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Okay, so I’m late to the game (pun intended, I guess) on this one. I bought it today pre-owned and I figured I’d share my thoughts for the benefit of those who still haven’t gotten their mits on it yet. If there’s one thing I can say about this game, is that it is huge. In fact I think it better deserves the term ‘sodding gargantuan’. If you ran on foot from one end of the map to the other it’d take you a good couple of hours, of that I’m certain.
Now, don’t expect the kind of voice acting you might find in the likes of LA Noire or Red Dead Redemption. This is on par with the original Silent Hill game, if not worse. I will admit I’m a total junkie for games-wot-act-like-movies. I like to see realistic graphics with stellar voice acting worthy of an A-Lister movie. It makes the cut-scenes almost impossible to watch when they’re badly done, and so mostly I’ve been skipping them.
The lip-synching and graphics (in the sense of the characters) isn’t anything to write home about; attention has clearly been focused solely on the environments, which – let’s be honest – is what Just Cause 2 is all about. We don’t care what the people look like, we care that the sweeping scenery we’re viewing after base jumping from a helicopter looks realistic and pretty. And it does.
Overall I would say forget the story, forget the cut-scenes and the voice acting, focus on blowing stuff up, shooting shut and grappling shit. This is a game designed purely for dicking around. And blowing stuff up.
The Happy:
- Huge map, plenty to explore
- The grapple! Oh, the grapple…
- Throwing yourself off cliffs is awesome
- Did I mention the grapple?
The Sad:
- Ammo is a rarity; starting a new mission does not replenish ammo, so you can go in effectively ‘unarmed’
- Sometimes the map can feel a little too big and, ultimately, pointless
- Fast travel isn’t unlocked for quite some time
The Gameplay:
Oh have you heard? Steam are now offering Team Fortress 2 to play online for free! Well I already had the game, but since I treated myself to a new gaming mouse (sadly something which the Mac needs to work on – hint hint), I will record some sessions with both friends and strangers.
I should warn you now: I’m not a PC gamer. This could get stupid.
If there is one memory from playing Homefront that will stick in my mind, it’s within the first few minutes, before I even gain control over my voiceless character, when I looked out of a moving bus window to see two Korean soldiers gunning down a young couple in front of their four year old son, who was screaming and crying whilst he watched.
This experience is basically what playing Homefront felt like. THQ apparently decided that difficulty levels were for Farmville users and have scrapped them entirely, meaning that the game – whether you’re a seasoned pro or a complete FPS n00b – can be either far too easy, or far too difficult.
(I should note at time of writing, I am only a little way into Homefront and have not yet been presented with a difficulty option, nor could I find one)
The aim assist on this game is also something that needs a little help. I will admit, I’m a user. However, I needn’t be on this game, because you have to have your cross-hair aiming dead on what you’re trying to shoot, or the damn thing refuses to lock. From the very beginning I was inundated with fire, getting splattered all over the walls whilst I was trying to shoot one of the targets.
Now I’ve played plenty of shooters. This doesn’t normally happen. It just felt as if I couldn’t get a bullet in edgeways from the word ‘go’. I’m going to give it more of a chance and see if this changes. However, I’m sorry to say it seems quite unlikely.
This aside, whether the single player was good or bad, I was looking forward to getting my mits on the multiplayer. Imagine my disappointment when I found that, having a pre-owned version, I then have to fork out a further £6 just to level up past level 5. I would have thought that with FPS behemoths such as Modern Warfare and Black Ops, THQ would have been trying to lap up passers by with a big free multiplayer tongue, but this additional cost is going to keep alot of players at level 5 whilst those willing to pay shoot up to level 50 and beyond. Luckily, the copy I bought came with a code that provides this service for free, but pre-owned gamers are certainly going to be disappointed. If you’re reading this to find out whether to buy Homefront, buy it new and buy the Multiplayer pack if that’s what you’re going for. It’s just needless extra cost otherwise.
By the time the LEGO series had reached the Harry Potter games, the idea was starting to fester a little. Punch bricks, collect studs, pull rope, build stuff… no matter what skin you wrapped around it, all of the games were becoming very similar. Of course it will never get old seeing your favourite movie characters run around in LEGO form, but the innovation was wearing a little thin.
LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean, however, seems to have gone back to its older roots, back to the days when the puzzles were challenging but fun, just like the original Indy game. There are a total of seventy something characters to unlock from all four movies of the film quadrilogy and the story covers all four movies.
Rather than an annoying hub world a-la LEGO Indy 2, which I found alarmingly easy to get lost on, there is a simply ‘Port’ level, where you are just on a dock, able to visit each story segment as you wish. At the moment I’ve not unlocked any more of this ‘home’ world (there’s a gate to the left and right of me, which I’d wager is unlocked by collecting gold bricks), but I can’t wait to see what they’ve got beyond!
I’ve just started the Dead Man’s Chest segment and so far things are looking fun. Captain Jack has his trademark swagger and all of the characters have their little nuances, like the dude with the wooden eye, Mr Cotton and his parrot and so forth. Sadly it seems like the women I’ve encountered so far do little more than run around (as in, no special moves on pressing B). Still, the man-folk have plenty to look forward to.
I’d definitely recommend playing this game. Whether you’re age 7 or 37 you’re bound to smile at least once, at the cut scenes if nothing else!
After a short hiatus and something of a do-over, Rae Jay Plays is back in action and this time, I intend to give you more updates, more reviews and more commentary! With any luck this website will eventually get its own domain of www.raejayplays.com but we shall see. Early days yet!
So if you’re new here, what can you expect to see?
Well I am Rae and I am going to be doing video game commentaries, reviews, articles and the occasional funny (photoshop/video mash-up) that will be posted here. I love doing top 10 lists and articles that you may not see on other gaming sites, like music about a Portal movie, or talking about what would happen if Mario and Yoshi had a baby.
I’m also hoping to eventually add Podcasts and video blogs to the list of things that this website offers, but baby steps, baby steps!
You may also notice, if you have been here before, that all of the other posts have kind of… vanished. The reason for this is that it had been a while since I posted, my trial screen recorder expired (I need to wait until the end of July to purchase the full upgrade) and it felt like an entirely fresh start was required.
When I have gotten RJP sufficiently on its feet, I am going to be looking for fellow writers, and guests bloggers. I am especially interested if you would like to review the score (music) in video games, or the writing, or something other than gameplay! Hardware/tech junkies also welcome to apply. This is not a paid position.
Watch this space, and click the ‘subscribe’ button to your right to be informed of future updates! Ciao!
Pending the release of Dead Rising 2, Capcom have released a ‘middle child’ set after the first Dead Rising, but before the second one, available on XBL Arcade. I admit, I was expecting something that had the graphical joy of Zombie Apocalypse, but what you actually get here is a good quality game with gore, fantastic choices of weapons, apocalyptic fun and hundreds – literally hundreds – of zombies.
You play a single dad, who finds himself in a small town in the backside of nowhere on the way to Vegas with his young daughter who’s been infected by the zombies, only staying alive by taking shots of Zombrex every 12 hours. The first problem is that they’re out of Zombrex, the second problem is that the military are moving in, and if our hero doesn’t find the Zombrex and some transport in time, the military will take his daughter away.
The best part of this game, right off the bat, is that all combo cards and levelling achieved within the game can be carried over to Dead Rising 2 when you get the game! This is brilliant, as you can restart the story level as much as you want in Case 0, but all levelling and money gets kept. The only thing that resets is the zombie kill-count.
If I have a qualm with the game, it’s that it suffers from the same problem that I have experienced with all Capcom games dating right back to the first Resident Evil; slow controls. Your guy feels like he’s running in slow motion minus the action movie soundtrack, and going from smacking a zombie upside the head with a newspaper and running away can feel a bit clunky – something which put me off the first game initially, as poor Frank ran along like he was bursting for a wee without a urinal in sight.
This flaw is overlooked because the remainder of the gameplay is fun. The sheer amount of zombies you are forced to plough through is jaw-dropping. Lumbering and slow though they may be, stop moving for a second and you’ll be zombie chow before you can say ‘where’s my Zombrex?’ The combat – again, if a little slow – is quite fun, and the amount of weapons never fails to amuse. You can shove traffic cones on zombies’ heads, throw playing cards at them, bat them around the head with a newspaper or go batshit bonkers and run at them with a rowing oar with a chainsaw on each end.
That alone is worth the Microsoft Points.
In conclusion, fans of the first won’t be disappointed and even if you weren’t a fan of the first and don’t intend on forking out £40 for Dead Rising 2, Case 0 is a fun, short game that’s well worth the money.
Ever since I purchased it a little over a week ago, Red Dead Redemption’s been pretty much all that’s been in my XBox. When I get a game that I love, I play it to death, and it’s rare that I trade them in. But something has caught my attention about Red Dead Redemption – it’s both the best and worst game that I’ve bought in 2010.
This isn’t a review, but Red Dead is the only game I’ve played this week so I just felt like talking about it (god bless not being paid to do this website; it means we haven’t got strict deadlines to work to, I’d hate for playing a game to become a well-timed chore).
I’m going to explain that best/worst comment below decorated with wonderfully western puns for your amusement:
The Good, The Bad and the Multiplayer…
Unless you open up a private game and invite your friends in to go and clear gang hideouts and go shoot some cougars, at the time of writing I wouldn’t touch multiplayer with a ten foot cattle prod.
There have been numerous, angry comments from fans on the internet who have been booted from public games (and that’s on the odd occasion they are actually able to join one due to ‘connectivity issues with other players’ – a common error message around the world). This is a little more than annoying and until Rockstar fixes it, this error has rendered half my game unusable, which is annoying given the amount of money I shelled out.
A Fistful of Glitches, For a Few Glitches More…
Whilst aesthetic glitches like the infamous ‘donkey lady’ and ‘cougar man’ don’t hamper gameplay and merely make a fun game funny, Red Dead has some more serious glitches that need ironing out. On more than one occasion, I’ve walked over, say, a bucket or a bale of hay only to be rocketed 100 feet in the air and fall to my death. This can be annoying if you’ve not had a chance to save your game after a difficult mission.
Another glitch, if you can call it that (I call it bad game design but there you go), is doorways. You can open a door, but then spend ten minutes face-planting either side of the door frame until you eventually sidle through like there’s an invisible net blocking you from advancing. The same tends to happen when your horse rides between rocks on the road, or obstacles in a town.
Once Upon a Save File in the West…
This brings me nicely onto the lovely modern world of autosaves! Come on Rockstar, get with it! You autosave after every change in honour, ever store purchase, every animal skinned and every stranger mini-encounter (you know, the ‘help, he stole mah horse!’ ones), so why oh why can’t you just take a leaf from the Assassin’s Creed II book and just ‘save as you go’?
Surely the game can cope? Safe houses and campsites would still be useful for changing clothes, sleeping to advance six hours and refilling ammo. The fact that there are so many places to save makes me wonder why autosave isn’t an across the board feature all the more.
Sandbox Drifter…
One of things that I love about this game is the size. It’s ruddy massive; and beautiful to boot. The sweeping, desert lanscapes, the weather effects, the quaint towns and ranches… I’m an out-of-the-closet country girl at heart and those who know me well know that I listen to more country music than I’ve had hot meals and have always had a penchant for the Old West. I just love how dusty and raw it all is.
That being said, I realised I’d clocked up a good 11 hours of gameplay before I realised that I hadn’t even finished the story – in fact I’ve still got West Elizabeth to unlock. I’d been so bound up in rescuing whores from kidnappers, having shoot-outs in gang hideouts, getting stolen horses back and picking flowers for old perverts that I’d totally forgotten somewhere along the line about the story – about what John Marston originally set out to do, and that was catch Bill Williamson.
You remember Bill Williamson? The guy at the beginning who shot– oh never mind, he’ll die of old age if I keep playing Blackjack long enough.
After the train wreck that was ‘Prince of Persia‘ where the stunning 3D visuals were replaced with clunky, ugly cell shaded graphics barely fit for the Nintendo Wii, Ubisoft finally pulled their finger out and realised that people loved and missed our old Prince. So they’ve brought him back and I for one couldn’t be more grateful.
As the original ‘trilogy’ went on, the Prince got more and more American and more and more annoying. It’s nice to see Ubisoft listening to fans, as they’ve kept the good parts of the latter games (the combat, the graphics, the game design) but have used the original voice actor and dropped the pseudo metal soundtrack.
Gameplay wise, the game is just like playing any other Prince of Persia, in that you run, jump, swing, climb, hack, slash and rewind time through a dozen hours or so of gameplay, all of it being easy to learn and difficult to master and always makes you want to leap into battle rather than avoid it. This is also a minor downside, as the levels all look fairly similar (as has always been the case with Prince of Persia games) and have a usual theme of ‘kill the horde of enemies for XP and then run, jump and climb your way to the door which was built unfeasible distances from the ground.
The only thing it seems that is missing from the game’s combat is the ability to run up a wall and backflip off, launching an attack on multiple enemies, which is a shame, as this was one of my favourite moves of the game.
One thing you can never berate Ubisoft for is their achievement whore friendly games; less than 2 hours into The Forgotten Sands and I’d racked up at least 6 achievements; most of them can be gotten simply by playing the game, which those of you who regularly ransack Rooster Teeth will be happy to hear.
Story-wise, it’s quite a simple fair: you have one half of the thing that can send the big bad away, the other half is god knows where, and you have to put them back together. In the meantime you must fight off King Solomon’s Army and avoid the giant monsters trying to kill you.
All in all, the game is about 60% puzzles and running, jumping, climbing fun an 40% combat, which isn’t nearly as fluid as previous games, and whilst proving far too easy on normal setting for seasoned fans of the Prince of Persia series, will prove an interesting, fun and challenging experience to those new to the series.
How Not to Play Alex Kidd