Hitman: Absolution Trailer Impressions

The most recent trailer for Hitman: Absolution has accomplished what it set out to do – get people to watch it who are not interested in the game by using controversy. It worked on me too, I may be a little late to the party but after reading about the uproar I felt it my duty to watch the ‘offending’ video.

It did not offend me but I can see why some may be offended, although some reactions have been ridiculous, if you’re a feminist maybe playing anything other than casual games and being a games journalist is the wrong profession for you.

It looked reasonable, although not brilliant, and obviously the game will not look as smooth, it was nicely atmospheric with darkening skies and rain – rain makes things look much better of course, get nicer reflections.

But:

1 – If the ladies dressed as nuns are assassins they should be wearing more comfortable and stealthy clothes

2 – An RPG has a kick, if she can fire it without getting some kind of recoil then I guess she is some kind of muscle bound Amazonian (she didn’t look like one though)

3 – As there are 8 assassins why isn’t one of them either watching behind them, or skulking in the back-ground to keep the others covered

4 – After Agent 47 takes out most of them and they finally get to attack him why try to strangle him with Rosary beads? use a knife at least

5 – I am almost certain that the human shield nun would only offer minimal protection from being shot by a semi-automatic weapon, at least a couple of bullets must pass through her and hit him

Not that I am picky of course, but if you want to be controversial at least try to be accurate. Sex sells, I am sure some people may buy the game expecting to slaughter sexy nuns for a couple of hours. I wont be playing it for that, I wont be playing it at all, I will be boycotting it (not really, just not a game that interests me).

Bills Hicks did a bit about advertising and the advert they would love to make “Here’s the woman’s face, beautiful. Camera pulls back, naked breast. Camera pulls back, she’s totally naked. Legs apart. Two fingers right here, and it just says: “Drink Coke.” Now I don’t know the connection but I’m drinking lots of fucking Coke.”

Film – Iron Sky Review

There has been a reasonable amount of hype around about this “Nazi’s on the moon” film made by a bunch of Finn’s on a tiny budget and so I entered it with a little trepidation.

I am happy to report that it does not disappoint. It made me smile pretty much all the way through and there were a few laugh out loud moments. It does not poke fun at Nazi’s and become a parody, it is more of a political satire, in my opinion the Nazi’s are a touch sympathetic and the American’s are the real villains of the piece.

There are subtitles in places but that is no bad thing and should be no barrier. There are no ‘stars’ in the film, it is an ensemble of actors who give it their all, the actress who plays the US president seems to have a lot of fun in the role.

Seeing a film with swastikas in three ways – a symbol of peace, the symbol for the Nazi’s and the symbol used by skinhead moron’s who think they are Nazi’s didn’t feel gratuitous at all, it shouldn’t make anyone feel uncomfortable.

There are some comedy nuggets which I cannot share as I don’t want to spoil anything of course, but it is a film I will watch again and again I am certain, hopefully there will be a ‘making of’ on the Blu-Ray as that could be very interesting.

Games – Social Gaming

I haven’t really played games for a couple of weeks, an hour on Peggle being about it. Last night I felt like going online so I did, played a bit of Dirt 2 with random people and then a mate (we shall know him as Clyde) came online, we played a few Peggle games – he won but I won the last game so under PE rules “last goal wins” so I am the champion once again.

Then we played FIFA, 6 very tight games, first 5 were draws and then he won the final game. The gaming itself didn’t mean anything though, what was great was the social side, I know Clyde outside of gaming and it was good to catch up, we could have been playing anything really.

In the olden days I am certain we would have played in the old school ways – split screen or passing pad back and forth, Xbox Live has removed the requirement for that, bringing the world together but pushing local people apart it seems!

It has changed my opinion a little, I was seriously considering not renewing my Xbox Live Gold account when it ends in a month or two, and I will ensure I get online more, even if it is to play nothing of importance and just to chat and catch up.

Games – The Blame Game(rs)

In 2002 the biggest selling games on the 3 home consoles were:

PS2 – Grand Theft Auto: Vice City

Xbox – Halo: Combat Evolved

GameCube – Super Mario Sunshine

Ten years later and we are still playing iterations of these games albeit on the next generations of the consoles concerned; GTA V will release in 2013 (probably) Halo 4 releasing later this year, there are other Mario games coming this year.

So what am I saying? Gamers moan about the lack of new IP’s but gobble up sequels and remakes like a rotund ex-colonial ruminates upon dainties. If you want a new IP then vote with your wallet, don’t buy COD Blops II or Halo 4 buy Ninja Badger* by those weird sounding Japanese developers.

Personally I wont be buying any big releases this year, apart from possibly FIFA 13 (but sports games are slightly different as you can’t change football, etc) but will be looking at new IPs such as Lollipop Chainsaw, some will scoff at that of course, but at least they are trying something a little different.

There is one game that I really want but without trying to learn to much about it – Ni no Kuni – which isn’t released until 2013 and will cost about £180 as it is listed for Nintendo DS and Playstation 3 only, and I have neither. Again you can scoff but there is a precedent, some years ago I had to upgrade my PC solely to allow me to play the new version of Football Manager which cost around the same. I am that committed/daft (delete as appropriate!)

New games do get released of course, but most new IPs seem to fail, LA Noire was released to a massive fanfare and then after early praise seemed to fall quickly and hardly featured in end of year lists. Dead Island had a buzz following a clever bit of marketing with a trailer but many people poo-pooed to game for it’s gameplay – personally it was my game of 2011 as the co-op made it great fun, played alone it wasn’t so good though. Homefront came and went – interesting story let down by cheap programming techniques.

I can’t think of many other new IPs released in 2011, yes I am leaning away from download only titles, that will be looked into at another time.

* this game does not exist but probably should.

Games – Growing out of Video Games

A recent post by fellow blogger Digital Gigolo (good guy apart from his love for Halo) about growing out of games made me think about my gaming habits and future – the full blog can be found here;

http://digitalgigolo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/growing-old-with-video-games.html

I recently posted about ‘the gaming funk’ that I seem to go through each year, but this year it feels different, it is earlier in the year for 1 thing, the other is that I do have unfinished and unplayed games available, but which I cannot muster the will to play.

In the past month I have used my Xbox more for media – iPlayer, You Tube, DVDs – than for gaming, should this trend continue then is there any point in keeping it? My gaming used to be based around multi-player games, Cod 4 was in my drive for months without being removed, but more recent FPS’s have left me cold. Over time I have reduced my friend list down to the few I play with regularly, and a couple I enjoyed playing with in the past, that leaves me with 5 on the list.

I have 10 co-op/multi-player games on my shelf, but none of which I am that fussed about putting in and playing at any time.

I don’t blame being middle aged for my sudden drift away from gaming, nor people on my friends list being online less as even when we do get online the first 5 minutes is spent going “what do you want to play?” and then we play Peggle – a great game of course, no arguments there of course!

Maybe I am just tired – literally due to medication taking it’s toll, and with games, there is not a lot out there that piques my interest being released this year, Borderland 2 is about all that I fancied, but I’ll want to play it on my schedule and that may not be possible.

Maybe I have no gaming future, will I miss it? Probably not. But should I continue gaming I won’t mind that either, I have enjoyed it at times, not all the time of course  (I wasted 15 hours of Trails Evolution after all) but maybe I will want to play tomorrow, or next week, or next month and my gaming mojo will return.

Games – The Gaming Funk

It is something all gamers go through at different times – the gaming funk – where you don’t know what to play or whether you really want to play anything at all. It often occurs when there is a dip in releases, my last one was last summer, so to drop into one at the moment seems a bit odd.

I have games that I haven’t started yet, but they are older titles – Lost Odyssey and GTA 4 – and I just can’t motivate myself to start them at the moment. I have a stack of multiplayer games that I enjoy, but with the exception of F1 2011 I have little inclination to even consider them, it is a great game but to do the races we do as a 2/3 takes a good 2 hours and I cannot motivate myself to jump online.

And then there is Trials Evolution, my opinion on it can be read in another post, but it has sucked my gaming mojo. I felt worse about it yesterday when i saw I had wasted 15 hours on it already – although in my defence when in multiplayer and stuck I will just sit and wait for someone to win the race and it to end, and whilst doing that I will read.

Not sure how long the funk will last, maybe a day or too, maybe weeks, there is nothing new on the near horizon that piques my interest so it may take some multiplayer game sucking me back in. Or maybe I’ll buy Football Manager 2012 and never touch my Xbox again.

TV – Comedy Shows To Watch

I was going to do a post per show and go into depth, but that looked too much like a Wikipedia entry so thought a simple list with my opinions would be better, and would let me cover more shows. I am not going to mention things like The Walking Dead, The big Bang Theory (I could write for days about that alone) or Game of Thrones, I am going to look at the more left-field things that you can hunt out and enjoy.

1. Archer – A cartoon but not for kids, it follows Sterling Archer who is a secret agent for ISIS, an agency run by his mother. It is crude, violent and crucially very funny. The characters are well rounded and the stories semi-realistic, okay I accept that the cyborgs that appear very infrequently may be a stretch!

2. Community – It is a crime that this show is not on terrestrial UK TV, it is a clever comedy with some brilliant actors and writing, and Chevy Chase too. It follows a group of 7 students in a Community College, and the adventures they get up to feel real, if a little hyper-real at times. My favourite character isn;t one of the main 7, it has to be the Dean, he dresses up (a lot) and there is a question mark over his sexuality which I hope is never answered.

3. Veep – This is a very new show in the US, from the creators behind The Thick Of It, because of that it is very well written, although the US audiences would never allow a Malcolm Fowler character with his colourful language there are some good one-liners and it  isn’t just a straight re-make.

4. 2 Broke Girls – Just starting in the UK but well through it’s first season in the US this is a  comedy with possibilities, it is far too focussed on the main 2 characters, but that can change as it develops hopefully. The snappy dialogue between the 2 feels natural and aside from the stereotypes also involved it feels fresh.

5. Whitney – Okay you’ve probably never heard of this and probably never will, as if it gets a second season I will be shocked. But I enjoyed it, and that’s what counts. it was a funny show with characters I liked, having a couple split and one of them ‘come out’ is a step forward in US comedy for sure. And the way the final episode ended was sublime, a sweet moment of pathos as opposed to going for a big finish.

6. Bob’s Burgers – I was going for a list of 5 and then I remembered this cracking show! I love animated shows, and this far surpasses the Seth Macfarlane cookie cutter shows (which swing from good to terrible on a weekly basis) and although I will always have a soft spot for the Simpsons the family on Bob’s Burgers feel much more real. Same dynamic – Father, mother, 2 girls and a boy, working in a burger bar and living above it, simple stories – getting out of gym class, trying to one-up the pizza restaurant across the street, but told with such care that the time flies by and you root for Bob, even though you know he is pretty much going to lose everything. But any man who moves into the crawl space in a wall to avoid relations has something going for him!

Why are they all UK shows? Well there is nothing from the UK that interests me at the moment, all the talent seems to be drifting over the pond, hopefully that will leave a void to be filled by new comedy writers and shows and then I can write about them.

Games – Trials Evolution Thoughts

I wasn’t really looking at this game as a purchase as I don’t buy too many downloadable games, but I decided to try the demo as there’s no loss in doing that of course. I was instantly underwhelmed by the demo, although it is a good length, it lets you play through various different tracks in which to get to grips with the simple controls. But to me it felt very repetitive, however once I had finished the single player demo I went into the track editor and spent far too long building a track I knew I couldn’t save.

I went offline but returned later to build another track, in that time a couple of friends had been online and bought the game, so in order to save the track I’d made I bought it. I also wanted to try the multiplayer as it looked quite interesting in the demos and reviews I’d seen.

Again I was underwhelmed, the supercross (up to 4 players on screen at the same time) is fun for a few minutes but little more than that, simply the fastest wins, no real skill required, landing a jump slightly better than an opponent can gain an advantage but that’s about all.

Doing the trials courses on multiplayer makes the opposition ghosts and the tracks are a bit more interesting, and some do require a little more skill and judgement, but so far too many rely on speed to find a winner. Brute force and ignorance can win the day.

The community designed tracks are the best thing about the game, I’ve made one which I have finished and shared with the world, it was short and fairly simple, but it requires a bit more than just speed, judgement comes in to play in certain areas which is what I went for. So far is is rated at 4 stars so I am doing something right! If you want to find it, and any tracks I do in future I believe you can search by gamertag – cudmoro.

Obviously the tracks have different difficulties, I have no objection to courses being impossible for me, but I do have to question why on certain tracks they have put check-points so far apart that you (meaning me) can get stuck at the same area for 10 minutes. That just feels cheap rather than difficult, failing is fine, I fail at games all the time, but on this occasion it made me angry and no game should make me feel like that because of it’s coding.

I will play the single player just enough to unlock the various motorbikes, as without that you can’t race on the community made tracks. Single player alone this game is a 6, with the editor it is an 8. The sites/magazines giving it 9’s may be by reviewers who have a massive amount of friends playing it and they can fight for places on the leaderboards of the tracks – that side of the game means nothing to me so it has no impact on my thoughts, or maybe they didn’t pay for the game with 1200 of their own MS Points. I wish I’d waited until it was on sale for 600 points, which may not be until Christmas but c’est le vie.

Addendum

After writing this and looking at more reviews and chatting to friends it seems that I am the only person who doesn’t think this game is very good. I have played more of the single player and I enjoyed some of the skill games – there is one where you have limited fuel and you have to go as far as you can, that was fun. There is a skill level where you ski rather than ride a bike, not sure if the developers have ever been skiing but you don’t tend to float 6 inches about the ground!

After the skiing stage i noticed that there are parts in the standard game where you seem to float above the ground, it isn;t as easy to see as usually you are travelling at a higher speed and are looking at the next obstacle rather than where your wheels are.

I worked through the medium tracks and the final one is a ‘game breaker’ called something like Gigatack, I had got about a third of the way through it in a multiplayer game so I had some idea what to expect. On the single player I got further but I didn’t complete the track, there were 120+ faults and I ran out of time – the limit being 30 minutes. It is utterly ridiculous to force checkpoints to be so far apart that when you get past one horrific area you have another before the checkpoint appears. If I make a mistake on Forza or F1 I crash but I don;t have to go back and re-try the corner until I get it perfect.

On the multiplayer side there is a supercross track that looks like a moto-cross race, and it made me want a proper moto-cross game, where you don;t have to stay in forced lanes so can take a racing line to try to catch opponents rather than waiting for them to slow down/crash.

Still a 6, at best.

Games – Pivotal Moments in My Gaming Life

I’ve been running low on ideas for blog posts recently so I put a  plea out on Twitter (@ilogilo if you’d care to follow me) and the first responder was @OC_Skulduggerer (heck of a guy) who suggested this topic, therefore I am doing as told and recalling my gaming life.

I am 36, so my gaming history goes back quite a long time, not quite to the beginning, but close. The first couple of games I recall are muddled so I best not try to go into them for fear of revealing how broken my memory is.

The first real game I remember is Scalextic on the Commodore 64 http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/details.php%3FID%3D2227). We had to move house when I was 10 from a house where there weren’t really any other children of my age to more of an estate, so I had to play with others. One of them was called Matt, he was older and looking back his house could well have been a crack den, it was were all the young  kids went to hang out and watch 18-rated ninja films and learn words they didn’t understand. He had a Commodore 64 and the first time I saw Scalextric on it I was hooked, being one of the younger kids there I was always last to get a go, but it had split screen and the music from the BBC coverage of the Grand Prix, in 8-bit of course. It had 2-player split-screen and a track editor, which for a game from 1985 seems fairly advanced; I’d love a track editor on Forza!

From that moment I nagged my parents for my own C64, and luckily my birthday is close to Christmas although we were by no means a well off family I could get a bike, computer as a joint present without mush worry (I do feel guilty looking back though).  So Christmas rolled around and I got it and the very old black and white TV from a spare room.

That led to my next big game – Cricket 64 (http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/details.php%3FID%3D563). I got is from my brothers girlfriend and future wife in some kind of pack of 4 games, the other 3 do not stick in my mind at all. It was such a simple game, and I played it for hundreds of hours, I would set my own teams and keep track of scores on pieces of paper for test match series. I kept going back to the game for years, even after getting other systems and more advanced games, I re-visited it a couple of years age, sadly I no longer have a C64 but I found it and an emulator. Sadly it didn’t work quite as smoothly as I wanted it too but if it was remade for iPhone / iPad I would be running to buy one now.

Next up – Blues Brothers, again on C64; it sticks in my mind as it was the first game I ever completed. It was a side-scrolling platformer with a suitably up-beat soundtrack. But it only really sticks in my mind because I completed it.

I upgraded to an Amiga and found my raison d’être – Championship Manager, I started with the mail-order only Italian version and then carried on with every version through the Amiga and into the PC days. I will hold back from eulogising about Championship Manager, which morphed into Football manager in the mid-2000’s, as it would bore you I am sure. Suffice to say I have spent too much, in both time and money, watching fake footballers try to do what I tell them to.

I had the Amiga and my mate Vince had an Atari ST, I’d go to his house every Friday after school and we’d play various games, Dungeon Master and Elite are semi-memorable (although I only got to watch) but the ones I enjoyed most were Kick Off and Speedball. It does seem that I am big on sports games and always have been. Kick Off we could play on the same side against the AI which was far more fun that juts playing against each other.

Around this time I would go to arcades with my sister and her husband (grew up not far from the coastal oases of Cleethorpes and Mablethorpe) and spent a lot of money on Afterburner, these where the flight combat games where the entire machine moved.

Back with my Amiga we’d moved again and I became very introverted for reasons you need not know, but it led me to more puzzle games for some reason. Worms was fun; I spent hours on it whilst listening to the first 2 Oasis albums. But the game that I recall most vividly was Pipemania (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe_Mania), a simple game where you used different shapes of pipe to divert liquid between 2 points with various obstacles in the way. After a while playing this I started to have odd dreams, I would have dreams (nightmare) in levels of the game and wake up hot and sweaty. At that stage I had to stop playing it, but as a sidebar I have been known to dream about Excel spreadsheets after staring at them for hours on end too, sadly I could not give up work though.

Around that time I was earning my own money so could buy more systems and games, I has a SNES but not 1 game stands out, Mario was nothing special, Street Fighter required skills I didn’t have, etc.

I got a Sega Megadrive (Genesis to my American fans) and Sonic was okay, but the main draw was Madden, I really enjoyed the dos-jointed way American football worked, you play for a few seconds and then stop for a rest and to play your next move, kind of like chess with fatter players.

I was the 1 person who bought a Phillips CDi, I never got many games for it as they were expensive and there weren’t that many, it was the first system where I had a wireless controller though, it was a thumbstick on the remote control (you could watch CD-Rom based films on it too) and the free tennis game that came with it looked superb – photo realistic, but very hard.

I’ve been through a few PC’s and laptop’s in the past 15 years, not really for gaming though, although obviously the Championship/Football Manager series continued to be bought and abused regularly.

For the PS1 I really enjoyed Demolition Derby, soon to be re-released as Dirt Showdown (not officially, I am being sarcastic!) which was simple and fun, although I did listen to Ocean Colour Scene whilst playing so it may have been a form of self abuse.

I had to sell it when I went to uni, but during my final year a flat-mate had a Nintendo 64, that was my first real introduction to FIFA and I was drawn in, even though he would get violent when losing, or winning. And then there was Goldeneye, I am not going to say it was the best shooter ever as clearly it wasn’t, but the multiplayer was good fun  even though I cannot recall getting the golden gun more than once.

There was also a PS1 in the flat, it was modded and there was a copy of Thrill Kill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrill_Kill) which was a fighting game that never got an official release, it was controversial for the violence and that’s why it wasn’t released – if you Google the finishing moves you may see why. Somehow I was unbeatable at it and my character of choice was Dr Faustus, a surgeon with a scalpel…

There was a great arcade we used to visit in Newcastle, the memory which sticks out from there is playing Championship Jockey (I think that is what it was called) where you had to ride this fake plastic horse and move quite vigorously for what seemed like ages but was probably 2-3 minutes, getting off it drenched in sweat and then walking like cowboys to the pub to recover.

After uni my gaming pretty much stopped apart from the aforementioned football management sim. I picked up a GameCube close to release but nothing really hooked my in the way things had previously, there was some kind of Mario and Madden again, but not enough to make me invest fully.

A couple of years later I was given a PS2 at work. As it had been a couple of years since I’d played anything I saw an immediate improvement in the quality of the graphics, if not in the games themselves. My game of choice was Gran Turismo 2, I liked the variety of cars available and how you had to improve to unlock new cars and progress your career.  The problem with the PS2 was the controller; it was comfortable and just blistered my hands.

After that it went quiet again for another couple of years, by which time I was being nagged to get an Xbox 360. I decided I would after moving house (why my gaming relates to house moves I do not know) but as the house would not sell I got one anyway. I have enjoyed various games but would I call them pivotal? No, I would call Borderlands pivotal though, the first story driven game I have played co-op, even with the issues (the ending for one) it was a great experience which led into the best game of 2011 – Dead Island, which would have been a poor game played solo, but with two mates it was a romp for the 35/40 hours we spent going through it.

Forza 4 is also pivotal, not so much for the game as it is car racing and that doesn’t really change much, but I bought a wheel to use with it. That has changed my perception of racing games, since getting it I have re-bought a racing game I got bored of with the controller and picked up 2 others, all of which are improved by using the wheel.

What will be next, will it be a game that changes the way I look at games or a peripheral that changes the way I play them? I have no idea but cannot wait to be entertained and inspired!

Games – Blades of Time Review

I would guess that this is a game that has slipped under the radar of most people, Probably because it hasn’t had massive coverage and isn’t a sequel (rare at present it seems). I happened across it when looking for things to add to my rental list so after a little research I thought I’d give it a go.

A tiny bit of history – I like things that others often don’t, game-wise the best example I have ir Rogue Warrior (you got to snap dozens of enemies necks whilst a guy shouted “get some” over and over again!).

But this game should not fall into that category, firstly it looks beautiful – the opening cut scene is crisp and cinematic. Secondly the character you play is a rather attractive blonde lady in a rather small bikini top, but with shorts, so no gratuitous ass shots. The game itself is a mythical hack and slash by numbers, racking up combos opens up different magical abilities, the normal state of affairs. it is similar to Dante’s Inferno, but without the babies with knives for feet.

One slight difference is that you get a gun, not sure why they did that as if they wanted a range weapon why not a crossbow or a sling-shot? There is also a nifty mechanic were you have a kind of out-of-body experience and time rewinds, not used early on but supposed to be vital later in the game, I will let you know.

The enemy always seem to appear in groups, it is very unforgiving at times, the first battle involves 4 enemy, and so far I’ve only encountered single enemy at the end of level boss stage, they are big and hard to kill (as you would expect).

Moving around is fairly standard, you can double jump and use floating coral to get to areas you otherwise couldn’t reach, you can also do that by jumping onto flying enemies, killing them, and jumping off them, an interesting way to leap a simple gap, even if it did lead me to fall into a lava river several times.

Overall it is a decent game but it could get very repetitive very quickly, to get to the end of the first level took many deaths, and I had to stop once my hands had morphed into claws from gripping the controller too tightly! But I will go back to it as there is a the promise of good puzzles to solve, how far I get depends on getting past the big bosses, as there is no way to drop to my usual simpleton mode it will come down to perseverance versus annoyance as to see how far I get.

So far – 6.5/10

Okay I have given up on this now, I managed to get past a finger numbing boss battle after at least 20 attempts – although thinking back a boss that can still kill you once you take it down is quite a good idea, even if at the time I wanted to weep.

I gave up because it got too repetitive, too much just hammering the attack buttons against multiple enemies. The ‘rewind time’ effect was quite cool but it never felt intuitive and I kept forgetting to use it.

One to maybe pick up cheap or rent as if you have more skill than me you’ll be able to slash through it in a few sessions. It does have a hard setting I found when I reloaded a saved game, but no simple setting for the likes of me!