Mirrors Edge: Catalyst

 

Sometimes I like to over-emphasize my opinion on certain games.  Like for example, if I'm feeling particularly mischievous I'll say something like "Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a shit game for twats" and while I don't like BotW personally, I do actually understand why its so popular and why people like it so much.  However I feel like maybe I should stop doing this because it does a disservice to games that actually do deserve it such as Mirrors Edge: Catalyst, a truly shit game for twats.

I remember the first Mirrors Edge coming out for the Xbox 360 when I was in University and I remember liking it quite a lot.  I beat it multiple times, would sometimes listen to the OST while studying and even tried to sort of speed run it.  Not in any serious way but I'd spend quite a few hours finding the optimal route through a stage just to see the little time trial numbers go down.  Mirrors Edge: Catalyst however pissed me off within the first 30 minutes or so of playing and finishing it was one of the biggest chores I have ever undertaken in the 26 years of my gaming life.

I don't even know what it really is.  I thought it was a sequel but it seems more like a sort of reboot more than anything else.  I'd love to tell you about the story at this point in the article but I hated the dialogue in this game so much that I played most of it with my TV muted and just switched my brain off and followed the little red noodle to my mission destinations.

What I can tell you though is that the parkour gameplay isn't actually all that bad.  As far as running around, jumping over, on and around things is fairly functional.  The downside is that it's marred by one of the most boring open worlds in the universe.  The world of Mirrors Edge has nothing in it, nothing to explore or see or experience outside of the set pieces in the main missions.  The only thing the open world is good for is getting from point A to point B and watching a cutscene which means that it doesn't matter how good your parkour gameplay is when you don't fucking do anything with it.

That's not to say that the world is completely void of things to do, it's just that the things to do in that world are pointless bullshit busywork made to prey on 100% wierdos like me.  There are delivery missions when you run from point A to point B, these tower things that you blow up and then run away from and a bunch of random crap to collect throughout the various areas of the world map.  None of this does anything though outside of giving you experience.  However I did a couple of these side shows at the start and quickly gave up yet still managed to max out the skill tree by the end of the game.  It's all literally just pointless bullshit to pad out the game

But let's talk about the skill tree quickly shall we?  One thing I wish games in general would stop doing is including bullshit systems just because it's the "in" thing to do.  The skill tree in ME:C is the most needless token addition to a game I've ever seen.  The developers were so starved for ideas for this token skill tree that one of the skills you unlock is fucking QUICK. TURN.  A feature present in most games as a standard bit of control has been slapped inside a fucking skill tree because whatever gimp decided it was a good idea to have it couldn't think of enough things to fill it.  You may find at that start that certain delivery missions are kind of challenging but NOT because you aren't good enough, it's because the game wont let you move fast enough.  Delivery missions are a breeze once you have quick turn, fast climb, tuck jump and extended slide but until you get these skills the missions are borderline impossible.  If I'm failing something in a game I want it to be because I need to "git gud" not because the dozy idiot I'm controlling hasn't earned the arbitrary amount of points in order for her to "git gud".

Although I'm not saying anything new or controversial with this post, people have been calling it shit since 2008 and rightly so.  I was just late to the party and didn't want to believe it going in so at the end of the day I'm the one with egg on my face.

Ready Player One

This is part of the series of posts I'm calling "Films wot I watched on the plane" and it's not going to be very long because I can sum up my feelings on Ready Player One in two words.

Complete abomination

Now if you didn't close your browser right there allow me to elaborate. Spoiler free

Ready Player One follows the adventures of some kid in a slum called Wade Watts.  Set in the future, Wade along with millions of other people spend most of their days in a sort of weird super-future version of Second Life called The Oasis.  With this being a family movie the plot can't be "if you die in the game you die for real" so all dying in the Oasis means is that you reset back to level 1 and you lose all your shit.  The plot actually revolves around the guy who created the Oasis dying and leaving behind a sort of gamer will where he has hidden 3 keys around the game world and any player who finds them basically becomes the owner of his company and therefore, owns the Oasis.  This of course attracts the attention of a big evil company called IOI and if they find the keys that would be like EA becoming the one and only game developer and publisher in the real word.  So Wade enters the game with his avatar Parzival and teams up with a bunch of other misfits for a wacky adventure in the virtual world.

Now despite the fact I think this movie is a complete abomination I will have to concede that if you don't play video games and know nearly nothing about them, you'll probably quite like it.  It's competently made, the acting is fine (I guess) and it's full of special effects and bombastic sequences that if you're just looking for a stupid popcorn flick then you'll probably garner at least a little enjoyment from it.

The problem arises when you're a viewer who quite enjoys games, which is kind of ironic because you'd think that would be the movies main audience.  While the movie isn't terrible (it's definitely stupid though) it's just sort of insulting.  Not because it takes liberties with how VR works or the way games are sort of in general but because of all the fucking references.  It's a bit like your dirty uncle coming to a party and then trying to show off to all the young people because he used to play Atari and has seen pictures of characters from Overwatch.  The game shoves all these referential bullshit on screen and EXPECTS you to jump up and down like an excited child, point and be like "OH MY GOD THERE IT IS!" but all it makes me do is roll my eyes so hard that you could power a small country with the kinetic energy.  Yeah I get it guys, you know what FPS games are and you've seen that one episode of AVGN where he talks about the Atari game Swordquest.

That's about as much as I can say without spoilers so I'll end with this.  If you don't enjoy video games (and therefore probably aren't reading this post) you might like it.  If you DO enjoy video games then just stay away and instead of wasting your time with this go play an actual game for 140 minutes instead.  

I Don't Get Sports Games

I like to play basically every single genre of games, I don't care if it's a military FPS or a swords and sorcery RPG, it's all good to me.  However there is one genre of game that I tend to stay quite far away from and that's sports games.

I am not a sportsman and I tend to stay away from sports in real life too.  Sure, I don't mind playing a little bit of something from time to time with a few friends for the sake of getting some good exercise, but I have no interest whatsoever in professional sports and the people involved in them.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that sports games or real sports suck, their just not my cup of tea.

But even with that in mind, sports video games fucking baffle me.  They baffle me in two ways in particular and I'm going to outline them in the hopes that someone will stumble across this post and explain the fascination to me.

The first way is the very concept itself of a sports game.  I understand something like a racing game, because the idea of someone going out and buying a vehicle capable of competitive racing is just too much.  However I don't understand things like Football (soccer) games or any other sports games because their isn't really any reason you couldn't go outside with a bunch of friends and play some.  I've never once in my life met a lonely football fan.  Every single person who has an interest in football usually has a group of friends that could go to a park or field and have a game of football.  Same goes for something like Tennis, ESPECIALLY if you live in the UK where tennis balls and rackets are cheap as shit.  Just buy some basic equipment, go to a park and play some fucking tennis instead of sitting on your couch doing it.  Something like Hockey might be a little harder, but generally speaking wouldn't it be better to just go and play the real thing rather then shelling out all this money just to play a video game version of something that would be better to do for real?

The other thing about sports games is that they are just a fucking rip off.  Every goddamn year there's a new Fifa or Pro Evolution game and people go fucking nuts for it.  I understand it when Konami releases a new IIDX game every year because there's new music on it and it's an arcade game.  Doesn't matter if it's IIDX 21 or IIDX 22, it's going to cost 100 yen to play.  But are sports games for things like tennis, football, American football, hockey, basketball etc. really that different from game to game?  What do they even fucking change? The rosters to reflect the teams? Who gives a shit?  In my head, what you're paying for when you buy Fifa 15 is Fifa 14 but with a few names changed round and maybe a shitty PS4 controller or Kinect gimmick.

Like I said, I don't think they suck per se, I just don't get them.  I'm sure there must be SOMETHING to these games otherwise companies like EA wouldn't be able to milk them for so much money every year.  Still though, when I see a game getting yearly sequels I roll my eyes, but when sports fans get yearly sequels it's cause for celebration.  What gives?

Stop Lying to Consumers!

Whats the one thing that EVERYBODY absolutely hated when Sim City (the new one, not the one from 1989) came out?  Always online!  People hated that shit and some said it really ruined their experience.  For example Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation fame had his experience stepped on because he wasn't allowed to call his cities silly things like DogBollock.

But one thing I remember hearing around the time that people were complaining about this was that it's just not possible for Sim City to have an offline mode.  Apparently the game was SO advanced and there was so much shit going on in the game that it absolutely had to be online.  I think anyone with half a working brain knew that was a load of crap but that was their story and they stuck to it.

UNTIL TODAY!

On March 18th 2014, Maxis released a patch for SimCity that allowed the game to be played offline and it stores all your shit locally so you don't have to worry about server wipes of whatever crap was going on around release time.

People are understandably happy about this development, people love the Sim City games and rightly so, they are really good.  But just forget that you get to play your latest instalment of the series offline for a second, why are people not more angry about being lied to?  Why is this an acceptable practice for publishers and developers to just flat out lie to their consumers to get their money!?  Why aren't people marching into EA to punch whoever runs that absolutely shit stain of a video game company in the face?!! 

Now I'm picking on SimCity because it's the most recent example I can find but it's not the only one doing it.  Remember how awesome those Dark Souls 2 gameplay videos looked?

Yeah....not quite how we were told it was going to look, is it?

Not that this reflects on the quality of the game itself, and I'm still hoping that the PC version will look as good as those preview videos, but it's a little bit annoying to be told it's going to look good and then it comes out and it looks no better than anything else.

Like I said about SimCity, I'm only using these examples because they are fairly recent but this trend of just lying to people has been going on for a long LOOONG time and it's really sad and needs to stop.  How about instead of lying to consumers to get their money, how about you just make a quality product that people will want to pay for?! Fucking idiots.

EA Kills Dungeon Keeper

Do you know what Dungeon Keeper is?  Well if you don't I'm about to give you a lesson!

Dungeon Keeper was a PC game released in 1997 and developed by Bullfrog Productions.  The game was a real time strategy game where you played as a dungeon overlord, managing your dungeon, recruiting monsters and keeping heroes away from your dungeon heart with fiendish traps.

It was a really good game since you were basically free to mine out any part of the map and build something there.  Hiring monsters wasn't as simple as building a building and producing stuff, you had to do special things like torture enemies (or even your own creatures) to death or locking them in prison for a set period of time, it was an interesting take on the genre and it's a classic game.  No description I can give it will do it justice, just go and fucking play it.

So we've not had any kind of Dungeon Keeper action since Dungeon Keeper 2 which was released in 1999 but some time last year EA released Dungeon Keeper mobile.  I'm late to the party here but I'm sort of glad because this game is a fucking disgrace.

Dungeon Keeper mobile is a free to play game for phones and tablets and I guess is an attempt to bring Dungeon Keeper back.  I've not played it and I never will, so why am I so mad about it? 

Well, the way I understand is that when you try to mine out blocks of the dungeon, a timer appears.  Let me show you what I mean with a picture I got off the internet.

So as you can see it takes time to mine out a block, which I guess is fine for a mobile game, having to wait for things is kind of common.  But hold the phone, look at that fucking wait time! 24 goddamn hours to mine ONE! FUCKING ONE! block of the dungeon.  But wait, the bullshit gets even worse than this.

You can speed up the process of things in the game by spending green gems.  As far as I'm aware it IS possible to get green gems through mining, but it takes so fucking long to mine anything that it's not even worth it.  So of course, the game has micro transactions for these gems, take a look.

OVER $100 FOR GEMS! HOLY FUCKIN' SHIT.

Now you may look at that and think "oh, 14,000 gems is a lot, I could do a lot of mining with that surely?"  Well no, you're wrong.  Some guy on YouTube worked it out and 14k gems let's you mine FIFTY SIX fucking blocks.  Back when I played Dungeon Keeper on PC I'd mine 56 blocks in the first two or three minutes of the map just so I had space to put shit.

So yeah, surprise surprise, EA is being a bunch of money grubbing dickholes.  If you have ever bought gems for this game, please seek professional medical attention, because there is clearly something wrong with your brain. 

For people who want to experience some REAL Dungeon Keeper, head over to Good Old Games and buy the damn thing for like $5, and play for as long as you want without having to spend any extra.

Fuck this game, fuck EA and fuck anybody who supports this bullshit.

E3 EA Conference! Podcasty Thing!

EA finished their show, I was impressed, listen to how impressed I was

I'm on a Boat!....and E3

Tomorrow is the start of the E3 press conferences!

Tomorrow Sony, Microsoft, EA and Ubisoft are going to hit the stage and deliver some press conferences before the main event kicks off officially on the 11th.

It's going to be an extremely interesting show as Microsoft have to clean up the mess they made with the Xbox One reveal and Sony still have to prove that they are not quite as stupid as Microsoft when it comes to design decisions for their system.

EA and Ubisoft I don't really care all that much about, in the past I've never been hyped for their conferences and I've always been a little bored and disappointed when I end up watching them, but that won't stop me from watching them this year and hopefully we'll get some good games out of them.

So you can expect to see little podcasty vlog type things like I did with the One reveal for each conference and I'll do them as soon as I can once I've watched them.  The problem is that I do have a chance of missing the start of the Microsoft one since I'm getting on a cruise ship today and I don't know if I'll be back for the start, but so far everything seems good for me catching the whole thing.  If I do miss it, I'll make sure to get myself up to speed by finding a recording before I go commenting on it.

So let's all get hype and break out the coffee and energy drinks because I know I'm going to be up until 5am to watch all the conferences tomorrow.

I thought Patches were to make things better, not worse

Sim City is just the shit gift that keeps on giving, goddamn.

So, while I was browsing round the net on Thursday morning I came across an article about Sim City patch 2.0.  What does patch 2.0 do exactly? well it breaks your fucking game is what it does.  Go and give it a google search but this patch has caused all sorts of weird things like small making all your sims shit absolutely everywhere and causing trees to make car noises along with much more.

I'm hoping that as I write this post that it's been fixed because a patch breaking your game is bullshit.  A while ago I made a post about how people need to stop finished unfinished fucking games.  If you're going to put something on the shelf and charge £40+ for it, then at least make sure the fucking thing works was the general gist of that post.

Now I'm a reasonable guy, I'm not expecting the developer to iron out 100% of the problems, a couple of little bugs aren't too bad providing they don't break the game, but shit like this is just fucking everything up and ruining it for everyone.

What makes it worse is that these aren't release bugs, the game was PATCHED to do this.  The whole point of a fucking patch is to make bugs that you missed go away, yet when EA patched this mess of a game it went and broke it even harder, what the fuck.

EA isn't the only one guilty of this shit because Silent Hill HD did the same fucking thing.  But in that case the patches just did nothing rather than break it.  You couldn't really break that game any harder.

Fucking stop this shit, indie games made by 3 or 4 people have less bugs than these huge budget games with massive teams.  What sense does that fucking make? you'd think with all these people working on it, it'd be easier to spot something going wrong.  Just make sure your game fucking works before you start selling it in the first place.  Fuck your deadline, I'm sure fans would appreciate a delay for a product that works out the goddamn box, pricks.

Always On DRM is Arse

The new Sim City game came out recently and before I even start this post I want to have a little rage about the name.  This is what?  Sim City 5? so why the FUCK is it called Sim City?!  I hate when games do this and it's been a thing for far too long.  Even recently we've had Tomb Raider and Devil May Cry despite not being the first one.  Stop doing this shit, it's needlessly confusing.

Anyway, I felt bad for people who bought Diablo 3 at launch.  Not because I think the game isn't all that great, that's just my opinion but because that people weren't able to fucking play the damn thing because the servers were being overrun with people trying to log in.

So we have a case of history repeating itself, and now there are shit tons of people who can't play their new copy of Sim City because there are too many people trying to log in at the same time, and they are shoved into never ending queues.

What makes the whole thing really bad about both Diablo 3 and Sim City is that these are single player games, and people who paid top price for these games are being fucked over because EA are worried about a few pirates.

They really need to find another way to deal with piracy because at the end of the day, the pirates will still find a way to acquire the game for free and the only people that are being affected by this shit are the people who actually paid for the damn thing.

There is more to the Sim City story than just people not being able to log in, but the big point here is that always on DRM needs to fuck right off.  Find away to protect your games without hurting the paying customer or just don't fucking do it.

Beating Dead Horses: Ultima Forever

What is this shit?  It's Mythic Entertainment dragging a relic of PC gamings past to try and squeeze money out of its legacy.

For those that don't know, Ultima is a big long line of old school RPGs that were created by a crazy dude known as Richard Garriot who went by the name of Lord British.  Quest for the Avatar was the 4th game in the Ultima series and it was pretty revolutionary for its time.  It did away with a big bad, and instead had the player focus on trying to become "The Avatar", which in the games world basically amounts to being like Jesus.

So what is Ultima Forever?  From what I can tell in the trailer, it's a dungeon crawl hack n' slash. WRONG! FUCKING, SO GODDAMN WRONG!  Ultima always had its fair share of combat but it was never a hack n' slash dungeon crawl.  It was the fucking opposite, where I think it was the virtue of honor meant that you had to leave fleeing foes and allow them to live because stabbing a dude in the back while he's running away crying is about as dishonourable as it gets.

But this trailer just has a guy smashing the fuck out of everything on screen, and all the depth and brilliant design to be found in the original Ultima 4 appears to be gone. This leads to another problem I have with the gaming industry.

Stop dragging up old names just to make sales on new games.  X-Com got lucky as that game ended up being pretty good.  But Syndicate took it right in the ass, going from an awesome tactics game to a shit first person shooter.  Now Ultima is ready to put its ass in the air and get fucked but the problem here is that Ultima already took it pretty hard after 9.  So Quest for the Avatar, a great game, is now going to have its legacy shit on by turning into an ARPG.

Ultima Forever may actually end up being a really good Action RPG, but there is no reason it should carry Ultimas name, fuck off Mythic.

Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure

Henry Hatsworth is a very silly, yet really very good platform game for the DS that I bought ages ago and never beat.  Now that I'm coming to the end of this game, I thought I'd do a little bit on it.

The plot of this game is very simple.  A long long time ago, there was a suit that was so classy you could rule the world with it.  Some guy known only as The Gentleman ruled the world with this suit and when his time came to an end, he spread the suit all over the world to prevent anyone getting their hands on it and fucking everything up.  That's where you come in, as Henry Hatsworth, the extremely British adventurer as you must go gather all the bits of the suit.

Despite the stupid sounding plot of this game it's actually rather charming and doesn't really get in the way of the game in anyway.  There are a few cutscenes dotted between each world as an excuse to crack a few jokes but plot really isn't all that important in this kind of thing anyway.

You may be asking yourself right now, whats so "puzzling" about this adventure.  Well here's the thing, when you find the first bit of the suit, you open up a rift to the "puzzle dimension" and cause a load of monsters to start pouring out of it.  In game play terms, this means there is a upward scrolling field of coloured blocks in the bottom screen of your DS.  When you kill a monster, it doesn't die completely, it returns to the puzzle where you must then match it up with 2 other blocks of the same colour to get rid of it for good.  Any monsters that reach the top get another crack at trying to kill you before they blink out of existence.

The platforming in this game is really good too with some great level design and really tight controls.  There is also some room for some exploration as there are a number of secret levels that dole out some nice rewards if you bother with them.  On top of that there is a shop where you can buy upgrades for Henry which gives you good reason to actually take on enemies rather than just find ways to rush and avoid them.

I will say though this game is really fuckin' hard.  The platforming can be really tricky sometimes and the enemies will really do you over if you're not careful.  Also the secret levels are insane so if the main game is too easy for you, there is still something that will really challenge your platforming skills.

So if you didn't play this game when it was new, go find a copy.  Easily one of my personal favourite games on the DS.