Quick reviews

This is just a quick review of games I've been playing in the past year or so. Most of these are based on the impression they left on me and maybe some of them will return to haunt this blog as full detailed reviews.

So here we go in alphabetical order

Assassin's Creed 2 - Fixed everything that was wrong with the first Assassin's Creed and renaissance Italy was a great setting. The scenes happening in modern day are still shit and the developers decision to leave two of the memory imprints from middle of the game as a DLC was totally fucked up. Probably my favourite game in 2009 even with its shortcomings. 9/10

Batman Arkham Asylum - Easily one of the best games in 2009. Great ride from start to finish and excellent execution all together. I wish the boss battles with Harley Quinn and Joker would have been a bit more innovative but still if anything this is a 10/10.

Borderlands - This is what Diablo would look like if it was a FPS set in a fallout-ish world with cartoon graphics. So in short addictive and brilliant. But fuck the DLCs. Maybe I'll get them if they manage to publish a game of the year edition with all the add-ons in a single disc. Still a 9/10.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - I'm currently not really into online gaming but I did like the single player campaign. I can totally understand why this was such a huge hit. 9/10

Dante's Inferno - Without referring to God of War this was an enjoyable and nice game until the level and enemy design just couldn't bring anything new to the table after the first few circles of hell. 7/10

Darksiders - Pretty accurately summed up as Devil May Cry meets Zelda. I had fun and there were enough cool moments for this to remain absolutely a positive experience. 9/10

DiRT 2 - Arcade driving with excellent graphics and presentation. The "extreme attitude" kind of FUCKING SUCKS because I'm not a 14 year old American kid. But once you get past that the driving is fun. 8/10

Dragon Age: Origins - Not as much fun as it should be. Also the graphics are really uneven like every once in a while they're awesome and then you see some crap textures that look like something out of the original Doom. I just don't see the love for this game and Baldur's Gate is way better. Not bad though but it's just missing something 8/10.

Forza Motorsport 3 - What more could you ask from a driving game. 9/10.

Mass Effect 2 - Just pure amazing! 9/10

Metro 2033 - Atmospheric FPS in the Moscow metro tunnels. This turned out to be amazingly good shooter and it's a shame it will probably remain an underrated piece of gaming history. 9/10

Prince of Persia - Nice and smooth platformer with annoying fight mechanics and repetitive boss battles that nearly got me to throw the controller out the window more than a few times. Sans the fighting this would be a charming game. 7/10

Red Faction: Guerrilla - I had zero expectations but this turned out to be an addicting sandbox type of game where you get to destroy a lot of stuff..I mean a lot..on Mars...With a sledgehammer. Cool! 8/10


So that's what comes into mind at this moment. I guess I have been playing pretty good games since there wasn't a single one that i would score lower than 7/10. Or maybe I have just blocked all the bad games from my memory. Or maybe they aren't just worthy enough to waste time writing about.

You may wonder why I gave Batman a 10/10 and AC2 got only 9/10 and I still claimed it to be my favourite game in 2009. I'm just that complex! But seriously I think Batman was more polished and was executed better so it deserves a better score but I still played AC2 way more.

Splinter Cell Conviction

I just finished playing the new Splinter Cell. It took about 5 hours to complete. Without dumb trial and error and sudden death parts I guess it would have taken about 3 hours to play through. This is definitely one of the shortest games this generation of consoles has to offer. Yeah yeah sure there is the coop campaign and multiplayer but still. The shortness doesn't even bother me all that much since I think most games are way too long and they get just repetitive. I'd much rather have short and interesting game that would keep me interested enough to play it again.

I'm not going to compare this to the previous Splinter Cells in any way. I realize this is a new direction the developers are trying and that's the way I'm going to treat it. I pretty much have no idea what the hell happened in the game plot-wise other than that Fisher's pissed of about his daughters death who isn't actually dead and then some evil dudes try to do something bad in Washington. That's about how much I cared about the plot. On a side note the hobo-ish Sam Fisher is awesome. He actually feels angry as hell and that kind of makes it okay to be able to take down a platoon of trained soldiers by himself.

About half of the levels are really cool and the new game mechanics in Conviction really shine. The "mark and execute" feature is nice and adds a bit of tactics into confrontations. The projected mission info and objectives being shown on the surfaces of the game world is very stylish. It's also cool when you go hiding and the color bleeds out from the screen and this is actually a pretty informative and intuitive way to show that you're concealed. The other half of levels is filled with awkward moments which the engine clearly wasn't made to handle. Iraq flashback level is totally stupid. I mean you have none of the tricks that you have just learned to use in your disposal. It's just a shooter level and a bad one with third person controls. Then you have the level where you have to avoid being seen or the level fails instantly. Not cool when you think you should be a badass killing machine with a vendetta.

Graphics are great but I still have to wonder why the fuck do they have to use prerenderent cut-scenes when you could have just used the great looking game engine. Also some of the cut-scenes have been done with the engine but they have been prerendered poorly so they look like a shitty version of the game itself. This is a sin that a lot of game companies still do. I guess it goes back to the nineties when it was cool to have state of the art cutscenes or intro videos that looked nothing like the game. And then they used screenshots of the cut scenes on the game boxes and everyone was disappointed by the time the actual game started. But now the graphics in the games are so advanced that why spend money on weird prerendered stuff. It totally ruins the mood and overall coherence of the game. At least GTA does this right.

So to sum it up Splinter Cell Conviction was a fun ride but it still has a lot of flaws. I'm kind of hoping they do a Conviction 2 and focus on just being a pissed of merc and just leave out all the dumb levels. There's no way anyone should rate this higher than 8/10.

Far Cry 2

I haven't played the original Far Cry but I do own Far Cry Instincts for Xbox. It was a fun game except the most ridiculous bug at the boss battle. I don't know if you know this but I'm gonna explain it anyway. So in the boss battle you see the main enemy on a cliff and you're being attacked by these mutant-whatever-soldiers. Keep in mind there's no way to know what you're supposed to do here. At first I was shooting the boss and killing the monsters every now and then but I was mainly focused on the boss. I thought the bulk enemies just kept on respawning and I never got very far with this tactic.

So it turns out that you have to first take out a few waves of these mutants and then they stop coming. Then you can start dealing with the boss. So the boss jumps down from the cliff and starts attacking you. Naturally I started to shoot the guy the very instant the last mutant-thing was dead. And I just kept dying and dying. Turn outs the game has a serious bug. You have to wait for the boss to jump down and WAIT for him to say a line. If you shoot him before he has delivered his awesome line he becomes invulnerable. I mean what the FUCK?!?! Who in their right mind will wait for the fucker to say anything?! He's the fucking hardest enemy in the game so of course you'll start to shoot the shit out of him at the first chance. This is definitely one of the most incredible bugs I've ever encountered. And I don't even know if it is an actual bug or did they just design it like this. Whatever the case that is fucking insane.

Okay so moving on to Far Cry 2. I wasn't planning on getting this game for a long time but I got a good deal on the Collector's edition so I had to buy it. Sadly the collector's edition isn't even very good. You get an artbook, t-shirt, map and a making of dvd. The artbook's kind of lame compared to the artbook from Fallout 3 which was awesome. Making of dvd is kind of boring because you just get to see some guys going to Africa to get reference material for the game. And a few trailers but that's about it. Also they somehow managed to write "enemies" as "ennemies" on one of the dvd menus. That's an accomplishment. I'm not really a big fan of these t-shirts either because the second I open the packing and wear the shirt it's not a collectible anymore. So I just have it lying around in a box like some other collectible game shirts. Yes I am a nerd..

I did like the atmosphere of the game. The graphics are good and gameplay is fine too. The guardposts which I've read a lot about in many reviews are really annoying. I can't figure what they were trying to prove by making the guards respawn ridiculously fast. So basically you just fight through them over and over again or at least take some hits while trying to avoid fighting. You are going to die a lot and you will become familiar with the loading screen. And the loading takes way too long. It's nice that world is open and you have to load it only once but apparently the console has to load the whole fucking thing again when you die. Not a very nice thing. Imagine if this would happen with GTA IV. Just fuck it.

I stopped playing this for a while but somehow it just crept in to my mind and I found myself playing it again. I guess that must mean something. The enemy AI is totally random and it's really impossible to try to take a tactical approach to fights. The enemy spots you at total random if you try to sneak up to them. Also the enemies are real fucking sharp shooters and you die a lot. That is until I turned the difficulty to the easiest possible and decided to play the game like Doom. So now it's way more enjoyable but obviously this isn't what the designers were trying to do. Anyways give the game a try if you see it at a bargain price..

PC versus Consoles Part 1

I switched my gaming platform from PC to game consoles a few years ago and I'm happy I did. I still do play some older games occasionally. But I just don't have the time or the money to constantly upgrade my machines so they can run the latest games smoothly. I also like to be able to play while I'm lying on my bed and relaxing. With PC you have to be hunched over right in front of the computer. Well all right I guess you can hook up your computer to a TV and get a wireless keyboard and mouse and somehow try to manage with that. But that's too much work.

Also installing games became such a chore to do. And it's not uncommon for something to go wrong and then you may or may not have to manually uninstall the parts already installed and then try again. It seems like a lot of trouble for trying to do something fun. Things were better when computers weren't very developed so most of the hardware were compatible and most games ran smoothly on any configuration unlike today. And installing was just copying the game from a floppy disk or just typing the start command and play the game from the floppy.

Installing (and the pricing and the game catalog obviously) is the reason why I haven't bought a PS3 yet, and I'm not likely to do so in the near future either. The mandatory installs are really the most fucking dumbest thing the winner of the last console generation could do. And still they did it. I guess it's because PS3 is a fucking blurayplayer-dishwasher-refrigerator-vacuumcleaner before it's a GAME CONSOLE. So good luck with that. And while on the subject, why the fuck did they drop the support of PS2 games? I have a ps2 game library of about 120 titles so no fucking way I'm going to have a PS2, Xbox 360 and a PS3 next to my TV.

And another thing that really fucked the game industry up is internet. No not the old piracy-blaa-blaa-blaa but because it enabled developers to publish unfinished products because "hey you can always update them later and maybe make them even work!". Sadly this seems to be a trend with modern consoles too. But in my books it's really unacceptable to publish half-finished products and maybe fix them later. I mean let's take Far Cry 2 for Xbox 360. The version on the DVD has some serious save game issues. So the saved games can become corrupt and you won't be able to continue. That's amazing. So now I can play the game fine because they published a patch that fixes the problem. But what the fuck am I supposed to do in 10 years when I wanna do a little bit of retro gaming and the current Xbox live system is dead and buried? So I just can't play the game then can I? What a piece of shit. Thanks Ubisoft. I'm pretty sure the name means you-be-soft in French. And boy are they soft...

Devil May Cry 4

I just finished playing through Devil May Cry 4. The game had been lying around for a couple of months and I finally had the time to play it. The game took about 10 hours to complete. It was an ok experience but nothing special.

One of the biggest complaints I have with this game is the fact that you have to play most of the levels twice. First you beat them with Nero and then you beat them with Dante in the reverse order. This is just boring because you've seen it all before and there's nothing new. It's just lazy level design or maybe the developer ran out of time. But anyways it's just not cool. It didn't bother me that much because I played the game through only once but imagine playing the game like 6 times with different difficulty settings and you would have seen everything 12 times! Luckily there's no way I'm gonna play this again in a few years.

The game and animation looks good except when your character is running on stairs. It doesn't look anything like climbing stairs. It's more like the guy's hovering above the stairs and running up and down a slope. Wasn't I supposed to notice that?! I mean come on! Also there are way too few different enemies. So the fighting becomes just a chore to do. You know how every one of the enemies act and what tactics you should use with them so there really isn't any challenge.

There are also these "special missions" peppered aroung the levels. At first I tried to finish them but they are just not fun. Every one of them has some strict time-limit and they are just stupid. Eventually I stopped even trying because they sucked. Also what's great about them is that if you died while on a "special mission" you died in the actual game too. So you had to go back to your previous checkpoint. What the fuck is with that? There were some other checkpoint issues with the game too. And some seriously annoying respawning enemies but enough about that.

The plot and the cut scenes are just ridiculous and the game knows it too. It's like nothing's even meant to be taken seriously. There are some cool maneuvers in the cut scenes but other than that they aren't very interesting. One thing that I did miss was Japanese audio track. I bet it would have been so much better than the English version. I just can't help but to wonder why in the fuck didn't they include the original audio.

This is just another basic ok game. Nothing special and really no reason to play again but I'd give it an 8 out of 10. Actually no... it's more like a 7.

Assassin's Creed

This is once again a game with huge potential that somehow manages to fuck it up. All the gameplay videos and trailers before the launch showed a sandbox game set in medieval middle-east. But what we really got was a monotonous and repetitive action game.

The whole DNA-memory shit basically ruins the whole medieval vibe. Why is it mandatory for the fucking numbers and other computer shit to be seen everywhere in the ancient world? It just ruins the immersion. I guess the game is trying to tell you that you are a guy who goes through his ancestors memories rather than that you are playing as the actual ancestor. But the point is I really don't give a fuck about this modern bartender who gets kidnapped and who walks slower than a turtle. I want to be the medieval assassin for fucks sake!!! How about renaming the game "Bartender's Problems" and I would have known to avoid it.

I have no complaints about the very streamlined and simplified jump and running system. It works for me and it's fun to just run around the rooftops without constantly falling down. Fight mechanics work quite well allthough it could have used some of variation. One major issue with this game is the story structure and how they use it to justify the development of the characters abilities. In the beginning he can us all of the abilities. Then he makes a mistake and is lowered in rank so he loses most of his abilities. And I can understand this with weapons for example. You can't use throwing knives or the hidden blade because they are taken away from you. But how the fuck can you make a soldier lose his ability to counter attack?!?! I mean really this is supposed to be the result of years of training and suddenly he just willingly doesn't want to counter attack untill his master gives permission for it. Are the cities filled with assassin spies who will report the big man if our character would counter attack someone? It's just fuckin insane!!!

This is a game that also brilliantly utilizes the environment twist. The end of the game is just killing dozens of enemies and there is nowhere to climb or hide. You just have to kill every one on the screen and then move a little bit further and do it again and again and again. Great way to really ruin the mood of the stealthy assassin you were supposed to be until this point. The boss fight is really stupid and not suitable for the game in any way.

I think the design went something like this. At first they had a great and innovative game concept and they managed to choose an awesome theme aswell. Then they started to hype the game. Reception was amazing obviously but then they realized there's no way they can finish the game in time. So they simplified the structure of the game and threw in a really fucking mess of an ending. And everybody's happy right? At least that's what metacritic says. The average score is 81. This game is barely worthy of 70 points let alone 100! It's nice to play the game through once but there's really no reason to every play it again. At first the game feels really good but soon it's limitations and repetitiveness kick in and you just have to force yourself to play if you actually want to finish it.

So the sequel is coming out this November. I really don't expect much from it because of the lesson learned with the first one. It's likely to be over-hyped and generally an ok game but I don't think it will blow my mind. Actually this is kind of a test for the series. The second one actually has to earn its place in my game collection because its older brother work it's way up there by cheating.

Call Of Juarez

I bought Call Of Juarez months ago and it has been just waiting to be played. So I had some spare time and thought I'd pop the game in. First of all the volume in the game is really low compared to any other game I've played on the Xbox 360. So at first I thought the dialogue was just some random mumbling that I wasn't really even supposed to hear. But yeah I was. Usually when I play a game the volume on my TV is at 10. For this game I had to put it up to 25. What the fuck is with that?

So at first you walk around at some forest and you do these tutorial parts. The second you get to a "gun tutorial" the game confuses me. You're at a farm and there are two buildings. A small house and a big decrepit building made of planks. You're supposed to find a box with a gun in it on the roof of the barn. Well guess which one is the barn? The fucking house of course!!!! I mean does Ubisoft have a different meaning for the word "barn" because I sure as fuck would have never called that shack a barn.

Then I advance to some town. I get a bunch of objectives that change just because I walk forward on a street and watch some short cutscenes. Is this really necessary? Don't give me objectives if I don't have to do them. They go something like this: "Find a gun", "Hooker has a gun, get to the hooker", "Can't get to hooker by using stairs, find another way", "Search the hooker's drawers for a gun". I mean just FUCK!!!

Another thing when I dropped a chair on some guy at the saloon the game gives me a message saying something like "You're not supposed to hurt innocents". Okay.. so this is the fucking wild west (you know the WILD is there for a reason) and I can't even choose who I punch or shoot. Not a very good start.

During the first hour of playing the game I get these idiotic time limits at least 6 times. DON'T PUT TIME LIMITS IN GAMES!!! They are not fun and they're not challenging. They are just fucking annoying. "You have 60 seconds to go through some hookers drawers to find a gun". I mean are you kidding me? How does this enhance the experience? The hooker comes in anyway the second you find the gun so what the fuck does it matter if i want to go through the drawers for 30 fucking minutes if I feel like it.

I also really expected the Reverend's voice to be much more ballsy. But I guess it will suffice. I also discussed the whip mechanics in an earlier post. But to sum up: it sucks. Then there are loading screens and auto-saving parts that constantly interrupt the flow of the game (if there is one).

So this really isn't a very good game. The things I described earlier aren't really major issues but when everything feels kind of half-assed and poorly executed the immersion falls apart. Once again a game with great potential but that just doesn't deliver any of it. Only reason I kept playing is the theme because the wild west is an interesting era but it's still not handled very well in video games. I'll keep my fingers crossed for future efforts though.