Ghostbusters: Concluded

Since the baby came along I've found less and less time to play games, which isn't ideal because a) the more games I play, the better I become at my job, and b) I still love playing games. Balancing time between games, work, and home is becoming increasingly difficult. But then Ghostbusters came along.

Let me begin by saying that I've been waiting what feels like my whole life for this game. Ghostbusters is a constant in my life. Other favourite films come and go (The Big Lebowski, Aliens ... I could go on), but I can put Ghostbusters on at any time, in any mood, and I'll love it like I loved it as a youngster watching at the Curzon cinema in Manchester, my mum telling me to cover my eyes before the librarian ghost flies at the camera. My expectations couldn't have been higher.

Ghostbusters fans have been harshly treated over the years. I have hazy recollections of an old plaform game (probably on the Amiga) disappointing me, but other than that Ghostbusters games have been thin on the ground. Zootfly released footage a few years ago that peaked attention, but that game appeared to die after the news broke that there was no official license. Shame as the footage looked excellent.

Fast forward to 2009, and after a few years in development Ghostbusters: The Videogame is released by Terminal Reality, a developer few people had previously heard of. Due to some complicated legal wrangling between Sony, Atari and Activision the game has a staggered release, meaning I have to pay over the odds for an American import version which works on PAL 360s.

Anyway, enough of the history lesson: my thoughts.

Ghostbusters: The Videogame is as good as Terminal Reality, or anyone else, could have made. It's very difficult to see how they could have made anything different, given the source material: it ticks all the boxes but feels a little sterile.

The bad:

Lip sync is terrible, the characters seem intent on showing that they have teeth.
The PKE image capture mechanic feels very tacked on, as if someone in Production decided the game needs something else, so they throw in the equivalent of a digital camera and expect the player to photograph every ghost, even in the heat of battle.

The game design is very old school. Expect locked doors and invisible walls.

AI is not so good either, expect huge gameplay pauses while you wait for them to do what their supposed to do, and for them to stare blankly until you do your thing. Peeking behind the curtain indeed.

The setting is a strange one. Obviously to get the best effect the game had to be set close after the end of the second movie (which would place it in the early 90s), however all the actors are now in their 60's, and sound like it. This gives quite the juxtaposition when you see the fresh young face of Egon Spengler on screen, but hear the voice of the 65 year old Harold Ramis.

Talking of the voices, Bill Murray could not sound less interested. I think he rang in his lines on a mobile phone from the bath. Sounds like it.

Overall it gives a decent spooky experience, with a few high points (sta puft is brilliant), but I'm afraid I'm going to have to end this with a terrible cliche: if you're a fan of Ghostbusters you'll love it, if not you'll think it an average videogame. As I've explained I'm a fan, so back off man, I'm a scientist.

The Path: Concluded

At it's heart, The Path is an adventure game that breaks design tradition by tempting the player away from the most obvious correct route. The player plays one of several red riding hoods, and the game presents the player with a path through the forest with a house at the end where Grandma awaits.

Rather unfairly, the player fails if they go straight to the house. The aim is to explore the forest away from the path, learning more about each character and the forest itself.

Audio cues and ghostly images populate the forest and give it a deeply unsettling atmosphere, giving The Path very much a feeling of the Blair Witch Project.

The presentation is consciously arty, a trick which can impress if used correctly but I'm not sure it works here. Art for arts sake? Maybe. The game would feel exactly the same were it to have a standard front end and in-game UI.

Now we come to completely unfair arbitrary death that the player will suffer many times. I still don't know how to avoid these (which seem to crop up with most forest encounters), however I understand that it's a mechanic to further the story. There's nothing worse in a game to fail and not know why, because it's impossible to learn from such encounters.

Is The Path important like Jason Rohr's work, Braid, or Ico? I don't have the answers, go ask Roger Ebert.

Dear Esther: Concluded

Dear Esther is a lonely ... experience (I hesitate to call it a game for reasons explained below). In essence it's an interactive ghost story, the character the player inhabits appears to also be the narrator. The experience goes a little like this: you wander around an isolated (Scottish) island listening to the story, but as the story gets creepier you get drawn in both physically and emotionally. It reminded me a little of a story I read that was linked from SomethingAwful (yes, I'm a goon), The Cave. I can highly recommend it.

The Chinese Room have done a fantastic job of teasing out every last bit of performance from the ageing Half Life 2 engine, and the audio is on par with the visuals.

Exploration with nothing to find.

A FPS without the S. Try it, you might like it.

Baby Break: Concluded

Well I certainly never expected it to be this difficult.

The one gripe I have about the whole baby thing is honesty. No-one is honest when it comes to their own offspring. "Labour's a magical experience". "You'll cherish every second of your newborn".

It's not, it's very difficult. All of it.

Anyway let's get back on track. I managed to get through a few games over the last three months (what else is paternity time for?) so I'll post my thoughts over the coming weeks.

Baby break

According to Google Analytics this announcement will be of interest to roughly 12 people, but I might as well post anyway.

The blog is offline for a while now because of this little disturbance:

Internet, meet Evan George. I'm not sure if he likes video games yet, I'm sure he'll let me know in due course.

Call of Duty: World at War: Concluded

I was putting off COD 5. It's been there for months, sitting there on the shelf, baiting me. "Put aside the thoughts of your grandpa fighting the Germans in WWII, old wars are entertainment now" it was saying.

I discussed this issue with my grandma a while back, when another high profile WWII game was released. She was oblivious of the fact that past wars pass as entertainment these days in games, TV and films; a nice easy way to kill time. Juxtapose that with the thought of her working in the factory, assembling weapons that were used by my Grandpa and his fellow soldiers to kill other men simply because they happen to be a thousand miles apart, and you maybe begin to see where I'm coming from, and why I'm not such a big fan of games of this ilk. Anyway, that's a discussion for another time.

COD 5 is pretty much at the pinnacle of modern FPS games, I fail to see how it could be improved. It ticks all the 'old war' FPS boxes ... where next? Inevitably COD 6 which should be a Modern Warfare 2, but where next for Treyarch and their old weapons? I shouldn't complain, this franchise along with Guitar Hero keeps me and my Activision siblings in a job.

Gameplay wise, for me COD 5 was a slog at times, however I enjoyed the city based levels a lot more than the countryside trench ones. Unfortunately it suffers from that old nutshell, the death (through grenade or otherwise), and retry. I lost count of how many times the protagonist eats a grenade, or dies at the hands of one of the hoard of unlimited respawned Germans until a trigger box is reached, then retry. Honestly I don't see what purpose these retries serve, if not to prolong the time it takes to complete the level.

If it wasn't for the achievement points, and the fact that I got it for free I doubt I would have played COD 5, even though I thoroughly enjoyed COD 4. It's not in the same era, sure, but it's not even in the same league.

Plants vs Zombies: Concluded

Popcap have done it again.

After the casual masterpiece that is Peggle, Popcap have released Plants vs Zombies, another attempt to steal all my spare time. And it worked.

Plants vs Zombies is fantastic. The game has rock-solid mechanics, is polished to a massive extent, has a sense of humour ... and taps into a very popular meme, namely zombies. What more does any game need?

Popcap's twist on the classic tower defence genre gives the player an ever increasing amount of plants to defend their house from waves of different types of zombies. Each different type of zombie has it's own distinct personality and skill, from the bog standard brain-eater to the Michael Jackson-esque dancing zombie who resurrects four of his pals with a Thriller-esque pirhouette, and as with the zombies, each plant brings something different to the table.

The game is played out on a 6x6 grid, and the currency used to 'buy' plants is sunlight, which drops from the sky, or can be generated using sunflowers, and mushrooms in later levels. This introduces a new mechanic to the genre, and gives PvZ a unique twist. As well as placing your plants, keeping an eye on any approaching zombies, and collecting any coins dropped, the player must also watch out for sunlight to collect. It's frantic at times, and completely brilliant.

One tiny criticism is difficulty, or lack of. As always, Popcap's learning curve is second to none, but as you play through the game you never get the feeling that a level is close to impossible to complete. In my whole playthrough, I only failed twice (on the very last level), but I guess this is what happens with casual games. Once completed, the game continues to give, with a whole host of new modes and minigames.

Let me repeat myself ... Plants vs Zombies is fantastic, and after reading the credits I can't believe it only took four people to develop. If only all games were like this.