Retrospective No. 56 The Last of Us

Titanic blockbuster smash hit? Check. Escort Mission? Check. Young, sparky female sidekick with no experience of the outside world? Check. Troy Baker? Check. With all these similarities I’d be stupid not to draw comparisons between The Last of Us and Bioshock Infinite. Long time readers might remember that last December I drew comparisons between Bioshock Infinite and Uncharted, a different Naughty Dog game. So because it is almost December and that isn’t much of a reason but it’s the best one I’ve got it here is round two of the Naughty Dog v Irrational Games showdown.

The premise is a great one. The Cordyceps fungus mutates and moves from zombifying ants (not scientifically accurate) to zombifying humans and you play as Joel, a grizzled survivor of the initial outreak, escorting the key to humanities redemption across the destroyed United States. In between you and salvation are the mutated mushroom headed monsters that once were humans and the monstrous looters and cannibals who supposedly still are humans. To add some substance to this weighty narrative the player puzzles and navigates their way through enemy forces in a very similar manner to how progression is managed in Bioshock Infinite.

So if it’s similar to Bioshock Infinite is it better or worse? I’d say it is better. The inclusion of stealth mechanics saves and elevates the combat above the usual boring encounter based arena gameplay. Unlike the battles where you had to kill certain number of enemies before continuing, the vast majority of these engagements could be completed with no kills whatsoever. The added variety ensures these don’t sink into tedium and feel diverse enough that each encounter is distinct and memorable. This is in part due to clever design allowing the player choices on how they proceed. You might opt to sneak around and with limited ammo this might actually prove easier than going all Rambo and slaughtering everything in sight. For the less gifted or more challenge easier levels allow the player to ‘hear’ through walls to track enemies and guide your progress for silent take downs of an entire room of enemies and the hardcore can have the pride of working it out themselves.

Unfortunately some similarities do exist between the titles that take you out of the action and make you feel like a visitor to a really cool interactive museum or tourist attraction. Encounter loading is fixed and inflexible. Enter from the wrong direction and enemies might spot you on sight or alternatively be so far out of position as to be cannon fodder. Additionally in its efforts to make you brown your underwear the game loads enemies out of thin air for a jump scare rather than trying to encourage frights naturally. Sneaking along with detection on only to have enemies pop up out of nowhere is frustrating but also immersion breaking. The game is pretty creepy as it is and a bit more faith in the horrible (in a good way) characters and environments they have created would do Naughty Dog some good.

 

Post-apocalyptia has never been so good. From first minute to last this is an exhausting, terrifying and challenging environment that thanks to great writing you really share with the characters on screen. Sections of this game rank alongside some of the most legitimately stressful gaming experiences I’ve had but every one of them is worth it. At times the game could be accused of trying too hard to manufacture a sense of wonder, a trait it shares with Bioshock. When it stops trying to force things and focuses on what makes it good which is solid game play and a brilliant story it is a cut above its blockbuster competition.

Retrospective No. 55 Spelunky

Procedurally generated is the hot new buzzword in game design as indie developers reinvigorate techniques from our gaming past for a modern audience. Random (or at least within set parameters) generation bypasses limitations in the creation of these titles which are often made with smaller budgets and smaller design teams. Creating levels in this manner allows added depth and keeps the game fresher as players don’t trawl through the same environments over and over. Recently, I’ve been playing Spelunky a mining themed procedurally generated platformer. Has Spelunky struck gold with this innovative idea or are you left sifting through rubbish?

 How does the unique selling point (well possibly not that unique thanks to it being the flavour of the month in indie game design) stand up to scrutiny? Does a procedural level creation system compare favourably to good old fashioned level design? Well I’d say it is a little bit hit and miss. The outcome is to actually make the levels feel slightly anonymous as there is little in the way of consistency to tie it all together. Some levels are frustratingly tricky and whilst other generations are noticeably easier than others due to the luck of the draw element that exists as each level loads. This makes it very hard to judge your progress as occasionally I could coast through a run due to a good draw whereas other goes felt like genuine ordeals as you died over and over.

 Is this just more whining on my part about being rubbish at a game? Oddly enough Spelunky is actually more interesting when the difficulty level borders on the insanely difficult. The challenge reflects well on a difficulty curve is set refreshingly high but this comes with a caveat. As exciting as it is to bound around the mines and outwit the puzzles thrown your way the complete absence of checkpoints makes things more frustrating than fun. It is expected that you will complete a run in one go which considering a fair portion of the time I don’t complete a level in one life is setting their expectations way too high. For a pick up and play title without much depth I found the standards required to get anything from the game well out of my reach. As an attritional challenge it might have worked for me but in its current format it is just an exercise in frustrating tedium.

Considering the game should be open to an incredibly huge number of variations I found Spelunky surprisingly boring. For all the different variations that are on offer the core game play remains exactly the same and that is where everything is kind of lightweight. This kind of platformer has been done to death (although possibly without requiring this much obsessive commitment) and Spelunky adds nothing new to a crowded marketplace. The random generation removes character from the environments and leaves the player endless trudging through a collection of samey levels with no sense of progressing on their journey. The grand sum of these advances has created limited quality control over the levels that you face and no sense of purpose. An innovation that should have extended the lifespan towards an infinite number of replays leaves me wondering why anyone would bother playing Spelunky more than once.

Retrospective No. 54 Medal Of Honor Frontline

It was only when I was halfway through writing this latest piece that I realised thanks to the wonders of my dark subconscious for Armistice Day I had picked a game that trivialises war and turns it into entertainment. So with these concerns about taste weighing heavily on my mind I will be looking at Medal of Honor Frontline. Frontline is one of many games in the series focusing on playing at Second World War re-enactments. It utilises a setting based on reclaiming territory following the Normandy Landings and carrying out covert missions in German occupied zones deliberately evoking memories of Saving Private Ryan. The only question is whether it can live up to the high standards set by this epic.

Initially, the game successfully projects an image of war being fun and exhilarating. Playing the Normandy Landing is a hell of a rush and is exactly what it should feel like being so heavily based on Saving Private Ryan. The gunplay is tight and responsive, the weaponry looks the part and the environmental effects are amazing. Charging off the landing boats, dashing up the beach and avoiding heavy artillery fire is brilliant. Should a war really feel so thrilling? A game definitely should and if it is a fictionalised account should it really matter? Ignoring such questions as they are far too important for me to deal with, the game continues but doesn’t really manage to match these early highs. Maybe this should be expected as the Normandy landings has become one of the iconic events in the Second World War so starting there will always lead to a sense of anticlimax. Of course as this is the order that history happened in there isn’t too much the developers could do to avoid this.

The game is built on trying to replicate the historic feel of the era but when the façade comes crashing down you are left with an empty experience. Once you leave the brilliantly realised beaches it’s very easy to get lost amongst the muddy textures of Normandy and the surrounding French countryside. Due to hardware limitations northern France looks very samey and repetitive which is a slightly underwhelming following a show-stopping beginning. More than once I entered a tunnel network trying to progress only to get turned around in the chaos and end up back at the entrance. Returning along these scripted routes is an eerie experience and you get a sense that you really are wiping out all life-forms on your march to the German high command. There appears to be literally no one else within miles of your location. It is almost like a war themed Truman Show where all the action only takes place for the benefit of the player character. This is also due to hardware limitations but it leaves you with an unsettling feeling of being watched or manipulated.

I’m not sure if it is entirely fair that I blame Medal of Honor for shattering my illusions when actually this is mainly down to my rubbish sense of direction and not being that good at the game. Would intrusive prompts telling me where to go really be a better option than allowing me to stumble blindly in circles around war ruined France? Both of these sound really irritating and it would be just as likely to ruin the mood if a prompt popped up telling me where to head next. I guess my only mild objection would be that progression points tend to be through narrow rubble strewn corridors presumably to close up the map and hide the boundaries of the game. Unfortunately as it is set largely in rubble strewn cities these corridors don’t tend to stand out as much as they probably should. Once again hardware limitations seem to be my main complaint and the developers can’t really help this. It feels unfair to be criticising a game for flaws and features that are intrinsic to all games but they just feel more grating in this context. Other developers found better ways of dealing with these issues and parts of the game seem so brilliant it is disappointing that it is hindered in such an avoidable fashion.

Retrospective No. 53 Super Mario Land

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptpyWR7O60M

If you could all kindly follow that link before reading this post I’d be very grateful. (You don’t need to listen to all ten hours but I’m pretty certain you’ll want to.) It partly provides a bit of context but mainly it’s because I am lacking in the skills necessary to embed this hypnotic, rhythm into the background of this page. Trust me if I could you’d never be able to leave. This is the soundtrack to the first game I had bought for me and considering it sold nearly 20 million copies that might be true for lots of you. However, as I booted up the cartridge the other day and fell back under its hyperactive, slightly agitated, hypnotic spell, doubt began to creep into my mind. Maybe, one of the foundations that my gaming life is based might not actually be that good.

The game starts, that music begins and all is good with the world. The jumping is present, the head crushing, curb-stomping is featured and you collect coins and mushrooms to give yourself powers. It is all very basic and very standard Mario but also you would expect this for pretty much any platformer. Mario has set the standard so other companies have tried to mimic it. So where do the doubts come in? Well I found that pretty much as soon as I left the first world I started to notice flaws that I had failed to spot as a six year old. Freed from the hypnotic effect of the world’s greatest soundtrack everything seemed a bit mediocre. The controls are a little sloppy with Mario having a frustratingly huge braking distance. This wouldn’t be so bad if some of the platforming from a very early stage ranks amongst the trickiest that Nintendo have ever put forward. The cynic in me might suggest that the massive early difficulty spike helps to bulk out what is a relatively lightweight game but going back to play this as an adult was actually refreshingly challenging. It’s odd that a slightly ragged design choice somehow makes for a pretty fun game and maybe we are lucky that it worked out this way.

The odd choices also extend to the bizarre cast of enemies that populate the game world. Most of the enemies that pop up here are of species which we never see again. Perhaps Mario is contributing to their extinction as he goes around massacring leaping Easter Island heads or angry fire-breathing sphinxes. Thinking about that in this context is actually sort of disconcerting. Maybe these species are desperately clinging to their lands and lives while trying to fight off a fearsome invader. Whatever the cause the result is a game that doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the series at all. Mario can’t swim and uses a submarine, the final boss (some strange alien who only appears again in Super Mario Land 2) is fought in a biplane whilst the game turns into a weird scrolling 2D space shooter. To cap it all Mario flies off with the Princess (not Peach for all the judgemental puritans out there) in a jet which just raises more questions such as “Why wouldn’t you use the awesome jet rather than the ancient biplane to battle the final boss?”

Super Mario Land is thankfully more than being the world’s greatest soundtrack even if it ranks as one of the weaker Mario platformers. In the context of the Mario series this feels like a standard early Nintendo ploy of creating generic games and slapping the name of a major brand on the box to see the sales soar. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad but it does seem to stop it being great. It is hard to marry the image presented in this game with the other Mario titles and even the other games in the Super Mario Land series. The unfortunate effect is that the game feels like a Hangover themed Mario holiday in Sarasaland (I literally found that out for the first time whilst researching this). This adventure you’d rather forget comes complete with a total lack of recognition of the events that took place and no acknowledgement that it ever happened. The Mario games aren’t exactly continuity heavy so I wouldn’t say Super Mario Land was a waste of time but don’t be surprised if you don’t get quite what you were expecting.

Constant Delays

Hi everybody,

Sorry for my complete inability to keep this updated recently. Won’t bore you all too much with the details but a change in job has left me a little busier than I had been. Hoping to get back on top of this soon and start updating more regularly again.

Thanks for understanding.

Retrospective No. 52 Mary King’s Riding Star

Here it is. Hope it was worth the wait.

For the last couple of games I’ve focused on how much more fun you can have when you are allowed to do what you want and play as you wish. Younger readers who have grown up in a gaming market where women actually outnumber men in terms of people who play games might not realise that this wasn’t always an option. The next sentence comes with the risk of sounding well in advance of my actual years. You see kids, in my day girls and presumably women (if they had even been given a second thought) were expected to play dross like Mary King’s Riding Star and enjoy it because as everyone knows all girls like ponies.

I’m not opposed to horses in my video games just in case some equine rights protesters were getting ready to picket my little corner of the internet. I adore shadow of the colossus, I’ve loved horse riding segments in the Legend of Zelda or Assassin’s Creed series and I’m incredibly disappointed that horse meat is off the menu of British supermarket lasagnes.  It’s just if there is to be a horse riding segment in any game I’m playing I want it done well. Surely if a game is entirely about horse riding as in there is literally nothing more to this game other than horse riding (it’s a dressage game endorsed by one of the leading dressage riders in the world) then you will be guaranteed fantastic horse riding mechanics.

If you made this assumption then you will be sorely disappointed. A decent portion of the game is spent simply looking after your rather terrifying looking horse. This scores points for teaching children about the responsibilities of owning an animal but loses all of them again for being incredibly tedious and uninvolving. Any children who did play this would surely grow up to neglect their pets from the sheer force of the traumatic tedium the game inflicts on them. When we get to the riding ring things sadly don’t improve. The game uses an isometric view point and some awful graphics to show a horse sliding around a ring whilst the player tries to judge jumps on this horrible interface. Almost as if to combat the terrible and lazy camera choices a magic line leading you to your next obstacle is drawn reducing player involvement to simply following exactly what the game tells you to do. The end result is something that is frustratingly complicated whilst being insultingly simple at the same time.

There was a time when males and females were compartmentalised into categories of who would play what game (I don’t have children so this might still be happening but I’m not aware of it.) Boys would be pushed towards age inappropriate titles whilst girls sadly were swamped by small, cute animals, fairies, sparkly things and pink. In some toy fields this branding works because the output product could claim to be of comparative standards between the two sexes. Unfortunately in gaming this hasn’t always been the case and Mary King’s Riding Star is a classic example of the attitude of some game developers to female customers. The game is shoddily made and monotonously dull to the point of being insultingly bad as if the assumption is that any rubbish with horses in will sell well just because of the target audience. It is arrogance of the highest order and shows total contempt for the player a huge gaming demographic if they just can’t be bothered to put the effort in.

Very Long Wait

I’ve just realised its been a month with no update. A post is on its’ way soon.

Retrospective No. 51 Watch Dogs

Last week I had a lot of fun being up to date for a change, writing about what a fantastic time I had playing Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes. So much fun that I decided I’d give it another go this week and talk about Watch Dogs, the great hope for next-gen gaming that ended up as something of a damp squib if only because nothing could ever live up to the hype that surrounded its promotion. The fact that it doesn’t look as good as it had in development turned a lot of people against it. (It definitely doesn’t match the quality of the screenshot below.) Graphics aren’t everything however and a they are still great to look at despite everyone’s disapointment at what might have been. So why do I still hate Watch Dogs so much?

Game play wise it feels distinctly average mixed with some really nice moments which is certainly not a crime and not worthy of my hatred. The stealth mechanics are actually really good fun to play. Allowing you to access CCTV and other cameras in the area to observe guards and mark them on your map is really fun and identifying where guards are to plan your assault is a great idea that it shares with Ground Zeroes. My only complaint would be that the shooting mechanics are too good with the bullet time feature making everything feel a little too easy if you are discovered. It is a a little disapointing to stealth your way through a mission only to blunder but discover you could have wiped everyone out as a one man killing machine anyway.

The story is a little ponderous at times and isn’t quite sure where it falls on the whole privacy invasion spectrum. Elements of the plot seem quite negative regarding the intrusion that modern life places on our private lives but this seems a little false when characters, including the player character gleefully use these same tools to murder and wreak havoc. This balance is felt throughout and as an open world game where the player character is more clearly defined as a hero the game play and story elements sometimes struggle to blend. However, this is a problem of any open-world game which follows a fairly regimented plot so once again shouldn’t be enough to make me dislike it.

If everything is serviceable, by the numbers game play, with good graphics, a fun representation of Chicago and some novel touches what about Watch Dogs could possibly have raised my ire? It is oddly enough the very thing the game purports to be against that proves its downfall. For a game with a subtext of the dangers of an overly connected, easily to infiltrate society it seems awfully keen on encouraging these elements of game play. Fellow players whilst online can ‘hack’ into and ‘invade’ your game setting up scenarios where you have to discover their identities and hunt them down whilst they try and remain hidden collecting information. This is exactly as pleasant as their careless terminology sounds like. There is nothing as irritating as spending ten minutes working your way through the busy Chicago streets only to find that all activities and story missions are locked until you either win or lose this unwelcome, uninvited head to head. I bought Watch Dogs for the single player experience and forcing me to play multiplayer is not a way to endear me to your product. It is frustrating and not what I want to do. If I have invested in your product it should be my decision as the end user to choose how I play it. If a developer has put in interesting features that are exciting to play people will use them but forcing them to do so just isn’t the answer.

Somewhere in the Ubisoft offices some smug designer is sat behind their desk grinning their smug little smile to themselves obsessing over how clever and brilliant their ideas are. This same person is so smug and self-satisfied that they came to the realisation that their idea is so good not involving yourself in it was negatively impacting how you enjoyed Watch Dogs. So in all of their genius they decided you should have to take part because it was for your own good. It is this kind of logic that infuriates me and has left Watch Dogs a shell of a game. Conceptually it’s interesting, the game certainly looks the part but at its core it is an actively irritating and unenjoyable experience. The most frustrating element is whichever control freak put the forced multiplayer in the game obviously missed the central message of the story mode. What we are left with is unbalanced, not that much fun and certainly not how I want to spend my free time.

Retrospective No. 50 Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes

Last week I was talking about whether size matters in video games. Using the unfortunately bloated Lego Lords of the Rings as my example I think everyone will agree I was fairly strongly against this supposition. This week I’m going to look at this from the opposite angle taking an extremely short game and seeing whether it holds up to my suppositions from last week and can compete with the longer titles on the market. In a bit of a departure from my normal format the game will also be a current generation, recent one that I only actually played at the weekend. This makes it less of a retrospective and more of a really late review.

Reports online suggested that the game could be completed in five minutes and was failing to offer players the kind of value that they had come to expect from the asking price that a full retail release gets. Having waited a while to play it myself I received a slightly reduced price but in hindsight I would happily have paid full asking price for this. Completing the story, even if achievable in five minutes, unlocks a fair amount of additional missions all to be carried out on a well-planned and interesting map. Side missions have a surprising amount of variety that reflects the eccentric genius that is Hideo Kojima with some being fun diversions whilst others are genuinely challenging tasks to complete.

Without a walkthrough guide just playing the game the way I felt I should have been playing the main campaign took me roughly two hours. Having played two of these side missions they have also taken me roughly two hours as I slowly crawled around an incredibly atmospheric Cuban military base. Despite my complaints with unnecessary bulk in games last week I can understand why some players might baulk at paying retail prices for an experience shorter than many films. Having said that others might feel it’s a blessing to not spend more than two hours with the camera focused on Big Boss’s sculpted behind. To focus solely on these issues with length is to ignore what makes this one of the greatest games I think I have ever played.

For two hours I was Big Boss and it was thrilling. Sure I might have been spotted twenty times and generally made a hash of my supposedly covert extraction operation but I’d made a colossal mess on my own terms. There is no rail-roading here, no endless corridors to force me down so I experienced everything exactly as the developers intended. I did it my way even if that involved much dying and countless retrying. I honestly hope this is the future of gaming where players get given loose goals and a large arena and are just encouraged to play. I mentioned before in my retrospective of Bioshock Infinite that it felt like travelling through a really interesting performance piece and this is the antithesis of that spectator based experience. You aren’t just an audience member marvelling at some admittedly fairly awesome sights and spectacles. Instead it feels like you are actually a participant and this immediacy grabbed me for the entirety of my playthrough.

So having spent the past seven days brooding over the obsession with the length of our video games, I feel this is the perfect counterpoint to the size obsessed. Previous Metal Gear games have been hindered by bulky cutscenes, at their most extreme over an hour long, which were necessary to drive what is a fairly convoluted plot. This stripped back version, although still with impressively cinematic opening and closing scenes has urgency to its action that has often been lost in amongst all the exposition in the other games. It is still classic tactical espionage action (or operation this time) that you know and love but it feels like you are actually living it more than ever before. If a game is this good my only complaint about length would be the length of time we have to wait for a sequel.

Retrospective No. 49 Lego Lord of the Rings

Bigger we are reliably informed is better. That’s why the largest size is a ‘super’-size. Bigger anything means better value that’s why larger purchases are also ‘mega’ and all the other positive connotations that you could possibly ever think of. Is this maxim always true especially in video games? Players frequently decry experiences that last less than a weekend and with the relative expense of games compared to other entertainment mediums perhaps this is a valid complaint. Length (keep your minds out of the gutters) is valued by gamers just as highly as graphics, game play and story. So should we value short but sweet or risk turning our games into a horribly bloated mess? (Like the troll below. Extremely tenuous link.)

Who better to champion the cause of short but sweet than some of the shortest, most peaceful fantasy characters ever created? Taking its cue from the vast library of other Lego made-over titles it plays out short segments of key scenes from the films whilst transposing the action into the bodies of cute little Lego minifigs. The result has always been an adorably humorous take on popular franchises that is extremely family friendly. However, an odd line in dark humour that sits comfortably just beneath the surface has also ensured that the games are wildly popular outside of their core demographic.

Lego Lord of the Rings deviates from the established formula which in a series that is now so long running is essential to ensuring it remains fresh and relevant. The first Lego Star Wars game was released in 2005 and the games have gone through a steady evolution since then. Hub areas have become more detailed and significantly larger; cut scenes (always carried out in hilarious mime) have become more in depth and interactivity has increased to create a large toybox simple for players to have fun in. Up until this stage the constant change and expansion seemed to be a great thing. The games were getting bigger and better all the time but traipsing around Middle-Earth it seems like the series has plateaued.

The hub worlds in previous games played as small arenas for fun brick smashing, coin collecting chaos to take place. The decision to abandon this format for a free exploration of the entirety of Middle-Earth recreated in brick form sounds like it would be an incredible scaling up of this idea but it just doesn’t work like that. The vast majority of the environment is disappointingly indestructible with settlements and interactive areas feeling like lonely outposts lost in a dull wilderness. Similarly, this film series just doesn’t actually have enough recognisable characters to make these areas feel alive. Diagon Alley or the Cantinas in Star Wars had lively interactions to carry out even if it was just characters milling around but The Lords of the Rings offers nothing like the depth of interactivity making it feel lonely and significantly less fun.

The sense of a game failing to deliver on the fun is felt throughout this entry. By adding in the official dialogue to cut scenes it feels less like a comical, fun take on Lord of the Rings and more like someone acting it out in their bedroom. Previously, these games were full of heart and humour and in trying to match the tone more closely to that of the films so much character has been lost that I’d wonder why they even bothered making it. If you wanted a tie-in game to The Lord of the Rings there are many better than this already in existence. They don’t have such a truncated storyline, they have better combat and you might actually be able to follow what is going on. When these issues are combined with a massive but ultimately empty free-roam Middle Earth the result is a dull, lifeless, missed opportunity and it left me feeling disappointed by a Lego game for the first time ever.