Tag Archives: PS4

Best of 2015, Games, GOTY, PC games, PlayStation

Best of 2015 #4: Rocket League

28/12/2015 Olly Leave a comment

Rocket League Conventional sports games haven’t done much for me in a while, the limitations of real sport striking me as unnecessarily restrictive on gameplay design in an effectively limitless medium. Real sport is for playing or watching in real life. If you’re going to turn it into a video game, let me fire a missile at the other participants or take them on with full, 360-degree movement.

Rocket League is grounded in reality – people play competitive games with real RC cars, after all – but, as I like it, with some of the limitations removed. You can boost yourself up walls with rockets, flip through the air, even fly to an extent if you have the patience to master it. This is a sport that I wish really did exist.

Either way, Rocket League was tremendous fun, certainly the best indie game of the year, and thanks to it being given away to PS Plus subscribers, one of the few multiplayer games that isn’t Call of Duty to have maintained a healthy population of players. It’s a fun, accessible party game with split-screen – remember those? As a free game for PSN subscribers it was, of course, a no-brainer, but even at the current price of £9.49 it would be one of my first recommendations for the post-Christmas glut of new PS4 owners.

Best of 2015, Games, GOTY, PlayStation

Best of 2015 #5: Until Dawn

27/12/2015 Olly Leave a comment

Until Dawn seems to attract faint praise, with reviews I’ve read and podcasts I’ve listened to featuring turns of phrase like “best 8/10 game ever” or “Night Trap but not crap”. The thing is, these statements are frequently tempered with a clarification that the game actually is very, very good. It’s what the first wave of ‘interactive movies’ promised to do, minus the bad acting and VCD-quality FMV. And it shows up the games of David Cage as the pretentious nonsense they are, even matching them on the technical level where they admittedly shine.

It’s apparent that I love the same teen slasher movies as the developers, with the films that I came of age watching, like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, clearly represented, along with classics old and new. The slow mechanics even make the dash of The Descent that’s in there less annoying than it has invariably been when action games introduce the late-game mutant enemies.

I’ll be interested to see whether Until Dawn keeps its appeal after a few years, when so much of the fun this time around came from chats with friends about your route through the game, who made it to the end in your playthrough and the horrible deaths of the characters that didn’t. Even completionists didn’t always need to chase that perfect run where everyone survives, the game making your one of several hundred permutations feel like yours alone. It’s a linear, narrative-led adventure without feeling as restricted and like a choose-your-own-adventure game as, say, something from Telltale.

I saw Until Dawn available for as little as £15 in the run-up to Christmas, not far off what you’d pay for a new horror movie on Blu-ray. And I guarantee you this will give you more entertainment.

Games, PC games, PlayStation, Sega

Shenmue III reaction

16/06/2015 Olly 1 Comment

I’ve never given up hope that Shenmue would get its conclusion, and it seems that my faith has been rewarded.

Shenmue III Kickstarter

It’s funny, though. For years I’d always suggest Shenmue III as a dream E3 announcement as a joke, opening myself to a ribbing, but in the last couple of years it started to feel like a real possibility. Yu Suzuki started to make public appearances more often, dropping hints that were taken as hope by some, trolling by others. He was pictured with Sony’s Mark Cerny at a time when Sony was openly courting developers, and then Suzuki uttered the words “to be continued” after the Cerny-hosted GDC postmortem.

This all left me more disappointed that it didn’t materialise at E3 2014 than I had since 2002. But I still had the feeling that there’s no smoke without fire. Something had changed, even if I wasn’t sure precisely what.

Fast forward to this E3, and this tweet:

E3で見つけた。 pic.twitter.com/Ku5CH7v6kU

— Yu Suzuki (@yu_suzuki_jp) June 14, 2015

Surely he’s not that cruel? Even if Suzuki thought that was just a cool-looking forklift, he knows what people are going to read into that, right? But the seeds were sown, and I started to believe. I put the possibility of Shenmue III somewhere below the similarly MIA The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy VII remake, both of which were all but leaked in the days beforehand, but I went to bed last night with my fingers crossed.

It’s going to seem like I’m making stuff up here, but I genuinely dreamt that Shenmue III was announced last night. It was an MMO in my dream, and I remember seeing all the NPCs in the various neighbourhoods with player handles above their heads.

Sorry, Barney. — I’d like to apologise to my brother for the early awakening.

I then inexplicably woke up at 4:30am – normally it takes a good few runs through the snooze button to get me up when the alarm goes at 7:30 – and checked my phone to see the news on GAF. $300 plus shipping went into the Kickstarter fund immediately. Then came much celebrating and annoyed texts from those I’d bothered with early morning messages. They’ll forgive me eventually.

I’m just absolutely ecstatic. It’s hard to believe that this has finally happened, after all the jokes and teasing aimed at those who’ve been carrying the torch for so long. I’ve spent the morning on Twitter, sharing reactions that mirrored my own, finding out which tiers my Shenmue-loving friends have pledged at. People who remember my old Shenmue website have been emailing me out of the blue to share their happiness too.

What a day.

Games, Impressions, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Wolfenstein: The New Order

05/02/2015 Olly Leave a comment

I’ve written before about how much I miss the B-tier of gaming, that time when there was something between a $100 million “AAA” release – the shifting definition of that term is another post in itself – and a quirky indie game from two blokes in a garage. Every so often you get something that channels the spirit of that time, showing that polish, cool ideas and a budget aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that this, which had sat on my pile of shame for a couple of months, is put together in that vein.

I mean it as a sincere compliment when I say that The New Order feels straight out of 2003. It belongs to that glut of post-Half-Life 2 narrative-driven shooters that were ten-a-penny on the original Xbox and actually represented, in retrospect, a reliably good subgenre for one that was rinsed so thoroughly. As well as Valve’s classic, the DNA of games like The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (there’s a Starbreeze connection), Breakdown, Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, Doom 3 and so on is on show here. Even if I limit the discussion to games about leading a resistance against a technologically advanced and oppressive regime, I could equally be talking about The New Order, Half-Life 2 or the much-missed Freedom Fighters.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

This retro feel is carried through to the pleasantly old-school design: secrets, collectables, non-regenerating health, an arsenal of weapons to carry around without regard for encumbrance systems, and giant enemies with exploitable weak points abound. Even the prominence given to dual-wielding feels pleasantly of that era, after Halo 2 made it a banner feature but before dour, grounded militarism became the genre’s creed.

The New Order isn’t thrown together without thought, though, which is perhaps surprising for a series with such straightforward roots. Almost as surprising as the lack of multiplayer in a game whose deathmatches once hooked me so strongly. The design of posters, signage, architecture and even the pop music heard in the background has been built to present a believable vision of the 60s in a world where the Nazis won the war and propaganda infuses all aspects of culture. I read several excellent articles about the music around the game’s release, among them VentureBeat’s, and was blown away at how much effort went into an area that is so easily overlooked.

Visiting Nazi London in Wolfenstein: The New Order.

Wolfenstein is undoubtedly a game that would have made my abridged best of 2014 list had I plunked down the cash before the Boxing Day sales. I’m tempted to drop a cliché about how it’s not big or clever, but really, it kind of is. The old-fashioned parts are lovingly, knowingly so, and the thought put into its vision of a Nazi-dominated 1960 is up there with the big releases. There’s nothing in The New Order that’s been thrown together arbitrarily.

I’m happy, therefore, to declare that gaming’s B-tier still lives! For one game, at least.

Best of 2014, Games, GOTY, PlayStation

Best of 2014 #2: Infamous: Second Son

30/12/2014 Olly Leave a comment

Infamous: Second Son That this is the only first-party game to make my list may be an admission that I don’t have a Wii U more than any lack of trying from the platform holders, but the fact is Microsoft and Sony haven’t been particularly prolific in 2014.

But even without caveats, I thought Second Son fulfilled the promise that the Infamous series had had since the beginning. The first two were good but saddled with a bland protagonist and a uninteresting, half-baked apocalyptic story. Delsin liked having powers, just like the player does. He’s like Spider-Man rather than another tortured hero.

Second Son was, in fact, the first game in which I bothered to earn the Platinum trophy. That means I finished it twice, when most games don’t even move me to play through them once. Even if it still suffers from the rather binary morality of the other Infamous games, the good and bad paths were enjoyably different.

It was gorgeous too, of course. One of the first games to restore some faith in what these consoles are capable of when they’re not running another remaster.

Best of 2014, Games, GOTY, PC games, PlayStation, Xbox

Best of 2014 #3: Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

29/12/2014 Olly Leave a comment

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Here’s another late addition, which I admitted to missing out on barely a month ago but have since fallen for in a big way. I wish I could say it wasn’t the Assassin’s Creed ripoff that I called it back when it was unveiled because, gameplay-wise, that’s essentially what it is. But it’s polished nonetheless – that’s something you can’t say about this year’s Assassin’s Creed – and has enough tricks to stand out.

The Nemesis system was the cleverest for me, in that it’s a somewhat procedurally generated system that doesn’t stand out as being so – you might not realise that Goroth Plague-Bringer, against whom you had a long-running feud, was a creation of the game itself. The way it would cause some uruks to run away and others to return from the dead, hell-bent on revenge, allowed the game to create something approaching the personal, unique stories that typify the best open-world sandbox games.

Monolith seems to have a way of coming out of nowhere with impressive games – think the Condemned, F.E.A.R. and No One Lives Forever series – without picking up the following of some of the better-known studios. After this, and following my frequent complaints that so few studios are making games that aren’t safe, ridiculously budgeted annual sequels, I’ll keep an eye on what it does next.