Crossing the Line, Spec Ops Style

While working through my backlog of games I am also playing some recent titles as well. I figure it is best to stager these in the hopes of keeping the blog relevant to current gaming instead of being totally retro.* I played the demo of Spec Ops: The Line some time back, soon after release, and was impressed with the feel of it. In my opinion this merited a closer look, so here it is.
* Note, not all went as planned here and... yeah this game is now last year's news and I am way behind again... but you can see my intentions were pure so I will keep this ill-fated line in none the less...

Relaunch Inauguration with Just Cause 2

So here I am, finally able to write for my blog again and having also fixed the issues with transfer to my new gmail address. Of course, for now the blog looks near the same as before and nothing much will have changed but... hey, we're back! And we are back with just cause, too. Or should I say Just Cause 2... yeah ok I won't pull too many of those jokes, I promise. They have been done to death already so let me just get into the meat of things. I have a huge backlog so this calls for some speed blogging.

So, Just Cause 2... let me just say first of all that this is a game I had resolved not to play initially. Pre-release I saw trailers and gameplay review podcasts about Just Cause 2 showing some of the gameplay features and, while clearly looking awesome on many levels I found some of the gameplay mechanics to be a little off. Namely the infinite parachute and grapple hook combo. Maybe I was too hard on the game and pre-judging it without giving it a chance? I often thought this but was content to let the game slide by anyway. Then Steam comes along with their awesome summer sale deals and put up the usual publisher packs, set fire to my credit card and dumped a load of games into my library before running off into the night. This is a process I like to call the Game Glomp, and no one does it better than Steam.

Batman: Arkham City on Trial

So, having been a huge fan (understatement if there ever was one) of Batman: Arkham Asylum, I was waiting with baited breath for Batman: Arkham City, delivered by Rocksteady Studios. I don't normally pre-order games at the store or even online via D2D distribution methods, but for this one I was willing to make an exception. Arkham Asylum was, without a doubt, one of the most satisfying purchases on the XBox I have made to date and needed a good kicking to pull if off its podium. Since we are talking Batman here, I think we can all agree that the only thing capable of pulling Batman off a high and hard-to-reach vantage point is another Batman.

UFC Trainer. Fitness? And gaming?

... Surely not... but if you insist.

Yes, lately I have been making all endeavours to lose some weight and I am doing quite well there. I have picked up my old gym membership card and spent time on cardio there, changed my diet and now invested in some basic home fitness equipment as well as digging out the old dumbbells from my parent's loft.

I also remembered how I have a Wii with a Wii Fit board and also a Kinect for my XBox that I have neglected somewhat. I was not entirely impressed with the Wii Fit so it has gone to a better home. But the Kinect was promising, at least as far as I had used it with the provided Kinect Adventures game as well as the Kinect Sports game I got at the same time. You do feel a workout as you use it, and I loaded it back up to supplement my efforts at the regular gym. Does the Kinect have the potential to replace gym membership for the masses? Well.. keep that question in mind as you read on. I will answer it in the end. This blog will focus more on an individual game instead of the Kinect platform as a whole, but this is a question I was asking myself as I utilised my new purchase.

Gearing up for War!

So, around the time I was half way through Space Marine and drafting my blog, a few days after release in fact, I ran back to the shops to collect my pre-order of Gears of War 3. The third (well, duh) in the series by Epic Games, Gears of War 3 has been a pleasure for me to play over the evolution of the series.

Anyone that knows me knows that I like a game with a story, and one that is told well regardless of how preposterous it might be in substance. This should be evident from my review of Mass Effect 2, where I praise the writing and story telling of the game in general. Gears of War as a series has story depth in spades, digging.. a very deep hole.... you get the idea.

Warhammer 40k Breaks Out of RTS

And I cannot be happier. Finally I can play as a Space Marine with bolter and chainsword hacking my way through a sea of greenskins with my brothers at my side.

Well, except I have kind of done this dance before with the Gears of War series and I guess this might taint thing a little. Especially with the release schedule fixed like it was this year. You see, once upon a time I grabbed a disk for my X-Box 360 called Gears of War after watching the trailers and being somewhat impressed with what I saw. And it took me all of 5 minutes of playing it to realise this is how it must feel to play as a Space Marine in Warhammer 40,000's universe.

Read Dead Redemption revisited: Undead DLC... Muwhahaha...

Hey folks, so I thought it was time, now that I got the Minecraft blog out of my backlog that I look for something else to play through.

Even though I still have to complete games like Front Mission Evolved and Dead Rising 2 and a flurry of other new titles are coming out all the time with christmas around the corner. The Kinect has launched, Black Ops is out, though not on my wish list as such, and previously new titles are turning into old ones. And here I am going back a few steps to another old one with a new DLC that has been out for a month or so now. Also, anyone with eyes will have noticed that this is the fourth game blog in a row with the 'Zombies' tag, because who doesn't like zombies? The darling of the video game scene since the likes of the Commodore 64.

But this is zombies in the wild west we are talking about... and Red Dead Redemption no less. RDR was, as I originally stated in my previous review earlier this year, pretty authentic feeling and experienced very little outlandish elements beyond having one super hero cowboy wrecking other people's shit in the dusty landscape of New Austin. And now, seemingly out of pure novelty given its release around Halloween, Rockstar have thrown some undead into the mix with Undead Nightmare.

My initial reaction was... Ohh god.... that's going to ruin it. but as much as I love the game I figured I would give it a try anyway and see if my favourite story driven sandbox has been enhanced or if Rockstar have just squatted over the rim and laid a steaming coil of crap in the corner.

Watching the trailer you cannot deny that it at least looks well made, and does not have the hallmark of a novelty expansion stuck to the side of an otherwise serious game with prit-stick, despite the setting mismatch. And much of the media who have reviewed the game and done previews before the launch were foaming at the mouth to get their hands on it and saying nothing but good things. Either they got their perspective different from my own or they know something I don't.

First of all, after downloading the DLC (along with the Liars and Cheats and Legends and Killers DLCs in a multipack) I noticed when going to single player that you have an option to play the undead expansion separate to the normal game. Guess it makes sense given the way the game ends in normal mode. It did not leave any leeway for add-ons that do not follow on with the story where it left off unless they force you to go play the whole story again and weave themselves into the main plot as a new sub plot.

After checking out a little of the small additions with the other packs to the main game, and given most of them are multiplayer content heavy anyway, I reloaded the game and selected the undead nightmare. The scene is set in the main story with John Marston after he returns home and is living it up on the homestead before the finale of the game. A storm is kicking up something wicked, literally, and a monologue voiced out of some 1960's B-movie sets the tone ending with an almost comical wicked laugh. Muwhahahahahahaha...... *Cough* And even the menu text reminds of Zombies Ate my Neighbours, all gooey greenish yellow and splotchy.

So yeah, impressions were not so great at this time, and as music worthy of the Munsters kicked up I started shaking my head. People who know me will know how I favour continuity of theme with my games and so far this game was doing a good job of biting the forehead of continuity and feasting on the mushy grey stuff inside before I even lifted the controller to my fingertips. When you finally do get to control the scene you are popping your first zombie in the face with the classic double barrel shotgun and then hog-tying the wife and son to stop them from munching on your vitals.

Then your story begins and it seems structured in the familiar sense of any other Rockstar free-roamer with mission activation waypoints and freedom to wander between jobs as much as you like. The last scene of the intro leads with a suggestion to head for Blackwater and find a doctor, but as I always do with games like this I ignored the initial jobs to see the extend of what I can explore freely first. Despite the almost cartoonish introduction and spooky writing, and even the map screen shows the water as being red like blood, the atmosphere hit me as being very well done. There are low hanging clouds, patches of fog on the ground and not a living thing to be seen, including animals at first. The music ditches the Adams Family feel and goes back to western with a good dose of slightly spooky tension completing the scene and the control systems all feel and work the same as we are all used to so nothing has been 'improved' there that I can tell.

Then I realised it was like restarting the game anyway, given the skills and array of weapons on hand and the poor quality of stamina in the horse you start with. You have fewer clothing options, but at least a couple of new one and some familiar ones too. Two of them you have to work towards getting like the other special garments in the original game. And there are some undead specific journal challenges to work your way through in ranks. Also the 'stranger' encounters have been replaced with 'survivors' and I had to catch myself to make sure I was not playing Dead Rising 2 by mistake. Well, ok not really. Survivors go with the theme of zombies like icing on cake or bangers with mash. Putting an already established western theme with it though is like serving the bangers and mash with custard instead of gravy.

OK, no more bashing of the 'theme mismatch' since I recognise it is subjective and you all want to hear the meat of the game so I will highlight the good and the bad and the undead ugly scratching at my heels from beneath the ground of the old grave yard.

As I said, the controls are the same so nothing has been fiddled with. See my original review for my thoughts on this as they were mixed. Detail wise, I have already said the atmosphere is good and the models and cutscenes are as sharp as usual. The in game map, which we all know had markers showing different animals that you might find in certain places, now shows clusters of humans too, which I can guess already will be places you see zombies.

As for everything else, well I don't know at this stage. My idea to head off into the wild and see what lurks before throwing myself into the mission was pointless. You are cut off from the rest of New Austin and Mexico as bridges are down again and nothing actually lurks anywhere. So guess the first missions railroad the story for a short while by way of introduction. All the safe houses you had in the original game are naturally not available too and you are sleeping at the ranch in the hay loft above the small stable building having walled up the wife and son in the main house.... not good planning on his part if you ask me. I would trade the double bed for a sleeping bag out by the outhouse any day but John Marston is a tough frontier cowboy so maybe he likes it this way.

A minor disappointment came my way once I realised I was trapped in West Elizabeth and it might be petty of me but I am sure I mentioned this in my original review too. There is not really a sense of the landscape changing to fit the progress of the story and despite the bridge being 'out' it was more a case of someone having rewound time to a point where the bridge was being built and then set fire to a couple of things. There were small cranes ready to rebuild the bridge and piles of wood and work benches scattered in places and the only telling details to give you the impression that they were broken down in the undead rising the previous  night were the flames. I mentioned in my first review that the town of Blackwater had some houses under construction to give the effect of progression when you play as John Marston. Then fast forward to a few years in the future to play as the son, Jack, and the same houses have not had a single plank or brick laid since.

Also, I did note that the rivers were not, in fact, running red with blood as the map shows us so not sure what that is all about...

So on to Blackwater I rode and began the story finally in the hopes of it releasing me into more exciting prospects outside the mission structure and revealing to me it's rotting dangly bits in all their undead glory. And then my initial disappointment at the 'cut and paste and apply glitter' approach to progressive scenery was soothed a little when the town of Blackwater was done a little better than the bridge. Broken furniture littered the street and buildings were boarded up and it seems the art team have done at least some work on making it look like civilisation was cut short overnight. However, one of my other bugbears emerged as the walls are scrawled with the usual 'The end is nigh' messages and I think to myself, why do people always find time when running and screaming as the end really is nigh to write their inner most thoughts on the walls?


But this aside I was thrust into a short cutscene ending in the expected manner and then the whole town came alive with the undead... so to speak. I am not sure if this is because with all my tomfoolery the sun ad begun to set when I arrived in town and the dead only rise at night, which would make sense, or if this initial encounter in Blackwater triggered this. But I soon found myself mobbed and called over my horse to high-tail it out of town and back to the ranch. Coward? Maybe, but bullets are few and zombies are many as Rockstar have added in the typical and classic survival theme of conservation of supplies. Again, raising my past review I did register my displeasure at the lack of utilisation of true survival in the wilderness where the only real reason to harvest meat and skin was to sell them on and herbs with medicinal uses were not really used at all so I get the feeling I am going to lament this lack of content in the game even more now there is a real emphasis on survival and the carrying of supplies or foraging for berries and such.

On the way back to the ranch I indulged in a little sniping of bats that has started to appear and collected a nice undead bat wing. Also, I was chased by wolves and after no less than 5 bullets from the revolver one of them still did not go down. I suspect a headshot might have changed that but I was kind of harried and concerned more with not dying until I got a good feel for things. As I ventured on I was gifted with a flaming torch weapon which was pretty cool and told to go burn some corpses by a hysterical redhead who was clearly in denial about her dislike of the men in her life.

On returning to the town a new mechanic rose from the depths like something out of a Thriller music video as some survivors took to a balcony and started sniping the dead. A progress bar appeared at the top of the screen like a beat-em-up health bar and I began to fill it when I took down corpses. When it was full it emptied itself and one of the markers above it lit green. So I guess I needed to fill the other marker and some targets appeared on my mini-map. I took them down, and one of them was curiously a chest in the bank building. Once I filled the second marker a final wave of enemies appeared on the radar. Once I killed them the town was declared safe 'for now' and a message told me that the town can come under attack again and if it falls into undead hands I will not be able to shop or sleep there until I clear it once more. This brings back a fond memory of the gang land wars in GTA San Andreas where you trigger a turf war and fight for control, and they can fight back against your own turf too at random. In all, while not a new concept in gaming by any stretch, it was a welcome addition and a distraction to compensate for the lack of other mini-games and occupations from the original. And the funky fog clears when you clean out a town, though the fires do not get put out so my earlier disappointment with dynamic scenery states lacking returned a little putting me in a state of neutrality at best on the subject.

A curious incident also arose while I was searching for the treasure map hinted at in the journal. A blue circle appeared on the fringe of my mini-map covering an area and a message said a 'mythical creature' had appeared there. I looked around and only saw a few horses and none of them stood out as being particularly unusual, apart from also being undead. So not sure what that was about but would guess it is some other kind of hunting challenge or maybe the four horsemen journal entry. When it happened again I looked around some more and found one of the four horses of the apocalypse, War, who is always on fire and looks pretty awesome. Running into a pack of zombies causes them to ignite into flame and he also has infinite stamina. There was also Pestilence that is near impossible to kill. The other two horses I have not found yet as I guess they are into the Mexico area and have not reached that yet.

There are also the usual random encounters as you ride along, where people have camps set up, one of them with his undead wife leashed to a stake in the ground while another seems to have taken to eating the undead and invites you to sit and share the fire. I approached one guy with my usual apprehension from the first game expecting an ambush and pulled out my gun ready to rumble. The guy soon took exception to my lingering while armed and tried to attack me. Another identical camp I found I just sat at the fire and watched as John tucked into some flesh before vomiting on the floor. There are people running from the undead or making a last ditch stand in the woods while calling for help number among them, one of them you hear before you see as he has an automatic field gun. And as before, there are some people making sport of this and bet you they can kill more undead than you in a time limit. Eventually I became aware that the only survivor encounters were generally people defending themselves from the zombies and started to wonder, where are all the looters? After all when the world turns upside down the general theme would always include the usual arse holes who please themselves and it looked like it was a pretty one dimensional apocalypse. Sooner or later I was proven wrong as I came across a guy trying to accost some 'favours' from a lone woman around the ranch and it felt good to kick him all around the field just for a change of pace.

Another feature they have adapted would be the bounty hunting, though it takes the form more of search and rescue. You take on a missing person rescue mission in return for ammo and head out looking for the lost soul, saving them from zombies and bringing them to a settlement.

I also noticed that when aiming at a leg or arm the crosshair goes blue instead, indicating an incapacitating shot of some kind. And on the subject of shooting it can be pretty hard to deliver a kill shot to a zombie since they have to be head-shots and they wobble around a fair bit. In dead-eye mode you can do this ok, and the advanced features of dead-eye are already available from the start but the recharge is slow to begin with and the lack of a 'legend of the west' duster coat giving you the bonus is keenly felt. Sooner or later your dead-eye meter is empty so you have to make good and frugal use of it because manual aiming for the head is pretty hard. The tactic in this situation is to stagger them with shots to the torso and quickly adjust to their head while they are standing still.

As for bullets themselves, well as I said they are more scarce in this DLC as all the shops are shut, naturally, and you are limited to what you can scratch around and find when you kill a zombie or find a chest when defending a new town. You get ammo as a reward for doing some of the encounters as well so it is not all bad but you can soon find yourself out of lead if you just indulge in mindless sport. This seems to focus your mind a little more too and keeps you on track, not to mention you have most likely played the original game to death and done all there is to do if you have owned it for any length of time before the DLC came out so the need to explore soon wears off as Undead Nightmare delivers a more focused campaign feeling. Also, another new mechanic that makes a little use of the old herbal gathering part steps in out of nowhere when you are awarded an upgrade for your bullets to fire phosphorous rounds that set zombies aflame. Pick one of each of two kinds of herb and they are consumed with each activation of the upgrade which lasts for a short while. And as with the buffs in Dead Rising 2 there is a conspicuous lack of indication on how long the effect lasts for and when it is nearly over, aside for the lack of fireworks when you shoot a shuffling corpse. And it did not seem to last long at all, like maybe three or four shots at most.

The zombies also come in several flavours. There are the usual zombies with nothing special, there are the 'bolters' who suddenly spring towards you very fast, and there are the bruisers who are pretty fat and take a good licking before they go down. They can charge at you and try to knock you down as well so be careful. You will also encounter some zombies that spit poison at you and one person wants you to capture one of them, because naturally there are crazies all over the west who have been out in the sun too long anyway. There are even some zombies who might qualify as a 'boss fight' since they are named and several seem to be from the original story. They might be people you killed yourself, or people you just tried to help to no avail. They usually show up either in survivor encounter jobs or when you are called on to burn coffins at a graveyard to lessen the spread of zombies. Not that it actually seems to have any effect there and it is a shame it's not mixed into the whole territory defence aspect of the game.

As in the original game, you can say hello to people as they pass by and the usual pleasantries are exchanged depending on your honour status. While the honour status seems to be missing this time around, with more important things to worry about beyond reputation, the hellos have also changed to something more fitting the situation with John saying things like he is happy to see another survivor and such. So some more work has been done there beyond simply scripting inside a current engine and new voice acting is not restricted to the storyline.

As I said earlier, the controls are pretty much the same as the original game and nothing innovative is added as such, and so the same control issues are present as well. However they are not as present in usual game play since you rarely need to duck into cover due to a lack of people with guns shooing back at you.

The story takes a few liberties with the central plot characters and while not wishing to spoil too many of the encounters you will come across some well knowns from the original adventure who meet a bad end here and there. It becomes clear that this is not meant to be some kind of 'missing chapter' in the story where everything sets back to normal and you continue on to the game's finale so we can see why it has not been ingrained into the original game like other step-in-out style DLCs.

Overall, and my own minor objections on theme mismatching aside, Rockstar have done as good a job as can be expected when planting the undead into an established background and have made a decent zombie themed game out of it. If anything, as it stands on its own, if RDR's original outing had never existed then Undead Nightmare is a very decent and passable game for the zombie killing lovers. There is also a host of new multiplayer challenges to play through with friends or on X-Box Live, but I have not toyed with them as I have mentioned my views on XBL multiplay in the past. I never liked stepping into a game with a bunch of strangers who I cannot reach over and slap when they act like retards and grief people so I am dependent on my very slim list of XBL friends to assist me there. But single play has plenty of content to make it worth the cash.

Dead Rising 2. Frustrations in Fortune City

It has been a while between work and other stuff but I have finally taken the chainsaw to this review and remade it a little. I always try to get near the end of a game's story before I review it but this one is a little different. The story is not all that big story wise, but we will come to that in a bit and why it might take you a long while to finish it.

So, here I am now with the game I should have picked up before Front Mission Evolved. Dead Rising 2 is, naturally, the second in the Dead Rising games, save for a short interlude in the form of Dead Rising: Case Zero. I have not played this one so I don't know what it is all about except that it involves your character from Dead Rising 1 and 2.

The basics of the game are this. Your character is Chuck Greene, former motorcross champ who's wife was killed in a zombie outbreak and his daughter was bitten. He was fortunate enough to have a shot of something called Zombrex on him at the time and this staves off zombification for about 24 hours but then you need a booster shot. When his career hits rock bottom he cannot afford the boosters without doing some odd stuff, like participating in the Terror is Reality show in Fortune City. He and a bunch of zombie killers are pit into an arena like gameshow where they mow down zombies by the dozen on bikes with chainsaws and get cash prizes for winning. Most of this money goes to buying the girl her Zombrex.

Simple, yes? Well, not really. Like all big and simple turning cogs a single wrench can screw it all up. Your first taste of the game comes in the form of the afore mentioned slice and dice with motorbikes so the game does not mess around and puts you in the thick of the blood bath pretty early. Then it halts for a second for the sake of the story as your make your way through the back stage areas with your winnings to find his daughter before all hell breaks loose and the zombies in the arena break out. You fight your way through them to the green room and pick up the girl and run for the door, finally getting to a shelter where some old police officer has the beds all warm and the coffee brewing in the corner.

However, you still need the next dose of Zombrex for your girl and the only place that has some is back outside. Luckily you find a way out of the bunker on a mission to find the Zombrex in the mall and this is where your game, as advertised, actually begins.

Now I say 'your game actually begins' but really it has already begun. There was a glaring lack of tutorial and adjustment to the game controls to begin with, and you pretty much figure it all out yourself. This is a theme that, annoyingly, persists through the game at all levels. If you are anything like me you have a quick skim through the manual, forget it all in an instant and return it to the box content to muddle through the controls. So I would hardly call the introduction the typical tutorial phase but, hey. Zombies wait for no man.

The game itself is all on a timer, with 72 hours of game time (not real time though, which might have been nice, but I will come to this later) before the army gets to town after sealing it off. And your only goals so far seem to be finding a shot of Zombrex every 24 game hours and maybe locating survivors to escort back to the shelter. This is facilitated by a Zombie rights protester (yes, you read that right) who also made it into the shelter. She is watching through CCTV in the shelter's security room and when she sees something interesting she will radio Chuck and give him a waypoint. This could be anything from a potential survivor to suspicious activity. Eventually these waypoints will expire if you don't act on them and you could miss out on a few things like weapon combo cards or a shot of Zombrex, saving you the job of locating one later. Though, if you have not got one by the time her shot comes around it is your own fault because a few hours before it is due you will get a message hinting you will get some Zombrex for going somewhere and doing something, But you should be prepared for a harder fight to get it.

Back to the timer thing though, and the whole mission structure as well as random encounters are completely choreographed by the game's passage of time and all have and expiry attached to them. Most of them will not affect your overall game though there is a central strand of missions too that will fail if you let them run without action. These will divulge the emerging plot where Chuck is framed for the outbreak and you need to find out who really did it and why by chasing down the reporter in town that broke the initial story on an anonymous source that tipped her off.

At first, my reaction to the timing based missions was not good. I fully expected a GTA/RDR style mission system where you have an open world to please yourself in, that maybe unlocks better stuff as you progress, and you could instigate missions in your own good time. As much of the game elements like crafting of weapons and exploring areas of the map or even playing the gambling mini-games in the multiple casinos speak of a sandbox open world, and throwing a timer in there seems like a horrible mismatch of gaming styles.

After the initial mission of finding Zombrex, as well as a detour to rescue a couple of survivors here and there, I was thrown at the first real mission that would eventually expire if I did not act on it. I found the reporter who put out the story of Chuck releasing the zombies, did her little job and once done I realised the mission system would not unlock the next mission until a certain time of day still to come. So I had a lot of spare time meanwhile to do that whole sandbox thing.

Since the games infuriating lack of documentation on how the missions are handled, my advice to anyone would be to tackle the central missions as soon as you can, because you don't know how long they will take you, and you won't have it hanging over you the whole time as you explore, level up and find new weapons to beat zombies in the face with, Also, you will always have to take time out to get the ever rare Zombrex from somewhere, be it a pawnshop run by looters with a very capitalist philosophy of supply and demand, or helping people who might give you some for free or a clue to the location of a stash elsewhere.

There is also a levelling system for the character, as you hack through zombies and gain.... not xp but 'pp'. I know... not sure what pp stands for and I don't care. It amounts to the same thing really. However, your character auto-levels and his attributes change themselves without your input. I find this entirely annoying as I like to control my play style and feel this being taken out of my hands as being against the spirit of this minor RPG like aspect. This as well as other frustrations in the game makes me wonder if the developers knew what kind of game they wanted to make and some elements should have just been left out in favour of others that gel better with the core gameplay. Again, I will come to this soon.

Other frustrations with the game, besides the lack of documentation and tutorial, is the combat system in general. It feels kind of clunky in more precision engagements, like when you take on a small gang of armed men in one mission you have no duck and cover system, no diving rolls (at least until you level and unlock the ability, again at the game's whim), no shooting back round corners and even worse, no sprint. OK when surrounded by zombies who shuffle along with the speed of growing grass for the most part, and you are armed with a wide and wild swinging battleaxe that cleaves everything it touches in two with ease, this is pretty much what you want. It will put many fine dedicated hack and slash games to shame. But when you want a little more control you find it lacking and it has cost me dearly. Maybe the PC version of the game will be better with weapon aiming for guns and such, so I will keep an open mind on this, but again the developers now mainly cater to the console market and the kind of gamers that enjoy co-op and multiplayer parties as a more social gaming experience than PC games can deliver. So why not cater to console gaming controls too?

Also, the timer based system of mission activation and expiration becomes a teeth gritting pain when you lose the mission and die and you realise your last manual save, and you can only save manually in toilets that are too spread out for my liking, was some time before the mission activated. You can have entirely too much fun and forget to save and then have to do it all over again if you are not careful, waiting for missions to become available. And you will die a lot on some of the encounters at first.

There is an emerging difficulty curve that drop kicks you in the face when you least expect it. I did note early in my play time that the game had no difficulty setting that it asked me to select at first so I figured given the more playful and light hearted nature of the game set by Capcom that they were aiming at the casual gamer and the only difficulty would come in the missions and the occasional race against the clock. After all, between missions you are simply in transit from one location to another as you please. Your first encounters with the Psychos is a little different though, and they will kick your arse very fast on your first play through. Again, the control issues do creep in but so does their clearly scripted behaviour in combat. I noticed that when attacking one of them she would take three hits before they automatically knock me down and I have no defence for this at all. And what followed was a good 2-3 health drop as controls are taken from you and they deliver another automatic blow.

There are means that the game compensates for this when you die, and I am not sure I like it because it smacks of poor balance and idle development. Essentially, you could do with the game giving you the option to restart the mission at the beginning of the encounter, but that is conspicuously absent and you are forced back to your last save point in the loo. Or you could just restart the whole story again from the beginning. The advantage in doing this is that you start with all your levels and skills where you left off. Some might call this a means of giving the player a helping hand when they begin to fail a lot, but a game should not be unplayable to the end on the first run and there should always be a means to complete it even if it is hard. And sure there is with this one too but you have to ignore a lot of stuff in the process and just get on with it and die a hundred times. I don't play games to die repeatedly and rely on blind luck to pass the next stage and a lack of skill based victory seems to become a more frequent theme in games.

Another gripe I have is with the dialogue system outside of cut scenes. To speak with people you approach and press the correct button, but there will be no voice acting unless it creates a cut scene. Not in itself a bad thing, if a little tacky overall. However you have to do this often with survivors fighting off zombies by the dozen to get their story. The game will not halt while you speak, and you will get a short bit of back and forth between your character and the other person. All the while you have to read this and attack zombies that get too close. And the text waits for no man as it moves on to the next dialogue with barely time to read and digest what is being said. However, the final annoyance comes when you realise that the conversation has stopped abruptly and you need to, once again, press the talk button to continue speaking and get more info. I am not sure why this is. Maybe the game wishes you to see what is happening a little first before you decide to help the person or not. But one guy needs literally convincing he has much to live for and after the 9th click of the B button he finally accepted my help and came with me.

Maybe Capcom needs to understand the target audience of such a game. There will be people that know they will want to help right now and go talk to the person, have them follow them to the shelter and reap the rewards and karma etc. And there are people who will either carry on walking or sit back and laugh as they get swamped by the undead. I don't see people picking their decision to help people based on some random and fast moving dialogue like 'I was out shopping for shoes when all this happened!' That is not going to move me to an emotive decision of weather this person it fit to live or die. I doubt I will find someone who will say 'I was lurking by the potted plants near children's play pen, slowly abusing myself, when suddenly zombies broke into the Mall. Please help me.' so I am not sure what I will read that I will make a choice on and all the extra clicking under these circumstances just torments those who want to do it all or who have a kid soul in the bleakness of the zombie apocalypse, shining like the last bastion of civilisation and hope.

Even more confusing in this system was the cop in the shelter telling me he would help by giving me the key to the maintenance rooms (this unlocks crafting) so I am like all 'yeah cool, thanks.' Only to find that the pause in dialogue happened and I had to actually speak to him again just to get the damned key off of him! Again, it makes no sense to me why this is and maybe the game is actually glitchy like this or perhaps Chuck has an on-off case of ADD and looses concentration if he is not driving a baseball bat with nails glued to it into the pallid face of the nearest zombie.

On the note of weapons and crafting custom weapons, all your weapons have a durability which, to me, is way too short or should have been handled different from what it is now. I would have liked a system where some weapons, naturally wood based ones and toys and such, do break after a time. It is only to be expected. But others like chainsaws and drill motors should only fail if used too frequent and need a cool down time. If observed they will be cool for a while again and you can go on mincing the moving corpses at will. But go too far and it might break down and be useless. These things will cut down half of the Amazon but they will only last for about 20 zombies? Give me a break here. Also, the crafting is good but if your lovely weapon of death like the wheelchair with a lawnmower on the seat is going break after you push it through only half of the main street or even less then let me carry some of the items in bulk so I can craft on the fly. Example, nails. A box of nails fits in a backpack nicely. I gather a few of these here and there and when I find a baseball bat or propane tank I can get into it instead of having to equip them to my small weapon bar and take them to a crafting bench, and then do the same again for a baseball bat. Though I guess this system keeps it to using what you have to hand, which is not always a bad thing I guess. But it gets old after a while.

DR2 dropped another point for me when I was suddenly, after a dozen times of waggling the left stick on my controller to shake off a zombie that latched on too tight, confronted with a different quick time event. This time, as I instinctively began shaking the left stick I realised too late I should have been mashing the Y key instead, and then it asked me for the left stick action once more. This sent me back to the end of my last mission after I had spent a good hour or so playing and stocking on some good weapons so I was not impressed.

So I have summed up al of my dislikes about this game. Lets move onto the likes as I tend to leave my blogs with negative comments lately and I don't want people to think I do not like these games because I do. The world is well presented, the animation in the cut scenes is pretty good, even if the characters are all stereotypes, and despite the clunky combat in the boss like fights where I think I can only win on blind luck or a lot of grinding to level up on a reply from the beginning, I do like the fact that nearly everything is a weapon. Even kids toys like a foam hammer or a police helicopter. I was overjoyed when I realised you did not just beat them over the noggin with it but you could set it running and leave it in the air like a chopping dervish to cover your back from hordes of the undead while you maced the faces in front of you.

You can craft a few few of your own weapons by combining one with another and by using them you will level up faster. But that is only if you have the combo card for it, which you find by doing missions, leveling up or rescuing people. You don't need them to experiment with crafting and if you find a combo you can use it but don;t get the benefit of double pp from your kills. However, as pointed out elsewhere, it is odd that you can combine a machete with a broom, but not a kitchen knife. Or why can I not simply equip nails into the leaf blower in splatter some undead to the walls even though I can put jewels inside to sand blast a million dollar smile into their faces.

Either way you will find the weapons to be entertaining. I accidentally discovered the firework lizard mask. I noticed that some fireworks draw the zombies away for a while and the mask is another way of doing it at the expense of another victim zombie. Stick it on one of their heads and the fireworks lodged in the mouth of the mask will draw in the zombies while the wearer walks around without knowing how ridiculous he looks.

Finally, there is a means of enhancing your player, and I fear I will descend into a rant about how it is poorly executed but here goes. You can mix drinks to gain boosts to certain aspects such as movement speed or damage resistance. And drinking them too often will cause Chuck to be sick, which in itself is funny. Even drinking normal alcohol will cause this and the resulting slippery mess on the floor will cause zombies to slide down on their arses and flail around in the chunky carrots. There is even one drink combo that causes this as the primary effect. However... and here comes the slight rant, as with the rest of the game you have little clue what the drinks will do for you since there is no documentation of them. Discovering a drink combo does not give you something like a combo card so you can remember it later or even describe the effects. So when you make a Painkiller you wonder... does this just heal a lot of health or does it give me damage resistance? More than likely damage resistance. But what about Nectar? Anyone know what this does? You need to go look at some strategy guides online to discover their uses and it seems like half the lack of documentation is designed by Capcom to make you buy one. This is hardly the usual JRPG game that has so much stuff to do it warrants buying one though. Also you have no visual reference letting you know how long the drink effect works for.

The other buff you have is magazines. You carry these with you and they give you bonuses to things like gambling, driving or weapon durability. Once again though, there is a downside built in with them since they take up one of your weapon slots so you cannot carry lots of them, forcing you to pick one you feel is best for your play style. This is no bad thing either, however ones such as weapon durability, in my opinion, are essential and it would have been better executed if there were a limited number of them dotted around that you actually consumed by reading them and gaining a permanent boost to that attribute. And if you go back to play through again, and continue levelling, you either lost their boosts, and needed to collect them again or you kept the boost but the magazine was no longer spawned. And this could have been more of a theme with the levelling system in general. In my Front Mission Evolved review I did rant a little about how I did not like the difficulty curve being matched by an increasing stock of better weapons and parts you did not have to work for, so it might seem like I am no advocating a similar system as a fix for another game. But I would have liked my actions to enhance my character rather than a levelling system, or even have it run along side the pp gathering aspect, and give me control of what attributes move, leaving other bonus buffs to be presented to me as I explore or complete side missions like psycho battles and survivor escorts.

Dead Rising 2 is not what I expected, and clearly I am disappointed overall with it. Though I am not a great multiplayer fan and being subjected to retards on XBox live from around the world does put me out of my comfort zone when gaming. So the social gaming side may well be better overall than the campaign, and competing in the minigames online to gather cash and more pp for single player gaming could open a whole new dimension for me. But I will leave this to other reviews to disclose. The pure visceral part about cleaving through hordes of slow moving zombies is still a joy and some weapon combos will make you cackle with evil glee as you test them out so it is worth getting if you are not put off by my rants about the failings of the game. It just could have been so much more than what it became and given a choice I would not have paid full price for it. Pick up a pre-owned maybe or wait until it goes budget buy.

Coming soon, after some hack and slash editing...

Dead Rising 2.

I was meant to have this out mid week after a short play through, however, Dead Rising 2 has been anything but a short play through. After having played a little deeper into the game and finding stuff out for myself, I come to realise what I love to hate about the game and my original review will need a rewrite.

I might have been a little unfair in my first draft and while everything I say will stand in my rewrite, it was entirely too negative. Essentially, DR2 is a game that does not reveal itself all at once, and not all in the first play through. And this is something I want to talk about a little as an amateur reviewer.

It is easy to judge many books by their covers, and people that do so are easy to spot for people in the know. Many film and game reviews I have seen take games I do like and make big deals of their flaws as though they are the only thing that the game delivers.

By the same token, it is easy to paint a reviewer who gets things wrong with this same tar-sodden brush. As not every reviewer will get a game review right based on a game that, like Dead Rising 2, does not tickle their fancy in the first couple of days. Like a good wine or a piece of cheese DR2 takes time to mature before you can appreciate it. It may stil taste like cheese, but it is at least good cheese and this depth needs to be explored in context as well.

Hence, my latest review taking a little more time between my work and more work. Like the many zombies of Fortune City, the cleaver must come out and much chopping and hacking is in front of me before I am completely happy.

Until then.... my three or maybe four dear readers.

Front Mission Evolved

Yes, something as new as new gets. As recent as your last breath. As.... current as a box of currants.....

Anyway, I picked up a copy of Front Mission Evolved this weekend, developed by Square Enix. What is it? Why did I get it? I would not be surprised if many people had not heard of the Front Mission games, as they have not been rapid with their releases over the years, but their origins can be traced back to the likes of the SNES console, but mainly in Japan and the US. The only Front Mission games I have seen in the UK have been Front Mission 3 and also a reboot of that game for the Nintendo DS, simply called Front Mission.

Essentially, if you like giant mechs with huge machine guns spitting bullets the size of a fat person from a gun the size of a truck then this is for you.

Front Mission 3 was my only other experience of this game on the PlayStation many years ago and took a prideful place among Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil Nemesis as well as one or two other titles from my old PlayStation library when I got a PS2. I kept them for the backwards compatibility and disposed of the other games I was not interested in. The story is set in the future of Japan where the main character is an engineer for a weapons contractor delivering a prototype WANZER (ohh wait, not that Wanzer, these are a Walking Panzer) to the JSDF when all hell breaks lose and the base is attacked by unmarked forces.

It was one of the few games where you had some limited differences in story based on decisions you make in the game. Early you were presented with the option of staying put and keeping out of the fight, only to be dragged in by one faction, or heading for the front lines in search of your sister who works on the base, and getting tangled up with another faction. From that point your opponents would differ and the story would be told from a different perspective, only to join together near the end with a different ending. And even during game play, where you are going through the story, you could be given a choice such as the left path or right path in the road, and face different odds, though your end point was the same regardless and only the fight was different.

The combat was turn based, you could equip your Wanzer and the Wanzers of other team members between phases in the story, you could visit bars looking for work on occasion or to catch up on gossip or look for key characters and intel, and by or sell Wanzers and weapons at black market and official merchants depending on your character's path so far. There were RPG elements too, with characters gaining experience points and levelling up, training skills and getting better at fighting. You could capture enemy Wanzers and break them down for parts, or blow bits of them to make them impotent in combat. Pilots would eject from their Wanzers too and be vulnerable, and it was sometimes required for the mission to do this, by either activating something on ground level or even capturing a Wanzer.

So, when I heard about Front Mission Evolved last year I kept an eye out for it. So far I have not been disappointed, save for a couple of small issues with the game, and one large one that I discovered not long ago as I played through more.

It has much of the same game play as the last game on the PlayStation, with the combat feeling very inch of it's size. But there is one crucial difference and that is the combat is simply live action rather than turn based. Also you do not control the whole team like you could in FM3, and the other Wanzers in your squad are controlled by the computer. However you can still blow off chunks of the enemy like their legs to slow them down, or their arms to reduce their accuracy and damage with the mounted weapons. Aim for the torso and you blow them away completely etc etc. There are even sections where you leave your Wanzer and go into a building.

Now when this first happened, and I knew it would since I had seen the screenshots of over the shoulder shooter sections, I was steeling myself for major disappointment. Like 'OK the Wanzer combat was good, so this is most likely going to be the steamy turd on the delicious cheese cake.' We all know what this is like when we played Mass Effect and 'Woah we can drive around in a tank dropped from the air? Sweet!' and the inevitable 'Urgh.... these controls really really blow!' thing. However, the game developers at Square Enix have done as good a job of the combat on the ground as they have in the Wanzers. (Saying Wanzer never gets old btw) Especially a moment when an enemy Wanzer come storming into a hangar while you are looking for something and begins ripping the place up with a machine gun as big as a car. You really o feel naked and vulnerable, except for your missile launcher slung over your back.

However, the storyline is on rails and I have not encountered any character choices to be made by me in the occasional cut scene between fighting. And the story starts pretty much the same. Wanzer test pilot working on a prototype when New York is attacked by unmarked forces and you go looking for your Dad who works at a government military building. You are drafted into the military quickly after assisting some Wanzer army units heading in your direction and encounter a boss fight with a mercenary Wanzer piloted by a cocky and talkative arsehole who gives way too much away with his gloating. So the story does suffer a little from elements like this. Not to mention the obvious romantic subplot that emerges between the main character and the female army Wanzer pilot giving jealous looks at the pretty and intelligent engineer from the testing labs.

And it seems even zombies cannot keep their noses out of futuristic giant mech shooters when the merc leader shows up and somehow uses a system that you also have in your Wanzer, called EDGE, to resurrect and control the dead Wanzers around you. Not bad for a module that is meant to slow down time a little (or rather increase pilot awareness and reflexes, but slowing down the game is a gameplay mechanic used to simulate this). Also, when you shoot a Wanzer until it explodes, I expect that the machine cannot function due to physical breakage... so how they suddenly got up and fought on is a mystery to me. Finally, the female army pilot seems to have some kind of secret and horrible past she does not like to talk about and gets overly dramatic about as she has panic attacks every time the merc leader shows up. The drama is pretty overblown all round with two of the mercs being evil baby-eating kitten-strangling gibbering psychos talking about the symphony of destruction or the coming of the Valkyries.

Despite the odd storytelling and character types the controls are very good, though the aim speed is a little too fast for my liking on the XBox. This is where the PC version might be better with a mouse as movement speed is constant anyway so the digital input of a keyboard is no issue there.

However, after the stars in my eyes vanished I could see a few little problems. They do not emerge until you get a short way into the game, and you are moving through a mountain road with lots of trees around you. When you turn sideways the trees get in the way of the camera, even when you zoom in with the precise aim mode, and you cannot see what is happening. Not good when the road turns 90 degrees and enemies are waiting for you. Also, you do not have the options to capture enemy Wanzers and break them down, and the available body parts and weapons increase only as the story advances. So it seems more like you are simply being given these things because you will need them, and not because you captured them and earned them. It makes this part of the game tat I loved in FM3 seem unfocused and shallow and they really might as well have left you with one single Wanzer type and ask you if you would like dual machine guns, a rocket launcher or the rifle and send you on your merry way.

Now comes the huge problem that made me see red when it emerged. So far I had done the first couple of chapters and spent a little time upgrading my Wanzer between fights before the story moved on and I did not notice that the game resets your Wanzer and configures it for you at the start of a mission. In FM3 your Wanzer would not change unless you changed it and you had to hope it was good enough to get you through the next combat phase. If not then go back and reconfigure and try again with what you have. However, while this is a little annoying and tolerable, since each time you would make changes anyway to kit out the new stuff you have been given, the real wet fart in the face came when I found the default setting of one mission - a rifle, missile launcher and agility backpack - was useless and I craved my twin machine gun, twin missile launcher configuration back. But when I did this and tried for the 5th time to beat this opening engagement it would not let me fight unless I had the rifle. No you must have the rifle! How else would know what fighting with a rifle is like?

It sucks! That is what it is like. My launcher takes out the ranged targets on the shore better than the rifle, and I know two machine gins will not reach them but they will chew up the Wanzers air dropped on top of us as well as the gunships flying over head better than both. Let me have it my way!

Same goes with the hover and quad leg attachments. OK the one mission where you need the hover legs, because there will be a need to cross water, leads you into using them in the pre-mission cutscene with a logical argument. So you kind of go 'Yeah ok, I will use those. It sounds cool.' and don't even notice you cannot use anything but those unless you try to change them. However, when a mission forced me to use the quad legs when they were introduced, the argument was 'you can carry more guns' given their power system boost. Again, I saw this as a good thing but the quad legs are slower with a shorter skate time. (Skating being a fast means of movement and strafing) But when I passed this mission I wanted to get rid of them and back onto two legs that I was used to. After all, bipedal mechs are why people buy these kinds of games in the first place. And for no logical reason I could determine, I was not permitted to use the two leg system. This, again, sucked.

Seems some games try to behave like your mother and still try to feed you sprouts. You get what you are given, and you clean your plate! Want does not enter into it. So as I said, the game might as well give you a pre-built Wanzer to do each mission with and drop the pretence of being able to customise them beyond the weapons you can take, based on certain restrictions like power and funds. I don't find myself mixing and matching the same as I did with FM3, and last night I realised why not. In FM3 different Wanzer parts were good for different things like close combat vs machine guns, vs rifles etc. Some bodies gave boosts to ranged accuracy while others gave power increases or critical hit and stun chance modifiers to power fists and batons. And while some of this is still present, it has been watered down heavily.

You can equip weapon mods called 'battle skills' where a chance based activation gives different properties to your weapons like more damage, EMP stun, extra limb damage and so on. It is kind of like Mass Effect's weapon mod system with multiple slots available on higher class weapons. And while some arms have increased accuracy over others, the worst in class do not drop below 90% which is something I can live with if it means I have more armour and can carry the weapons I wish. Again, this makes picking arm A over arm B a done thing an there is a clear line of good, better and best between them. The configuration sections seems more like busy work and useless labour, even if it does not feel like one of the circles of hell as such it is not a good thing either.

One final thing as I have been playing and writing this breakdown. Have you ever played one of those games where you have NPC allies but every enemy on the map seems like they are only interested in you and you alone? And your allies are completely useless in causing damage to your enemies and you have the sole task of killing everything that hits the map? If you find these as annoying as I do then you will be annoyed with Front Mission Evolved since is does this too. Maybe it is because I launched right into the hardest setting that does this and when I reply to unlock more of the hidden stuff it might be a different story. But as someone that values a little realism in my gaming I find these mechanics to break the credibility of a game.

Overall, Front Mission Evolved is not quite the game it succeeds from a few years ago, and in some ways it is a good thing, though I cannot help but feel if they re-jigged the old game to modern standards, even with turn based combat, and kept the depth of character building and Wanzer capturing,as well as the meaning behind the customisation process, it would not have been worse. Was this ultimately a bad reunion for me with an old friend? Not really, no. The pace is fast in fire fights which keeps you thinking and moving and the chunky feel of the heavy metal combat is something that can only be rivalled by the imagination of a child playing with his robot toy collection stomping all over the small plastic army men and tanks.

Something old or something new?

Well the something old is not going to be that old at all. And the something new is.... well, older than the old. But whatever. Time is a relative construct and as far as where I am standing, the something new is something that I have owned since Saturday the 2nd October.

I speak of Halo ODST.

And the something old, I mentioned at the end of my first blog, is Red Dead Redemption.

Lets start with the old first. As I said in my last post, RDR is the only game I bought this year that was a new release when I grabbed the box off the shelf. I think it had been out for like 3 days at the most before I dragged it home and crammed the disk into the XBox 360. All I had seen were the trailers on Gamespot and on XBox live, and read the articles in the OXM mag. And I saw all I wanted to see. That magical Rockstar games logo. Birth givers to the GTA series of games that have only gotten better with age since the humble beginnings on the Playstation with their top-down car jacking antics.

So, GTA in the wild west? Well, actually, yes. One would think that the change of venue and time period would make such a claim hard to live to by default. But when you stop to think about it the antics in GTA were always more like the wild west in modern times anyway. But I guess anyone could bang on for a while about the social conditions of a life of crime showing parallels back to god knows how far in history. A life of crime is a life of crime at the end of the day.

So onto the gaming itself. Well, needless to say, I loaded the game and lost a whole day to it. This is always a good sign. The kind of game that kills your social life completely for weeks at a time. The house becomes a mess, the dishes begin to rot on the draining board and there you are skinning your 18th wild boar somewhere near the McFarlain Ranch for another level of hunting skill. Really, the fusing of little side interests (as opposed to mini-games, which are somewhat different, but also present in RDR) is something that can make a game stand out. And it is something Rockstar does very well. Some might argue too well, looking back at the likes of GTA San Andreas where people found entirely too much to do. By contrast, GTA IV has a fair bit less but what there is left is deeper and this is where they have matured the process and applied it to RDR. And, of course, there is the almost obligatory tie in with the XBox achievement system, where by collecting 10 Prairie Poppies will earn the player something like 5 gamer score points to their heaving or minuscule total.

Still, you have the options of chilling between bounties with a hand of Texas hold em, downing a random drink like whiskey or rum at the bar after boring a hole in some cocky shmuck's face on the thoroughfare to take the edge off, or trying to sneak into the back door of a bank to crack the safe instead of riding off to that important mission where you save some fat con merchant selling snake oil to the good folks of Rathskeller Fork.

Yes, there comes a little issue with the more open world games like this with the free roaming format between main missions. Sooner or later you reach the stage where a mission you just did leaves the story with a sense of urgency to the next mission, but you have time to gather your stuff and wander around between them. For a game based on a deep storyline this creates a real impulse to press on and keep going until you leave things in a calm enough state to go beat a table full of Mexican rebels at liar's dice. So why put in all the extras between missions if you are going to postpone the hanging of an abducted rancher's daughter for as long as you will it to collect wild flowers? It is all about how frequent this happens in the storyline, I guess. And RDR pulls off a balance where the story itself seems to pause and lose urgency and your running from one corner of the wilderness to the next to find a buried bar of gold does not seem as immersion breaking. And, if a story is suitably immersive then the player is compelled to continue the story missions rather than linger too long at the bar, or get sidetracked by the hunting skill system demanding you gather a bunch of rabbit skins.

I have also played other games that did not pull this off as well, such as the first Mass Effect where the storyline was this mad dash to save the galaxy with emphasis on no time to be wasted, but you could choose to wander between missions and explore some planets a little more tagging ore deposits and hacking old technology only to be given a gun tat was worse than the ones you already had.. Overall that part of the game seemed like a tacky and bolted on afterthought with very little to actually do anyway so there was not so much motivation to press through the storyline as there was little else to do. In retrospect, ME would have been better as a simple on-the-rails shooter game, like Gears of War or Halo, to match the constant fast pace of the whole story.

Back to RDR though, and I will say that some stuff was pretty annoying, such as the controls. If you will notice a theme on my future posts where I come to the downside of any game, it will usually start or end with the control system. I find myself frequently let down by the controls of many a good game and it seems like the proverbial skidmark on the fresh britches of a game. Some are destined to get it wrong constantly. Overall Rockstar has a good track record with controls, and the only real issues come when the character you control has some strange behaviour in certain situations that usually always crop up when you are trying not to die while making sure that others around you shake hands with the devil instead.

The times I have found myself unable to jump on the blasted horse or make it turn when I want to and lose speed as it skids to a halt by the edge of a sharp drop in the terrain. Or when I have tried to shoot from horseback and suddenly the camera locks onto the wrong enemy that is right behind me instead.

Also, there is a constant rolling tutorial when you encounter something new and it will show you how to play the game again. The only trouble is that it is on a live timer so you have to read really fast, absorb the information and apply it or face death or failure or simple confusion. For the most part I absorbed quickly with one exception. The duelling system. I still am not entirely sure how it works or what effect I have on the outcome and while at first I won most duels, some I could not win no matter what I did. Though a couple of them I found out why after doing some digging and it was less to do with my understanding of the duel system and more a limited option tat was available to me.

This maybe a little spoiler but both duels are on a side quest so I guess you can go ahead and read otherwise skip ahead to the next paragraph. Basically one duel involves you teaching some hot shot actor a lesson who thinks he is now some kind of legend of the west. His producer wants you to go talk some sense into him. Instead he challenges you to a duel and naturally you know that killing him might be a bad idea so you avoid the shots anywhere that could kill. However I like to think that games are moving past the scripted requirements and shoot to kill anyway thinking I might just fail the quest when I tell the producer he is dead. But no..... you lose the whole game. Over a side quest... So I second guess the options available to me and aim for the gun this time and shoot to disarm thinking this display of marksmanship will make Mr Legend shit a square brick and get back behind the camera once more after washing his nickers. But instead, no matter how I do, I get shot and die. It was getting frustrating until I resorted to a community wiki for RDR and read the walkthrough where it seems I am not the only one to be infuriated by this lack of choice in the matter and it clears it up that the only way to work it is to shoot him in the arm. Duh! I figured that wounding him would not be a good idea as people like their actors capable of acting without bleeding on their costumes. But I guess I was wrong. But why oh why could I not jut get the same outcome by shooting the gun out of his hand like I do many of the usual suspects in the towns? The same specific requirements are applied to another duel where you have to talk a rich guy into looking after his mistress who is now pregnant and kicked out by the wife. He too wants to shoot you for presuming to get involved and of course I don't want to kill this poor sap. But it seems the only way to win is to kill him and anything less will not do. There is a reason I won't go into, so lets just say the next encounter on this little side mission requires he be dead. Whatever happened to alternate outcomes for different moral choices? Guess I have been expecting too much from having played the likes of Fallout 3 and such.

Still, with few other complaints I felt the game was worth every penny. The horses are animated wonderfully, the gun play is awesome and satisfying, the story is pretty compelling (if loaded a little with too many obvious bad guys and bastards) and it does justice to the wild west without resorting to gimmicks and dramatisations present in Hollywood. It has a dirty feel to the muddy frontier, and a walk in the woods will earn you a savage mauling from a pack of wolves if you're not careful.

One final note though, and it is one of slight disappointment, with the whole hunting side quests. I fully expected to be able to use some of the stuff I gathered and apply them to actual survival in the wilderness. You collect desert sage and fever few and the descriptions talk about making teas with them for fight off infections. There are snakes that will bite you or your horse. You can cam under the stars or on a stormy night and here I have all these furs to keep the protagonist warm. And a bucket full of chops of meat rated in quality. But the only thing I can do with them is to sell them. It seems like a missed opportunity on Rockstar's behalf but maybe speaks of most games created under the economic troubles where studios were downsizing or getting rid of production houses and developments were being cut short. RDR was one of these victims, being released earlier than predicted due to a drop in funding and the need to exploit the game right now for the cash they could milk from it.

It is still an awesome game though. Should I give it a rating? Am I going to start rating some games on a percentage scale or one to five stars? No. But the game did sit at the top of Gamespot's chart for a couple of months as the editor's choice. And this is a game that earned that, and was not paid for under the table in advance like other games have been. So as I said, it is an awesome game.

And that's all for now.... what? Halo ODST? Oh I won't be covering that in this blog. Sorry, did I make it sound like I would? Well, I was going to but this one has hammered on for quite long enough I think so I will save Halo's last outing for another day.