Upcoming Games/Reviews 29/11/2009

A few things I want to/will be playing in the near future. I can't promise review for all of these, but I'll do my best, seeing as I will be borrowing a good few of these so might not get a full analysis so to speak.

1. Left 4 Dead
2. Batman: Arkham Asylum
3. The Orange Box
4. The last two missions of Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising that I can't play on my near-broken version...
5. Mass Effect
6. Shadow of the Collossus (for PS2...)
7. Borderlands

This will be in the course of the coming 3 months.

Reviews: http://failboatskippersgamereviews.blogspot.com/

It's an Obamanation! Or some other rubbish Obama pun!

Well I'll be damned, just a couple of days after me complaining about the many many morons in the media including the apparent second form of Jesus, Barawwwck Obamobile (who must be amazing cos he's black, and that's revolutionary and stuff, so he's the best president ever right?), claiming that video games are little hobgoblins in our homes spitting on your cutlery and raping your cheese, the big White House man has decided to cash in on the video game industry to his advantage. Don't spaz out because I insulted Obama. Good on him if he gets our lads out of Iraq, but he's not your 'brotha'.

So as I read off the source of all life, IGN, Obama has decided to use 'educational' games to convert kids from the dark side of such horrors as Viva Pinata and Beautiful Katamari and to play boring games to teach them about maths, science and other stuff they spend 5 days a week learning anyway. It's not good enough that they play games to have fun, and to do something other than school, after all that would mean education hasn't dribbled over every inch of their 'young and free' lives. Inspired by the fantastically creative Little Big Planet, he's hoping these could be a whole new area of gaming and is planning to give thousands of PS3s to libraries over the USA. For a subject he so confidently believes he knows everything about, he sure knows NOTHING.

Point number 1 Mr President, these 'educational' games have been around for longer than I've been alive. Hell, we even had Baptist Christians jumping on the video game bandwagon in the NES era, creating remarkable so-bad-it's-good-but-no-actually-bad games like Bible Buffet. When we had the tough, complex puzzle solving games like Tomb Raider, you think we were just thinking about slaughtering all those innocent tigers and bears? But the ones which were actually based on mathematical problems you had to solve to continue some boring, badly thought up quest, we didn't play them. Why? BECAUSE THEY'RE SHIT. Who cares if we play video games because we want to watch hardcore car porn (Forza 3),  relive World War II or even run over countless civilians? They're games. That's what they're for. And school is what education is for. 

Number 2, you're using PS3s, and in a library. Once the 'thousands' of PS3s has cost you 'millions' of dollars which you could be spending on getting soldiers home to their families, you've put a game console in a library. Game console. Library. Well I suppose you've got kids into one, but they won't be reading, no, they'll be flocking in their hundreds from school to try out your abysmal games/steal the controllers and generally piss about as the librarian passes out from an insane burst of manic 'shh'ing. 

Maybe America was better off being a bitterly Conservative, video game hating country. Maybe Halo 3 is a better thing to bring kids up on. Maybe...

For Fallout fans + About upcoming Assassin's Creed II review

Okaaayyy now you may have noticed that the last posts have ALL been 'articles', as in no, that is not how I usually write when simply talking about stuff. They've all got a point, an attempt at humour etc, but the blog was made for a mixture of these and just random thoughts jotted down too.

For any Fallout fans out there, MY BRETHREN, I would damn strongly recommend you see the film A Boy and His Dog, which was the main inspiration for the Fallout series in the first place. It's a 1975 film so expect a definite feel of wackiness but the same themes are all there: companionship in post-apocalyptia, light hearted murder, dog-eat-dog (sometimes literally) and of course like the Wastelanders against the Enclave, the choice between the dangerous yet free anarchy of the wasteland above or the safe but 'be happy or be removed' nature of a mysterious underground civilization called 'Down Under'. Great acting, very immersing, if you loved ANY of the Fallout games it should fit you down to a tee.

My money problem is very, very slowly being solved which had crippled my ability to add new games to my repertoire (I REFUSE to be one of these people who play one game for all eternity), and I will be able to get good old/new Assassin's Creed II, play the hell out of it and get it reviewed. Sure, I would review Flashpoint, BUT IT HASN'T LET ME FINISH THE CAMPAIGN. COS IT'S NOT SAVING ANY DATA. AND I CAN'T FIND ANY MATCHES ON MULTIPLAYER. I'm not going to review a game that I've half-played, I'll feel dirty, however much I want to enlighten everyone on how abysmally flawed it is. 

So yeah, that's all for now. Still playing Bad Company, it still hasn't got old. If you haven't got it, buy it. If you have it and don't like it, shoot yourself.

Reviews: http://failboatskippersgamereviews.blogspot.com/

Where to look for the meaning of life and the centre of all intrinsic goods... hmm... OH I KNOW, VIDEO GAMES!

Picture pretty much unrelated. I couldn't resist.

My faith in games is pretty strong in places. As much as I don't think they are a fine art, anyone who plays them a lot (or at least as much as I do) and has played a decent range of games, especially more recent ones, should realise there is a huge amount of storyline (COUGH METAL FUCKING GEAR SOLID) cinematics and voice acting talent in the game industry. Look at Fallout's dark satire of human futility and the American dream, or Gears of War's story of love and loss on Dom's part - though you will have to look past his damn poor voice acting; 'Oh Maria, Maria, why didn't EPIC games just sign me up to be some COG grunt who gets shot in the first five minutes?'. In some cases, such as my harshly-coughed Metal Gear series, games can be much deeper and hold many more moral messages than most films can offer. Despite this, and my passion for gaming/games in general, there's a point where I stop and think, 'this is not reality.' And it's not, it's no more reality than a film or book. 

So this brings me to my question of not why intellectual elitists treat games as if they are inferior to all other 'art' forms, but why they think they affect us so deeply. Yes, young adults, teenagers and kids like games. LIKE is the operative word. They're not drugs, we're not addicted, we just find them fun, is that so hard to believe? Yes, some kids play too much, but that's the parents to blame. What do you want to do, blame games for being too much fun?

People like Barawwwk Obama and the rage-of-the-apocalypse-inducing Bill O'Reilly (or as he tells his producer minions to call him, Lucifer) have said on numerous occasions that video games are killing the youth. By this, they're referring to games like GTA where you're given the freedom to pointlessly exact your revenge on innocents, or just violent games in general. So... they think that we're morally influenced by games? That we see Niko Bellic screwing a hooker then running her over and taking her money as... something we should do? Fair enough for thinking kids are idiots, but there are a tiny few who actually see things in games and think 'WOW, THIS IS OBVIOUSLY A GOOD IDEA.' For goodness' sake, pretty much all games even penalise you in some way for actions like this. The opening cutscene isn't Niko getting off a boat, and screaming 'EVERYTHING I WILL DO IN AMERICA IS RIGHTEOUS. YAY ME.' The kids in America who performed drive-bys because of playing too much San Andreas didn't do it because of the game telling them to do it, it's because they're fucking dumbasses. It's that simple.

Naturally there are exceptions where things seem pointlessly harsh like Manhunt, The Punisher and Modern Warfare 2 which I'm literally twitching to not start another argument on. Yeah I don't like them a great deal because taken out of context they give games a terrible name, but hello? They're 18s! As in, if your kid is playing an 18, he's gonna see some nasty stuff. If he/she is too young/stupid to take it, then once again, THE PARENTS' FAULT. It's not as if we have to censor films for disturbing content, unless it reaches Evil Dead standards. Why should games be any different? 

I can't think of an outro paragraph, you'll just have to put up with it.

2010: A Great Year To Come, A Great Year to Disappoint

At time of writing it is late 2009, and the whole world is still jumping up and down in excitement like a hyperactive child over the sickeningly overrated Modern Warfare 2, instead of looking forward to the more intelligent and creative games such as Assassin’s Creed II because they don’t have sniper rifles and kill streak rewards. My eye is on Creed II as it seems to have taken into account what was so flawed in the first game (that is, only five mission types in the whole game) and proven Ubisoft actually have the ability to look at game forums and see what people like. However, more expectant am I on the games of 2010. Just Cause 2, Bad Company 2, Fallout: New Vegas and a possibility of Gears of War 3.

This looks like a great year to come, but what’s that thing which affects us Brits more than anyone else? Sod’s law maybe? The more you expect something in anticipation, the old bastard Sod has to swoop in, eat your dreams, spit them out, eat them and again, and vomit them up. That’s what happened with Mercenaries 2, the sequel to my favourite game on PS2, so why not ruin ALL these games that I really want?

What’s more worrying is that almost all said games have a reason they could end up turning rubbish, opening the garden gate for Sod’s Law, letting him through the front door and taking his coat. For starters, Just Cause 2 is next in the series for a game which was horribly disastrous in so many ways despite its potential with a massive map and skydiving mechanic. It was meant to be similar to a cheesy action movie yet turned out to be worse than Vin Diesel’s acting in the way it was played. The sneak-peekers say that it’s improved, but seeing as it’s still meant to be the same type of game, I don’t see why they won’t bugger it up again. I mean it’s Eidos, did you SEE what they did to Tomb Raider?

Fallout: New Vegas isn’t even developed by Bethesda, who were the guys who made Fallout 3 so perfect, because they’re probably making Elder Scrolls V however much they violently deny it. The guys making this one are Obsidian, and apart from KOTORII, they’ve been known for ruining sequels. Oh great. There goes another instalment of my favourite game of this generation. WHY DO THEY PUNISH ME SO.

Gears of War 3 isn’t as likely as Gears of War 2 added a lot of great things, but we know who the lead designer of EPIC games is: cocky ‘hey-I’m-your-best-friend’ twat Cliff Bleszenski who will probably think it would be a great avant-garde idea to kill off Marcus Fenix and have him come back as Uber-Marcus in a Jason X kinda way. Oh and if and when you kill the Queen, she explodes into butterflies and it turns out that Sera was actually Teletubbie land. Oh you’re all so silly for thinking Gears was a serious game!

Bad Company 2 I can’t think of a flaw so easily. I’ve seen the early footage and thankfully they haven’t removed anything and have only added extra destruction, vehicles and weaponry to the mixing-pot, unless you count simplifying the classes to how they were in the older Battlefield games as removing. BF:BC was a great formula for true multiplayer greatness and for the first time since Nightfire it looks like EA may have made something... incredible.

So yeah, there are my thoughts of 2010. If it’s true that things always turn out the opposite than what you expect, we’re in for the best year of gaming in a LONG time. Now let’s hope Activision can bear to stay out of the action and not ruin it.

Infinity Ward: The World's Worst - And Definitely Sickest - Game Developers

Before I start this blog, I need you to know that, as you probably guessed, I am a gamer. I am not ignorant of what is acceptable in games, and I do play mostly violent games. I'm not a conservative middle class mother. I don't think GTA is a bad influence on society and I don't think it should be banned. However, there is SO much wrong with this mission, 'No Russian' from Modern Warfare 2 I can hardly describe. I've watched gory and disturbing films, and yet this was hard to watch to the end.

Through Charlie Brooker's Twitter I saw this had been leaked onto the net, just like most of the game. I had also known already that the second instalment of Infinity Ward's 'FPS for Dummies... In a Modern War Theatre' series gets darker than the first, but I had no idea it went this far, and it doesn't surprise me now that even Brooker himself found it nasty.

Call of Duty for a while now has been attempting to show the 'brutality of war' in their games. Like any sane person, I hated CoD: WaW, but I genuinely though they pulled off the harshness quite well, such as shooting surrendering Japanese soldiers were they stood. This wasn't nice at all, but you realise this is part of the nasty experience and you put it to the back of your mind. These were soldiers, they would kill you if they had the chance. It becomes a somewhat different when they're innocents that you're madly mowing down as if they were trying to blow YOUR head off. This is only comparable, I think, to Splinter Cell: Double Agent, when you have the choice to kill thousands of innocents on a boat to gain the trust of the enemies you're working undercover with. However this isn't shown to your face as you simply push a detonator. Modern Warfare 2's shoving-down-your-throat of a brutal slaughtering in an airport, on the other hand, is downright sick.

For goodness' sake Infinity Ward, do you know who your games appeal to? I'll tell you, you fucking morons, 12 year old kids. CAAWWLL OF DOOOTY is a mindless FPS where you run, aim and shoot. Endlessly. With no depth. So it seems they've had to put it some massive shock factor to keep some actually interesting storyline in the game. Yeah, no agrees with me, so what. I'm happy enough to believe I'm the only sane gamer out there. Because of how simple the game is, it appeals to the younger, idiotic generation of gamers that infest Xbox Live, and so they'll be the ones so eagerly anticipating the second Modern Warfare, and damn it they will play it. And they'll play this mission, where you casually stroll into an airport and empty endless rounds on literally hundreds of screaming, terrified civilians, who you mercilessly finish off when they try to crawl to safety. And they'll probably think it's really cool. Do I sound like an overprotective mother? Yes, I suppose I do; they're actually right this time.

I imagine a criticism I'm going to face is, 'it's only a game'. Yes, thankyou, I can see that. You know what? People like games. People pay attention to games. As such, generally speaking even the most violent of games usually have boundaries which they won't cross. You can shotgun and enemy to bits or shove your boot through its skull, but only because it would do the same to you. And yes, this isn't real, and these people you massacre don't actually have husbands and wives and kids and lifestyles, but this is the most realistic simulation of pure modern sadism I've seen. It disgusts me.

No doubt with the death of a few hundreds civilians, GTA comes to mind. But there is a difference, at least I think. In GTA, you're given the FREEDOM to kill the innocent bystanders, but you face the consequences of having the police after you, and you might even get killed yourself. This, however, TELLS YOU to do so. It's your OBJECTIVE, and there's only one bit where you can get killed by the Counter-Terrorist forces. You might as well be telling these kids, 'THIS IS OK, AS LONG AS YOU'RE A TERRORIST.' Also in GTA, there's a certain comedy factor to the whole game, such as the stupid screams they make, or in the older games how their heads pop like balloons. You play this, and try to see it as a joke.

So this is what gaming has come to. Extreme, shocking violence to those who don't deserve it, shown in the most graphic and realistic way possible, as if it is realising a sick and twisted fantasy of the game's developers. No doubt due to the game's inevitable success, other developers will jump on the bandwagon as well in later years. Fuck you, Infinity Ward, and I hope your overrated piece of over-the-top shit gets banned.

Wanna watch it? Enjoy...

http://www.gameanyone.com/video/171701

EDIT: I would just like to add that Infinity Ward had the nerve to release this the day before Remembrance Day. If this is their idea of honouring the glorious dead, they should join them.

'I don't want fun, I want to POWN THE WURLD AND MAKE THEM SCARED OF ME'

A statement hit me pretty hard lately. It was from someone I've known for quite a while and though he's been into games as long as I have, I wouldn't be afraid to say he's not the kind who can get passionate about games in the same way I can, but really just wants to kick everyone's ass in multiplayer of the abysmal Call of Duty 4. You know the type. Anyway, we were discussing Fallout 3 and how it beats almost everything on the Xbox 360, and he comes in with the self-assured declaration of stupidity, 'what you guys talking about, it's not a good game, it doesn't have multiplayer!'. These days I'm a facepalm veteran but this time I nearly broke my nose. But this fella acts like, talks to and is friends with the average Xbox gamer of today, and I realised, a lot of people are thinking like this. The mentality for a huge amount is, 'it's only good if I can play random people and kick their asses'.

How did this happen so quickly? I know online gaming has been existent and competitive for a while back, but the population of console owners has only just come out the PS2 days for goodness' sake! It's not as if they were playing the Playstation's terrible internet play, and barely any of the kids you'll find on Halo or CoD had Xbox Live on the original Xbox. So how have they so suddenly adapted from good old single player games, or a bit of split screen Nightfire to ONLINE GAMING ONLY, ULTRA-COMPETITIVE. I know I still haven't. I enjoy matchmaking but big fuckin' deal, you're never going to be pro, and if you're not pro then no one cares.

What's worse, is that what is also now available due to powerful systems isn't always fully appreciated nearly enough. People buy Gears of War and Halo and don't think once about using any of what the developers have sweat blood to create. OHHH HEY GUYS I HERD FROM A M8 DER IS SUM GD HORDE MODE ON DIS, GUNNA PLAY JUST THAT 4EVER. No need, of course, to experience Gears of War 2's stunningly varied campaign which takes third person shooters to a new level. SUP GUYS JUST GUNNA PLAY SUM HALO 3... HERD FROM EVER1 ITS GUD SO ILL JUST GO STRAIGHT TO MULTIPLAYER 4EVER. Grand finale to an incredibly complex storyline, the Forge mode making thousands of possiblities for your own maps, custom games also offering endless different ways to play with your friends; hell, even just the soundtrack deserves immense appreciation. Open your eyes, multiplayer is just one part of the game. Get your money's worth...

And of course this is what drove this associate of mine to thinking Fallout 3 was bad. 'No multiplayer, therefore bad'. What? I think you'll find it's an RPG, and RPGS BARELY EVER HAVE MULTIPLAYER UNLESS THEY'RE MMO. So what was basically said is that a whole genre is bad. Because you can't use your l33t sk1llz to do some mad no sc0p3s H34DSH0T5 on some person who won't even be impressed. Fallout 3 has depth, serious depth, a million different storylines from so many different people, life lessons, ironic views expressed on the American Dream and on human futility, yet combining it with excitement, action and humour. NO, IT'S BAD. IT DOESN'T HAVE THE SEARCH AND DESTROY PLAYLIST AND DOUBLE EXP WEEKENDS.

Reading the post before this one followed by this, someone would probably think that I prophesy the end of gaming to be brought about by ignorant kids 'playing to pwn'. Don't get me wrong, I hate the little critters, but I don't think that, and although I think gaming has its problems due mainly to the people playing it, I think it's also got a lot of good stuff to come. However I think it's clear to see that casual gaming, in a lot of cases, is ignorance. Sounds extreme doesn't it? I'm really into this gaming thing.