Rispon Avenue

Considering I’ve been playing the game for close to a fortnight, I thought I should put my thoughts down on the game.

Where to start… Okay so after I finished the first Mass Effect, I waited a day before starting the next one. Upon starting I could see straight away that there were indeed massive improvements to the graphics, which was nice. The game opened up with a scene of the Normandy being destroyed by some unidentified massive space craft that looked half like a rock, and Shepard being ’spaced’ and dying.

Great start! Then a group from Cerberus – yeah, remember that crazy black ops group? – picks you up and fixes you better than you were before! Yay! But then you’ve got to run around with a group of Cerberus people for pretty much the rest of the game, and deal with the irritating ‘Illusive Man’ – voiced by Martin Sheen, and seems to be an homage to ‘The Smoking Man’ of X-Files fame – to figure out why whole colonies of humans have gone missing.

You get only two of your previous crew members, Tali and Garrus, though Joker is still your pilot. You do, however, get a bunch of new people to run around with, many of whom are irritating in one way or another. Miranda is your link to Cerberus, and comes off as mean and frosty, though you can make her less so by completing her ‘loyalty mission’. Then there’s Jacob, who’s strangely brusque with you considering you’re his commanding officer. You get a very strong biotic named Jack who’s kind of insane – understandably so – but who is also very rude and foul mouthed. You get a Salarian doctor named Mordin, who’s actually pretty funny, and a Krogan named Grunt, who I like quite a bit, even if he’s violent as all heck. Samara is quite nice, an Asari Justicar, so at least she’s fighting the good fight. Thane is a Drell assassin, and in spite of his profession, is a stand up guy. Haven’t gotten to know Legion all that much yet, but it’s interesting having a Geth on board. Then there’s Zaeed, a human bounty hunter, who’s an irritating old ass, in my opinion.

You’re no longer with the Alliance, who’ve tried to say that all your warnings about the Reapers where silliness, and that really it was just the Geth and Saren that were the issue, and you’re on a bigger, better Normandy supplied by Cerberus.

Personally I am enjoying this game more, but the storyline is far, far less appealing than the previous game. I don’t really dig fighting on the side of Cerberus, especially with the Illusive Man being all creepy and ‘end justifying any means’ kind of thing. I personally think he’s some remnant from the Protheans, perhaps an AI or some such, but either way, I don’t like him and I don’t like working for him.

I’m also irritated by the new HUD, and think that it would actually be, oh, I don’t know, a good thing to be able to see your damn health and shields bars!

Yeah, mixed feelings on this one. I liked a heck of a lot about the first game, and I am enjoying the sequel a lot, but I am not as happy with the over-all game as I was with the first one.

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It’s amazing, but Tekken 6 really does suck. I really tried to like it, but I just couldn’t.

So, wow. Just wow. How hard can this game possibly lose? I’ve played the Tekken series for a long time now, I think I first began on Tekken 2, then owned 3, and 4, though I don’t think I played the fifth version. I really enjoyed those games, so very, very much. My SO and I bonded whilst playing Tekken 3 on the PS One; ahh, fond memories. That was a good decade ago, and now here we are with a sad, sad, version of a much loved series.

Tekken, for those who’ve managed to not hear of the game, is a fighting game which came out in ‘94 as an arcade game, but then was moved over the the Playstation for the next four iterations, and then finally was ported to the Xbox 360 for Tekken 6 as well as the Playstation 3. It’s been one of the best fighting games for the past fifteen years, and I was sure that it would continue to be so. However, the sixth sequel is just… just awful.

Okay so I played it for two days, on and off, so I gave it a fair chance. My SO and I happily placed the disc into the 360 and started the game up. We knew the music was going to be less than great because of the IGN review, and they also mentioned the lack-lustre sound effects. We said we could deal with that and away we went.

We picked some of our favourite characters straight up, and it was nice to see so many characters available for use straight away. I fought as Bryan Fury, and my SO fought as Ling Xiaoyu. Okay, here we were, and yeah, the music wasn’t great, but I could deal with that. My SO absolutely hated the poor fight sound effects, saying she never felt like she landed a proper attack because the sounds were so muted.

The controls of the game were poor to say the least. I’m a good fighter, but it felt like the only way to play this game was to button mash, and then we actually tried the single-player modes; up until this point, we’d only been fighting each other.

So I tried arcade mode, hoping to unlock more content. I got to the third fight and was then faced with ‘*Oops*’ the bear. A blue version of Kuma with gold wrist braces and paw-pads. This ridiculously difficult opponent took me thirteen attempts to beat, in spite of being able to get through every other arcade/single-player mode in a fighting game pretty straight forwardly in the past. There was no learning curve, the AI went from complete dunce that will allow you to throw them over and over, to nigh-on unstoppable knows every attack in the catalogue kind of opponent in only three rounds. I mean, what the hell’s with that?

Then we tried the ‘Scenario’ mode as a cursory glance online suggested this was the way to unlock content. It was terrible. A strange strolling along a path fight were you were stuck with an annoying android who’s trying to explain the abstract defunct story-line. I couldn’t stand this style, it was very unintuitive.

Combine all of this with some seriously ugly character models and the worst fractured storyline you could imagine, we ended up taking it back and trading it for Soul Calibur IV. Sheesh.

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It was a nice surprise to find that the one game I’d not heard of in my 360 bundle was actually a very fun game to play.

Pure is an ATV racer, yep, those four wheel motorcycle things. Surprisingly, a game based on racing these things is actually very fun. You’ve got three different race types, Race, what it sounds like, which is three laps around a fairly long course. Sprint, five laps around a very short course, and then Freestyle, which is where you’ve got a full tank of fuel, and you race for as long as you can whilst performing tricks which will extend the fuel you have allowing you to pull off more tricks for even greater points.

You get to build your own ATV with parts provided, changing colour and other aesthetic options, and choosing parts based on which attributes they give bonuses to so you can build bikes for specific types of events. There is a heck of a lot of customisation here, especially as you play the game further and unlock more and more parts for you to use as well as level ups for specific types of parts.

I hadn’t heard of this game prior to looking up what the Elite was currently bundled with, but after watching the video review on IGN I thought it looked like fun, but playing it is more fun than I’d expected after seeing the review. It’s fast paced, the music is good and suits the game, and the over the top stunts are magnificent to watch. It’s a great pick up and play game, which gives you a good adrenaline boost.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that the graphics for this game are really very good. You can get up to some roaring speeds around some of the race tracks, but there’s no screen tare or pop in or anything like that. It’s incredibly clear and the tracks are detailed and very pretty. I was surprised that so much effort had gone into things like trees on the sides of the tracks, or boats in the distance on water, which was rendered extremely well, by the way. If you’ve got the chance, this is a great game to have on hand for short to medium length of bursts of play.

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It’s got a lot of issues which cause a great amount of irritation, but I played it for at least three days before putting another game in the 360.

So I went and picked up the 360 Elite last Monday, and I’m really enjoying the console. When I had the original 360, I had a regular television and the AV cable hook-up, but since then I’ve picked up a great LCD TV and have the 360 hooked up with an HDMI cable, and it looks fabulous. So nice to see the console put out a quality HD visual.

I picked up the Elite with a bundle which included the games Pure and Lego Batman, and then your pick of two others. I chose Assassin’s Creed – knowing it’s not great but wanting to play it before playing the sequal – and Mass Effect as I’d never had a real chance to fully play it because it was too buggy to bother with on my PC when it first came out, and then it’d never install on my PC again afterwards and I’m very much looking forward to the sequel.

I played the first Fable, and it was alright, so I decided that along with the bundle, I’d pick up a copy of Fable 2 as well. This was actually a lot of running around as my local games store didn’t have a sealed copy so I had to run around and find it at a store that did, but not before I’d ordered it through that original store and two days had passed and then they told me that their warehouse wouldn’t let them get any more in as they already had stock in the store. Anyway, I got a hold of the game.

I played it a lot for the first three days of having it and I just had to get that bloody disk out of the 360 because I just could not stand the ridiculousness of Molyneux’s writing for one second longer. Let me just say oh. my. god. What the hell was that guy ‘thinking’!? First off, your sister dies in the opening act, which, alright, you can take that as part of good writing, if it were good writing. Next you’re running around doing what some strange woman who saved you tells you to do, without telling you why. Then you have to save another ‘hero’ like yourself, who also just happens to lose a family member and that’s how this hero joins your fight.

Next up you have to travel to this ridiculous spire where you’re stuck for the next TEN YEARS getting the next hero. After you’re back from that, gotten another hero who tries to have you killed – after stealing your youth – you finally get to have a go at the bastard who killed your sister – who was at the spire the entire time you were there but you never tried to kill whilst you where there – only to find that he’s now also gone and killed your wife and children and your dog – who’s at least twenty years old at this point but still spry – and after you kill that moron, you get to use the stupid spire to make a wish, you can wish to bring your own family back, but it’s not the most ‘pure or good’ option you can take, that’s bring back all the thousands of people who died trying to re-build the spire who never actually were a part of the game world, nor do they turn up in it after you make that wish.

Oh and if you do bring back your family, you do get your dog back, and your sister is revived as well, though you never get to see her again anyway.

Believe me when I say this, this game includes some of the worst writing I’ve ever read. Molyneax is actually trying to upset the player, he’s even said that he wanted to ‘make a game that would have gamers crying’ in interviews before the game came out. He’s obviously greatly in love with his own ideas, and the game is incredibly narrow, irritating, poorly written, and frustrating to play.

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