Affectionate Diary

3D is rubbish. I can’t wait to buy Avatar on Bluray so that I can see what’s going on in the outer parts of the screen. Apparently in games it’s quite good, but I’m not convinced. I don’t want anyone messing with my ability to read what’s happening onscreen for the sake of creating some sort of depth illusion that wasn’t enough to save Michael Jackson in Captain EO. And so it’s a MASSIVE relief that find that Picross 3D, the newest version of one of the greatest puzzle games of all time, doesn’t need me to wear a stupid pair of glasses that might mess up my hair.

It’s in 3D! Does that worry you? It scared the shit out of me until I played it, and now my feelings on the game can be summarised thusly: YES! But, and this never happened with Picross, I’m also occasionally this: hmmm. But not often! Not often at all.

One of the many amazing things about Picross was that the numbers scattered around the edges described the pictured contained within, and through your omniscient intellectual presence you would logically work out how to draw that picture. Towards the end of the game you would believe you could hack into NASA’s mainframe if only they’d use Picross as their system front end (instead of, say, Windows 98). But Picross 3D isn’t quite like that. It doesn’t give you *all* the numbers. It just gives you some, so that rather than decoding an intricate puzzle you’re instead following a trail of breadcrumbs that will eventually lead to the solution. Well, certainly so far that’s how it goes. Maybe it’ll change as I go deeper in, in which case I’ll have to write an even more definitive review. There’s also now a time limit, which is really quite relaxed and an odd addition. You wouldn’t have a timer on a crossword, but if you did you would make it last for hours. And even then, you really wouldn’t have a timer. And then if someone makes mistakes, or goes slow, you wouldn’t punish them by making them repeat a puzzle, would you? One they just did, so they go through the motions again before they can access the next set of puzzles. I really don’t understand that, and it’s an odd threat for the game to make, but such an incredibly weak threat that you can completely ignore it, because you will never fail a puzzle.

That’s not the bad news, though. In fact, there isn’t any bad news. There’s only news, and then some good news, and that was the news. The good news is that for some reason, even though it’s in 3D and even though sometimes it’s a bit fiddly and even though it doesn’t show you all the numbers, just enough to let you complete the puzzle, it’s somehow exactly the same thought process as before, only now you have to hold a 3D shape in your head instead of a 2D grid. Which should be pretty fucking obvious from the name, really. And that’s AMAZING.

So then! Picross 3D. Still FUCKING BRILLIANT, even in 3D.

EVEN IN 3D.

21

The single player campaign is fucking shit.

Well, that’s not fair. It’s awesome if you love corridors full of trigger points for bad guys that are always placed somewhere that makes it really hard to survive unless you do anything other than run backwards to cover. So your flow is run forward, die, repeat but understand the trigger point and then run back to cover, shoot some people from afar and then carry on. The AI is terrible, the story is terrible, the environments boring (though technically pleasing) and I don’t give a shit that you can blow some walls up. So actually, yeah -

The single player campaign is fucking shit.

Where’s the fucking helicopter mission? All anyone does is play far enough to be able to pilot the helicopter so that they can get in it in multiplayer and not fly backwards out of the area, killing everyone inside and causing them to lose points for a suicide, making you the biggest dick in the game by far. So give me that helicopter mission, and give it to me STAT. Then fuck off forever and never come back.

The Conquest and Rush modes are REALLY FUCKING GOOD. And you can blow up the walls! Which means that guy in the attic shooting through the tiny window can be exposed with a quick rocket, and you can have switched to your Uzi and be shooting at that attic before the rocket has even reached him. FUCK YES! But you know that, probably. And you know that if you try and play this game as straight shooter not only will you not do very well, but you’re also a total cock face. OH LOOK, THE CHARGE IS ARMED, WHY ARE YOU STILL ON THE .50 CAL TRYING TO SHOOT A HELICOPTER THAT ISN’T EVEN ANYWHERE NEAR US.

I know! What a cunt. Who would even consider playing like that? Can you imagine someone playing Medic class but running out in front trying to shoot people? What a dick. Are you dead? TOUGH FUCKING SHIT. That’s people being shit, though, and can be easily remedied by never playing with strangers. Which is the opposite of what I recommend for life outside of videogames, but easily the most important rule of Battlefield.

I really love everything about the game once you’re playing. Let’s not talk about what might be the best use of sound in a shooter ever, and let’s not talk about the near-perfect destructive design, or how well the different classes work together to create a sense of a living battlefield. Actually, that’s a lie, let’s talk about the sound.

The sound! I know homes has my back when he tells me he’s put a medi pack down for me (assuming I’m on the English-speaking side). I know how far an explosion was from the intensity of the blast sound. I know when it’s nearly the end of a game of Conquest because of the REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING PIERCING HORN. I know when I’m near my motion sensor, or when it’s no longer working. I know all of these things and more through sound alone, which is what I need because my eyes are focussed on one thing only: children. I mean killing. Same thing, really.

There are 24 people playing at any one time. Ace! Because I regularly play with a large group of people! But obviously if I want to enter a game as more than four people at once, I can fucking whistle. Thanks, EA! How about if I create a squad of four people and we want to enter a game and play together, in a squad of four, taking on the world? 50 per cent of the time I can fucking whistle! Why the FUCK do we enter a game as a team of four, and then when we start one of us is on the other team? DON’T PUT ME IN THAT FUCKING GAME IF THERE’S NOT SPACE FOR FOUR OF US TO BE ON THE SAME SIDE YOU FUCKING CUNT. If we wanted to be on opposite sides, we wouldn’t form a fucking squad! Fucking EA cunts. I bet they had a clause in the contract that stated they must have minimal wait times as a key differentiator to Modern Warfare 2, and so by following that clause they fucked us over (but kept the money men sweet).

What else? Oh yeah, when medics start they can’t heal, and when engineers start they can’t repair. Are you fucking mental? You already have such a huge selection of unlocks and an enjoyably protracted levelling process without those needless steps at the beginning, you stupid fucking cunts. I know, I know, you want to ease us in so that we’re not overwhelmed by the dizzying levels of excellence that your game exhibits when things are running at their very best. Well, I guess you could have done that with the single player, using a story to wrap together a series of objectives that gradually explain how the multiplayer works in an interesting and informative fashion. That way, we wouldn’t need to work our way through the abortion that currently exists for no reason other than we feel we have to for a sense of completion. I mean, you have the mechanics in place, so why not do that? Nobody bought your fucking game to play through another stupid fucking corridor shooter, they bought it to play the multiplayer. They just feel they need to have a single player bit in so they don’t feel cheated. That doesn’t give you the right to then abuse us, though, with tedium so strong I feel like you’re shitting in my mouth. Still, at least it’s not as bad as Heavy Rain. You can always say that. But so can everyone.

“Darling, why did sex only last four seconds? It’s bad enough your penis is tiny, the least you could do is last longer than the time it took to put it in.”
“Yes, but was it better than Heavy Rain?”
“Of course, I’m not going that far.”

I tell you what, though - the server technology is mind-fuckingly good. 24 players, vehicles, trajectory tracking, destructible environments and what feels like zero lag almost all of the time? Impossible.

The best game of all time for at least a month, which is quite a long time.

21

First Assassin’s Creed II champions Downs Syndrome, then Heavy Rain champions rampant nervous twitching. Now Super Street Fighter IV champions rape.

It’s time to oil up!

Anyone who thinks videogames aren’t maturing clearly can’t see the wood for the trees.

If there’s one thing that Bayonetta was missing, it was enough monsters and opportunities for epic, escalating battles where I get to slaughter vast amounts of cunts with astonishing style and panache.
 
 Let’s get one thing straight – basing yourself on a mishmash of God Hand and Devil May Cry while having amazing tits and ass is an excellent starting point, but I was hoping for a little bit more than a brilliant combat system dropped into a steadfastly average 3rd-person adventure (albeit one slightly elevated by the batshit mental storyline, but not to any significant degree). Imagine my outright horror and consternation that Bayonetta insisted on doing nothing else other than its starting premise of simple mashup between the two, with some Ninja Gaiden on top.
 
This is something of a let-down. Despite the colossal, towering amazingness that Bayonetta’s fighting system represents, it’s somewhat astounding – and, I believe, a total crime – that you don’t fight through swathes of idiots for 90% of the time you spend playing and end up with endgame KO counts in the tens of thousands. Instead, there were these unfinished bits where I had to WALK AROUND and do NO FIGHTING WHATSOEVER. All these empty corridors CLEARLY needed a bit more filler than ‘walk up staircase for 30 seconds’ or ‘wander around some streets’, ‘jump through some remedial platform challenge hoops’ and ‘wait for cutscene to finish’. Basically, a nice implementation of classical crowd melee mechanics would have been nice.
 
YES YOU CUNTS. Stop braying about Bayonetta’s stellar qualities for one second and consider it as some smack in the face to Ninja Gaiden, only with less monsters to fight. It’s all in there – the pointless cutscenes, the pointless adventuring, the ULTRA FUCKING SICK SWORD WORK (only you don’t get the same awesome options for on-landing powerup with the charge attacks, as far as I can tell). What could have been THE VERY BEST GAME OF ALL TIME APART FROM VIRTUA FIGHTER is instead a really good game of sporadic fighting and too many boss fights with two nostalgia nods that went on for far too long. It’s a bit of shame, considering it has the (perhaps) best fighting system ever invented. For me, this separation of combat into delineated instances when each level could have been full to the brim with ever-respawning, currency-generating, XP-giving sword-fodder is a criminally missed opportunity to merge three gaming templates into one shining, unified triumph that shames all before it. As it stands, it only shames Devil May Cry. NOW, I know I’m being a classic cunt by having a go at Bayonetta for not living up to my mad dreams of what it could have been, so if you really want me to review the game for what it is rather than what it isn’t, then take this: it isn’t as good as God Hand and it isn’t as good as Ninja Gaiden 2. There. I said it.
 
Bayonetta is, like, totally fucking hot, but I didn’t get to play with her enough. I couldn’t really dress her up properly, nor could I really customise how I used her to anywhere near the degree I could customise Gene. Looking back at what I have to plough through on a harder difficulty level, or what I need to do to unlock Jeanne, leaves me with a massive sense of resignation. It’s going to be a plodding affair where all I’m doing is not looking forward to the next boss fight, as it’ll be a bit harder and probably more of a fucking grind. The density of combat is pissily thin compared to Ninja Gaiden 2’s onlsaught of removable limb challenges and, well, it leaves me thinking if such a reliance on boss fighting as focal climaxes wasn’t so much necessity of the game’s outmoded concept, but more another ham-fisted attempt to associate itself with a PROPER ART GAME like Shadow Of The Colossus. Then again, you can always get properly enraged by thinking that this somewhat lacklustre structure has more to do with taking on the rhythm of lumbering set-piece snorefests like God Of War, where spectacle and asset movements are seemingly considered more important than deep-ass stylish technical endurance fighting.

It’s really, really hard to write all of this because Bayonetta is so totally fucking hot but, y’know, it’s true. It’s as much a victim of its AAA aspirations as it is a true contender for such a status and, well, it’s bullshit. Can’t we just have a special edition that’s nothing but fighting all the fucking time with no big, dull boss fights? Or do I have to unlock that?

21

Man! This game is so good. The best way to summarise it would be Mario Kart with a tweaked version of Outrun’s handling and better power-ups. Or Outrun on circuits instead of point-to-point, but set in the ultra-colourful world of Sega when Sega was amazing. Or even it’s F-Zero GX with Outrun’s handling and Mario Kart’s power-ups that aren’t broken. You already know from those sentences whether or not this is the greatest game of all time. You don’t NEED to read a fucking review to know that this game is the game you’ve been waiting for, you can tell from the screenshots. But you have doubt in your heart. I don’t blame you. New Sega is a dangerous beast, and one that we can’t trust unreservedly. But you can trust me, which is why I’m going to show you some FUCKING SHIT games journalism and reassure you that you’re right, you do need this game.

Eurogamer’s Dan Whitehead, a long-standing enemy of truth, justice and joy, gave the game 6 out of 10. He opens with this sentiment -
“it has produced something that lives almost completely in Nintendo’s shadow, copying the Mario Kart template, pasting SEGA stuff over the top and doing almost nothing to move the core ideas forwards.”

So what? Who gives a fuck? It’s a fucking KART RACING GAME WITH SEGA CHARACTERS. If I was looking for progression I’d be ‘playing’ miserable pieces of shit like Heavy Rain. Not every movie should be marked down for not being in French with subtitles. Unless you’re dead inside. What else?

“With the game’s focus firmly on how well you can curve around bends sideways, tracks are either incredibly easy or frustratingly hard depending on how well they accommodate this feature.”
Read that as “there are some tracks that are easy and some that are hard”. Thanks for that.

“Those based on Super Monkey Ball are pure hatred, full of short right-angled corners that jab awkwardly at handling designed to resist the handbrake turn.”
What handbrake turn? There is literally no handbrake in this game. And the Monkey Ball levels are some of the most exciting tracks in the game. If you’re drifting and you LET GO OF THE ACCELERATOR but continue to drift, you drift round those corners with ease, building up boost. Then you can release the boost to realign yourself violently and hopefully slide into the next corner sideways at the speed of Apollo 12 exiting the Earth’s gravity. They’re fucking excellent. The easier tracks seem a little pedestrian when you do understand the drifting, but then you realise they’re really about trying to maintain drift state for as long as possible both entering and exiting the straights and it’s all good again. Someone else mentioned how the right angled corners are a nightmare, I wish I could remember where I read that. LET GO OF THE FUCKING ACCELERATOR YOU CUNTS. Use the speed boosts to change your cornering angles.

“Everything else is much as you’d expect.”
WICKED.

“the ideas get spread too thin and the tracks all tend to favour too many random obstacles over truly ingenious design”
I really couldn’t disagree with this more. There’s nothing on the track that you’re not warned about. Anything about to impact has a shadow marking its entry point, and anything already on the course can be seen from the distance. They’re there to force you to change your racing line on the fly, which you can do because the game warns you, not because they’re random.

And then he goes on about how terrible the missions are, as if you have to play them to enjoy the racing. You don’t. You can ignore them forever.

And the power ups are basically reskins of the Mario Kart ones, but improved versions. There’s no blue shell and the green shell equivalent gets you a slight advantage, not an outright victory from half a lap out. They’re a tweak to a working formula and a succesful tweak at that. To be fair, most people acknowledged this, so my anger is merely Code Orange on this.

This game is incredible, and it flopped at retail. Piece of shit reviews like this one are partly to blame for you being afraid to buy this, because you were afraid that Sumo fucked it up. They didn’t. It’s fucking incredible. Anyone who marks this game down for not being forward thinking or unoriginal has an agenda. That agenda is to show the rest of the world how much they know about games and how they demand that the games they play should be sophisticated and elegant and inventive, but really, sometimes it’s more than enough for your screen to beat your face in with every colour in existence at once and have Akira do handstands on top of a Ferrari while 20ft in the air. Sometimes it’s just totally fucking excellent that a game is simply brilliantly executed. And joyous. And worthy of your money. If you cackle with glee when you’re doing something, then that’s already The Greatest Thing Ever. And Sonic And Sega All-Stars Racing is definitely The Greatest Thing Ever.

Man! Why can’t all games be this pretty? I could walk down corridors like this all day! And why is everyone so beautiful? I was beginning to think that games could only do people with nervous twitches and various forms of mental retardation. I have already had at least three wanks over Lightening saving me from a gang of thugs and then taking me (gently) right there and then. I’ve only had one over Snow, but then he dyes his facial hair. You can tell from the dark shadow under the blonde. An odd choice for his design really, but in Japan you can be that much of a Hoxton cunt and people will still take you seriously.

Is the black guy racist? I can’t tell. The Chocobo in his hair is a bit unhygienic, I think, but everything else about him says he’s a professional. And homeboy carries guns. He’s the only one that carries guns, get me? Because he’s black. Is Square-Enix saying all black people carry guns and are minging? Let’s start a petition! Against Square-Enix, not black people.

The levelling system - it’s pretty! Needlessly so, but after Heavy Rain I couldn’t be more grateful for any sort of artistic flourish. Why does improving the Medic route give me as much HP as going down the Commando route? I don’t quite understand, nor do I understand the impact of going up a level in one type. I do check ahead for skills, that seems pretty important, but beyond I just pick a class to improve at random. Still, it’s all fine because it’s basically incremental changes to what should be BULLSHIT but is actually AMAZING - the Paradigm system.

It should be bullshit, I know. It should be, but it isn’t. Prioritising which sets ups to use depending on what enemies you’re fighting, as well as the restrictions of the characters you’ve been given to use forcing you to learn specific strategies, is FUCKING QUITE GOOD. The choices you make are really simple, but because you have to make your choices so quickly, and because I’ve already died a couple of times in what should be cake walk battles, I’m loving it. I don’t care that it’s not the best RPG system ever, because we’ve already had that - Disgaea. It provides just the right level of engagement. It means you can play for hours and hours without a break, tweak things between battles, experiment, work towards specific goals and just get lost in the constant stream of battles that you willingly activate as you move along endless corridor after corridor. And then suddenly you have 500 points to spend in the crystal levelling system and it’s like Christmas, because you got so lost in the fighting you forgot about levelling up.

This seems like a good time to mention that I’ve not played a Final Fantasy game since FFVII, and then I got as far as the open world and then realised I couldn’t take any more random battles. I fucking hate random battles. And FFXIII isn’t random battles, but it’s exactly the same rhythm as random battles. The only change in flow is that sometimes you wait before triggering an encounter so that you can sometimes get a pre-emptive strike, but really, it’s exactly the same flow. The only difference is the illusion of control. It’s genius, and is almost definitely not new to anyone but me, but I’m time skipping from 7 to 13 so cut me some FUCKING slack.

The more I think about it, the more I’m sure the black guy’s representation is racist.

21 out of 21