The Week According to Foo

The start of the week was quite bad in a way. Not 'bad' bad, but sort of 'disappointing' bad, if you know what I mean (chances are that you do not). My Rock Band kick-drum pedal broke, you see and everything in the world seemed to fade into irrelevance at this tragic event. Not for long, though, as EA sent me a new one! Yay! Suddenly the world seemed a better place and a little nicer smelling at that. Thank you, EA, very muchly.

You see, I feel that the drums are the core of that game, and it's certainly its main selling point. It's because we've all played the bygone Guitar Heroes and some of us have played SingStar, so it was obvious the main attraction Rock Band has to fans of the Rock-Bemani sub-genre is the drum-kit. I'm pretty sure that most of the people who bought Rock Band spent the first few hours getting to grips with that rather marvellous piece of gaming kit rather than repeating something they'd done on Guitar Hero and SingStar before it. I'd also wager a fair amount who bought Rock Band bought the game and the standalone drum-kit and chose to either ignore the 'Band in a Box' or wait until a later date before picking up the remaining peripherals.

But that's old news now. What's new news is that I've bought Alone in the Dark for my Xbox 360. I've played a good 2 hours of it and frankly, despite being disappointed at just how bad it is to actually play, it seems to get better the more I play it. This might be down to me becoming honed to the nuances of the game; for instance the control system and the way your character moves. It might be that I'm getting dragged in by the story and that no amount of clunky gameplay can make me deviate from it. But it might just be that the game is simply getting better - no more, no less - as if the developers started the game from the first level (or, as they're called in Alone in the Dark, episode) and worked it's way to the end of the game, slowly becoming more accomplished at making the game they wanted to make.

I very much doubt it'll end up being The Best Game I've Ever Played in The World Ever™, but it could very well become one of those games that isn't praised by absolutely everyone in the world, but finds its own loyal devoted fans that love the game despite its shortcomings and such, and that I might find that, come completion, I can call myself a member of this small club. At the moment, it's hard to say whether I will or won't, but I will definitely tell you if I do and if I don't. 

There is a game that I have happened across in the past and I truly believe it is one of the most criminally underrated games in the history of man… that's for another time, but the same place.

Crack Band [Update]

The reasons for my title are two-fold: Rock Band is as addictive as crack (not an analogy I've made from personal experience), and my drum pedal has a big-ass crack in it - it will snap into two pieces very soon.

I've stopped playing it. Anticipating the pedal to inevitably give way under my foot and becoming completely unusable is just as bad as it being completely unusable anyway. It saps all the fun out of playing the damn thing and makes me want to stop just in case I'm desperate for one more final go tomorrow (I'm quite good to my future-self like that).

On the freakishly large Rock Band box, it says that I should visit rockbandservice.ea.com if I was to "encounter a problem with any Rock Band™ peripheral", so I did just that. A quick questionnaire later and I was well on my way to having my pedal replaced. After having to sign up for an 'EA Account' (whatever that is), I had to give them my name, address and telephone number and then I was told I'd get a confirmation email which I still haven't received. So I don't really know what's going on with it. I'll keep you updated, but I've got every faith in EA that I'll soon be receiving my brand spanking new and completely unbroken pedal (I've got a score to settle with Run to the Hills - God, I hate Iron Maiden).

[Update] Yeah, it's broken. I wasn't even playing it, I was testing it and it came apart. The worst thing about it is the new one would have been delivered today, but I missed the post-man, so now I'm sans pedal until Thursday.

*cries*

Are Game Critics Overly Harsh?

I don't think I can call myself a critic, although I have certainly criticised games for not doing things right, or having something incredibly frustrating in them or for being completely unfair (I've used that last one a lot), but as I'd rather heap praise upon games than criticise them (unless I feel they deserve them), I'd much prefer to be called a gaming enthusiast. But I was just wondering if sometimes critics can be far too harsh on games.

Say you were made to create a game, but had a lot of things going against you, like, for instance time constraints or this being your very first game and what have you, and your finished product doesn't come out quite the way you wanted it to and thusly receives a bunch of negative reviews. You'd feel pretty hard done by, wouldn't you? Imagine having all the work you've just spent the last 2 or 3 years on being paraded in public and roundly criticised. That wouldn't feel too nice, would it?

Obviously, reviewers can't (and, in fact, shouldn't) take into account the many obstacles the developer had to overcome when they were trying to create a good quality game and get it out onto the shelves. All reviewers can do is work with what they play with and in no way should this influence their overall feeling of a game, because it'd be the average gamer who suffers, having to spend their hard-earned on a game they don't like, as critics can hold a lot of sway with gamers, and can sometimes decide if a game does well or not. Obviously, some game reviews don't really influence how well a game does. Even though GTA IV got relatively universal praise, I doubt very much that if it hadn't it wouldn't affect how much that particular game will sell. However, GTA IV is an incredibly well established franchise, what happens when a fledging developer puts out a new IP only for it to get completely derided in the gaming press? It'd hit the games' sales and would affect the developer's future a hell of a lot.

To be honest, I'm not too sure what I'm getting at. Maybe it's that I feel new developers should be helped along the way when they first start. They should be nurtured and cared for until they finally have the confidence to take off their metaphorical training wheels and go it alone in the big bad world. Maybe even smaller, or indie, developing houses could get the same treatment? Surely it would only benefit the industry if this were case? So, maybe critics and reviewers and the like should tread a little more carefully around a game from a new developer. Like I said, their final opinion of the game should be the same as if it'd come from a major developer, but could they at least go a little easier on them?

Extolling the Virtues of … BioShock

Do you want to roam around a massive underwater neon-covered art deco city? Want to fight off its mutated and insane inhabitants? Ever wanted to stick power-giving hypodermic needles into your left arm on continual basis? Fancy wrestling with a superhuman in a diving suit? I could go on …

If you answered "YES! FRIGGING YES!" to any of the above questions, then you need to calm down a little and play BioShock. If you haven't played it yet, or answered no to all of the above, then, sir or madam, you are a first class idiot.

BioShock is one of the greatest games ever made. That's not even my opinion, it's certified, bona fide, scientific fact. The game takes one of the most overused gaming genres (FPSs, in case you didn't know) and wraps around it a completely unique setting. By doing this, it has already freed the game from some of the generic constraints that other games in the genre lend itself to, especially wandering around a grey-scale corridor that looked just like the last corridor you walked down, which looked like any other corridor you've already walked down in a thousand other FPSs before.

It also gives you powers to use as and when you see fit, and the game doesn't make you choose the same thing over and over again. You can use strategy if you want, or you can just shoot the shit out of everything that comes near you. You can play to your style and the game doesn't really ever punish you for choosing the 'wrong' way in which to tackle certain enemies, because, literally, there is no wrong way. Yes, some enemies fall easily to specific types of ammo (each gun has three different types), but whichever way you go about it, the enemy you set our sights on is going to go down. You never really feel overpowered, but the power you do get (especially towards the end of the game) really is rather satisfying, the game is incredibly well-balanced and the difficulty never shoots up to the max too quickly.

Dying isn't a complete chore, either. You never really die, you merely get sent back to a Vita-Chamber, with everything you've done up to that point left how it was. It's seamless gaming, and it's all the more wonderful for it. No more hours wasted because you died before you remembered to save, none of that labourious 'trial and error' gameplay that plagues way too many games. And even if you like that shit, you can turn the Vita-Chambers off, but who the hell would ever want to do that?

The story is marvellous. It's not the be all and end all of this game, either. It's there if you want it, but you don't have to follow it too meticulously if you don't. If you think you'll be perfectly happy with just the gameplay (and believe me, you will) then you can let yourself loose on the city of Rapture. But, know this, the story may well drag you in. When you get there, the city is in chaos and the audio-diaries of the people who lived there prior to whatever disaster hit the city litter the game, pick them up and listen to them piece together exactly what happened bit by bit. There are even completely useless diaries, especially one where someone merely explains why they prefer a particular brand of cigarette over another. Brilliant!

At a Loss in The Dark

I'm somewhat at a loss as to whether or not I should get the new Alone in the Dark. The reviews it's getting seem to say the same thing - it's good, not great or you'll want to love it for what it does right, but you'll hate it for what it does wrong. I think this is a gamer's worst nightmare; a game that you seem really interested in, but the reviews don't really give a definite 'yes' or 'no' answer to whether you should buy it or not.

Luckily for me, though, I've got a trump card that I pull out whenever I'm in a game-purchasing-pickle. It's called Official Xbox Magazine UK. It has never done me wrong and on the one time I decided to go against what the magazine said I got a metaphorical kick in the balls by the game I decided to purchase against the better judgement of said magazine. That's right: 'better judgement'. I don't have time to spend deciding which games I should or should not buy, I need someone to do it for me, and as much as I love the internet, I don't quite trust it enough to decide for me.

That's why I still buy magazines. It's not so good for your back to do all your reading on a computer and that's merely one of the reasons I love, and probably always will love, reading articles, reviews and news from the glossy pages of gaming publications. For the sake of all that's innocent in the world, I've been doing so for at least 10 years, I'm not about to stop now!

A Problem: Game Saving

Mass Effect is an awesome game. It might have some issues with repetitiveness with regards to the side-quests, as well as technical issues with the game not loading the textures quickly enough and the fact that the inventory system is a complete shambles, the motions of characters can sometime be a little stunted and robotic and the conversations can be a little strange, but other than that it's an awesome game. But my biggest gripe with Mass Effect is that you have to keep saving it, just in case.

This is an RPG, and one of the biggest things that put me off RPGs (JRPGs in particular, like Final Fantasy etc.) is that you get massively punished for dying. Mass Effect lets you save anywhere you like as long as it's not in the middle of a battle, which is perfectly understandable. This is great, but if you have a big session on the game only to die without saving it, it's a complete chore to go back through the same section of the game. It can also be incredibly hard, especially on 'Veteran' difficulty. Add this to the fact that your squad members are nearly completely useless, with their only saving grace being that you can utilise their 'powers' as if they were your own, provided they're not stuck behind a wall or something.

What I'm trying to get to, though, is the fact that in this day and age you'd think that games would learn from past mistakes and not punish the player so much for dying. Originally, dying was a way to get people to stick more money into the arcade machines, but now, when a game's story can be a lot more important than the actual challenge of completing it, it seems a shame that game developers are stuck in the past and are insistent on having what I see as major flaws in their game such as this. I'm not saying that every game released hence should feature indestructible characters that can never die, because that would spoil it for those who love a challenge, I'm just saying that games with plots that are essential to the enjoyment of the player (like the Mass Effects of this world) should have a much better way of saving your progress and not punish those that are playing for the story.

Shepard: "Who do I gotta blow for some auto-save?"

Will all that said, though, I do enjoy a challenge, and I try to play Mass Effect on the hardest difficulty setting that I deem enjoyable. But for me, it's the 'Normal' setting which isn't much of a challenge at all, because you die a hell of a lot on the other, harder, difficulty settings and, like I said, if you don't save (it is very easy to forget) you have to go back to your last save, which is normally where you picked up the game from where you last left off. This can be really frustrating in a game like Mass Effect, where upgrading your character, buying and selling and inventory-management are all big parts of the game. Having to go through them all again when you die is a little dispiriting. But all this could be remedied by having an auto-save feature, or a checkpoint system like Halo. Gone should be the days of save-points; these are the folly of games that saved onto cartridges or memory cards, because being able to save anywhere would simply require too much memory. Now we have hard-drives, SD cards and more memory than we know what to do with, why can't every game have auto-saves? GTA IV had them and got rid of the ball-ache of having to travel the entire length and breadth of the city to save your game so you could have your dinner!

However, I still testify that Mass Effect is one of the most engrossing games that I've ever played (probably the reason why I keep forgetting to save), but not having auto-save is a far bigger nuisance than textures not loading properly. Mass Effect 2, you've got a lot to live up to!

So, Rock Band, Then!

I haven't posted for a while, I know. I've been playing Rock Band. It is definitely worth that £140, it's probably even worth the RRP £179.99 (I think). Analysis list time, because I can't be bothered with punctuation.

• The Drums
• Awesome
• Work incredibly well
• Well made
  
• Quite loud (clack, clack, clack, clack)
  
• Steep learning curve
• Ultimately satisfying

• The Guitar
• Feels quite cheap
• Works well
• Not as good as GH III guitar
• Added extras are cool

• The Microphone
• Is basically a real microphone
• Feels incredibly cool to hold
• Works very well

• The Songs
• Practically all tastes accounted for (provided you like Rawk!)
• It's got Little Sister by Queens of the Stone Age = enough said
• The DLC stuff is amazing
• Also, My Sharona by The Knack
• More Than a Feeling by Boston
• Detroit Rock City by Kiss
• I mean, I could go on
• Paranoid by Black Sabbath
• Crushcrushcrush by Paramore
• That enough for you?
• This Ain't a Scene, It's an Arms Race by Fall Out Boy
• Needs some System of a Down, but so did GH, GH II and GH III (at least there's some Serj Tankian)
• Learn to Fly by Foo Fighters :D

• The Actual Game
• Yes, it is better than GH III
• Rock Band World Tour is a revelation
• Achievements are nice and fair, unlike GH III
• Can see myself playing this for a long, long, time

Also, I've been playing Rez HD. I missed it the first time around when it came out for the Dreamcast, and I have to say it is now one of my very favourite games ever. And I haven't even used the Trance Vibration yet!