My Creepy Little Big Planet Date

I was recently given Little Big Planet 2 for my birthday. A rare novelty because I hardly ever buy new games and certainly not within a month of the game’s release. Sixty dollars is a ridiculous price for a game. It's kind of short but it adds a hell of a lot of new gameplay mechanics. It's almost half 2-D shmup now. In the first Little Big Planet, I ignored the online community in large. I can count the number of times I actually played in the same level with someone on one hand. In about half the levels that there were prize bubbles that required multiple players to get, I figured out some way to get most if not all of them by myself. I'm that kind of online player. In WoW I never joined a guild. Everyone knows If you join a guild, you can go into dungeons and get better loot and equipment. It’s standard procedure. Teamwork or even competition is generally rewarded in video games. The problem is the dual edge sword. You might want to join a guild simply because of the allure of getting fabulous glowing armor with bigger numbers but suddenly you have some guy trying to e-mail you a thirty page Acrobat PDF of rules and regulations you have to adhere to to stay in the guild. Sorry, no. I play video games to have fun. Sometimes that even includes playing an awful game. I don't play video games to subject myself to a bunch of tedious obligations. I like loading the game, doing what I want to do in the game and then turning the game off when I want. From what I had gathered looking at in-game pictures and playing a couple hundred community levels in the first game, the LBP community was largely comprised of furries, goths, emos and shemales probably in the range of 10-18 years old with an evenish gender split. Yeah I know, sounds great, right?

Little Big Planet 2 makes it much easier than the first to just spontaneously end up playing in a level with someone. I started letting people into my games and decided that it wasn't so bad. I even made a couple of friends. Not real friends; people that made friend requests to me. I checked their PS3 profiles and reveled in the fact that I had more trophies than what was probably a couple of thirteen year olds.

I played several levels with, (we'll call them Clingy5150,) who seemed unusually friendly and a little strange in general. Their profile basically said that they could only play on weekends. Sounded like parental rules to me. Whatever, it gives me a big window if I just want to avoid them for some reason.

A week later, I log on and am putting the finishing touches on a level I'm making. Seconds after getting into my level, I get a request from Clingy to join me. Here we go, I thought. The unsolicited pestering at all hours begins. I'm not about to let someone join me in a level I'm creating because they'd either be bored watching me place sound effects in various places or they'd be running around and screwing stuff up. I let the request timeout and continued working. Later when I was bored of building, I wanted to play and decided to ask Clingy to join. He/she did and I sent us to a level which had a multiplayer prize bubble puzzle which I hadn't done yet.

About half way through the level, Clingy starts having self-esteem issues about his/her in-game performance and put on the crying face. I gave them a little reassurance and wonder why I'm having to do this in a video game. They ask if I don't like them anymore. Jeez, I'm trying to have fun here, not immerse myself in relationshit drama. Thinking that this is about me ignoring them earlier, I explain that I was building a level. They seem fine with this explanation. We go into another level and they start having a self image breakdown, complaining about how no one likes them and telling me to be myself. I wasn't really sure what they meant by this.

Once we're back at my pod again, Clingy starts talking about how no one will be their friend. I tell them that I'm their friend and immediately begin to feel weird about it. I'll seriously do just about anything to diffuse awkward situations or at least get them to shut the hell up for two seconds even if it means doing something else that’s awkward…

Clingy says to me, "We're more than just friends." Okay... That was an interesting response. I follow them to their pod and they change the pod view to something more romantic. The term 'cyber' pops into my head. Suddenly I realize that that Little Big Planet literally has everything needed for anyone's elaborate role playing fantasy. Hell, they even let you film movies now. I'm starting to feel rather uncomfortable at this point.

Clingy asks me to kiss them. I paused for a moment. Is this normal? How should I know? Can sack people even do that? Why would they want to? I grabbed them because that’s the one of two interactive capabilities that isn’t violent. I kind of maneuvered the controller around for the head. It had all the eloquence of mashing two sock puppets together.

Well, that felt wrong. Can we... play a level now? After much browsing in the community levels, Clingy finally chose one. Finally! The talking’s over and we can do video games again. The level loads. We get in a car and drive to... a restaurant? What kind of level is this? Clingy sits down at a two chair table and pretends to eat the blocky food which sat there. OH... MY... GOD... I don't know which to be confounded over first; the fact that people make levels where you're supposed to go on a virtual sack person date or the fact that I'm on a virtual sack person date in one of said levels. I've seen some weird-ass levels but this is just... Why do I feel like I'm playing pretend with a little kid? Probably because I am. Either that or it's some grade A chat roulette trolling from a frat boy.

After dinner, we went dancing. Well actually we just flailed our limbs about on a disco dance floor. Then we drove away. Once we were back at Clingy's pod, he/she told me to change my appearance. I was dressed as a male detective from the future, kind of like the agent guy in Heavy Rain only with skin that constantly changes colors so sort of a Rorschach from Watchmen aspect too. Clingy just had a red dress and blond hair. They told me to change to what I looked like when we first met. Okay... I did and they got upset. They said that I didn't look like that. We're both girls now. I distinctly remember being my girl character (which I main as) when we met because Clingy somehow changed my skin color to tan instead of the green plaid I had it set on. He/she also made my entire pod red with stickers. Thanks, Clingy.

It is kind of messed up that you become acquainted with someone and then suddenly they switch genders and start wearing a green space suit with a feathered boa. I looked at all four of my saved costumes and tried to figure out what the hell they were talking about. My options essentially look like the following…

Daria or Enid from Ghost World

Rorschach

Zidler from Moulin Rouge

MCA as he appears in the Beastie Boy's Sabotage video.

Why would they want me to be any of those? Wait, do they think I'm someone else? Because that would make so much sense!

Suddenly two of Clingy's furry friends that he/she was with when I met them, appear in the pod. Oh good, now maybe we can go do something fun. (I never thought I'd be saying that about furries.) I can hear them slapping the hell out of me while I'm typing something out. Clingy says "Stop it. That's my BF."

Okay, I thought. It's way past time to leave. One of the furries responded, "That's a girl." I pressed the power button and tossed my PS3 out the window. Well, that’s enough LBP for today.

Dino Crisis 2

Regina is once again roped into a crisis involving dinos. This time an entire research facility dedicated to researching the same energy that allowed dinosaurs into our time in the last game has disappeared in time. A team is dispatched through a stargate… I mean time gate to recover data and survivors.

Once the game started I realized, hey, I have a shotgun… That’s weird. I got a feel for the controls and noticed that when I aimed the shotgun, a little image of the gun appeared in the HUD with the number 100 in it. Wait, a hundred as in ammunition? A hundred shotgun shells? ONE-HUNDRED shotgun shells? It must be a percentage. When I fired the gun once, the number said ninety-nine. One-hundred shotgun shells. When I press the circle button I do a melee attack with a machete. I restarted the game to look at the start screen again. Yeah… it says “Dino Crisis” on it. Huh… I must have some kind of weird beta version where they accidentally put guns and ammo in it. Moments later, I’m blasting the ever-living fuck out of raptors while they attempt to ambush me as I’m running down a jungle game trail. What the hell’s going on here?

I get points for killing dinosaurs and extra points for higher combo kills. I can use the points at the save point computers to buy new weapons, weapon upgrades, first aid kits and various tools and equipment like armor.

The menu screen has… WHOA! A health bar? It’s even in the heads up display!

And the inventory has item names that make sense and aren’t part of some convoluted six part fetch quest? Are you insane?

And, HOLY SHIT! Some kind of file log where you can reread documents you’ve seen? Am I in the fucking Twilight Zone?

Girl on girl BDSM cut scenes ? …Wait, that didn’t happen.

First person vehicle driven rail shooter segments? Reminds me of the Jurassic Park arcade rail shooters.

What is this? Some kind of underwater segment with underwater weapons and underwater dinosaurs and a pneumatic propulsion system? You get to battle a plesiosaurus boss in an underwater reactor with a torpedo gun!

There is almost a dozen different dinosaurs in the game. Dinosaurs that swim and fly and even just run away when they see you. As far as I care to investigate, all of them are legit too. Even the Giganotosaurus which I had to look up. Yeah, it existed and yeah it IS bigger than a T-rex. In the game you can only kill it with a high powered satellite laser.

There are so many different and well-detailed environments that AREN’T just grey laboratories and loading docks. A lot of stuff looks like retaken Ingen facilities from the Lost World.

There’s a ton of awesome weapons and different things to buy. You probably won’t even get to give attention to all of them. Even the SUB weapons are awesome. Mines, insta firewalls and a Taser knife?

Even the time travel plot is a magnitude more interesting than the story from the first Dino Crisis and I couldn’t even hear half of it because of sound problems. Though I will admit that I actually liked the characters from the first one better, especially Rick.

This game is… fun. I mean the amount of fun is unprecedented and nearly unfathomable. I know it helped significantly to have low expectations in the first place but it’s still hard to understand. It’s like they fired the entire staff from the previous game or something. Dino Crisis 2 is completely different and on an entirely new level than Dino Crisis. It’s like comparing Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4 or Terminator and Terminator Two. And they fixed EVERYTHING. I can only really complain about two things. The fixed camera angles still conceal what’s ahead of you from time to time and the dinosaurs respawn WAY too fast. Basically if you accidentally walk back onto a screen that you just cleared a second ago, All dinosaurs are back. Unless it was a one big dinosaur.

The paramount difference here is that they actually figured out that a franchise named “Dino Crisis” should probability revolve around KILLING DINOSAURS.

Alone In The Dark: Inferno

Alone in the Dark IV: The New Nightmare on PC was the first M rated game I think I ever bought in original packaging. I was too young to obtain it legally from a store. I had to try a couple of different Walmart cashiers before I found one that wouldn’t card me. This was about the time that they implemented those little alarm prompts at checkout for restricted products. You hear the little beep and hope that you picked someone who really didn’t give a shit about store policy and the law.

I remember the game as being pretty scary (experiencing it as a less desensitized 13-14 year-old.) One incredibly cheap but pants-pissing jump scare still stands out in my mind to this day. It was basically the equivalent to watching a screamer on the internet. And it’s at the VERY beginning of the game. It’s like oh shit, maybe I shouldn’t be playing this. At the end of the game it says “Edward Carnby will return.” Well, it took 7 years. I’ve wanted to play the previous games but I can never seem to get them to work on my computer so I guess my only option is…

Edward Carnby wakes up just as New York City begins to erupt in giant annoying black spires and hellspawn of four, count ‘em FOUR, different forms. There’s some kind of satisfying effect on a very primitive part of the brain while you’re watching everything fall apart. Buildings crumble. Vehicles explode and flip up into the air. It’s like HOLY SHIT! Did you see that building? It was all PKREEEEEERRRRRRR BOOOOOOM!!!

There are so many different components shoehorned into this game, (driving, puzzles, platforming, first person shooting, third person everything else,) that every button has three or four different functions depending on what you’re doing. There are quite literally five and a half pages of controls in the manual. Sketchy controls in general coupled with so many different controls sometimes makes it feel like you’re making suggestions or giving advice as opposed to controlling. It’s really easy to accidentally equip or unequip something and have no idea until you try to do something with it. You can end up stabbing a hole in the bottle you’re holding instead of aiming your gun or throwing the bottle in your left hand with the intent of shooting it only to realize that the object in your right hand is not the gun but in fact the flashlight lens.

Easily the worst part of the controls is the melee weapon combat. It’s hard to explain how bad the melee controls are unless you’re actually using them but basically there’s a huge disconnect with timing and proportional movement between the stick and Carnby’s arms. It doesn’t seem like there’s any momentum or follow-through with the swings. It can best be described as trying to wield a baseball bat with your feet. I never say this but I think the melee would be better with the motion controls of the Wiimote… or I guess the Move since I’m playing on Playstation. Or just why can’t it be like it is in Silent Hill Origins where you pick up an object then press button to swing it around or throw it. Hold it down to charge the attack. It’s not fucking rocket science. The other huge problem with melee is that when you’re in attack mode with an object, the right analogue stick is used for swinging. Previously it was the camera control. Now you can’t aim the camera anymore. You have to get the stupid camera situated BEFORE you even think about trying to attack. Then you just hope that you don’t have to REsituate it during battle. The camera’s pretty bad already without it being completely unusable.

For most of the game you’re screwing around in Central Park. The park’s really big so you need to steal cars to get around. (Don’t worry, everyone’s dead and they don’t need them anymore.) Getting around is not as easy as you’d think. There’s a bunch of those stupid black spires and pits and fault lines where the ground is raised into an impassable wall that you have to take a three mile detour to get around. Humanz, (I’m just going to call them zombies because what’s singular for humanz? Human? That’s stupid,) that you pass will often leap unto your car and start pummeling it which for some reason translates to bodily damage. AND THEY DON’T FUCKING COME OFF! You have to either run into something at a high rate of speed which is going to fuck up your car and slow you down big time or just keep driving until they decide to leave. It’s good practice that any time you pass a zombie while in a car to swerve. Just jiggling the sick back and forth as you pass is usually enough to fake them out and get them to misjudge their leap. Yeah, it’s stupid but you’re going to want to do it.

Cars have a tendency to just fall apart while you drive regardless if you run into things or not. Dents grow on the sides as soon as you step in. Then the bumpers will spontaneously fly off. Tiny invisible inconsistencies in the road make your car spin out or nearly flip over on its back. It doesn’t make any logical sense. Also there are no breaks. You can use what is described in the manual as breaks but it doesn’t slow you nearly fast enough which is great for when you’re driving at top speed down the road and suddenly an impenetrable wall of dirt just appears in front of you.

Some of the physics in general are just screwed up. In a segment where you’re supposed to solve puzzles while driving a forklift, I got stuck. You’re supposed to raise this ramp that looks like a random pile of debris with the lift so that you can drive up to a higher level. I ended up just jumping onto the top of the forklift and then jumping onto the next level. After dicking around up there for a while it became apparent that I needed to somehow have the forklift there with me since there were a bunch of large boxes that I needed to move around. The boxes were metal and probably big enough to stuff three to five illegal immigrants in each. Still, I found that I could push a two-high stack around just by running into it with my body. When I finally got the forklift up there, I was surprised to find that trying to lift and place them somewhere I wanted was a real bitch. When you try to move two at once, they just get horribly misaligned and fall over as if the slightest breeze will send them wafting across the room. When you try to stack them one by one, well… they get horrible misaligned and fall over again. It’s like trying to stack two giant beach balls with a hockey stick. It’s actually a LOT easier to just push them around by hand… which you shouldn’t even be able to do! The game’s so broken and anal retentive about some things.

The first time you get in a car, you have to smash open the window with a bat to unlock it. I stood there for five minutes gently tapping the roof of the car and bashing in the door, (the part UNDER the window.) I started to wonder if it was even possible. How hard is it to break a fucking car window with a bat? How do they screw up such a textbook example of interactive environment?

In several places you’re supposed to shine your flashlight with a lens over it so that it projects a symbol. You have to shine it on these invisible markers that you can only see for a few moments when you close your eyes. (Yeah, there’s actually a button dedicated to blinking.) Anyway you have to line up the symbols and hold it there for a while and it has to be PERFECT. If more than three photons are off, it doesn’t work!

The first time you’re supposed to use your spirit vision to see freaky shit happens when you’re trapped in a tiny room with absolutely nothing to do and only one thing to interact with. I turned the game on, played for ten minutes wandering around the room, accomplished nothing and then turned it off again. Wow, that was real fucking fun. The next time I tuned it on, it actually told me what to do. That’s nice because I’m sure as hell not going to think: oh, maybe I should close my eyes. The second time, it happened at the castle and I had no idea what to do there either because it never told me what the hell I was supposed to be doing. (And no e-mail instructions from Sarah do not count because I can barely read that shit on my poor person’s TV.)

In some places there’s living black goo on the ground that you can’t step on or you die instantly. Sometimes you won’t even know it’s there until you jump off of something and land in it. You’re supposed to keep it away by shining the flashlight at it. (Reminds me of those stupid photosaurus’ in the previous game except a lot more fucking annoying.) The problem is that the flashlight only seems to work some of the time and it gives you almost no margin for error. Logic would dictate that if you walked while pointing the flashlight straight down you’d be completely enclosed and protected by a penumbra of light but you aren’t. Trying to get through these areas with just the flashlight will drive you crazy. Just hope that you have a bunch of glow sticks or flares to toss on the ground.

You can make fire bullets and the game encourages you to aim them at the fissures on zombies because it will kill them. But if you do aim at the fissures it never works. I’ve had basically a motionless zombie standing in front of me with the laser sight trained on the fissure while shooting and nothing happens. It’s a hell of a lot more effective to just shoot at the zombies indiscriminately and leave it to chance. Why does everything have to be so finicky?

Running over zombies would be fun if A: They didn’t jump on your car and B: They actually died. It doesn’t matter how many times you reverse and roll back over them, they always get back up. It takes like eight bullets to put the weakest zombie on the ground for any significant amount of time. Still, if you stick around for long enough, they’ll be up and at you again. The only way to kill them is with fire, that is if you can find a way to harness it at the moment.

In your tiny-ass inventory you can create improv weapons, (most of which are useless in one way or another,) out of stuff you find around the park. Nine times out of ten your problem can be solved by throwing a bottle of flammable liquid and shooting it in mid air to make an explosion. You can do stuff like tape a glow stick to a flammable bottle but what the hell’s the point? The glow stick is just going to explode. You can’t even activate the glow stick while it’s on the bottle or beforehand so it won‘t even be glowing when it explodes. Another interesting thing is that you can toss a full bottle of Smirnoff and shoot it to make a John Woo sized explosion but the second you make it into a Molotov cocktail it becomes the biggest waste of flammable liquid in the game. One of the most useful combos is spray can with lighter. It’s ironically more effective than bullets since everything’s so susceptible to fire. You can just go around spraying fire at enemies. This was very interesting to me since it was exactly how I used to kill black widows in my garage as a kid. That is until I almost burned down the damn garage. True story.

The inventory screen is the interior of your jacket. I like how you pull it open like you’re announcing to everyone in the room, “I have a bomb!” The space for items is ridiculously small. On the left you have five slots and on the right you have four. Yeah that may sound like plenty but let me explain. On the left side resides your lighter and that stupid lens. You CAN NOT get rid of them at any time. So you only really have three slots. Your bullets go in one. Well, you need those. Your pointy implement sits in another. You don’t want to get rid of that because knives are hard to find. Okay so there’s really only one space to work with on the left. There are three different objects you can fit there, (rags, tape or bandages.) Forget about rags because bandages keep you from bleeding out when you’re critically injured and can double as a fuse. Tape is crucial for making things but you have to keep those damn bandages. Never drop them or you WILL bleed to death. It’s Murphy’s Law.

On the right it would be wise to always have a medical spray can to heal yourself. You should also have either a second medical spray can or some other flammable spray so that you can light various things on fire. Also it would be really good to have flares or glow sticks for the occasional black goo because if you don’t have them, you’re up shit creek. So that leaves us with…. Oh, one slot. Fantastic! Basically, find the most explosive bottle you can and put it in that slot. Every time you use it, go get another one. And that’s the inventory. It’s so aggravating to be trying to build things like this or just have to go find another bottle of something as soon as you use it because you can only carry one. Okay, drop the bandages and pick up the tape. Drop the Jack Daniels and get the plastic bottle. Oh, the bottle shattered on the ground when I dropped it. Great. Throw the tape away and get the bandages again. Where did they go? I dropped them right here, damn it! Oh and you know what else? The inventory is REAL TIME just like in Fear Effect! It’s not nearly as shitty but it certainly isn’t conducive to spending time to make anything!

One thing I can say I’m grateful for is the ability to hold a flashlight and a gun at the same time which is more than I can say for Doom Guy in Doom 3. In that game you either got to see the enemies OR you got attack them. Edward can even hold two things in his hand AND use the light by putting it on his shoulder.

All and all the game tries to do too much. It just seems like there are hundreds of little unresolved issues everywhere. They should have either dropped one ore two major components to smooth over everything else or just spent more time on it as a whole. It was better than the shitty movie anyway…

Fear Effect

So, Fear Effect for the Playstation ,(at least disk 1), is set in a futuristic CEL shaded Hong Kong. Visually it looks like Bladerunner meets Killer 7. Sounds awesome. So how can they screw this up? When I first played I thought the backgrounds were prerendered with fixed camera angles but when I looked it up I found that it’s actually short clips of looped animation. I had noticed this but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before so I didn’t know what to call it. No wonder this game has to be on four disks. The animated backgrounds look great except that the animations are only like three seconds long. Once you see them loop, (or even freeze), it breaks the immersion. So which is better: stagnant prerendered backgrounds or full motion backgrounds that keep showing the same thing every couple of seconds? Another weird thing about the game is that it’s in letterbox aspect ratio.

While playing, you alternate between controlling three different mercenaries on a team as they try to recover a kidnapped individual. The controls are, to put it mildly, a fucking abysmal pile of horse shit. For starters, the X button is fire. Yes that’s right, the X button; the button that has been ingrained in you as the action button. In third person shooting games there is traditionally an aiming mode that might make X switch to being the fire button for that moment but here it’s just fire plain and simple. So every time you go up to an object you want to investigate, you’re going to end up shooting at it instead. The real action button is triangle which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The square and circle buttons are, get this, your inventory. Yeah… Circle goes forward through your items. Square goes back. What the hell were they thinking? Those four buttons are supposed to be reserved for functions that are important/often used as in actual gameplay and they dedicated half of them to inventory? Lets see, what are we going to need to do a lot of quickly in the heat of battle? Dodging and running? No. Sifting through the various keys that you picked up. That’s going to be the most useful. The shoulder buttons are running, dodging, turning 180 degrees and sneaking. Which ones are which doesn’t matter because you’ll never remember anyway. That’s how intuitive the controls are. You have to actually mentally recall which button did what or just try them until you find it instead of just playing the game.

The controls for movement should be simple and self explanatory but they actually suck too. I don’t know why Sony didn't put analogue sticks on their Playstation controlers until three years after launch. So it’s the new 3D era of games. How do we move in them? Oh I know! A D-pad! That way the player has to zig-zag their character around retardedly and even the simple act of walking through a door takes countless minute adjustments to accomplish. Complain all you want about the fugly three-handed N64 controller but at least Nintendo knew it was time to use sticks. The game actually has support for the analogue stick controller but when you use it... I don't know but somehow the control becomes even worse which is just divide-by-zero mindblowing.

Luckily I'm playing on an emulator so I have free reign of the control assignment. I remapped EVERY SINGLE BUTTON save for the sneak button and the movement controls. And the only reason I didn't change the movement controls is because there's no other option than to have them shitty. Immediately after doing the game designers' job for them, the game is suddenly a significant degree better. That's not to say it doesn't suck in many other ways.

Going back to the so important inventory with two buttons dedicated to it, you have to scroll through it one item at a time in real time. This it really great for when you run out of bullets in the middle of a firefight and need to switch to a different gun with more ammo. You just have to stand there like a dumbass, taking hits until you either find something useable or die. I guess you could roll around if you’re good as multitasking but that presents its own problems.

The dodge or roll move is important because you can quickly distance yourself from an enemy and also become unhittable while rolling. What sucks about this is that you have almost no control over which direction you’re rolling. If you’re really careful you can roll straight forward or straight back. Everything else is completely random, from the direction you roll to the direction you’re facing when you stand up.

Whenever you come across a locked door that you happen to have the key to, you have to dig the key out of your inventory to use it and usually every subsequent time you want to go through that door. It's such a small thing but come on. I have the key. You know I have the key. The key's not good anywhere else. Just USE the damn key. I don't have to tell you to keep breathing or to tie your shoes periodically. It's just a tedious waste of time.

The other thing about the inventory is that it pops up on screen when you press the buttons for it. If you don't do anything quick, like in two seconds, it disappears and resets at the first item, making you have to find whatever item you were looking for AGAIN. There's no reason why it has to be like this. It could pause the game when I'm using the inventory. It could have its own screen. It could let me see all of the items at once. It could stay on the screen until I tell it to go away. This is what the screen looks like during gameplay.

Notice anywhere where they might be able to squeeze in an inventory? Like maybe half the fucking screen?

The health bar in the game (and the thing that the game is pretty much named after) is basically a fear meter kind of like in Clock Tower. It starts out green and when it reaches solid red and you get hit, you die. Several things affect your fear differently for better or worse, or so it's alleged. I’ve read a lot of explanations on the internet regarding how the fear meter works and they all say different things, most of which I think are bullshit. I know one thing we can all agree on though is that getting shot increases your fear. The only way you can get healed significantly as far as I’ve experienced is when you reach an unknown prescribed spot in the game like when you switch characters or finish a large segment/puzzle.

It’s hard for me to be legitimately upset at the health system when I don’t know exactly what the official game manual says about it so I went to replacement docs and downloaded a PDF of it. What it said is that in order to lessen your fear, (heal yourself), you can sneak kill enemies, do well in gunfights, solve puzzles and discover important items.

Sneak kill enemies: Bullshit. I sneak killed two enemies in a row with a red fear meter and guess what color it was afterwards… It was fucking red.

Do well in gunfights: True. I saw it happen. But you know what? I didn’t need it. Know why? BECAUSE I DID WELL IN THE GUNFIGHT.

Solve puzzles: True, but that’s basically the established healing checkpoints that I mentioned.

Discover important items: True but essentially you discover important items by solving puzzles so…

Things that increase your fear besides bullets in your head are running out of ammo and being detected by enemies.

Running out of ammo: As if running out of ammo wasn’t bad enough in and of itself, they have to punish you for it?

Being detected by enemies: Yes, sometimes it’s possible to pull off a sneak kill but most of the time it’s not. And yes, the enemies are probably going to “detect” me when I shoot several bullets right in their fucking face!

All and all, I hate the lifebar. It’s deceptive, unreliable and needlessly complicated. But what’s worse is that the way it punishes or rewards you basically equates to strapping weights on a drowning person because they’re failing to stay afloat or strapping life vests to someone in the desert for doing a good job not drowning.

The ever-present drawback of fixed cameras in an action game is that you can’t see where the hell you’re going. Every time you’re about to transition to the next screen, you could literally be instantaneously catapulted into a gunfight with half a dozen enemies with absolutely no warning and then just die. That’s not entirely true. Usually your fear meter pops up when you’re about to get ambushed. But still, sometimes you’ll find yourself having to mow down wave after wave after wave of enemies that are presumably piling out of some clown car just off screen. You have no idea where they’re coming from or how many there are. If you want to sneak up on someone, you basically have to go around every corner sneaking in the assumption that someone’s going to be there.

There’s a ton of ways to die instantly in Fear Effect. Getting electrocuted, falling off of something, getting burned. A lot of these things are so petty and aren’t even identifiable as deathtraps until you kill yourself with them. This game is a real dick. It just loves to sucker punch you with endless instakill scenarios, a lot of them coming out of fucking nowhere with no warning or explanation so you’d have to be precognizant just to not die. Diffuse the bomb! Run from the explosion! Jump quick! Now! Now! Now! Escape the guards! Look out! Faster! Switching characters! Everyone’s shooting at you! Watch out for the water! Don’t shoot that! Boom! Oh, look at that! Ha ha! You died! Try again, asshole! I'm suddenly reminded of this.

There are parts in the game that slow to a snail’s pace just because you’re constantly having to reload the game, play to the shitty death part and try again by killing yourself there enough times until you can figure out what the hell it wants you to do there. (If you watched that first video, that wasn’t even all of them.

The same step here/don’t step here puzzle keeps reappearing I don’t even know how many times. They work so great too with the terrible depth perception and finicky controls.

Yeah, this is about what that looks like to me.

At the end, you descend into hell to defeat the King of Hell. (Honestly I didn’t see it coming.) Out of the three characters, one is already dead and now you have to choose who to play as and who dies since they’re having a disagreement about how to proceed. I chose to play as the girl, not because I supported her ideals but because I knew she had more guns and ammo at the time… Also two arms.

Not so good for dual-wielding. I was also mystified as to how he even reloaded his guns. I didn’t know at the time that there was a different boss depending on who you chose. The guy’s boss is actually a lot easier. Hana’s boss however is a combat nightmare. The only way you can hurt him is by burning paper money that randomly appears. (I have no idea.) As I’ve already explained, having to use the inventory in battle is like trying to trim your toenails by kicking a big rock repeatedly. So basically survive long enough to grab the money, maneuver yourself into the always tiny interaction zone next to a torch, quickly find the money in your inventory while being raped and select it before the inventory disappears. Even after I could accomplish all of that, it would most of the time fail for reasons I’ll never understand. The only thing I could conjecture is that it was because I got hit right before using it but it’s not like I have any control over that!

Borderlands + DLC

Once I cleaned the ridiculously large accumulation of dust out of my tower, I was able to play games on it again without them lagging far outside of playability. I started on the thickly outlined, cel-shaded FPS RPS Borderlands to break my long dry spell of PC gaming.

In the beginning you can choose one of four characters. It’s your stereotypical fare spanning from a vainy steroid- ridden meat sock to a pair of tits stacked on an ass. I was going to go for the soldier but I always end up doing that because it’s safe. So instead I chose the Hunter.

Each character gets three skill branches to develop. Out of those I went with Sniper first. Each character also gets a special ability. Mine was… Well I got this attack falcon… hawk? Anyway the cool thing about it is that you can just send it out and it’ll go find the closest enemy and kill them if it’s strong enough. You can just sit behind a rock while your bird goes and kills people. Well, only one at a time and it has a half minute cool down. Sometimes though, the bird will get stuck somewhere or just take a retarded amount of time to attack. I’ve literally stood for several seconds watching some guy come at me with an axe over the horizon, the bird swarming around him waiting and waiting… and waiting until I eventually have to take action by blowing his head off with a shotgun. Thanks for nothing stupid bird.

The world is obviously an homage to Mad Max even going so far as to insert actual references to the movies. The only problem with working with that material is that you can only take about two hours of playing in a humongous desolate desert junkyard before your brain goes numb. And it’s that way for the whole damn game. Everything looks the same; boring. The only way you can tell where you are is by constantly bringing up the map screen. Not even the heads up compass is very reliable thanks to the terrain layout. Luckily you have outposts which you can teleport between which takes off a lot of the travel time. That is if you can remember which name corresponds to which monotonous junk pile.

In a double whammy with the repetitive landscape, you also have repetitive enemies. There are maybe like six different ones? That’s excluding the ones that are just larger versions or other ones or different color swap elemental types. Another annoying thing is that sometimes the enemies will get so close to you, you won’t even be able to shoot them. Especially the midgets. Why the hell are there so many midgets? It’s almost like forty percent of the planet’s population is composed of midgets! Midgets who run at you screaming and giggling!

At some point you get the ability to drive cars which would be a lot more useful if they didn’t handle like a morbidly obese man with unicycles for legs. And rest assured if there’s only one obstacle within twenty miles of you, you *will* hit it. As if just driving wasn’t shitty enough they make you do vehicle combat to. It’s awkward and difficult enough to take out just one other vehicle but right after you do, two others will spawn directly behind you from out of fucking nowhere and blow your ass into outer space.

Now where did I park the car? Oh yeah, I left it hovering five feet off of the ground outside of the prison.

The whole objective of the game is to find “The Vault.” The Vault is supposedly some giant treasure that only opens once every two-hundred years. While you play, you take on missions to gain experience points, special weapons and money. Some missions have to do with the main quest. Most don’t. You’re main reason for doing them, aside from the three reasons I just stipulated, is so you don’t have to listen to someone jabbering in your ear every fifteen seconds about new missions available over in Fetid Stinkhole. Seriously, I only need to be told once. If I don’t break my legs to get over there ASAP it means that I’m doing more important things. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP. The constant harassing could have been easily replaced with a simple map symbol or highlight that appears.

There are guns everywhere. You’re constantly on the lookout for better ones trying to compare and see which numbers are higher. This one does a lot more damage but the accuracy sucks. This one has a higher fire rate but only holds two shells. It came to the point where all of the numbers started to blur together and I just stopped caring. I hadn’t found better weapons in six hours of gameplay so why continue wasting my time? I didn’t even pick up expensive stuff to sell it because my inventory was always full of situational weapons. Hell, I never even carried anything to heal myself with. I always just used the health regenerating shields.

SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>

Eventually you get to the Vault. The final boss which was hiding inside it, though huge, is quite literally the easiest boss in the entire game. I’m not sure if I understood everything I was supposed to at the end but what I took away from this was that the final boss was stupid easy and there was absolutely nothing worthwhile in the Vault… Awesome.

END>>>SPOILERS>>>END>>>SPOILERS>>>END>>>SPOILERS>>>END>>>SPOILERS>>>

The Borderlands DLC is a mixed bag. The ones I played included The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, Mad Moxxie’s Underdome Riot and The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned.

Right off the bat Armory loses points for having driving central to the gameplay. My computer started lagging like… a morbidly obese man with unicycles for legs because for whatever reason they decided to make the environments huge. It’s not like there are a lot of enemies on the screen or the environment is extra complicated, they just added eighty percent more expanse of sand and brown rock texture.

T-Bone Junction is the only town in the area. The whole place is extremely linear which is just great to have when you’re already dealing with repetitive terrain and enemies. From there you can only go either north or south on the freeway. Why there’s a freeway, I have no idea. It’s been road blocked in several locations by the soldiers of the Crimson Lance. Every few times you have to get out of the car and fight your way to some gate controls. Luckily once they’re all open, they stay open.

After playing for about two hours, I really wanted to quit. The problem was that I had yet to see an outpost, you know, the things that let you teleport between places you’ve already been to. I kept seeing new places and then checking the map looking for outpost icons so that I could be sure I could get back quickly. I jumped the car off of the ramp and made it inside the prison which is part of the main quest. Then I just turned off the game because I figured that There was no way I couldn’t have passed at least one outpost.

Once I had acquired the constitution to sit through another session of Borderlands, I ran it again and loaded my file. Much to my chagrin, I found myself spawning at fucking T-Bone Junction. As it turns out, there are no outposts *anywhere* in Armory except at T-Bone Junction. In case it’s not clear how incredibly terrible this is, here’s a little map which simplifies the problem.

Every single time you load the game, you’re going to have to drive the car and/or walk/fight through all that shit completely over again. So basically never turn the game off until it’s finished. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more repetitive, it does. What the hell where they thinking?

So after driving down the same highway for the thirtieth time, (unless you habitually alt + tab the game into your tray or let your machine overheat if you’re on a consol), you get to the secret armory. Then you fight General Knoxx which is a real bitch when you’re doing it alone. He gets to use a giant mech suit and several waves of minions. It’s actually very similar to the final fight in Avatar…

You know, it just occurred to me that the Borderlands planet is also called Pandora. Holy shit! It’s the same planet! Just after the inevitable nuclear holocaust carpet bombing that the Na’vi signed up for after they drove the military and mining company away.

Once he’s dead you have to go blow up the armory. You’re also supposed to loot it but for some bullshit reason, you have to start the two minute countdown *before* you loot it. Then you have to loot it quickly and escape. I of course didn’t find anything in one and a half minutes that I cared about or if I did didn’t have nearly enough time to digest the spreadsheet of numbers and stats in order to figure it out. You barely have enough time to fully open five chests and take nothing.

The Underdome is just what you’d expect, a bunch of tourney shit. So I don’t care.

Last but not least; the Zombie Island of Doctor Ned. This is by a WIDE margin the best thing in Borderlands. For one, it’s not in a fucking desert.

I don’t even need to say any more. You already get my point. It’s on an island with a spooky deserted mining and logging camp that became overrun with zombies. The whole thing is very tongue in cheek and actually funny. The beginning cinematic is narrated by Marcus who narrated the first cinematic. I kept having to remind myself that he wasn’t Strong Bad. Doctor Ned is actually Doctor Zed with a mustache… glued over his surgical mask. Everything generally has a much sillier air than the rest of the game. The level design kind of makes it feel like a more fanciful Painkiller.

The bad things are; still no more than one outpost. I don’t even mind so much since this area is a lot smaller than Armory, making getting around less aggravating and tedious. I was over-leveled for the area. What can you do? Most of the enemies are just zombies. Lots and lots and lots of zombies. Every time you get a zombie headshot, the zombie drops a brain. The brains are labeled as mission items but there’s never any reason as far as I’ve seen to collect them. I don’t know why they exist. Still, If the game had been a lot more like this, it would have been much less mediocre.

Drake's Fortune FAQ

1. Why doesn’t Drake run at a pace that indicates that he would like to live?

2. Who the hell is shooting me?

3. MORE climbing shit?

4. What kind of grenade beeps?

5. Why is the aiming suddenly inverted for the vehicle segment?

6. Why are exploding barrels only identifiable as exploding barrels after you’ve already killed everyone around them?

7. Why does it take indefinitely longer for someone to train a gun with a laser sight, (a tool that makes aiming easier,) on me than it does someone to train a gun without one?

8. Legible ancient books?

9. In the humid jungle?

10. Really?

11. Where the fuck do I go?

12. Is *this* where I go?

13. Is *this* where I go?

14. How on earth did you make such terrible quick time events?

15. Is *this* where I go?

16. Do I HAVE to drive the waverunner again?

17. Where are all these exploding barrels coming from?

18. An exploding barrel factory?

19. That feeds into the river?

20. What kind of gun is Navarro using there at the end?

21. Some kind of magical sniper shotgun perhaps?

Infamous

In Infamous you play as a Cole McGrath, a guy who has electrical superpowers thrust upon him in a Marvel-esque fashion, acquired through the activation of a device known as the “Ray Sphere” which also causes a humongous explosion destroying a large portion of the city. You crawl out of the crater as the sole survivor and dust yourself off.

As if that wasn’t bad enough the whole city becomes quarantined due to a plague outbreak. In a ridiculously short period of time the sociopolitical power within shifts to three factions or gangs which operate almost like they’re in some kind of urbanized version of The Road Warrior.

The main focus of the game is to reacquire the Ray Sphere and either destroy it or use it to make yourself more powerful.

The first cool thing you notice while playing, (well, besides being able to electrocute things,) is that no matter how high of a building you jump from, you don’t get injured.

You run your first mission and then get introduced to the first gang. Then you make enemies with them. Then suddenly for the rest of the game you can’t go anywhere or do anything without being shot at. Seriously, if you’re running down any given street and there’s less than two guns shooting at you, it’s your lucky day. Needless to say, it gets really old really fast. You’ll be minding your own business trying to climb a building to reach a blast shard or a mission start point and the bullets will be pelting you, slowly chipping away at your sanity. People on rooftops from half a mile away with impossibly perfect aim. It’s like trying to play World of Warcraft, (or really anything,) with someone sitting next to you poking you hard in the ribs every ten seconds. And it always has the potential to just keep escalating and escalating. You’ll end up having to reenact the entire hospital climax from Hardboiled just because you took a slight detour to grab one blast shard.

There are primary missions and then there are side missions. All missions give you experience points which you use to upgrade your powers. The side missions also help you take over territory in the city which will clear areas of gang members, significantly reducing the amount that you get shot at in that area and believe me, you will want to do every single one. You will want to launch a genocide. One can only take being jabbed in the ribs for so long before one wants to rip the person’s finger off and ram it through their eye socket.

Some missions are good or evil and some have choices that you must make along the way that will help either align you as evil or good. It’s a long process becoming totally good or evil. The different results are the game ending, your powers, your appearance and things that happen as the story progresses. The city changes somewhat accordingly. If you’re evil, people will shout threats at you on the street and even throw rocks or take a swing at you which is silly because if you play the game anything like me, hitting you with a rock is going to be the last thing they ever do.

The problem I have with the missions is that they get repetitive sometimes. You go into the sewer over and over to restore power to parts of the city. Out of like the forty side missions there are only about six different scenarios which just get copy and pasted.

Your motive to go into the sewers, besides being able to recharge yourself in the city with the power back, is getting new powers. Every time you go in the sewers you get a new power, all of which use electricity in some different way. You can throw shock grenades, ( yeah I don’t know how they work either.) There’s something which is basically the equivalent of a lightning ball rocket launcher. Both are very fun to use if you don’t mind blowing up every car and pedestrian within a two block radius.

There’s a psychokinetic push but it’s not called that because it’s electrical again… somehow. My first time playing through, I practically forgot this move even existed. My second time playing through I learned just how awesome it was. Why waste time shooting someone on the roof when you can just shove them off. You can even kill someone by rolling a car over on them. The weird thing about it being a fairly short ranged attack is that you might try to push an enemy who’s a little too far away and they’ll only stumble backward slightly. The car behind them however will be ripped from the ground like a styrofoam cup in a hurricane. What’s with that? If I’m trying to use my powers to defeat an attacker, it’s difficult but if I use them to make a pointless spectacle, then they work great?

There’s a precision electrical bolt which is basically just a sniper mode. Time slows down and the camera zooms in over your cursor which has suddenly adopted some kind of head repelling power. Anything that’s not a headshot might as well have been shot at the ground. The other reason you don’t want to miss is because it uses a stupid amount of energy. Three or four shots and you’re about depleted.

One of the more interesting powers is the polarity shield which is basically a transparent shield that you make in front of you. You can steer it around like the camera at where the gunfire is coming from. It doesn’t block explosions or RPGs or melee attacks or even point blank gunfire which blows. But what’s worse is that while you’re desperately trying to steer the shield in between you and wherever the bullets are coming from, Cole is trying to die. He stands with his head and legs completely unprotected and doesn’t even try to shield them. So if the enemy’s above or below you with a non planar trajectory you’re screwed. There is also no good way to run while shielding your back and that out of every possible scenario is the one you want most of all.

When a mission effects your karma negatively or positively it sometimes seems random with no relevance to what the morality factor actually was. If you’re evil, restoring the power makes you more evil but if you’re good, restoring the power makes you more good. Eliminating crime throughout the city is considered neutral. Healing wounded pedestrians makes you good but if you bio leech an enemy, (kill him to completely recharge your own energy,) it makes you bad. But at the same time if you beat the enemy to within an inch of his life, (AKA on the ground and no longer a threat,) then kick him off of the roof, killing him out of spite, it has no effect on karma. The good counterpart of bio leech on an enemy is arc restraint… which doesn’t do shit to help you.

At one point in the story you have to make a decision to either save your girlfriend or five doctors.
So which one is the evil route? Well it turns out that saving your girlfriend is evil. I have a problem with this. Maybe saving her was not in the interest of the greater good but I don’t think it makes you evil. The first time I played through, I was trying to save her but I accidentally climbed the building with the doctors and she died. Funny how such a stupid mistake can be made when it’s night and you’re being shot at while under stringent time constraints. The second time I played it, I chose the correct building and… it wasn’t her. It was a decoy. The bottom line is that you can’t save your girlfriend. Well that’s a load off of my mind.

To get around the city, you basically run everywhere which is fine most of the time since you can run pretty damn fast. You can climb almost anything which has its own set of annoyances. In Uncharted your parkour exploits are always fraught with extraneous and confusing bullshit. Where do I go now? Is this a ledge? Is that a ledge? Do I jump to that jumbled mass of vines? Okay, I’ll try. Oh no, it was just scenery. Now I’m dead and have to do the whole thing over again for the eleventh time. Man, I love this!

In Infamous you have the opposite problem. If you press the X button you jump into the air. It also activates a super-powered neodymium magnet inside you, making you gravitate to the nearest edifice where you become molecularly bonded to the architecture. Sure it makes climbing a building easier but inevitably when you have three semiautomatic RPGs and a gun turret pummeling you mercilessly, you’re going to want to get off of the damn wall. Pressing the O button is supposed to make you drop and it does… two feet down to the next ledge. Then you press it again and again and again and again, slowly working your way down until you eventually die from the gunfire. The other option is to try and jump away from the wall which either produces similar results or causes you to attach yourself to something else like a telephone pole or the building across the alley. When you’re trying to dodge bullets in the street, you always end up ducking behind a car or grabbing on to shit when all you want to do is just run the fuck away. Why is it so difficult to let go of a building or run?

Occasionally at super critical moments you will fail to grab on to something you were clearly close enough to grab. Sometimes you go to an edge and press O and you can’t drop down. Sometimes you can’t walk over a slightly convex surface or in between two random objects. Sometimes you need to climb an object which was obviously forgotten about when they were handing out climbing protocols.

Whenever you enter a new area, you get a bunch of new assholes with new guns and basically have to start from square one. It’s frustrating because your new enemies will always be much stronger than your old ones which greatly diminishes your sense of growing power. As you grow stronger, things just get harder. I know there is supposed to be a difficulty curve in video games but at no point do you ever feel powerful. You always feel like the underdog.

Now that you’re in the new area the people take three precision lightning bolts through the head to kill, plus they’re invisible half of the time, plus there are flying grenade launchers which also turn invisible, plus random proxy mines on roof tops. The more powerful you get, the weaker you feel. If you want to feel powerful you basically have to beat the game and turn the difficulty on easy.

At least the gangs in the Neon District and Historical District have heads to shoot. The other jackasses look like amorphous piles of garbage ambling down the sidewalk.

Water kills you. I don’t believe they mention this at any time in the game or even the manual so you just sort of have to figure it out the hard way. I don’t really get *why* it kills you. You’re obviously immune to electrical shock already so why would water make a difference? Maybe it makes you short circuit like a toaster in a bathtub or something.

Sometimes when you die in water, the controller has to vibrate full throttle for half an hour before you can play again. I hate this. The controller is vibrating about sixty percent of the time while playing. It vibrates when you’re hit with bullets or explosions or landing on the ground or shooting lighting or having hallucinations or a train’s passing by or you’re riding on the train, or you’re electrical capacity is being upgraded or you’re grinding on a power cable or the railway, which unfortunately is about the fastest way to get around.

I don’t know what other people think of controller vibration function but I find that it irritates me more than… whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be doing. It’s kind of helpful sometimes to have a little extra feedback so that you know when you’re being attacked but for the rest of the time, it’s either annoying or I couldn’t care less. It’s not fun to hold the controller when it’s vibrating and fighting to escape my grasp. Maybe I’m weird that way but whenever I grind the railway for a significant distance, I just put the controller on the floor until I think I’m almost to my destination. It’s either that or hold it until my hands go numb. The worst part is that the game has no way to turn off the vibration. Trust me, I looked.

In the end everything is revealed to you about the plot involving the Ray Sphere and it’s one big spoiler. After you’ve watched the credits, you’re free to just screw off and do whatever you want, which is great if you’re a completion whore like I am. On a related and bizarrely introspective note, as I was slowly grinding for points so that I could get my last power upgrade, healing the same people and killing the same respawn bad guys, I realized something. Empire City is purgatory.