Have you ever wanted to know what a Japanese tactical third person shooter on the PS2 plays like? Well here are some thoughts on just that. It's only been a week since my last blog. I'm pretty awesome!

Special Forces / Simple Series Vol 108: The Nihon Tokushubutai.

The year is 2015 A.D and the cops no longer have control of the streets. The terrorists need to be subdued, and regular cops just aren't going to be enough. What Japan needs is some kind of supercop, the best of the best, the fastest, bestest, smartest cop. Japan needs cops that are ready to make the hard decisions. Do they go in guns blazing or negotiate a peaceful solution? Use stealth methods to take down threats with a minimal loss of life? Being a member of SACT (Special Assault Combat Team) you're going to be tasked with a lot of tough decisions, decisions a normal cop just wouldn't be able to handle.

SACT is made up of the four best cops for the job...

Will Right - An experienced team leader with the charisma to unite even the most disorganized of teams. VERY virtuous and also really good at designing monsters using the Spore Creature Creator.

Joe Thompson - Passionate, courageous and some great reflexes. A man so swift and graceful that it doesn't matter that he can't shoot for shit.

Chris Beckett - He could kill a man from a thousand yards with a rifle in high winds. Only eight or ten guys in the world could shoot like that.

Ray Saito - Ray unfortunately stands out due to having the least Japanese sounding name of the team. He's as stealthy as they come and has the most beautiful mane of golden hair. Ray is not only good with a deadly weapon, but has looks that could stop any man dead in his tracks, maybe even kill!

Special Forces is a tactical shooter in which you control a team of Japan's best cleaning the streets of terrorist scum. At the start of each mission you can select your two weapon loadout. The back of the box promises me that I'm going to use "REAL WEAPONS!", weapons such as the AZ47 and the Valther 38. The game will also let me unlock grenades and sniper rifles later on, but I'm limited to the standard selection of near-future weaponry at the beginning. I am ranked private after all... Whoa, what? Japan's very best are the lowest military rank? Is good hair or very virtuousness more of a requirement for being a member of SACT than being a veteran of urban combat?

The game also lets me choose who I want to play as from the selection of Helghast SACT members, as well as choose an AI controlled partner that will follow me about. It's pretty confusing which one you're choosing for what role. For some reason the character you play as is standing in the background, and the AI partner in the foreground on the mission select screen. To be honest it doesn't really matter which one you choose for what role. They all act and look the same anyway.

The first mission wants me to rid a store of dangerous terrorists. Their demands are unknown so I should probably try and take as many of them alive as possible. Every twenty seconds of the first mission one of my superiors calls me to tell me I need to do something or other. "Hey, that's a terrorist! Stop him!" "Hey, that's a door! You can open them!" "Hey, listen!" " Hey, listen!" "He..." SHUTTHEEFFUP!

I'm constantly reminded that I'll get more points if I capture terrorists instead of shooting them dead. If I can sneak up behind them I can warn them and then arrest them by holding down the circle button. It's kinda like pointing your gun at the back of a guards head in Metal Gear, but it's broken and 90% of the time you'll put them into an alert status where you will need to shoot bullets into them until they fall over. Thankfully shooting bullets into anywhere other that their head puts them into a downed state where they writhe about the floor for a few seconds. If you can run up to them uninterrupted, you can look down at them at an oddly specific angle and arrest them that way. Once arrested they blink into nothingness and you're awarded with a giant yellow 100pts! Shooting them right in the face will only net you a measly ten, so it's always better to arrest someone instead of murderifying them.

I tried my hardest to stealth my way into the storefront with three terrorists, but always alerted someone resulting in me spraying bullets into them until they were dead. It's very hard to arrest people when someone is shooting at you. You're so fragile that you find yourself shooting at someone and then backing off immediately because every single one of the enemies is a complete idiot, forgetting they just saw you seconds ago. Even when you wound someone and dont kill or arrest them in time they just stand back up and go about the day like nothing happened.

Because this game is set in the future we are given stealth camo. By hitting the L1 and R1 buttons at the same time you're able to turn invisible for a handful of seconds. During this time you can run away from gunfire or sneak up on someone to stealthily shoot unsilenced weapons into them without alerting anyone. I found the vast majority of my time had me turning invisible, shooting people in the face and then backing off till my camo had recharged. At some point later in the game there are so many enemies that arresting people is no longer an option, and thinning the herd is the only way to progress.

Seeing as I've mentioned that a large portion of this game is shooting people dead, you might have assumed that it's an easy thing to do. Special Forces makes killing people with ease a pretty hard thing to do. The aiming reticule moves so jerkily that I often found myself lining my shot up with an enemies feet in the distance and then travelling forwards, using stealth until I got close enough to him that the dot was in line with his face. If you want to go into the zoomed-in aim mode, the aiming reticule seems to be magnetized to the middle of the screen making any kind of precision shooting impossible. Later on the game will unlock a sniper rifle that changes position when you aim down the scope, and can only be moved at right angles when zoomed in... brilliant.

For some reason your elite team of dudes only ever consists of you and your partner. I'm not entirely sure what the other two are doing when you're risking you life for your country, but it seems very strange that you only really have control over one other team member. The partner can be set to three different modes. Attack on sight, follow and stay. The best way to describe your partner is by calling him a fucking moron. Every so often he will fire a couple of shots off at enemies, maybe even kill one here or there, but for the most part he exists purely to alert terrorists to your location. Thankfully he turns invisible when you do, so escaping from danger isn't that much of a problem, and because you do most of the killing it really doesn't matter all that much if you let him die and blink out of existence. ("Dead 1 people!") Even when you call him over to you you're often greeted with an "Allies were unable to arrive" message... Sometimes when he is standing two feet away from you. He can also be told to open doors, answer phones (have no idea why this exists) and climb ladders. He's usually pretty good about opening doors, but climbing a ladder... nope, just not doing it. It feels like they forgot to actually program that one action into the game.

The back of the box also says there are 37 thrilling missions, and that they mean is that there are nine of them with various difficulties. ( I assume there are a few other that are unlockable somehow.) The opening shop level is pretty straight forward, but they start adding in a bunch of half formed ideas that are exclusive to a single mission. In a bank robbery mission with music oddly reminiscent of the dustbin lid clanging of Goldeneye you need to shoot out security cameras and unlock vaults that for some reason act like terrorist monster closets. Another level has you collecting card keys like Doom, and another has you having to shoot out the walls in a Japanese castle... This game has destructible environments!

The mission briefings often tell you you need to stop a bomb threat, kill hijackers on a plane before it takes off or clean the streets of cultists, but the objective is always the same. Kill EVERYONE dead! (Or arrest them if you're into S ranks and shit.) The other constant is that during mission briefings you are always told that the terrorists demands are unknown. You'd think that at least one of these groups would want their demands known, but y'know evil people being evil and all that.

Special Forces is a bad game. That's pretty much a fact, but like the other games in the Simple series developed by Vingt-et-un there's something about them that I enjoy. Maybe it's how ambitious the developers are despite the skill or budget to do what they wanted with the game, or maybe it's just that I'm crazy and have played so many bad games recently that any with even a hint of interesting ideas start to seem more appealing than they actually are.

Despite the bad shooting, despite the bad AI and despite it only really having one mission type, I kinda had something resembling fun playing this game. There's a strange satisfaction from doing the dodge roll & pose (useless) when you hit R2 twice, and I'm quite fond of the references to other Simple games on the posters on the walls during a train station mission. I fully understand that these are not good reasons to enjoy something as bad as this, but I'm pretty committed to descending into terrible video game madness.

End bit.

I have actually been playing arguably good games this week also! Theatrhythm CC is a wonderful update of an already wonderful game, and returning to Titanfall after a couple of months has rekindled my love for the game that a lot of people seem to have turned on. Other things of note: Lethal Weapon 4 continues to be bad and once you take The Final Countdown out of the equation, Europe were pretty rad... Can my opinions on anything be trusted? Will I ever play Billy Hatcher? will the next Simple game I play have boobs in it? Maybe I'll answer these questions within the next week. One thing is for certain. I'll probably be a little less saner.

Blog EXECUTE!

Thanks for reading and be excellent to each other.