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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Videogames Thread 3 - Dark & Gritty Subtitle of Publisher Dullness

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22:07 / 27.05.05

Sand> I don't disagree at all. You already know how pointless I think arguments about hardware are, even when that hardware's materialised. And if people really *have* to do it, you'd think they'd come up with something just a little more original than just yelling "OMG teh Sony LIARS" at everything.

I think writing the FFVII tech demo off as "pre-rendered" without any actual evidence to back that claim up is painfully obvious trolling, though, especially given that the words "tech demo" can mean anything you want them to.

Also, I'm comparing it to the Killzone 2 stuff - which is so obviously unrealistic as to be insulting - and the FF vid comes off as far more believable. Primarily because it's not pretending to be footage of a playable game, unlike the Killzone nonsense, but also because it's noticably less spectacular, and if you could expect anyone to be able to get the most impressive visuals out of a piece of Sony hardware at launch it'd have to be SqEnix. If they were just going to create the most insanely detailed bit of pre-rendered footage they could and then try and pass it off as PS3-standard, you'd think they'd aim higher than that.

And it doesn't look a million miles away from what's claimed to be footage of Dead or Alive 4 on the 360, which is another reason to not immediately write it off as a fake.

00:10 / 29.05.05

MGS3 keeps getting better. SPOILERS again.

Make your way into a Russian base disguised as a scientist, and use a hankie covered in choloroform and a fake cigar that puffs out sleeping gas to take the inhabitants down! Capture poisonous snakes or scorpions alive and throw them at enemies!

Best bit so far, though - epic battle with a 100+ year-old sniper boss, where you've got no equivalent weapon and have to silently make your way around to his position (once you've discovered it by either following his footprints, looking for the glare of the sun off his scope or using your directional microphone to listen out for him running/breathing/talking to himself) in order to do him any damage. Moments of genius - and the stuff I'll be pointing to in future, should anybody ever ask me exactly why I think that the Metal Gear games are head and shoulders above nearly anything else - come with the alternative methods of beating him.

If you're quick enough off the mark after an earlier cut scene, you can take out the soldier pushing his wheelchair, leaving him defenseless and allowing you to kill him a couple of hours before you're even supposed to get to the boss battle with him, avoiding it altogether, or else you can get into the big sniping battle, save the game and just turn your PS2 off and leave the game alone for a week (or else simply fiddle the console's internal clock to make it think that a week's passed). When you load your game back up, the dude's died of old age in the meantime!

I re-read an old interview with Kojima the other day, back from when MGS1 had just received its UK release, and he was saying how he wanted the game to be more than just the code on the disc. It should involve the box, the player, the television, the controller, the physical, real-world things, too. Three games in and he's *still* inventing entirely new ways to make this shit happen, and liberally peppering his games with them.

nedrichards is confused

15:18 / 31.05.05

LEGO Star Wars is actually a really, really good game. Some people have criticised it for being too easy and short. For me, this is not a problem, I have a hard enough problem getting time to play games at all that I'd actually like to finish a few any time. And anyway that sort of carping really misses the point of the game and how it's structured. Yes there are infinite lives but at it's heart the thing's a high scores game like a shooter and the studs you lose from dying really hurt your chances of getting those coveted unlockables. It's just a game that's accessible to all skill levels and that you can play with a variety of different approcaches and goals. I see no harm in that.

Plus it's superfun and witty really amping up the whole, 'you are 5, this is going on in your bedroom as you re-enact the stories' vibe. Something that is frankly very dear to my heart. Also it takes the space battle at the start of RoTS and turns it into the most transparent homage to Panzer Dragoon Orta I've seen for a while. There are just a thousand little touches like that which makes all the difference between a game that is made with love and whose creators cared about the player, and one where they're just going through the motions. A big up to Travellers Tales for that one.

15:18 / 09.06.05

Fuckeroonie! I finally got the PSX disc swap trick to work! Final Fantasy Tactics, motherfucker!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

22:17 / 09.06.05

In a scant few hours, San Andreas will be out on the Xbox. Social life begone!

04:51 / 10.06.05

Spatula, my friend, I too share your love for all things MGS. Have you played the upgraded version of the first Solid game for the Gamecube? Beautiful stuff, even more great in-game 4th wall smashing. The fight against Psycho Mantis was especially trippy.

Anyway, some of that stuff has got to be my favorite part of 3.
Spoiler...
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When you're fighting The End, go into his area, save the game (ignore the warning you get saying NOT to do this) and either wait a real-time week or set your system's clock forward a week. Load that game back up, and you'll find that the fight with The End has become a lot easier.
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end spoiler

For games I'm playing right now, I've gone back and started FFVII again. Great game, even with Barret's constant "Hooked on Ebonics worked fo' me!" lessons.

12:14 / 10.06.05

Yeah, the battle (or not) against The End sums up the entire game perfectly - the freedom, the sense of humour, the way it rewrites what you're allowed to do in a game. I've been playing through the entire thing again in order to try and open up some more of the secret stuff (stealth suit, here I come) and I've just passed that section.

There are some other little tricks similar to the whole 'avoid The End' thing that I don't know if you've noticed. Stuff like destroying food stores with TNT so that the enemy troops end up starving, allowing you to chuck poisoned food at their feet and take them out quickly and silently, or taking out the parked Hind at the one jungle base to prevent it from bothering you on the climb up the mountainside later on.

Not played the Cube remake of the first game, no. I'm a little put off by a review I read that said that the rejigged and extended cinematics tend to spoil the flow. I also love the purity of the original - the fact that aiming is more difficult because you can't do it in first-person means that it's an entirely different experience than the sequel. In 2 I tend to wait until an enemy is isolated, then tranq him in the head. In 3 I generally snipe from a distance, or create diversions. In the original version of the first, though, the difficulty in aiming accurately means that I focus on enemy patrol routes a lot more and either try and sneak past without touching them or else get right up behind and snap a few necks. I think the addition of first-person aiming in the Cube remake would just mean that I ended up playing it like 2, robbing it of its individuality.

13:03 / 10.06.05

That's the main concerns that I had when playing Twin Snakes. It's that fundamentally, the levels are designed for the kind of gameplay mechanic offered by the first game. The additions were developed for MGS2 which is a different game altogether, retrofitting them into the first game kind of breaks it. Both guards and the CCTV cameras are positioned for working with a top down view and the akward aiming. The inclusion of first person aiming alone just destroys all of that, the tank hanger at the beginning of the game being a prime example. You can pretty much take out every guard and camera in that room from the gantry before there's even a possibility of being spotted.

The cutscenes seemed to pull it in the wrong direction too. Snake seems a bit too much of a completely incredible action hero, hopping on missles fired at him and the like. Whereas when I played it on the PSX it seemed to walk the knife edge between believability and the ridiculous just right.

None of that is to say that there's not a lot still to enjoy in the game, but it's kind of telling to me that I 've only played through it once in all the time I've had it.

MGS3 is a game I find it hard to talk about, because I really don't know where to begin with what I love about it. Something I admire is that though it's not a very long game it is an incredibly deep one. Within the short space between beginning and end, you can do pretty much as you please and are positively encouraged to experiment. It's almost like if you think two gameplay elements can be tried out against each other to produce some effect, then they will.

I love.....

SPOILER SPACE
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As Raidenovich: Punching guards and scientists in the face, hiding in the box and generally having the run of Grozny Grad.
Oh, and have you tried saving and then reloading when you're in the prison cell after the obligatory MGS torture scene?
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13:16 / 10.06.05

It might be worth holding off on talking about this any further until the new forum is set up - you're right, Mel, there's an awful lot to discuss. Dunno whether we should have a MGS3-specific thread or one that covers the entire series, though. Thoughts?

13:28 / 10.06.05

I would say it's possibly a good idea to have both.

I can see as good a discussion coming from opinions on Kojima's evolving game design ethos as I could from a "what do you get if you cross crocodile mask with a Dobermann Pinscher?" one.

10:46 / 11.06.05

I just managed to play San Andreas for the first time as well... (borrowed PS2).

Man, that's fun! After a long day at work, it's so nice to come home and just drive down the highway at high speeds... with the occasional drive-by of course...

I'm Rick Jones, bitch

16:01 / 11.06.05

I was totally right.

16:08 / 11.06.05

Everybody already totally knew that the hardware wasn't finished. This is not news. Nevertheless, here's your biscuit.

18:35 / 11.06.05

The Emperor truly has no clothes.

18:47 / 11.06.05

What interests me, though, is that there hasn't been much discussion on the implications of showing fake footage at major functions. Something which is becoming increasingly common is met with either; a apathetic shrugging of the shoulders or a vindicatory "I TOLD U! LOLZ".

Do stunts like this sign a trend of conventions being increasingly devalued? You go to a show expecting, or at least accepting a buffed/tarted up version of the companies product, and instead you get a RealDoll. It looks like a farce and I don't think enough people are taking this kind of deception seriously.

19:45 / 11.06.05

Because it's always been the case, I suppose, so everybody who follows this stuff expects it. You can trace it back to the first home consoles, where the game boxes would display screenshots from the arcade versions. That sort of dishonesty was probably at its peak when the C64 came out, with the Amstrad and Spectrum versions of games always featuring the more colourful, more detailed images from Commodore's machine.

I think it's also tied into the way that the industry exaggerates fact as a matter of course. The stats that get thrown around about new hardware are always... economical with the truth. Not lies, but not entirely accurate either. Things like the infamous PSX 'dinosaur' demo. Yeah, it looks bloody lovely. Now let's see it running at exactly the same level of detail with full backgrounds, collision detection, AI, a player interface - let's see it in a game. Doesn't happen. That doesn't mean that it's not an accurate representation of the console's power. You could probably have had that dinosaur in a game's cut-scene somewhere, provided that all it was doing was sitting there, just as it was in the demo.

Oh, and the press. Remember how the tabloids were spunking over the Emotion Engine? Games that will make you really feel something! Well, no. Not without anybody writing a story that'll make you feel something, or designers creating characters you care about it won't. But hey, that's the press for you. A bunch of ignorant divvies who take backhanders to copy the contents of press releases into their columns rather than doing any research. Or thinking.

It's not a shrug of my shoulders - I think it's despicable behaviour - but to try and make out that there's only one company passing untruths around is plain dumb. Gears of War, anyone?

I still stand by what I said about the FFVII tech demo, though. First up, it's clearly labelled as a tech demo. Secondly, it's clearly a non-interactive sequence, and thirdly, it's signifcantly less 'OMG teh pictures!' than the Killzone demo, which quite obviously *is* a pile of bullshit.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:06 / 11.06.05

Not without anybody writing a story that'll make you feel something, or designers creating characters you care about it won't.

Something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but I'll wait until (as now seems likely) we get a gaming forum to try and kick that one off.

20:17 / 11.06.05

Stoats, seriously, grab the Xbox version of Metal Gear Solid 2. Kojima uses it to examine traditional forms of videogame storytelling and also to introduce some new methods. Looked at one way (and, depressingly, I can't find evidence of very many people online who've done this) it's actually a commentary on vdieogame narratives in videogame form.

Not always successful, but when you tune into what he's trying to pull off, it's breathtaking. Defintely recommend reading a synopsis of the plot from the first game before you tackle it, though - a lot of the cleverest things in 2 do require knwoledge of the events in the previous game.

I really think that it's going to be impossible to talk about narrative in games from now on without referencing MGS2.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:23 / 11.06.05

Cheers for the tip- next time I get paid I think I'll hunt one down! any recommendations on MGS1 synopses? As I say, the narrative aspect is something I find utterly fascinating, so it's the part of the game I'll really be wanting to work at its best!

All Acting Regiment

20:32 / 11.06.05

Y'know, earlier, I dug out Age Of Empires 1 and had a brilliant few hours. I was playing as the babylonians, so I streamlined all my research towards archery, priests and towers. There were a lot of tense moments when my supply chain got fucked (Persian elephants stampeding on my gold miners).

You can do things like landing your men on an enemy island, or sneaking round their territory killing all their antelope so they have to come in range of your ballista towers for food.

I really like it.

20:43 / 11.06.05

Well, MGS2 itself contains a couple of pretty exhaustive pieces of text which describe the events in the first game, both in the form of 'books' - one written by a conspiracy theory nut who claims to have performed an investigation into the affair, the other by a Russian weapons specialist who was a member of the support team that communicated with you/Snake and offered advice during the course of the game.

I find reading text on a television screen means that I have trouble absorbing it, though, so if you're the same you might want something fan-written. There's a summary at GameFAQs which I've oinly glanced at, but seems to have all the bases covered. GameFAQs is an arse about direct linking though, so you'll have to go to this page first - the file you want is in the 'In-depth FAQs section, titled 'Plot Summary'.

There's also one there called 'Game Script', but just reading the script is a bit dry.

Oh, and bear in mind that for the vast majority of the time that you're playing MGS2, you'll be wondering what the hell I was on about. Stick with it - the real meaning behind it only becomes clear(ish) as you approach the end.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:46 / 11.06.05

Cheers. Reckon I'll check it out the day before payday. Get myself in the mood, and all that.

22:26 / 11.06.05

Oh, I just thought - don't worry about tripping over spoilers in the first five sections of that summary. Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake is an earlier game than Metal Gear Solid 2, so you can read that bit without ruining it for yourself. Odd naming strategy, I know - the series' order is

Metal Gear
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty/Substance
Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater

Don't read section 6, as it's a summary of MGS2. It's a very literal summary, and the guy seems to have given up out of confusion at just the point when the really interesting things start to happen, but that still means that it covers about 90% of the events in the game.

08:45 / 12.06.05

Just got GTA:SA on PC, and boy is it luuuuurvly. Rockstar have really pulled out the stops this time to create a gorgeously interactive game area.

Incidentally, PC owners might like to plug in a few of the mods which have already started to appear for the game, especially the one which puts back the girlfriend mini-game that Rockstar originally put in, then took out of each version at the 11th hour.

20:12 / 12.06.05

If that's what I think it is, I do hope you're joking.

20:29 / 12.06.05

Rhythm-method action?

06:46 / 13.06.05

Indeed. It's available here, and it's bloody hard (so to speak)...

...then again, I've always been awful at those press-suchandsuchakey-in-time-with-the-rhythm games.

11:41 / 13.06.05

I'm enjoying San Andreas on the Xbox, too, despite the atrocious port of the controls (which have not been as fluidly dealt with as the III/VC ports).

I think what they've nailed in this one is how to shrink architecture; the freeway provides a real benefit to travel times (as well as wayfinding) and it's been entertaining to watch pile-ups as I try and navigate it on foot.

There's also a much more convincing sensation of being "part of a whole": other people, bar the player character, are also comitting crimes. The gang warfare is a lot more pronounced than in VC; it's fairly obvious how hostile the Ballas are, and so tensions are always high as I drive through Inglewood. Also, civilians now have weapons too - I watched a woman batter a guy to death with a shovel because he pulled out in front of her car.

The geography's much more developed, too: neighbourhoods blend into one another better, rather than having the stop-start nature of VC. And the trainline running through the town really does seperate communities.

Finally, some of the missions are more fun; the motorcycle chase with OG Loc is great, because the guy you're chasing drives like you: off road, up the pavement, over the skate park; it's really exciting to watch an NPC break the rules as much as the PC does. Oh, and I've enjoyed the soundtrack if only for the consistency: it seems less like the "greatest hits" that VC provided and a bit more realistic.

In short, it's fun.

I'll post on MGS at some point in the nearfuture. Stoatie: you'll probably be able to find MGS1 for PC dirt cheap these days. That's how I played it through the first time.

12:00 / 13.06.05

Um, anyone else ever dreamt of leading a plague of the undead, rather than capping the poor suckers in the head? Personally, this one has me losing a lot of sleep:-

Stubbs the Zombie

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:09 / 13.06.05

There's also a much more convincing sensation of being "part of a whole": other people, bar the player character, are also comitting crimes. The gang warfare is a lot more pronounced than in VC; it's fairly obvious how hostile the Ballas are, and so tensions are always high as I drive through Inglewood.

Totally- I must admit, innocent that I am, it quite took me by surprise when my gang members starting shooting out of my car of their own accord.
That was one thing the much-maligned (and really quite poo) Postal 2 did get right- depending on your previous actions in the game, different groups of people would be hostile or friendly to you, rather than just those who were in the vicinity at the time- take on some survivalists, and their friends will remember you. It's good to see it put to use in a far superior game.

It also makes the game seem more of a coherent story, even when not engaged in missions- in Vice City, there was very much a sense of "you're either playing within the story or you're having fun pissing about and doing your own thing". To VC's credit, this wasn't something I realised was lacking until playing San Andreas. (Again, I'm saving too much big discussion of narrative until we get a forum, so I'll leave it at that).

12:49 / 13.06.05

There's also a much more convincing sensation of being "part of a whole": other people, bar the player character, are also comitting crimes.

Absolutely. The amount of time I've heard the sound of gunshots and the police yelling stop, only to turn around and find them chasing someone down the street.

I also love the fact that many drivers will now - upon being involved in an RTA with you - get out of their vehicle to attack you, or, worse, chase you down themselves.

16:14 / 13.06.05

The cutscenes seemed to pull it in the wrong direction too. Snake seems a bit too much of a completely incredible action hero, hopping on missles fired at him and the like. Whereas when I played it on the PSX it seemed to walk the knife edge between believability and the ridiculous just right.

Honestly, that's kind of what I liked about it; that they just said "to hell with it" and jumped clear off the edge of the knife. The cutscene with the Ninja after you fight Ocelot was amazing. As was the battle with the tank.

That said, I couldn't believe how bloody this version was. There were some bits that seemed like I'd stumbled onto the set of that one zombie movie I can never remember the name of. The one where, at the end, the protagonist runs back and forth through his dining room with a lawnmower held upright...

The conclusion of the battle with Sniper Wolf still gives me shivers to this day. The controller vibrating when Snake pulls the trigger. Just... wow.

On San Andreas: Great game. I already have the PS2 version, and want to get the XBox one just so I can have Carl cruising through Inglewood to an anime soundtrack. Hellsing or Jungle Wa in particular.

I'm still in complete awe over the size of that map. It doesn't really seem all that large until after you start unlocking areas, at which point the reason for an airport in each town becomes apparent.

17:07 / 13.06.05

The one where, at the end, the protagonist runs back and forth through his dining room with a lawnmower held upright...

Oh nostalgia, thy name is "Braindead".

I have more to add re: MGS and San Andreas both but I got completely sideswiped by zombie trivia.

08:12 / 15.06.05

Thankyewverymuch, Ms Triplets; to dvdpricesearch.com I go!

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