Category: Games

I finished playing Halo last week: wow. Despite some annoyingly repetitive sections about three-quarters of the way through, it was an enormously satisfying game. The climactic ending was the best I’ve come across since Ico. It wasn’t as emotional (I didn’t cry), but it was adrenaline-filled, rousing, and pleasingly cinematic. (I had been half expecting an Alien-style final encounter with a Flood creature on board the escape ship.)

By rights, Halo should have been the game that made me go out an buy an XBox. The best multiplayer fun I’ve ever had was playing 8-way split-screen Halo on two XBoxes and two big LCD wall projectors. I had enjoyed playing through some of the early single-player missions on friends’ boxes, both alone and in co-op mode. The choral opening music still gives me goosebumps.

For a long time, I had an XBox + Halo on my wish list, in case anyone was looking for ideas for a Christmas or birthday present. But for an equally long time, Halo was the only XBox exclusive game that held any real interest for me. I already had a PS2 and a GameCube, so I had multiformat games covered, £150 is a lot of cash to lay down for just a single game. I had thought I might get it on the PC when it came out last year, but performance issues convinced me otherwise.

In the end it was Rainbow Six 3 that was the tipping point for me to buy an XBox. Or, more specifically, the XBox Live multiplayer aspect of the game. Tactical squad-based shooters don’t light my candle, but co-operative team-based play does. And when you can slip on a headset and enjoy a lively shared experience in the comfort of your own home, well, that’s a whole new ball game.

So would Halo alone have been worth the price of an XBox? Good though it was, I don’t think so–especially as I already had plenty of games hardware. If I hadn’t had a PS2 or a GameCube, it might have been different. Having said that, I have Halo 2 on pre-order, and I’m planning to take the release date off work to put in some quality time with the Master Chief. Oh yeah.

Boy, does it rock. XBox has been slowly working its way up my “must-have” list, but it crashed through the final barrier when I was round at Richard’s place a couple of weeks ago for a gaming session. We played some Rainbow Six 3 and Project Gotham Racing 2, and had an absolute blast.

So…I had to get one for myself.

The only Live-enabled game I have right now is Rainbox Six 3, but I should be getting back my copy of PGR2 sometime soon. With a toddler and an infant around the house, I don’t know how often I’ll be online, but if you’re on Live, too, look out for me under the Gamertag of Sunpig. (What else?)

For books and films, I have a full record of the ones I’ve read and seen in my Quick Reviews. For music, I have the date on which I ripped an album to MP3. For games, however, I have no such information. Which means I don’t remember if it was 2002 when I first played Ratchet and Clank, or 2003. This means my wrap-up of the games I played last year is going to be shorter and spottier than the others. Probably a good thing.

The first thing to note about 2003 is that, for me, it was a year of console games rather than PC games. I bought a copy of Everquest at the start of the year, played it for a little bit, and came away very disappointed. I suspect that’s partly because I don’t have the patience (and time) to spend weeks building up a decent character and roaming the landscape looking for quests. I like a game that gives me entertaining action right from the start, and I like a story with some decent structure. I also found the graphics to be poor, and hence distracting. I had been hoping to reclaim some of the magic of old-style text MUDs, but it just wasn’t there for me. YMMV, of course.

And that’s it as far as PC games were concerned. I upgraded my PC in the middle of the year (nForce 2 motherboard, Athlon 2500+, Radeon 9600 Pro, 1GB RAM, thank you for asking) in anticipation of goodies like Half-Life 2, Halo, Deus Ex 2, et al. But what do we get? Sod all, and rubbish, respectively.

I downloaded the Halo demo as soon as it came out, and found it to be slow, slow, slow. I’m running nearly top-end hardware, damn it. Even in 800 x 600 mode with graphical detail turned down low, the Halo demo regularly dropped down to 10-15 frames per second on the Silent Cartographer mission. Not acceptable.

Likewise Deus Ex 2. What’s with this 10 frames per second crap? I had to drop down to 640 x 480 resolution and download a tweaked settings file just to get above 20 fps occasionally. And yes, I do have the latest drivers for my video card. Quake III and Unreal Tournament 2003 time demos give me results that are comparable to other people with similar hardware. In addition to immediate action and good story, you can add the following to my list of gaming requirements: fluid graphics.

Smooth movement is key to keeping me immersed in a game, and that’s what I really want. I want to be sucked in and held tight. Graphics are to games what verisimilitude is to a novel. Verisimilitude means that the details you put in have to seem realistic, not necessarily be realistic. If an author can just make me believe that they know exactly how to run a police incident room during a major murder investigation, that’s much more important than rolling out lists of minute details to show off all the painstaking research they’ve done. In games, characters that are animated smoothly to gloss over the cracks in their polygon models beat the pants off lovingly bump-mapped environments that linger on screen like a slowed-down zoetrope.

In PC games, slowdown is only acceptable because of video card envy and hardware snobbery. If a game runs like shit, it must be because you haven’t spent enough money on the latest kit. Well, bollocks to that. This has got to be the only industry where you get less performance and quality the more money you pump into into your equipment. Want to play Halo? Buy a £100 off-the-shelf XBox instead of a £500 off-the-shelf Dell. Hello?? McFly??

And yes, I know that PCs are designed to be much more than just game-playing machines, while consoles are specifically designed to run them. That’s precisely my point. I can play DVDs on my PC, too, but you don’t see Abi and me cuddling up in front of my monitor with a bowl of popcorn on a Friday evening. PC gaming is dead; it just hasn’t stopped kicking yet.

(Phew. That was more of a rant than I’d intended. Maybe I’m just bitter about Half-Life 2 being delayed.)

So anyway, what console games did I enjoy playing in 2003?

• Ratchet and Clank was excellent. It’s one of the very few games I’ve played through from start to finish more than once. It’s well balanced, with good challenges, and it has a goofball sense of humour. It’s fun.
• Ratchet and Clank 2: Locked and Loaded is also excellent. I finished my first run-through of the game about two minutes to midnight on 31st December, so it still counts as a game of last year. It’s basically just more of the same as the original R&C, but that’s a good thing.
• Metroid Prime was marvellous. Lovely environments and lush sound design gave it a sense of atmosphere to rival even something like Myst. The game was tough, but the sense of accomplishment from finishing it was amazing.
• Tiger Woods 2004 got me through October. It has a simple pick-up-and-go game mechanic, a good learning curve, pretty golf courses, and lots of collectibles. It’s the videogame equivalent of a puppy: willing to love you no matter how little you really care for it in return.
• Jak II: Renegade was notable in a “I’m not going to let this $*$%&!! game beat me!” kind of way. The designers took some risks in changing the gameplay so much after the original Jak and Daxter. Some of them paid off, some didn’t. It’s an interesting and entertaining game for the most part; but in places it’s almost impossibly difficult and annoying.

Games that didn’t really make the top tier:

• SSX 3 dropped a lot of the fun characterisation that SSX Tricky had. Also, being good at SSX Tricky means you’ll be pretty good at SSX 3, too, and so it’s less of a challenge.
• Super Mario Sunshine was pretty but unexciting.
• Grant Theft Auto: Vice City hit the 80s nostalgia button, but didn’t inspire me enough to finish it.
• Pikmin was a fun little puzzler.
• Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker provided some soothing sailing action.
• Frequency was different and fun, for a while.
• Star Wars: Rogue Leader was likewise entertaining, but not very long-lived.

Games I didn’t care for at all:

• Super Monkey Ball 2 suffered a rapid and catastrophic slide from harmless fun into downright annoying.
• Maximo didn’t measure up to the quality of Ratchet and Clank, and frustrated me with its lack of camera control.
• Herdy Gerdy was washed out and drab.

Despite everything I said earlier in this posting, I’m still looking forward to Half-Life 2 for the PC in 2004, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be the last PC game I ever buy for myself. On the console front I’m looking forward enormously to Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2, which should be shipping soon. Halo 2 might tempt me into buying an XBox. Also, there are still a few must-play games from 2003 I still need to catch up on, such as Beyond Good And Evil, Prince Of Persia, and Viewtiful Joe. I’m planning to start writing Quick Reviews for videogames, too, so with any luck next year’s wrap-up will be a bit more coherent…

Can someone please explain to me why the PC game “Bob The Builder: Bob Builds A Park” needs Administrator rights on my PC to run?

Alex (2 and a half years old) has his own login on the PC, with restricted permissions. He knows how to log in on his own (his account doesn’t have a password). He has learned to double-click, and is getting the hang of drag-and-drop. He knows how to open the Start menu. If I give him Administrator rights, I dread to think what damage he could do to the system. (I can just hear him saying, “Alex delete it!”)

So why does a simple game, whose target audience is clearly toddlers and small children, demand that I grant a two-year-old full and complete control over my PC? Methinks the programmers need to learn about developing code as a non-admin.

Abi and I are book hoarders. We buy lots of books, and we keep them. Even after we’ve read them, and even if we have no real intention of re-reading them, we usually hold on to them. Most of them (about twenty-five carboard boxes full) are sitting in our loft right now, but some day we would really like to have a house with a library so we can have them all out on display. Mmmm. Lovely boooooks. Our precioussses.

I’m starting to turn into a bit of a games hoarder, too. There are a bundle of games that I’ve played, and have little intention of re-playing, that I can’t really bear to get rid of: Grand Theft Auto III, Ico, Metroid Prime, Ratchet and Clank. I can sort of understand myself holding on to racing games, beat-em-ups, sports games, and other things with decent multi-player options (Mario Kart), but is it really worth keeping story games?

A book is guaranteed to be backwards-compatible. If I really enjoy a book this week, I won’t re-read it immediately, but I might want to read it in ten years’ time. I know that won’t be a problem. A videogame, however, is not likely to stand the test of time quite so well. For a start, I’d have to hang on to my PS2 and GameCube to make sure I’ll still have the hardware to play the games on. But will the televisions a decade from now still be compatible with all the connectors and wires from the early 2000’s?

Games like Metroid Prime and GTA III are cutting-edge right now: MP in terms of its immersive graphics, sound, and music; GTA in terms of its wide-open environments and freeform gameplay. But games are going to take enormous leaps forward in the next ten years. Dusting them off and playing them again won’t be the same experience as it was the first time. It’ll be retrogaming. The games will look old-fashioned and quaint. They may allow me to revel in the nostalgia of the age, but I’m sure that I’ll long to return to the wonders that game developers and publishers will have in store for me in 2013.

Some books don’t age well, but classics remain classics. I can pick up one of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels from the 1970s and enjoy it just as much as his latest adventure. Classic games like Elite still have their fans, but how many of them did not play the game the first time round? Is the original version of the game still atracting new players in the same way that, say, Jane Austen is still attracting new readers?

So does it make any sense for me to hang on to these games when, if I were to sell them on, I could use the cash to fund new acquisitions? Intellectually, I’d have to say “no”, but my heart is currently exercising its veto. I might never play them again (well, apart from Ratchet and Clank, which Alex is very fond of), but they have great sentimental value. And so…I hoard.