So after all this yelling about Uncharted 2, i finally bought it and sat down to play it. You better believe all this positive talk about a game can lift expectations. I like to think mine weren't completely unrealistic, but seriously, this game has some big issues. So much so I'm starting to wonder if it doesn't suffer a bit from the Call of duty syndrome, where scripting and set pieces overshadow the quality of the core gameplay.
 
It's not bad! Christ. Haha I'd be crazy to say it's anywhere near bad. But outside of the sheer spectacle this game is throwing around, i have certainly seen games that do what Uncharted 2 does mechanically better. 
 
I'm aware Naughty Dog are proud of their animation blending, which makes it really odd to see things like Drake suddenly flinging into his stumbling animation while sliding slowly sideways after a small jump. Inverse kinematics go out the window. 
 
This is a cover based shooter, but when you're in the inner elbow of a low L-shaped wall and it's nigh on impossible to shift cover from one inner wall to the other, you know, the one you're technically already up against, without a 90% fail rate that ends with you just standing up dumbly, that cover system needs some work. I like to think I'm not completely motorically challenged, but i still can't figure out exactly how their cover shifting works!
 
Why are nobody pointing out that every character's eyes have two dozen highlights, and that the lack of antialiasing, while really noticeable overall, turn the highlights into clouds of white dots effectively obscuring the pupils? It's hard to emphasize with a glowing-eyed space alien. Do all these characters have a fever? Chloe's face in particular is incredibly hard to look at.
 
Why are nobody pointing out that short of headshots you are emptying clips into dudes who only react when they finally die? There is little to no force to any non-explosive weapon! This was a problem in the first game as well, and it hasn't been remedied. Guns feel "soft".
 
Why, oh why oh why, did Naughty Dog choose to effectively open their game with an unforgiving stealth mission? When you sneak up on someone for a stealth knockout, 50% of the time you get a short sharp blow that lets you get right back into cover. The rest of the time a long strangling takes place. The difference, tactically, is immense. I've pulled off perfect stealth sections only to fail at the very end; bam, restart the section. Oh, and on this restart, you get other animations that take long enough to complete that you fail where you previously succeeded. It's a mess of a section and Naughty Dog should be ashamed. FFS, if you aren't making a stealth game, make stealth optional!
 
This is all mechanical nitpicking of course; As an adventure movie kind of experience, this is exceedingly well done. Mechanically however, it makes me almost desperate to go back to inFAMOUS where everything just works and feels right. I'm not sure I'm totally cool with this script-heavy trend. For every cool edge-of-your-seat moment in this game there's a bit where you repeat the section and the smoke and mirrors go away; Imminent peril will wait until you move to the next trigger. On the PS3, inFAMOUS remains my GOTY 2009. Part of me wishes i hadn't seen all the hype before playing Uncharted 2. I would certainly have been more enamored with it.

Giving Shatter soundtrack of the year only proves two things. 
- That the crew didn't live through the euro computer game tracker disco/techno 90s, of which the Shatter soundtrack is a poor replica
- That Justice and the rest of the stupid new disco movement are poisoning music and must be stopped.
 
A boring game filled with mediocre synthpop. Soundtrack of the yearh. Blehh.

So i bought a whole eff-ton of games from Steam over xmas, and getting to play some gems for the first time. A standout is Just Cause, which is frankly some of the most hilarious retardation i have ever seen. This is a good thing, and has me totally excited about JC2. It got me thinking about how a core game mechanic can really drive a game, in this case the hijacking/stunt position/parachute trifecta. Here's a list of mechanics i really enjoy in action games; Any combination of these will likely get me interested. All 10 might make me implode.

1. Jumping from one moving vehicle to another
   Ever since Pursuit Force (though this is probably not the first instance of it), I've found this stuff totally awesome. It's just really satisfying to pull off. Needs slow-mo, and mid-air shooting of driver heads is a definite plus.
   
2. Delayed homing missile lock-on
   Been playing a bunch of Warhawk recently, and the #1 thing that really keeps me coming back is the near constant delayed-lock reactions. There's something almost Hitchcock about it. A bomb under a desk that goes off is action. A bomb under a desk that hasn't gone off is suspense. There's something great about trying to maintain a lock until you can really nail someone. The louder and more annoying the lock on klaxon the better.
3. Hi-Fi climbing
   Infamous, Assassins Creed and The Saboteur all do this. I'm not sure which i prefer, but I'm pretty sure it's all awesome.
   
4. Grappling hook
   Kind of begins and ends with Bionic Commando this, but then again that whole game was defined by it. Curious about how Just Cause 2 is going to roll with it, but the more physical and momentum based it is, the better. God damn i love swinging from shit!
   
5. Music-sync rewards
   You don't see this often in action games that aren't dedicated rhythm-action titles, and that surprises me somewhat. Music is such a big part of getting adrenaline going in a tight action sequence, and rewarding players for "playing along" seems like a total nobrainer. Might not be of course. But hey!
   
6. Flying kick
   It's just neat to jump and kick at things. What can i say?
   
7. Move charging
   Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Prototype both do this, and it's freaking awesome. Every single move in a fighting game should be chargeable, complete with slow-mo during charge. It's especially important for the jump to be chargeable.
   
8. Skill trees
   A wide, well developed skill tree is a big part of what keeps me coming back to action RPGs. There's something neat about working your way to a target spec, gaining other rewards along the way.
   
9. Property acquisition and management
   I was heartbroken to see GTA4 omit the property ownership nonsense of San Andreas. Might be the completist in me, but unless i actually own the world, I'm not satisfied (!!!11)
   
10. Strategic dismemberment
    This can take a bunch of forms. For me it didn't start with Dead Space, but rather Mechwarrior, where plucking off weapons or limbs was completely vital to success. The idea of taking an enemy apart weapon by weapon to turn the battle in your favor feels much more resonant than just shooting people in the face. Though that is pretty neat too.

Been playing The Saboteur on the PC, and while it's really quite broken in some regards (performance is ABYSMAL, lapsing into brutal stuttering), I'm still really enjoying it. 
 
I think it's sad that it's gotten such meh reviews. It definitely has big problems, but for all its stealing of ideas it comes off as pretty fresh to me. Maybe it's the setting, or getting to play a WW2 game that finally thinks cackling mad Nazis are sweet villains, and that it's perfectly okay for a bombing Irishman to say "top of the mornin' to ya" to prostitutes.
 
It deserves to be played, and not just discarded for its similarity to more polished games. It pilfers from EVERYBODY, but the core play of rampaging through Paris and setting off bombs and carrying out inpromptu assassinations really works for me. The moment you settle into the role of a murdering dickish drunkard in an insane American comic book idea of Paris and let the cartoony bullshit fly, it comes into its own.
 
I recommend a rental, at least. It might surprise you. Surprised me a good  bit, and i didn't think Pandemic pulled off a good game since Mercs 1.

Next to Baldurs Gate 2, System Shock 2, Thief 2 (lots of 2s) and assorted adventure games, the No One Lives Forever games are some of the most pleasant things to rediscover. Seems every time i play them I'm surprised at how WIDE they are. They have a lot of different gameplay going on. NOLF in particular seems like Monolith just threw everything they could find at the wall to see what stuck. It goes absolutely effing bananas, with fighting through sinking ships, harpooning sharks, floating through space stations, sneaking through nightclubs.. Just a crazy amount of variety. NOLF2 caps a search through an abandoned building for evidence capped with a boss fight against a ninja in a trailer caught in a tornado.
 
This blend of adventure game, FPS and RPG is something you see so rarely these days, and the NOLF games were made in a time when a lot of companies were exploring that formula, with Deus Ex going the furthest. Games you could just replay and replay and keep digging deeper.
 
I feel like this kind of generous action game is an absolute rarity these days. I've been really surprised by the generosity of Dragon Age, but that's an RPG and it's almost par for the course. It seems like action games have become direct parallels to hollywood blockbusters, where more effort is spent on presentation and less on brevity. It's such a god damn shame! 
 
Anyone else got examples of really generous, giving games that they love, and maybe some recent counterpoints to my gut feeling? I'd love it if it wasn't just "me getting old" for once ;-)

Been playing a bunch of DA:O recently, and for the most part; Giant, effing high five Bioware. It's been a long long time since i enjoyed a party based RPG this much, and it really does feel like it harks back to the BG2 days. The world struck me as hopelessly generic at first, but it's coming into its own, particularly with the notion of the Fade.
 
The only thing that really bothers me with it right now is the whole weird sorta-creepy relationship stuff. On one hand, it feels hilariously awesome to see such transparent dating game nonsense in such a big budget high profile release, but on the other it feels disappointing to have Bioware create these massive characters to get to know, and boil down the process of getting to know them into manipulating what's essentially a progress bar. As getting closer to a character has real game benefits in terms of upgrades and such, you want to get that bar as far right as possible; It's only natural as a player. So instead of gradually getting to know these characters over time, like BG2 did for instance, you can for the most part simply go to camp, spam gifts on a character and save/reload conversations to optimize your "score". It reduces well written characters to machines you can manipulate. That the peak of a relationship tends to be an awkward dry humping session set to this overbearing epic "romance theme" doesn't help either.
 
The funny thing is, this really influenced the way i role played my character. I went in wanting to be all goodie two shoes and help everybody, like i always have. However, now, a little over 20 hours in, i'm a lying, cheating, conniving, manipulative bastard, who will HELP DEMONS to get the best out of every deal.
 
This is actually pretty cool. It's literally a new perspective for me as an RPG player. Where i was previously absolutely incapable of being mean to anyone in Fallout 3, i will do the meanest shit to ANYONE for kicks in DA:O, because the role-play aspect of the game feels like a machine to mess around with, and not a world in which my actions are judged.
 
But cool or not, it feels like Bioware are selling themselves short. All this depth and all this dialog, and it's all reduced to a graphs and numbers.
 
I feel like a lot of this could have been changed around simply by hiding the numbers. If you'd hid for me the effects of a conversation, i'd feel less inclined to retry them and optimize their results. If i didn't have that bar to look at, i'd rather have to read a character's opinion of me out of their behavior. I wish this was an option.
 
How about the rest of you; feel like DA:O's roleplay aspect plays out differently than other recent RPGs?

I'm not gonna be a douche and say it's going to be a bad game, because, shit, i was ready to hate MW, and that game ate up god knows how many hours of my time. I'm not a big fan of "realistic" gun porn for various reasons; Borderlands' brand of crazy bullshit is more my kind of videogame tea. But still. MW played mad tight, had a mostly interesting campaign with great, memorable moments, and i'm sure MW2 will do its best to outdo its predecessor.
 
But man, that online play.. 
 
It's awesome. Maybe too awesome? MW became one of those games, like R6 Vegas or Gears, where if you didn't spend every waking moment playing, the community simply ran off. The R6 community became so abrasively idiosyncratic it became absolutely impossible to get into a game without being kicked for breaking some unwritten rule, or simply because you didn't have a high enough rank. That's right; You were routinely banned for not having played enough. On the Gears tip, that game just became chock full of god damn specialists who would pop your head off with sniper rifle hip shots. It just made the game less fun to play. 
 
MW didn't sink that far, but trying to get into a MW game today after a good while of not playing it is absolutely impossible to enjoy yourself. The community is simply too damn hard core, and too damn good, and in most cases, very happy to tell you just how bad you are at the game.
 
So i have this feeling, with MW2, there won't even be that lull post release full of inexperienced players. I'm pretty sure a lot of MW2-players will be returning MW players, and god knows they are prepared.  I don't know of a solution for this thing. On the 360, Trueskill has been a less than successful method of matchmaking over time, simply because the overall skill level is so high. I suppose today's "fix" for this problem is to throw in a coop survival mode, but, my god do i hate survival modes.
 
The result is, i'm not sure there's going to be any multiplayer for me to get into, and to be honest, with IW's style of super-scripted campaigns (MW in particular had notorious bits of Endlessly Respawning Russians where the only way to beat the enemy was to.. Charge ahead until the respawn stopped?), i'm expecting to see huge heaps of MW2 on the resale market. Which is honestly where i'll probably pick up my copy.
 
I hope this doesn't read too much like bitching about the game itself. The "problem" is that they've simply made too good and too popular an online shooter.
Or maybe i'm just being completely wrong: God knows i feared this with Halo 3 as well, and i had some fantastic times with that game. Hmm. We'll see.

 http://www.datassette.net/content/datashat-at-plex-london-september-4th-2009.mp3
 
I can not recommend this enough. This guy is a fucking hero.

So my second warranty-less 360 died a week ago, and since my economy is currently shot for a couple of months, i've returned to my other systems for gaming sustenance. The Wii has gotten a lot more play (though mostly through VC stuff), but also my PC, my Dreamcast and bizarrely my Xbox classic (got to play Oddworld Stranger again, woo!).
 
I'm struck with some really odd emotions that have taken me a couple days to process fully. The first while i actually felt sort of desperate to pick up another 360, in spite of not having money for things like, you know, food. Getting to a point where i realized i had other gaming media was immensely liberating, and i got back to playing games i haven't had time for in the longest while. I've finally finished Metroid Prime 3, i've been playing more Super Mario Galaxy, i finished Zelda 3 again, i've been getting into tournaments of Blood Bowl on the PC (which despite its bullshit frontend is really enjoyable if you're a board game kind of person), and i started replaying Freedom Force and its sequel. I even got time to plan a weekend co-op session of System Shock 2 with a friend who never played it but loved Bioshock. 
Got around to addicting my girlfriend to Rez on the PS2 as well, which is still a killer game.
 
I'm absolutely loving it. It feels.. free?

The feeling i've got is that games used to be more about plain fun for me, and the fun of playing the games themselves. I look back on the past year(s) of 360-centric gaming, and i realize how much time i've spent playing for achievements, and the sense of gentle failure at loading up a game to play and seeing how few of the 1000 points i've got. I realize for some, that adds a kind of meta-game to their hobby, but for me i have to say it mounted to kind of a painful addiction, where i'd play games almost out of spite to clear achievements and "clean up my life". I'm not even any kind of weird neat-freak (hardly), but there's a bizarre element of guilt or shame to those missing points that make me think i paid for a product that i'm not fully making use of. Games like Shadow Complex for instance wear this achievement meta-game proudly on their sleeve, and seeing there are achievements i haven't got in a game that's essentially all about completion in its purest sense makes me feel, well, shit at the game.
 
Sometimes this sensation will even make less of games i truly love. Bioshock for instance, and Bionic Commando Rearmed, both games i have played and replayed to the point where i really can't go back to them, but still there are those mother fucking achievements i didn't get. So how can i say i really finished them?
 
Frankly, the more i think about it, the more i'm certain that (for me at least) this meta-game high-score list is bullshit that brings the experience down to a really basic level. I don't feel any need to be matched up against my "peers". The gamer term is bullshit anyway; why do i want more "gamer points"? How is collecting gamer points supposed to make something i *already love* better? Can't point-centric games have their own leaderboards and lets be done with it? Should i be RATED on how i play my immersive RPGs? Having played Mass Effect twice over, have i not played it enough? Am i somehow LESS of a player for not grinding out the remaining achievements?
 
Worse yet, in some games i'm pretty sure achievements are effectively breaking some of the immersion for me. Not necessarily because they exist, but because they intrude in the gameplay experience. Again, if the game i'm playing is an emotional revenge story like The Darkness, why the fuck should i care about that achievement dialog popping up?  

The paradox of course is that i really do enjoy getting achievements. It's a reassuring little pop of success, and it always feels good. But on the whole i'm not sure they amount to anything worth caring about. Much like a cola addiction really. I love coke, but man, on the whole i'm not sure it's good to keep it a cornerstone of my life.
 
I remember reading or hearing some Nintendo quote that playing games shouldn't be incentivised, simply because playing the games should be reward enough. Considering the sense of reward i'm getting from playing achievement-free games, and replaying games from before achievements became cool beans, i'm pretty sure i agree. To be perfectly honest, at this point i wish the achievement system was opt-in. I'd love to not have that number there at all.
 
So, fair folk, take a few steps back; how do you really feel about achievements? Do you feel they have shaped or altered the way you play games?