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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:

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?

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.

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