Xbox 360
Computer games, diddies and the breakdown of society
This morning’s episode of Radio Scotland’s Morning Extra was about videogame violence and GTA IV (yep, I was the one who called in at the end to call irresponsible parents “diddies”, heh). I know phone-ins don’t exactly attract rocket scientists - I mean, they let me on air - but even by the usual standards of jaw-dropping nonsense I was gobsmacked by one caller. He thinks violent videogames are bad. He, er, lets his eight-year-old play 18-certificate video games for hours on end. He doesn’t approve of this.
WTF?
*bangs head on desk*
Blacksite? Blackshite, more like
I bought the Xbox game Blacksite (no, not at full price - are you mad? Fifteen quid from Amazon Marketplace) to find out whether it really was as bad as the reviews suggested.
It isn’t. It’s worse.
It’s not the bad voice acting, the soulless regurgitation of every first-person shooter cliche, the lazy respawning enemies to keep levels vaguely challenging or the fantastic decision that means your super-tough army type is incapable of opening a door by himself (seriously - you need to wait for a bit for no good reason and then summon a squad member to do it for you); it’s that the makers seriously expect you to pay fifty quid for a game that simply doesn’t work.
I’ve never played a game with so many bugs in it. Dead bodies float in the sky. Driving sections get confused and make you retrace your steps before an exit that wasn’t there before magically appears. Objectives don’t get updated, so you’ve cleared a level but keep being told you need to clear the level. And best of all, the frame rate doesn’t just drop - it dies. In one section you go round a corner and the frame rate drops below zero, with the screen freezing for a full ten seconds before lumbering back into arthritic life at a staggering 1 frame per second. And that’s not even a busy section with stacks of on-screen enemies pushing the console’s processor to the limits: it’s a bit when you’ve killed absolutely everybody and there’s sod-all happening.
There can only be three explanations for this. One, the game was never tested. Two, the game was tested but the testers were idiots. Or three, the publishers really wanted to rub their doughy buttocks in the face of every purchaser, but they didn’t have enough AirMiles - so they decided to make a rubbish game instead.
This is a game that still retails at forty to fifty quid. And publishers wonder why so many gamers rent or pirate games instead of buying them.
Xbox is “crack for kids”, says woman
A nice, reasoned piece in The Times by Janice Turner:
I refuse to buy them portable gaming consoles, Xboxes, GameCubes, PS2s. These are Satan’s Sudoku, crack cocaine of the brain. Even the crappiest cartoon or lamest soap teaches a child about character, plot, drama, humour, life. Playing videogames, children are mentally imprisoned, wired into their evil creators’ brains.
Consoles are crack for kids? I suspect that increasingly, the crack for kids is, er, crack.
From The Independent:
Drug agencies in the city [Cambridge] report a marked increase in clients using crack cocaine in the past 18 months, mostly men in their 20s and 30s. Younger people are also getting hooked. Cambridgeshire Youth Offending Service is treating a girl aged 13 who is taking crack more than once a week.
Blimey, another year’s nearly gone
As ever, magazines are doing their review of the year thing and I feel inspired to follow suit. Rather than a “what a year that was, eh?” thing, though, here’s a quick list of things I’ve really liked or been let down by this year.
Books: Mr Biffo, David Quantick and Charlie Brooker made me laugh so hard I probably damaged internal organs, and judging by the way Mrs Bigmouth has been laughing like a drain “Mommies Who Drink” is a hoot too. As always I read about 200,000 crime novels, of which the latest Ian Rankin was the most reliably entertaining, and I loved Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace. Although by “loved” I really mean “was utterly freaked out by”. Which also applies to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Music: Obligatory Radiohead joy aside (Reckoner is jaw-dropping), the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration was wonderful despite my hatred of Robert Plant’s voice and my loathing of music that sounds vaguely country. I bought all the Talk Talk records I’d already bought several times already, rediscovered the joys of The Big Dish, was let down by a rather anodyne Sugababes album (what a great first single, though!), discovered Regina Spector about a decade after everybody else and danced very badly to pretty much everything Timbaland has had a hand in this year.
Springsteen’s Magic was an unexpected old-school delight, Mark Ronson’s version of Valerie is one of the most joyous things I’ve heard for ages, Girls Aloud’s Tangled Up was worth buying for Call The Shots alone, and the reissued Joshua Tree reminded me why I used to really love U2.
Tech: Both Vista and Leopard fell into the “glad I have ‘em, could live without ‘em” category, DRM didn’t quite die - although the signs are encouraging - and I had to eat my words about the iPhone, which I thought would be a pile of crap but which I - rather shame-facedly - love dearly despite the lack of 3G. I was also wrong about the Apple TV, which I was very excited about pre-release: it seems as if Apple lost interest in it by the time it actually came out, and it’s become a technological footnote rather than anything more exciting.
FARK, Flickr and PopJustice remained brilliant, Facebook walks the line between fun and being really, really annoying, Newsgator/NetNewsWire/iPhone Integration is better than sliced bread and Logic Pro is God’s own music software. Of the big stuff, the scariest stuff happened (and will continue to happen) in the world of privacy.
Games: Halo 3, too short. Timeshift, predictable but fun enough. Bioshock, flawed but great. Still sod-all decent stuff for the Wii. Orange Box is great value for money, but Half-Life 2 Episode 2 frequently feels like Space Invaders (the antlions in the tunnels, the striders attacking). And not in a good way. Crackdown was a hoot and is well worth tracking down second-hand on eBay. On the PC I loved the Minerva mods for Half-Life 2, but the much-hyped STALKER bored me to tears when it wasn’t crashing.
A major annoyance for me was the increasing focus on online gaming, which means the single player bit of any console game can be completed in about six hours by an inept gamer like me. That probably translates as three seconds for anybody that’s any good. At 40-odd-quid per game, that’s hardly value for money.
The interesting/depressing thing about gaming this year was its increasing resemblance to the film industry: blockbuster-driven with months and months of hype and overly excited previews, with reviewers being outflanked so their words don’t appear in print or online until a terrible game’s hit the top of the charts. Never mind the quality, just look at the first-week sales. A lot of very bad games made a great deal of money this year.
Also depressing was the repeat of last year’s Wii bundle bastardy, where retailers took advantage of Nintendo’s inability to make enough consoles by forcing desperate punters to buy big bundles of crap. They’re doing it again this year.
On a happier note, Eurogamer’s featuring some excellent games writing and the new Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog has quickly become a favourite bookmark.
Magazines that I don’t write for: EDGE and The Word were ace as ever, although the latter is teetering on the very edge of the abyss where Uncut and Mojo live. Empire seems to have found its mojo again, Q’s better than before - less list-y, with proper writing again - although I’m now old enough not to care about 99% of the music it covers, and Car magazine remains a work of art with superb writing to boot.
What about you, ladies and gentlemen?
Escapist review of Halo 3
Absolutely bang on.
Via David. Language isn’t safe for work…
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.
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.
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.