Right then, first thing's first, I've recently become aware three games that have brought me ever closer to failing the challenge. I haven't given in, but here they are, and the reasons why:
Temptation 2: South Park: The Stick of Truth
This one's a bit of a mystery to me. Am I a South Park fan? Not really; I kind of lost interest as it got ever-more ridiculous. Am I an RPG fan? Yes, and I've got plenty of those games and I know it. But everything I've seen on the new South Park game looks so good that I really wanted to give it a try. I've seen Angry Joe's review, and Total Biscuit's WTF is... video on it, and it really does look like a game I would enjoy playing. Apart from anything else, it's about time someone put out a decent South Park game!
Temptation 3: One Finger Death Punch
Another one from Total Biscuit, this simple-but-intricately-timed brawler looks like an absolutely amazing way to fill a few hours. I'd love to download it onto my Xbox, (there's no way it would happen on my laptop!) but I'm keeping it quiet for now.
Temptation 4: Final Fantasy VII.
An old friend put me on to this. I think this game is as good as Final Fantasy ever was or ever will be, and I've owned it on the PC and the Playstation. Sadly, there's no way on God's Green Earth that any computer we have in our house will run a game ported to PC in 1998, and I've lost my copy of the game for the Playstation (we suspect it was stolen.) Then my friend put on Facebook a picture of him playing the game on the PSVita, and if I ever get one of those, that will be the reason - so I can play Final Fantasy VII again. Trouble is, dropping at least a tonne on the Vita and buying a game I already own will come dangerously close to breaking the challenge, so in its spirit, I will wait until it is over before I do this.
And now on to what I've been up to this week...
Actually, not a lot. Apart from the fact that I've been busy most nights this week, I've also been quite ill with the back-end of a cold. I've had headaches, I've been dizzy, and I've been unable to regulate my body temperature - three things that are not conducive to having a particularly good time when I've been playing video games. Plus my girlfriend was up this weekend so my PS2 has remained off. So most of these notes actually cover what happened last week...
Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel
So I spent quite a lot of time last week talking about how I think we came to have such a game on the PS2, and why a relatively poor addition to the otherwise-excellent Fallout franchise came to exist at all. If you missed it and are wondering what Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is, here's a quick re-cap: The game is a top-down Dungeon-Crawler action title, with some very basic RPG elements based on the Fallout setting (post-apocalyptic 50s style.) The idea is that you are an initiate in the Brotherhood of Steel - about as near as the Fallout series gets to having a 'good' faction - sent on a quest to find some of the brotherhood. Naturally, things don't go to plan, and you end up fighting your way through Radscorpions, Raiders, Ghouls and Super Mutants.
There are quite a few aesthetic differences between this game and the other games in the Fallout series that are worth mentioning straight away. First, you do not 'create' your character in the usual sense; you choose from a choice of three (and later six:) Nadia, Cyrus and Cain. Nadia is the 'quick and nimble' archetype who moves slightly faster and has the ability to use dual weapons. Cyrus is a heavy-set man, tougher than Nadia who can't use dual weapons but can use heavy weapons. Cain is a Ghoul, neither tough nor particularly quick but can use all the weapons and also has the advantage of being immune to radiation. This difference will put off a lot of the more traditional Western RPG fans, but it does have the advantage of being able to put you in the action more or less straight away. These, by the way, are the only differences between the characters. The dialogue options and the way each character handles certain situations never changes in the slightest.
The other change of course is the music. The background music during the game, when present, evokes a feeling of hopeless defeat and laziness, synonymous I think with Fallout. We do have an ironic 1950s track that plays at the start (uncredited, but probably called 'Nuclear Blast.) Most significantly though are the inclusion of tracks from a number of notable Metal bands of the time, including Slipknot, Messhugha and Chimaira. These generally appear during boss battles, and there is nothing like shooting the shit out of the devious mayor of the local town while listening to a vocal-free mix of The Heretic Anthem. It is a little out of style with the usual music you might expect from a Fallout game, but as I mentioned last week, this game was to cater to a very different demographic.
The graphics aren't amazing, in fact for a 6th gen console game they're actually quite poor. The character models only look a little bit better than something you might find on the PS1. Generally, they didn't have to be much better than that, as most of the action is coming from the top-down so you wouldn't necessarily have the kind of view that would give rise to that kind of detail. But you really do notice when you talk to characters and the quality of their models and animations are... repetitive, to say the least. The voice acting is done well enough, but the script sounds like it was written by a teenager with a very limited vocabulary.
Then we get to the gameplay itself. It is pretty standard stuff; running around, hacking and slashing and shooting at various enemies that will do nothing but try to kill you. You eventually pick up a balance of Ranged, Melee and Grenade-style weapons, and as you can equip up to three weapons I guess it's the best balanced option to pick all three types. With Melee weapons, there's usually not a lot of difference in how they handle; a Hammer is only marginally quicker than a Knife, for example, but does more damage. The difference, then, is that certain characters can't use the larger weapons. With ranged weapons, there's a little more variety between single-shot, automatic, shotguns and all sorts really, though certain characters can't wield two at the same time. The aiming is rubbish: you press R1 to aim a shot; sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Finally there are the grenades, and I have to wonder what on earth they were thinking when their functionality was designed. You have to hold down the button to throw them, and then a little glowing light moves steadily ahead from you to represent your shot power. You then let the button go and they're thrown in more often than not a random direction as it gets stuck on a piece of scenery. Cover is limited to being able to duck, which I wouldn't have notices at all if I hadn't bashed all the buttons to find out, and even then it's hard to tell.
To be fair, I think all this was before controls in shooters were really standardised, so there are some differences to the controls and functionality which may have just been ill-educated guesswork. And there is some fun to be had in gunning and slashing your way through hordes of enemies. Why do you think we play Dynasty Warriors? However it gets repetitive very quickly and, despite the inclusion of three characters, doesn't lend itself well to multiple play-throughs. This is about my fourth, though I've never reached the end of the game.
For this one, I chose Cyrus, and ramped up the difficulty to the maximum available, and here's where it starts to get interesting: You have to pick your spots carefully. Some enemies are better dealt with ranged weapons than others, but ammo is limited and so is your health, so you have to learn how each enemy attacks, how to avoid it and how to kill them as quickly as possible. You find yourself asking questions like: "Is it worth using a few rounds of ammo to deal with this Radscorpion who will poison me if I get too close?" "These raiders are pretty fierce and I'd love to shoot them but I know that some of them have got Flamethrowers, should I save my ammo for them?" "Is it worth taking a few hits to take down four guys at once with a grenade?" This is where the game comes in to its own, and almost becomes reminiscent of the old-school platform/run and gun style games where you'd have to memories enemy types and attack patterns to survive.
The problem is that the old games it emulates were generally over in an hour and a half. With this game, it takes about that to get through a single section of the game, and there is a LOT of it. The plot isn't particularly compelling either. Currently I'm at the end of the first chapter out of three. I'd love to get to the end of this title simply to say that I have, but I have a feeling I will be tired of the overly-repetitive gameplay long before the game is.
We'll see where I am with it next week, though if my eye doesn't stop twitching, I won't be playing much of anything...
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