooter since Halo 2/3, making Gears of War an essential game for anybody with a decent grasp of the controls and £5 a month to spare on Xbox Live Gold.
Finally,
Mirror’s Edge (Played demo infinity times on 360 AND PS3)
I’ll either write another 1,300 words on this game alone, or I’ll write a lot less, the latter of which sounds appealing, as if I were to get started on the inviting gameworld, interesting story concept and (what I found to be, personally) mindblowing control system, I’d be writing all night, which neither of us want. No other game has actually made me physically squeal at finding out what the “jump” button is. The duck and rotate buttons being all shoulder based, too, while the Right Trigger maintaining it’s conventional “makes stuff die” usage makes the control system easy to access, which is just as well, because as a “platformer”, you could argue that it’s brutally unforgiving (although the reload time is rather fortunately only momentary). I personally got on with this game very well, and most times, I’ve pressed different combinations of buttons to make Faith jump off/jump over/jump onto/slide under/roll upon landing on everything in the world, and everything was just as satisfying as it was the last time I did it. Tomb Raider’s days as a linear platformer, i believe, are numbered. Because not only is Faith reasonably proportioned (therefore not making her a target of radical feminist hatred), she doesn’t always just want to shoot everybody, and won’t die because you can’t see where you’re supposed to be jumping.
That concludes my semi structured ramble through the 5 games I’ve had the pleasure of meeting during the last few weeks. If you thought this was a long post, you just wait until I play through these games in full and I’m either hideously dissapointed or even more riotously impressed. These 1571 words are nothing.
