All You Ever Needed to Know!

(About PC gaming.)

A Guest Article by Mr Party Hat

No-one wants to play PC games. Not really. Your mouse is covered in hand-jam, your keyboard is infested with bits of toilet roll from an attempt to mop up the latest batch of semen, the heat of your graphics card pushes the room temperature beyond the realms of human acceptability and, ultimately, it costs too much. But what if you want to sound informed on The Internet? How can you hope to be taken seriously by the people who really matter – forum geeks – if you don’t know your Empire: Total War from your Empire Earth?

You can’t. That’s how is how it is is how it is.

Which is where I come in! My mouse is hand-jam free, I rarely masturbate near my keyboard (I store it up for scientific experiments) I have a water-cooled graphics card that keeps my room cool and, crucially, I shop at Aldi, leaving mucho funds (that’s Spanish, keep up) for PC gaming. So sit back, take your hand off your mouse (that’s how the hand-jam gets there) and prepare to be enlightened by morsels of PC Gaming for the Educated Gentleman.

Liam, why should I buy a gaming PC? Wouldn’t the money be better spent on prostitutes?

That depends on several factors. Firstly, the sex economy in your area. If you live in a weak sexconomy, you can expect to pay as little as £20 for a blowjob in a KFC car-park. Poor sexconomies are determined not by demand, but by the physiognomic attractiveness of your area’s prostitutes. If they are rough [Latin name: Skank-ass-hos] then you can expect more bang for your buck. Examples of such regions – Milton Keynes, and other places as grim as Milton Keynes. In these instances, forget PC gaming. For the price of a decent gaming rig you can buy 35 blowjobs. If, however, you live in an area not populated by “skank-ass-hos”, PC gaming becomes a genuine alternative to paying for sex.

Liam, aren’t PC games just dodgy ports of 360 games?

If you had said this two years ago, I would have tracked you down and cum in your porridge. Unfortunately, [booming voice] The Recession [/booming voice] has brought about the apparent halt of console gaming. By the time the original Xbox was the same age as the 360 is now, it had already been dead for over a year. And there is absolutely no sign of the next generation. In-fact, Microsoft are readying a relaunch of the same hardware, with the help of paedophile trainer Milo and Natal.

This sudden halt has caused the PC gaming market to stagnate. Publishers have grown to rely on the homogenisation of PC and console games. Why create a gloriously cutting edge piece of wonderment exclusively for the PC when it’s only going to sell 30,000 copies in its first week (Crysis)? Much better if you simply port a successful console game, removing 80% of the work and quadrupling the profits. And so, PC gamers have been forced to wait. Crysis 2 (PC Exclusive, DX11) becomes Crysis 2 (360, PS3, PC). Cut down to portions manageable by the weakest link and then churned back onto PC, a shadow of its potential self. Our cutting edge rigs are sighing as they use an iota of their potential to render Resident Evil 5, Mirror’s Edge and Arkham Asylum. They grit their quad-cores as we connect to Xbox Live to upload our Gamerscores, sealing the homogenisation with one more sticky fanboy wank.

Liam, is PC gaming completely dead, then?

I’ve watched enough Lost to know that you don’t blow all your load in one go. Tune in next time I have a spare ten minutes to find out if I really think PC gaming is DOOMED!!!, and which developers are doing their best to salvage it.

Discuss this article on the forum.

Continue reading All You Ever Needed to Know!

Review - Assassin's Creed II

• Game: Assassin's Creed 2
• Format: Xbox 360
• Other Formats: PC, PS3
• Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
  
• Publisher: Ubisoft
  
• Genre: Third Person Adventure

The first Assassin's Creed was a game with great potential - the Prince of Persia-style free running allowed you to climb any building then leap into a conveniently placed haystack at the bottom. Then there was the crowd-based stealth system that when used properly could let you walk right up to your target, stab him, and walk away before the guards even noticed he was dead. All this was tied up with a plot that could best be described as "The Da Vinci Code if Dan Brown wasn't a talentless hack" and the truly revolutionary concept of using a historical setting that was neither World War II nor ancient Rome.

Note the lack of Nazi gladiators.

Despite this potential, there were a number of major flaws that prevented it from being a truly great game. But now two years on, the sequel is here and provides one of the best examples in years of how to address the flaws of a game and bring the concept forwards.

The story kicks off right where the first game ended. Desmond is rescued from Abstergo by the modern Assassins and put into an upgraded version of the Animus. Once there he begins to relive the life of his ancestor Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a 15th century Italian nobleman who, much like Altaïr, is also a behooded Batman wannabe fighting to stop the Knights Templar from stealing the powers of Space Jesus. It makes sense in context. This change of character brings with it a new setting in the form of five cities in Renaissance Italy.

The dialogue è ormai casualmente switch between English e Italiano. Accendere i sottotitoli. Requiescat in pace.

The most obvious flaw in the original game was the dull mission structure, with constantly repeated missions involving such thrilling jobs as pickpocketing or sitting on a bench. The sequel does its best to address this problem, with much more variety in the missions and more cinematic set-pieces. There are also a number of underground tombs that allow you to make the most of Ezio's parkour skills. Having said all this, there are still too many "very slowly walk after this guy" missions (i.e. more than zero).

And the improvements extend further than the mission structure, to the point where it is hard to think of a single criticism of the first game that hasn't been addressed to some extent. Lack of reward for finding things? Collection increases the value of your villa and hence your income, plus there are proper unlockables for finding enough hidden feathers. Instant death water? You can now not only swim, but make sneaky takedowns from the water's edge. Not enough answers regarding the metaplot? Two sidequests give plenty of information about both the Assassins and Templars, and the ending is essentially a chain of massive revelations.

Non-instakill water. Really useful when you're in Venice.

There are still a few problems though. Having to keep returning to the villa to pick up money is a pain, especially as it involves a loading screen and usually a fairly long walk. In addition, despite improvements the combat still pales in comparison to something like Batman: Arkham Asylum. There are a number of new moves, but the all-powerful counter attack is still enough to defeat just about any enemy. This combined with enemies that politely attack one at a time means that battles often degenerate into holding the block button and waiting for an opportunity to counter.

All in all, this is the game we should have got two years ago, and means the series now actually deserves the level of success it has received. There are a few things left to be ironed out, but if the inevitable Assassin's Creed III has the same dedication to addressing its failings then it could be a true classic.

Score:
8/10

Discuss this article on the forum.

Continue reading Review - Assassin's Creed II

Why Do Some Games Scare the Hell Out of Me?

I’ve been playing games for almost as long as I can remember. I can distinctly visualise hassling my older cousin to have a go on Super Mario Land on his Gameboy when I was around 4 years old. I remember playing Super Mario Bros. 3, Punchout, Marble Madness and more on a friend’s NES every week for a number of years and a different cousin and I spent tens of hours playing Contra 3. I think it’s safe to say that I became well-versed in games at a reasonable level of difficulty and challenge.

These days I can safely say that I’m completely shit at a lot of games, almost entire genres. I find that games are throwing too many uncontrollable variables and obstacles my way and I’ve lost a lot of love for a lot of games because of this. Take for example Battlefield 1943; it’s a great game and I know that full well but it took me a good hour to get a single kill (and I think I fluked that) because I was apparently too shit at the game to survive for more than 30 seconds at a time. This was made even more frustrating that I had no fucking idea why I was dying so frequently even when I was utilising environmental cover, supporting team members and just staying out of sight. No matter what I did I kept dying without knowing why and I came to the conclusion that I was just very, very shit at the game.

On the other end of the scale is Serious Sam, an FPS of a different kind. I know what’s coming my way, I know I’m not going to die instantly (in most instances anyway) and all I really have to worry about is which direction my comically oversized weapon is pointing. In short, I feel in control of the situation that I’m in and I like it and any of my failings are due to my own fuck-uppery, unlike being killed by a single shot from westhamdave16x because I have no bloody clue what’s going on. Maybe it’s just a difference in leniency to how many hits I can take before I bite the dust, but I just don’t find such a large degree of uncertainty in games fun in comparison to games where there’s a low level of uncertainty in my environment.

Those examples would be extremes for me but I feel that I’m in a similar position with other genres too. Beat ’em ups are a great example. I’ve always been half decent at Soul Calibur and games which largely utilise a “Direction + button = different attack” system much like the Super Smash Bros. games. Street Fighter games too utilise this to a certain extent, but any inexperienced player would stay away from the likes of Zangief and his array of moves that involve full circles (or even two) on the stick to succeed. I find that Tekken and to a lesser extent Fighter’s Destiny on the N64 take this concept to the next level and create button combinations for certain moves that require you to press Up, Down, Up, Forward, Back, Heavy Punch, Up, Back, Light Kick, Wank, Down, Rotate controller 360 degrees, Forward and Heavy Kick which even then are only successful at 5pm on a Tuesday during the winter, this is of course after acquiring an encyclopedic knowledge of move lists. It appears that simplicity in success is something that I find attractive in a game (not in the way you’re thinking).

I won’t go into other genres, but it comes as no surprise to me that the Wii has become such a success story. If I, a seasoned gamer, am so reluctant to play the likes of Modern Warfare or any other game with a similar level of complexity then I dread to think what Mrs Biggins is thinking when she comes across these games. Anyone could conclude that I like simple games with simple interfaces, simple objectives and few extraneous factors that affect my progress. You could say that I was just a gigantic moron when it comes to certain games and you could well be right but the truth is that I like to succeed in the games that I play and I can personally only really succeed when I have a certain degree of control. When that level of control is gone then my personal success rate drops and I become shit at the game. I don’t like being shit at something because like most people I don’t like failure and that is why you could say I’m scared of some games.

Discuss this article on the forum.

Continue reading Why Do Some Games Scare the Hell Out of Me?