Xbox 360
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.
Games for grown-ups
There’s an interesting contrast between the age of gamers and the mental age of games. The average gamer is 33 (the average buyer is 40, but that average includes parents buying games for their kids) but in many cases the mental age of games seems to be around 14. It’s an endless procession of pumped-up, vaguely homoerotic muscly, monosyllabic men who, like, totally go and kick alien ass!
Don’t get me wrong, there’s always room for daft, childish fun - Earth Defense Force 2017 has a mental age of about three, and it’s a hoot - but the word I’m seeing more and more in interviews with developers is “morality”. In the forthcoming Bioshock, the relationships between non-player characters are crucial and you’ll have to make some difficult moral choices; in Haze, your super-soldier discovers that things are considerably less black and white in war than they might first seem, and so on. I’ve just picked two games off the top of my head but there are plenty more.
Stories in games are nothing new, of course, but what’s significant now is that the technology has grown up, the gamers have grown up (your 33-year-old average gamer has been playing games for 12 years) and our expectations have grown up too. Creating realistic, immersive worlds is routine, and at least some developers seem to have the attitude that pretty isn’t enough.
Of course, not all developers (or perhaps their publishers) have that attitude. Building grown-up games is harder than bashing off yet another Spider-Man tie-in, and desperately bad games such as Sonic 3D still rocket to the top of the charts and stay there. But the same dull cash-chasing applies to other forms of entertainment, so for every American Pie rip-off there’s an American Beauty. As for games, as long as you have developers like Warren “Deus Ex” Spector, who says things like this:
To grow our audience to match our ballooning next-gen development and marketing costs, we have to broaden the range and increase the quality of stories we tell. We need to lure people in with things that are familiar and comforting, and we must take interaction out of the realm of the abstract and into an area they already understand - emotionally satisfying stories about recognizable people, stories that illuminate and enrich their lives.
…I’m optimistic.
Why I didn’t download the Halo 3 beta
I love Halo. I love Halo 2, despite the rubbish ending. Only Deus Ex has wasted more of my life (somebody remake it and hurry up - the DX Source project seems to have ground to a halt), and I’m genuinely excited about Halo 3. But I didn’t download the Halo 3 beta, despite owning Crackdown and therefore being eligible. The reason? Multiplayer.
I hate multiplayer gaming, because I’m rubbish at games. And that’s becoming a bad thing, because publishers see multiplayer as the future. The latest release for the Xbox, Shadowrun, is largely (entirely?) multiplayer, and more and more console game reviews say things to the effect of “the single player mode is crap and even a monkey could finish it in less than four seconds”. I ain’t paying fifty quid for that, which means that of the few console games that come out, even fewer of them are of any use to me.
Now, I’m not ashamed of my rubbishness. However, it does mean multiplayer is a complete waste of time for me. No matter where or when I connect, the same thing always happens. Go! Bang! Dead! Shite! Go! Bang! Dead! Shite!
The difference between my skill level and everybody else’s is just too big. You could put me in a multiplayer game where I’m armed with rocket launchers and everybody else has nothing but grated cheese to defend themselves, and I’d still be fromaged to death within three seconds.
I briefly thought that playing similarly rubbish gamers might be the answer, but it isn’t. Imagine the scene: a barren post-apocalyptic wasteland (that’ll be every game, then). Player one commandeers an all-terrain vehicle and drives it over his own head, East 17-style. Player two wanders into a cupboard and can’t find his way back out. Player three strolls off a cliff while trying to remember which button jumps and which one reloads. Player four sits down and has a nervous breakdown. And player five turns out to be a skilled gamer slumming it, and within three seconds I’ve been cheesed to death.
Today I am mostly hating my Xbox 360
I stumbled upon the critically-acclaimed Psychonauts in a branch of Game the other day. I’ve been looking for it for ages without success, and I know that although it’s an Xbox game, my 360 will run it. Better still, it was four pounds. Four pounds!
Game in, dashboard says there’s an update, update installs, system restarts… can’t play the game. I have the wrong cable. The game needs PAL-50 and the cable doesn’t support that.
Balls! Giant dangly balls on toast!
This has happened before - Half-Life 2 springs to mind - and it’s one of those little details that makes the difference between console love and console hate. I don’t even know whether I still have a cable that’d let me play the game, and if I do I can’t be arsed looking for it. So today I have console hate.
Earth Defence Force 2017: fun, if you like that sort of thing. And I do
If you fancy some big dumb fun on the Xbox 360, Earth Defence Force 2017’s worth a punt (it’s going for £18 on Amazon). It’s essentially Space Invaders given the FPS treatment, and if you turn off the voice acting and music it’s an utter hoot. Particularly when you fire at a big bug with your rocket launcher, miss completely and realise that every single building in the city is destructible. So far I’ve killed about three aliens, four hundred and thirty skyscrapers, six bridges and a thousand trees. Heh heh heh.
The trailer’s on Play.com, but don’t let its soundtrack fool you: the music in the game itself is bloody awful.
Games: too expensive for impulse buys
Mr Biffo’s column in the new issue of EDGE (it’s not online, sorry) raises the thorny issue of game prices among other things, and he makes some good points - the gaming industry is right that films get income from the cinema before they hit DVD and games obviously don’t, but the industry doesn’t tend to mention that even the biggest, shiniest, most expensive game has a budget that wouldn’t cover the catering bill on a typical movie - that sort of thing, but I think he’s hit the nail on the head when he suggests that at £50, games are too expensive to take a punt on.
I’m currently loving Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (it’s very Japanese, and I mean that in a good way) but I swithered before buying it - the demo didn’t put across the sheer nuttiness of it, and if I hadn’t read EDGE’s fairly glowing review I probably wouldn’t have bought it at all. I’ve got Rainbow Six Vegas waiting for when I finally finish LP, and that’s it.
I’ve spent ages looking at other titles but again and again, the price puts me off. At £40 to £50 I’m not willing to take a risk on a game I’m not sure I’ll even like, either because it’s terrible (Perfect Dark Zero), tedious (the 360 version of Far Cry) or just something I’m not into (Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter).
Part of the problem is that there are some truly terrible games out there. That’s not just a matter of taste - while I don’t get GR:AW, I can see why others love it - but of plain truth. I give you Sonic The Hedgehog on the Xbox 360 which, according to the gaming press and the entire internet, would be an atrocity at £5 but is a threat to the very fabric of humanity at £50. A quick look at Rotten Tomatoes or any intelligent games magazine shows that there are many, many more.
There are options, though. If I lived nearer a GAME shop (and I’m assuming they still do their “if it’s shit, bring it back” exchange thing) I might take more risks, but I don’t so I don’t.
Pre-owned games would be another option, or at least they would be if the games shops weren’t so greedy (Pre-owned! £39.99! Bastards!).
Trade-ins would be good if the difference between the original price and the trade-in (or the trade-in and the mark-up when it goes back on the shelf) wasn’t so big. And there’s always eBay, or there would be if my account wasn’t still suspended due to an eBay cock-up. Oh, and eBay prices reflect reviews, so if a game comes out and everyone thinks it’s crap then you’ll be lucky to sell it for 2p.
The problem with all of those solutions is that they don’t bring in any more money for the game publishers. When someone buys a new game at £50 and then trades it in or eBays it, and I buy the pre-owned copy, and play it, and trade it in or eBay it, and someone else buys that, and… three, four or more people are playing the game but only one person’s generating cash for the publishers. When I exchange a full-price game because it sucks, I get a full refund and buy something else, so I’ve played two games but only paid for one.
I know some of you are gamers; what do you think is the right price point for a game? £50? £40? £20? Would lower prices encourage you to take more risks? Should we be allowed by law to punish the people who knowingly sell us bad games, with RRP determining just how much punishment we’re allowed to dish out?
Things what I have bought and are good
- The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Bleak!
- Lost Planet: Extreme Condition for the Xbox 360. Fun!
- On The Wealth of Nations, by PJ O’Rourke. Witty!