BULLET POINTS

23 May

Absurdly quick roundup, because bed:

  • The Avengers was incredible. Admittedly I’d walked in hoping for, but not expecting to  receive, The Adventures of Tony Stark and Friends, but therein lies the film’s brilliance – each lead has enough individual moments of either sheer, usually violent heroism or understated hilarity that it’s impossible to waste effort picking a favourite. I still haven’t seen, nor am I still likely to see, the Hulk prequel, but his scene with Loki alone was enough to elevate him to ‘Almost As Fun As Robert Downey Jr.’ in my really-not-qualified-be-a-film-critic eyes.
  • Speaking of criticism, I reviewed Tribes: Ascend over at Gaming Daily. In hindsight I might have been  bit harsh on the turtling/defensive aspects; circumventing them takes practice, but is possible, and in some cases has actually made my flag-capturing attempts far more tense – and thus more rewarding to pull off. Still detest turrets, mind.

  • Over on BeefJack, meanwhile, I had a look at free mortify-em-up Raptus and previewed Crysis 3. Sadly, only two of my three ‘cry-’ puns made the cut in the latter, which means it’s only two-thirds as informative, witty and transcendent as it could have been. Still, I’m quite pleased with it – I wanted to make it partly about the series as a whole without drawing on tedious ’1 vs. 2′ tantrums which seem to show up whenever a Crysis sequel is mentioned on a site with longer comment threads than ours.
  • unforgivably, I’ve only seen four episodes of Adventure Time. This is the fifth-worst situation to be in once you’re aware it exists, and I plan to use the summer break to catch up, but you don’t need to be a longtime fan to enjoy this stunning and sweet songification:

Tags:

Better Enemies in Mass Effect 3

2 Apr

Normally I wouldn’t even consider thinking about possible changes to a relatively small multiplayer component of a predominantly solo-focused game. Mass Effect 3, however, has been showered with a surprising amount of post-release TLC; it’s already had several notable rebalancing patches and what turned out to be weekly one-off ‘events’ (Kill 3 million of one enemy type, bonus XP etc.). That, and Bioware’s apparent willingness to go back and tweak the game’s ending after a particularly vocal backlash, makes big changes to what might have been a half-assed piece of co-op padding a very real possibility.

As it happens, Mass Effect 3′s multiplayer is fantastic. Combat is rarely noted as a series strength (RPS’ Jim Rossignol “loathes” it) but I could play it with three other not-Shepards for hours. Every bullet, tech attack and biotic strike carries such a tangible weight and hits with such a loudly audible sense of impact that every single one of a round’s eleven waves turns into a spectacularly rich display of fire explosions, miniature black holes and headbutting. With that said, there’s a lot of bullshit too, pretty much entirely on the part of enemies – canned animations that unavoidably one-hit-kill you, irritating insects that punish you for killing their mother too efficiently, boring and useless smoke grenades… I don’t honestly expect Bioware to implement any of the possible changes I’m about to pull out of my backside, but at least ME3 multiplayer’s post-release support has been strong enough that I don’t feel stupid simply for pondering them.

Cerberus Centurion

Ditch the smoke grenades. These throw up an unconvincing 2D jpeg of some smoke which rotates trees-in-Tony-Hawks-Pro-Skater-style depending on where you’re stood, and thus suck. More importantly, they serve no other purpose than to annoy – smoke means you can’t attack effectively, but troops themselves don’t even use it to advance or cover their buddies. It’s just there to get in the way, creating dull waitaround periods that break the flow of a good battle. Atlas mechs use them too, to even lesser effect, since the smoke doesn’t even cover their hulking frames.

Cerberus Nemesis

Give her a melee attack. This is partly for my benefit; despite being snipers, as an Engineer or Sentinel I’m constantly engaging them at close range, though her sole reliance on sharpshooting means she usually just scuttles away. Letting her fight back with a swift omni-blade attack of her own would both slow her down, resulting in less lame chase sequences (“Get back here so I can hit you in the face!”) with the tradeoff of her kicking my ass should I fail to strike the first blow.

Cerberus Phantom

Those bitches. Obviously she fills the Cerberus’s agile, durable melee fighter quota, so let’s not change that. Do, however, get rid of that horrible insta-kill stab attack. The problem isn’t the prospect of a swift death itself, but like the equivalent moves of the Atlas, Banshee and Brute, the attack will unfairly lock you into place – sometimes forcing you to involuntarily slide halfway across a room so you’ll be in the right position – before brutally bypassing all your health and shields. If you want one-hit-kills, balance them with a dodgeable charge-up animation, not one that fucking teleports an escaping player back into range then locks them in place. It’s not challenging, it’s just cruel.

Alternatively, since the Phantom has a sword, why not take a cue from this utterly brilliant Renegade Interrupt (singleplayer spoilers, skip to 0:35) and make the animation a high-risk but satisfying QTE?

Geth Pyro

It’s not just bad guys who need a nerf right now. Anyone who plays Krogan and has a functioning brain stem is pretty much guaranteed to trounce everyone else on the server, thanks to their ridiculous shield/health numbers and a massively damaging charge attack. It’s great fun to play, I’ll concede, but it’s a bit silly that they can run straight up to the nozzle of a raging flamethrower and pistol-whip the robotic owner so hard they go into orbit. These guys, as tough close-range damage dealers, make appropriate rivals of the Krogan, so their flamethrowers should be especially harmful to them.

Geth Prime

Enough with the stunlocking. I can’t even articulate a decent reason why they should change this, it’s just immensely annoying.

Reaper Banshee

See Phantom. Also, undo the recent health buff. No-one likes a sponge.

Reaper Brute

See Phantom.

Reaper Husk

See Phan…wait! The canned animations of the Husk’s grab attack almost certainly won’t kill or even significantly hurt you, but it’s still an incredibly cheap way of getting you to stand in place while Cannibals and Marauders pump bullets into you whilst Ravagers shoot you with their blatantly overpowered automatic rocket launchers.

Reaper Ravager

Lose the blatantly overpowered automatic rocket launchers. Want them powerful? Sure. Want them fast? Go ahead. Want them accurate? Okie doke. Want all three at once, with a big AOE and a fired from something with a metric shit-tonne of armour? You’re insane.

Only slightly less tiresome are the Swarmers, tiny Reaper-ised bugs that pop out of Ravager sacs when shot. It’s bad enough that having the apparently unacceptable gall to target a Ravager’s weak spots will create a group of these little cretins without the fact that stamping on them (clearly a reasonable response to seeing a hefty insect) is a big drain on your shield. Make their hitboxes bigger so just shooting them is less of a chore, or just cut them entirely. Even the game doesn’t consider them a ‘real’ enemy.

Banshee, Brute and Phantom again

Seriously, it’s absolutely dreadful. Did nobody at QA complain? Not one?

Tags:

We need to talk about Esther

19 Feb

It’s a struggle to articulate the flaws of Dear Esther – of which there quite a few more than the flurry of 8s and 9s out of 10 would suggest – mainly because it’s surprisingly hard to describe the game itself, as I discovered two days ago when my housemate asked what the hell I was playing. Self-doubt starts to creep in even before you start typing out detailed complaints about the excruciatingly slow walking speed or the complete lack of anything to actually do, because this isn’t a game about doing – it’s a game about looking and listening. Still, it’s on Steam and it costs seven quid – the time for chin-stroking is over.

The main issue is that it’s a story-led affair without a very good story. I care more for the shouting, musclebound thugs of the Modern Warfare series more than the disembodied narrator, his dead wife slash girlfriend slash sister or the completely undefined entity I’m directing through the outer Hebrides, as Dear Esther has the kind of narrative the designers can easily explain away with “Oh, we want players to draw their own conclusions”, but instead awkwardly occupies the space between ‘compellingly vague’ and ‘an actual story’ – a depressing limbo filled with plot points that do exist, but have been cruelly denied any meaning. A few specifics get spelled out quite quickly, but they’re neither open to interpretation nor particularly interesting; someone called Esther has died in a motor accident, the narrator is very sad and wants to top himself because he’s ill anyway, he’s gone a bit nutty and is scribbling on the walls etc. etc. et goddamn c. For £6.99, that’s your lot. I’m increasingly losing patience with writers who expect me to fill in the gaps when they clearly had something specific in mind, but willfully neglected to include it. I’m not here to write fanfiction, I’m here to experience the story you – you! – wanted to tell. Unlike, say, The Stanley Parable, Dear Esther uses a hell of a lot of words to say absolutely nothing at all.

Which is a shame, because the island (which is frankly a better character than any of the ones with names) is beautiful. Stunning. Even when you’re being funnelled FPS-style to the end of each section, it feels expansive and barren, with some of the best caves in gaming – and that’s a lot of caves. The score is impossible to fault too, a restrained and ethereal mix of strings, keys and gentle vocals that hits the loneliness aspect out of the park. And herein lies another problem: you can experience all the best bits (landscapes and atmosphere) and avoid all the worst bits (holding down the W key for an hour and a half) of Dear Esther by simply watching someone play through it on YouTube, with no real effect on how you’d approach the barely-there story.

I truly love the concept of Dear Esther, the exciting notion of exploring hidden landscapes to uncover lost truths. Yet, for reasons I’ll probably never comprehend, it remains so reluctant to give up its secrets that I can only feel like I’m wasting my time even trying. Whether you consider Dear Esther to be a game, an experiment, an interactive story, or all three, that feeling can only ever be the sign of failure.

You should probably go see Chronicle

12 Feb

One of the upsides of my PC breaking, then PC World employing the most comprehensively incompetent repairmen in the West of Europe, is that I finally have an excuse to watch more films. This mostly involves dusting off my LoveFilm account or rewatching Biffy Clyro’s stunning live DVD (sample!), but I’m a lot more willing to be dragged to a cinema too – last week we saw The Grey, which I can’t honestly recommend to anyone who enjoys happiness and smiling. Yesterday we took advantage of the inexplicable deal Orange have made with theatres to get half-price tickets on Wednesdays, and checked out Chronicle. It’s pretty good.

Chronicle is part superhero movie, part coming-of-age tale and all masterclass in character writing. All three leads – the American high schoolers who mysteriously contract telekinesis – are both likeably charming and, importantly, broken in some way. Obviously Andrew, the introverted hero (of sorts) seen above silently murdering an innocent car, is worst off – his dad beats him, he eats alone and thinks nothing of carrying an ancient video camera around his school. Matt, Andrew’s cousin, is well-meaning but dangerously ignorant of his relative’s dark side, while Steve – an athlete, but a disarmingly friendly one – displays a lack of tact and understanding that has grim consequences. Still, even when Andrew’s power begin to corrupt him, he never seems like an outright jerk; on more than a few occasions, his misuse of an incredible power is incredibly cathartic. But it’s the humane, naturalistic dialogue that really sells the boys’ friendship. I repeatedly have issues with films that can’t reconcile narrative ambitions with convincing characterisation, a kind of “Pfft, nobody talks like that” cynicism. Chronicle actually seems to portray people having a conversation, not actors recalling lines from a script. Obviously, once you can believe in someone, you can actually start to give a damn – Andrew becomes more tragic, Matt more conflicted, Steve more affable.

To be honest, the makers could have easily stripped out the pseudo-USP: 95% of the movie is in ‘found footage’ style, captured from the perspective of Andrew’s video camera. That’s fine, but the footage is of such high quality and is so often the subject of telekinesis (allowing for suspiciously steady conventional pans, zooms and angles) that when that format is quietly ditched during the climax, nobody seemed to notice. The home-video schtick could have been ditched completely with barely any effect – every other aspect of Chronicles is so strong, silly tricks like this weren’t really necessary.

Offcuts: Due Date

25 Jan

Behold, the worst injustice in filmic history since that actor you like wasn’t nominated for that award you thought he should win: Due Date’s Metascore is twenty-two points lower than that of The Hangover. I. Know.

Zach Galifiankis plays pretty much the same oblivious, thumb-handed idiot in both films, but partnering him up with a quietly seething Robert Downey Jr. yields far funnier results than having him flanked by two equally stupid (but considerably more prone to hysterical screeching) manchildren. RDJ’s expecting father -a high-strung but straight-faced architect forced to roadtrip across the US with the bearded cretin that got him kicked off his plane – focuses his rage with laser precision. It’s genuinely funny when he punches a kid in the stomach, almost entirely because of the swiftness and efficiency of the blow – in an instant, the outburst has passed without so much of a changing facial expression. These kinds of moments are, simply put, far more entertaining and far less tiring than the prolonged screaming meltdowns that so often punctuate male-led comedies.

The story is predictable, the situations contrived, but Due Date boasts  some great staccato-ish gag delivery, gorgeous scenery and an enormously underrated double act (even though Galifiankis can’t match his co-star’s comedy chops, he’s likeable enough and absolutely sells the more dramatic bits) that probably won’t reform ever again. LoveFilm it, at the very least.

Offcuts: Fixing Modern Warfare 3

19 Jan

The sequel!

1) Make Akimbo Go To It’s Room And Think About What It’s Done

Most games of multiplayer MW3 are blisteringly fast. The excitement therefore comes in the fraction of a second it takes for you to meet an enemy, level your gun before they do, and be the first make an accurate hit. It’s an almost inconceivably brief period of interaction, but there are so many instances of this during one game that it isn’t really a problem.

All akimbo loadouts successfully remove this. Instead, their user simply strolls around, looking in the vague direction of any foe and liquefying them with a wall of hipfire spray before they can even bring up their sights. This isn’t tense, fair or fun for the victim, and – having tried this tactic myself in a couple of games – doesn’t provide any real satisfaction for the culprit.

It seems to me like, just maybe, secondary weapons should be used as secondary weapons? Making akimbo guns far less accurate than their two-handed default equivalent – even with Steady Aim – would encourage slower but more rewarding playstyles, without sacrificing their role as close-range backup for snipers.

2) Seriously, Why Are Flares Still Automatic?

The general de-emphasis of offensive killstreaks in favour of team-friendly Support pointstreaks is a huge leap in the right direction, but mighty Osprey choppers and AC-130 gunships still act undeservedly unassailable. When the best players are given even more opportunities to remotely blow up the losing team, is it really so much to ask to have them take their finger off the trigger for one second to deploy their defensive flares manually?

3) Even The Odds: Give Out Free Unlocks

One of the reasons I abandoned Battlefield 3 was that I was sick of getting killed by people with objectively superior weapon attachments to what I’d unlocked so far. Thanks to smaller maps, higher damage and lower recoil, this isn’t so much of an issue in MW3 – someone with an ACOG scope doesn’t necessarily have an absolute advantage over iron sights peasants (as in BF3). Still, the new Proficiencies (perks for weapons rather than people – lower recoil, better bullet penetration etc.) don’t start unlocking until several levels in, and new ones appear only infrequently after that.

It would be great if freshly-unlocked weapons came with all the Proficiency options included. There are still incentives to level up in attachments and camos, but newer players start out on a slightly more level playing field – and are free to experiment with different setups before they settle into a complete loadout.

 

Offcuts: Chuck, Season 5

19 Jan

It kind of feels like, somewhere along the line, spy fiction forgot how to be fun. Arse-joke comedies where the main character happened to wear a tux, sure, but films and TV that weren’t parodying a genre that doesn’t exist anymore resorted to either immense grumpiness or impenetrable technowank. Chuck, for all its California glossiness, was pretty much unique: a competant spy-fi action series, with a sharp sense of humour and brilliantly understated pop culture geekiness. Then they went and cancelled it.

Season 5, which only has a couple of episodes left to air, has been crafted in the oddly beneficial knowledge that this is truly, properly, for realsies the end this time. That means no more infuriating cliffhangers, no more tiptoeing around character development or playing coy with backstory. The end is nigh, but for once in US TV, they saw it coming. This doesn’t mean, however, the ostensible plan to tie four season’s worth of only unconncected stories into a final mega-conspiracy hasn’t been a total bust – after setting that up in the season 4 finale, it seems like the writers didn’t actually know how to pull it off, so substituted it for a smaller plot masterminded by someone who wasn’t even a villain until halfway through season 3.

That said, Shaw is an awesome villain – genuinely threatening but frequently funny (“If you were, you would have brought a coat. Silly.”). It’s hard to think of Brandon Routh as anyone other than the hilarious psychic vegan bassist from Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Word, but his character here – a symptom of a not-seen-enough side to Chuck, one which doesn’t pull punches and isn’t afraid to put bullets in the main cast – makes me sad that we’ve seen the last of him.

Otherwise, S5 has been mostly great. Action sequences are more ambitious and better-choreographed than ever, the references remain pleasingly modern, and the subversion of the Intersect from magic cure-all to a brain-melting scourge is the perfect way to put a lid on the whole thing. It’s a bit weird seeing Chuck himself being a decent fighter, hacker, shooter etc. without it – the initial appeal was, of course, seeing a complete dork fumble his way through international incidents – but hey, they’ve all got to grow up some time.

← Older Entries

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.