The Games Flood

We seem to be in the middle of a games flood, after quite a while with very little worth having we've got something like 5 or so titles all hitting at once. Why they couldn't space this out so people had a chance to appreciate one before the next came out I don't know. So anyway let's take a look at the first three of the deluge of new gaming gems to purchase for most gaming platforms.

SAINTS ROW 2

Leading the charge was Saints Row 2. The original Saints Row was the first game to bring the GTA mechanic to the next gen systems, it was a GTA rip off but it did innovate a few interesting things like GPS rather than just an arrow pointing the way and the ability to have a gang of followers back you up and even the ability to rob all the shops in the game and the use of a mobile phone to call people and get access to various secrets. Now the sequel has come along and in the mean time Rockstar have delivered their own next gen GTA with a lot of the refinements Saints Row added to the formula so volition have released a refreshed version.

This is basically more Saints Row with a ridiculously in-depth character creation system allowing male or female and even scarily anything in-between. I went with a female mime artist with an insane expression on her face. Most things in the game is customisable to some degree cars can be taken to a garage for complete cosmetic overhaul and the addition of improved body engine nitro/hydraulics and even james bond style tyre shredders. Cribs can be decorated, clothes, hairstyles, tattoos, and jewellery can all be bought and add to your style score which levels unlocking various things.

In the game there are various levels of things to do Missions which progress the main plot they are typically story stuff and are usually quite inventive less monotonous than the GTA4 ones which for the odd gem tended to be a bit formulaic. Strongholds where you storm an enemy strong hold to gain it's territory (the more territory you have the more money you gain) they typically lead in with some small mission then you have to kill are the lieutenants guarding the stronghold. Activities which are specific things to do like old style GTA rampage (with one where you have to destroy a certain amount of property in a certain amount of time and another where you are doing insurance fraud by throwing yourself in front of traffic) with 6 levels each earning more money and respect (respect unlocks missions) it also unlocks things like new skills or weapons. then there are diversions little things littering the game landscape that you can do these are typically not pointed out on the map and often just pop up when you jump in a vehicle like an ambulance or a taxi or if you steal a vehicle with a passenger in it you can initiate the hostage diversion where you have to stop them escaping by keeping the speed up while avoiding the police to get money out of them.

It is a game with a multitude of things to do and it doesn't force you to do anything unlike GTA4 that could be a bit demanding what with all that bloody bowling. It adds a few little touches to the formula the GPS is improved so that you can unlock short cuts so if you find a shorter route through a back alleyway it adds it to the GPS for next time, you can take people as human shields to stop enemies shooting their mate and then throw the person as a missile and knock people down or throw them off a roof, you now gain respect for driving like a nutter or shooting people with style (head shot etc). You can steal any vehicle in the game more or less with cars, motorbikes, helicopters, boats, and planes they have added a cruise control option that allows you to set the speed and then shoot things without needing to control the accelerating the brake slowing you but the the cruise control brings you back up to speed to allow steering. They also have the typical radio stations with comedy voice adverts that GTA pioneered you can also buy the tracks you like in music shops then set up your own radio station with the tracks you like.

You can buy shops as well as new cribs to get even more income. The selection of weapons is fun, with the sticky remote detonating satchel charge being a personal favourite cover people or vehicles in those then boom! Other greats include the taser gun, chainsaw, flame thrower, and a minigun.

The graphics are pretty good, the physics forgiving allowing for plenty of handbrake and skidding something absent from the latest GTA due to its more realistic take on things, the only downside is the lack of a proper cover system but you can take human shields to compensate.

It is a game that encourages you to just play around, you could spend some time racing cars in either street races or destruction derbies, you can be an ambulance driver, or fly a helicopter gun ship, collect cars for a chop shop, do some hitman missions, drive a septic truck and spray people and buildings with sewage to lower property value, pretend to be a policeman for a tv cop show looking for extreme violence, rob a load of shops, or I suppose you could even play the main missions ... if you were bored or something.

FABLE 2

Next up we have fable 2 another sequel, the fable franchise is from lionhead and specifically peter molyneux, the patron saint of ridiculously expansive concepts that he fails to deliver on. He is obviously a man of great vision who gets very excited about the sort of game he would like to create but is ultimately hamstrung by real world limitations. The original fable was an enjoyable lite action rps it looked nice and was fairly easy to play. It had the morality system of good and evil and added things like player own able property, and the ability to marry in game (multiple times in multiple cities) but it was a fairly simplistic game. The sequel has moved forward a few years and for the most part lionhead has managed to gag the over enthusiastic Mr Molyneux. It is the same game world but now more a sort of Victorian early industrial feel rather than pseudo medieval with blunderbuss's and rifles replacing bows and the game cities like bowerstone having grown into sprawling metropolis from the small castle town of the original.

The graphics are wonderful colourful and vibrant with gorgeous landscapes, interesting character models, wonderfully detailed architecture. You can choose your protagonist as either male or female, in game customisation of your appearance can be done a little with barbers and tailors offering different clothes and hairstyles. You also shape your avatar with your actions, spend a lot on melee and they'll bulk up etc they are also affect by your moral choices your appearance changing to reflect your moral compass.

They have the same love hate system where people react to you based on their opinion, this now extends into the vendors where if they love you the give you a good price a worse price if the hate you but that is countered a bit if they are afraid of you. You can win people over by doing various social things to impress them ... like farting. As people come to like you then eventually you can convince them to follow you (and then lead the dopey fucks to their doom by sacrificing them at the temple of shadow for evil loyalty points) give gifts or continue to impress and you can get people to marry you and set them up in a house (all property is purchasable then you can either rent it or live in it) and maybe have some kids with them (or sacrifice them at the temple of shadow for even more evil loyalty points.

You are joined in the game by an AI dog companion. He acts as a little scout finding hidden treasure and hidden items. It works surprisingly well and encourages you to explore and go off the beaten path to find hidden things all manner of treasures out in the wild.

It employs the same system of renown where you gain notoriety for your deeds then that allows you to do bigger and better missions, missions are fairly simple affairs but usually good fun. You can also take odd jobs that gain you money and are fairly simple mini games.

Combat it fun and furious, you have the option of three types of attack melee, ranged, or magic ranged is now blunderbuss rather than bows and magic has had an overhaul so that all spells are either area effect or targeted. The spell selection system has changed a little you have one spell selected as active and each spell has multiple levels you can gain, you basically don't have mana you just charge the spell up gradually gaining more powerful levels the longer you charge. I used a combination of guns and magic so far zapping people with lightning then blowing their heads off with a shotgun, it's very satisfying. If you die you get knocked down and take a small xp hit then get right back up again it's a game with very little if any punishment for failure

It's a game of lots to do that encourages you to explore and you can always find your way back by following the glowing trail of golden bread crumbs that lead to the active mission. It's a pretty good system that in concert with the dog just lets you go off and see what's out there.

It's a pretty fun game and my tale of unspeakable evil of a wench and her hound death machine sacrificing anyone and everyone to the dark gods for a few coins is sung by many a bard.

DEAD SPACE

Dead Space is the next title to hit (on the same day as Fable 2 damn it) which is an EA original IP that basically rips off a load of other survival horror games and films to make a sort of amalgam of Event Horizon and Resident Evil.

You play Isaac Clarke the voiceless mostly faceless engineer in the armoured spacesuit, he is the protagonist of the whole affair a worker on a rescue vessel sent to investigate the Ishimura a mining vessel that has lost contact. It also has his girlfriend on board who sent him a slightly odd and disturbing message shortly before the vessel loosing contact. They arrive and find the ship unresponsive proceed to land and then all hell breaks loose.

The ship is infested with zombies sorry necromorphs weird monsters that attack and kill. Unlike normal zombies where you aim for the head, these need their limbs severing and the game provides some lovely tools to do just that, most of which are basically mining tools that Isaac re purposes. The plasma cutter that fires a small line that can be used to blow of a limb, it helpfully can be rotated from vertical to horizontal for ease of delimbification. The line cutter that is a massively beefed up version of the plasma cutter that will slice off both legs in a single shot. There are also more conventional weapons like pulse rifle or flame thrower. You can also take them on a melee range smacking them about and curb stomping them. The zombies all seem to be full of large quantities of jam that sprays out when smashing up their corpses.

One of the other tricks they steal from other games (like sands of time) is the use of stasis you can throw a stasis grenade that basically slows down an object (this is used in puzzles expect lots of fast moving doors you need to get through) or an enemy. You only have limited charge but it can make despatching a zombie child's play or buy you some breathing room to take out other targets while one is froze in the air mid leap.

It also probably rips off some other toys as well that I've yet to find.

The graphics are superb it does look wonderful with the creepy monsters and dark oppressive corridors of the ship ripped up and abandoned occasionally exposed to space (giving you a limited window to move about in due to your suits limited air reserves. It also employs some zero G sections where your boots cling magnetically and you can hurl yourself from surface to surface avoiding zombies and debris floating about the place.

It may all be ripped off but it is put together with some style each bit is well used and fairly fun, hacking zombies apart at range is very satisfying. The in game use of holograms projected from the suit is wonderful allowing you to see ammo, health, and stasis without needing on screen displays. The holo map that projects from your suit is also good and any coms comes up in a little window in front of you. You can also get an analogue of Fable 2's bread crumbs a holo-line briefly projected on the floor to show you the way to the next objective.

All in all it's a pretty fun game not really doing anything new but taking a load of ideas you've seen before packaging them together in pretty box with shiny paper. The depth of the story is probably not it's strong point, I find it hard to feel anything for Clarke and his quest to find his girl as he is pretty much a non entity sometimes that means it's easier to imagine it's me in he suit but in this case it doesn't work. They also did some prequel animations (drawn by Ben Templesmith who was the guy who did 30 days of night, wormwood, and fell to name but a few) which show the events leading up to the game but they didn't really clarify much to me, something about a new religion and some sort of thing it was all a bit odd.

It does do one slightly peculiar thing, as part of the early buyers thing you can download a new suit for the game for free for the first few weeks of release (these give you armour and inventory spaces) there is one for each platform xbox gets the elite suit (white and glowing green lights blerg!) and the ps3 gets the obsidian suit (black with blue lights classy) both of these are free to download and better than any other suit in the game (there is also the scorpion suit which is red and costs 200 MSpoints but as far as I can tell is otherwise identical) they cost nothing to buy in the game shop and completely defeat the point of having upgradeable suits since you can practically get them from the start at no cost. I suppose some people will play it without them just to get the challenge.

But anyway you can't beat the fun of shooting the limbs of a bunch of undead in glorious HD graphics with gallons of jam shooting out of the limbless torsos as you stomp them into the decking ... good times.

Anyway so far that is it on new games out soon is Fallout 3 from Bethesda the oblivion/morrowind people Fallout 1&2 are some of my all time favourite games so a new one is great but we'll see if they have ruined it or not. And also the new de-blasphemed version of Little Big Planet is out a week after that. So many games so little time.