The Week Gone By: 11th April, 2014

This week, nothing much happened in term of major events that will actually matter in the future, but there was plenty of interesting stuff that happened. First, I’ll look at my predictions to see if anything I said was correct. Octodad sadly did not get a PS4 release date, and from what I counted, only two indie games were announced for the PS4, and neither of them were on Steam. However, my prediction that Iwata would say please at some point was nearly correct, as Masahiro Sakurai did during the Smash Bros Direct. Anyway, we’ll get to next week’s predictions later, time for a news round-up.

Yes, okay, I did do a retrospective on Hotline Miami because of the Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number trailer, but I’m pretty sure I was forced to do it by the soundtrack of the trailer. Wrong Number seems to be taking everything that was fantastic  about the original game and simply expanding on it, rather than just doing what popular games are doing and tweaking the gameplay to be more like that. The story is also looking to be just as engaging as the first game, with Richard the Chicken coming back to presumably give us more morally challenging questions and ‘The Fans’ killing minor gangs after being inspired by Jacket from the first game. It’s gonna be incredibly interesting to see how it plays out.

Another trailer released this week that immediately piqued my interested was the new trailer for Wolfenstein: The New Order. Firstly, it involves the killing of footballers, which will be a handy WebM/Gif to throw around when the World Cup is on.  Secondly, it looks like a first-person shooter that threw away all of it’s inhibitions and just wants to be one hell of a fun game. It also helps that they have full focus on what is apparently a 15-hour or so single player campaign with some genuinely fantastic character design. Crazy Nazis are obviously not the most unique of characters but the two we’ve seen, Deathshead and Frau Engel, are both so brilliantly written and performed I don’t care. This game is deinitely one to look out for, and I’m excited.

Now, it’s not much of a secret that I’ve been incredibly hyped for the new Godzilla movie ever since it was first announced to be in the works. This trailer did nothing but cement my hype, and I am definitely looking forward to seeing it on the big screen in May. This trailer gave gave us a solid glimpse at the MUTOs and what appears to be another brand new monster which seems to be snake-like, and doesn’t even look like the dead kaiju that was seen in the original trailer. While I still think they need to do a public trailer dubbed with the Oppenheimer speech, the trailers have still been brilliant and, unless the ruin it with some sort of romance subplot like most over movies, it’s all gonna be about Godzilla, which it needs to be.

Today wasn’t particularly big on the news front, and it was mostly just trailers that were of interest. There was another ‘reveal’ of Epic Games’ new free-to-play 3D Don’t Starve Fortnite which I didn’t really care about, but that was it. Still, all the trailers I’ve highlighted today were great, and did nothing but excite. I can now also confirm that I have pre-ordered WATCH_DOGS, partially because I’m really interested in it and partially because the incredibly rocky road this game has been on has to lead to somewhere, and that my review for it will either be on the 2nd or 9th of June, depending on how much I get done in the first week or so. I will now leave you with my predictions: Minecraft for PS4, Vita and Xbox One gets a release date, Firaxis’ new game is an XCOM for PC, PS4 and Xbox One and PAX has a load of indie reveals.

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Knock Knock – A Hotline Miami Retrospective

In light of a very good trailer being released recently for a game in no way related to Hotline Miami at all, I decided to look back on one of the best indie games of the past few years. It’s not exactly a secret that Hotline Miami is filled with ultraviolence, pixel art and all of the drugs in the world, but there many things which allow the game to rise just above being bloody fun, as well as allowing Dennaton’s Cactus and Dennis to sit at the big boy’s table in the cafe. Let’s just get it out-of-the-way first, yes I know that Hotline Miami has one of the best soundtracks ever, and no that will not be brought up again.

Okay, I lied, but it’s very difficult to ignore. The soundtrack of Hotline Miami is composed of many songs from a selection of unknown artists such as CoConuts, M.O.O.N. and Scattle. Every single bit of music in the game raises each stage in the game to another level, especially Scattle’s Flatline. which is pretty much the only thing which makes Trauma tolerable. It’s been stated by the guys at Dennaton that people have just been sending in their music to be used in the sequel without them having to pay any royalties because the game’s soundtrack had that much of an impact. Also, if it’s any indication, the new trailer for Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number basically confirms that it will top the original game, significantly.

Now, something that isn’t universally agreed to be fantastic is the graphics, or rather ‘art style’. Now, objectively, the game basically looks like a more modern 16-bit game, which by AAA standards is pretty pathetic. However, the art style is one of the major parts of Hotline Miami that separates from other games. The way the game is presented, and the way it looks during gameplay, just makes you forget that this game looks about fifteen years old. If Sonic 3 was released in 2014 and cited as a brand new experience, people would scoff at it, but Hotline Miami came out just over a year ago and people love how it looks. Presentation is key.

Now, after all that pointless stuff that doesn’t help a game be a good game, let’s continue that theme by talking about the story. It goes without mentioning that this game deserves it’s M rating, and no matter how they could’ve cut it, there was no way this would ever be T rated. If this game was in full 3D, this game would be banned, especially when compared to an actual banned game like Manhunt 2 which would pale in comparison to a version of Hotline Miami in a 3D AAA engine. Now, obviously a lot of this stems from the absolutely brutal violence, drugs and swearing, but it doesn’t help that this game has one of the most twisted and dark stories in recent memory.

Without wishing to spoil anything, the game deals with hallucinations, assassinations, gang culture and exploitation of women, which is somehow handled better by a game which basically has the unique selling point of ‘kill anything’ than a game which tries to be all serious and gritty. While not voiced, the dialogue is very well written and in some cases makes the player directly question their own actions, something that only Spec Ops: The Line had managed to do before, at least in my opinion. The story is seriously one of the reasons you should check out Hotline Miami, because it screws with your head, makes you question your own morals and is overall pretty damn fantastic.

Okay, so now I’ll actually break the trend and talk about the gameplay, and this game has brilliant gameplay. While you may be forgiven for trying to play this game by stealthily planning every single little thing you do, you will definitely be better off just throwing away your inhibitions and exploding through every level like the drug-fuelled psycho that you are. You could argue that Hotline Miami is almost entirely a twitch game in a similar vein to Super Hexagon with the amount of quick thinking and constant restarting you need to do. I have never seen someone play through the entire game without dying at least once, and if somebody has, please refer me.

Another thing that adds a hell of a lot of replayability, other than the levels being explicitly designed for it with all the scoring the game has, is the selection of secrets the game has to find. Alongside various masks, a subject we’ll finish on, you can also find various letter pieces, which lead to something rather interesting that I don’t want to talk about. Now, the aforementioned masks play a huge role in the gameplay, with each of them offering different abilities. The ‘canonical’ chicken mask offers no bonuses but others offer abilities such as lethal doors or killing punches, allowing you to use different tactics in each level.

But, the time comes to actually say if the game is worth your time or not, and it certainly is. It’s currently free for European PlayStation Plus users, so I highly suggest you go and download it now if you own a PS3 or Vita, and it’s not exactly expensive to buy, being only £6.99 on Steam at full price, with most sales bringing it down by at least 50% nowadays. With the trailer for the game that is completely unrelated to this game being released this week, which I will be looking at on Friday, as you’d expect, it was a perfect time to discuss Hotline Miami, and I hope you find it in your heart to punch everybody in the face to death.

Can’t You Find Another Way? – Bioshock Infinite: Burial at Sea Episode 2 Review

There really isn’t a review tagline that I could use for this review which wouldn’t spoil the DLC or the main game, so I opted to use a Queens of the Stone Age reference to make it easier. Anyway, I digress. BioShock Infinite was a pretty fantastic game, and if I arbitrarily ranked all of my favourite games of 2013, Infinite would be around third. I was happy to purchase the season pass after the reveal of Burial at Sea, knowing what I’d be getting, and after enjoying Burial at Sea Episode 1 and not really playing Clash in the Clouds at all, I was very excited for the next episode of Burial at Sea. It also deserves to be called out as Irrational Games’ final ever release, so let that linger around.

Burial at Sea Episode 2 begins immediately following the events of the first episode, sort of. It’s hard to explain without ruining a pretty awesome segment, although it doesn’t really affect the overall story in any way, so we’ll just leave it at that. You take control of Elizabeth, the first female playable character in the entire series, as she goes on a great adventure filled with death, horror and weirdness. It’s basically what you’d expect if you played the main game for more than twenty minutes. Anyway, one of the biggest factors in this DLC is it’s story so I do not want to go into any specifics, as minor as they may be, so I’ll just say that players of the whole series will probably appreciate the DLC a bit more but new players will be brought up to speed with a rather helpful ‘Previously on BioShock’ video.

Okay, so now I’ve finished the incredibly undetailed synopsis of the frankly quite brilliant story of Episode 2, let’s get into the meat of any video game, the gameplay. Now, I liked BioShock Infinite’s gameplay, although it certainly had issues. Being limited to two weapon slots is pretty much terrible, especially in a fairly unrealistic game, and aside, from any skyhook-based battles, it felt like a bit of a generic arena shooter. However, Episode 2 does quite a lot of things to get rid of most of the issues. Much like in Episode 1, there is a weapon wheel that stores every weapon, which is just fantastic and helps change-up the gameplay a bit more than holding onto only two guns at once, one of which is probably explosion-based. Also, the overall combat system definitely favours using stealth, and the new Crossbow weapon helps that, with various bolt types to help stay hidden or get out of a bit of bother silently.

Also, the game introduces two new vigors, although I don’t want to explicitly state their function. However, I will happily say that one of the new vigors stayed as one of my equipped vigors permanently, while the other was a cool gimmick that I didn’t find all too useful. You can also find vigor upgrades in hidden areas rather than having to buy them, which is a change I rather enjoyed as a significant boost in a vigors capability should be something that you should discover by exploring, rather than being something you just buy at any old ‘Veni! Vidi! Vigor!’ machine. I think one of the upgrades could be considered gamebreaking as it does make the combat significantly easier, but I don’t think it is too useful when you get found so it’s pretty much fine.

Apologies, but I am out of non-spoiler images. Anyway, the story and gameplay are both pretty damn good for this piece of DLC, I’d even say fantastic. It should be getting a nine or possibly even a highly prestigious ten. However, there  is one quite major thing that prevents it from getting the fabled perfect score, and that’s the fact it runs on the PS3 like if the PS3 used the GameCube’s GPU. In one fairly major section I kept getting massive lag spikes, constantly, and it completely destroyed any chance of getting through a combat scenario stealthily. I don’t know what it was like on 360, and PC performance is basically on you, but it’s absolutely unacceptable. Yes, the game is very pretty for seventh-generation hardware, but the main game didn’t have drops as major as those. It left a slightly bitter taste in my mouth, so it’s a good job the DLC is overall really damn good. My final score for BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea Episode 2 is an

8/10

Sorry if I seem to be turning into Eurogamer, but with its performance issues on the PS3, it is impossible to give this a nine or above, and the DLC is too good to get a seven or below. Performance issues aside, Episode 2 is completely worth your time with its gameplay improvements and it’s amazing story. It brings tremendous closure to the series, and I would like the thank Irrational Games for bringing us two fantastic games and two fantastic pieces of DLC. I hope Levine’s next project is as special as this saga.

The Week Gone By: 4th April, 2014 (also, Mercenary Kings)

When I decided to schedule my blog posts, I falsely believed that every week will have news as shocking and as interesting as the Oculus VR acquisition by Facebook last week, and while there was a fairly big news story this week, it certainly didn’t explode like the acquisition did. However, there was some other things that happened this week, as well as a couple of new trailers. I will also talk about Mercenary Kings too, as I’ve had an hour or so with it and I want to talk about it without reviewing it in full. Now, with that said, the big news story of the week.

As you may of heard, Brendan Eich is essentially anti-gay, and has been known to contribute money to anti-gay charities. Now, while that is just minority suppresion because why the hell not, it’s not why Eich was in the news. Yes, to the great joy of all Firefox users now that they can’t be branded homophobic by stupid people anymore, Eich stepped down as CEO of Mozilla. Some may agree with his beliefs, many will think he is an archaic idiot. However, hopefully we can all agree that people are happy that others will now shut up about Firefox users.

You can read Mozilla’s official blog post about Eich’s resignation here.

A rumour developed recently that 4A Games were working on a next/current-gen compilation of their two Metro games. This rumour was also supported with some presentation slides and mock-up box art. However, on the 31st of March, Deep Silver posted on the Metro series’ website, confirming that they working on the remakes. I gained a tremendous amount of respect for Deep Silver after they confirmed the leaks were legitimate, and they even mentioned they could’ve just went with the standard “not commenting on rumours” stance. I am very much looking forward to seeing what Redux looks like on the next/current-gen consoles. It’s also worth noting that this will be the first time Metro 2033 will be on PlayStation.

You can read Deep Silver’s blog post here.

In other news, it has been announced that Pure Chess is being brought to PS4 and looks beautiful. It’s been a while since I was excited to play chess, but there you go. A new trailer was also released Always Sometimes Monsters, which looks like a cross between Hotline Miami, To the Moon and IMVU. The violence in the very chibi-looking world as actually very unsettling, and as the game seems to have many story branches, I’ll keep a very close eye on this project. I should probably also mention that Phil Spencer has been promoted to head of the Xbox brand, but I’m a vitriolic PlayStation fanboy, so why would I do that.

In the movie world, the big trailer, and I think the only big trailer, from this week was of course for Lucy. According to the incredibly unreliable synopsis featured on Wikipedia, Scarlett Johansson’s character Lucy gets used as a drug mule for the Taipei mob, but she accidentally absorbs the drugs and can now absorb knowledge instantly, move objects with her mind and doesn’t feel pain. Yes, this does mean that Johansson is playing a character that is more of a superhero than the actual superhero she does play. Also, Morgan Freeman has a role, because of course he has.

However, you all keep up with the news, so I want to talk about Mercenary Kings for a bit, as I haven’t played it enough for a review but I have played it enough to form an opinion. I went into Mercenary Kings expecting it to be a new age Metal Slug with customisation elements. But, this game should not even be mentioned in the same paragraph as Metal Slug, and I am technically insulting SNK right now. Mercenary Kings is actually a quad-directional shoot-em-up with scavenging elements, insultingly basic crafting and the worst level design I’ve seen for bloody ages. For a game which has a strong focus on its customisation elements, why the hell am I limited to two predefined characters that have four different colour palettes each. Oh yeah, and you can also rename them, that really make a whole lot of difference. It’s not like it would be hard to implement some sort of character customisation considering the game is basically the most stylised thing ever released.

Also, if having two predefined characters was so important, the character could have at least been interesting. Unless they were characterised in the pretentious Metal Gear tribute/rip-off codec sequences, which I skipped because a reference to a prolific series that doesn’t end is not funny, then they are essentially blank slate anyway so character customisation may as well be a part of it. Also, while we are at it, the gathering and crafting system is just poorly implemented. There isn’t any way of getting a steady stream of actually valuable resources like steel, which in turn means it’s irritating to actually create a decent weapon, which again turns into a system so pointless they may as well give you pre-defined weapons you can switch between on the fly. Don’t make me provide materials and money, especially when the gunsmith is meant to be part of your actual team/army/something or other. If the real army made each individual soldier provide metal for their guns as well as money for the crafting of them, nobody would sign up. Maybe Mercenary Kings was developed just to try to dissuade people from going to war, ironically.

I should probably finish up this rant before it turns into a review, but I would last like to go into a little bit more detail on the appaling level design I mentioned earlier. I still haven’t got passed the first area for reasons that we’ll get to in a minute, but the main level they use for most things in the first area is just a big open space with lots of doors that lead to random places, which in turn leads me to remember Fez, which had terrible level design but was at least very pretty. Now, I stopped playing Mercenary Kings after my second attempt at the first boss, because I really didn’t want to try again. The boss starts in what I assume is a constant position, and then wanders off when it gets bored and spawns in one of three other places, each of them being a pain to get to. There were also several instances where I searched every possible place, and found out that it can move while you are looking for it, which is bad design, and just plain stupid. In conclusion, buy Metal Slug 1, Metal Slug 2 or Metal Slug XX on PSN.

Anyway, I’ll see you guys in a few days for the Monday review, which wont be Thief again because I spent too much time trying to have fun playing Mercenary Kings. If I can get around to it, the review will probably be for Burial at Sea Episode 2. If not, I’ll just review One Finger Death Punch or someting. So, another week closes and another begins. My predictions for the following week are that Octodad gets a PS4 release date, Iwata says “please” at some point and twelve more indie games are announced for the PS4, with at least eight of them being on Steam already.

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Doctors, Teachers, Fathers, Sons – Discussing Dying Light

Think of a trailer in the past, say, ten years. In fact, think of a few. I am willing to guess that most people would think of Dead Island when asked this question, and so they should. The Dead Island reveal trailer was probably one of the greatest things to happen in 2011, and it deserved it, as the entire trailer just had everything right. Techland again did something similar when revealing Dead Island Riptide, and while it didn’t the godly levels of the first trailer, it was still pretty damn good. I always had a weird soft spot for Dead Island that I never fully understood, so I was incredibly excited when Techland announced Dying Light. They first provided  a selection of pretty fantastic screenshots, and then followed those up with one of their famous cinematic trailers.

Backed by Woodkid’s Run Boy Run, which is incredibly fitting for a game that involves free-running away from zombies, the trailer marks what I consider the quickest time for a twist to occur, happening near the end where after all his effort, the guy ends up getting knocked out right by the supplies. However, Techland have a reputation for releasing generally hilarious gameplay trailers after the fantastic CGI reveal trailers. This is generally caused by appalling voice acting with super dramatic music in the background, creating a contrast that comes off as parody. I think the only character in the Dead Island series whose voice actor wasn’t completely awful was Sam B, and that was only because Phil LaMarr sounded like he was doing the macho black guy shtick ironically.

However, Techland actually completely turn this on this head with its Dying Light trailers. They began with the Lighting trailer, which somehow manages to be a really good game trailer while essentially being a tech demo. After that, they just went straight into giving out and showing demos for the game, which is something more developers really need to start doing more of. The other trailer they have released so far was the Humanity trailer which is the most recent new footage that we’ve seen of the game. The Humanity trailer was pretty much directed as well as the CGI trailers, which was pretty surprising. It also helped that the guy doing the voiceover wasn’t completely laughable, and was actually really quite good, so hopefully he is playing one of the main characters.

But hey, Dying Light isn’t just a collection of lovely trailers, let’s actually talk about the game. Even though it’s a cross-gen game, it is still pretty damn beautiful, and Techland are targeting 60 FPS at 1080p on both the PS4 and Xbox One, which is awesome. Zombie models are looking great, and hopefully there are enough unique models in the game to keep them interesting, and character models look nice too, and are very emotive when talking or giving a quest, which makes them seem a bit more human, unlike Dead Island NPCs that just stared into your soul, learning all of your sins. Also, unlike many games, the world looks amazing during daytime and nighttime, which is probably helped by the South American setting.

With all this talk about graphics and trailers, I need to digress and get onto gameplay. In the most basic of terms, the gameplay is like Dead Island and Mirror’s Edge, which is quite possibly one of the greatest gameplay merges I can think of. The free-running will allow for incredible chase sequences, supported by the ‘looking behind you’ mechanic, and I’ve always found the Dead Island combat charming. By the looks of it, the footage shown doesn’t use the analog controls that were part of Dead Island, but I hope the option is there as the analog controls were great to use. Also from Dead Island is the weapon crafting system, although it seems to be a bit more grounded this time. You can actually see on the electrified machete used in one of the gameplay demos that it looks wired up in a realstic way rather than just having a load of wire coiled around in connected to a battery taped on the handle.

Much like Dead Island, or rather Left 4 Dead which pretty much popularised the idea, Dying Light features a selection of special zombies, although they aren’t really unique as most ideas for special zombies have been used. Two of the ones you’ll see are the acid-spitting Toad and the massive tank Demolisher. Also, there is a special zombie type that only comes out at night, the Volatile, which will apparently render escape near impossible and the player will need to use their wits and various distractions to escape. These zombies form a part of one of Dying Light’s main focuses, the night sections, where you lose any advantage you have over the zombies. They become faster, more intelligent, can climb like you and are near unkillable. This all sounds great, and I really hope Techland manage to pull it off.

I have been looking forward to Dying Light ever since it’s reveal, and none of the released footage has put me off the game, even reinforcing my hype in some areas. With no release date set in stone yet, other than a fairly taunting TBA 2014, I will expect to see the game launch in about Q3, and most likely in August as nobody will want to compete with Destiny in September. Techland are definitely starting to become a develop people are starting to like, especially with the last Call of Juarez game getting a good response from critics and customers alike. Let’s just hope they can’t screw up a combination of Dead Island and Mirror’s Edge, but to be honest, that will be very difficult.