Hey there everyone, and welcome to the fifth part of My End of 2017 Awards, the Game of the Year-styled awards ceremony that just keeps on giving, even when everyone else has had enough. Every year I pay tribute to what I've played by coming up with some novelty gongs as well as a definitive top ten at the end of it all. If you're new to My End of 2017 Awards, if you've missed any of the previous instalments, or if you're joining us from the future and want to navigate the ceremony out of sequence, you can find links to every single part thus far in the table below:
We're well past the midway point of the individual awards stage of this year's festivities, rounding the final corner before the homeward stretch. I have another seven gongs to bestow upon games that I've played in the past twelve months, acknowledging their best (or in some cases, their worst) aspects to celebrate my time with them. Let's begin today's presentations with:
Rucks' narration and Darren Korb's soundtrack make Bastion an aural masterpiece
From some of the industry’s worst voice acting yesterday, we now move on to some of the very best. Bastion reprises this year’s version of the same award it won on my first playthrough five years ago, acknowledging both its phenomenal soundtrack and its pioneering use of gameplay narration. Logan Cunningham gives an inspired performance as Rucks, his Western-style drawl serving as the perfect accompaniment to the player’s actions in any given moment. Darren Korb’s soundtrack couldn’t be a better fit either, combining acoustic and slide guitars with drum loops and other subtle electronic elements to create an astounding sense of place and bring post-Calamity Caelondia to life.
Quests in The Witcher are rarely straightforward or formulaic
I spent a lot of time absorbed in the world of The Witcher this year, starting my playthrough in the spring and finishing it up in September. A lot of that time was spent getting deeply into its quest system, trying to tie up every loose end and making sure I didn’t miss any of its wealth of content. In my time with the game I ended up performing an autopsy to identify a murderer, attending an elite social gathering to learn more about Vizima’s unstable political situation, and spent a night in a crypt to cure a cursed princess. Even the monster-slaying quests add an extra layer of depth by demanding that the player reads up on their mark to learn its weaknesses before beginning the hunt. In a gaming landscape so oversaturated with the “go to X, kill Y, bring back Z” mission structure, The Witcher’s varied quests stand out as being wholly unique experiences.
A word of advice to everyone - don't drive the President
Driver is, by and large, a pretty straightforward game. It doesn’t bog itself down with a mess of mechanics – you simply drive from point A to point B, navigating the surprisingly detailed 3D city environments and avoiding the local police department en route. However, there are some incredibly sharp difficulty spikes on this largely smooth ride that threatened to derail my enjoyment. Most notable are the game’s bookend missions – its opening tutorial which demands you perform a list of manoeuvres against the clock in a cramped car park environment, and the final ‘President’s Run’ mission that throws suicidal FBI cars at you from every angle as you navigate from one end of its map to the other in undrivable, icy conditions. The latter genuinely took me more time to beat than the rest of Driver put together, and was the closest I came to rage-quitting a game this year.
Dragon Quest III was the most fun I had with my phone this year
One of the most pleasant game-related surprises of 2016 was upgrading from my Windows phone to an Android one, and discovering the first six Dragon Quest games on the Google Play store. I promptly downloaded them all and have been slowly working my way through them, playing through the firsttwo games last year and moving on to the third instalment this autumn. Dragon Quest III is a notable progression from everything the first two games achieved, offering a longer adventure with deeper mechanics such as a true class system and a day/night cycle. It didn’t resonate with me as much as the first game (which was very much a ‘right place, right time’ deal), but there’s no doubt it’s the most polished game in the series thus far, and one of the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had on a cellphone.
Cuphead's incredible visuals need to be seen to be believed
Cuphead is a total technical marvel. Its Mega Man-esque boss rush structure and tight controls would be enough to make it a fantastic game, but what really sets it apart from other games like it is its incredible visual direction. Its imitation of 1930s Fleischer and Disney cartoons is striking because of how authentic it is – every frame of animation is beautifully hand-drawn, with a wealth of true-to-the-era post-processing effects that perfectly capture the feel of its inspiration. It’s one thing to see a screenshot, but it’s another thing altogether to witness it in motion, somehow simultaneously stuttering like a classic cartoon while running at a crisp, responsive sixty frames per second. Quite simply, there is nothing else on the market that looks like Cuphead.
This screenshot isn't from FFIV -Interlude-, but it might as well be
I debated long and hard over whether to include this within this year’s awards list. For those not in the know, Final Fantasy IV -Interlude- isn't so much a game as it is a two-hour vignette included as part of Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection on PSP, intended to bridge the gap between the original FFIV and its episodic sequel, The After Years. Using mechanics lifted directly from (and designed around) a thirty-hour JRPG, FFIV -Interlude-’s brevity and static level of challenge mean there’s absolutely no significant character development to speak of. The plot points it does seek to establish are ones that it doesn’t need to make, since the pre-existence of The After Years renders all of its revelations moot. If nothing else, I hope its inclusion on this list manages to steer other curious players away from this pointless connecting chapter in the FFIV saga. If you’re reading this, don’t play FFIV -Interlude-.
This is where you start. Where you go from here is up to you
In a year when Breath of the Wild came along and completely redefined the Legend of Zelda formula, I found myself going back to the game that started it all, and which no doubt served as a jumping off point for a lot of its latest successor’s design choices. The original Legend of Zelda is characterised by its extensive open overworld and lack of player guidance, something that makes it nigh impossible to play without a guide at hand, but which also serves as one of its biggest strengths. It’s a game that bestows a true sense of adventure upon the player by encouraging and rewarding exploration. Playing it again has got me very excited to check out Breath of the Wild when I get my mitts on a Switch in the new year.
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We're almost there folks. In the last five days, thirty-five awards have been given to forty-one games. Just seven of these individual awards remain, and I'll be presenting these to the final nine games that I beat this year tomorrow, including the best (and worst) licensed soundtrack, the protagonist who straight-up refuses to die, and one of the weirdest games I've ever played. Until then, thanks as always for reading. Take care, and I'll see you around.
Bon soir mes amis, and welcome to the fourth part of My End of 2017 Awards, my personal answer to the Game of the Year-oriented questions that Giant Bomb and other gaming communities find themselves asking at this time of year. If you're boarding this awards train halfway through the journey, or looking back from the lofty heights of 2018 and want to peruse any other part of this monstrous ceremony, then I'll be updating the table below with links to every section as it progresses:
Today brings seven more individual awards to the table, acknowledging the best and worst aspects of the games that I played this year and taking us beyond the halfway point of this whole endeavour. We're going to hit some real highs along the way, but we're beginning today's journey on a slight downer, with:
This screenshot does nothing to convey just how broken Enter the Dragonfly is
Enter the Dragonfly has so many issues that I don’t know where to begin listing them. There’s the shockingly bad frame rate, which chugs and sputters at almost every movement of the player or the camera. There’s the terrible clipping and collision detection which makes every single jump or enemy encounter fraught with uncertainty. There’s the audio glitch that makes distant enemies and collectibles sound deceptively close. There’s the fact that sometimes objects in the game, from gems to mission-critical enemies, can simply disappear or refuse to spawn, making full completion impossible without a hard reset. And there’s the complete dearth of levels and features that renders the experience repetitive and (mercifully) short. I pray I never have to experience a game as irredeemably broken as Enter the Dragonfly ever again.
The Plasma Whip is one of many new additions to Ratchet's arsenal in his third outing
The third instalment in the Ratchet & Clank series is subtitled ‘Up Your Arsenal’ in America, a moniker that’s undoubtedly earned given the variety of weird and wonderful weaponry on offer for players to experiment with. Alongside standard fare like the N60 Storm blaster and shotgun-like Shock Blaster, Ratchet can also wield weapons with more unique effects, like the mind-altering Infector that causes enemies to attack each other, or the Rift Inducer which generates miniature black holes that suck opponents into another dimension. While the story and mission structure of Ratchet & Clank 3 might be the weakest in the original PlayStation 2 trilogy, the sheer number of combat options ensure there’s rarely a dull moment on the battlefield.
Ratchet: Gladiator is more an arena combat game than it is a platformer
The Ratchet & Clank series has always been as much about exploration as it has about combat. Part of the thrill of playing one of these games is hopping from world to world, hunting for secrets and collectibles scattered across varied maps with multiple branching paths. Ratchet: Gladiator (subtitled ‘Deadlocked’ in the US) almost completely does away with this aspect of the series’ gameplay, forcing the player through a series of combat-focused challenges on barren maps clearly designed with multiplayer in mind. What content there is in Ratchet: Gladiator is fun and well constructed, but the lack of exploration and true platforming leaves it feeling repetitive and unfinished – more like half a game than a full one.
Beyond Good & Evil was way ahead of its time and still holds up great today
Beyond Good & Evil has been on my radar for a very long time. I originally acquired the PlayStation 2 version way back in 2010, after years of recommendations from like-minded gamers on sites like Giant Bomb. Last year I substituted that with the remastered Xbox LIVE Arcade version given away free as part of the Games with Gold initiative. And this year, I finally bit the bullet and played through this cult classic. Having played it for myself, it’s certainly a very unique experience, marrying a core action-adventure premise with an open overworld, light puzzle solving, and even a photography mechanic. I appreciated its story too, using its fantasy setting to dip into some heavy allegorical themes like oppression and conservation in a way that reminded me of the Oddworld franchise. Beyond Good & Evil is definitely deserving of its reputation, and I’m glad to have finally given it my time and attention after all these years.
Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy is one of the best remasters I've ever played
I’m a Crash Kid. I was born in 1990, and consequently, my formative gaming years were spent playing the first three Crash Bandicoot games on the original PlayStation. Therefore, as a part of its target audience, I feel qualified to say that N. Sane Trilogy is one of the best examples of a remaster done right that I’ve ever seen. It’s not just the incredible visuals that make it special, either – it’s the wealth of quality-of-life improvements that Vicarious Visions have brought to the table, like replacing the draconian save system in the first game, or retrofitting Warped’s time trial Relics into its older brothers. I spent two months across these three games, squeezing every drop of content from them and earning three Platinum Trophies in the process. If that’s not a strong enough endorsement from this Crash Kid, then I don’t know what is.
"No one would have believed that human affairs were being watched from the timeless whirls of space..."
I love The War of the Worlds. Ever since I read the book for the first time in 2010, I’ve been fascinated by how ahead of its time it was, and particularly by its juxtaposition of futuristic alien technology with its comparatively primitive setting of Victorian-era London. This is where Resistance: Fall of Man succeeds most in my view – it paints a stunning recreation of 1940s England, with its village greens and red-brick buildings, and offsets it against the angular, metallic architecture of the invading Chimeran forces. It’s the closest any visual medium has ever come to replicating the images that my mind’s eye conjures up when reading H. G. Wells’ sci-fi classic, and that was such a special feeling to me that I was able to overlook its shortcomings and see the whole story through.
I enjoyed playing through the Director's Cut version of the original Resident Evil on PS1 a lot more than I thought I would. Navigating the game’s mansion environment and avoiding its zombified inhabitants was a tense experience, with the rug constantly being pulled from underneath me as my expectations were subverted with every new enemy placement or discovered shortcut. What I will remember more than anything else, though, is the ‘so-bad-it’s-great’ voice acting that drives the plot forward. There’s a reason this game has spawned memes like “Jill Sandwich”, “Master of Unlocking”, and “I hope this is not Chris’ blood” - the overacted delivery really sells a low-budget B-movie feel. Whether that was the intention, I honestly can’t say. Oh, and if you want to know my favourite line, it’s gotta be Chris Redfield’s pained “No! Don’t go!!” from the intro cinematic.
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We're over halfway through now folks. Twenty-eight awards have been bestowed upon their respective games, meaning there's just fourteen more of these to go before the reveal of my top ten gaming experiences of 2017. I'll be back tomorrow with the penultimate septet of individual gongs, including the game with the best quest design, the game with the best art style, and the game with the most rage-inducing difficulty spike. Until then, thanks very much as always for reading. Take care, and I'll see you around.
G'day mates, and welcome to the third part of My End of 2017 Awards, my personal answer to the Game of the Year-oriented questions that Giant Bomb and other gaming communities find themselves asking at this time of year. If you're just joining us and missed the previous two parts of these awards, or you're joining this party after the fact and want to peruse any other part of this monstrous ceremony, then I'll be updating the table below with links to every section as it progresses:
Today we bring the individual awards portion of this little celebration towards its halfway point, with seven more accolades that recognise the specific merits of all the games I've played over the last twelve months. We'll kick things off with the appropriately named:
When a significant portion of a game’s marketing is centred on the phrase “rip and tear”, you’d be a fool to go into the experience expecting a minimal amount of bloodshed. 2016’s DOOM is one of the most hyper-violent games I’ve ever played, but that violence is a core part of what makes it so memorable and engaging. The stellar gunplay is supported by a fantastic ‘Glory Kill’ melee mechanic, maintaining the flow of the action while giving the player a front-row seat to some shockingly visceral context-sensitive fatalities. That applies to the player’s own deaths too, each one accompanied by the kinds of bloody dismemberment animations that I last remember witnessing in Dead Space. It’s so over-the-top and almost cartoonish in its execution that it’s impossible not to get caught up in it all. Rip and tear indeed.
I’m not sure what possessed me to spend a week of my summer playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD on my Xbox 360. Probably blind nostalgia. In a year when games like Yooka-Laylee and Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy got the whole “paying tribute to the games of yesteryear” thing so right, THPS HD stands as a shining example of how to get it totally wrong. The wonky physics model punishes any attempt to rely on muscle memory built up from its inspiration, resulting in frequent bails and making the whole thing feel uncomfortable to play. What should have been a fun time revisiting some classic THPS levels turned into an exercise in frustration and boredom. I’ll definitely be steering well clear of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5.
I used to own Chains of Olympus on PSP, but this year marked my first time playing it on a home console as part of the God of War: Origins Collection on PlayStation 3. For the most part its conversion to the big screen is a successful one, with the greater number of available inputs on the PS3 controller providing some much-needed control fidelity (roll being back where it belongs on the right stick was a Zeus-send). Its low-resolution textures still betray its origins as a portable game, but the core gameplay and the series’ trademark sense of scale ensure that it holds its own against its PS2 counterparts, undoubtedly making this the definitive version of Chains of Olympus.
Breath of Fire's ragtag band of heroes is even more ragtag than most
Looking back on Breath of Fire, there wasn’t really anything remarkable about it that made it stand out. The turn-based combat was enjoyable but pretty basic, the overworld was big but a pain to navigate due to the lack of a decent map, and the story was interesting but tough to follow due to the iffy translation. What I remember most was how varied the playable characters were, and how almost every single one was half-animal, ranging from dragons (Ryu) and birds (Nina) to wolves (Bo), snakes (Bleu) and moles (Mogu). This wasn’t purely aesthetic either, as each character had unique abilities that often played into traversing the overworld or solving dungeon puzzles. I’m hoping Breath of Fire II does something similar, as I plan to play through it in 2018.
One of the most incredible and baffling things about video games as a medium is how they can tap into physical manifestations of nostalgia as well as emotional ones. I picked the original Spyro the Dragon back up on a whim after watching one of my friends attempting to Let’s Play it on YouTube, and was surprised by how much of the experience came flooding back to me. And not just the mental side of things, like remembering where to find hidden collectibles, but the physical side as well – nailing the timing on difficult supercharge jumps in Tree Tops first time and flawlessly navigating the obstacles in Gnorc Cove being just two examples. I was able to blitz through the whole game in around five hours across just two sittings, a surefire sign that the game has stayed with me in more ways than one.
inFamous does a great job of putting you in the shoes of a superhero
2017 was a year in which I got around to playing quite a few recommendations from both friends and the wider gaming community. inFamous was one of the former, a game that my buddy Tom has been telling me to play more or less ever since I bought my PlayStation 3 back in 2013. It’s a really solid open-world action game that does a great job of making the player feel like a superhero thanks to the wide array of powers at protagonist Cole’s disposal. I also appreciated the morality system, which brought to mind the subversive superhero movie Hancock, although I did find it a little restrictive since it actively encourages you to go all-in on the good or bad end of the spectrum for the sake of maximising your potential for growth. It’s a game that hasn’t aged brilliantly visually, but I had a lot of fun playing it, and I look forward to checking out its more polished sequel in the near future.
It's not just Clementine's adventure - it's mine and Alice's too
I know what you're probably thinking - it's hardly Super Smash Bros. - but just hear me out. My girlfriend Alice doesn’t play video games, but she does like watching The Walking Dead on TV, so I suspected that she might be on board to check out Telltale’s critically acclaimed video game adaptation. Over the last year we’ve played through every single morsel of TWD content that Telltale have put out, starting with the original series and working our way through Season Two, the Michonne mini-series, and most recently A New Frontier. I’m on controller duty, but it’s Alice who calls the shots when it comes to dialogue choices. It’s been a fantastic way to share some quality time together, and we’re both stoked for the impending start of the fourth and final season, announced this year and scheduled for a mid-2018 release.
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We're halfway there guys. Twenty-one awards have been distributed, and twenty-one more remain. Join me again tomorrow when I'll be handing out seven more gongs to the games that made my 2017, including individual awards for the hottest mess I played this year, and the game I really should have played sooner. Until then, thanks very much to all of you for reading. Take care, and I'll see you around.
Welcome one and all to the second part of My End of 2017 Awards, my personal answer to the Game of the Year-oriented questions that Giant Bomb and other gaming communities find themselves asking at this time of year. If you missed the first part of these awards, or you're joining this party after the fact and want to peruse any other part of this monstrous ceremony, then I'll be updating the table below with links to every section as it progresses:
Yesterday we opened the festive gong-giving with the first seven individual awards, my all-encompassing take on the more specific categories employed by others which ensures that every game I played over the course of the year is given at least a little recognition. Today brings another seven of these mini-celebrations, including my first multi-game award honouring multiple games from the same franchise with a single accolade. Let's begin with...
Racing games have arguably gotten closer to true photo-realism this generation than any other genre, but one area in which they’re sorely lacking is believable damage modelling. High speed collisions in games like Forza and Gran Turismo often leave cars with little more than scratched paintwork and the occasional loose bumper, presumably due to stipulations in the many licences they have no negotiate to get real-world cars into their games. Burnout Paradise hasn’t been beaten since it set the gold standard for crumpled cars nearly a decade ago, and even now it remains oddly satisfying to watch its non-licensed vehicles reduce to useless chunks of twisted metal, wheels escaping from their arches in super-slow motion. These beautiful disasters make Paradise City one of the few places in video games where failure can feel almost as rewarding as success.
Taking down my first Thunderjaw was an experience I'll never forget
There were a lot of aspects of Horizon Zero Dawn that I could have honoured in these individual awards – its peerless visuals, its gripping story, and its original setting were all strong contenders. But ultimately, what has stuck with me more than anything else are the epic fights I had with the game’s larger robots. Playing on the hardest difficulty made every encounter incredibly intense, and forced me to use every tool and technique at my disposal to level the playing field. Developing strategies, crafting the relevant ammo types on the fly and putting my plans into action led to some of my personal gaming highlights of the entire year, and forged memories that will stay with me for many years to come.
The Master Chief Collection is the definitive way to play the first two Halo games in 2017
One of my mainstay comedic categories makes its triumphant return for 2017. I played two Halo games this year – specifically the Anniversary releases of Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 included within the Master Chief Collection on Xbox One. The former was a quick solo “refresher” playthrough to accommodate a co-op playthrough of the latter with my buddy Duncan, and I enjoyed my time with both games. I particularly appreciated the improvements that the Master Chief Collection brings, such as a flawlessly crisp sixty frames-per-second and seamless switching between Anniversary and Classic graphics modes, all of which add up to make these the definitive versions of some of the most important and beloved games in console FPS history.
Ground Zeroes is even more impressive on PS4 than it was on PS3
This is the second time that Ground Zeroes has earned this specific award, mainly because I’m not sure how else to acknowledge it. This year marked my first time playing the current-generation version of the game, opting for the PlayStation 4 version after two playthroughs on PlayStation 3 in 2014 and 2015. The benefits of the PS4 release were immediately apparent, with a much smoother frame rate and better lighting effects unsurprisingly making it the superior version. Ground Zeroes remains a very impressive vertical slice of the gameplay that would eventually follow in The Phantom Pain, and playing this version has confirmed that if I ever do revisit MGSV in full, I’ll definitely be doing so on PS4.
Yes, that's a Gruntilda reference in a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie
I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that knows it’s a game quite as much as Yooka-Laylee does. It’s certainly not the first game to break the fourth wall, but I can’t think of another that has done it as consistently or as successfully as this spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie from Playtonic. Every corner of every world is dripping with self-referential humour on subjects ranging from collectibles to boss battles, and the sardonic tone of it all echoes that of Banjo’s most recent outing on Xbox 360, Nuts & Bolts. My personal favourite example is Rextro, the low-poly holographic dinosaur that guards the arcade machines in each world and has such a low built-in memory that he can’t even remember Yooka’s name half the time. Yooka-Laylee knows it’s a throwback 3D platformer, and it revels in and celebrates that fact at every opportunity.
Usually an award like this would go to a game that I’d beaten in entirety in a single sitting, something that I achieved a couple of times this year with games like Oxenfree and Super Mario Bros. Spyro 2, however, holds the honour of being the game I spent the least amount of time with in 2017, clocking in at a little less than half an hour. The reason for this? While illustrating the franchise to my girlfriend Alice, I noticed that my most recent playthrough of Spyro 2 had stalled at 91%. So I got comfortable, played through the two remaining worlds in Winter Tundra, took down Ripto, and made my way to Dragon Shores to reach the full 100%. It was an enjoyable half-hour, and a pleasant reminder of just how great the first three Spyro games are.
Pokémon Sun feels like it was compromised to meet a deadline
I enjoyed Pokémon Sun for what it was. I loved the visual style of the Alola region and a lot of the new Pokémon designs, and I appreciated the changes it made in an attempt to breathe new life into the series, like replacing Gym Challenges with the more varied Island Trials. It’s a real shame that so many of those changes, including the Pokémon Snap-esque Poké Finder, the disappointing roster of available Pokémon in the Alola Pokédex, and all the stuff surrounding the sixth-gen legendary Pokémon Zygarde, ended up feeling half-baked - an unfortunate effect of what I suspect was a rush to get the seventh generation of Pokémon games out of development and into stores in time to mark the series’ twentieth anniversary. As I said, it’s enjoyable for what it is, but it’s very difficult to look past that ever-present feeling that there should have been a lot more to this package.
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That puts us at one third of the way through these awards, with fourteen distributed and a whopping twenty-eight still to go. I'll be back tomorrow with more celebrations of individuality, including gongs for the games that spilled more virtual blood and made me feel more like a superhero than any other this year. Until then, thanks very much for reading folks. Take care, and I'll see you around.
Merry Christmas folks, and welcome to the inaugural chapter of My End of 2017 Awards. As in previous years, I present these multi-part awards celebrating the games that I've played over the course of the previous twelve months, working towards one of those Top Ten Games of the Year lists that seem to be all the rage around these parts this time of year.
As always, I'll begin with a series of individual awards, named after some of my favourite songs, that celebrate the best (and worst) aspects of every single game I've finished in the last twelve months. Due to some games belonging to the same franchise or collection, and in the interest of making things slightly briefer, I've opted to group some of the more similar titles together for these individual awards. Even so, I'll be dishing out a whopping forty-two of them, at a rate of seven per day over the next six days. Once every last game I've played this year has been honoured, I'll be bringing My End of 2017 Awards to a triumphant close by revealing my personal top ten games of the year on New Year's Eve.
If you're joining the party late, here's a helpful table of contents that I'll populate with hyperlinks as the week's festivities progress:
There's a lot of stuff to pick up in this galaxy far, far away
My 2017 began the same way 2016 ended – in a charming plastic rendition of a galaxy far far away. I may have seen the credits roll on LEGO Star Wars: TCS last year, but I felt compelled to keep playing it through January in pursuit of 100% completion and a full 1000 Gamerscore from its Achievements. Retreading familiar ground with different characters to find hidden secrets was made incredibly rewarding thanks to the percentage marker that gradually ticked up every time I returned to the cantina hub. If anything, the game probably boasts a few too many collectibles – I definitely could have done without the blue minikit canister hunting – but the steady stream of rewards kept me hooked right through to that hallowed S-rank.
Oxenfree evolves the dialogue tree formula in a way I hope we see again
While I loved Oxenfree’s world, story and art style, the most memorable thing about it for me was the way it handled dialogue between its characters. Its central cast are all performed believably by their respective voice actors, transforming from teen drama archetypes to surprisingly complex individuals over the course of its chilling narrative. Where Oxenfree really subverted my expectations was how it broke genre conventions and made the timing of my dialogue choices just as important as their content, giving me the option to interrupt other characters mid-stream if I wanted to. It’s a design choice that made the game’s core mechanic feel much more dynamic, and one I hope other dialogue-heavy adventure games will adopt going forward.
Replaying Crystal Dynamics’ 2013 reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise this year, one of the most memorable aspects of my playthrough was its incredible use of high-action set pieces throughout. The game is absolutely packed with adrenaline-pumping sequences – the tense cavern exploration of its opening minutes; the exhilarating downhill river slide sequence; escaping an ancient monastery as a sandstorm tears it to pieces around you; navigating a burning building while explosions rip through the walls; fleeing from the sinking wreck of the ship you arrived on. These are just a handful of Tomb Raider’s best moments, made all the more impressive by the level of agency the player has during them. Uncharted may have pioneered these kinds of gameplay sequences, but TR2013 is the finest example of them I’ve yet seen.
Borderlands' online co-op brought me close to a far-away friend this year
While I’m predominantly a single-player kind of gamer, the last few years have seen me gravitating towards sharing video game experiences with those close to me. One example of this has been my co-operative playthroughs of several first-person shooters with my buddy Duncan. Initially a means of socialising over great distances while we lived in separate countries, the tradition was upheld when he moved closer to home. In February of this year we completed a lengthy playthrough of the original Borderlands, taking my Siren and his Hunter through the wastes of Pandora in pursuit of ever-bigger and ever-better guns. It was a really fun co-op experience, and I hope we can continue with Borderlands 2 some time in 2018.
Rise of the Tomb Raider's challenge tombs are a massive step up
One of my main criticisms of the Tomb Raider reboot was its disappointing challenge tombs, which were both few in number and rather simple to solve. Rise of the Tomb Raider does a fantastic job of addressing this, offering up a lot more opportunities to go spelunking for spoils over the course of Lara’s latest adventure. Not only are there more of these optional tombs, but they’re also larger in scope and much more challenging (and rewarding) to solve, often featuring multiple micro-puzzles that contribute towards solving a much larger puzzle. Some of them even have their own unique histories, explained through diary logs written by the architects and slaves who built them. All of these things contribute to elevating Rise’s challenge tombs above anything in TR2013.
Grandia's characters develop both mechanically and emotionally
I spent two months playing through Grandia at the start of 2017, and in that time I witnessed what should have been a run-of-the-mill Japanese RPG transform into something rather special. Part of that is down to its battle mechanics – in Grandia, weapon and skill proficiencies have their own experience gauges which level up with repeated use, encouraging the player to use a variety of different attacks and magic to ensure all their characters level up evenly. But it’s not just the mechanics of character development that made Grandia so memorable. It’s their narrative development too – protagonist Justin’s evolution from obnoxious urchin to bona fide hero and the interplay between (and revelations around) sisters Feena and Leen being my personal highlights.
A good platformer is invariably only as strong as its characters. It’s why historically, console mascots have tended to be platforming protagonists – Mario, Sonic, Crash, Spyro, and of course, Banjo and Kazooie. Replaying their original Nintendo 64 outing, this time as part of the Rare Replay collection on Xbox One, reminded me that the game’s charm extends way beyond the eponymous bear and bird. From Bottles the mole and Mumbo Jumbo to Gruntilda and Klungo, every level is jam-packed with memorable faces, almost always sporting a trademark pair of googly eyes. Hopefully next year I’ll get around to sampling Banjo-Tooie and meeting even more awesome characters.
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Seven awards down, thirty-five to go. Join me again tomorrow when I'll be handing out another septet of accolades to the games that made my year. Thanks very much for reading folks. Enjoy what remains of your Christmas Day, take care, and I'll see you around.
Hey there folks and welcome to another instalment of An Hour With..., my blog feature wherein I choose a random game from my enormous backlog and spend sixty minutes with it to determine whether I should PLAY it to completion, or PASS on the experience. The overarching aim of this feature is to help me whittle down my immense Pile of Shame by giving me some formative time with each title rather than simply casting games aside at random. If you're a newcomer to the series then you can get a flavour for what I'm trying to achieve my reading this introduction to the concept, or you can peruse the list of previous entries by means of the table below:
Today's game chosen at random by the Backloggery's awesome Fortune Cookie feature is the Xbox 360 version of a surreal survival horror title that's attained something of a cult status here on Giant Bomb. What is it, and how will it fare through its opening hour? Read on to find out more...
The Game
Deadly Premonition is a third-person open-world survival horror game written and directed by Hidetaka 'SWERY' Suehiro and developed by Access Games. Receiving a staggered international release over the course of 2010, the game was published by Marvelous Entertainment in Japan (where it's known as 'Red Seeds Profile'), Ignition Entertainment in the US, and Rising Star Games in Europe. As FBI Special Agent Francis 'York' Morgan, the player is tasked with investigating a mysterious and grisly murder in the quiet American town of Greenvale. Deadly Premonition has gone down in history as one of the most critically polarising video games of all time, with ratings ranging from an irredeemable 2.0/10 from IGN, right through to a "perfect" 10/10 from Jim Sterling at Destructoid. Nonetheless, it has become something of a cult classic in the years since its release, not unlike one of its main inspirations, the drama series Twin Peaks. Perhaps most pertinently, the game was famously featured as the subject of dual 'Endurance Run' let's plays right here on Giant Bomb in the spring of 2010. A special 'Director's Cut' edition was released for the PlayStation 3 and PC in 2013.
The History
It probably won't surprise anybody reading this to learn that I bought this game purely because of the aforementioned Endurance Runs. What may come as a surprise, though, is that I'm yet to watch any of either playthrough. See, I bought the game with the intention of playing through it for myself first to gain my own uninfluenced opinions about the game, and then watching both sets of videos afterwards. I believe I picked up my copy of the game in early 2011, a few months after the original UK release in October 2010. Since then I've been meaning to get around to it, but its divisive reception has usually worked against it - after all, why would I spend time playing through something that could be terrible when I have so many critically acclaimed games in my backlog that I should probably get around to first? Thus the game has sat unplayed on my shelf for over six years, waiting for the day when I would finally pop it into my 360. Thanks to this blog feature, that day is finally upon us.
The Hour
Here's where the blog really gets going, with a blow-by-blow account of the sixty minutes I spend with the game in question. I'll be peppering in various thoughts and opinions alongside descriptions of my in-game actions, to give you a full and balanced account of my time with the title. Although I'm sure anyone reading this is probably already familiar with the story beats of Deadly Premonition, having either played it themselves or watched one (or possibly both) of the Endurance Runs here on Giant Bomb, I'll still pop my usual spoiler warning here and make you aware that there are likely to be some light early-game spoilers over the next few paragraphs. With that laid down, let's fire up the ol' 360 and see what this game has to offer...
Fifteen Minutes In...
Even before I'm given the option to start a New Game, Deadly Premonition throws me straight into the action by way of an introductory cutscene. Literally the first thing I notice about the game is the graphics, and I'm not saying that in a good way. The opening shots take place in woodland, and the textures and geometry are extremely primitive and low-resolution, betraying Deadly Premonition's origins as a title being developed for the PlayStation 2. Usually I can look past a game's visual shortcomings very easily, but when they're this in-your-face, it's hard not to be put off by it. It's not helped by the voice work either, which despite being minimal at this stage, still manages to come off as poorly acted.
Looking past the aesthetic issues, though, there's some genuine intrigue going on here. A young woman has been murdered and strung up on a tree, where her body is discovered by two young twin boys and their grandfather. After a slightly uncomfortable montage involving a lot of sweeping camera movements and some out-of-place music, we're treated to several snippets of the townsfolk presumably mourning her death. Against all odds, it has what I presume is the desired effect - it gets me curious as to what has happened to this woman, who her upset acquaintances are, and how it all ties together. By the time I reach the main menu and start a New Game, I'm already slightly invested in Deadly Premonition's weird brand of storytelling.
The opening cutscenes of the game proper don't exactly do much to shed any light on what's going on. I'm put in control of a suited man in a red room surrounded by trees and carpeted with fallen leaves. The twin boys are here too, but now they've got wings for some reason? Before I can make sense of any of this, the clock chimes and I'm cast out of this scene and into another. Our smartly dressed protagonist is introduced as FBI Special Agent Francis 'York' Morgan, and it seems he's been sent out to investigate the murder of the young woman seen in the game's introduction. This five-minute cutscene prompts so many questions that I'm struggling to remember them all at this point. Why does York think it's acceptable to light a cigarette, talk on a mobile phone and use a laptop while driving? Who is this 'Zach' he's talking to? Why does that squirrel make a monkey noise? Why does York just shrug off the fact he's totalled his car and light a fresh cigarette as it starts to burn? This game's complete lack of self-awareness is totally stupid, and yet oddly captivating.
Thirty Minutes In...
I now assume full control of York in order to navigate him away from his wrecked car and into town. It doesn't take long for me to realise that Deadly Premonition doesn't conform to modern third-person shooting controls. York controls like a tank, with forward and backward movement and turning all on the left analog stick. The right trigger readies his weapon and the A button fires or swings. It's not a completely alien control scheme - Resident Evil 4 got a lot of mileage out of a very similar layout - but I feel like it is going to take some getting used to after years of using the right stick to aim and the right trigger to fire. Hopefully the game's combat will be reasonably forgiving while I adjust.
This first playable section of the game is incredibly linear and essentially boils down to guiding York down a set path intermittently punctuated with short story events and a couple of simple puzzles. These puzzles don't get much more complicated than attaching fuse boxes to generators and using them to power on electric gates to access the next area. It's a gentle introduction to exploration, and also combat, with a few isolated encounters with handfuls of zombie-like enemies. There's a lock-on feature mapped to the left trigger, which mitigates some of the awkward aiming sensitivity and lets me draw a bead on enemies instantly before fine-tuning my aim for a headshot. The enemies can teleport short distances and have an unsettling backwards limbo-shuffle animation which makes combat a bit more interesting, since their head isn't always in the place you might expect.
As I gradually press on through this opening section of the game, I can't shake the sense of complete bafflement that has been overwhelming me more or less since I booted it up. I'm perplexed by the inclusion of breakable melee weapons - why would I want to use any of them when my default weapon is a pistol with unlimited ammo? What is the significance of the medals scattered around the environment, why do I earn some money every time I pick one up, and what is this money even for? Less baffling and more outright frustrating is the game's Pause menu, which I have to keep accessing to see a map of the area I'm exploring. Because there are 3D models within the menu, it takes two or three seconds for it to load every time I press the Start button. That may not sound like a lot, but given how regularly I'm referencing the map to make sure I don't miss any explorable areas, the cumulative amount of wasted time waiting for the menu to load in starts to get pretty egregious.
Forty-Five Minutes In...
After about twenty minutes of gradual progress, I hit my first wall in the form of an un-telegraphed and unforgiving quick-time event. Just as I reach the end of this linear area, the red-coated figure that caused York's car accident appears once again and swings an axe in his direction. I have next to no time to react, and before I know what's happening, it's Game Over. I'm reset back to the last checkpoint, a little unfairly I feel, and I need to work my way back through the enemies I've just taken out all over again.
Replaying even this short five-minute segment is enough to further compound some of the issues I've been having up to this point. Utmost of those issues is the frustrating lack of a mini-map on the screen, forcing me to sit through the painfully slow Pause menu any time I want to check the area map. And that happens more than you might think, since the player's sense of direction is disoriented every time the game breaks for a cutscene or other interruption. This, coupled with the mounting confusion around all the game's mechanics (What is 'Profiling'? Why am I earning money for shooting these backwards zombies? WHAT IS GOING ON?!), serves to make the experience of playing Deadly Premonition not particularly fun.
I manage to get past the quick-time event the second time around, forcing the red-coated attacker to flee and leaving the path out of this tutorial-style area open. I head through the door in front of me, hoping that something, anything might happen to redeem this game and start to reveal to me why it's become a cult classic.
One Hour In...
And do you know what? The last fifteen minutes of my hour with Deadly Premonition do a pretty good job of turning me round. As soon as I regain control of York heading down the road into Greenvale (complete with what may be the best running animation I've seen in a long time), my prayers are answered with the addition of a mini-map in the bottom-left corner of the game's HUD. It's joined by an in-game clock, which tells me that there's probably going to be at least a bit of RPG-style time-management in this open-world game. Less clear is the 'limit' under the mini-map - perhaps this signifies there will be specific time windows to get things done in? Part of me feels I should read the manual to try and find out some of this stuff, but another part of me feels like Deadly Premonition's unique brand of crazy isn't going to be explained away in a twelve-page colour booklet.
Speaking of crazy, the main plot thread chooses this moment to rear its head once again. York meets Sheriff George Woodman and his Deputy Emily Wyatt on the bridge just outside town, and a little bit of exposition takes place establishing the status quo of Greenvale and just how unwelcome York's presence is. The whole scene, much like every other scene before it, is a captivating watch. There's next to no acknowledgement of what York has just been through, and nobody seems to mind that York stops every few seconds to have a chat with his imaginary friend - not even when he's commenting on how surprisingly attractive Emily is, right in front of her. My guess is that I'm supposed to take York's conversations with Zach as equivalent to asides in a play, where characters can step out of the on-stage action to relay information to the audience. That's what I'm going with anyway, since no other character in the game has acknowledged the York/Zach dichotomy up to this point.
York gets put up in the town hotel and the prologue sequence officially ends with a 'Mission Clear' statement appearing on screen. I don't appear to have been graded on my performance, but I have been paid a decent salary and a bonus for the medals I picked up and the enemies I put down. I'm assuming I'll get to spend all this money at some point, but as with a lot of other things in the game, nothing is especially clear right now. Beyond this there isn't really that much to relay from the last five minutes of my experience - York returns to the red forest room from the start of the game, where he meets another mysterious young boy who teaches him the basics of what I assume are Deadly Premonition's stealth mechanics (you hold your breath and move slowly past enemies, since they can't see you if you're not breathing apparently). When York wakes up in his hotel bed I have just enough time to save my game before my hour is up. Now that... was something else.
The Verdict
I don't think I've yo-yo'd back and forth on a game in An Hour With... as much as I have on Deadly Premonition. On the one hand, there's a lot about it that's undeniably bad. The visuals are sub-par in every possible aspect. The voice acting isn't great. The music is sparse and often seems wildly incongruous with what's actually unfolding on the screen. The controls are archaic and imprecise. Every design choice seems questionable - for example, why include melee weapons when your standard firearm has infinite ammo? Even the menu is a chore to navigate. There's a surreal air about everything that's happened in the last sixty minutes, with strange things occurring in-game that I feel the characters should be calling out, but they aren't. It's a weird-ass game.
And yet, for all these obvious flaws, there's enough interesting stuff going on underneath all that weirdness to make me genuinely curious about where the game goes from here. I still haven't experienced any of the open world of Greenvale. I've barely scratched the surface when it comes to interacting with its characters, all of whom up to this point have been weirdly charming in their own unique ways. I want to see where this murder mystery story ends up going. That's why, right now, I'm going to give Deadly Premonition a provisional PLAY verdict. I'm going to revisit my thoughts after another couple of hours of playtime, once the game has truly got going. If I care enough about the gameplay side of it at that point, then I'll keep playing. Likewise, if I'm not enjoying playing it, I'll step away and consume the rest of the story through either or both of the Endurance Runs on the site. Either way, this is one crazy video game, and I want to see how it unfolds.
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Here ends another edition of An Hour With..., one that may well be my favourite instalment thus far. As always, thanks very much for taking the time to read through this blog. I'll be back in the near future with what promises to be a very special edition of An Hour With..., with a slightly different focus from what I've been doing up to this point. Until next time, take care folks, and I'll see you around.
"What's this? Two think-piece blogs in less than a week? Does this mean danielkempster is finally getting back to regular blog writing?", I hear you cry. I wish I could dub this some kind of triumphant return to the blogosphere, with updates hitting at regular intervals from now on, but that isn't the case. Truth is, the stars have just aligned over these past few days - I've been playing games that I want to say things about, and having some time off work means I've had enough time to get those things down for a change.
Edinburgh's a very pretty city
On Thursday, I travelled from Hertfordshire, near London (where I live) to Edinburgh in Scotland (where I don't live) to witness my girlfriend Alice's graduation after earning her degree in Graphic Design back in May. It was a bit of a trek, consisting of just over six hours of sitting on trains, but it presented the perfect opportunity to try and topple another short game off my Pile of Shame in my quest to beat fifty games before the end of the year. The game I chose to tackle was the original Super Mario Bros. for the NES, or more specifically the Virtual Console release downloaded to my trusty 3DS. Over the course of that six-hour train journey, I made my way from the familiar layout of World 1-1 to the final challenge at Bowser's Castle in World 8-4, leaping across gaps and jumping on countless Goombas, Koopas and Lakitus along the way. When I dropped the bridge under Bowser and rescued Princess Toadstool, I felt a real sense of accomplishment, but I also felt guilty about taking any kind of pride in my victory.
The reason for this? I beat the game using save-states.
For the uninitiated, save-states are a common feature of emulation software like the 3DS's Virtual Console. There, they're dubbed 'Restore Points', and they function as a kind of instant save-point. With the press of a button or tap of a touch screen, the emulator takes a 'snapshot' of the current in-game action, which the player can choose to load and resume from at any point. Their impact on playing older games is profound because of the opportunities they present. Save-states can be used to dip in and out of a game much more easily than might otherwise be possible. This is especially true in the case of the 3DS Virtual Console, where the games in question aren't designed for short bursts of on-the-go play. If you're halfway through a dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and your battery light starts to flash red, you can simply create a Restore Point and power down the handheld, safe in the knowledge that your progress will be preserved once you're recharged and ready to go again.
But there's another, less legitimate side to using save-states - because of their 'save-anywhere' nature, they can be used to avoid unfavourable outcomes and manipulate progress in some fascinating ways. Creating a save-state immediately before a particularly difficult boss or other kind of challenge can mitigate some of the backtracking or reloading that you'd otherwise have to go through. Going one step further and creating another save-state halfway through that boss or challenge on a particularly good run creates an on-the-fly mid-battle checkpoint for you to pick up from if things turn sour. This practice is known colloquially as 'save-scumming' and it seems to be frowned upon by a lot of the gaming community. Even developers recognise the potential problems it can cause, with Nintendo disabling the Restore Point feature for all the Virtual Console releases of the first- and second-generation Pokémon games, lest players use it to duplicate powerful Pokémon alongside the integrated compatibility with Pokémon Bank.
Every time I hit one of these screens, I would 'save the game'
In my aforementioned Super Mario Bros. case, I used the Virtual Console's Restore Point feature to create a self-imposed 'save point' at the start of every new level on my journey through the Mushroom Kingdom. Every time I beat a level and was greeted with that familiar black start screen, I would hit the Create Restore Point button on the touch screen. Every time I ran out of lives, I would press the Load Restore Point button, instantly putting me back at the start of the last level I'd reached with one or more lives in hand. In this fashion I was able to make slow, steady progress through the whole game, never repeating a level that I'd previously beaten, and ultimately saving the princess at the end of the journey.
As a player of video games in the modern age, where so many titles are vying for my time and attention, I consider the save-state an important tool for someone like me who wants to see as much content as possible. I don't feel like I haven't beaten Super Mario Bros. - the nature of when and where I used the Restore Point means that over the course of that train journey on Thursday, I played through every single one of its thirty-two levels, from beginning to end, in entirety. This shows that I have the necessary skills (if only in instalments) to beat the game. And if I have the requisite skills to tackle all the obstacles it can throw at me, then why not make use of this tool to facilitate my time with the game in a way that spares me from frustration, repetition and failure?
But like I said earlier, because I was using the 3DS's Restore Point feature, I wouldn't allow myself to be proud of my achievement. Even though I'm able to recognise that I successfully achieved what the game expected of me, I can't escape the fact that I didn't do it in the way that was originally intended. I couldn't sit down in front of an NES with an original Super Mario Bros. cartridge and beat the game in the same way as I did on that train journey. Nor can I get away from the fact that there are thousands of players who could beat the game in that way, who can and indeed do every day, from enthusiasts and hobbyists like myself right through to speed runners. There's no denying that their achievements trump mine. But does that mean I'm not entitled to be proud of my own achievements, in their own right, and under their own specific circumstances?
Is this somehow more legitimate than using save-states?
I think some of the stigma attached to save-states comes from the fact that they're not a developer-endorsed tool. Incidentally, Super Mario Bros. serves as a perfect example for this, because it does contain a developer-endorsed comparison to save-states in the form of its warp pipes. Hidden at the end of secret paths in select levels, it's possible to skip large chunks of the game by 'warping' through the plumbing system of the Mushroom Kingdom to reach spots several levels (or even Worlds) ahead. Now, if I'd managed to beat Super Mario Bros. finding and using the warp pipes, but without using save-states, I feel like the legitimacy of my achievement would be much less open to questioning. Even though I would have skipped over vast chunks of content that I actually played through on my save-scumming run, using the warp pipes somehow seems less like cheating, purely because they were put in there by the developers. I can understand how you'd reach that conclusion, but that's some backwards-ass logic if you think about it for long enough.
Will you live with your actions? Or will you jump back in and try to change things?
Elsewhere on the spectrum, you have games that seem to actively endorse save-scumming through their own built-in design. Games like L.A. Noire or Telltale's The Walking Dead spring to mind - games with a strong narrative focus, that place emphasis on the decisions you make as a player and seek to reward the player with unique consequences depending on those decisions. The fact these games allow you to replay individual missions or chapters to try and take the story in another direction, so you can find out what might have been, seems to go completely against their overall design philosophy. Games that offer Achievements and Trophies for exploring different paths are also guilty of this - Fallout 3's karma-based Achievements spring to mind as an example. You could argue that these encourage multiple playthroughs, but as I said before, the reality is we're all living in a world where games are just one of many things demanding our time and attention. If there's a quicker option, a lot of players are going to take it. If developers are happy for players to rewrite their own stories in games with so much emphasis placed on their narratives, then why are we attaching so much stigma to something as comparatively minor as when and where you choose to save your progress?
I think that ultimately, save-states and save-scumming are as 'legitimate' as you, the player, want them to be within your own experience. Personally, I'm fine with how I used the Restore Point to make my way through Super Mario Bros.. It probably won't be the last time I use save-states to help me tackle a game in this way, and I wouldn't hold it against another player who used it for the same reasons. In fact, I don't think I'd hold use of save-states or save-scumming against any player who was using them to get the experience that they wanted out of any given game, providing it didn't have any negative impacts on others who might be sharing the experience. After all, this medium is supposed to be about having fun. I had fun with Super Mario Bros.. If you're having fun using save-states too, then more power to you.
This girl is crazy awesome, and I couldn't be more proud of her
Now, If you'll permit me to get soppy and personal for a moment, I'd like to close this blog by congratulating my girlfriend Alice on her BA (Hons) in Graphic Design. A degree isn't something that you can save-scum your way towards - you have to put in a lot of time, effort and energy. I was there for a big portion of her course, I stayed up through the late nights and I saw the stresses of deadline days first-hand, so I know how hard she worked to get those grades and earn her qualification - there's no denying the legitimacy of her achievement. Well done Alice, I'm so proud of you.
As always, a huge thank you to everyone for taking the time to read this blog. I suspect it'll be a little while before my next update, but I have plenty I intend to get through before the end of the year. Having finished Skyward Sword earlier today, I'm now able to get back to my An Hour With... blog series, starting with a sixty-minute look at a Giant Bomb fan favourite and continuing with some very special instalments beyond that. I'm also really looking forward to tackling the issue of Game of the Year next month, especially given how many games I'll have to talk about. Until next time, take care, and I'll see you around.
I'm playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword at the moment. It's a game that I've been meaning to get around to for quite some time. Initially I couldn't play it because I bought the game long before buying a console to play it on (yep, I may well have been the only person in existence not to own a Nintendo Wii in the winter of 2011). When I finally picked up a second-hand Wii a couple of years later, I started the game but found myself losing interest through its lengthy and patronising tutorial sequence. I made a second false start last year, making it just past the first dungeon before getting distracted by other things and not coming back. All year I've been promising my buddy Matt (who is a hugeZelda fan) that I'll get around to it before the end of 2017, but then Horizon Zero Dawn happened, and the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy happened, and The Witcher happened, and it kept getting pushed back, until about three weeks ago when I dusted off the Wii and fired it up. Third time was indeed lucky for me as I managed to get over the initial tutorial hump and pressed on deep into the game's narrative. Thirty-one hours deep, in fact, at the time of writing. And while I'm definitely enjoying my time with it, I haven't been able to shake the feeling that something about the whole thing is a little "off".
Before any of you start speculating, it isn't the motion controls. I can understand why people might not like them, but as someone who played Twilight Princess on the GameCube and bought a Wii specifically to play this game, I've found the whole experience pretty novel. The swordplay is great for the most part, bringing a much-needed layer of depth to the series' usually simple hack-and-slash combat. It's fun working out enemies' tells and navigating around their defences to land the killing blow, replacing button-mashing with a more methodical watch-and-wait approach. The dungeon items are all fun to use too, although there's not quite as much variety to them as I would have liked (four of the eight items have almost identical controls). But save for a couple of isolated incidents, the control scheme hasn't impacted negatively on my experience. I've never felt like I was telling the game to do something and it did something else, so in my book, that's a success.
Flight isn't quite as liberating as it should be
I think what's really getting to me is how "guided" the whole experience has been. Skyward Sword gets a lot of flak for how it holds the player's hand through its lengthy tutorial, but what's often overlooked in those criticisms is just how little you're permitted to explore throughout the entire game. A great deal of this is down to the world design, in my opinion. At first glance, Skyward Sword invites comparisons with Wind Waker due to its vast, open hub world (the sky surrounding Skyloft in the former, the Great Sea in the latter) populated by islands for the player to explore. Where the games differ is in both their sense of discovery and the degree to which their hubs are populated. When you first start exploring the Great Sea in Wind Waker, you have no chart, no map, no real frame of reference, and as a result the ocean feels mysterious, unknown and begging to be explored. Comparatively, Skyward Sword gives you a map of almost the entire sky up front. Nothing is unknown, everything is charted. Equally, the sky is much more sparsely populated than the Great Sea, and almost everything significant that happens is concentrated within Skyloft, making it feel comparatively lifeless and rendering exploration almost unnecessary.
It's rare for the dungeons to offer up any kind of forking path
Things aren't much better when you break through the cloud barrier and descend to the surface. Skyward Sword's surface world is made up of three distinct regions - Faron, Eldin, and Lanayru. Each of these regions is vast but also very segmented, and progression through them is limited by both the items Link carries and the direction of the story at any given time. What this means is that while some areas look wide and open, there's actually only one direct route from A to B. Couple this with companion Fi's constant interruptions and advice on what to do next and the end result is an experience that feels curated and guided, rather than one in which the player has a reasonable degree of agency. This sense of linearity and throttled exploration even pervades the dungeon design. Having been through six or seven of Skyward Sword's dungeons at this point, I've never felt overwhelmed with options as to where to go or what I should be doing. Don't get me wrong, the dungeons and the puzzles within are brilliantly designed, but they're designed with the intention of funnelling the player down a set path, rather than opening up and giving the player options for exploration.
Dowsing for your next objective takes a lot of the fun out of exploration
Even the side quests eschew legitimate exploration in favour of hand-holding, mainly due to the inclusion of dowsing. Using his sword, Link can "track" the location of important items and quest objectives within the world and home in on them. This reduces environmental exploration to a simple game of "follow-the-flashing-light". One particular side activity consists hunting Goddess Cubes on the surface to awaken Goddess Chests in the sky. Initially I had fun hunting down the Goddess Cubes (without dowsing for them, which becomes an option later on), but the fact that the activated chests are then pinpointed on the map with flashing purple icons creates a sorely missed opportunity for some decent exploration in the sky. Instead of scouring the skies, I could simply open my map, plop a beacon of light over the chest icon, and make a beeline for the treasure. When I ultimately opened each chest, the reward felt hollow because I never felt like I'd earned it. Skyward Sword also features some light loot and crafting mechanics, seemingly encouraging exploration in a way that's completely at odds with the rest of its design philosophy.
He's not kidding - you ever try playing original Zelda without a sword?
What really drove the matter home for me was when I blitzed through the original Legend of Zelda on a whim last weekend (with a guide to hand, I'm not bloody Superman). At times I found it hard to believe that these games co-exist within the same franchise. Original Zelda is obtuse as hell, dropping the player in an open overworld with no guidance and encouraging them to explore and find things out for themselves. Even Link's sword is optional - players can head off screen without entering the first cave if they so choose, putting them in a very difficult position against the Octoroks and Tektites that litter the overworld. I'm not saying original Zelda is perfect - in fact, I think it goes way too far in the other direction, to the point where its lack of guidance becomes a severe hindrance for those looking to beat the game. I think a lot of my personal favourite Zelda games, such as Wind Waker and A Link Between Worlds, strike a good balance between direction and exploration, signposting goals for the player without explicitly showing or telling them how to get there, and without punishing the player for trying to go off the beaten track and explore the world a bit.
As I said at the very top of this blog, I don't think Skyward Sword is a bad game. I wouldn't have put over thirty hours into it if I did. One major upshot of the game's more guided design is that it gives the story a much better sense of pacing than any other Zelda I've played previously. In my book, that's a good thing, because the story is the best I've seen in a Zelda game to date. Judging by the point I've just reached, and based on how long it took me to beat Twilight Princess, I'm going to hazard a guess that I'm about three quarters through Skyward Sword. I'm really excited to see where the story continues to go from here, and how it ties in with the rest of the series (I'm aware that Skyward Sword is the first game chronologically, and I'm curious to see if it earns its status of origin story). I just think it's a bit of a shame that engaging with the story is probably all I'll want to do from this point on. Hopefully in the new year I'll be able to get my hands on a Switch and a copy of Breath of the Wild - I'm reliably informed that it addresses the shortcomings of Skyward Sword by overhauling the core of the franchise in some very big ways, and I'm very excited to discover what those are.
As always, thanks very much for taking the time to read this blog. It's been a while since I threw together one of these essay-style posts, so please forgive me if the structure's a little rough. Once I've wrapped up Skyward Sword, I'm hoping to return to my An Hour With... blog series, with a special bumper instalment planned for before the end of the year. And hey, speaking of the end of year, we're getting pretty darn close to them there Game of the Year awards. This year I've managed to make my way through more games than ever before - my total currently stands at forty-three games beaten, and I'd really like to try and push that up to fifty before the end of 2017. As always, I'll be putting together some special blog-based shenanigans to document my year of game-playing, so be sure to keep your eyes peeled for that. Until next time, take care duders, and I'll see you around.
Daniel
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Currently playing - The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii)
Hey there folks and welcome to another instalment of An Hour With..., my blog feature wherein I choose a random game from my enormous backlog and spend sixty minutes with it to determine whether I should PLAY it to completion, or PASS on the experience. The overarching aim of this feature is to help me whittle down my immense Pile of Shame by giving me some formative time with each title rather than simply casting games aside at random. If you're a newcomer to the series then you can get a flavour for what I'm trying to achieve my reading this introduction to the concept, or you can peruse the list of previous entries by means of the table below:
Today's game chosen at random by the Backloggery's awesome Fortune Cookie feature is a primitive action-adventure title that originated on the ZX Spectrum, but has since been ported to the Xbox One. What is it, and how will it fare through its opening hour? Read on to find out more...
The Game
Sabre Wulf is a 2D, top-down action-adventure game developed and published by Ultimate Play the Game (the company that would later become Rare) and released on the ZX Spectrum in 1984. Putting players into the shoes of intrepid explorer Sabreman, the game tasks them with finding four fragments of an amulet which, when collected, will enable them to escape from the maze-like jungle they inhabit. While exploring players must fend off all sorts of threats including wild animals, indigenous tribesmen, and the titular Sabre Wulf itself. Sabre Wulf was very well received on its release and remains one of the ZX Spectrum's highest rated video game releases alongside its sequels Underwurlde and Knight Lore. It was subsequently ported to other systems including the Commodore 64 and BBC Micro, and lent its title to a side-scrollingspiritual successor for the Game Boy Advance in 2004. In 2015, Sabre Wulf saw a current-generation release as part of the Rare Replay collection on Xbox One - this is the version I'll be dabbling with today.
The History
Oh boy, and I thought I had nothing to write in here for the Resistance: Fall of Man edition of this feature. Sabre Wulf's presence in my video game backlog is purely down to the fact that I bought Rare Replay, and that purchase was driven by other games in the collection. As a man in his late twenties, the ZX Spectrum pre-dates me by a few years, so I don't have any inherent nostalgia for this era of video games. Prior to this feature, if you'd asked me when I intended to get around to playing Sabre Wulf, I guess my answer probably would have been "never". But that's one of the reasons why I do An Hour With... - it gives me a chance to get a taste of games like this, that I might otherwise skip over entirely.
The Hour
Here's where the blog really gets going, with a blow-by-blow account of the sixty minutes I spend with the game in question. I'll be peppering in various thoughts and opinions alongside descriptions of my in-game actions, to give you a full and balanced account of my time with the title. Ordinarily I'd give you an obligatory spoiler warning at this stage, but given that Sabre Wulf's entire story has already been described in full two paragraphs previously, I don't feel it's necessary this time. Let's power up the Xbox One and get lost in the jungle...
Five Minutes In...
One thing I can definitely say that Sabre Wulf has going for it is immediacy - after an initial title screen and the option to choose between one- and two-player game variants, I'm dropped straight into the middle of the game's 256-screen jungle map and given control of Sabreman. I'm instantly struck by the game's visual style, which I think still holds up well in spite of its simplicity. The colours are bright, and the sprites are clear and reasonably well detailed (albeit restricted to a single colour in the case of moving objects). The title screen features a short instrumental piece, but there's no soundtrack to accompany the gameplay (save for some footstep sounds and the occasional beep or boop when an enemy spawns or an item is picked up, as I'll find out soon).
The next thing I'm struck by is something slightly less pleasant - an enemy that has randomly spawned in the spot where I'm standing. It feels a bit cheap to lose a life in this way, but I pick myself up and from my next life, I actually start playing. Navigating the screen is straightforward enough, although there's a weird floatiness to the game's movement, a delay between me letting go of the analog stick and movement stopping, that makes Sabreman feel like he's in the depths of an ice cavern rather than the middle of the jungle. Attacking also feels very imprecise, with Sabreman's sword swing feeling ineffective for most of its animation. Within five minutes I've died four more times, triggering my first Game Over with an adventure completion percentage of just 2%. Back to the drawing board, I guess.
Twenty Minutes In...
After about twenty minutes of play, I start to settle into a more comfortable rhythm with the gameplay. I think a big part of that is down to my discovery that holding down the A button on the Xbox One controller puts Sabreman in a state of permanent attack, making most enemies much less of a threat than they were when I was trying to strike them with timed button presses. I'm starting to learn my way around Sabre Wulf's opening screens and making consistent (if slightly slow) progress. It feels a little like a clear precursor to (and inspiration for) other top-down adventure games like The Legend of Zelda, with its multi-screen overworld and simple real-time combat mechanics.
Even in spite of this though, I wouldn't say I'm really enjoying myself as I play it. Sure, it's rewarding to see that adventure completion percentage creep a little bit higher with every Game Over, but that's really just mitigating my frustration at going all the way back to square one. It doesn't help that much like The Binding of Isaac (another top-down game that Sabre Wulf must have either directly or indirectly inspired), so much of every playthrough seems to be down to complete chance. While the jungle map is set for every run, things like item placement and enemy spawns seem to be completely random. Some runs might start with an abundance of extra lives to pick up on the first few screens. Other times you might navigate forty screens and not see a single one. I guess the random aspect adds replayability since it ensures no two runs are the same, but for me it also fosters frustration - especially when enemies spawn right under my feet and leave me powerless to stop them.
An Hour In...
I continue to play Sabre Wulf until my allotted hour is up, but to be honest, there's really not much more I can say about the last forty minutes that would be different from the first twenty. My most successful run ends with a high score of 28,070 points and a pretty impressive 32% adventure completion, but even on this run I don't manage to find any of the four amulet pieces required to make tangible progress towards the end. I'm still none the wiser as to whether these amulet pieces are set at defined places on the map, or whether their locations are randomly determined like every other item and enemy in the game. I don't even know what the damn things look like. While holding down the A button has mitigated some of my combat frustration, the inability to attack directly above or below Sabreman makes vertically navigating the game's narrow pathways a very uninviting prospect, especially since this is how most of my deaths seem to be occurring at this stage.
When my time is up, I power down Sabre Wulf feeling that even in spite of my gradual improvements, my ever-increasing adventure completion percentage, and my earned spots on the high score leaderboard, I haven't really made any in-roads towards completing it. And that, more than anything, is why I turn off the Xbox One feeling unfulfilled at the end of the hour.
The Verdict
I think it's already pretty clear to anyone who's made it this far that I'm going to be giving a PASS verdict to Sabre Wulf today. On some levels I found it to be a very impressive product. Graphically it excels in my opinion, I love the bright colours and the detailed sprite designs of the jungle environments and enemies alike. While the gameplay is simplistic, the maze-like nature of the jungle map makes any amount of progress, however slight, feel rewarding. And on the subject of that map, its size must have been a very impressive technical feat at the time.
Unfortunately I can't say the same for the rest of the package. Sabre Wulf's core conceit and mechanics are unintuitive, and the gameplay lacks the depth that the game's intended scope seems to demand (the inability to attack up or down on the screen in particular is a real disappointment). What really harms it for me is how much of the player's success is determined by chance, with randomly spawning enemies and items that can benefit or cripple a run before it's even begun. As a history lesson on the ZX Spectrum era of games, something I was completely unfamiliar with an hour ago, it's been insightful But on the base level of asking myself, "is this a game I want to keep playing?", then the answer is sadly no.
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And so we come to the end of another edition of An Hour With.... I hope you're all enjoying this series as much as I've grown to enjoy writing it. Next time I'll be casting an eye over a cult horror classic on the Xbox 360. Until then, thanks very much for reading. Take care, and I'll see you around.
Hey there folks and welcome to another instalment of An Hour With..., my blog feature wherein I choose a random game from my enormous backlog and spend sixty minutes with it to determine whether I should PLAY it to completion, or PASS on the experience. The overarching aim of this feature is to help me whittle down my immense Pile of Shame by giving me some formative time with each title rather than simply casting games aside at random. If you're a newcomer to the series then you can get a flavour for what I'm trying to achieve my reading this introduction to the concept, or you can peruse the list of previous entries by means of the table below:
Today's game chosen at random by the Backloggery's awesome Fortune Cookie feature is a Western-themed third-person shooter from two console generations back. What is it, and how will it fare through its opening hour? Read on to find out more...
The Game
Red Dead Revolver is a third-person shooter developed by Rockstar Games' San Diego studio (formerly Angel Studios) and released for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox in May 2004. Set in the Wild West at the end of the nineteenth century, the game puts the player in the shoes of the mysterious Red, a bounty hunter out for revenge on the bandits who murdered his parents and raided their farm. Originally under development at Capcom as a spiritual successor to the arcade game Gun.Smoke, the project changed direction after the studio and the rights were acquired by Rockstar in 2002. Red Dead Revolver received generally favourable reviews from critics upon its release, who praised its authentic Western style while criticising its clunky mechanics. The franchise was later reborn by way of a GTA-inspired open-world pseudo-sequel named Red Dead Redemption in 2010, with another (Red Dead Redemption II) due for release next spring.
The History
It probably isn't surprising to know that before I ever owned a copy of Red Dead Revolver, I played Red Dead Redemption. I picked that game up for my Xbox 360 on launch day and sank over a month into the story of John Marston, captivated by its story, addicted to the gameplay, and perpetually stunned by the level of attention to detail in what remains one of the most impressive gameworlds I'd ever spent time in. Ask me on the right day and Red Dead Redemption easily breaks into my top ten games of all time. In love with this follow-up, and aware of its status as a spiritual successor, I started keeping my eyes peeled for a reasonably-priced copy of its precursor.
It took a couple of years, but I was eventually able to track down a copy of Red Dead Revolver for PS2 in a local second-hand entertainment store - the sticker still attached to the front of the box tells me I paid £6.00 for it, which in the current economic climate is roughly the same price as a large Whopper meal from Burger King. I promptly shelved it and moved on to other things, until today, when the Backloggery's Fortune Cookie feature selected it as the subject of my next blog - a timely coincidence, given the recent release of a new trailer for Red Dead Redemption II.
The Hour
This is where these blogs really get going. What follows is a blow-by-blow account of my first hour with the game, chronicling my in-game actions as well as any thoughts or opinions about what's happening on screen. As is customary at this point, let me warn you that the ensuing paragraphs will likely contain some light story spoilers for the opening sections of Red Dead Revolver, so if you're planning to play it for yourself and want to go in as blind as possible, I'd advise skipping ahead to The Verdict below. After a bit of fiddling around with my old slim PlayStation 2, I successfully get a signal on my TV and launch into the game. Time to spend sixty minutes in the Old West...
Five Minutes In...
Red Dead Revolver's opening chapter serves as both a primer for the story set to unfold and a tutorial for the game's most basic mechanics. I'm very quickly put in control of a young Red Harlow and steered through simple actions like movement, camera manipulation and the core mechanics of gunplay. One thing that strikes me almost immediately is the game's graphical content - Red Dead Revolver does a great job of evoking the Old West with the earthy tones of its colour palette and its sparsely populated environments, something that's apparent even before I've left the Harlow homestead. That being said, the technical side of things definitely leaves a lot to be desired. I can't say for certain that Revolver is running on the same game engine as Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto III trilogy, but the visual fidelity is certainly comparable in my opinion. That's kind of disappointing to me - the GTA games' sub-par graphics were always forgivable due to the open-world nature of those games, with the understanding that a bigger gameworld meant certain trade-offs had to be made in terms of minutiae. Revolver definitely isn't an open-world game, but it doesn't seem to be pumping any extra horsepower into its visuals. Character models are blocky, animations are stiff, and faces have about as much room for expression as your average festive nutcracker.
Another thing that I quickly pick up on is that the game's shooting controls aren't all that great. There's an unnatural speed and swimminess to the default analog sensitivity that makes fast precision aiming almost impossible for me, and adjusting the settings in the game's options menu doesn't do a whole lot to alleviate this either. After a bit of stress-free shooting to acclimatise me as best it can, Revolver starts throwing moving human enemies in my direction for the first time. The rapid acceleration of the crosshair combined with the enemies' movements takes a bit of getting used to, but I manage to put down all the raiding bandits without taking any damage. Revolver also introduces its bounty hunting mechanics here, rewarding the player with different amounts of cash depending on which body parts their shots hit. I can't help but feel the game shows this particular hand a little early here, since this is supposed to be a prologue and all - could they not have waited until the following chapter when Red's actually a bounty hunter? Nitpicking aside, Revolver awards me an Excellent rating for beating its first level (the rating appears to be tied to stats including shot accuracy, time taken, and best cash multiplier) and throws a couple of unlockables my way as a reward. Seems like a decent incentive to keep playing.
Twenty Minutes In...
After the prologue mission, the action fast-forwards an unmarked number of years to Red's adulthood. The tutorialisation continues though, with the next couple of missions walking me through some of the finer points of combat including cover-based shooting, duelling, and the slow-motion "Deadeye" feature. The former feels incredibly janky, something that I suppose could be chalked up to Revolver being an early example of this now-ubiquitous mechanic without the benefit of hundreds of other cover-based shooters on the market to imitate and learn from. While it's possible to aim from cover, Red doesn't actually pop out of cover until the Fire button is pressed. This results in a noticeable delay between the button press and the actual action of firing a gun, giving enemies a chance to move out of the aiming reticle and making the whole process feel slow and wonky.
Deadeye and duelling, on the other hand, both feel pretty good. Using a bullet-time effect similar to the Max Payne games, Deadeye allows the player to target multiple enemies and body parts by passing the aiming reticle over them, before raining quick-firing hell upon them. Duelling works very similarly, but with the added caveat of drawing your gun with the right analog stick and having to manually 'paint' your targets before actually pulling the trigger. Both mechanics suffer a little from the aforementioned speedy, swimmy camera movement, and it's nowhere near as responsive as it felt in Redemption, but it's still mighty satisfying to watch Red rattle off all six shots into three or four enemies and drop them to the ground. Slightly less satisfying is witnessing an enemy still defiantly standing after putting two or three bullets into their head, since for some perplexing reason headshots don't always equal a one-shot kill - handy for racking up those cash multipliers, but not exactly authentic.
Forty Minutes In...
Over the next twenty minutes, Red Dead Revolver puts me through two of my favourite sequences from this whole sixty-minute session. The first is a dynamic, cinematic run-and-gun segment set atop a moving train that encourages me to use all the abilities I've learned so far. There's a platforming aspect to advancing down the train and dodging various obstacles coming towards Red at speed. The gunplay is fast and frenetic and due to the corridor-like nature of the train-track environment, it's a perfect showcase for exploiting Deadeye to maximum effect. The chapter even culminates in a dramatic face-off between Red and a group of bandits on horseback as they try to board the train and attack its engineer. It's action-packed and exciting as Hell. On the flip side it's also where I hit my first fail-state and because I'm distracted typing out notes for this blog I end up missing the continue countdown, resulting in the game booting me back out to the title screen and forcing me to start the whole mission over instead of resuming from my last checkpoint.
The second memorable sequence comes about ten minutes later when I face off against the first major boss battle in Revolver, the bandit known as Pig Josh. The fight is infinitely more engaging than I expected it to be because it really encourages me to mix up my combat tactics. Pig Josh isn't just a bullet-sponge, he requires a specific approach to beat, and the resulting change in my approach made for a really memorable encounter. Rather than going in guns blazing and relying heavily on Deadeye, I had to slow things down and use cover effectively so that Josh would lose sight of me, giving me the opportunity to attack his weak spot on his exposed back. It reminded me a little of the boss fight with Vulcan Raven in Metal Gear Solid in that respect, and if nothing else sticks with me from this hour with Red Dead Revolver, this fight will.
Between these two memorable moments is something that I wasn't expecting from this heretofore relentless shooter - a bit of downtime in an active settlement. There aren't any threats in the town of Brimstone, and as such the time Red spends here between missions gives me a welcome opportunity to drink in some more of Revolver's fantastic atmosphere and setting. A handful of the buildings in Brimstone can be explored and store proprietors interacted with, and while most of them simply serve as conduits to purchase unlockables for the lore-expanding Journal and the multiplayer Showdown modes, it's nonetheless a joy just getting to live in this world for a bit. Before the clunky shooting and rapid camera movements break all the immersion, that is.
One Hour In...
If the previous twenty minutes were what started to win me over on Red Dead Revolver, these last twenty minutes are what pushed me back over to the other side of the fence. Somewhat perplexingly, the game follows up the battle with Pig Josh by placing me in control of an English sharpshooter named Jack Swift during what seems to be a flashback. I wasn't prepared for this, but the shift of perspective opens my eyes a little wider to something that's been bothering me for most of the last hour - how is it that this side character, who I literally just met, feels somehow more fleshed out than the actual protagonist that I've been playing as up to now? Red feels like a blank slate compared to Swift, and I don't mean that in a positive, dark-mysterious-and-brooding sort of way. He's barely spoken, and the only thing I know about him is that he wants revenge. I genuinely think I feel more sympathy for the dog that got shot ten minutes into this game than I currently do for Red Harlow, and that's a pretty damning assessment of his lack of characterisation.
After spending ten minutes playing as Jack Swift attempting to stop a bandit wielding a mysterious green potion that transports him all over the battlefield (I guess the transfer from Capcom to Rockstar didn't strip this game of all its "weird West" trappings after all), the game takes me back to Brimstone for another little bit of downtime before heading off on Red's next bounty. The target this time is a woman named Bad Bessie, who's holed up with her posse at the very top of a canyon. The environments for this level might be my favourites in the game up to this point, adding both verticality and distance to the gameplay in a way that I haven't really had to consider before now. Unfortunately the promise built up by the level itself is completely undone by the battle against Bad Bessie herself at the end of it. I go in expecting a similar strategic fight to the one against Pig Josh, but all it seems to boil down to is a lengthy run-and-gun fight at the top of the canyon without any real technique or strategy involved. Bad Bessie falls just after my clock signifies I've now spent an hour with this game, and so I turn it off and start to process what I've just experienced...
The Verdict
Red Dead Revolver is a game that revels in its aesthetic. From the distinctive feel of its environments to the authenticity of its spaghetti Western soundtrack, it's a game that completely nails the feel of its inspiration. In that respect it conjures up a lot of warm, familiar feelings from my time spent with Red Dead Redemption. Unfortunately it's difficult for me to say anything else overwhelmingly positive about my experience over the last sixty minutes. The gameplay just doesn't back up the presentation I'm afraid - when the shooting is functional it's merely alright, and when it isn't it becomes very frustrating. With a couple of notable exceptions the gunfights don't feel dynamic or varied in any way, the melee combat is atrocious, and the platforming aspects are clunky and cumbersome.
Perhaps my biggest issue with Revolver was just how disinterested I was in its story. As a player who became completely enraptured by John Marston's tale in Redemption, I was expecting to feel at least some degree of attachment to Red Harlow, but the connection just wasn't there for me. The game's opening chapter establishes his motive as a lust for vengeance, but beyond that there really isn't anything to him - his emotionless single-sentence answers don't endear him to the player, and I just couldn't bring myself to care about his plight. I could probably forgive the clunky mechanics and irksome gunplay if I felt there was a story worth seeing through here, but I'm just not seeing it. That's why, as much as it pains me to say this about a Rockstar game, I've decided to give Red Dead Revolver a PASS verdict. Here's hoping Red Dead Redemption II will scratch that gunslinging itch I'm feeling when it lands in the spring.
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And so another edition of An Hour With... comes to an end. As always, thanks very much for reading these blogs - I may not always reply, but rest assured I do read every comment that pops up under one of these things, and every one is taken on board and appreciated (I've even been thinking about going back to Metro 2033 and giving it another hour of my time to let it really get going, after some impassioned defences of the game from commenters). Next time on An Hour With..., I'll be turning the clock right back to 1984 and playing an Xbox Oneport of a ZX Spectrum adventure title. Until then, take care and I'll see you around.
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