The least
gamey game on this list by a long chalk.Nintendo’s Animal Crossing
doesn’t care about high scores or developing skills or solving puzzles or
interactive narratives.It cares about
relaxing and having fun in a little virtual town.
Describing AC to someone who’s never played it makes it sound terrible.“You move into this little village,
yeah?And you get a mortgage.And you pay the mortgage off.Then you make your house bigger and you get
another mortgage.This goes on for a
while.When you’re not trying to pay off
your mortgage, you can wander around a bit, um...talk to the other
villagers.Do a bit of fishing.Plant a garden?Dig up fossils.Maybe design a dress.Stargaze.Just...stuff.There’s no real
goal.No end.Just...enjoy yourself.”
It’s joy.I played it at least once a day for well over a year, and still pop in
occasionally.Apparently the 3DS
version, New Leaf, is the one to get,
but Wild World will always be my Animal Crossing.To switch to another version feels like
betrayal, frankly.
MAGIC MOMENT: Blathers, the
jolly-good-old-chap-wot-wot type owl that runs the museum.He’s an endless bundle of delight.
Well, it may be two months too late but I've found my favourite movie sequence of 2013. In my defence, I only saw the supplying film, Disney's Frozen, yesterday.
The sequence, as anyone who's already seen Frozen may have guessed, is the "Let it Go" musical number. It's up on Youtube - I was going to post it here, but it really needs to be seen a) in the context of the whole film and b) on the biggest screen possible (and probably in 3D, unfortunately I could only get to a 2D screening). It's basically a perfect storm - great song, stunning vocal performance (both technically and emotionally) from Idina Menzel, and some utterly astonishing animation. And by astonishing animation I don't mean the ice powers (although they're great) - I mean the actions, reactions and emotions of the character Elsa. Rarely if ever have I seen such a jawdropping example of animated acting. The moment where she throws her crown away and lets her hair down is just incredible.
The rest of the film has a few flaws (the script feels underdeveloped in places, some of the songs are notably weaker than others) but overall it comes recommended. Even if you just watch it for that four-minute sequence.
Apropos nothing, here are brief thoughts on all the films I saw at the cinema this year. (A couple of them are 2012 releases, 'cos I missed them last year and saw showings at my excellent local arts centre, the Farnham Maltings, which tends to show films a month or more after their general release. So there.)
Ho-leeeeee shit, I added to this list. I've actually moved house now, so I might get this finished one of these days. Not that I've written everything yet, but hey...
Apologies for the fact that any sort of update schedule has been unceremoniously chucked out the window. I'm in the midst of attempting to move house, and having to look after my infant niece quite often in the mornings (I work afternoon/evenings). So...yeah.
39. Super
Smash Bros. Brawl
Developers: Sora, Game Arts, a few other
people they grabbed off the street
Most of the
games on this list are things of elegance.They demonstrate superior design, rabid originality, refinement and
class.Red Faction: Guerrilla is not one of these games.Red
Faction: Guerrilla wants shit to blow the fuck up.
Guerrilla
is the third in the Red Faction
series.The first two were first-person
shooters on the PlayStation 2, PC and Xbox.I haven’t played them.I’m not
convinced that anyone’s played them.The
cornerstone (pun kind of intended) to the Red
Faction series is destruction.The
first two games were on systems that couldn’t handle what the developers
wanted.But come the Xbox 360 and
PlayStation 3, the tech was there for stuff to go boom.
Guerrilla
breaks from its predecessors by swapping into a third-person, open-world
format.(One of the admirable things
about the series is Volition’s willingness to completely change the game style
– the fourth game, Armageddon,
switched things up again to a linear shooter a la Gears of War and company.And there was also a spinoff between games 3 and 4 that was entirely
vehicle-based, although apparently that was a bit pants.)The plot, such as it is, sees you as builder
Alec Mason (DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE DO YOU) drawn into an attempt to
free Mars from the military chokehold of Earth forces and give the planet a
fresh start.You do this by breaking
things.
Guerrilla
is entirely a showcase for GeoMod 2.0 – an engine that allows unrivalled levels
of physics-based destruction.Every
building in the game can be destroyed, and it’s all carried out the way you
would in real life.Walls shatter before
steel beams buckle.You can take out a
building in one go with a well-aimed sledgehammer swipe at a load-bearing
area.Use an explosive and bits of
wreckage fly through the air and smash through other buildings.No piece of cover is entirely safe, as it too
could be destroyed.
It’s astonishing.Allegedly, Volition had to hire some real
proper architects as the engine was so true-to-life that some of the more
outlandish sci-fi structures they’d come up with wouldn’t take their own weight
and would collapse as soon as they were coded into the game.And it makes the primary act of the game –
its core, its USP, its very raison d’être
– exactly as enjoyable the five hundredth time as it is the first.Smashing stuff up simply never gets old.And the toolset you get for smashing up said
stuff is highly pleasing.Mason’s never
without his trusty sledgehammer, and the limpet mines you get right from the
start – chuck ‘em on to something, detonate ‘em when you feel like it – are so
pleasing they’re unlikely to ever get left out of your inventory.(Extra sadist points – stick a mine to an
enemy soldier and cackle as they run around in a panic.)Going up through typical weapons through to
oddities like the electricity-shooting arc welder, sawblade-spitting grinder or
the enforcer, with its homing bullets, is great fun.
And great fun is basically what this game is
about.It’s not deep and meaningful, and
it’s not trying to be deep and meaningful.It just wants to entertain you.When it gets it right, it’s like playing a cheerfully dumb action movie
from the ‘80s or ‘90s – probably starring Stallone or Schwarzenegger – and is
exactly as enjoyable as you’d hope.(You
even get a jetpack near the end.And
occasionally you get to run around in a big mech suit smashing things just by
waving its arms about.)Admittedly, it
doesn’t always get it right: some missions are annoying, the last one in
particular, and quite a lot of the sidequests are a bit rubbish.But the good bits are so good that it doesn’t
really matter.Plus, it’s an
American-made game from 2009 where you play as a heroic terrorist with distinct
Communist undertones.How likely is
that?
MAGIC
MOMENT: The mission that ends the second chapter, where you have to evacuate a
town before the troops arrive, is breathlessly exciting.
Right, here we go. I wanted to get a decent backlog before I actually started posting these.
DA RULES
All publisher info, release dates etcetera refers to the European version of the game. 'Cos I live in Europe and buy European games.
For "format", I list the version I actually own first then the others in alphabetical order. I haven't bothered to list every single machine you can get each game on 'cos with some games we'd be here all day - I've just noted the ones that the game was initially released on. So there's no "Xbox 360" for Sonic 1 or whatever.
This is 100% personal preference, regardless of the game's objective quality, to such extent as objective quality exists. So there.
The longlist is actually a couple of months old now so if I wrote one today it might be slightly different but whatever.
it begins
50.
Psychonauts
Developer:
Double Fine
Publisher: THQ
Year: 2005
Format:
PlayStation 2, Xbox, PC
No matter
how generic and unadventurous gaming gets, there’ll always be a Tim Schafer or
two.In 2005, we were just coming out of
the stealth game boom and warming up for the rhythm-action takeover.Schafer’s Double Fine, meanwhile, were
unleashing their first game – a free-roaming platformer with adventure
elements.Set at a summer camp designed
to train psychic children.Psychonauts tells the unlikely tale of
Raz, a young acrobat with considerable mind-manipulation skills.Running away from the circus and attending
Whispering Rock Summer Camp to hone his talents and achieve his dream of
becoming a psychonaut – a secret agent who can delve into others’ minds – he
instead stumbles across a fiendish plot to steal his campmates’ brains.As you do.
The game lets you wander across Whispering
Rock at will, taking the Zelda-style
method of letting you enter one level at a time and locking off areas until you
get the requisite ability to open ‘em up.Once you actually go into a level, it’s a more straightforward 3D
platform affair.But that’s where the
“straightforward” bit ends, because the levels are, as you’d expect from the
plot synopsis, set inside people’s minds.And good heavens do Double Fine take this idea and run with it as far as
it’ll go.Levels wrap around themselves,
so you’re running on the floor, and suddenly the floor’s the wall, and then
it’s the ceiling.You sort out literal
“emotional baggage” – crying pieces of luggage – by finding its lost address
labels.The people whose brains you’re
running through might appear as themselves, or as a giant bull laden with
symbolism.There’s a secret room in one
brain-level that completely re-evaluates one of Raz’s teachers – I won’t say
more, but it adds a huge amount of depth to the character and is arguably the
game’s most startling, affecting and thought-provoking moment.And you could quite easily go through the
whole thing not knowing it’s there!
It’s the wealth of detail that makes Psychonauts, really.The way that late in the game you get the
ability to see through other characters’ eyes, so you can see how they view the
world.The pile of extra bits and pieces
to find.How Double Fine manage to come
up with legitimate justifications for a couple of platforming’s most enduring
bits of silliness – Raz can double-jump by telekinesis, and can’t enter water
because his family are labouring under a curse that says they will all die by
drowning, meaning that he becomes paralyzed with fear and imagines a hand
coming up out of the water to grab him if you get too close.
The only major fault of the game is
difficulty spikes – most people agree that the final level, the Meat Circus, is
too hard.Personally I didn’t have any
major problems with it.Instead, I got
stuck on a boss fight barely halfway through the game – if I hadn’t found a
toggleable invincibility cheat, I would’ve given up altogether.Important note for game designers there –
always provide an out.If it hadn’t been
for that cheat, I wouldn’t have got through the game, and it wouldn’t have
taken its rightful place on this list.
MAGIC
MOMENT: the utter genius of the level The Milkman Conspiracy.Set in the mind of a near-catatonic
conspiracy theorist, it presents a twisted view of suburbia where the streets
twirl into loops and the classic mysterious men in hats and long coats are
everywhere – except they’re trying to disguise themselves as members of the
community.And they’re absolutely
terrible at it.It’s completely
hilarious.
Yeah, anyway. At some point in the near future, this blog will host my Top 50 Games Ever. Because it's something to do. And it'll provide some much-needed practice for my writing skills, which have got somewhat rusty due to the fact I haven't had any professional writing work for the best part of a year.
(Hi, Mr/Ms Writing Job Person! You should totally hire me! I can almost guarantee wacky hijinks! Or at the very least punctually-filed copy!)
I've just dived into the mysterious new world of Kickstarter to help fund Carmageddon: Reincarnation. I'm a little leery of whether Kickstarter's the bold new future that some people have been claiming, but Carmageddon II remains one of my all-time favourite things of any sort and I couldn't resist the chance of a new one.
I hope they put in that forklift that was converted into a mobile guillotine. I liked that.
I was just playing the GoldenEye Reloaded demo on los Xbox - rather enjoyed it, I'd heard it was rubbish. (Although my enjoyment might be partly because I only played the N64 original for about two minutes fourteen years ago, so I didn't really have anything to compare it to.)
But something that amused me was that I got genuinely confused for a minute by the fact that Bondface could pick up more than two gunsat once. Like, whoah. That odd little mechanic introduced by Halo has got so pervasive that it didn't occur to me that a recent major FPS release might not use it. I don't even like the mechanic! And yet I was startled by its omission.
It reminded me of the nice article in the Observer yesterday by Lucy Prebble - she pointed out that when playing L.A. Noire she was surprised by the fact that the player character, a cop in '40s Los Angeles, isn't corrupt and the game doesn't want you to play him in a corrupt way. It's a sign of how some tropes and concepts get so deeply ingrained for one reason or another that it's quite shocking when they're deliberately not used.
On a not-really-related note, I gave the Asura's Wrath demo a whirl too. Bit of a nutty game, eh? I'd like to have the ability to spontaneously grow four extra arms when I get really angry, mind.
So about this time last year I was commenting on Duke Nukem 3D's astonishing cheapness. Well, today I hopped over to GoodOldGames.com and downloaded me a bit of Blood, very much a brother in spirit to Duke (used the same engine, had a similar feel and style, and in fact finding that Wikipedia article has revealed to me that it was co-made by Duke creators 3D Realms, which I didn't realise) - it's a game I have fond memories of playing round a friend's house.
And good heavens, it is even more shameless than Duke. It wants you dead every step of the way, even on the easiest difficulty. To give you an idea, the baseline enemy - the first you encounter, and the commonest - is a zombie with an axe, and may very well get up again shortly after you thought you killed it. I was getting thoroughly mullered for a while before working that one out. It's remarkable how much gaming has become more user-friendly in the last ten to fifteen years. And frankly, I much prefer it.
In completely unrelated news, my current film-based obsession appears to be Tangled. Watched it once, thought "yeah, decent film". Fancied watching it again, did, thought "actually, this is brilliant. I'ma buy it". And now I basically want to watch it over and over again all the time forever. It's great. It's so fun and so pretty. And Rapunzel and Flynn are easily the best leading Disney couple for years - since Belle and the Beast, I'd say. Obviously lessons were learnt from The Princess and the Frog's rather dull stars. (Well, Naveen was alright.)
Following on from my last post, I think Phineas and Ferb might actually be my favourite show on telly at the moment. It is literally the only programme I have watched this week with the exception of the new episodes of Futurama that were on last night.
(Technically I'm also watching Battlestar Galactica but I've got about five weeks behind on that somehow. All the episodes are sitting there on my Sky+ box waiting to be watched. And on that note, when does the show get really good? Don't get me wrong, I'm enjoying it, but at this point - about a third of the way through season 3 - I'm still trying to work out why everyone went ballistic over how good it was. It's a good show, but it's not that good. So I'm wondering if it suddenly kicks it up the proverbial notch at some point. Possibly the fact that I already know the Big Twist over what time period it's actually set in has partially ruined it for me?)
Aaaanyway, to go back to my original point, Phineas and Ferb is great. It looks nice, it's funny, it encourages all sorts of positive behaviour in the younglings without being preachy or worthy, the musical numbers are brilliant ("rubber bands, rubber balls...") and all the characters are worth spending time with. I read somewhere that one of the creators said one of the show's rules is "No stupid characters or jerks" - I guess Candace is kind of a jerk sometimes but she's still basically likable at points - and this is genuinely quite refreshing. Also, Richard O'Brien's in it. What more could you want? There's some episodes up on YouTube, check 'em out.
Today it's this one. Hey, at least it's not a Japanese one so I can actually understand what they're singing about.
I just finished Super Mario Galaxy 2 this morning (well, by "finished" I mean "beat the final boss", not "got all the power stars") and I really don't get why the guys who make these games can craft fantastic, fantastic platformers and then completely fuck it up on the bosses. Both Galaxys have a few decent bosses, but most of them are shit. And the shit ones are invariably the ones you have to fight multiple times because they couldn't be arsed to think up some new ones. I don't get it.
(Actually, as a rule I don't much like boss fights anyway and would be just as happy if they weren't there, but even so.)
Also, in Fallout 3, I accidentally made the bloke who helps you nuke Megaton run away. So now I'm trying to play through with Neutral karma instead. Go figure.
I've started a second playthrough of Fallout 3, which continues to delight and dazzle with its joyful brilliance. But it's all gone a bit pear-shaped.
My first playthrough was on the Very Good side of the Karma meter. I was lauded far and wide, people ran up to me to give me stuff for free, etcetera. So this time I thought I'd be a villainous villain and go Very Bad. I've even come up with a reasonable in-game excuse: I've made my character Asian in appearance, the little meta-narration in my head explaining that she's from a dynasty of cunning Chinese spies.
That sounds kind of racist. I should explain that in Fallout's backstory, the world has been reduced to a crispy post-nuclear wasteland as a result of a bit of argy-bargy between the U.S. and China. So the idea is that my girl (who I've named Ziyi in honour of Zhang Ziyi because a) she was the first Chinese woman I thought of and b) I really fancy her) is the latest in a long line of craftily planted agents designed to keep on screwing Americans over long after the war. Hence, villainy.
Annnnnyway, it ain't happening. I'm on level 5 or 6 and still on the Good side of the meter. I'm finding it genuinely hard to be a bastard. The worst thing I've done is told Bryan Wilkes, the little kid who kicks off the "Those!" quest (the one with the giant fire-spitting ants) to naff off and stop bothering me. And I would've done that anyway 'cos "Those!" is a really annoying quest and I vowed never to do it again after my first playthrough. And I gave Three-Dog a bit of lip, but since that was after I already helped him out with repairing his radio broadcasts it didn't do much. I did try to nick some of his stuff while he was sleeping, but he woke up, took the stuff back and then instantly went back to sleep again. Git.
So yeah, I apparently don't have it in me to be a wanker. Actually, this is a thing about Fallout which is one of the reasons I love it so much: there aren't enough games that let you be nice. Most open-world, "do anything" games translate "do anything" as "shoot anyone". (Hi, Grand Theft Auto!) It's kind of the standard response in gaming, so to come across a game where you can persuade people not to fight you and give up the vital keycard or whatever willingly is so refreshing that I find it hard not to choose that option. (On a smaller scale, the fact that in Bully you can wander around giving people thumbs-ups and compliments always delights me.)
I am going to try and kick off in Fallout 3 though, honest. I'ma nuke Megaton and everything. Although I need to get my lockpick skill up high enough to rob Sheriff Simms' house and find the Bobblehead that's apparently in there first. Then I'ma nuke it.
Although actually, now that I think about it, another reason I'm holding off on the bastardry is that I don't want to disappoint my in-game dad. Because he's Liam Neeson. Liam Neeson. You don't let Liam Neeson down, for heaven's sake, he's a talking Jesus-allegory lion Jedi that leads the A-Team. And I think he had a beer with Homer Simpson once.
I guess I'm going to have to keep reminding myself that the game's main bad guy is Malcolm McDowell. I'm not betraying Liam Neeson, I'm teaming up with Malcolm McDowell! No jury would convict me.
So to follow up my last post, I watched Mad Max and it's rubbish. He doesn't even get mad until the last twenty minutes of the film! And half of those twenty minutes consist of him driving round trying to find people to be mad at. Piffle.
In not-at-all related news, I'm currently reading David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It's set in 1799, and there's an intimation at one point that one of the minor characters is a distant ancestor of Eiji Miyake, the protagonist of another one of Mitchell's books, number9dream. I love it when authors do that. (And yes, before you ask, I do read quite a lot of Stephen King. But not Michael Moorcock. I've never actually read any of his stuff. I guess I ought to at some point.)
The Twilight Watch and The Last Watch, books three and four in Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch tetralogy (side note: according to Wikipedia, the first usage of "quadrilogy" dates from 1865) = £2.50 for the pair
Mad Max = 49p on video
Lastly, and most importantly,RollerCoaster Tycoon = £1.99. I actually saw this a few days ago, and figured it wouldn't work on my current PC (the box only specifies Windows 95 or 98, not XP). I decided to get it anyway, andit motherfucking works
Hells yes
One of my all-time favourite games, back with me at last
The power plant had won it With Roger Clemens clucking all the while Mike Scotia's tragic illness made us smile While Wade Boggs lay unconscious on the bar-room tile...
Well, there are a couple of shots where a blurry zombie in the distance might be me, but that's it.
The end.
In more-or-less unrelated news, another thing I've been reviewing is the sixth series of Bleach. So now I have this stuck firmly in my head. And now I am trying to stick it firmly in yours. Consider it a gift!
From the age of about seven or eight to fifteen, I loved - loved - the Redwall series of books by Brian Jacques. I had the first thirteen of the series and compusively read and re-read them: my favourites were Redwall, Mossflower, Mattimeo, Mariel of Redwall, The Bellmaker, Outcast of Redwall, The Pearls of Lutra and The Long Patrol (man, that's eight out of thirteen, I can't decide which is the best! Maybe Bellmaker or Lutra. Or Outcast. Or...).
Anyway, they were wonderful. The first books I'd come across to really emphasise descriptions of places and things, they left mental images in my mind's eye so strong I can still recall them now. They were also the first place I came across several types of animals - polecats, pine martens, and most memorably, the shrike in Bellmaker (named Glokkjaw or something like that?), which I presumed was an animal Jacques had made up until I found it in a bird book several years later.
I re-read the books a few years ago, and they didn't quite stand up to an adult's eye - repetitive, predictable and with some slightly uncomfortable undertones that you could potentially read as mild racism, although I don't think that was intentional - but I'll always have a lot of love for the series as a key point in my reading history. And in fact I'm considering getting a couple of them for my niece to see what she thinks in a year or two.
As such, it's sad to hear of Jacques' death, and the fact that the forthcoming twenty-second novel in the series will abruptly be the last. R.I.P. Brian Jacques, and thank you for many, many, many happy hours of reading.
