Virtually Past It
A blog about video games as seen through the eyes of an idiot
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Hello. This isn’t really a proper post. I just thought I’d better do something to illustrate that I have not been eviscerated or drowned. It’s the blog equivalent of Alan Partridge giving directions to Heston Services on Radio 4, just so you know it’s not ‘dead air’. (By the way, Heston Services can be found between junctions 2 and 3 on the M4. Customers can enjoy a children’s playground, Costa Coffee and paying fifteen fucking quid for a packet of Quavers in WH Smith.)
So listen, I’ve been really busy, yeah? But I’m not about to give up on ‘Past It’ (as it is not known to media cunts or anyone else), and am hoping that at some point, my life will settle down into some sort of routine that allows me to get something written more than once every three months. I’m still not happy with the layout either, so I’m going to be buggering about with it over the next couple of days.
The other problem I’ve got is that I still can’t upload images to the blog. And this is a problem, because you’re all thick fuckers that only look at websites with lots of pictures. The person I was hoping would sort this out for me is currently not responding to my emails. Perhaps he is on holiday. Or perhaps he is wondering why he agreed to host a website in exchange for some silver foil and two buttons. Who knows? It is a bit frustrating though, as I’ve got a couple of things ready to go and would like to write about Red Dead Redemption at some point. But no doubt it’ll get sorted out eventually.
In the meantime, I hope you’re all enjoying your summer so far. Turn that sausage over, it’s burning. And if you’re a slightly mental man, try not to shoot anyone. We’ve had quite enough of that this year, thank you. And if you work in television news, kill yourself. That will be all.
- In: General Bobbins
Watson, you’re creeping me the fuck out
9 Jun2010
So you’re the world’s greatest detective. But even a master of criminology with the finest mind in the Empire needs a partner. And what are the most important requirements for a partner? To be dependable? To provide an invaluable second opinion? To book the carriage from Baker Street? Or to really fuck your mind up doing shit like this all day:
Let’s get one thing straight: Apple evangelists should probably be murdered in their sleep. Anyone that uses the phrase ‘it just works’ should be kicked to death. No question. I’d even be prepared to chip in with a boot or two. And I’ve got fucking massive feet.
So why does Microsoft make it impossible to for me to run Windows without wanting to kill myself?
I got my first MacBook a few years back, after three PCs had basically collapsed under the sheer weight of malware and filth I had heaped upon them. And it’s true to say that I’ve never had a problem since. But for Christ’s sake, a computer shouldn’t be seen as a kind of portal to a better life, should it? It’s a fucking computer! It should be seen for what it is: a gateway to an infinitely huge amorphous splat of pornography and illegally sourced music with the odd blog or news website chucked in for good measure.
Windows 7 was designed by bastards for idiots. Snow Leopard was designed by smug arseholes for other smug arseholes. And the thing is, I’d rather side with the smug arseholes because the other option ends in a messy death. Specifically, mine. (I’ve never been very good with knots.)
I had to buy a laptop the other week. It’s for work. It’s fucked already. Turning it on in the morning is an exercise in ‘will it, won’t it’, as the various cogs and valves creak into life, get together and mull over whether they can be arsed. Most of the time, it just about works. But occasionally (probably one in ten) it doesn’t. I am then required to root about in the machine’s innards, searching for hidden directories and other shit that’s too complicated for me to think of an analogy for.
It drives me FUCKING INSANE.
It shouldn’t be like this. But it will be, forever. The only thing that could change this endless cycle of misery would be if Steve Jobs wakes up one morning and decides to stop taking the piss with how Apple price their products and thus encourage more people to shell out for one. At which point the nasty spammers and writers of malware and spyware realise that Macs are worth shitting up as well as PCs. And then we get a entirely new cycle of misery, one in which the smug-as-shit Mac users have to get their impeccably groomed heads around the fact that they’re now fair game for hackers.
Oh hang on, it’s already happening. (But without the price-drop part, natch.)
But for now, you’d have to be a fucking idiot not to use a Mac. But obviously, that makes you an insufferable twat. Like me.
- In: General Bobbins
I got hacked.
Well, not me directly. That would not be possible, given that I am a carbon based life form without the ability to connect directly to the internet. And ok, technically it wasn’t even the site that got hacked. It was the host’s servers. But let’s not split hairs. It’s been a bad enough week as it is without getting into an argument over the semantics of hackery.
So if you’ve been here before, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve changed the layout. There are three reasons for this. Firstly, whilst we managed to salvage all the actual posts, it seems that a lot of the images I uploaded over the last few months were lost. And quite frankly, I could not be arseholed with uploading them all again. Secondly: the previous layout didn’t really make it easy to write shorter posts. Because of how it was structured (with an image-heavy front page), I always felt it necessary to try and write a bloody essay on the chosen subject. Plus every post necessitated finding a banner image and a post image, cropping and uploading etc. Not the most time consuming thing in the world, but just enough to make posting something that little bit less enjoyable. And thirdly: because I like this layout. I’ll still be adding images to my posts so the front page won’t look too boring (like it does now).
So I hope that’s all ok with you, but am more than happy to tell you to shove right up your big fat arse if it isn’t.
Having to re-jig Virtually Past It was no major hardship then. What was (and still is) a huge pain in the cock was losing my ‘proper’ website, that is the one I use for work. I built that site up from scratch and it took me ages. When you run your own business, losing something as fundamental as your website is a Pretty Big Deal. I’ve managed to get the home page more or less back to what it was, and the inner pages aren’t a million miles away, but all in all it’s been really fucking frustrating to have to do it again. Which brings me to my question:
Are all hackers complete cunts or what?
I yearn for the days when Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy could nearly bring forth nuclear armageddon with an IMSAI 8080 and a dial up modem with actual fucking phone on it. Ok, they may have come close to exterminating 90% of life on earth. But they weren’t cunts.
Not cunts
I can understand why someone might want to hack into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account, or NASA, or the CIA, or any number of heavily-protected government websites. To do so would (I imagine) represent a real challenge in pitting one’s wits as a hacker againt those of the people paid to protect the data. Or in Palin’s case, by guessing her password in about five seconds then Googling the answers to her security questions. Hard to believe this shit-for-brains may one day be placed in a position to go one better than Broderick and Sheedy managed. But I digress.
The point is, knocking out a bunch of websites belonging either to individuals or small businesses is properly cunty. There’s no financial reward and, as far as I can imagine, little kudos either. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe somewhere there is a group of hackers warmly congratulating one of their number with virtual high fives and digital back slaps for briefly removing a tiny video games blog from the internet.
Cunts, either way.
And here’s some breaking news: as I write this at 1.50pm on Friday afternoon, they’ve done it again! Although Virtually Past It seems to have escaped this attack for now, my ‘work’ has been hacked. Hooray for hackers! They’re really sticking it to the man. Even if in this instance, the man is literally one man. Me.
Still, there we are. No point getting too irate about it. And I think it’s clear that despite my liberal use of the word cunt (and variants thereof) that I’m completely chilled.
Honest.
Some games related shit coming soon.
- In: General Bobbins
In the time I’ve been writing this blog, there have been a number of examples of games that I’ve started playing, then quickly ditched. The reasons for abandoning games are varied, but nearly always quite petty. In Ghostbusters, for example, I was annoyed by the interior of the hotel in the first section. (Mind you, the actual ‘busting’ of ghosts was pretty clunky and unrewarding as well. And the script was irritating. And I felt like Activision was effectively abusing my childhood memories whilst stealing my pocket money and braying in my face like a mental.)
Actually, there was a lot I didn’t like about Ghostbusters.
There was Assassin’s Creed 2 as well. I did actually try to persevere with this one, spending about 15 hours on it altogether. But after 15 hours, I didn’t really feel as though I was getting anywhere and was getting fed up with the grind of missions: go there, get that thing, kill that geezer, kill some more geezers, come back here. Ok, so it was basically the same as every GTA game (and I loved the last one), but the setting that seemed to have so many reviewers spaffing off in their collective journalistic pants just left me cold.
And what about Left 4 Dead 2? I couldn’t bear it. No doubt I wasn’t getting the best out of the game, since everyone everywhere bangs on and on and fucking on about the joys of multiplayer. But I’m not a multiplayer kind of guy. I like to experience my games in the same way I experience my entire life: naked and alone in a darkened room with only the occasional screams of my victims punctuating the silence.
I wrote a review for L4D2. It’s still sitting in the draft folder. At literally no extra cost, I will reproduce it for you here:
Zombie’s don’t run. Ever. 0/10
Running zombies are the invention of cynical movie bastards that think everything has to be BIGGER and FASTER and LOUDER and MORE AWESOME. (And no, I am not including 28 Days Later in this rant, since they weren’t actually meant to be zombies.) So even if it hadn’t had ordinary graphics, incredibly linear play and an entirely useless single player mode, I still would’ve been irritated by it.
Recently I have found myself not wanting to play two more games. Once again, they’re two games that received generally good reviews. They are games that most people that have played them like.
Resident Evil 5 is, well, it’s another Resident Evil game. The first three in the series were pretty seminal moments for me in my gaming life. The first one in particular, since I’d never seen that type of game before and it was genuinely ABSOLUTELY FUCKING TERRIFYING in parts. I lost touch with it after Nemesis, so this was the first time I’d picked up a Resident Evil game in about ten years (!). And it all started off well enough. The opening sequences are genuinely creepy, with an authentically uneasy atmosphere.
And then it all goes completely batshit mental. Look, if you haven’t played it then I won’t spoil it for you. Actually, I will. You go from having a sense of creeping dread to being chased by a million fucking zombies and some huge thing with an axe as big as you are in about ten seconds.
And yes, the zombies are running.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
And don’t say, “they’re not zombies actually, they’re Majini.” Fuck off. It’s Resident Evil. They’re fucking zombies.
Anyway, there then follows a sequence where you basically have to avoid getting killed for a few minutes before you’re picked up by a chopper. I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t Resident fucking Evil. The AI of your partner is pathetic (as usual), and the whole sorry episode just smacks of the developers trying to appease the kids by chucking you into some KICK ASS ACTION right at the start of the game. It’s more like a computerised realisation of Black Hawk Down, and I was going to put that in the post that before I saw that it was on RE5′s Wikipedia page. Honest.
I turned it off before I’d even been killed. It just isn’t what I wanted or expected, and I find it a bit depressing that a series that meant so much to me has cheapened itself by taking the easy option.
Yes, I am massively overreacting.
I will revisit RE5 because I suspect (or rather, hope) that the majority of the game won’t follow the same pattern of being attacked by a seemingly infinite number of running zombies.
Last night, I booted up Borderlands. And I’ll be honest, I liked it immediately. The opening titles, whilst obviously derivative if you’ve seen a film in the last decade, were stylish and well done. I liked the feel of it, I liked the cell shading and the characters seemed fun (Mordecai, since you asked). I got through the predictably tedious tutorial and into the game, and…
I don’t know.
Maybe my attention span just isn’t what it was. You’re instantly into a series of missions which consist of, yes, go there, kill some things, pick up some stuff and then come back here. I played it for a couple of hours and could feel my shoulders slumping a little more with each errand I was required to run. I dunno, it just didn’t seem like much fun. Again, I’m not so stupid as to be unable to see that it doubtless requires more than 2 hours of play to really get into it. And I will keep going.
But all this has left me yearning for a game that grabs me from the beginning and never lets up. Uncharted 2 certainly fell into this category, as did GOW2 and Fallout 3. But it feels like that kind of experience is the exception now as opposed to the norm. And I don’t necessarily mean ‘grab’ in terms of action. Fallout 3 certainly wouldn’t fall into that category. Uncharted 2 only does a little bit. GOW2 obviously does, but it does it well and delivers what you’re looking for incredibly well. Borderlands just feels like Half Life in the desert. And I can’t, simply cannot be fucking bothered with the lame RGP element of buying and selling stuff. For fuck’s sake, if you’re making a FPS then it should be law that you just pick up health packs. I bet they haven’t put that in the fucking Digital Economy Bill, the cunts.
There’s no doubt that my attitude going into a new title is affected by the fact that I rent most of my games. My mindset is that I’m less patient, that if I’m not hooked immediately then it goes back in the envelope and I wait for the next one. But in most instances, I think I’ve given the games I’ve sent back early a fairly decent crack of the whip. How long should one expect to have to play a game in order to find the experience rewarding? An hour? Two? Fair enough. Twenty? You can go and fuck yourself.
Or is it an age thing? I don’t think so, but then I would say that. Nobody likes to categorise themselves as a preternaturally old bastard, even if that’s sometimes how I feel. And anyway, surely it’s meant to work the other way around, that your attention span is lower when you’re younger?
I don’t know anymore. Perhaps I need to take a good long look at myself. Perhaps I’m wrong and everyone else is right. Although obviously that is a ridiculous notion.
Final point: despite my vociferous slating of Heavy Rain in my previous post, I played it to the end. Ok, I’d planned to do so in order to write about it. But if it had been as dispiritingly familiar as Borderlands or as inconsistent in build up as RE5, I’d have ditched it quickly and just made a load of shit up about it.
In conclusion then: I am a twat.
- In: General Bobbins|PS3|Xbox 360|Zombies don't run
- Tags: 360, PS3
Heavy Rain: The Virtually Past It verdict
30 Mar2010
There are few things more irritating in life than people that are only too happy to proffer a negative opinion on something without ever having seen/heard/eaten/shagged the thing in question. Like every single time a politician makes a comment about video games.
I am one of those people. Sometimes.
I am basically a lazy bastard. So if I’m reading something, either in print or online, and I find myself liking the article and warming to the theme, then I can usually be relied upon to just sort of slip unannounced into the author’s mind and nick off with his or her opinions, appropriating them for myself and relaying them to whomever will listen.
And so it was with Heavy Rain. The build up to the release seemed to illustrate that there wasn’t a lot of middle ground with it – people were either heralding it as some kind of new dawn for gaming or ripping the absolute shit out of it. And because I am, by nature, a miserable bastard that likes negativity and swearing, I sided with the latter bunch. But that’s pretty fucking meaningless, isn’t it? So I decided to play it.
And it is shit, which just goes to show that I’m a fucking idiot for wasting several hours of my life in a pointless attempt to justify my stolen opinions. I should’ve known. The people I stole those opinions from know their shit. I mean, you wouldn’t nick a Ferrari off Chris Evans only to find out that the oil needed changing and there were crisp packets and Rizlas all over the passenger seat.
If you’ve ever read anything here before, you’ll be aware that I don’t really review games as much as try and write jokes about bumming with a few references to the title. And I won’t be breaking that habit here, but be warned: if you haven’t played it and think you might, then you should be aware that there are spoilers ahead.
But don’t worry, they mostly relate to digitized tits.
Ok, the basics: Heavy Rain is pitched as an interactive movie. You get to play as four different characters, and the decisions you make with each one during the game will affect not only the outcome, but also the actual events leading up to it. And that’s just fucking great, up to a point. And the point is when you realise you have absolutely no interest whatsoever in what happens to any of the characters. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be hoping for a scenario in which they all die, preferably by being encased in concrete and lowered into a storm drain.
There’s a lot of storm drains in this game.
The game uses what the developers probably describe as a revolutionary control system for character interaction. And it is revolutionary in a sense. Because you can’t actually control your character. Well, you can. Sort of. But check this out: there’s no button for run. I’ll write that again in bold type in case you think you’ve lost your mind.
THERE IS NO BUTTON FOR RUN.
Occasionally you do actually get to run. But only when the game says you can.
“Yeah but Shaun, it’s in keeping with the realistic element of the game, people don’t run everywhere in real life, do they?”
Get fucked. It doesn’t add any sense of realism to the game, it just makes the incredibly tedious tasks scattered throughout it even more fucking tedious. Here’s a brief list, off the top of my head, of just some of the gaming delights afforded to you by David ‘I’m like a film director, only moreso’ Cage.
- Make scrambled eggs
- Change a baby’s shitty nappy
- Draw a house
- Do some cleaning
- Push son on swings
- Sit in a chair
- Brush your teeth
- Have a shower
- Have sex
The perverts among you will have probably woken up at the mention of those last two points. Controlling one of the female characters (no, I can’t remember her fucking name), you get to take a shower. Which means that, yes, you get to see her tits. It is the most gratuitous and profoundly unerotic thing I have ever seen in my life, let alone in a game. At least it was, until I got to the sex scene. I sat there genuinely trying to work out the point of it. It wasn’t titillating (although I bet some dirty little bastard has cracked one off to it) and it didn’t add anything to the ‘plot’ because I DIDN’T CARE ABOUT THE CHARACTERS IN THE FIRST PLACE. And to cap it off, the bloke (Ethan, remembered that) was wearing some kind of bandage that looked disarmingly like a bra, which gave the whole thing the air of a scene from Glen or Glenda.
The ‘action’ scenes fare little better. Basically, they’re a bit like those mercifully brief parts in later Tomb Raider games where you press buttons as prompted on the screen. And occasionally waggle the controller about. That’s it. I played the game through on the normal setting and it was pathetically easy, even for a cack-handed fuckwit like me.
But I suppose my real problem with Heavy Rain is with its pretensions to be somehow elevated from other games by its apparently adult theme and complex plotting. Bullshit. The plot, such as it is, is so hackneyed, predictable and derivative that even an early 80s Michael Winner would have balked at making it into a film. David Cage talked about being influenced by films like Se7en. Believe me, Heavy Rain is to Se7en what Columbo is to, well, Se7en. Although I would genuinely prefer to watch an episode of Columbo than spend another minute on this turd of game.
Most games have fairly shonky plots. But by and large we’re prepared to forgive that, provided the gameplay itself is good. There is no gameplay in Heavy Rain! It’s a con. No gameplay, a wafer thin plot and even thinner characterisation.
I’m starting to feel a bit sick now, so let’s round this off with me taking a few pot-shots at David Cage and the pretentious shite that drops out of his mouth every time he moves his chin.
“I believe that people are not used to thinking when they play simply because no one offered them the chance to think before. People like to think. When I watch a movie the last thing I want is something that doesn’t make me think. I want something that provokes reactions in me. Why would games be any different?”
Well, he’s right in part. People do like to think. I lost count of the times I thought “this game is fucking shit” whilst playing Heavy Rain. And the movie analogy is a terrible one. Let’s take a few recognised classic films: The Godfather, Goodfellas, Chinatown, Blade Runner, etc. I enjoyed them all immensely (still do), but not one of them ‘makes me think’, at least not in the way Cage means. They provoke reactions, sure. But the assumption that a film (and by extension, a game), in order to be any good, has to make you think is complete bollocks.
Some films, however, do make you think. And I’m not against the idea that a game could do the same. But what, exactly, is Heavy Rain meant to ‘make me think’? Do you expect me to watch poorly voiced characters recite a terrible script and then ponder such issues as the baseness of man, the nature of bereavement, the idea that man can ultimately do good by doing bad? OR DO YOU JUST WANT ME TO LOOK AT A PAIR OF DIGITISED TITS?
For fuck’s sake.
“You are in the middle of the story and you can change it.”
BIG FUCKING DEAL.
You know what, Cage? When I first watched Goodfellas, at no time did I think to myself, “wow, that was great. I wish I could watch it again, but a version where Henry decides not to marry that woman out of The Sopranos. It would be so fascinating to see how the story would change.”
Would it fuck.
The only way in which changing the story of Heavy Rain becomes a factor is if you’re prepared to put yourself through it again, and make different choices throughout. I’ve no doubt there are some cretins out there that have done just that, and they should be found and killed.
Christ, I can’t do this any more. Heavy Rain is the most tedious, pretentious, joyless skidmark of a game I’ve ever played. Oh, and one final point. Not only do you not have the option to play as a black character, but every black NPC that I came across was either a thief, a murderer, or both.
Makes you think.
Fuck it.
Is Joe Danger out yet?
Hello. I haven’t been here for a while. It is a pattern that is likely to be on repeat for the immediate future at least, although at least this time I’ve got a different excuse for my non-posting. I’ve been away, see? On a much needed (but scarcely deserved) weekend away with ‘the lads’ to the Lake District.
‘The lads’ in question are a fairly mixed bunch. We have a copper (not bent), a satellite engineer (or whatever it is he calls himself, fiddles about in the back of trucks at sporting events), a ‘teacher’, an idiot with a bewilderingly good job in telecoms, a man whose work for Rolls-Royce consists mainly of eating cornflakes at a desk, a very hairy doctor who apparently hates all people, a small useless man that fixes beepy machines in hospitals, a man that does advertising for those fancy see-through vacuum cleaners, an illegal immigrant, and a still technically jobless cretin (me).
The plan was simple: find a remote house, then drink enough beer to ensure that we were barely to remember any of the ensuing nightmare.
It was a largely successful plan.
For some reason, I had agreed to drive myself and beepy-hospital machine man up there. Now generally I laugh in the face of your average long-distance drive, and this was no different. Leaving literally all stones unturned, I neglected to look at a map at all, instead choosing to rely on the sat-nav. And all was well. We even managed to catch up the satellite engineer and copper on the M6, whereupon a frantic exchange of abusive hand signals naturally followed.
We are all 35.
However, not long after this, things went a bit wrong. And when I say ‘a bit wrong’ I mean “FUCK, LOOK AT THAT MOUNTAIN, LOOK AT THE FUCKING ROAD GOING OVER THAT MOUNTAIN, WE’VE GOT TO FUCKING DRIVE OVER THAT. FUCK!”
Me, thinking that
The Hardknott Pass, it says here, is made up of some of the steepest roads in England, with gradients of up to 1 in 3. I had intended to avoid it, although quite how I thought this was going to happen I have no idea, since I knew the sat-nav would take me in that direction and had neglected to look at the alternative route.
I am a dick.
Anyway, to be honest I’ve talked it up a bit. That is to say, massively exaggerated. It was pretty steep, and there was one fairly hairy moment caused by an elderly man descending in his four-wheel-drive Nissan Shitbox at approximately the pace of a glacier. But actually it was pretty good fun, and I enjoyed trying (but largely failing) to scare the shit out of my passenger via the medium of a bit of mad driving. But then he had consumed half a bottle of vodka by this point.
We arrived at the house, cracked open a couple of beers and waited for the other boys to arrive. As is my wont when I enter old houses, I immediately found the lowest beam in the place and cracked my head on it. I am reliably informed that the sound was not unlike that of a brick being smashed on the road.
The other guys arrived in dribs and drabs (mostly dribs), I got the curry on, the beer was flowing and the house was already a right fucking mess. I’m not sure quite how such a comparatively small group of humans are able to transform a nice clean house into something resembling the Young Ones’ gaff in less than five hours, but by Christ we did it.
Curry, beer, table, chairs, ceiling, light, heavily breasted men, man smells. Sorted.
Mmmmm.
There’s probably little more that I can say about the first night that the following picture does not amply illustrate:
Is it piss or merely a cruel trick to play on a sleeping friend? Yeah, it's piss.
The next day had been earmarked as a day of walking, so naturally we all turned in good and early in preparation. I think I hit the sack at about 5am, and I was by no means the last to retire. Up again at 10, bacon and egg butties (thanks, telecoms idiot) and straight out. Off we went, 10 young (fuck off) men, our lungs breathing in the wonderful fresh air and exhaling rank alcohol fumes.
Ray Mears, eat your FUCKING HEART OUT
Before long, we had started to ascend what might charitably be called a mountain, but wasn’t. It was a hill. A bloody big hill, but a hill nonetheless. Quickly, the group settled into a natural rhythm, which is to say that the illegal immigrant and I were most often to be found at the back, collapsed against a rock and gasping for breath like a pair of shit fish in the bottom of a boat.
Your author, fucked
After a couple of hours of this, we’d had enough. (That’s me and the immigrant, everyone else was still going strong.) After a brief rest, the group once again headed up; we headed down. Straight down. It wasn’t the most graceful way to get off a massive hill, but it was effective. We spotted a pub and headed for it. After about 45 minutes of expletives and minor injuries, we made it. Beers and a nice sit down.
We are 35.
Presently the other group arrived. We moved inside, and staked our claim to a small corner. There was rugby (absolutely rubbish), there was beer (good), there was chips (very good, thanks copper), there was drunken darts (entertaining for us, less so for the other patrons), there was high spirits and some pretty good banter. It was (despite the abject shitness of both the Wales and England rugby teams) a bloody good afternoon. My personal highlight was the effect several pints of Guinness has on my doctor friend when drinking in the afternoon. Basically it’s like a waking coma. He can move his arms and legs, but speech and the ability to blink have been rendered impossible.
We walked back in the dark. We didn’t get run over. When you’re comfortably into double figures with the black stuff, this represents something of an achievement.
One thing that I had been keen to do over the course of the weekend was introduce some of my more backwards, ignorant, idiotic and stupid friends to the pleasures of gaming. Some of these men, despite being in highly responsible jobs and/or earning vast sums of money, are basically as thick as a bucket of shit when it comes to telling their arse from their Xbox.
I fear I have not improved the situation.
There are more questions than answers
Charlie Brooker (yes, him again) wrote something a while back concerning the perils of allowing non-gaming friends to play games in the presence of regular gamers. Throw a few crates of beer into the equation and you’ve got a verbal exchange along these lines (whilst playing Fifa 10 in co-op mode):
Me: What are you fucking doing?
Friend: What do you mean?
M: What are you fucking doing, why don’t you just pass me the ball?
F: Because he won’t do it.
M: Don’t fucking give me that bollocks you twat.
F: I’m trying, I’m pressing the fucking button, I’m telling you he won’t fucking do it!
M: Oh right, so I suppose the massed ranks of EA Sports’ development team just dropped a bit of a clanger and forgot to add a button for ‘pass’ then, yeah? You absolute fucking wanker.
F: [throws controller and stares at me in a manner that brings to mind long forgotten beatings in school]
M: Want to play something else?
It doesn’t work. But one thing I will say is that Trials HD is evidently just as addictive for non-gamers as it is for those of us well versed in wasting hour after bastard hour on it. I couldn’t get the fuckers off it. Fight Night 4 went down reasonably well, particularly as I’d created a boxer modelled on one of my friends, and naturally made him fat and useless. Uncharted 2 and AC2 are clearly solitary experiences. And having tried my hand at Street Fighter IV prior to arrival, I must say it didn’t even make it out of the box. Unless I am missing something, it was/is a truly massive turd of a game.
Anyway, the night wore on and we started to fade. Two consecutive nights of very little sleep had well and truly taken their toll by Sunday. Most of the boys bade their farewells, leaving just four of us to spend the day sitting about, nursing a beer for about five hours and refusing to go outside. (That was me, obviously.) That night, we went back to the pub for some food. I swear the chef could not have made scampi and chips look less appetising if there was a freshly laid jobby on the salad. That’s not fair, actually. There was nothing wrong with the food, and everything wrong with the inner workings of my body.
And I do mean everything.
All that remained for us on Monday was to leave as much of the cleaning as possible to idiot-telecoms-man (success!) and drive home. And I don’t know about you, but there is literally nothing I would rather do then drive for 5 hours on the M6, having barely eaten or slept for three days and with a headache that is still going strong as I write this. On Thursday.
Would I do it again? Oh yes.
- In: General Bobbins
I have a problem with Assassin’s Creed 2
7 Mar2010
Having finally finished the storyline of GTA4, it was time for me to move onto another heavyweight release. I started playing AC2 about five days ago. And to be honest, it has left me wondering if there’s something wrong with me. You know, mentally.
It came out in November of 2009, and was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the sequel to Assassin’s Creed 1. I haven’t played that, so don’t expect me to bollock on about how much of an improvement it is over the original. Instead, I’m going to bollock on about how the reviews and generally accepted brilliance of the game bear very little resemblance to my own experience.
Ok, cards on the table. I haven’t finished it. In fact, I’ve probably racked up no more than 7 or 8 hours of total game play time. Is that enough to form a proper opinion? Well if it isn’t, it fucking well ought to be. Because I don’t want to have to play anything that requires 30+ hours of sitting on my arse in front of the telly before I feel able to decide whether or not it’s any good. I can accept that some games are slow burners, and it wouldn’t bother me if I was playing an RPG. But a game that revolves around legging it over rooftops and killing people? I expect (and need) that to grab me firmly by the bollocks after an hour, maximum.
It didn’t.
Things don’t start well. Having not played the first one, the initial sequence (where you play briefly as the famous 90s West Indian barber, Desmond) didn’t mean a lot to me. But it’s hardly David Lynch, and therefore pretty straightforward for my tiny brain to pick up on the plot. Anyway, it’s mercifully brief and you are quickly dumped into a virtual version of Renaissance-era Florence.
And so begins the most tedious in-game tutorial in the history of mankind.
Jesus, it drags. On and on and fucking on. The controls themselves are pretty straightforward, but the developers are intent on showing you the minutia of the environment they’ve created, and it’s boring. So I can sit on benches? Boring. I can buy armour? Boring. I can visit a doctor? Boring. And I can even walk amongst a small group of people and remain undetected by the various baddies that are out to get me? It’s boring, but it’s also really stupid. For a start, your walking pace is always slightly quicker than that of the people around you, meaning you are constantly bumping into them and are forced to stop and then start again. Then bump into them again. I don’t know what the Italian is for “will you watch where you’re going you fucking idiot?” but it definitely should have been included here.
Things barely improve even when the game proper starts. The missions are basically a riff on GTA4: go here, pick something up, bring it back here, kill this guy and so on. But somehow I just seemed to connect more with the environment in GTA4. Maybe it’s because it was set in the present day in a city with cars and guns and that. As opposed to 15th Century Florence with, well, a lot of rooftops.
Ah, the rooftops. One of the central attractions of the game is your character’s ability to climb up just about anything, monkey style. It is never explained quite how or why so many of Florence’s citizens are able to scale walls better than fucking Spiderman. They just can. You can also ‘free run’. Or ‘run and jump’ to give it a less hip, but far more accurate description. To complete these complex maneuvers, one has to really concentrate. Except of course you don’t, not really. You just hold down two buttons and point Ezio where you want him to go and the game mechanics take care of the rest. There is an element of having to think a few step ahead to plan your route, but it’s not very hard. And yet, because I am essentially a mong, I still usually manage to leap gracefully off a rooftop and go plummeting to the ground below. But that doesn’t matter either, because it seems Ezio can fall about five stories before he does himself a serious mischief.
And then there’s the fighty bits. Admittedly, it can be fun when you’re assassinating NPCs, but no more so than any other stealth-type game you’ve ever played. The sword fighting is naff. No doubt there will be more and varied weapons added as the game goes on, but quite frankly unless these include a sniper rifle and an M4 Carbine, I’m not interested. The counter-attack move works pretty well, but takes all of about three seconds to master. And the enemy AI is non-existent. When fighting a group of soldiers (or whatever), half of them just sort of stand about until you actually go somewhere near them, at which point they then seem to remember that they’re supposed to be killing you. Move away a bit and they forget again. The cretins.
AC2 is meant to be a stealth game. It isn’t. Well, sometimes it is. It largely depends on whether your target is the kind of idiot that wouldn’t notice a large man approaching them with two big fuck off knives up his sleeves, or so perceptive that he’ll spot you from a rooftop half a mile away and start slinging fucking arrows at you. How can you tell which he is? You can’t!
Another thing that irritates me about AC2 is its insistence on actually trying to educate you about Renaissance-era Italy. NOT FUCKING INTERESTED. I’ve actually been to Florence. Admittedly there was no way for the developers to know that, and I’m not suggesting they tailor their games to meet my exact needs. (Except I am, obviously.) But the point is, if I want to know about something, I’ll find out about it under my own steam. In the same way that I don’t watch films based on actual events to get an accurate view of history, neither do I play games to read about THE FUCKING BANKING SYSTEM IN 15TH CENTURY ITALY.
So, there we go. That gives you an idea of where I’m coming from with Assassin’s Creed II. But now things start getting weird. Before I wrote this, I decided to have a quick look on Metacritic to get an idea of how the game was received when it came out.
Holy shit.
Seven, that is SEVEN reviewers gave it 100%.
100%
That is, seven people on earth actually thought that AC2 was perfect and could not be bettered in any way. You have to wade through SIXTY-SIX reviews before you hit one under 90%! Sixty-fucking-six! What the Christing fuck?! Here’s some choice comments made by people that apparently know much more about what makes a good game than I do:
“None of the scenes drag out too long…” You’re taking the piss.
“The writers should also be commended for preventing the script from ever descending into melodrama…” You’ve got shit for brains.
“For all its pomp and Renaissance-themed grandeur, the game’s true artistry is revealed in its tiny details, and in its creators’ willingness to turn the focus away from the sheer scale of the thing, and allow individual brief moments to really shine.” Oh fuck off.
“…there’s never a sense of any kind of grind…” This actually made me check the disc in my machine to make sure I was playing the right game. But I was, which means the person that wrote that is a massive bell end.
Actually, all those comments came from the same review. I can’t be arsed to add any more, but they’re all along roughly the same lines. Idiots falling over themselves to offer a celebratory hand shandy to Ubisoft for creating a game that is average at best.
And as pointed out at That Guy’s A Maniac, a lot of the characters do look a bit Joey Deacon.
Balls to it.
- In: General Bobbins|PS3|Xbox 360
- Tags: PS3, XBLA
I didn’t have a 360 or a PS3 when GTA4 came out. The release of the game was therefore of no interest to me. Particularly as I’d already played and finished GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas on the PS2. Based on what I saw on the regular tv spots, GTA4 basically offered more of the same, but with better graphics. And that’s more or less the case, but it doesn’t mean that the bastards at Rockstar have not succeeded in literally eating a chunk of my life and then shitting it back out in the form of this review. Which you are now smelling/reading with your nose/eyes.
Much has been made of GTA’s violence and apparent lack of moral code. But not to worry, because every single person that has ever said this is a complete cretin that should be turned into solid fuel and given to the elderly to burn in order to prevent them freezing to death during this ridiculous winter. How violent is it? Not very. Sure there’s shooting, blowing stuff up, whacking people round the chops with baseball bats and so on. All that. But it’s violent in the same way that an episode of The A-Team is violent. That is, in such a way that only insufferable bores and Keith Vaz would find offensive. But whatever. I’m not here to talk about that. It’s got an ’18′ certificate. ‘Kay, Keith? Tosser.
The game follows the same basic format as all GTA games have since GTA3. You start off as a veritable bedwetter in gangster terms, and must gradually do stuff to become a bit of a Billy-big-bollocks. .That’s basically it. There’s a wafer thin plot of sorts, which can be summarised as follows: shady illegal immigrant has shady past life, seeks revenge against other shady illegal immigrant over something shady that happened once. It’s riveting stuff.
But come on. This isn’t Heavy fucking Rain here. Nobody plays GTA for the complex plotting and well observed characterisation. It’s a chance to run about in an incredibly realised virtual cityscape blowing the shit out of helicopters and stuff. Here, then, is my handy summary of some of the best and worst aspects to the mighty GTA4.
Worst portrayal of a gay character in any entertainment media, ever
Ok, so it turns out that one of Niko’s old army friends has moved to Liberty City and he’s a bit… you know. Keeps his coins in his wallet. Drives on the other bus (the one full of men bumming). With a little bit of luck, you have realised that so far in this paragraph, I have been using the tools of irony and humour in order to (hopefully) raise a smile. Despite the fact that I’m as thick as a bucket of shit, even I understand that, whilst a sweeping generalisation like ‘keeps his in coins in his wallet’ might strike a chord, it is in no way an accurate description of gay men in general. I also understand that if you filled a bus with gay men, they wouldn’t immediately all start bumming each other.
Well, they probably would. But let’s pretend they sat there quietly listening to the new Mika album or something.
Gay men can be funny. They can be irritating. They can be outspoken. They can be introverted. They can, in short, be like everyone else. Because they are like everyone else. (Except they like cocks and that.) But for some reason, Rockstar thought that they needed to MASSIVELY overstate the SHEER GAYNESS of their one GAY character. Just look at this:
For fuck’s fucking sake.
The clothes are shit
Pikey chic. Two words that have no business being adjacent to one another.
With friends like these, kill yourself
One of GTA4′s new features is your ability to befriend various NPCs. And all I can say is, if my real life friends were this much of a pain the cock, either they or me would have been killed a long time ago. Being a complete fucking idiot, I played along with it for the first few hours. So when Roman called and asked me if I wanted to play pool, of course I accepted. About an hour later (an actual real earth hour), I realised that I’d been playing virtual pool with a virtual friend listening to a conversation I had no means to affect. It was a dark moment.
And it never ends. The fuckers keep phoning. Darts, bowling, a comedy club… The possibilities are literally not endless. Pointless, irritating and a classic example of a gaming concept being much better while it remained a concept.
Pedestrians: still thick as pigshit
Would it be too much to ask for the coding nerds to add some kind of AI for the pedestrians? It’s as if they all woke up in the morning with one thought in their tiny virtual minds: ‘I must make sure that I get run over today’. It hasn’t been funny for the best part of a decade. Sort it out.
Niko Bellic is an arsehole
Fallout 3 uses a karma system, in which your karma is affected by your actions in the game. This in turn will lead to different situations and your meeting different NPCs. It’s pretty rudimentary stuff, but it works. Because I am a girly fart pants, I chose to play as a ‘good’ character, rescuing all sorts of innocent people and keeping my slaughtering of passers-by to a minimum. GTA4 does not have a system like this, and as a result your relationship with the playing character is weirdly distorted. Through the many cut scenes in the game, the player builds up an impression of Niko Bellic. The developers clearly want us to think that he is a decent, if flawed individual. Blah blah blah.
But the fact is, he’s a total fucking wanker. It’s not possible to play GTA4 without stealing a car from someone at gunpoint. Or shooting dozens of policemen to death. Or running someone over without stopping the car to see if they’re ok. Etc. Your actions in the game make this character a properly horrible dude. So cut the bullshit, Rockstar. Let’s have a proper version of Niko in the cut scenes. That of an evil, narcissistic, murderous war criminal with mental health problems.
It’s a polished turd
What makes the GTA series such fun to play is Rockstar’s continuing ability to bring a shine to a lump of age old gaming shit. We’re like magpies. We like shiny things. If they’re shiny enough, we don’t even notice the fact that they’re shit.
I’m going to drop this analogy now. It’s rubbish.
But look, there’s no getting away from the fact that GTA4 follows the same basic template of the majority of games these days: get mission, get key/object to help with mission, go from one place to another place, try to complete mission, find out that you need to do something else first, go back to first place, and so on and SO FUCKING ON.
The controls are a bit shit sometimes
I’m no expert in gangster-type activities*, but I’m pretty sure that if I was chasing a senior mafioso with a view to executing him and needed to get on a motorbike, I wouldn’t suddenly change my mind and climb down a ladder instead. This happened to my twice on the last mission. TWICE! The first time it happened, I was prepared to accept that my inherent mongness had caused the problem. So I gave it another go. And if you’ve played the game, you’ll know that there’s a bloody lot you’ve got to get through to get to this point in the mission. And then it happened again. As a result I still haven’t finished the bloody game. Had that happened in the first couple of hours, there’s a good chance I’d have ditched it straight away.
Also, the cover system ain’t exactly Gears of War or Uncharted 2.
*Obviously I am an expert in gangster-type activities, but I can’t admit to that in case the pigs are reading this.
Ignore all that, it’s actually quite good
Well it can’t be a huge pile of shite for me to have racked up 50+ hours on it. It’s not perfect, and of course there is an element of having been here before with a lot of the missions. But that still doesn’t detract from the pleasure to be derived from a speedboat chase and gunfight, followed by blowing a helicopter out of the sky with a bazooka.
So there you have it. Not really a review at all, more of a series of barely connected and idiotic opinions. I’m going to bring things bang up to date next week with my COD3 feature.
And listen, not that you care but I have actually moved house now. I’m putting the cunt back into country. As I type this, from my window I can literally see a man with webbed feet and an ear in the middle of his forehead gutting a badger with his bare hands, as a crowd of braying Daily Mail readers cheers and applauds. It’s rural bliss.
But now that things are moderately less manic, hopefully there will be a bit more activity here. Just about to start playing Assassin’s Creed 2, where apparently all the characters look like they’ve got Down’s Syndrome. So that should be interesting. Also stuff to come on Plain Sight, Greed Corp and Joe Danger. And if I ever get round to it, there’s a third installment of Crap Movie Club that I’ve been meaning to finish for about a month.
I should probably stop talking about what I’m going to write, because I almost always end up not doing it. And you all think I’m a dirty liar. And I am.
I’ll leave you with the words of the great Martin Luther King: “Twenty fucking quid? You can stuff it up your bollocks mate, I’m not paying that.”
See ya.
Well cock-a-doodle-date-rape. It’s been a momentous week for me. And when I say ‘momentous’, I mean ‘of outstanding significance or consequence’.
The more keen-eyed (and less mentally deranged) among you may have noticed that having had a brief period where the site was updated every single fucking day, I’m now back to one or two posts a week. If I’m lucky. I don’t have to give you a reason for this if I don’t want to. It’s my blog. I could post the same picture (that one of my friend Trevor holding a piece of paper with the legend ‘I PISS MYSELF’ thereon) every bastard day if I wanted to. Fifty times a day. Perhaps I will do this. I haven’t seen Trevor for some time, and I like the thought of him becoming the subject of a meme simply due to the fact that he couldn’t control his bladder after a night out and spectacularly pissed the bed.
But perhaps I should explain myself. I recently took the decision to start my own business. And, against all natural law and common sense, that’s what I’ve done. It’s got a name and premises and everything. It even says ‘Ltd’ on the paperwork. So there’s been a lot to sort out. Which means I’ve been very busy. Hopefully you’re making the connection now.
Don’t worry though. The business I’ve set up will enable me to spend all day, every day sitting on my arse in a poky little office, laughing at the idiots who leave comments on the Guardian game blogs and writing about them here.
But that’s not the only reason why it’s been a momentous week.
WARNING: MORE DEPECHE MODE COMING
On Wednesday of this week, Depeche Mode played a gig at the Royal Albert Hall in aid of Teenage Cancer Trust. It was, by all accounts, to be a special performance in a special venue. And, because I am the biggest idiot on earth, I did not attend. This is currently ranking as one of the more significant mistakes of my life, because ALAN FUCKING WILDER TURNED UP AND PLAYED A SONG WITH MARTIN GORE.
Fuck-fuckety-cockfuckfuck.
Anyway, all is not lost. There’s another Depeche gig tomorrow night, and I’m going to this one. And the what’s had me with a lazy lob on for a few months is this: Nitzer Ebb are supporting. What’s that you say? Who are Nitzer Ebb?
You make me sick.
Anyway, I last saw NE in 2006 and four fucking years is a long to wait for another show. I am soiling myself in anticipation, regularly.
At the other end of the scale, this week also saw the BRIT Awards happen. I attempted to ‘liveblog’ it, with predictably dire results. Although I still think I did better than the cunt from the Guardian. You can judge for yourself here. If the sole purpose of the BRITs is to annually highlight the absolute certainty that nearly everyone working in the music industry is a cunt, then this year’s awards can be considered a success. Perhaps the most successful ever, when one considers that the all-round cuntery on display was, at times, mind blowing.
It’s difficult to pick out a best/worst bit, so I won’t bother. But nobody came out of it smelling of roses. Least of all Peter Kay, a man that seems completely devoid of an actual sense of humour and comes across as a bitter, ill-tempered, arrogant tosser. He reminds me of the child’s entertainer in Hi-De-Hi, but fatter and more smug. I was willing him to do a ‘gag’ about Muslims, in the hope that someone would issue a fatwa against the miserable cocky fat bastard. And eventually, he complied. Although I’m not sure a sarcastic dig at Muslim Driving School is going to be sufficient for him to feel the wrath of any religious nutters that might have been tuning in.
Must try harder, Pete.
What about fucking video games then, eh?
Heavy Fucking Rain?
What’s that all about, eh?
Well, if you believe the reviews, then it’s a revolutionary new type of video game, and one that will leave you stunned and amazed. However, if you read the fucking excellent Affectionate Diary, it’s a like being trapped in a VHS copy of a worthless 80s psychological thriller, only more boring and joyless. I haven’t played it, but the people at Affectionate Diary swear quite a bit, so they get my vote.
Details of the new COD game have surfaced. It is to be set during the Vietnam war. If that gets you excited, then I suggest you take a long hard look at yourself. It’s another FPS stuffed full of fucking cliches and ripping off every great Vietnam film you’ve ever seen. Then again, no doubt it will be great to play. Unlike Heavy Rain, where the action involved sitting down on chairs, getting up off chairs, turning the lights on (and off) and brushing your teeth in the manual style.
Anyway, that’s it for now. Off to London bright and early tomorrow. I am traveling down with a couple of my idiot friends, and meeting a couple more when we get there. Being a married man with two children and a business to run (cough), I seldom get the opportunity to drink until my shoes are covered in vomit. This weekend is one such opportunity, and not one I intend to pass up.
I’ll leave you with the thoughts of Douglas J McCarthy: gold, gold, gold, gold, church, church, church, church, guns, guns, guns, guns, FIRE! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!
Muscle and hate.
See ya.
- In: General Bobbins|Music|PS3