In the final entry of this series (for now), I've got Terminator Salvation in my crosshairs. This game could have been really good, and should have been, given the source material, but we Terminator fanboys got stuck with a clunky mess of a game that isn't even fun to play. There's no 'it's so bad, it's good' going on here. It's all bad.
From the first time you load up the game, you'll see a loading screen that seems to take much more time loading than it should. You'll see this screen a lot during the game; in between chapters, in between different parts of a level, and all in all I'd say there are between 5-10 minutes total you've spend staring at this loading screen by the time you finish the game (assuming you don't die a bunch of times and have to see it even more so). I'm no developer or anything, but it seems to me that most loading should take place behind the scenes and not interrupt gameplay every 15 minutes.
Once the game has actually loaded, you'll be bombarded with blurry graphics, awful writing, and awful, bored-sounding voice acting. In the first level, you as John Connor lead a team into a beaten old building in Los Angeles, and discover a Hunter-Killer hovering around outside.
Blair: John, use that rocket to blow up the HK!
Equip the RPG, find cover, and peek out when you see the HK hover in front of the building. Fire the rocket. The rocket will hit the HK and it'll fly away for a minute.
Blair: Good work John!
Rogers: Nice shooting John.
Do this three or four more times. See what I mean?
There are six types of enemies in the game, three of which will hound you constantly from beginning to end. You have five weapons to choose from, and two different types of grenades. That by itself should turn around 84% of gamers off, especially those who play Halo and Call of Duty, where dozens of weapons await you over the course of the game. Then again, neither of those games are 4 hours long.
Another huge problem with the game is that the graphics and design are awful. Everything is a bit blurry and flat. The environment design, at least in the first couple of levels, is pretty good; LA looks like a broken shell of a city, just what you'd expect after a nuclear attack. After that, though, it's the same thing over and over. You walk into a building where several layers of barricades sit in the middle of the room, and robots walk out and shoot at you, and you hide behind a barricade and shoot at them until they die. Flanking is a huge part of the game; the spider robots won't die unless shot from behind. Your AI teammates, however, like to run for cover in random places and crouch behind it, never popping out to give you covering fire. This makes for some fairly drawn-out battles on the hardest difficulty, because you're the only one actually doing anything, and your health winds down very quickly.
Speaking of the hardest difficulty, I played the game once through on Easy, then went all the way to Hard, and it was only a little more difficult than the first time around. No challenge whatsoever. Well, unless you count 'moving in slow motion even with the sensitivity turned to 100%' and 'popping out of cover and pressing the Fire button but your character just stands there and gets shot to death.' The last two chapters are literally 10 minutes long apiece, if that. If you play in co-op, it would probably take around five minutes apiece.
This game is slow, clunky, badly voiced, and needs to be played on the hardest difficulty to get your rental fee's worth out of it. Yeah, you will get 1000/1000G easily since there are only 12 achievements, and if you liked the movie you'll get filled in on some of the backstory leading up to the events of the film, but if you don't have the patience to put up with shoddy game design, avoid this at all costs.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Splinter Cell?
I'm too aggressive for stealth games. I got Splinter Cell: Double Agent from GameFly last week, and loaded the training missions since I've never played an intense stealth game before (I don't count Metal Gear Solid as strictly stealth since you can still shoot people if you really want to). My 'handler' told me that lethal force was not allowed, and I had to sneak past everyone and avoid any kind of detection to complete the objective. In the first mission, I disabled the security cameras, walked through the laser trip wire, triggered the alarm, and took the objective. In the second mission, I punched the cop, walked into the next segment, and on the staircase overlooking the maze with the two terrorists clearly visible, I pulled out my gun and shot them both. Then I walked through the maze and completed the objective.
When I tried the first mission, I shot the first couple of guys in the face, infiltrated the base or whatever kind of facility it was, and shot people in the back. Then I was gunned down. I did this two or three more times, and decided that enough was enough, and I sent the game back. I'm sure that Splinter Cell and the like are really awesome games, but I don't have the patience to sneak around everything. I like games that let me utilize the direct approach, like Halo, and GTA IV, and Asteroids.
When I tried the first mission, I shot the first couple of guys in the face, infiltrated the base or whatever kind of facility it was, and shot people in the back. Then I was gunned down. I did this two or three more times, and decided that enough was enough, and I sent the game back. I'm sure that Splinter Cell and the like are really awesome games, but I don't have the patience to sneak around everything. I like games that let me utilize the direct approach, like Halo, and GTA IV, and Asteroids.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
The Worst Games I've Ever Played... GameCube Edition
1. Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions
Imagine a world where all of the characters look like they are modeled on an N64, so they are perfectly polygonal. Imagine that one of these characters is eating Jello out of a martini glass, and she drops the glass, and a perfectly polygonal, sharp-edged object that is understood to be Jello spills out. Then you start playing the actual game, where you are driving around in a car, racing to catch up with, as your boss tells you, 'the Yakuza cars.' You also learn that you work for a secret anti-Yakuza car-driving team knows as 'The Flying Dragons.' If you fail the mission, your car comes to a halt and your characters says "oh noooooooooooe! we lawwwwwwwwst!" because your character is a whiny-voiced girl. Then is where I turned off the 'Cube and cursed myself for paying to rent this worthless game.
2. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
What does heavy metal have to do with ancient Egypt? If you ask this game's developers, probably a lot of stuff, because that's all you hear when you play. I would have rather had my fingers crushed with a hammer by Islamic terrorists, like what happened to Leo DiCaprio in 'Body of Lies' (avoid that movie too).
3. The Scorpion King: Rise of the Akkadian
The graphics were awful, the cutscenes were all pre-rendered CGI, so they looked infinitely better than the actual game. The voice acting sounded like the producer had gotten The Rock, et al into a darkened room and threatened to not turn the lights on if they didn't record their lines.
(The Rock and a Mysterious Old Man walk up to the exit of the evil dungeon where Rock just killed a giant water serpent. They look off into the distance.)
The Rock: I'm going home now.
Old Man: Eeeehhh, Akkadian... (imagine the most stereotypical old man voice possible)
The Rock: No. It can't be.
Old Man: I'm afraid so, Akkadian. Akkad is in flames. Someone has attacked it.
The Rock: I must go.
Fun fact: if you walked over a save point in the third or fourth level with a broad sword equipped, the game would crash.
Fun fact #2: Mark Hamill does the voice of one of the bosses. I'll give you a hint as to who that voice really belongs to. It starts with 'J' and rhymes with 'toker.' Yep.
This game's mediocrity should have prevented me from playing it, but I beat it several times over, because once you beat the game, you start over from the beginning with all of your upgraded abilities, while the enemies remain in their 'easy mode' state. This makes the game incredibly easy to beat and a laugh-fest at that. Go to Amazon and pay $.53 plus shipping if you want to play one of the most repetitive, uninspired games in all of Creation.
4. Enter The Matrix
This game should have been mind-blowingly awesome. Instead it was buggy, and the combat sucked, and those driving levels were some of the most painful experiences that a human being could ever have, aside from having their limbs removed with a can opener and having to watch 'Mio In The Land Of Faraway.' The story was pretty interesting, seeing as you'd be really confused if you watched The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions without playing the game first, because it explains the backstory of Niobe and Ghost and everything that they do while Reloaded is happening. But you have to play the entire frickin' game in order to discover the whole story, and you just might drop your controller and say that it isn't worth it, and you'll read it on Wikipedia instead.
If more time and effort had been put into the game, it might not have been as bad as it is. And it has its redeeming qualities. The bullet time is awesome, as usual, and some of the combat moves were really cool, especially since using bullet time (Focus, in the game) changed the moves into jaw-dropping moments of arse-kickery. Prime example: if you walk up behind a guard and press the Action button, you'll clamp your hands over his mouth and strangle him. If you press the Action button and then press the Focus button, you'll snap his neck so hard that his head is turned around 180 degrees, so when he lands facing down, his face will be looking up at you. How awesome is that?
One of the other great things about this otherwise-awful game is that if Hollywood and the game industry did partnerships with this level of detail and cooperation, movie-based games might not suck as bad as they do. That, and the hacking mini-game was spectacularly well done. That by itself might justify buying it for a very small amount of money.
Otherwise, the game falls flat. There are numerous bugs within the game, and a lot of graphic-related issues that made the game really hard to enjoy for me. Yeah, I played it a lot, because I was bored at the time, back in 2003, and couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of games.
Imagine a world where all of the characters look like they are modeled on an N64, so they are perfectly polygonal. Imagine that one of these characters is eating Jello out of a martini glass, and she drops the glass, and a perfectly polygonal, sharp-edged object that is understood to be Jello spills out. Then you start playing the actual game, where you are driving around in a car, racing to catch up with, as your boss tells you, 'the Yakuza cars.' You also learn that you work for a secret anti-Yakuza car-driving team knows as 'The Flying Dragons.' If you fail the mission, your car comes to a halt and your characters says "oh noooooooooooe! we lawwwwwwwwst!" because your character is a whiny-voiced girl. Then is where I turned off the 'Cube and cursed myself for paying to rent this worthless game.
2. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
What does heavy metal have to do with ancient Egypt? If you ask this game's developers, probably a lot of stuff, because that's all you hear when you play. I would have rather had my fingers crushed with a hammer by Islamic terrorists, like what happened to Leo DiCaprio in 'Body of Lies' (avoid that movie too).
3. The Scorpion King: Rise of the Akkadian
The graphics were awful, the cutscenes were all pre-rendered CGI, so they looked infinitely better than the actual game. The voice acting sounded like the producer had gotten The Rock, et al into a darkened room and threatened to not turn the lights on if they didn't record their lines.
(The Rock and a Mysterious Old Man walk up to the exit of the evil dungeon where Rock just killed a giant water serpent. They look off into the distance.)
The Rock: I'm going home now.
Old Man: Eeeehhh, Akkadian... (imagine the most stereotypical old man voice possible)
The Rock: No. It can't be.
Old Man: I'm afraid so, Akkadian. Akkad is in flames. Someone has attacked it.
The Rock: I must go.
Fun fact: if you walked over a save point in the third or fourth level with a broad sword equipped, the game would crash.
Fun fact #2: Mark Hamill does the voice of one of the bosses. I'll give you a hint as to who that voice really belongs to. It starts with 'J' and rhymes with 'toker.' Yep.
This game's mediocrity should have prevented me from playing it, but I beat it several times over, because once you beat the game, you start over from the beginning with all of your upgraded abilities, while the enemies remain in their 'easy mode' state. This makes the game incredibly easy to beat and a laugh-fest at that. Go to Amazon and pay $.53 plus shipping if you want to play one of the most repetitive, uninspired games in all of Creation.
4. Enter The Matrix
This game should have been mind-blowingly awesome. Instead it was buggy, and the combat sucked, and those driving levels were some of the most painful experiences that a human being could ever have, aside from having their limbs removed with a can opener and having to watch 'Mio In The Land Of Faraway.' The story was pretty interesting, seeing as you'd be really confused if you watched The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions without playing the game first, because it explains the backstory of Niobe and Ghost and everything that they do while Reloaded is happening. But you have to play the entire frickin' game in order to discover the whole story, and you just might drop your controller and say that it isn't worth it, and you'll read it on Wikipedia instead.
If more time and effort had been put into the game, it might not have been as bad as it is. And it has its redeeming qualities. The bullet time is awesome, as usual, and some of the combat moves were really cool, especially since using bullet time (Focus, in the game) changed the moves into jaw-dropping moments of arse-kickery. Prime example: if you walk up behind a guard and press the Action button, you'll clamp your hands over his mouth and strangle him. If you press the Action button and then press the Focus button, you'll snap his neck so hard that his head is turned around 180 degrees, so when he lands facing down, his face will be looking up at you. How awesome is that?
One of the other great things about this otherwise-awful game is that if Hollywood and the game industry did partnerships with this level of detail and cooperation, movie-based games might not suck as bad as they do. That, and the hacking mini-game was spectacularly well done. That by itself might justify buying it for a very small amount of money.
Otherwise, the game falls flat. There are numerous bugs within the game, and a lot of graphic-related issues that made the game really hard to enjoy for me. Yeah, I played it a lot, because I was bored at the time, back in 2003, and couldn't afford to buy a whole lot of games.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
The Worst Games I've Ever Played... Rogue Warrior
There aren't enough negative words in the English language to describe this saucy goatshtup of a game. It's based on a guy who I guess was the original Navy SEAL, so when I got bored one night and rented it, I figured it wouldn't be so bad. The cover looked pretty cool, and Mickey Rourke did the voice of the protagonist, so... how could this go wrong?
In just about every way possible.
For starters, the graphics were absolutely awful. Most of it looked like a PS2 game that was illegally hacked to allow usability on a 360. Your player's face hardly ever changes, and neither do the faces of your enemies. The environments looked like they were straight out of Tomorrow Never Dies for PS1, and that's saying something.
Continuing the horror, the sound effects were pretty standard. All of the guns sounded like they came out of a cheap Jason Statham movie that no one bothered to see. Your enemies all talk in very exaggerated Asian dialects (you're in North Korea), and Mickey Rourke mumbles all of his lines and only puts feeling into them when he really feels the urge. For an example...
1. "ManthisplaceisashitholehowthefuckdidIgetinjured."
2. "Dropthatmotherfuckeryoufuckin'amateurs! AW FUCK!"
Oh, in case you couldn't tell, there are more f-bombs in this game than any Quentin Tarantino movie you've ever seen. Not that I cared; most of the time it was downright hilarious because it was so over the top. Case in point: you're walking down a hallway, with your night vision goggles on, and you gun down an evil North Korean Communist, and Mickey decides to shout "Goddamn cockbreath Commie motherfuckers!" You tell 'em, Mick.
Gameplay was an absolute wash. When you're firing at your enemies, your bullets will only hit them around half of the time, while they pump lead into you mercilessly until you die. You'll want to take cover a lot, assuming their bullets don't magically pass through the object you're hiding behind (yes, it's true). When you're not in a firefight, you can pretty much walk into an enemy's peripheral vision and kill him, because the AI is so stupid that a dying amoeba would pose more danger to you than one of these guys. It's almost as if the developers decided to go for the player demographic of 'blind horses without legs' when figuring out how difficult to make the actual game. Don't believe me? You can go up to any enemy, even if they're firing on you, and press the Action button to perform a very sweet-looking knife kill, which is just about the only redeeming quality the game has, even if you are in the middle of a massive firefight with 10 guys shooting at you and you can take them out one by one with your knife. Besides the fact that...
...it's only 2 hours long. On the easiest difficulty, too. And they throw achievements around like candy; I was able to rack up 495 Gamerscore points in total, and there's still a bunch left I could get if I wanted to, assuming anyone plays this game online (they don't), or any of my friends rent it to try it out (they won't).
This is, without a doubt, in the top three worst games I have ever played. Yeah, I tried really hard to get my money's worth out of it, but at least I didn't pay full price for this steaming pile of diseased walrus crap. Heck, I wouldn't have been able to get my money's worth if I had gotten the game for free. So... if you're looking for shameless, easy ways to boost your Gamerscore, rent this game for a day. Or steal it. And if you do, steal two copies so you and I can play online and get even more achievements, while losing our last shred of dignity in the process.
In just about every way possible.
For starters, the graphics were absolutely awful. Most of it looked like a PS2 game that was illegally hacked to allow usability on a 360. Your player's face hardly ever changes, and neither do the faces of your enemies. The environments looked like they were straight out of Tomorrow Never Dies for PS1, and that's saying something.
Continuing the horror, the sound effects were pretty standard. All of the guns sounded like they came out of a cheap Jason Statham movie that no one bothered to see. Your enemies all talk in very exaggerated Asian dialects (you're in North Korea), and Mickey Rourke mumbles all of his lines and only puts feeling into them when he really feels the urge. For an example...
1. "ManthisplaceisashitholehowthefuckdidIgetinjured."
2. "Dropthatmotherfuckeryoufuckin'amateurs! AW FUCK!"
Oh, in case you couldn't tell, there are more f-bombs in this game than any Quentin Tarantino movie you've ever seen. Not that I cared; most of the time it was downright hilarious because it was so over the top. Case in point: you're walking down a hallway, with your night vision goggles on, and you gun down an evil North Korean Communist, and Mickey decides to shout "Goddamn cockbreath Commie motherfuckers!" You tell 'em, Mick.
Gameplay was an absolute wash. When you're firing at your enemies, your bullets will only hit them around half of the time, while they pump lead into you mercilessly until you die. You'll want to take cover a lot, assuming their bullets don't magically pass through the object you're hiding behind (yes, it's true). When you're not in a firefight, you can pretty much walk into an enemy's peripheral vision and kill him, because the AI is so stupid that a dying amoeba would pose more danger to you than one of these guys. It's almost as if the developers decided to go for the player demographic of 'blind horses without legs' when figuring out how difficult to make the actual game. Don't believe me? You can go up to any enemy, even if they're firing on you, and press the Action button to perform a very sweet-looking knife kill, which is just about the only redeeming quality the game has, even if you are in the middle of a massive firefight with 10 guys shooting at you and you can take them out one by one with your knife. Besides the fact that...
...it's only 2 hours long. On the easiest difficulty, too. And they throw achievements around like candy; I was able to rack up 495 Gamerscore points in total, and there's still a bunch left I could get if I wanted to, assuming anyone plays this game online (they don't), or any of my friends rent it to try it out (they won't).
This is, without a doubt, in the top three worst games I have ever played. Yeah, I tried really hard to get my money's worth out of it, but at least I didn't pay full price for this steaming pile of diseased walrus crap. Heck, I wouldn't have been able to get my money's worth if I had gotten the game for free. So... if you're looking for shameless, easy ways to boost your Gamerscore, rent this game for a day. Or steal it. And if you do, steal two copies so you and I can play online and get even more achievements, while losing our last shred of dignity in the process.
Friday, July 16, 2010
The Worst Games I've Ever Played... Watchmen: The End Is Nigh
In this series of posts, I'm going to write about the worst games I've ever played, in no particular order. I'm going to start with Watchmen: The End Is Nigh.
Last month, this game was for sale on XBLA for something around 800 points. I downloaded the demo to see if it was any good. I had heard that it wasn't the greatest game of all time, but I figured I'd try it since I love Watchmen and I love good deals even more. I fired up the game, started the first level, and part of me died inside. I'm not kidding.
You have the option of playing as either Nite Owl or Rorschach. I chose Rorschach because he's my favorite character from Watchmen. After a brief cutscene, Nite Owl and I dropped into the prison so we could quell the riot happening there, and began to fight against the inmates.
First of all, the graphics were awful. The prison consisted of a bunch of brick-colored blocks with flat gray lines for prison bars. The inmates all looked like Michael Chiklis in a gray jumpsuit. The dialogue was flat and mind-blowingly inept. A sample:
Rorschach: Daniel, cover me while I open doors.
Inmate #1: You're just a midget!
Inmate #2: Fuck shit!
When you enter combat, you have two or three buttons to press: strong attack and light attack. When you punch or kick the inmates, you hear these incredibly cartoony sound effects, and buckets' worth of blood appear from nowhere and splash on the floor. After dispatching the first group, you enter the next segment of the prison, and experience more of the same. This was when I went back to my Xbox Dashboard and deleted the game. Total playing time? Less than five minutes.
What a colossal waste of time and energy.
Last month, this game was for sale on XBLA for something around 800 points. I downloaded the demo to see if it was any good. I had heard that it wasn't the greatest game of all time, but I figured I'd try it since I love Watchmen and I love good deals even more. I fired up the game, started the first level, and part of me died inside. I'm not kidding.
You have the option of playing as either Nite Owl or Rorschach. I chose Rorschach because he's my favorite character from Watchmen. After a brief cutscene, Nite Owl and I dropped into the prison so we could quell the riot happening there, and began to fight against the inmates.
First of all, the graphics were awful. The prison consisted of a bunch of brick-colored blocks with flat gray lines for prison bars. The inmates all looked like Michael Chiklis in a gray jumpsuit. The dialogue was flat and mind-blowingly inept. A sample:
Rorschach: Daniel, cover me while I open doors.
Inmate #1: You're just a midget!
Inmate #2: Fuck shit!
When you enter combat, you have two or three buttons to press: strong attack and light attack. When you punch or kick the inmates, you hear these incredibly cartoony sound effects, and buckets' worth of blood appear from nowhere and splash on the floor. After dispatching the first group, you enter the next segment of the prison, and experience more of the same. This was when I went back to my Xbox Dashboard and deleted the game. Total playing time? Less than five minutes.
What a colossal waste of time and energy.
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