Gaming
Richard Cobbett on BioShock
In a nutshell, if Bioshock isn’t Game of the Year, odds are good that we atheists are going to look a little silly at having to explain God showing up to make a new Monkey Island. It’s the best FPS since Half-Life 2. It’s the closest thing to System Shock 2 since Shock 2.
And if there’s any justice in the world, everyone responsible for the miserable pile of arse that was Doom 3 is out there right now, slashing their wrists with the retail CDs and sobbing to sleep on unsold expansion packs.
But while it’s great, it’s flawed (I’m still in the early stages, but his criticisms of the stuff I’ve played so far are bang on): Beware the plot twist!
Out of the blue, Irrational suddenly feels the urge to pull down its pants and start mooning you through the screen with a bit of bizarre meta-gaming nonsense. And I’m not sure why.
Wii Fit sounds like a hoot
The next Wii Sports (ie. a top laugh for pissed people)? It certainly sounds like it.
Bioshock is beautiful (and bloody scary)
If you can stomach the download - it’s over a gigabyte, and thanks to my patchy wi-fi it took eight hours to download - the Xbox 360 demo of Bioshock is stunning. You get about an hour of gameplay, and if that’s representative of the game as a whole it’s going to be incredible. The ruined art deco environments are beautiful, the gameplay’s exciting and the atmosphere is genuinely unsettling.
Please please please let the game be as good as the demo.
On game save points and the tyranny of console game prices
Dear game developers: could you make it easier to save game progress, please?
I’ve gone from loving Resident Evil 4 on the Wii to loathing it, the people who wrote it, and anybody who’s met anybody who knows the people who wrote it. The culprit is a section where you’re inside a house as the zombies attack, and to date I reckon I’ve been killed a few hundred times there. Restarting that section every time is annoying enough, but when I’ve had enough and turn off the Wii it means when I come back, the save point is so far back it may well be in Resident Evil 3.
This is one of my pet hates with games, particularly console ones: the combination of a slightly too difficult set-piece and inconsiderate save points sucks all the fun out of a game very quickly.
And my other pet hate: console pricing. Bioshock’s out on the 24th, and it’s £29.99 on PC or £44.99 for Xbox 360. I can only assume the difference is the razor blade model of the console business: sell the kit at a loss and make up the difference in licensing fees from the games. But a 33% price difference between PC and console is taking the piss.
Wii will hurt you
For all I love Nintendo’s Wii and reckon it’s a work of genius, I’m really not sure about the Wiimote from an ergonomic point of view. As someone who’s had repetitive strain injury for years I’m pretty good at keeping the symptoms at bay (so RSI-inducing games such as Rayman Raving Rabbids are a no-no), but over the last week my right hand has started doing the “hello! I’m a claw!” thing anyway. It doesn’t look great, and it’s really rather uncomfortable.
The culprit? Resident Evil 4, or rather using the Wiimote for RE4. Rather alarmingly, just 20 minutes of holding the Wiimote with fingers poised over the A and B buttons is enough to give me crab hands - whereas *hours* on the Xbox don’t cause any ill-effects at all. I’m beginning to think that what’s fine for Wii Tennis - a controller with all the ergonomics of a house brick - is a really bad idea for other games.
I know some of you have Wiis and don’t have RSI (as far as I’m aware) - are you experiencing sore hands from gaming with the Wiimote?
Wii will shock you
I’ve been playing a bit of Resident Evil 4 on the Wii, and it’s amazing - not the game so much as using the Wiimote to play it. What is (so far) a pretty standard O Noes! Zombies! game becomes considerably scarier and more stressful when you’re trying to aim your gun for real or stab someone with the Wiimote.
It also freaks out the dog if you’re playing it on headphones.
More on Manhunt 2
There’s a nice, balanced Manhunt 2 piece on Eurogamer by someone who’s actually played it.
If there’s a conclusion to be gained from my brief time with Manhunt 2, it’s that Rockstar appears to have been naïve and reckless when, considering the microscope its predecessor fell under, it should have been cautious, clever and alert.
Video nasties: when publicity stunts go wrong
I’m sure you all know this already, but I’m indebted to Total Film’s Jamie Graham for adding to the sum of useless but mildly interesting stuff that floats around my head. I always thought that the 1980s video-nasty panic originated in the tabloids, but Graham’s piece in the current TF points out that it was largely due to a publicity stunt that backfired.
It all started with Driller Killer and Cannibal Holocaust. The lurid ads for the former caused a lot of complaints, but the distributor for Cannibal Holocaust decided to kick things up a notch. Posing as an outraged member of the public, the distributor wrote to Mary Whitehouse expressing shock and horror that such filth was available for purchase. The distributor helpfully included a copy of the video so Whitehouse could be shocked too.
Whitehouse did exactly what the distributor hoped and went ballistic, but the issue gathered momentum, the tabloids seized on it and inevitably, there were demands that Something Should Be Done. That resulted in the Video Recordings Act, the expanded role of the film censors and notoriety for the 30-odd titles dubbed Video Nasties, but it also created the system that recently banned the computer game Manhunt 2.
The moral of the story? While it’s fun to wind up the self-appointed guardians of public morality in an attempt to boost sales, once you’ve wound them up you can’t always stop ‘em. Headline-chasing games developers might want to bear that in mind.
Quick review: The Darkness (Xbox 360)
When Deus Ex: Invisible War came out, I was pretty excited. I loved the original Deus Ex - it’s still one of my favourite games - and the prospect of a new game with better technology had my credit card twitching long before it came out.
And my god, did that game suck.
The game itself was fine, mostly, but what ruined it for me was the loading. It seemed that every time you walked through a door, there’d be an interminable loading screen before you could do the next bit. I reckon for every hour I spent playing the game, I spent 55 minutes watching loading screens. It was like a really good episode of, say, House stretched out to 37 hours because it cuts to an ad break every time Gregory blinks.
The Darkness is a bit like that.
Loading screens ruined the game for me. They are quite witty, but the novelty wears off after a while and you get into a rhythm like this:
- Get assignment in subway station
- Get train to other subway station
- Swear at the loading screen
- Go up the stairs
- Swear at the loading screen
- Realise you’ve gone to the wrong subway station and head back downstairs
- Swear at the loading screen
- Get on a train to the other subway station
- Swear at the loading screen
- Go up the stairs
- Swear at the loading screen
And so on.
I’ll cheerfully admit that I’m spoilt by games that have nailed the loading thing - Crackdown, Halo 2 - but surely today’s next-gen console technology means we don’t have to sit through this stuff until the end of a level? It’s particularly frustrating with The Darkness, because it’s based on atmosphere. Every time the loading screen kicks in and you unleash a volley of expletives about the developers, you’re out of the game.
It’s a real shame, because the rest of the game is largely great (despite some minor issues - the city streets are empty of non-player characters when the baddies aren’t around; the hell levels are a pain in the arse to navigate; the map’s useless and once you’ve killed bad guys there’s a lot of wandering around empty stages) and the darkness powers are hilarious and gory. Overall though - for me at least - it’s Invisible War all over again: a potentially great game that really got on my nerves.
Anyone got Resident Evil 4 on the Wii? Any cop?
Xbox 360 can bring your ancestors back from the dead
Well, not quite. But I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon.
As I’ve mentioned endlessly, my back problems returned with a vengeance in April: a slipped disc or discs resulting in pretty much constant sciatic pain in my leg and foot. Everything I do hurts: sitting at the computer, sitting downstairs with the laptop, watching TV, driving the car… you get the idea.
There’s one exception: playing Xbox. It’s not just that it doesn’t hurt; it’s that it seems to make my back better.
At the moment my daily routine goes a bit like this. I’ll wake up in pain at 5am or so, try to get back to sleep, doze off for a bit and finally admit defeat at 6, 6.30am. I’ll then shuffle about like an old man, drink coffee, read the papers and start work somewhere between 7am and 8. By 10am I’m sore, by noon I’m really sore, by mid-afternoon I’m in bloody agony. I’ll lie down for half an hour in a fruitless attempt to take the pressure of my back, do another bit of work, swearing all the time, then I’ll put dinner on. And that’s Xbox time - specifically, Crackdown.
I’ll play Crackdown for half an hour to an hour, and during that period my back isn’t sore at all. No back pain, no sciatica, no anything. And yet I’m sitting on the same sofa, in the same position, as when I watch TV or read a magazine. The latter two mean I constantly have to shift position because the sciatica gets worse, but when I’m blowing stuff up in Crackdown I don’t even have a twinge. The effect lasts for about 30 minutes after I’ve stopped playing, and then it’s back to the back pain.
I’m intrigued by this, because there’s got to be a reason for it. It’s not a one-off, a two-off or a three-off; it’s every single time I park my arse on the sofa and play Crackdown. So it’s one of two things: either the game is distracting me and taking my mind off things, so the pain is still there but my brain’s more interested in taking out an SUV full of Shai-Gen soldiers; or gaming’s releasing a bunch of happy drugs that do a better job than any painkillers, prescription or otherwise.
Anybody else experienced the same kind of thing, with gaming acting as a painkiller? Or does anyone have any idea why playing Crackdown’s considerably more effective than Co-Codamol? I’m really intrigued by this.