I was innocent, once.

To be honest I didn’t think much of Peggle when it first came out on Xbox Live Arcade. Call it judging a game by its cover, if you will, but the prospect of playing a child-centred pinball-type game didn’t appeal at all. But I went ahead and downloaded the trial version anyway while I was busy creating extremely sexist female characters in Soul Calibur IV and pondering the worthiness of using Blanka against those cheap Sagat players in Street Fighter IV.

To my ultimate surprise and similarly for the hundreds and thousands of people who have purchased the game, Peggle is brilliant fun. I was sold as soon as the final orange peg was struck and Beethoven’s Ode To Joy began playing in a ridiculous smattering of rainbows and colour and triumph. What a great game!

And now, look at me. Just look at me. Playing online duel matches with dirty tactics: urging my opponent’s ball to not hit any orange pegs so as to cop the 25% points deduction penalty; stealing their green peg special abilities even after I’ve taken my own already; ’snookering’ them by throwing my last shot so that they could not possibly hit the final orange peg and hence preventing them from gaining that massive Fever Bonus; and utterly, thoroughly, and wholeheartedly hoping that they screw up. Such behaviour would, and probably does given the likelihood of the child demographic playing this game around the world, make a youngster cry. Whereas me? I’m an adult: instead of crying, I just swear softly to myself when they hit a good shot and get a bucket bonus at the end of it. Up against Magic Hat Rabbit and Zen Ball Owl, avatars constructed soley with love and innocence in mind, when the colours of the rainbow explode to indicate that I have lost the match, I shout the words “Oh Fuck Off” with shocking sincerity.

Bullshit!

It is a game based as much on luck as it is on skill but the sheer possibilities are wondrous, however I never would have thought that a title encouraging such fun physics, goodwill, mutual friendliness, and above all, purity, would end up with me willing my opponent to mess up just so I could come away with an empty – but jubilant nonetheless – victory. Have I been completely corrupted as a human being? Well, given that I once called a successful Scary Ball player the C word under my breath, it sure bloody looks like it.

Originally posted here

~

[I will probably get in trouble if certain people read this blog. But here it is anyway]

A bit of context, just to get it out of the way early on: I tend to take my gaming addictions a bit far sometimes, and I absolutely love open world games. GTA III had me hooked like a junkie as I enjoyed the exploration and sightseeing within Liberty City; taking my time doing missions in order to fully appreciate it all, the wonderful digital city: soaking it in, the geography, the design, the personality. These virtual escapes then followed with Vice City, San Andreas, and of course, GTA IV. Oh the time and sick days spent on that one.

None of that intense training could prepare me for Fallout 3, however. Nope. Bethesda have well and truly destroyed me.

Doing all-nighters. Taking days off work. Cancelling dinners and movie outings. I really did all these things. I just needed a few more hours to scour the world for those 30 Nuka-Cola Quantums, finding that leaf blower to make my custom weapon, to get some ant pheromones for the chick in Rivet City, to grab all the loot from vanquished Talon Company Mercs and to repair and compress my inventory space, to travel through subway tunnels in DC looking for those Super Mutant behemoths…on and on it went. And with a game as vast and as open as this one, there’s never a shortage of things to do – there just aren’t enough hours in a day to be able to do them all.

Upon reaching the maximum of Level 20 (a bit of a disappointment to be honest, albeit a life-saving one) it dawned on me. It was as if my body had been detached from my mind; the former reduced to conduit slave status whose sole purpose was to punch buttons and serve the latter which was, and had been for a while, floating in its own virtual space within the DC Ruins of the game. It was 5 am. I had played all night. Then, a voice. My voice. I was glad to hear it.

“Man, you’re not taking very good care of yourself. If there was no maximum level, you’d be just like one of those World of Warcraft freaks who plays all day every day within those game cafes eating instant noodles, the only difference being that you’re too tight to pay the monthly subscription fee which is probably in itself fair enough given that I don’t agree with regular payments for MMOs either (despite the fact that I AM your mind and it’d be contradictory for me NOT to agree, but lets not go there). Look at what GTA IV did to you. You lined up unnecessarily for the midnight launch just to play in the early hours of the morning, having to drag yourself off to work with little to no sleep even though the game was hardly in short supply and you could have easily picked it up the next afternoon. And, going back further, look at what San Andreas did during your uni years: skipping class to stay home and deck yourself out with green bandanas and ammo for your AK47 as you took over gang territory in the name of the Grove Street Families. Ah, memories”.

Then my alarm rang and the voice of reason was gone. 7:40 am. Another choice presented itself to me, and even though I was (kind of) back in real life, I could still see the dialogue window from the game, complete with response options:

“Your alarm has gone off, alerting you to the fact that you need to get dressed and go to work. However your eyes are bloodshot and their lids extremely heavy given that you’ve played the game non-stop, overnight, with only a carton of orange juice as sustenance. You decide to…”:

• Abide by the laws of society and get dressed and go to work, trying not to collapse, dead, on public transport along the way
• Take a nap for a few hours, then go to work. After all, being late is better than not being there at all!
• [SPEECH 100%] Take a sicky

Option 3. Success!

Once the decision was made though, away went any remnants of my fatigue, seemingly magically and almost immediately. So guess what I did? Yep. I salvaged ammo from the dead Super Mutants, went back to where I told Dogmeat to stay, and fast-travelled around to look for more locations to fill up the empty spaces of my map, inevitably finding yet more new places and distractions to keep occupied. Fallout 3 isn’t without its flaws; the character animations are often stiff, there are clipping issues and a ton of glitches and bugs, the AI of NPCs is often questionable at best, and given the combination of the game’s scope plus an unreliable Local Map, it is incredibly easy to get lost within internal environments – particularly the other Vaults. But everything else about the game? Bloody hell. Fallout 3 is one of the best games I have ever played, and is definitely my favourite game of 2008 even amongst such distinguished company this year. The world, the characters, the story, the dark humour: you could say that I’ve been ‘immersed’ in it.

So today, amazingly, I’m back at work and typing all this down. I know! Crazy isn’t it! I’ve seen the sun, and it is beautiful. Let’s see then, doo do doo do doo, what will my options be for tonight? Take a wild guess.

I’ve heard all the advice before, too. “Just go to sleep, moron. It’s not hard”. “Be more mature about it and control yourself, you overgrown child,” etc etc. But I’m telling you, completely honestly, the open world video game is my vice, my Kryptonite. It gets me EVERY time. I am an addict, and I admit it with much shame and self-loathing. Maybe it’s to do with wanting to escape from one’s own reality, finding salvation in a world that follows different rules with alternate social underpinnings. There must be something deep down inside, a hidden reason behind this type of addiction; something Freudian perhaps. One thing is for sure though after this whole saga: even if I do absolutely love savouring these digital worlds and all the little details they offer, taking my time to free-roam to my heart’s content (if not the rest of the body), I really cannot wait until Fallout 3 is truly over and I’ve seen all that there is to see – if only just to escape my own personal Vault 101.

But then there’s the option of playing through again as someone evil. Jesus. Christ.

So this is what Bionic Commando was like. Having never played the original 1989 NES game, opting instead for a Sega Master System II (hey, II sure beats I) in the 8 bit generation, I always wondered why my Nintendo buddies raved on about it. And the reason? The absolute awesomeness in controlling a character with a grappling hook bionic arm, a brilliant gameplay gimmick that existed at just about the perfect time when action movies were all the rage; in between a bit of Predator and Terminator 2, the ability to swing like you were invincible may well have been a young boy’s ultimate fantasy. You know, back before other things start entering your mind post-puberty.

So how well does the bionic arm hold up these days, where almost every game has a cover system of some sort and 2D platformers, no matter how great, often fail to break even? First off, the presentation is top notch. The intro sequence, complete with remixed 8 bit music which kicks serious arse, blew me away, and the artwork is brilliant. After consulting Youtube for clips of the original BC, it’s also good to see that all the grammatical mistakes and quirkiness of the NES version have been replaced with a form of English that at least makes sense, with the developers even poking fun at the idiosyncrasies of that game: and in my book self deprecating humour is always welcome. Particularly when you’re out to rescue a guy named Super Joe, which may have been cool in the pre-LOL days.

As soon as you start the game, you realise something pretty crucial: Spencer, the red-haired green suit wearing guy you control, cannot jump. Marcus Fenix and Dom can’t either, but they didn’t have to worry about pits of death that bounced you around helplessly until you died. You can’t even jump over a barrel, meaning that the only option is to either grappel it to use as a shield or a thowable weapon, or rappel up to a conveniently placed ledge. Which makes me think, with adult cynicism, when the bad guys realise that the only real weapon this dude has is the ability to grab and swing, why not just get rid of all the ledges and make the ceilings extra high? You can tell I never played this when I was a kid.

Graphically, Rearmed looks fantastic, and the remodeled environments paying homage to the original’s colour pallettes will often make you stop and glance at the wonderful neon 80’s-ness of it all. Certain stages even contain silhouette type sections which makes me think of Jean Claude Van Damme fighting that guy with the spurs on his boots in Double Impact. Well, hey, if you grew up with that stuff it haunts you forever okay?

You also realise pretty early on that this game is bloody hard. I mean, seriously hard. I even began to question whether this generation of games just make it too easy for us – people just want results nowadays, bang bang bang, and so in that respect it’s pleasing that these old school games with old school difficulty levels are coming out, Braid being a good recent example. But man, were games back then really this reliant on trial and error? Using the bionic arm to hang on ledges is fair enough, but the sheer precision required when you need to pull off the more advanced moves is crazy. Infuriatingly crazy. And if you think you can make it through all 60 or so Challenge Rooms for an easy points addition to your Gamerscore, forget about it. 2 player co-op and 4 player deathmatch-style local multiplayer adds longevity after you finish the game, and the potential fun to be had is enormous. Potential, because it all depends on skill and timing, facets that you and your friends may need brushing up on after getting so used to the easy wins in Call of Duty 4 thanks to the one ridiculously good player on your team.

The surprising thing is that the bionic arm gimmick never gets old. Frustrating yes, but you won’t get tired of it. It’s the controls, however, that really mess with you after a while: standing still lets you shoot your grappel diagonally, pushing forward sends it out horizontally, and holding up shoots it vertically, and yet when it comes to the crucial moments, no matter how well you have visualised your plan of attack beforehand, one wrong move could mean game over. Overall, Bionic Commando Rearmed is a great release/remake with enough humour, old school playability, fantastic music, and satisfaction when you pull off a difficult manouvre to make all the controller-throwing temptations worth it, if only just. And if it all gets too much, just be thankful that you can at least save the game now: if I had to play through the whole damn thing after stuffing up the final level, I would cry.nostalgic tears whilst reminiscing of the great 8 bit era, with all these happy memories fading fast when I remember how difficult things were back before cover systems, favourable checkpoints, and the amazing, astonishing ability to jump.

I’ve tried studying its movements, to no avail. I’ve tried alternating my right thumb shooting patterns to keep it on its toes, but more often than not it’s me who comes off second best. And everytime a whole bunch of them are on screen, I’ve tried carving out a path, holding them back with firepower and frantically bolting for the temporary space I’ve created only to get cut down by the one green rhombus from the pack who decides to rush me. Do they possess hive intelligence? Some sort of psychic ability? Because no matter what I do, it’s almost always them that get me.

The addiction of Geometry Wars Evolved 2 presents itself in constantly making you believe that, no matter how well you did in your last game, you can always do better. A lot better. There is a sense of injustice when you get taken out by an enemy you saw die, or at least,you believed it was dead. And in highlighting the shape that killed you when your little claw-shaped ship explodes into light and lustre,you want to come back, Charles Bronson style, for some sweet sweet vengeance.

The gameplay is immensely deep: you start to learn about how to navigate past certain shapes, and how best to take them out. You turn into a bully, destroying the easier ones in order to get to the tougher varieties. And of course, you learn about picking up the dropped ‘geoms’ of vanquished enemies – the vitally important score multipliers. Before you know it, what was once an overload of colour and confusion becomes the norm after practice and patience. You start getting ‘in the zone,’ seeing only what you need to see, and process this information in your brain at a ridiculous rate. You will then continue to dream about the shapes, tactics for victory. These shapes will invade your life.

Looking back on the first game it was fairly limited: only one gameplay mode was available and that would eventually get to a stage where there would just be a tumultuous, mad rush in enemy shapes that would suit players of a particular skill set. I was not one of those players, but, given the crazily high scores of many on my Live friends list, others were. GWE2 goes so much further to offer 6 different modes, all brilliant in their own right, where players are able to find the best mode to suit their own styles. For me, my best mode is the one where you don’t shoot – Pacifism – and instead lure your enemy into ‘gates’, one of the many new additional objects in the sequel. The closest the game comes to a ’story mode’ of any description, that is if floating geometric shapes in space had a beginning and an end, would probably be in Sequence where you have to try and make it through 20 levels of ever increasing difficulty. For those who enjoy video game nightmares, Waves gets to the point where panic sets in. But, again, learn the patterns, know your strengths and limitations, and you could master it. Because you know you can.

While there is no online multiplayer, probably due to the effects even the slightest lag would have on this game, local multiplayer supporting four players in versus or co-op is available. But the most surprising thing is, after having a few friends over to play it, how much of a ’spectator game’ it turned out to be, complete with sound effects: the oohs and aahs came regularly, the phwoars at near miss escapes, the angry awwws at unexpected deaths. And the best thing? No one has to wait long for a go, but at the same time, if someone is having a good turn we want them to absolutely kill it.

But the most addictive thing out of all in this game? The online friend leaderboards. GWE2 takes you back to what is practically the origin of ‘old school’ arcade gaming, where high scores meant everything. Already, I have been pushed beyond my expected ability thanks to the intense competition from IgnipotentBrendan, Zumafire, and TheNintendoTheory as we all battle it out for top spot. The friends leaderboard within the game is so well implemented that, upon waking up and deciding to have ‘just a quick one before work,’ the discovery that Brendan has once again managed to thoroughly demolish your previous best score provokes an unrelenting, powerful desire to beat it whilst making full use of the Xbox Live messenging system and calling in sick. In conclusion, get this game. Become the neon shape destroyer you were born to be. But be very, very careful around those tricky, unpredictable green bastard rhombi.