Backlog Beatdown: Being a Dragon again with Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage

 I’ve been playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage as part of the Spyro Reignited trilogy. Details of how I came to own this are detailed in my original review of Spyro the Dragon, and the same basic details apply, so let’s jump right into it:

Do you know what he is?

The plot of Spyro 2, such as it is, picks up from where the previous game left off. Spyro is looking to go on vacation with Sparx to Dragon Shores, but instead gets summoned to a fantasy realm called Avalar. There, he meets with Elora the Faun, Hunter the Cheeta and Professor the, er, Professor, who tell him that they’ve summoned him there to help to defeat Ripto, a diminutive but malevolent… I don’t know what to call him. Warlock, apparently. Anyway, he’s taken over Avalar with the help of his much larger minions Crush and Gulp, and since he comes from a world of Dragons who keep him in check, Spyro has been summoned to try to beat him. With the help of his new friends, Spyro chases Ripto across the Summer Forest, Autumn Planes and Winter Tundra, hoping to defeat the evil warlock and bring peace to Avalar.

The underwater sections added a
new dimension to the levels.

The gameplay is much the same as the original Spyro the Dragon, but the game was so good that this hardly matters. Spyro still has his old moves; he can charge, breathe fire and glide over long distances. In addition, he can hold projectiles in his mouth and manually aim them to spit them out again, and gain a quick hight boost while gliding. Later in the game, Spyro learns to swim, climb and even perform an overhead smash. It’s everything a sequel should be – everything that made the original game great, with enough new mechanics added to open the level design and vary the challenges.

The levels in Spyro 2 usually have an overarching objective – usually get to a certain point on the level, by which time you’ll have defeated the enemies that form the main antagonists for that level. There are also some orbs you must collect in order to open up certain sections of the game, and these are attached to your side quests. Some of these are quite mundane, such as killing a certain number and type of enemy, and most of them are fairly easy, but some of them are actually quite challenging, and apart from a couple of clangers where the solution is deliberately obtuse, they’re pretty good fun. The highlight for me was the Ice Hockey mini game early on! The flying levels make a welcome re-appearance as optional changes of pace, and they have time trials attached to them as well to make sure you’re bringing your A-game!

Gulp proves a significant challenge
when aiming for completion...

I also managed to complete the game 100%. This isn’t too hard to do, since there are no trophies tied up in multiplayer modes and the tasks are, with a few exceptions, quite easy – a fine game to play if you’re a completionist looking for something you can breeze few in a few hours. Just keep in mind that, unlike the first Spyro game, some of the areas are locked behind mid-game abilities so some backtracking is necessary.

The presentation is great too. The voice acting is spot on, the graphics show significant improvement from the original PS1 games with the Re-ignited trilogy and are absolutely gorgeous, and Stewart Copeland’s soundtrack is a great augment to an already fantastic game. The developers really hit their stride with the level design; a little more linear than the previous game but still with a sense of openness that put them ahead of their contemporaries. There are a couple of aspects that niggle – I’m not sure why, when returning to a level, you have to watch the cutscenes and in some cases do the main quest again; this feels like something that could have quite easily been left out.

All in all, Spryo 2: Ripto’s Rage is a great game that anyone should be able to pick up and have a decent amount of fun with. It is not a hard-core experience, but it knows what it is, tells the story it wants to tell and is the game it wants to be.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Backlog Beatdown: Taking down the Syndicate with Syndicate

My never-ending quest to get through all my video games is hampered by my love/hate relationship with long form role-playing games and strategy titles, requiring levels of commitment that often take months to get through an entire game, if I ever manage it. That being the case, it was a refreshing change to play a relatively short game!

Your HUD - Heads Up Display - is in an AR system
that goes across your field of view.

Syndicate, then. I might as well address the elephant in the room right now: I never played the original games that were released back in the 90s so I had no basis for comparison between the two different iterations of the game. For how many people have snarled at this 2012 Xbox 360 title for not being as good as the original game, it reviewed surprisingly well at the time, but I wasn’t tempted to buy it until it was on sale at a second-hand game shop, on the basis that I’d found the game on Metal Jesus’ Hidden Gems videos.

Syndicate on the Xbox 360 is a first-person shooter game with hacking elements, set in a grim Cyberpunk world of mega-corporations, asset wars and a downtrodden forgotten people. You play as Miles Kilo, an Agent, an augmented super-soldier created to enforce the mega-corporations they’re attached to. So far, so Shadowrun meets Deus Ex.[1] Your initial goal is to eliminate corporate rivals and protect your company assets through a series of linear levels, but as is very often the case with games like this, nothing is as it seems…

Looking back at that previous paragraph I’m not surprised to recall I’ve ended a few opening descriptions with “nothing is as it seems.” There’s nothing wrong with that; plot writers and consumers love a good twist and imagining a nightmare future where western life is bartered with and ended on the whim of the people in charge is sufficiently compelling enough to engage. But when I played Syndicate, it was hard to escape an exhausted sigh of “haven’t we been here before?” You just know the huge corporation you’re working for will turn out to be behind it all along, and that the people you thought were friends were enemies and the other way around. It tells the story reasonably well – it’s just that even at the time there was nothing new here.

No health bar here - your injuries are displayed by the
blood splatter effects on the screen.

As for gameplay, the shooting mechanics work reasonably well; we’d reached a point in gaming history when controls were standardised, so it was pretty much impossible to get it wrong. Syndicate gets it wrong anyway by forcing you to equip grenades like any other weapon before you could throw it, rather than mapping it to one of the buttons, but other than that, it works OK. What Syndicate brings to the table is hacking mechanics and what the game calls a DART-6 system, where you go into a Matrix-like view of the stage, slowing down time, making enemies easier to see and I think you do more damage as well. Hacking objects in the game basically amounts to activating switches remotely, but things get interesting when you start to use them on enemies – causing their weapons to backfire, forcing them to commit suicide, or even fight for you for a few moments. This is a way of balancing out otherwise hopeless fights and when used well can produce some positive results. It is almost crucial for the boss battles, which are entertaining, challenging, and one of the few things Syndicate does well – each has its own gimmick and method to defeat them, and it’s up to you to figure it out.

The level design is accurate in its theme, but uninspired and dull with repeated corridor and open sections. That might have been the whole point, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting game! The graphics and sound are good, with some harsh edges and lighting effects that make for a unique if unsettling experience.

Syndicate is a standard experience with flashes of brilliance in places, hinting that the game could have been so much more. It won’t change your life, but it’s worth a look at least.

Final Score: 3/5: Worth a look.

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[1] Not that I’ve played a massive amount of either, but I’ve heard enough about them to know the general overlaying themes!

Last Week's Games: 8-Bit Armies, Lumo

My time has been limited this week, but since that means I’ve played less games, I’ve got a little more space to write about them:

See what I mean? Exactly the same either way.

I’ve been soldiering on through 8-Bit Armies, and I’m not far from beating it now. Those of you who have been following me for a while will have seen that I’ve been mostly positive about the game so far, and for the most part I’ve enjoyed it. However, I want to talk about an aspect of the game I’m not enjoying so much: The level design. All the maps I have played on in the campaign so far have been almost completely symmetrical, either two, four, six or sometimes eight-way.

The problem I have with this is a matter of suspension of disbelief more than anything else. This might seem like an odd thing to say about a game like 8-Bit Armies, which understands that it is a video game. But the map design is not very inspired at all. It always places your home base, and that of your enemies, in a raised easily-defendable position at a corner of the map, and while that is strategically sound, it’s hard to believe that it’s ever that simple for military forces. It keeps the pace of the game going, I guess, but it’s hard to be particularly engaged with a map where the key to victory is almost invariably smashing a gauntlet of gun turrets at the top of a hill to where the enemy base is, and defending your own is nothing more complicated than building a set-up of gun and rocket turrets. Would it have been too much to ask to create some different maps that would force players to use their positions and resources more creatively?

There's a Red vs Blue series in here somewhere...

I can see why they would have done this for the multiplayer aspect of the game, as you’re not going to want to design your map so that one player or team has an advantage over another. But even then, some asymmetry wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad thing. Perhaps they could have designed some maps so that the tactics used for each side of the map were different, but would have created an equal chance of winning or thereabouts? Part of the skill of strategy games is learning how to use the lay of the land to your advantage, and with 8-bit Armies, you only need to do that once and then you’ve learned the enemy strategy for the entire game.

Having said that, I really enjoyed one level that occurs late in the game. Your mission is to destroy three enemy HQs, but that’s nothing unusual. What is less regular is that your centre ground is almost always under attack, so you must keep your eye on your defence network there. Also, the level starts you off with a few harvesters and refineries already active, which means the oil fields around your base deplete quickly, forcing your harvesters to look for resources in less-well-defended areas. I was surprise by the few times the enemies had found my harvesters and had brought a tank company to attack them; having to respond to that was an extra level of challenge the game just hadn’t managed at that point.

If you put the soap in the water it will clean it.
It will still kill you though.

Elsewhere I have been playing Lumo on my Nintendo Switch. This is an interesting isometric puzzle platformer, where you play a boy or girl dressed as a wizard trying to navigate your way through a labyrinth of blocks and jumping puzzles that take the form of, from what I’ve seen so far, the basement of a castle. Your aim, I think, is just to get through the castle, but there are lots of collectables lying around as well for you work out. The Rubber Ducks, for example, appear in water that kills you if you touch it. You have to jump on to the duck, then you have about a 15^th of a second to jump onto the next platform, or you die and have to start again. It’s the kind of game I play the Switch for, and I’m enjoying it so far, though as it can get frustrating it’s better played in short bursts.

Until next week…

Backlog Beatdown: Stoning Wolves (I think) with Wolfenstein 3D

Over the last few months I’ve re-discovered GOG.com, which promotes and sells older games as well as some newer titles. I’ve found a lot of games on there that I enjoyed when I was younger and are for the most part a pleasure to go back and play now. One game that I had been aware of and had never played was Wolfenstein 3D, and when it came up as part of a special offer, I thought I would try it.

These Blue guys were the SS, and took a lot of
shooting to drop - they also had automatic weapons.

Wolfenstein 3D is fondly regarded as the Grandfather of First Person Shooter games, and with good reason. First Person games existed before it was released in 1992, but this was the first time it had featured fast-paced action and thrills. It was a piece of innovation by id Software, who were at the top of their game in terms of pushing design, hardware and conceptions. Set in the era of the Second World War, you play as B.J. Blazkowicz, an Allied spy who has been captured in the titular Castle Wolfenstein, and your mission is to run and gun your way through the castle and complete crucial missions against the Nazis.

What this amounted to was running through the levels and shooting all the enemies; there were nine levels to each episode and each episode had a boss. The version of the game I downloaded had six episodes in total, the latter three being prequels, so there was plenty of content. But with a game this old, the question must be: Does it still hold up?

Zombie mutants packed a
surprising punch...

And the answer is this: Yes it does, but you have to consider what was going on at the time it was developed and released. Military shooters are ten-a-penny now, and even at the time it didn’t take long for this craze in game development to begin flooding the market with what were (perhaps derogatively) called Doom clones, but in 1992, nothing like this had been done before. Five different enemy types, three different weapons and levels designed on a flat grid might not seem like much these days, but at the time, exploring these things in a 3D environment was something new, exciting and fresh. Also, using Nazis as your principle enemies might have seemed like a straightforward choice, but the addition of Nazi symbolism and propaganda throughout the game, not to mention the opportunity to kill Hitler himself, was a hitherto unexplored and controversial design decision.

Who wouldn't want to kill Hitler?

Perhaps even more impressive, and why I feel it remains a good game, was the way the development team – which was only about four or five people – managed to make it work within their limitations. Yes, you only had three weapons, but if you found the Chain Gun, (the best of the three,) you had to be very careful with managing your resources as the rapid rate of fire would drain your ammo very quickly. There were only five enemy types (not counting the bosses,) but each enemy presented its own challenge and needed strategic thinking in order to defeat, especially when they started appearing in significant numbers. Finally, while the levels could only be designed on a flat grid, there was a massive amount of thought put in to their design, and except for a couple of clangers, the layout of each level was bang on point. Secrets areas with ammo, health and treasure were your reward for exploration; the rest of it was claustrophobic and challenging on usually the right level.

Wolfenstein 3D doesn’t look particularly good these days, and while the gun sound effects were meaty enough, the voices were tinny and distorted (more to do with the hardware limitations of the time than anything else.) But – and I’ve said it before – all the bells, whistles and graphics in the world can’t replace good level design and a solid core gameplay loop. It runs fine in DOSbox, and I didn’t run in to any compatibility issues. With that in mind, if you like first-person action games, you could do far worse than try Wolfenstein 3D to experience the core of this style of game – and make up your own mind as to how little or far video games have come since 1992.

Final Score: 4/5: Great game.

Backlog Beatdown: Old School Platforming with Mega Man X

Mega Man X is a game that I first played when I was about 10 or 11, my friend Matt had a Super Nintendo and borrowed it off someone. I remember enjoying it at the time; it made enough of an impression for me to download it onto my Wii U 20 years later.

While I wouldn’t have consciously thought this when I first played it, I guess Mega Man X is a “gamer’s game,” and as standard as they come. A side-scrolling platform game with colourful characters, bosses and upgrades, easy enough for me to get more or less all the way through the game without me discovering many of its secrets, but challenging enough on the right level for it to be fun. Also there were plenty of optional upgrades to discover for those people who wanted to look for them.

Watch for the attack patters, or just
shoot it until it dies - game's fine either way.

I haven’t played many Mega Man games, but as far as I know the pattern scarcely varies between each game – you go through a number of levels, fight a boss at the end and take his weapon if you beat him, and then go on to the final level where you get a boss rush (fight all the bosses again) and defeat the game’s final boss for the win. It’s a simple enough concept, and is solid enough for it to still be popular even to this very day, with new games in the series being released as little as a few years ago.

The gimmicks of the ‘X’ series – and what sets it apart from the other games – is that you can upgrade Mega Man himself. In the main series, your upgrades were limited to the weapons you received from the bosses you defeated. In Mega Man X you get that too, but you also get upgrades to his legs, chest, helmet and gun, allowing him to dash, take more damage, break certain ceilings with his helmet and charge more powerful shots, respectively. You can also pick up items to increase your maximum health, and even ‘sub-tanks’ that allowed you to store health pick-ups to re-fill your health bar when you were ready. Finding and using all of these upgrades is the real challenge and reward of the game.

The levels are well-designed and challenging. Very few of your enemies put up much of a fight and will die if you hit them a few times, but some of them exist to get in your way and force you to come up with strategies to either avoid or kill them quickly. You die far more often to traps and pitfalls than you do from taking damage! You can access the levels after you’ve beaten them to search for the secrets, and brilliantly, areas hidden areas of some levels are only accessible once you’ve beaten others. This is a classic example of good design – you’re not forced to discover these secrets in order to beat the levels, but it is a rewarding challenge for those who do.

Most of the bosses can be beaten by analysing their attack patterns and reacting accordingly, but you can make things a lot easier for yourself by finding out which boss is vulnerable to which weapon. The classic example is Spark Mandrill – once you have the Shotgun Ice weapon, he freezes as soon as you hit him with it. Boomer Kuwanger is almost impossible to hit, but is particularly vulnerable to the homing missiles you get from Launch Octopus. The final bosses of the game are also weak to certain weapons.

I’ll admit that I used a wiki to help me to discover some of the game’s more obscure secrets – the last few health tanks, and the final bosses’ vulnerabilities. Some may call it cheating, but these were tricky enough moves to make and did not detract from the challenge of the game. I’ve had a lot of fun with Mega Man X; it’s a splendid platformer from a strong development team at the very top of their game. I’ll keep it on my Wii U in case I fancy another go, but I can’t see that happening any time soon as I’ve seen most of what there is to see.

No Game New Year: From Dark Souls to... BattleBlock Theatre?

I was watching an episode of Let’s Drown Out, a show that Yahtzee does with his mate Gabriel. It’s somewhere between a Let’s Play and a Podcast, where they stick on a boring game and talk about things. One of the things they were saying was: About 39% of games that are on Steam are never played.

That got me thinking: There are a lot of games I have that I’ve never played. So I went back to that list I did ages ago, where I was not surprised at all to find that a similar proportion of my Xbox360 games have never been played. This is something that I felt the need to address.

Unfortunately there was something in the way of that, which is the game I’m currently playing – Dark Souls. As I’ve said in the two preceding blogs, Dark Souls is a game where it is perfectly possible to play for hours and get nowhere. If I can play this game for two hours and all I’ve achieved is levelling up my character ONCE, I’d consider it progress. And while I’m still enjoying the game – it has an old-school feel to it that I haven’t seen in games in a long time – it is taking time away from playing everything else I’ve got.

So I’m making the decision to put Dark Souls to bed. Not because I don’t like it – but in the spirit of No Game New Year, I think I need to be playing more games than just the one, if there’s no evidence that I’m getting anywhere in it. I will come back to it at some point, but not now.

I decided to check off the first un-played game on my list:

 

BattleBlock Theatre

And what a fantastic game this turned out to be! In essence, it is a puzzle-platformer. You have to take your player through a series of block-puzzle-style mazes and challenges in order to rescue your friends from a theatre run by cats for their own amusement.

It sounds mad – and it is – but that is part of the joy of the game. This kind of thing reminds us of why we got in to games. It’s bright, colourful, the gameplay is fantastic and above all else is actually FUN. There is a non-interactive tutorial if you want it, but the game mechanics are explained to you as you go along so you can spend more time in the game. The levels are well-designed and balanced; no enemy feels out of place and only a small number of challenges in the main game have been insurmountable for me.

A typical scene. Except I made my guys blue.
For Birmingham City.

If longevity makes a good game, this game is great. The idea is that you need to collect gems in order to open the exit clear the level. There are 6/7 gems per level, but you only need to collect three of them to clear it and if I was playing the game like homework, I probably would. But getting all the gems and a ball of yarn (to bribe the cats for new weapons!) raises your score and rating for the level, and I found myself replaying levels over and over just to find enough gems to give me an A. If you compete the level fast enough you also get an A++ with 2 more bonus gems, but I rarely get this as I am not that fast.

A special mention must also go to the soundtrack of the game. In these times, it is always a pleasure to hear a game that has background music! And much respect to Will Stamper, for the voice that narrates the game. In what I can only describe as a ‘fantasy Irish’ accent, he narrates in a naïve yet oddly sardonic way that fits the tone of the game perfectly. Sometimes he goes off on one and you’re so busy laughing you don’t even notice. And it’s worth getting to the secret level just to hear what… occurs… as he scat-sings over a 2-chord refrain.[1]

This will keep me going for a while – I haven’t even tried the other modes yet – so expect another blog on this at the end of the week!

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[1] It’s worth a youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZISypgA9M

No Game New Year: Half Way Through with Sonic 2! See what I did there?

Hi there!

Once again, I haven’t posted for a while, largely for girlfriend-related reasons though I have to say that I needed to give myself some time to play the games as well!

So we’re at the half-way point of the challenge, and so far I’ve been doing OK. By that I mean I’ve managed to get through the last six months without buying a game or any DLC of any kind, and any games I’ve acquired during this time have been absolutely for free. And as we approach the back half of the year, I’ll take this opportunity to reflect on the challenge, and how it’s made me approach games:

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that it is easy for me to fall in to the trap of buying games habitually. The huge stack of Xbox games, both original and 360, in my bedroom is testament to that. This year I’ve had to make a conscious effort not to do this. And to be perfectly honest it’s been a lot easier for me than I dared to hope at the start of the year!

This is largely because of the new generation of consoles that are coming out. The line-up for the new generation is the Playstation 4, the Xbox One and the Wii U, and I don’t own any of them. Therefore I can’t be tempted to buy games for them! Not that there are many to get at this point, and most of the ones you can buy were available on previous-gen as well. I’ve spent some time thinking about which one I’m going to get when I am allowed to do so, but that’s a whole different discussion for another time.

When I buy games, I tend to go for the ones on special offer. GAME – the main retailer for games in the UK – often has deals on that mean you can get 4 games for £20, or something similar. The games are usually pre-owned, but that’s never bothered me since I usually buy games because I want them, not because they’re a new release. I’ve got something like 60 games for my 360, and I think only 3 of them I’ve bought new or even close to release. (Both XCOM games and GTAV, if you want to know.) So I walk into a shop, see what games I like and then go ahead and buy them if I can make a good deal out of it. Because of the challenge, I’ve not been going in to game stores, and I actually find it more of a faff to order physical copies online, so it’s not been particularly hard to avoid!

Where the challenge has presented me with, well, a challenge is when it comes to actually thinking about the games I own. I know I’ve been a bit spotty with this over the last few months, but the original idea behind the blog was to post updates about what I think of the games I’ve been playing and whether or not I want to keep them, this that and the other. And I’ve seen some of the other guys playing games on their posts and getting through a significantly higher number of games than I am, and I’m wondering if I should be doing more. Not playing more games; we all have different schedules so if I don’t have time to play as many as I’d like, or as many as other people do, then it’s not really a problem. But I sometimes ask myself whether I should be doing more to say how I’m getting on.

What I’ve been doing, then, is while I play the game, I think about what I want to say about it. Not just for the sake of the challenge, though. I think it’s quite a good thing that, given how much of my time I spend playing video games, it’s good to ask myself why I’m actually enjoying it – and if other people want to know, then that’s fine by me. So I mutter to myself passages that eventually end up in the blog, in the hope that someone’s going to read it and find it interesting…

Case in point: This week’s game.

 

Sonic the Hedgehog 2

This game will always be very special to me. Back in 1994, I got my first Sega Megadrive, (Genesis,) and I’d been after one for literally years. I remember I was 8 years old, and my Mom bought me a Megadrive with Sonic 2 on it. It wasn’t my first ever game; we’d had an Acorn Archimedes computer before that and we’d had plenty of games for it. But the Megadrive was mine, and so was Sonic 2. I played it almost non-stop until the end of the school year when I was bought another couple of games – more on that later. I come to own it now from the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection that I’ve spoken about before, and I thought 20 years later, now was the time to give it another play-through.

Turns out I’d forgotten two very important things about the game. The first is how much fun Sonic is! And the second was how hard those old games are.

So Sonic 2 is a great game, it really is. Side-scrolling platformers were hardly uncommon 20 years ago, but few games did it so well. It encouraged speed by having Sonic move incredibly fast for a video game, but punished carelessness by throwing spikes and pit traps in your way. The levels were designed in vastly different styles, each with their own gimmicks, traps and enemies – but with enough similarity to tie it all together. The fact that there were different enemies on each level was actually not that common, if I remember rightly; most of the games I remember playing at the time used the same or similar enemies across multiple levels. The sound track is nothing short of iconic. I know that word should not be used lightly, but just do a quick search on YouTube for the number of people who’ve done videos of Bass Guitar covers of the Chemical Plant Zone theme.[1] And most importantly of all, whether you got through the game or not were entirely up to you.

“Well, no shit,” I hear you cry. “You’re in control of the game; of course it’s up to you whether or not you beat it!” Yes… but it’s not that simple. You have a lot of control over what happens in the game for a few reasons:

1. Sonic 2 was a competently-made game. That means that it had been play-tested so the dev team knew it all worked properly, and there were no game-breaking bugs or glitches that would screw you over. That’s not to say there weren’t any bugs or glitches in there at all, in fact some of them were quite beneficial, but none of them would harm your progress, and they weren’t even taken out for the game compilation I’m playing it on! Thankfully most of us remember a time before there was scope for games being patched for bugs, so the developers really had to work hard to make sure that everything worked. They didn’t always get it right, but they got a lot more right than many of their contemporaries manage these days!
2. The game wasn’t designed to be played for you. There were no button prompts, no “Hit the Crawl from the rear or you’ll just bounce off him” or “Jump to avoid these spikes/that pit trap.” If you avoided the traps, it was because you saw them coming. If you destroyed a badnik without getting hurt, it was because you’d considered the best way to approach it. If you managed to beat the bosses, it was because you’d analysed their attack patterns and developed your counter-attack from that. Or more likely, you’d buggered it up fifty times before you got any of it right – which made the game a challenge, but not unfair. There was a lot of trial and error, and the sense of accomplishment from finally getting it right was where a lot of the longevity of these games comes from. I’m still playing it 20 years later!

It was quite strange, playing it through again. Those muscle reactions that I thought long gone were coming back to me as I played my way through the early levels of the game, only to get stuck later on because I kept dying. Rarely from a Badnik (evil robot.) No, I’d always get trapped, or fall down a pit, or drown or something or other. I remember finding the game a lot easier when I was younger and I found myself wondering, are games getting easier in the last few generations? Or am I getting rubbish at them in my old age?

It turns out the answer doesn’t relate to either of those things. In actual fact, when I played this game when I was 8 years old, I had all the cheat codes to it and could select whichever level I want, and was also able to change into Super Sonic any time I wanted as well. So I had plenty of opportunity to practise those harder levels. I actually can’t remember, even in my younger days, playing the game through from one end to the other more than a couple of times, though I did complete the game several times by cheating. I can’t remember any of the codes now, even if I wanted to cheat – though I do remember you input the codes by playing certain tracks from the Sound Test in a particular order. I don’t think they’d work now even if I wanted to do it, because I did play back some of the tracks and my 360 seems to be a lot less happy about doing this than my old Megadrive was. (It crashed after a couple of tracks.)

That being said, Sonic 2 is also a lot harder than today’s contemporary games because here you have a fail state. You start with three lives. You can gain more, but if you ever lose them, you have to start all over again. This just doesn’t happen in modern games, and rightly so, because modern games are sometimes quite a lengthy procedure that would not survive having the whole thing de-railed because you’d died too many times. But in the early games, those lives were your lifeline. You had to hang on to them, and try not to lose them.

Because lose them I do; usually either to aforementioned traps, or boss battles. Some of the latter are ridiculously easy, some are insanely hard, and the last boss battle is borderline impossible. I’ve fallen down on the last couple of bosses several times, and even though it is frustrating, I don’t particularly mind. Let’s be honest; this is what these games are about. Smashing your way through levels, exploring them fully to find their secrets – they will give you cool stuff but you have to earn it – praying that you’re still in good enough shape to battle the end-of-level boss, and then when you’re exhausted and your concentration is slipping, have one last duel to the death between you and the final boss. Whatever happens at that point, it is a fitting end…

I managed to beat the game last Sunday night, and allowed myself a small smile of overcoming the challenge, as hitherto I always fell down on the last couple of levels. But I would like to make a few comments on the game itself, how it is different from the other Sonic games, and what I think of the mechanics involved with it.

For a start, Sonic 2 is a very good sequel. Over the last few generations, we’ve been seeing more and more sequels that haven’t been as effective. On one hand, some sequels iterate rather than innovate, basically releasing the same game 4 or 5 times. *cough* Dynasty Warriors *cough* On the other hand, some games take it too far the other way, and release games where the mechanics and design are so different that it is barely recognisable as part of the franchise. (Less often, though I think some of the more recent Sonic games are guilty of this!)

To contrast, Sonic 2 is basically Sonic 1, but better. He can still do everything he could do before, in the same way – but now he can do more things. Here’s a few alterations to what had gone before that made Sonic 2 an improvement on Sonic 1:

First, the Dash Attack. Sonic’s been able to do this for so long, sometimes it’s hard to remember that it wasn’t always the case. You could now duck on the floor and charge a ground-based spin attack, whereas before you had to do it from a run. This was very useful for opening some item boxes and hitting some of the enemies where precision was required. It’s no surprise that they kept this one!

Second, the Special Stage. This was a massive improvement over the rotating special stage from Sonic One, where one wrong move would take you straight back into the main game. For a start, it was much easier to get to – get 50 rings and find a Star Post, then jump through the ring of Stars that appears there. A challenge, certainly, but better than praying you still had enough rings left at the end of the level. And then there was the Special Stage itself. The sort-of-3D graphics looked amazing for the time, and the setting made the age-old premise of ‘collect the good stuff (rings) and avoid the bad stuff (mines)’ a lot more interesting. Plus, if you did muck it up, the game would drop you back in the same level next time, rather than move it on. This was good because some of the seven stages were actually really hard!

Third, Super Sonic. This was your reward for getting all seven Chaos Emeralds out of the Special Stage. If at any time after this you collected 50 rings and hit the jump button, Sonic turns yellow and becomes Super Sonic. I remember Sonic The Comic (published in the early-to-late 90s, I got most of them up to 1999,) portraying Super Sonic as an out-of-control demon, super-strong, invulnerable and very, very angry. The Super Sonic you control in the game is pretty much like that except he can’t fly. There were no morality issues either; in pretty much every game before 1995, you were either the good guy, or in a very small number of cases, you weren’t. Sonic, Super or otherwise, has always been the good guy and rightly so. Super Sonic is faster than Sonic, won’t take any damage that would normally result in losing your rings and can jump higher. But he’s less accurate to control, which is not good during some of the precision platforming you have to employ late in the game. Also, getting him was something of a blessing and a curse – he drains your rings for every second he’s in the game, and there’s no way to turn him off short of letting him drain them all. And it was almost impossible not to do it because the trigger was the jump button. Try getting through any Sonic game without jumping and see what happens! This was all well and good, except that the best way to collect extra lives was to collect 100 rings, and playing as Super Sonic prevented this. So, the individual levels were easier, but the end of the game was harder as it allowed less room for error.

Finally, Tails/2 player Co-op. Sadly, I think they missed a trick here. True, Tails became one of the most famous characters of the franchise, and the idea of a fox with two tails that can fly is a good one. But as there was no way to make him fly in the game, it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference whether you played him or Sonic. This undermined what could potentially have been a great innovation into the game, allowing Tails to reach harder-to-reach areas. The Co-op mode was, I suppose, a good way to allow a younger player to play with a more experienced player, since Tails couldn’t die or lose any rings. But the second player is shut out of the last couple of levels since Tails doesn’t appear in them, for the story’s sake as much as anything else. You could, of course, allow the AI to control tails, but this rarely helped. His role seemed quite reactive; i.e. if a Badnik hurt Sonic, Tails would attack it. If Sonic lost his rings, Tails would pick them up. He was no use at all on the Special Stage, as he would follow Sonic and his reactions were delayed by about half a second, which meant that he would more often than not run into the mines you were trying to avoid! Most of this was fixed for Sonic 3 though.

So, to conclude, a great game, and I was happy to have the opportunity to play it through again. I think I will cover Streets of Rage 2 at some point as well, but for now, I’m going to decide what to play next in amongst the multitude of things I’ve got to do…

---

[1] Then do another, much longer search for one who actually got it right…

No Game New Year: Tomb Raider

Last Monday night I finished Tomb Raider on the Xbox 360. This brings the total number of games I have finished during this challenge up to four; not quite what I was hoping for now that we’re well in to the sixth month of it but there you go. Tomb Raider was always going to be one of the games I’d have to finish, though. I got around three quarters of the way through the main story last year, and for reasons that most likely relate to one of the XCOM games I abandoned it. Which was pretty rubbish, thinking about it, and I think the game deserved seeing it through to the end.

 

So, what do I think of the game?

Hmm… difficult to say. I think I would do the game a disservice by comparing it to previous Tomb Raider games, since the whole point of a re-boot is to offer a new experience with the same intellectual property. But the inevitable comparisons arise, and I can’t quite decide whether the new game is better than the older games, of which I have played Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II. In the new game, the world feels more accessible and at the same time more restrictive. The plot appears to be more realistic and yet more contrived. The introduction of skill development is welcome, but takes away some of the challenge of having to work out what to do and where to go.

That having been said, it is a very good game, and I’ll explain why in a moment, but to clarify: The rebooted Tomb Raider is an excellent game for the current/previous generation. It is a good game of it’s time – just as the previous games were good for their time. The franchise is nearly twenty years old now; technology and capability has come on a lot since then and it’s good to see that Crystal Dynamic made it work for the current generation of gaming.

 

I certainly like the new version of Lara Croft. Better proportioned, still conventionally good-looking, but with an air of vulnerability about her, the origin story does a lot to develop what has become one of video games’ most iconic characters. Up until the reboot, she has as far as I know time been portrayed as a kind of female Indiana Jones; polite and professional in the right circumstances, and an absolute badass when out in the field. This was great, and it certainly did a lot to promote the idea of a female protagonist. I can’t think of any other game in the mid-90s that was both an original IP and had a primarily female lead; strong female characters did exist but usually as an ensemble of at least an equal number of males. It’s more common these days, of course, but seeing the character whose main motivation is to get off the island and survive lends a new side to female characters, and indeed Lara Croft. Her previous fascination of history and artefacts are now secondary considerations, or side missions, and the idea that she’s less likely to throw herself lightly in to danger in order to pursue an interest makes her character far more believable. And she’s very well voice-acted as well, which does nothing but add to the effect.

There has been some criticism of the imbalance of her personality between the cut scenes and the game. The obvious example is the first time she kills someone; in the cut scene she’s horrified at what she’s had to do. Yet after this scene, she’ll gun down seven or eight guys at a time in open play and appear not to be effected by it at all, even uttering curses to her enemies later on. I can see the point of the criticism, but I think it is misapplied to this situation. The developers had to show that killing people is not something Lara does lightly, nor has it ever occurred to her to do so before; hence the cut scene. If the same thing happened every time she killed someone in the game – 200-300 people by the time you reach the end – then it would suck all the fun out of it and derail the whole thing. So it’s something of a non-issue for me.

 

The gameplay is good, the controls are fluid and responsive and the combat is as good as any 3^rd person action game I’ve played on the 360 – at least as good as Space Marine, and probably a little better than Gears of War. The game rewards you for exploration; you don’t HAVE to look around all the tombs and solve all the puzzles, or explore every inch of the map for every item, but if you do, you upgrade your experience, skills and equipment as a reward. In my play through, I did what I thought I needed to and ended the game with a not-inconsiderable 82% complete. It was somewhat satisfying to find all the challenge maguffins in one area, and find enough artefacts etc to trigger the Achievement Points, but leaving it all until the end felt like more work than fun while trying to cover what I’d missed.

The elephant in the room of course is the Quick Time Events, which are a controversial issue amongst many people. I’m not keen on them. It’s not actually that much fun to be in a situation where the gameplay mechanic is: “Tap this button or you fail.” I find myself looking for the button prompts, almost ignoring the cinematic sequence that gives rise to the QTE in the first place! Thankfully, in this game, they don’t outstay their welcome, though I wonder if plonking one over what aught to have been the last boss was a good idea.

Lara now has a number of different skills to use with her weapons; bows and arrows, climbing axes and the like. This is commonplace in a lot of modern games, and does add to the overall experience, but falls down when compared to the older games in the franchise. It’s kind of hard to explain why, but bear with me:

In the old games, Lara has a specific set of skills and moves that stay with her throughout the game. Apart from the weapons, absolutely nothing affects these skills all the way through the game. That means that Lara is as good as she is from one side of the game to the other – and it is up to the player to figure out how to use those skills to the best effect. There was no hand-holding; the player had to decide whether she will be able to make the jump, climb the wall, and run fast enough to escape the trap, or swim to the other side of the lake in one breath. If a secret is revealed, it is up to the player to work out how to get it – it is certainly possible but the way won’t always be obvious. It puts the risks and their rewards where it needs to be: In the hands of the player.

In this reboot, Lara gains skills and moves throughout the game but their application is situational, and so obvious that it takes a lot of the challenge out of the game. Early on you acquire a climbing axe which can be used on certain walls. This is great, except that the walls which are climbable could only be more clearly marked if they had bolt-on holds. The only risk, then, is mis-timing your pressing of the X button, which can usually be saved by another QTE.

Another new trick you will be doing A LOT is using the bow and arrow to create ropes, for Lara either to pull something down, pull her up or slide down. You fire arrows with rope attached by pressing the right shoulder button, and your target is always a set of ropes wound tightly around something – or a climbable wall. If you’re creating a rope bridge, there’s a hooking post to which you attach the rope; it’s not rocket science.

Perhaps the most salient way in which the new game differentiates from the old one is the so-called Survival View. What happens here is that you press the left shoulder button, the screen goes black and white, then the areas of interest – say, climbing walls, rope attachment points or collectable items – will he highlighted. With the old games, you’d have to figure out what to do; with this new game, you can hit the left button and the game will give you hints like ‘Well, it’s to do with that hitching post, and that wall. Guess what you have to do…’

Obviously, there are positive connotations to this as well. It does mean that you’ll spend a lot less time doing something I did a lot with the previous Tomb Raider games, which was wander around the level hopelessly lost and confused, wondering where to go next and what to do. It’s kind of like having a walkthrough that they used to print in gaming magazines (and maybe they still do, I haven’t bought one in a while!) telling you what to do, and while that was pretty much the only way I was able to get anywhere in the previous Tomb Raider games, it does take away a lot of the challenge of figuring it out for yourself. But again, this is the generation we have now; we expect to be able to finish single-player campaigns in 20 hours or less without getting stuck. And a lot of the kids who will have played the new Tomb Raider game won’t even have been born when the first ones came out; they won’t remember the frustration at having to work out which key goes in which door – nor will they ever have the satisfaction of figuring it out.

These points fit in with a lot of what I’ve been hearing from certain Youtube channels, like TotalBiscuit, Yahtzee from The Escapist and some of my friends as well, about how the nature of games have changed over the years. That’s a whole blog in itself, and won’t be entirely welcome since a lot of those points will already have been made, but essentially comes down to this: Games these days rely far too much on spectacle, graphical fidelity, and multiplayer modes. It is what people have come to expect from games, but most people my age (I’m 28, the aforementioned Youtubers are a bit older and most of my friends are mid-late 20s or thereabouts) remember a time when we didn’t have the technology to provide this. What we had instead were well-designed levels, rewards for finding secrets that actually made a difference and replayable games; I’m not saying all old games had this, but the ones we remember tended to.

The game has already been re-released for the Next-Gen consoles, names the ‘Definitive Edition.’ Not yet owning a new generation console I couldn’t honestly say what difference it makes, having never played it, so I’m going on what I’ve found out over 10 minutes research: the game looks obviously better on the new consoles. The PS4 apparently has the edge in this, and there is significantly higher frame-rate in the new games presumably making for a smoother experience. (As I don’t play games on PC, frame rate is pretty much a non-issue for me.) From what I’ve been able to find out, the new game does have a little more content in single player, but not enough to justify buying it again if you’ve already played it through. So even if I do get a new-gen console, I won’t be buying Tomb Raider for it – though I may be interested in the sequel that’s supposedly in the works.

 

The game’s Multiplayer mode has been criticised for being lacklustre. I neither agree nor disagree with this, as to be perfectly honest I haven’t really been able to find out. I doubt it’s on the same level as the Call of Dutys, Battlefields and Halos of this world – and say what you like about those games, but their Multiplayer modes are well-maintained and very popular – but Tomb Raider’s multiplayer mode functions, if nothing else. There is your generic team deathmatch, and a free-for-all deathmatch mode that is the base of any multiplayer mode. There are some other modes based on survival and scavenging, that presumably fit in with the theme of the game. Unfortunately, by the time I bought the game, which was less than a year after it came out, the online community was already drying up to the point where you couldn’t get a game in anything other than team deathmatch. And now, well over a year after the game’s release, you’re lucky if you get that. It is the same logistical problem that many modern games have – multiplayer is all well and good, but absolutely useless if no one is playing it.

Tomb Raider stands up well enough on its single-player campaign for this not to matter so much, but the developers missed a trick here – Why not create a 2 or 4-player co-op campaign? There are certainly enough characters to make it work, and an alternative story could be created to work alongside the single-player campaign. There are even characters in the Multiplayer mode that, as far as I know, don’t appear in the main game at all – why not create a game mode based around a group of survivors who Lara and her friends never have the fortune to meet in their adventures? Or even an evil campaign based on the Solarii brotherhood would have been entertaining as well.

But there’s little use in thinking of what might have been. Tomb Raider is what it is: A solid third person action adventure, and a story well-told through the medium of video games. If you can find it at a cheap price, it’s worth a look – just don’t expect the old games!

 

Next, I'm giving Prototype another go; another game I never really gave the chance it deserves. We'll see how that pans out!

No Game New Year: Grand Theft Auto Five

Right, I wasn't expecting to come back to this blog quite so soon but something's come up and for some unknown reason I'm really excited about it:

No Game New Year.

This is an idea put forward by Brian Castleberry and Norman Caruso, the latter known on YouTube as The Gaming Historian. I suppose it all ties in to the New Year's Resolution we're all allegedly doing, but this is something that I can do and I'm actually really interested in doing it.

The idea is that we - that is to say, everybody who is doing it - will buy no new video games this year. Instead of that, we will play through the ever-increasing backlog of games we have. We play our old games, and if we like them, we keep them. If not, we get rid of them, either selling them, exchanging them, or just giving them away if we can't do that. There are more rules to this, just to clarify the ways you can get around not buying any new games, so here's a link to the Facebook page where you can see what's going on:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/256949654464181/

There are, of course, benefits to this. It will, for example, save me some money. Not much money - I rarely buy a game on release, after all - but some money, that could perhaps better be spent elsewhere. But the main benefit to me, as far as I can tell, is that I've got about sixty Xbox 360 games, some of which I've had for nearly two years and never played, and even more that I've started, got about a tenth of the way through and never picked up again. This is as good a time or reason as any to give them a go.

So why am I doing a blog about this? Well, part of the deal is that we're all supposed to be updating our progress on what games we're playing, whether we're enjoying them and whether we're making a decision on whether to keep the games or move them on. I could do this on YouTube of course, but to be perfectly honest I prefer to write. And the camera on my phone is rubbish.

This is supposed to be happening every week, however I think I can almost guarantee that there are weeks when I'm just not going to be able to make an update, for whatever reason. The two most likely are either:

• Personal circumstances meaning that I won't have time/internet access to write a blog, or even play the game. I'll usually know if this is the case and let you know in advance.
• Because some of the games are quite long, it might be the case that I've got almost nothing to say about it. I won't want to blog just for its own sake, and if this happens I might just make do with a post on the Facebook site if it's all the same to you.

However one thing I will say is that I'm unlikely to move any of my games on. I bought them all for a reason, even if it was only to make up a special offer, and I won't get rid of any of them if I still think I could potentially get something out of them (or while there are still achievement points to be milked!)

So that's the pre-amble. Now, on to the first game I'm going to be playing:

Grand Theft Auto Five

I had this game for Christmas last year. I'm taking a somewhat cautious approach to playing it. I've seen quite a lot of coverage on it so I had an idea what to expect, but of late, I've not been too impressed with the series. Let me give you some background on this:

I've played and owned all of the 'core' games in the series, from the first GTA game all the way up to this one. Not the expansions though, by which I mean not GTA London, not any of the PSP spinoffs from the GTA3 canon, and none of the DLC for GTA4. In that time, I've seen it grow and develop and constantly try new things, which is great, as nobody wants to play the same game twice. However, with a creative team as innovative as Rockstar and Rockstar North, there are going to be times when it doesn't go quite as well as they'd hoped, and personally, I think GTA San Andreas was as good as the series ever got. I didn't like GTA4 very much. I'm not saying it was a bad game, it wasn't a bad game. But it didn't engage me on the same level that San Andreas did. I wasn't rushing home from work in order to play GTA4, as I did with San Andreas.

The reason I'm saying all this is that a lot of the comments I'm going to be making on GTA5 will be in comparison to the relevant parts of the rest of series.

So, is GTA5 any good?

Well, yes it is. It's a GTA game, it was never going to be bad. The controls work well enough, the graphics are perhaps not quite what I was expecting for the time it was released but then again, I have it on the Xbox360 which is coming to the end of its iteration. The gameplay is good fun and I'm enjoying it so far. From having played what the game is telling me is 14% of it, here's what I'm getting out of it so far:

By far the best innovation that the game has made is the three characters. I say this even though I have only reached 2 of them so far (I haven't got Trevor as a regularly playable character yet,) and being able to switch between the three of them at almost any point is an absolutely genius idea for an open-world game. Lots of games want to tell a story. Rockstar have taken it a step further and decided to tell three different stories that interlink with one another. Well, good on them, because I'm liking it so far.

This innovation alone is good, but the characters themselves are very well designed, written and acted. Not necessarily likeable, but that's not the point. They are... compelling. I can think of no better way to describe it, except to add that it is a massive step up from the previous game. Let me go through the previous games and tell you what I mean:

• There really wasn't any personality from the first two GTA games; your character was there to play the game and that was about it.
• There wasn't much personality from Claude from GTA3 either. (While the lead character is never referred to by name during the game, he does appear briefly in San Andreas where Catalina calls him Claude.) However, this wasn't the point. At that time, a 3D Open World game was a relatively new concept and a VERY big deal, and the aim was to make that into a good game. Others had tried before, some got nearer the mark than others, but in terms of making a fun game to play, Rockstar took the mark and pissed all over it with GTA3. In the end, all that alluded to Claude's personality is how the player played the game, or more accurately how ruthlessly the player completely the missions, how indiscriminately they killed pedestrians, how often they forced a 6-star wanted-rating killing spree just for the fun of it. It was left to the overblown caricatures of the supporting cast to provide the personality of the game, and in terms of the way it was handled, for the time it was pretty good.
• Tommy Vercetti from GTA Vice City was much better. Having some discernible back-story, a background as a mobster and having the added bonus of being an absolute badass breathed some much-needed life into the player character, and we could be reasonably confident we weren't just playing the same game with a different setting and skin. Even though Vercetti was pretty much an anti-hero in every sense, the fact that he had something to offer meant that I actually cared about all those missions I found myself doing, and I wanted him to win in the end, even if it was not necessarily for the right reasons. Sadly I never played the game to the end so I referred to Wikipedia for the back story. Cheating, I know...
• Carl Johnson from GTA Vice City was probably one of the most compelling and well-done characters in any game that I have played. He tries to be, and probably at some point was, a really nice guy, and tries to uphold an honourable ideal, if not a very good one. However, he is desperate to win the approval of his gang and peers, desperate to clear his name of murder (which is kind of ironic, given how many murders he does through the game) and is prepared to go to any lengths in order to do it. Because the game pretty much for the first time gave you some control over how this played out, this struck a balance between the personality of the character, and the personality of the player. This is actually quite hard to do, especially in a video game where there can only ever be a finite number of options, and Rockstar did it quite well here.
• Then we had Nico Bellic from GTA4. And he was DULL. Not fighting for anything other than a new life, he somehow manages to get caught up in crime. He rarely gets angry at anything and seems content to do as he is told. Now fair enough, I didn't play much of GTA4 so maybe this improves later on. But as an opening statement, Nico let the side down quite badly.
• Now, in GTA5, we've got Michael and Franklin, (again I haven't found Trevor yet) who have their own set of ideals, and their own set of problems. They've got friends (sort of,) allies, patrons and their own quite unique ways of responding to them. Any of them on their own might make for more of an interactive movie than a game, but the ability to switch between them I think gives a well-rounded experience, and I'm looking forward to see where the game takes this.

That's a good part of the game. Now for a... sort of middle of the road part, neither good nor bad. And that is the missions: (this section contains some spoilers)

The missions themselves are actually quite good. They're well-designed as set pieces, set up pretty well though the use of flowing cut scenes (starting the dialogue for the cut scene as the character approaches the relevant trigger, and cutting to the scene with almost no load time, is a stroke of absolute genius and one I expect to see used far more in the future with the new console generation,) and have good cinematic points that fit the story. I've had some fun playing them.

The problem is that there's really not much scope for doing the missions that I've done so far in any way other than the way the game wants you to do it. For example: The mission where Michael and Franklin have to save Jimmy from the people who have kidnapped him in the boat he was trying to sell can only be done by driving close enough to the truck to allow Franklin to climb onto the boat, shooting the crooks on the boat and then driving underneath the boom arm to rescue Jimmy. There is no other way to do it. You can't, for example, switch to Franklin as he gets on the boat and get Jimmy off once you've killed everyone on it. You can't cut the truck up to stop it getting away. You can't use any gun other than the pistol Michael has in the glove box, and you can't allow Jimmy to die and get the boat back. (Obviously this last one probably wouldn't happen anyway since I have a feeling Jimmy will become more relevant to the story later on, but from the dialogue running up to the chase, Michael seems more than prepared to let that happen.)

This particular mission is designed as a set piece so there's pretty much only one way it can be done, but the other missions aren't much better. Whether driving, escaping from the cops, or corridor shooting, there's usually only one way to do it, the exception being when you have to escape attention from the police as that does at least give you the whole map to do it in. Now, I understand that if it's important to the story, certain missions have to play out in a certain way. But remember in GTA3 where you're ordered to kill somebody, and you could either nick a car and run him over, drive-by shoot him or go back to your hideout to pick up one of the many weapons you'd amassed there and gun him down? Hell, you could even do it as a fist fight, if you wanted to. None of that so far is in GTA5. There's usually only one way to complete the mission, and if the game thinks you need a new weapon or piece of equipment, it will give it to you in the mission pre-amble. For example: quite early on in the game, Franklin gets involved in a gang shootout. There are more enemies than can be reasonably handled with the pistol, but one of the guys you shoot early on rather conveniently drops a shotgun. There's still, therefore, a lot of hand-holding going on, where the game is almost telling you what to do. This is something that I think let GTA4 down quite badly, as it was still explaining game mechanics to me 6 hours in to it, and thankfully, it's not quite as bad with this game. But I still found myself thinking "no reason to go to Ammunation to get more ammo for my gun before I do this next mission; if the game thinks I need it, it will drop a new gun for me with enough ammo to complete the mission." I don't think that should be happening in this day and age.

I've also come across some of what I think is called "Jank," which I understand to mean: "An inconvenient necessity to make the game work," and I suspect I will come across it more and more as the game goes on. Where I noticed it was the mission where Michael discovers his wife's affair with her tennis coach. When the coach runs out of the house, jumps in his car and drives away, Michael follows him in a pickup truck that certainly wasn't there before, and for no reason explained in the cut-scene, Franklin is suddenly in the truck with him. Both are necessary to complete the mission, (you'll see,) but their sudden appearance is rather weak given the detail of the rest of the game.

That having been said, I think the scoring system for the missions is a good idea. You can now get Bronze, Silver and Gold rankings upon completion of each mission depending on how well you did and whether you did certain things in the mission, even if it's not always clear what you have to do to get the top score. It's more carrot than stick, because it rewards you for doing missions well rather than punishing you for barely scraping through with your life, let alone the mission objectives (the latter usually being how I end up doing most missions in any GTA game to be honest.) The reward in the game is, as far as I can see, rather abstract. You either get a gold medal or you don't, and if you don't it doesn't appear to have an affect on the progress of the game. But it's nice that, for the first time, the game is telling you: "You aced that, well done," or "Yes, you could have done that better, and here's how:" Competitive players and speed runners will love it. If I pay any more attention to it than I already have it will be to unlock an Achievement to increase my Gamerscore.

I do have a couple more things to say but I've rattled on far too much already and it's time for me to go to bed. However, a couple of points I'm going to be looking out for next week:

• So that I am not playing the game through like homework, I will interject my progress through the main game with the occasional foray into GTA online. I've had a go with it already and it looks pretty good so far, though I suspect I have been the victim of people farming kills off me which made it less enjoyable than it might have been. More on that next week.
• I'll be interested to see how the story plays out in terms of how you can influence the environment around you. The best game I've seen for this so far is San Andreas, where you could participate in a turf war that made, apart from anything else, some areas of the city safer to visit than others. I haven't seen it in GTA5 yet but that doesn't mean I won't...

See you all soon!