Disappointing games massacre.
I really have no idea why I am uploading this. It is the absolute opposite to my previous reviews. I tried to make my previous reviews paced, polite and short. These reviews are harsh, poorly constructed and fairly long. This is more of an improvised rant than an actual set of reviews. I personally prefer my more polite short reviews. On the other hand since people tended to dislike my nice reviews perhaps the opposite will reap better results? And I cannot see any reason not to post it. It is not as though I have a reputation to uphold. Anyway without further ado...
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
I need to let off some steam about some games that not only excel at poor storytelling but also leave you feeling empty and angry inside.
Fable 2 in particular is the main culprit that makes me become violently ill. Many video diary's and advertisements boasting freedom of choice, elegant combat and fun all round. But somehow in all this fable manages to pull off the impossible. It manages to offer less freedom than other games.
Not simply by restricting your movement to a set path, although it does. And not simply by restricting your interaction with the surrounding environment, but it really does to that too, quite a damn lot. But by making your interactions with other characters a one way system against you. Characters that Peter Molinue believed before launch to be so strong that they may very well induce emotion in its audience, and yet failed to make it so you could talk to them. T
he characters themselves are rather dull. They tend to avoid letting you in on what their opinions are, or what they think of you to any degree beyond ?you are so awesome?. As they talk at you
you have almost (I say almost because you can make damn stupid gestures during cut scenes at set intervals between the dialogue) no responsive options to reflect your feelings on the situation. For all they care you could be really quite upset about your current situation, or might be very heavily injured and need some assistance. But they don't care. Your just a thug they for some reason own like a dog. Your character could have a personality in your own mind. But during the story he will leave all his previous characteristics behind and replace it with a cold, heartless monster who unquestioningly obeys his orders despite them more often than not getting him traumatised, enslaved, beaten to a pulp or mutilated in some ghastly way.
One part in particular strikes as a ridiculous plot device inhibiting your freedom of choice to a all new low. You have, due to your unnecessarily callous orders from your support characters who is a blind seress named Theresa, been imprisoned for ten whole years in an Orwellian doom fortress located just off shore resembling the tower of mount doom in lord of the rings that enslaves and brutalises decent folk in order to construct a doomsday device. You have been tortured, beaten, humiliated insulted and enslaved. And finally after ten years of absolute, dreadful misery you have made your way out to sweet freedom.
Then, as you make your way across the pier off of the boat, still wearing your hateful uniform, Theresa turns up with your bloody annoying dog. She falls just short of even so much as a bloody thank you and immediately assumes you wish to continue your droneish, poorly thought out tasks. I mean come on, cant I, for sake of example, refuse? Maybe shout at her a little for sending me to that godforsaken piss stained hell hole of a high security prison? And why, oh why, am I supposed to be pleased to see my little dog again, pray tell? His use is questionable, and I still cant fathom how he has outlived the twenty years that the game spans.
Your customisation is also lacking. There is a very limited supply of good designer wear on offer and that which is provided is likely to make you look like either a rich pirate or a downtrodden scum bag. There is one easy to obtain overpowered melle weapon that beats all alternatives. And the gambling games are so difficult to understand, chance based and suicidally money hungry that you wont want to give them a try either. There is no fun to be had even after your Nazi support character is done messing you about. There is no hapless wandering, no quests that really invite you to think carefully about how you accomplish the task. It is all so weak and empty that by the time you finish (It takes a really short amount of time to finish too) You will curse yourself for once again falling for Peter Molinuex crafty tricks. But the very worst thing is right at the end of the game.....
Steven Fry turns up, Theresa tells you he is a support character and you need to be friends with him in order to do...something or other. The first thing you will notice about this character is he is very obviously dislikeable. He is supposed to be, and the scriptwriters intended it to be so. Therefore, I reasoned as he babbled on in his own Steven Fry world, I must be able to do something nasty to him later. And I did want to. Very much. Unfortunate, perhaps, that the support character I had increasingly come to refer as ?that annoying *****? wanted me to be extra special friends with him. He gave me tasks, each one more annoying and redundant than the last. Finally he gave me a mission to explore a deep dark cavern full of monsters. Upon reaching the deepest chasm I came to discover that it was, unsurprisingly, a trap. I spend another's life to save my own in an arbitrary moment of choice, despite my characters alignment, and sped off to deliver a knuckle sandwich, the address been Stephen Fry's face.
Upon reaching him he was all too quick to smugly shrug off the fact that a deadly warrior or hero is standing in front of him brandishing a cleaver. He literally sits there taunting you for your inability to kill him. The script writers actually sat there writing a sequence whereupon you have to stand a inch away from a horribly dislikeable person who has over the past hour alone killed some of your own business partners who you had come to like, attempted to kill you, lead you on utterly meaningless quests and generally insult you. And you are, due to a cut scene, utterly powerless to launch magic from the tips of your fingers to finish off the little twerp once and for all. By this point they may as well have included a cut scene where the Steven Fry character jumps on a table and jerks off in your face. There is no way you can possibly loose any more dignity by this point. Why not a sequence where you have to shine his shoes? kiss his arse? Do a little dance for his amusement? Then, to put a neat cherry on top you have to team up with him in a gunfight immediately after all this while he gabs off about all the people he has killed. Wow.
And just to finish it off with a nice hole where satisfaction should be if you don't shoot the pathetic excuse for a final boss quick enough then Steven Fry shoots him instead. Then walks over to you making smug preening noises..... and slaps is arse at you, then commands you to dry hump his leg like a pathetic little ***** who needs the comfort of his masters leg. Fable 2 was so great.
Edit: Far cry 2 review begins here. This is no longer a fable 2 review. I say this because the lack of event between fable 2 and far cry 2 reviews has confused somebody. So anyway:
A brief mention to Far Cry 2 for making such a blatant mess of storytelling nearly to the degree of Fable 2 minus the loathsome humiliation. This wont include spoilers save for spoiling the illusion of choice. If you honestly don't want to know how the game ruined itself then skip ahead a little.
In Far Cry 2 you can choose who lives and who dies. Or at least who lives slightly longer than who.
You see, during the game you meet a slew of multi racial warlords who want all the shiny money for themselves. You will receive objectives from them until they are pleased with the result and leave you to the other characters. But in the second half of the game your missions involve killing off all the other warlords for money. It is satisfying to see all the characters to be picked off one by one. But there was one character I really, really liked a lot. His name was something like ?Greaves?.
He was British. He was nasty, and he had utter disregard for human life. When I finally got to do missions for this guy it was like watching a master at work. He is an evil genius who comes up with the most ingenious plans. When I came up to his office after having met him once or twice he briefed me. Breathlessly I listened as he portrayed his intricate plan. He wanted to jump-start the war again just to open up new work opportunity. How damn nasty is that? And what's more he wanted to do it by leading a shipment of weapons into a neutral harbour to inflame anger between both sides. Sweet! In my head I made a mental note that I hoped for this guy to live. The only problem is that later on I had been given a mission to assassinate him, as I drove towards Greaves's base I was absolutely furious. Why? I thought. Why must I kill him? Why cant I resist orders?As I walked into his room with a gun he and some random business associate put their hands up and start to argue that the other should die. I thought ?who the bloody hell is this guy trying to make me kill Greaves?? and shot him within an instant. But as I pointed the gun at Greaves something odd happened. I couldn't fire.
I physically froze, I couldn't bring myself to sink a bullet into such a loveable basterd. This had not happened before. Not just in Far Cry 2 but any game where I am tasked with murder. Previously whenever a mission such as this had occurred in Far Cry 2 I pulled out my gun, walked up to them and put one bullet right between the eyes. But with Greaves I simply sat there as the little devil on my right shoulder argued with the little angel on my left. In my personal conflict I came to realise that Greaves is making me an offer to eliminate the man who tasked me with his removal. PURE. JOY. That little encounter had me smiling as I taken the car journey back to my boss with grenade launcher in hand. So pleased was I that I declared the game to be excellent without further ado. This is how choice systems should be! I should actually be able to pick favourites and try to protect them! Unfortunately for me my lapse into joy was, as always, cut off by a pile of shit blocking my car. Because nearing the games conclusion you are asked politely by the games main villain who has assailed you at every turn to kill all the characters you chose previously to save during the game without any way to avoid it.
SHUT THE FUCK OFF.
I cant even begin to describe what is wrong with this. Firstly what if I don't want to team up with the evil madman who has repeatedly fucked me over an entire mountain of gold? I know he has started acting nice but that will not excuse the fact that he is a gun trader who has supplied death and destruction to all for a very reasonable price.
Secondly these people don't really need to die, I was told that if they live then the wars will still continue but I must point out that in the near future a fresh batch of bastards is going to take control and this will all be for nothing. The war will just start all over again. Thirdly the writers must have assumed that the people who are left are the people I did not kill. I did not kill them for a very good reason (ie I really like Greaves so much) so asking us to kill them is about as well received as an invitation from Guantanamo Bay.
Not only that but the actual game part of the game is all very Ubisoft. The gameplay is a routine repeated to a painful degree (see assassins creed) and gun play so unsatisfying it physically upsets me. I really wish they did this well. They always make brilliant concepts with staggering tec but gameplay is as usual unpleasantly repetitive. Never mind, at least you are actually allowed to kill annoying characters as supposed to ?Slave work the game? by which I mean Fable 2.
Edit: Just to reiterate the spore review starts here. Just so you don't get confused and suchlike. Thank you for your patience.
Spore. Oh dear. Spore. This one is going to haunt me for many years to come. I did try, you know, not to get worked up prior to release. But the sad truth is that this game has broken my sweet little gamer heart and turned it sour. I was already on that path, but spore was so bad I literally felt what it is like for my own brain to break. The process takes a whole evening of pure fury at the very existence of human kind but once it is done you feel nice and dead inside. I am sorry but I cant even restrain my anger for spore. About three or four years it was for me. Four years of starry eyed optimism. So what if the Wii was not as good as it could have been? So what if the games industry has not progressed a great deal save graphical tec? At least one day Spore will come and make it all better like a magic wand.
But coarse that sort of thing only happens in dreams. What the game turned out to be was a strictly linear Pixar cartoon creation kit married to a boring grindy world of war craft Pokemon accounting game with as much depth as a monolith. You traverse through four stages of swaggering about until you reach the final stage where you take up accounting and slowly trade multicoloured ?spice? about in your little avatar. The final stage is supposed to be a fun sandbox to play about in but instead it is a dull, heartless void. Even if you start to get into the swing of things, actually start having fun with the editing tools, then no doubt a ecological disaster will engulf your home world or a puny pirate raid will launch a futile and unprofitable assault in their annoying little ships. If you find yourself enjoying your time in space then the game will automatically instruct you to do some more accounting or what have you.
It's odd really. I was under the apparently mistaken impression that video games were recreational products not jobs that you must pay to carry out. I apologise for my lack of restraint in these reviews regarding my anger towards empty, loathsome and boring games but Will Wright really is a sad tale of woe. I feel quite sorry for him having all those EA executives breathing down his neck. You see, he made them gallons of money, he created the monster, like doctor Frankenstein. And now that he wants to be creative and stop spamming thirty quid expansion packs for everybody's favourite bland simulator EA has let him go wild while simultaneously rushing him for more output. I get the feeling Sims three was his way of apologising to EA. Still this is all speculation. for all I know Will Wright could really like the latest version of Spore, as if that was possible to do while still having brain function.
So between these games and Humphrey Davey school I have become misanthropic and angry approximately thirty years to soon.
PS: There should be a game based around Will Wrights career called ?Mediocre Boring Life Simulator Tycoon?
I really have no idea why I am uploading this. It is the absolute opposite to my previous reviews. I tried to make my previous reviews paced, polite and short. These reviews are harsh, poorly constructed and fairly long. This is more of an improvised rant than an actual set of reviews. I personally prefer my more polite short reviews. On the other hand since people tended to dislike my nice reviews perhaps the opposite will reap better results? And I cannot see any reason not to post it. It is not as though I have a reputation to uphold. Anyway without further ado...
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
I need to let off some steam about some games that not only excel at poor storytelling but also leave you feeling empty and angry inside.
Fable 2 in particular is the main culprit that makes me become violently ill. Many video diary's and advertisements boasting freedom of choice, elegant combat and fun all round. But somehow in all this fable manages to pull off the impossible. It manages to offer less freedom than other games.
Not simply by restricting your movement to a set path, although it does. And not simply by restricting your interaction with the surrounding environment, but it really does to that too, quite a damn lot. But by making your interactions with other characters a one way system against you. Characters that Peter Molinue believed before launch to be so strong that they may very well induce emotion in its audience, and yet failed to make it so you could talk to them. T
he characters themselves are rather dull. They tend to avoid letting you in on what their opinions are, or what they think of you to any degree beyond ?you are so awesome?. As they talk at you
you have almost (I say almost because you can make damn stupid gestures during cut scenes at set intervals between the dialogue) no responsive options to reflect your feelings on the situation. For all they care you could be really quite upset about your current situation, or might be very heavily injured and need some assistance. But they don't care. Your just a thug they for some reason own like a dog. Your character could have a personality in your own mind. But during the story he will leave all his previous characteristics behind and replace it with a cold, heartless monster who unquestioningly obeys his orders despite them more often than not getting him traumatised, enslaved, beaten to a pulp or mutilated in some ghastly way.
One part in particular strikes as a ridiculous plot device inhibiting your freedom of choice to a all new low. You have, due to your unnecessarily callous orders from your support characters who is a blind seress named Theresa, been imprisoned for ten whole years in an Orwellian doom fortress located just off shore resembling the tower of mount doom in lord of the rings that enslaves and brutalises decent folk in order to construct a doomsday device. You have been tortured, beaten, humiliated insulted and enslaved. And finally after ten years of absolute, dreadful misery you have made your way out to sweet freedom.
Then, as you make your way across the pier off of the boat, still wearing your hateful uniform, Theresa turns up with your bloody annoying dog. She falls just short of even so much as a bloody thank you and immediately assumes you wish to continue your droneish, poorly thought out tasks. I mean come on, cant I, for sake of example, refuse? Maybe shout at her a little for sending me to that godforsaken piss stained hell hole of a high security prison? And why, oh why, am I supposed to be pleased to see my little dog again, pray tell? His use is questionable, and I still cant fathom how he has outlived the twenty years that the game spans.
Your customisation is also lacking. There is a very limited supply of good designer wear on offer and that which is provided is likely to make you look like either a rich pirate or a downtrodden scum bag. There is one easy to obtain overpowered melle weapon that beats all alternatives. And the gambling games are so difficult to understand, chance based and suicidally money hungry that you wont want to give them a try either. There is no fun to be had even after your Nazi support character is done messing you about. There is no hapless wandering, no quests that really invite you to think carefully about how you accomplish the task. It is all so weak and empty that by the time you finish (It takes a really short amount of time to finish too) You will curse yourself for once again falling for Peter Molinuex crafty tricks. But the very worst thing is right at the end of the game.....
Steven Fry turns up, Theresa tells you he is a support character and you need to be friends with him in order to do...something or other. The first thing you will notice about this character is he is very obviously dislikeable. He is supposed to be, and the scriptwriters intended it to be so. Therefore, I reasoned as he babbled on in his own Steven Fry world, I must be able to do something nasty to him later. And I did want to. Very much. Unfortunate, perhaps, that the support character I had increasingly come to refer as ?that annoying *****? wanted me to be extra special friends with him. He gave me tasks, each one more annoying and redundant than the last. Finally he gave me a mission to explore a deep dark cavern full of monsters. Upon reaching the deepest chasm I came to discover that it was, unsurprisingly, a trap. I spend another's life to save my own in an arbitrary moment of choice, despite my characters alignment, and sped off to deliver a knuckle sandwich, the address been Stephen Fry's face.
Upon reaching him he was all too quick to smugly shrug off the fact that a deadly warrior or hero is standing in front of him brandishing a cleaver. He literally sits there taunting you for your inability to kill him. The script writers actually sat there writing a sequence whereupon you have to stand a inch away from a horribly dislikeable person who has over the past hour alone killed some of your own business partners who you had come to like, attempted to kill you, lead you on utterly meaningless quests and generally insult you. And you are, due to a cut scene, utterly powerless to launch magic from the tips of your fingers to finish off the little twerp once and for all. By this point they may as well have included a cut scene where the Steven Fry character jumps on a table and jerks off in your face. There is no way you can possibly loose any more dignity by this point. Why not a sequence where you have to shine his shoes? kiss his arse? Do a little dance for his amusement? Then, to put a neat cherry on top you have to team up with him in a gunfight immediately after all this while he gabs off about all the people he has killed. Wow.
And just to finish it off with a nice hole where satisfaction should be if you don't shoot the pathetic excuse for a final boss quick enough then Steven Fry shoots him instead. Then walks over to you making smug preening noises..... and slaps is arse at you, then commands you to dry hump his leg like a pathetic little ***** who needs the comfort of his masters leg. Fable 2 was so great.
Edit: Far cry 2 review begins here. This is no longer a fable 2 review. I say this because the lack of event between fable 2 and far cry 2 reviews has confused somebody. So anyway:
A brief mention to Far Cry 2 for making such a blatant mess of storytelling nearly to the degree of Fable 2 minus the loathsome humiliation. This wont include spoilers save for spoiling the illusion of choice. If you honestly don't want to know how the game ruined itself then skip ahead a little.
In Far Cry 2 you can choose who lives and who dies. Or at least who lives slightly longer than who.
You see, during the game you meet a slew of multi racial warlords who want all the shiny money for themselves. You will receive objectives from them until they are pleased with the result and leave you to the other characters. But in the second half of the game your missions involve killing off all the other warlords for money. It is satisfying to see all the characters to be picked off one by one. But there was one character I really, really liked a lot. His name was something like ?Greaves?.
He was British. He was nasty, and he had utter disregard for human life. When I finally got to do missions for this guy it was like watching a master at work. He is an evil genius who comes up with the most ingenious plans. When I came up to his office after having met him once or twice he briefed me. Breathlessly I listened as he portrayed his intricate plan. He wanted to jump-start the war again just to open up new work opportunity. How damn nasty is that? And what's more he wanted to do it by leading a shipment of weapons into a neutral harbour to inflame anger between both sides. Sweet! In my head I made a mental note that I hoped for this guy to live. The only problem is that later on I had been given a mission to assassinate him, as I drove towards Greaves's base I was absolutely furious. Why? I thought. Why must I kill him? Why cant I resist orders?As I walked into his room with a gun he and some random business associate put their hands up and start to argue that the other should die. I thought ?who the bloody hell is this guy trying to make me kill Greaves?? and shot him within an instant. But as I pointed the gun at Greaves something odd happened. I couldn't fire.
I physically froze, I couldn't bring myself to sink a bullet into such a loveable basterd. This had not happened before. Not just in Far Cry 2 but any game where I am tasked with murder. Previously whenever a mission such as this had occurred in Far Cry 2 I pulled out my gun, walked up to them and put one bullet right between the eyes. But with Greaves I simply sat there as the little devil on my right shoulder argued with the little angel on my left. In my personal conflict I came to realise that Greaves is making me an offer to eliminate the man who tasked me with his removal. PURE. JOY. That little encounter had me smiling as I taken the car journey back to my boss with grenade launcher in hand. So pleased was I that I declared the game to be excellent without further ado. This is how choice systems should be! I should actually be able to pick favourites and try to protect them! Unfortunately for me my lapse into joy was, as always, cut off by a pile of shit blocking my car. Because nearing the games conclusion you are asked politely by the games main villain who has assailed you at every turn to kill all the characters you chose previously to save during the game without any way to avoid it.
SHUT THE FUCK OFF.
I cant even begin to describe what is wrong with this. Firstly what if I don't want to team up with the evil madman who has repeatedly fucked me over an entire mountain of gold? I know he has started acting nice but that will not excuse the fact that he is a gun trader who has supplied death and destruction to all for a very reasonable price.
Secondly these people don't really need to die, I was told that if they live then the wars will still continue but I must point out that in the near future a fresh batch of bastards is going to take control and this will all be for nothing. The war will just start all over again. Thirdly the writers must have assumed that the people who are left are the people I did not kill. I did not kill them for a very good reason (ie I really like Greaves so much) so asking us to kill them is about as well received as an invitation from Guantanamo Bay.
Not only that but the actual game part of the game is all very Ubisoft. The gameplay is a routine repeated to a painful degree (see assassins creed) and gun play so unsatisfying it physically upsets me. I really wish they did this well. They always make brilliant concepts with staggering tec but gameplay is as usual unpleasantly repetitive. Never mind, at least you are actually allowed to kill annoying characters as supposed to ?Slave work the game? by which I mean Fable 2.
Edit: Just to reiterate the spore review starts here. Just so you don't get confused and suchlike. Thank you for your patience.
Spore. Oh dear. Spore. This one is going to haunt me for many years to come. I did try, you know, not to get worked up prior to release. But the sad truth is that this game has broken my sweet little gamer heart and turned it sour. I was already on that path, but spore was so bad I literally felt what it is like for my own brain to break. The process takes a whole evening of pure fury at the very existence of human kind but once it is done you feel nice and dead inside. I am sorry but I cant even restrain my anger for spore. About three or four years it was for me. Four years of starry eyed optimism. So what if the Wii was not as good as it could have been? So what if the games industry has not progressed a great deal save graphical tec? At least one day Spore will come and make it all better like a magic wand.
But coarse that sort of thing only happens in dreams. What the game turned out to be was a strictly linear Pixar cartoon creation kit married to a boring grindy world of war craft Pokemon accounting game with as much depth as a monolith. You traverse through four stages of swaggering about until you reach the final stage where you take up accounting and slowly trade multicoloured ?spice? about in your little avatar. The final stage is supposed to be a fun sandbox to play about in but instead it is a dull, heartless void. Even if you start to get into the swing of things, actually start having fun with the editing tools, then no doubt a ecological disaster will engulf your home world or a puny pirate raid will launch a futile and unprofitable assault in their annoying little ships. If you find yourself enjoying your time in space then the game will automatically instruct you to do some more accounting or what have you.
It's odd really. I was under the apparently mistaken impression that video games were recreational products not jobs that you must pay to carry out. I apologise for my lack of restraint in these reviews regarding my anger towards empty, loathsome and boring games but Will Wright really is a sad tale of woe. I feel quite sorry for him having all those EA executives breathing down his neck. You see, he made them gallons of money, he created the monster, like doctor Frankenstein. And now that he wants to be creative and stop spamming thirty quid expansion packs for everybody's favourite bland simulator EA has let him go wild while simultaneously rushing him for more output. I get the feeling Sims three was his way of apologising to EA. Still this is all speculation. for all I know Will Wright could really like the latest version of Spore, as if that was possible to do while still having brain function.
So between these games and Humphrey Davey school I have become misanthropic and angry approximately thirty years to soon.
PS: There should be a game based around Will Wrights career called ?Mediocre Boring Life Simulator Tycoon?
