Reboot

I know it's been a long time time since the blog was updated, but I've been busy with stuff on the internet mastering a game and mastering (hopefully) raising a minor.

I'm still playing games, so I'll be updating a bit more regularly. Oh, and I hope you like the new look. It's a template!

Uncharted: Drakes Fortune: Concluded

The biggest problem with growing up with the Indiana Jones movies is that every experience that presents itself as ‘Indiana Jones-like’ is bound to be a letdown. Movies and games that try to reproduce the Indy experience very rarely hit the highs of the movies, so Uncharted was a pleasant surprise.

Everything feels right in Uncharted, there are very few times that the game experience is ruined by a bug or poorly coded AI behaviour. I’ve done a bit of research into Naughty Dog’s impressive production techniques, well worth a read if you can dig them out – the proof is in the pudding and when such good production techniques yield such a good game, you know they’re doing things right.

If I was being overly critical I’d say the game is around a third too long; Naughty Dog could have ended the game before introducing the cave-dwelling monsters and I’d have been happy. Oh, and the very end of the game is amazingly frustrating – without spoiling it for the few that might not yet have played it, the end sequence takes the mechanics you’ve been using throughout the last 8 or 9 hours and pops them straight in the bin, to introduce a new way of doing things right before the game ends.

Uncharted is a real boys-own adventure game, it’s polished to a high standard and a great introduction to the franchise. Roll on Uncharted 2!

PS3

You may or may not have noticed a few PS3 games have crept onto the playlist. That's right, I'm the proud owner of a shiny 250gb PS3 slim. After buying a used PS3 from ebay, it turning up broken, and the nightmare of having to return it for a refund, I decided to trade in a few old games to get myself this new one.

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.