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No post for this week. I will be back on Thursday to celebrate being one year old! (The blog that is not me personally.)

 

Retrospective No. 42 Payday 2

Stealthily climbing onto the roof I peeked through the skylight to scout where the guards were. Instantly spotted I panicked fired a few rounds, shattering the glass and triggering a full alert. I stumbled forward through the roof landing in a heap. Gaining a second wind I ran into the gallery, grabbed a painting and promptly triggered the security gate. Five long minutes passed while the hacker disabled the security measures during which time I was filled with so many bullets I clinked as I ran. Charging towards the escape van my bot allies fell in the storm of bullets but it didn’t matter, we had done it. We snuck away with the loot leaving only a mountain of corpses and hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage as evidence were even there at all. If this sounds ridiculous it’s because it is. I am terrible at Payday 2 but I love it.

Payday 2 is a multiplayer heist game (if you couldn’t tell from the opening paragraph) using a reworked first-person shooter engine to make it more favourable to the stealth and crime game play elements. Unfortunately, these separate ideas don’t necessarily blend together very smoothly. Upon triggering an alert the game goes all guns blazing and turns into an out and out shooter. When I’m in control the action most closely resembles a group of toddlers playing cops and robbers with live ammunition. It’s chaotic, badly organised and appears to be slightly lacking in hand eye coordination. I’m having so much fun this doesn’t matter in the slightest but to an external observer it must seem a mess.

 

During these moments the repurposing of a standard first person shooter game mechanics into this pretty fun heist game becomes fairly obvious. The actual cracking of safes, hacking of doors or other tasks requiring a deft touch is carried out automatically leaving the player to protect the equipment. This turns the game from a stealth orientated experience into a horde mode survival. Fortunately, the game excels when this is the focus as the shooting game play is considerably stronger than the stealth elements. The construction of the aforementioned corpse towers is pure run and gun, adrenaline pumping entertainment and is easily the highlight.

Stealth game play tends to be poorly suited to a first person viewpoint anyway so perhaps this isn’t surprising. A third person camera gives a sporting chance helping to accommodate for the lack of real world feedback that a controller and screen interface can actually offer. Without it sneaking around can feel a little clumsy. This is certainly the case when you are as bad at it as I am. The strength of the shooting mechanics may just be a necessity to provide balance and stop this fun multiplayer mayhem from degenerating into controller snapping chaos.

There was one overriding question at the heart of all this slaughter. With all the fire power you are packing is payday 2 too easy? As I’ve mentioned me and my friends are bad at this game and so far we’ve escaped with the spoils every single time. The game may send waves of enemies after you as punishment for making mistakes but the volume at which we could despatch them easily outweighed the rate they were sent after us at. Health is generous and regenerating, whilst downed team mates can be revived within 30 seconds of death. Even if this time elapses a player is in custody for a few minutes to leave the team a man short but can re enter the fray when this time limit expires. (Which as you are implied to be dead or in custody is slightly jarring.) The end result is like the Marx brothers take on Reservoir Dogs, slapstick bloody but fantastically good fun.

Retrospective No. 41 Anna Kournikova’s Smash Court Tennis

Tennis is one of those things that translates poorly into a video game experience. The deftness of touch or the pure blasting power that typifies an exciting tennis match has so far proved difficult to replicate in a satisfactory fashion. The little nuances that make the sport appealing have so far proved extremely difficult to replicate using a video game controller. Even the motion control bubble has failed to adequately solve this and most steps forward still just feel like a prettier way to play pong. Anna Kournikova Smash Court Tennis was, despite my fond (and obviously mistaken) memories, no exception to this disappointing return. (Ace pun, yeah?)

Launched in 1999 to cash in on the burgeoning popularity regarding Anna Kournikova’s tennis career I had high hopes for this title as a decent sports simulation. Being a sport mad youngster I played lots of football games but always struggled to find titles to satisfy my thirst for other sporting pursuits. Sadly this game fell well below my lofty expectations. What you are offered instead of a decent sport sim is the cheapest, most unprofessional looking of all sports games I have ever played. From the elevator music in the menus, right down to the one licensed player this game has (any guesses who?) everything about this ‘sports’ game screams cheap. Even comical redeeming features like a large cast of Namco guest stars from other games are shoehorned in poorly. The developers have failed to implement these characters well even when going with the cartoony style that they chose. Playing tennis as Pacman is nowhere near as fun as it sounds and it definitely doesn’t make a bad game any better.

When it comes to the actual game play things really aren’t any better with the fare offered up having very little in common with actual tennis. The players hit the ball at the same speed regardless of your positioning or timing making the only way to successfully score a point a battle of attrition. If you can outlast your opponent in a rally (which frequently turn into mad volleying fests) then the point is yours. They also have a tendency to crawl around the screen at a snail’s pace making the court seem gigantic and the players pathetic. This lack of pace totally negates any of the tactical elements of tennis in favour of a constant battle to place a slow moving passing shot just out of your opponents reach. This produces a game which is not only deeply unsatisfying to play but also looks rubbish while you are doing so.

More mystifying than Ms. Kournikova’s popularity is the enjoyment I got out of this game when I was a child. Going back to play it now (and I’d encourage all of you to refrain from revisiting these forgotten ‘gems’ unless you wish to shatter your rose tinted glasses) it is a monstrosity. Maybe I’ve underestimated how far the tennis game has progressed in the last fifteen years but they feel of a totally different class to this. It is dull and lifeless with barely any sense of control over your shot selection an only a limited sense of control over the player character at all. The arcadey game that we are left with if perhaps most notable as one of the more cynical uses of celebrity endorsement to shill a game. This is simply Smash Court Tennis Two with a lazy branding tie in yet it somehow even manages to be inferior to the original game. It just seems like they didn’t really care about putting in a great performance and hoped the name recognition alone would be enough to turn a profit. In the context of Kournikova’s tennis career this actually makes her a brilliant ambassador for this game.

Retrospective No. 40 2048

When I close my eyes all I see is sliding tiles and numbers rushing by. It’s even infected my dreams. Recently I’ve had many a restless night watching my efforts multiply before it crashes down around me, waking in a cold sweat only to realise that everything is ok. So what game could possibly be so damaging to my psychological well-being? What horrific scenes conjured up are causing me to be short of sleep? Are nightmarish moral dilemmas leaving permanent scars on me to affect me during my waking hours? Or maybe it is none of these but the blatantly, obvious, logical answer that you all should have guessed.

Caught up yet? My sleepless nights are obviously the result of over-indulging in 2048. (I’m not sure why I continue with this joke when I have the title plastered over the top of each item.) The game, if you have managed to avoid the pop-culture sensation is a simple tile matching challenge. Obviously the stuff of intense nightmares. Players slide numbered tiles using the touch pad looking to add pairs of numbers. Successfully matching two tiles creates a single tile of double the previous value. Adding these and increasing in multiples of two the eventual goal is to try and create the mythical 2048 tile before your board becomes entirely filled with tiles and you can make no further moves. Can you feel the intensity?

This game play is incredibly simple but ridiculously addictive. At its core the game combines instant point gratification (pretty much every move will result in a score) with a concept that is easy enough to grasp for all players. Even random hysterical flails and swipes on the touch pad will enable a player to go fairly deep into the game. Fairly soon it becomes apparent however, that to make it all the way to the end a more tactical approach is necessary and this is where the addiction sets in. Strategising and trying different forms of play is a fun experience as progress in the early stages is almost always rewarded with success. By the later stages, utilising a random tile spawn and the hard to control nature of the tiles resulted in some tantalisingly close encounters with 2048. Most frustrating are the occasions where you have feasibly enough tiles on the board to form 2048 but are unable to manipulate them into place before getting a dreaded game over. The random number god is in full effect here though and many a promising game is ruined by a cruel tile spawn.

 (Simple isn’t it?)

My obsession with 2048 was a fleeting fling which lasted a grand total of three days. It is a fun little puzzler but not the impossible behemoth all the hype had led me to believe it was. The simple concept works well and proves a decent challenge even if the random luck elements are part of the game which is unavoidable. Completing the game ruined it for me. I had built it up as this epic challenge which could take months to crack and it totally failed to meet these expectations. The ascent was so much better than the view from the summit and this is because I foolishly believed the hype that had built up around this game. It has soured my opinion on what is still a really fun, free game.  These are two conditions that normally would be all I needed to praise it from the mountaintops (My metaphors have gone slightly astray) but this time it wasn’t enough.