War is AWESOME! Don’t give me that look; you know it’s true. As a video gamer, we know that better than anyone else. Sure there are games like Armed Assault and Operation Flashpoint, which try to show that the battlefield is a brutal and unforgiving place, but thanks to the efforts of games like Call of Duty and Army of Two, we know the truth. War is awesome. You get to kill foreigners (preferably of a different skin colour or at least of a different ethnicity) with tons of cool weapons, you get to go to all of these picturesque locations (and blow them up) and you get to watch huge explosions as the laws of nature bend to slow down time so you can fully appreciate them. There is the slight inconvenience of getting shot, but if you hide behind a table or a rock, your body regenerates and heals itself. What’s not to like about war?
Yes, in case it isn’t obvious, Army of Two: The 40th Day is from the school of stupid when it comes to war. And it seems to be aware of it and remains blissfully uncaring. I guess the developers realised that it isn’t possible to yank the subtlety chain after you have destroyed the entire city of Shanghai in the opening cutscene and decided to just roll with it from there on. And it works, in a way. So we have the two protagonists - Salem and Rios (whose names I had to Google to find out even after finishing the game twice. Yes, the writing and characters are that forgettable), who land in Shanghai on some sort of a mission and some bad guys just happen to start bombing the hell out of the city soon after that. And that’s pretty much it.
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I think my favourite bits of Left4Dead were its moments of tranquillity that came between the bouts of carnage. The brief periods of time where you were grabbing ammo, healing team mates, swapping weapons and preparing for the horde you knew was coming. Every one of those moments felt like the climax of a great zombie film and even the fact that it happened so often never seemed to make them feel repetitive. Problem was that despite these moments of brilliance, I always felt that the game was lacking in content, depth and variety. Left4Dead 2 brings all three to the table along with a mountain of dismembered bloodied zombie corpses.
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Looking back upon the Halo trilogy, I have come to realise that the whole series is about moments. Yes, there is the wide open level design, the superb combat balance, the brilliant AI, the space opera storyline and kick ass multiplayer mode too. But what really stands out over the past 8 years of Halo are the moments which stay with you long after you have played the game. Some of them are designed set pieces (the beach landing in The Silent cartographer) while others are of your own making (“accidentally” sticking your co op buddy with a plasma grenade when he is making a run for the Scorpion Tank). The point I am trying to make with this trip down memory lane is that what makes Halo 3: ODST great is that it’s like a highlight reel of the past 3 Halo games.
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As I start writing this I am still trying to figure out which part of my brain Shadow Complex appealed so much to. Different games tickle different parts of you, something like Halo caresses the part of you that wants to get some mindless killing done. Whereas something like Braid shows some much needed love to the quiet, thinking part of you. So where do I fit Shadow Complex? The closest I can come to is the part of your head that’s always curious, that wants to know what happens next; the explorer in you that’s always eager to look at new territory, or the kid in you that wants to get his hands on the next cool toy.
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There is this bit in Misery, where Stephen King talks about the “gotta” factor in storytelling. It’s the art of telling a story in a way that makes your audience invest more time in it because they “gotta” know what happens next. It’s the reason you stick around commercial breaks to watch TV, it’s the reason you forget about food to finish a book, and it’s the reason why I am awake at 4 am and playing The Sims 3 instead of being fast asleep. Its strange that for a game that has no story (except what you make, I guess) The Sims 3 has the “gotta” factor nailed down better than any video game since Diablo. You know you have been playing way too long, but you just gotta develop that one more skill, fulfill one more need, get one more promotion etc. It’s the gaming equivalent of crack cocaine.
Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family
The concept of the game is simple enough. You create a Sim (or more than one if you are so inclined), give them personality traits that you like, drop them in a house in the town of your choosing, and act out their lives as you see fit. The term ‘life simulator’ is thrown about quite a lot when people talk about the Sims series and The Sims 3 takes that to a whole new level. It hits particularly close to home when the computer loving, absent-minded Sim I create with the loner trait seems completely content working a crap job and staying at home playing video games all day in his free time. And it becomes uncomfortably realistic when the only girl he can get is of particularly loose morals when it comes to monogamy.
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I imagine its rather tough being around Mr. Richard B. Riddick. It’s bad enough that you will get stabbed, shot, beaten, run over by a mech, thrown into rotating blades etc. Worse is that the man is incapable of holding a normal conversation. Any dialogue is only, and only answered with an over the top macho one-liner. You would think that this would start to grate after 14 hours of gameplay, but Vin Diesel’s gravely, film noir voice somehow manages to make it sound fresh every time. So towards the end when a particular bad guy proclaims, “I am the baddest motherf**ker in the universe”, you can’t help but grin when Riddick quips back, “I’ll make sure they tattoo that on your corpse.” I guess in a way that’s what the game is like too; there is a part of you that feels that the game is repeating itself at times, but it’s so much fun that you don’t really care. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s start at the beginning.
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena is a combination of two games - the 2004 Xbox cult classic Escape from Butcher Bay and the new added-on campaign Assault on Dark Athena. It also has a multiplayer game tagged on, which no one (quite literally) is playing. The gameplay across both the campaigns is a mixture of stealth, combat (guns and hand to hand) and some occasional puzzles. But it’s in stealth where the game is at its best. That’s not to say that the combat sections are bad; far from it - hand to hand combat is brutal and engaging and gunplay is always tense and swift. However, there is a constant feeling that whenever you move from stealth to all out war, the game is a little less fun and you are just slogging through to get to the next place where you can hide in the dark and snap someone’s neck.
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Let’s pre-empt the first question. It’s a tower defence game. For those unfamiliar with the genre of tower defence, it’s a lot like a real-time strategy game. Only instead of a large map, you have a single area that you have to defend. The bad guys (in this case zombies) start approaching from one end of the area and their objective is to make it to the other end (kinda like golf). Your objective is to stop them by putting obstacles and weapons in the way (again kinda like golf, i.e if golf had landmines in the sand traps). It sounds like a relatively simple concept, but like any good RTS, it gets infinitely complicated once you hit the ground.
In this case, most of the gameplay happens in the garden of your house. With the zombies pouring in from the road (on the right of the screen) and trying to get into your house (on the left of the screen), it’s up to you to build up the defences and stop them. Since each level is played out on a single screen area, the placement of your defences matters a lot. Put a ranged offensive weapon (in this case a pea spitting plant) in the front row of your defence and its going to be useless and will get devoured (literally) by the zombies in a matter of seconds. Similarly put a short range weapon, like a puff-shroom, at the back of your defence and it would be useless.
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Here’s the thing about first person shooters; if you can think of a setting where someone has held a gun or shot stuff, chances are a video game has been made on it. So in an oversaturated genre when (rarely) you get to see something different from all the usual stuff, your mind tends to oversell it to you. But if you are aware of this fact, then you could also end up underrating what is essentially a good game. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is certainly unique enough in its setting and arsenal to warrant a look. Let’s see if we can walk the middle path and find out if it is something you should keep an eye on.
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (henceforth referred to as CoJ2 in this article because of my amazing lethargy in typing large game names) is a prequel to the sleeper hit Call of Juarez (at least I assume it must have been a sleeper hit because most people that played the first one seem to recall is fondly). Set 20 years before the events of the first game, CoJ2 tells the story of the McCall brothers - Ray and Thomas. We follow the brothers as they start off as soldiers, but soon become deserters to protect their family and eventually end up as outlaws. It’s not going to win any Pulitzers, but the story was engaging enough to hold my interest throughout the preview gameplay.
Rifles and pistols have a noticeable pause between shots
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I am late! That’s the first thing that pops into my head as soon as I wake up. It’s 11:30 and I am supposed to attend the Xbox 360 Arcade launch event at 12:00. I take a quick shower, skip breakfast and I am good to go. As I get there it’s already 12:10 and I rush up to the PVR inside the mall. I keep thinking ‘I am late’. I get to the entrance and a very pretty girl smiles and welcomes me, “Are you here for the Microsoft event?” “Yes.” “This way please.” I am ushered downstairs. It’s almost 12:20 and as I walk downstairs, the voice pipes up in my head again. “I am lat….”, but is cut midway through.
We didn’t have a camera with us, so you’ll have to make do with Photoshopped stock images
Actually it turns out I am early; quite a bit early. The seating area is still mostly empty and it’s quite apparent that the event hasn’t started yet. So I take some time to look around. The whole setup is quite elegant. There are comfortable sofas spread around. A few demo consoles are set up. Ironically mirroring Microsoft India’s concurrent theme of getting things here too late, the consoles are playing (the demo versions of) PGR3, Call of Duty 3, Pac Man and a couple of other LIVE Arcade games. I am not bored enough to try any of them yet. The food and drinks bar is set up on the left and I am informed everything is on the house. Thanks MS. I grab a soda and sit around for a while and am starting to get bored. Keeznah calls me and helps me kill some time by talking dirty to me, but since I am in a public place, it doesn’t work. Once I get bored enough, I saunter off to a demo console to mess around for a bit in PGR3.
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Let’s start at the end. You know the final paragraph of the review, where I try to boil the whole thing down to three sentences and try to answer the question - “Is the game worth buying?” Only this time instead of an ending with an answer, let’s start with a question. How deep you are into the Halo mythos? Because Halo Wars is neck deep in it.
Set almost two decades before the events of the first Halo game, Halo Wars follows the crew of human warship Spirit of Fire as they race to stop the Covenant from uncovering a forerunner technology that could wipe out the humans quickly. The story is told through some of the most impressive pre-rendered cut scenes I have seen in a very long time and it’s an engaging tale full of the usual Halo twists and turns with some memorable characters. Presentation is top notch through and through and the game has a superb musical score and excellent voice acting to add to the top quality story telling. The single player campaign is spread over 15 chapters and will last you about 8 to 9 hours on normal difficulty.
“It’s an engaging tale full of the usual Halo twists and turns”
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