Call Of Duty 5

Both games have a short-ish but perfectly formed single-player campaign. The level of polish on these is absolutely superb – little things like the almost total absence of ‘clipping’ on the models is impressive. I found both enjoyable, though my criticism is that the game essentially is another “fire and dodge” shooter – the basic mechanic hasn’t really changed since Space Invaders thirty years ago. And there’s the merest skeleton of a story to pique the interest beyond that. I’m not sure how long I can simply keep playing this same game.

I think Call Of Duty, as a series, is totally average in every way. It does a bog-standard experience better than any game I can mention. And I think that is why it’s such a bestseller. It offers multiplayer for the ‘hardcore’, and a polished single-player campaign for the ‘casuals’. There’s nothing radical here, nor need there be. (I've written a longer piece on Call Of Duty 5 on my blog)

Speaking of distinctly average FPSs, I am trudging through Fear 2. Actually it’s a pretty shocking game in my opinion, and the story is absolutely woeful – incredibly confusing, impossible to follow, and deeply uninteresting. The draw in this game for me is the little horror-inspired moments – a flashback that flicks onto the screen, an apparition here and there, and lots of environmental effects that really work well. The game is really good at knocking you off balance, often physically – don’t play this if you get motion sickness. It is doing just enough to keep me playing, but never doing enough to really impress me.

On a totally different level in every way is Windosill, a flash game that to many would barely qualify as a game at all. There’s about 10 connected screens filled with weird and wonderful contraptions, shapes and creatures, and you interact with them with the mouse and watch them do beautiful little animations. Each screen is also a little puzzle, where you need to find a small wooden block so that you can proceed. If it sounds weird that’s because it is, but it’s one of the finest half-hours I have ever spent on a game.

The Sims 3

I think it’s a much more open-ended game than the previous versions. In the Sims 1 or 2 I felt rather trapped into sending my Sims off to develop a career, which then got boring, but there simply are more options now. You can busk, fish, cook or paint for a living. You can get a part-time job. You can become a partner in one of the local businesses. And if you choose to ignore work altogether there are still aims to fulfill, whether it’s running a well-tended garden with rare plants, or travelling about the town looking for bodies of water with rare fish to catch. The game still has its faults – it’s too safe, and it’s simply much harder to fail than to succeed, and your sims always default to conventional mode. But it’s still a unique experience – there is no other game that is like The Sims.

I’m still trying to play through Mass Effect, but it’s frustrating me more and more. Any section where you have to drive the BigTrak just drives me mad. I hate the save system. I find all the equipment tinkering fiddly and unsatisfying. You have to forgive the game continually for glitches. And the basic combat just ain’t that good. Even worse, I think I must have skipped the infamous sex scene for some reason - story of my life!

I think this is a game that everyone feels goodwill towards, simply because it looks so damned good and was really very ambitious. But it’s a game I’m endurng rather than outright enjoying. But I do think I’ll get to the point with Mass Effect where I’m so invested in the characters that I start really caring about what happens, and a game with that capacity is simply a step above most of the competition.

Windosill is my game of the week though.

Plans for the next week? I want to finish Valkyria Chronicles. I’m going to buy Zeno Clash when it’s cheap on Steam at the weekend. At some point I want to start going through the Final Fantasy games in order. And just a week to go until Tiger Woods 10 and the motion-plus here in the UK – I can’t wait.

http://www.dontshootfood.com

Newsflash: Newspaper and magazine editors are deeply cynical and manipulative professionals. They pore over subscription and sales figures. They quickly gain a simple checklist of things that sell in the media. And the biggest of these is flesh - a female in either a low-cut dress or a bikini. If the dress isn’t low-cut enough, they will photoshop it. Because it sells newspapers and magazines.

This single fact is the reason why Lara Croft is such a figurehead for videogaming. The media will publish pictures of her, even in-game, and give her games column inches. There’s even the vague idea that she is some sort of empowering female role-model - yeah right!

In Tomb Raider: Underworld you get a fully customisable Lara, ie you can decide whether she starts a level in shorts or pants. I chose shorts, just so you know where I’m coming from with all this. My daughter laughs at the way Lara wiggles her bottom, and my daughter knows nothing of what Ms Croft represents.

There’s the prevailing idea that Tomb Raider games are rather harmless mid-level entertainment - sub-Uncharted but good enough to while away a few hours on. There’s a vague story here but it’s papered on so thinly that you’ll have forgotten it by the time you’ve swung across your first chasm, or negotiated your first moss-covered climbing wall. Yes the mechanics work quite nicely, and there are nice set-pieces (a brilliant escape from a sinking ship) and a very cool bullet-time feature that kicks in allowing you to act split-second heroic at crucial moments. As usual the gunplay is awful, the puzzles get frustratingly oblique, and the whole thing is lifeless and linear.

What stays with me most is what you cannot do. You will get to a ledge that looks very scaleable and simply won’t be able to grab onto it, simply because the game doesn’t want you to. It wants you to scale the wall its way. It’s a crushing metaphor for everything that Lara Croft stands for - fall in line and follow the crowd, get behind the marketing machine and swallow these sub-par action games. And yes, I could easily grind away and finish this game in a few hours, and some of the set-pieces I will genuinely enjoy, but all it leaves me with is a frustration over how uninspiring it all is. It’s the gaming equivalent of cabbage.

NOTE: I picked the frontal shot of Lara above as I feel it shows her sultry side. Apologies to fans of her ass.

http://www.dontshootfood.com

Two media lies have been debunked to some extent in recent days. It appears that everything we read and heard in the gaming media was wrong in two key areas. One is PC gaming and the other is piracy.

For the last 6 months, the gaming media has been parroting the rumour that World Of Goo has been suffering at the hands of pirates. With no copy protection on their PC or Mac releases, 2D Boy were inferred to have suffered a sort of commercial suicide, with pirates once again blamed for the ills of the games industry and particularly the independent sector.

Now the truth comes out, and it appears the gaming media is ‘full of shit’. No big surprise there. But the truth reveals more than that.

First of all, copy protection appears to be worthless. As 2D Boy noted in their speech at GDC, no copy protection exists that hasn’t been cracked within a few days. It’s incredibly bad news for the copy protection industry, whose livelihood probably depends on the idea that their products are actually the only hope of keeping the PC market alive.

Bujt anyone who has struggled with the increasingly annoying copy protection on some games won’t be shedding a tear. Treating every gamer like a potential criminal is annoying, and apparently has achieved no real results anyway. As 2D Boy note, playing a cracked copy of a game is a better experience than coping with copy protection.

Which brings us to the second lie – the idea that PC gaming has been dying. Not so according to the latest survey which suggests that the PC outsold even the Wii as a gaming platform last year. Again, for the last 18 months the media has been saying the exact opposite.

The first thing to note is that this survey is from the PC Gaming Alliance, a group set up to promote PC gaming – let’s take their findings with a pinch of salt. But if they are even vaguely near the mark, the gaming world as we know it is rather a different landscape to what we were promised.

There are a number of reasons why the PC market is underplayed in the media. Firstly it is in competition with the big businesses promoting their consoles, who wine and dine journos and provide a steady stream of pro-console content for the media. The PC, meanwhile, is promoted by exactly nobody for the most part. PC games are often aimed at niches which the general games media struggles to cover efficiently. The media would prefer us to play a regular drip-feed of triple-A titles on consoles, so they can review them easily, not worry about technical specs and issues, or have to employ a ‘PC strategy’ or ‘MMO’ or ‘flight-sim’ specialist.

But hold on, if the PC market is relatively healthy, and games with no copy protection are facing no real disadvantages in the marketplace, how is piracy killing gaming? As we know piracy is most prevalent on PCs, certainly according to the media, and piracy rates of ‘90%’ are often estimated. Quite how they settle on the 90% figure is totally unclear, and since the media and the gaming industry has a vested interest in overestimating such a figure we can be justifyably suspicious.

The answer, it seems, is that piracy actually doesn’t matter all that much. People who pirate games wouldn’t necessarily buy them. It has existed throughout gaming history without ever dealing a fatal blow to the industry. Just as video recorders didn’t destroy the film industry, or tape recorders destroy the music industry.

Which platform has the biggest problem with piracy behind the PC? Why it’s only the biggest-selling handheld device in history, the DS. Perhaps DS gaming is dying because of the terrible threat from these pirates? The figures don’t seem to back that up either. And it certainly wouldn’t suit Nintendo to start peddling that theory would it? And thus you never hear about such a ‘problem’ in the media!

Of course piracy will continue to tick off the industry, who miss out on money that could be in their pockets. And rightly so. But using the issue to try and stamp out the incredibly diverse gaming platform that is the PC is unjustified and underhanded. People need to read between the lines of these media scare-stories.

http://www.dontshootfood.com

My pet hate in gaming (and particularly in JRPGs) is over-fussy, long-winded dialogue, and this game is great at simply setting up characters with a couple of lines of spoken text, and usually leaving it at that. I don’t want to hear everybody’s life story in a game like this, any more than I want to hear it in a movie or TV show. The shopkeepers here are basically shopkeepers, with the merest of tweaks just to keep it interesting - it’ll be a travelling salesman rather than a shopkeeper, or the shop is in a cave rather than a building. The game is very good at keeping the variety up without the game losing its focus.

And the game succeeds at doing the standard JRPG set up without too much fuss. Each area seems open-world but is artificially gated - your dad is ill in bed so you can’t venture too far, or something like that. Within these areas is a different aim, the equivalent of a different dungeon to explore in the world, and you tool up and then take it on. If you fail, a day passes and you try again. It works very well. The more you fail, the more chance of you levelling up in the meantime and getting better gear, so there’s no real pressure to succeed first time around. Very user-friendly and non-stressful, but addictive enough to keep you playing.

The presentation is really nice, with the option to spin around in full 3D - it gives the game an interesting visual style, because essentially it is still a top-down traditional JRPG. Praise to the production team on this, because they seem to have tweaked a classic game to give it a real boost for the DS, without killing what was essentially great about the original game itself. It feels modern, but it’s a vintage effort. It feels like we’re paying homage to games past, which gives me a fuzzy feeling in my hardened gamer’s heart.

I’m about 4 hours in, and things have really taken a turn for the worst. 10 years have just passed in my life and I feel slightly bewildered and disorientated, but I’m pretty determined to see things through, presumably to my death as an old adventurer, with all the rights wronged and justice served. It feels much more like a genuine life story than Fable II, which felt too contrived and obsessed with ‘emergent gameplay’ to be really genuine. This is just the story of a life lived in fairy tales, and I’m happy to accept the simplicity of it at face value.