Video Game Review: South Park: The Stick Of Truth.

South Park: The Stick Of Truth is a game developed by Obsidian in collaboration with South Park digital studios and released by Ubisoft. It is currently on 360, PS3 and Windows.
Development started in 2009, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, approached Obsidian about making an RPG featuring the shows likeness. Up until then, South Park had only ever had two games. South Park Rally and this mess below.

PS1 era baby. Gameplay was mostly chucking snowballs and yellow snowballs at turkeys. It was fun, but notoriously short lived.

South Park: The Stick of Truth is quite a step forward in many respects.

You are "the new kid" who has moved to the eponymous town and becomes involved in an epic role-play fantasy war involving humans, wizards, and elves, who are fighting for control of the all-powerful Stick of Truth. Their game quickly escalates out of control, bringing them into conflict with aliens, Nazi zombies, and gnomes, threatening the entire town with destruction.

It touches upon items and themes from pretty much every episode of the show and show a lot of appreciation towards their fan base.

First, you make your character in a character creation screen reminiscent of the official South Park creator that I used to spend three hundred hours creating on the school computers back when I was 13, before printing off skating decals and mascots and then taping them onto my school planner.

 

Ah, nostalgia.

 

 

Then you hit the ground running and can start doing whatever you please in the 2.5D world.

 

Once you've picked a character and name, you can pick a class from a list of four. Mage, Thief, Fighter and Jew. All classes have their own unique specialisation and playstyle.

 

As you progress through the game, you unlock various abilities to help interact with the games overworld and previous places that were inaccessible are now accessible. (e.g. You can only access mouse holes after gaining the ability to shrink. You can only access alien satellites once you have the alien probe in your character etc.)

 

Battle and combat is an interesting kettle of salamanders because a good percentage of the time, you can avoid combat by killing enemies in the overworld by dropping things on their heads or otherwise incapacitating them. If you fail to do this, you will enter a turn based battle that takes place separately, much like in a Final Fantasy game.

 

Interestingly enough, the person who goes first in combat is always the one who strikes first and bow attacks can stun enemies, which makes them more vulnerable to attacks.

 

 

You can also augment your weapons and armour with patches that increase attributes or do extra damage. You can also cause status effects such as "fire", (damage over time) "gross out", (damage over time and occasional interrupt) "frost" (chance to slow) "bleeding" (a damage over time effect that stacks up to five times.) and "pissed off" (will only attack the character that caused a pissed off effect. cannot use special abilities)

 

With so many tricks, combat is decidedly easy and most of the times I was stuck on this game were during more technical moments such as performing a robot abortion and using the wrong analogue stick because the wrong one was displayed, using a buddy outside of combat to heal a dying enemy in order for him to talk to me (which had no prompt and I had no idea I could do.) or the very clunky and clumsy fart tutorials that only apply to the Mage class anyway.

 

It's very much designed like an old school RPG. Lots of depth, but not very intuitive.

 

Indeed, for a parody game made to not take itself seriously and make fun of everything, it certainly takes the combat and gameplay seriously. And that's something I'm starting to call the "Saints Row 4 effect." The game sits at the back of the class, smiling coyly and explaining how it isn't pretentious and how other games are really nerdy and super lame whilst secretly admiring them from afar.

 

In order to make fun of text-adventure games and street brawlers, there was both a text-based adventure and a street brawler in Saints Row 4. In South Park, there's a top down 8-bit Canada level with a retro-themed soundtrack.

 

So you have to wonder where the line between mockery and homage is. Because if you painstakingly recreate that which you're making fun of.... Well, it's just like a dude going down on another dude to prove he's not gay.

 

It's just kinda weird really.

 

Also, the game suffers from "Bioshock Infinite Syndrome" in that you can Google the game and the images you get are not in the final product.

 

This includes the Goth castle, Crab people, Gnome Mines and Hippies, Mr Hankey's Christmas Town and Ginger Redneck kids and a gorilla monkey gargoyle thing. Hopefully they'll be put back in at a later date as DLC. But hey, lots of games end up with hours and hours of content left on the cutting room floor. It's just the industry standard.

 

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/03/27/the-deleted-content-of-south-park-the-stick-of-truth.aspx

 

All in all, it's a great game. Lots of replayability and long enough if you don't rush through it all, do all your sidequests and eat all your greens.

For something that was almost chucked when THQ went down, I'm really glad Ubisoft picked it up.

 

One to consider.

 

 

Video Game News: GameStopped GameStop.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/134007-GameStop-to-Close-120-Stores-Expand-Into-Non-Gaming-Fields

So GameStop are closing a hundred and twenty stores in the US and beginning to focus its development in the adjacent sectors of mobiles and tablets.

I don't quite know why they're doing that and if you don't understand why I don't understand, I want you to go into any store in America and ask a Sales Assistant if they stock iPhones. But here's the catch, it can't be a store that would sell them.
It could be a bakery, a sex shop, McDonalds or a Restaurant.
Apart from looking at you as if you were mentally unsound, where would that person redirect you?

Well gee, I don't know, probably any store but GameStop.

GameStop are known for games, and the idea of the stores shutting down in order to go after a market that's already cannibalizing itself with streets littered with phone shops. (Guesswork here. British man typing.)

Without GameStop, most counties in America won't be able to purchase used games. They don't have a CEX like we have here in the UK. In fact, the sole places you'll be able to buy games will be Target, Wallmart and BestBuy. And I'm sure the staff know lots about videogames.

"A Link to the Past? Ethernet Cables are in Aisle 7, sir."

 

It's a shame to me, because the people who'll cry out "Just download them online, for crying out loud! This is 2014!" are almost certainly right. But I kinda don't want them to be.

 

Right now, I can download loads of titles onto my PS3. I picked up FF9 for a couple of quid from the PS store. I could get numerous PS1 and PS2 titles if I chose to.

 

But I'm not really owning anything, am I?

 

I'm owning a ghost, a spectre. Something I can't see and something I can't be 100% sure will always be there for me no matter what. If I have a disc and I have a console, I'm confident that I can pop it in and will always be reassured that I can play the game. With a digital download, I'm only gaining a right to play a game. I don't own jack.

 

It brings me back to E3 2013, where the Xbox One was announced without a disc-tray and would always be online.

 

I remember talking to a friend of mine and we both reached the same agreement. Sooner or later, there will no longer be discs. This is a future that will almost definitely happen. Microsoft ballsed up the entire presentation, but they hit upon a point. Sooner or later, most, if not all, of our game purchases will be digital downloads. They'll be switched out like CD's for iPods.

 

But see, I like my CD's. I like my video game cases. If I went to a video game store today, I could pick up N64 cartridges for next to nothing that would be old enough to drive cars. Sixteen years, that piece of plastic has been around.

 

It's part of history. It's physical. It's mine.

 

If all our purchases become digital downloads, I strongly feel that videogame history will be side-lined.

 

And I'm not sure I want that.

 

(As an end note, why are digital downloads the same price, and sometimes even more expensive, than retail units? What's up with that?)

 

Video Game Review: Goat Simulator.

If video games were knights in shining armour, Goat Simulator would be the knight that covered his armor in vinyl Swastikas, defecated in his chain mail and spoke in complete gibberish. To understand the ways and nuances of Goat Simulator is to go completely mad. To praise Goat Simulator is to give up freelance video game blogging entirely.

But maybe I should start at the beginning.

Goat Simulator is a game by Coffee Stain studios, an independent company that created the game solely due to a clamoring fan demand.
Once they added a goat tower, popularised by 4chan's random board that is inhabited by sixteen year old stoners, they just had to produce the game in full.

So the game was released on April 1st and it was a glitchy, bug-riddled mess. The developers then listed all 

bugs which didn't outright crash the game as "features" and even as I'm typing this, Patch 1.1 is being developed and  will include a new playable map featuring a ferris wheel that can be overloaded using car batteries, new achievements, better optimization, additional playable goat characters and local splitscreen multiplayer.

Heh. Lazy me.

The question of "Is it fun, though?" must be answered with a tired yes. It is fun. I know this because I had fun. But once you've had fun, you're done. There's only so many times you can lick a pedestrian with your sticky goat tongue and pull him in front of a speeding car. And push people off buildings. And headbutt explosives.

If this was a serious game, the "points" you rack up throughout your session could be spent on upgrades or cosmetics. But they have literally no use and the numbers just keep on rising infinitely.

For some gamers, it may evoke the spirit of Burnout: Paradise or Thrasher: Skate and Destroy, but unfortunately, Goat Simulator just doesn't have the soul.

It's a good game, has DLC and you should definitely pirate it instead of spending ten pounds on it. The maker of the game actively encourages you to get it from The Pirate Bay.

Because saying Goat Simulator is worth ten pounds with a straight face is like this woman saying to me "You are the father." With a straight face.

Yeah. Didn't think so.

Video Game Review: Fable Anniversary.

A month without updates. I'm sorry. My bad. I've been a very naughty boy and must be punished so take me to your dungeon.
Sexual fetishisms aside, Fable Anniversary is a game by Lionhead Studios, an English company that used to be run by Peter Molyneux before he skedaddled after Fable: The Journey.
In all honesty, it's probably for the best. At the launch of every game, he would often overhype or downright lie about the product. He most famously said of Fable that "plants will grow in real-time, towns are repopulated over the years and every house in the game world could be bought." "Carve your initials into a tree and it'll still be there in years to come." "You can poison a water supply in a town." "You can lock people in their houses and burn them down."

All lies from this dude.

Fable's a great game, but it certainly isn't made better by a shouty salesman. You sold me from the trailer pitch, the feel, the music, the ambience and the characters. So please stop talking, Peter.
During the making of Fable 2 and 3, he said they'd be the best games in the history of the universe. Afterwards, when confronted, he actively explains how much he hates them.

Here's his take on Fable 3. Remember, he owns the company that made it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7vnKQIEUfI

Take off your sales shoes and put on your smart marketer hat, Pete. You generally don't want to be telling the public these sort of things. Even if they are perfectly true in the case of Fable 3. I'd say you had balls if you hadn't defended the product like a newborn before you made enough sales from it to go "Yeahhhhh, actually it's sort of shite."

But let's not talk about Fable 3. If I talk about it for too much I tend to go silent for hours afterwards and stare out of my bedroom window for the rest of the day, watching the rain pour down my bedroom window and wondering what might have been.

.....

...

....



SO ANYWAY, Fable Anniversary takes place in Albion, which is a lot like England, and has lots of mythical creatures including:

-Werewolves (Balverines.)
- Goblins. (Hobbes.)
- Evil Fairies.
- Angry Screaming Ghosts.
- Bandits.
- Trolls.
- The Undead.
- Beetles.
- Wasps.
- A Dragon.
- A Kraken.
- Demon Minions.

And many more different kids of enemies that I've probably forgotten. "Annie" is made up of the original Fable AND Fable: The Lost Chapters, the DLC which sorta completes the game. Only it's remade in Unreal 3, which brought to life Arkham Asylum, City and Origins, Spec Ops: The Line, Gears of War, Bioshock Infinite, Bulletstorm, Mass Effect, Borderlands 1 and 2 and Goat Simulator.

So it looks very pretty and very shiny.

It's a certain combination of bloom, saturation and contrast that gives a strange feeling of nostalgia which really sell Fable for me. And there's plenty of things to look at indeed.

It certainly has many evocative sections and after I finished up after thirty hours of play time, I found that there was an entire section of the map I hadn't even stepped foot in with about five more hours.

The combat is brilliant and Skill, (Shooty), Strength (Stabby), Will (Blasty) all are incredibly fun. I completed the game with only one discipline filled because I kept dipping into magic or stabbing. If you're the sort of person who sticks with one, this game still has a lot to offer.

I also enjoyed the fact that it undersells itself on spells. Fable has more spells than both Fable 2 and Fable 3. Sixteen in all, and all of them different and unique.

Devs just don't make that kind of effort anymore.

You can also decapitate enemies and kick their heads over fences. Beauty.

If I had to nitpick, I wished they'd maybe regrounded a couple of quests into the 21st century rather than keep them in the Xbox era. The only one I didn't complete was a quest to find four blue mushrooms. One was given to me. One was on a trader stand. One was fished up from a lake after some hippies told me to go looking and the final mushroom was in a section of the map that you never need to go back to, held by a person of literally no significance in a group of fie others. Unless you have murder them and take it or "romance" them and receive it as a gift. Why would I do that? What motivation was there?

Just change it so that the mushroom is on a stump somewhere instead of that bullshit. Geez. Unfinished quests niggle me.

All in all though, I have to say that Fable Anniversary is a good investment if you're after an RPG that doesn't abandon you to do your own thing and, whilst it's definitely not on rails, is linear and packed with action sequences.

The second game may remain my favourite, but anyone who says that the original Fable is the best should definitely be listened to. And if you see anybody, on any forum, say that Fable 3 is the best? Well, hopefully I shouldn't have to tell you what you should call his mother.

Video Game Discussion: Oculus D-Rift-ing Away.

Okay, let's summarise what's just happened.

The guys behind Oculus Rift who got about 2.4 million for their project, an immersion headset to be used for video games have sold out to Facebook for- Stop thinking it's two billion dollars- $400,000,000 dollars and 2.3 million in Facebook shares plus bonuses of about $300,000,000.

(Thank for the correction, Miles.)

I have no idea what's happening to the people who donated money towards the Kickstarter. Presumably shafted. Unfortunately, that's what seems to have happened.

So let's get a few things out of the way. Zuckerberg didn't do this because he wanted everyone to be using his website. He has little or no motivation to get in the way of its development to that extent.

He's certainly not the sugarplum fairy in terms of business ethics, but it seems as if Zuckerberg is throwing himself behind the project just so he could catch on the wave.

The parties, concerts, publicity, fun. He doesn't necessarily think it's a good product, but he knows it's a lucrative project just from the hype generated. There's a difference.

However, the Oculus Rifts days as a game machine might very well be over.

Sony is probably having a mini-panic attack right about now. Project Morpheus (pictured below) was Sony's own Virtual Reality (VR) machine that they'd suddenly decided to throw on the table earlier this month.

Now suddenly the Oculus has much, much, much, much, much, much more money behind it than Sony's Project Morpheus.

The Oculus was designed to be a peripheral for the hardcore videogamer. Mark seems to have other plans for the deigned machine. (I love that word. Deigned.)


http://www.businessinsider.com/zuckerberg-why-facebook-bought-oculus-2014-3

He wants it to be a social hubpoint with advertisements and virtual purchases.

Dead. Called it.

It's dead. Gone. Completely ruined.

Palmer Luckey took to Reddit to assuade the people about how the project is going to get much better with its increased funding and insists that he still has full control of the startup. I don't go on the site myself, but I saw screengrabs of people who had dropped up to seven hundred bones on the project only to have their investment go up in smoke.

Palmer even said that the Oculus would have been abused when it went to market if it wasn't taken by Facebook. I can believe that, but you've screwed over the people who invested. On an indie project. Which is now owned by a multinational corporation.

I mean Jesus. Is there any hope, Notch? After all, you were the top backer for this project.

"We were in talks about maybe bringing a version of Minecraft to Oculus. I just cancelled that deal. Facebook creeps me out." - Notch.

(Embedding tweets seem to be impossible, but by darn it's there.)

http://notch.net/2014/03/virtual-reality-is-going-to-change-the-world/

Oh, someone who has no qualms making money in just about any way has hit his moral limit.

Nope. It's fucked. Abandon ship.

 

 

Video Game Review: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. (Part 2/3)

I swear I said I'd do one later in the week. In early 2013. And then never mentioned it ever again.

 

I'd like to talk about Skyrim some more and try to flesh out this game as much as possible. In this segment we're going to be talking about professions. Alchemy, Blacksmithing and Enchanting.

You can also cook, but there's little incentive to actually do that apart from minor health and stat buffs.

Anywho, Skyrim's crafting system is one of the most intuitive you can find in any RPG. Any purists who claim that Skyrim is an Action-Adventure title and that its easy-to-navigate menus and lack of a bazillion different stats locks it out of true RPG status can go sit in the corner. I'm not having that nonsense today.

Granted, it was easy to break the entire game by making potions that helped your enchanting, enchanting equipment that helped your alchemy skill and repeating that a few times, but that's all part of the Elder Scrolls fun.

 

 

You could make equipment that would allow you to pick up anything without getting over encumbered.

 

 

 

 

 

Make a sword that can kill everything. Rename the weapon something dumb. Make gloves that can punch enemies over mountains. Make a crossbow or bow that will cause so much damage that the enemy will be catapulted upon impact. Make items that increase your barter skill to levels where shopkeepers will give you thousands of gold if you sell them a single tomato.

 

 

The options are seriously endless.

 

And it's not patched out because it's not a glitch. It's a fair use of game mechanics.

 

I like that. In a competitive multiplayer game, you'd be banned if you found a way to break the game.

 

In Skyrim, it's fine.

 

That's probably why I prefer these kind of titles to shooters. Less restrictions.

 

And I can never say no to Todd Howard's magical smile, a smile that's been with the Elder Scrolls games since the start.

He once said that developers should ignore demographics and installed, and follow their passions, saying “if install base really mattered, we'd all make board games, because there are a lot of tables.”


What a guy.

 

 

 

Video Game Review: Titanfall.

Titanfall is a game that does a lot right, most noticeably the removal of camping. Since there are enemy as NPC's well as the actual opponents running around the battlefield, there's little incentive for people to sit in corners being assholes.

 

 

I was lucky enough to have a play around with Titanfall at my friend Murray's house.

After playing the quick tutorial that runs you through the basics of pilot training and running around in a Mech, you can jump straight into multiplayer and start shooting people in the face.

It's actually pretty hard. However, map navigation is less of a problem given that you can get around by double jumping from building to building which is incredibly fun. Wallrunning mixed in with existing game mechanics makes this a game of skill. This is both fun and rewarding.

In terms of graphical fidelity, the games textures look relatively crisp and there would be a clear contrast if put alongside a PS3/Xbox 360 title. There is, of course, a mild bloom effect which leaves the trees looking ever so slightly whitewashed in one particular level, but that's all I really have to complain about on the graphical/pretty side of things.

Piloting a Titan is incredibly enjoyable, especially with the ability to customise your loadout. I was a bit concerned about that lack of model varieties as it seems to current stand at a staggering three different Titan meshes.

I said to Murray that I wished for the ability to paint and customise sections of the Titans, making chunky ones with tiny legs of one with tiny heads built like a tank.

Basically, I wanted to build Bumblebee.

Or Jetwing. Or Optimus Prime.

When my good friend told me how I should play a Transformers videogame if I wished to do that, I simply rolled my eyes and emphatically expressed how it wouldn't be the same. I needed to make a Transformer in a non-Transformers game in order for it to be fun and/or enjoyable.

My friend also asserted that making a custom titan out of individual components would be hard for the developers to properly balance. I conceded his point, given the incredibly detailed single player that had been made for the game. It is pictured below.

So that's why I have a hard time letting the devs off on this one. There is no single player. Whenever Robot-Man showed up in the corner of my screen, telling me that my Titan was online in two minutes, I asked Murray who he was and he had no choice but to shrug. When African-General-Man insisted that we all pull together and win the match, my emotions were not particularly riled because I have no idea who he is, what I am doing, what my motivation is, where I am, where all these robots have come from, the story behind my surroundings and environment and much more.

And this is where you decry me as being too story-oriented in a game which should be intensely focused on a gameplay element as it's solely multiplayer. And that's where you're right.

I am just too old fashioned at the grand old age of twenty.

Back in my day, a solely multiplayer game was a tech demo.
Back in my day, big-head-mode and colour palette alterations were an integral part of the game or hidden cheats instead of downloadable content that would have cost the cost of a brand new gamein small micro-transactions.

My friend let me load up Project Spark and I was dismayed to find 75% of the content was micro-transactions. For a beta. Not even an actual game yet.

I get so jaded sometimes.

But shooting things in a robot makes things a little bit more ok.

And it's the Y button to kick and the baddies explode into red goo.

That's kinda cool.