The last few games you beat and rate them III

[H3ckt1k]

This again.

Such a good game.

 

[Lady Santa]

Recently, I beat:

Owlboy - 6/10
Meh. It's a game that looks pretty. And that's it.
The mechanics are lackluster, the pacing is terrible, the level design is all over the place, and the characters, while loveable, lack a back story to make you really attached to them. The game looks and sounds amazing, though.

Steins;Gate - 9/10
Woah.
Time travelling is done a lot in games and movies, but it always just happens magically (Life is Strange, Butterfly Effect). Steins;Gate attempts to explain it with existing scientific theories, all the while weaving it into an incredible story.
The first four chapters are long winded and a bit boring, but, if you hang on, the rest of the story is absolutely gripping. I cried a lot

To the Moon - 6.5/10
No.
I think they tried to make up for some -horrid- game play with an emotional story, but the story felt bland as well.
The sound track was great.

Dead Cells - 7.5
Not a bad game. It's a roguelike so you restart over and over, trying to get further each time, and hoping to pick up some lucky items along the way.
The combat is super smooth and fun, but the game feels really repetitive as there's a lack of items. It's still in Early Access, so it could get better.

Costume Quest - 8.5/10
Cute. Cute. Cute. Cute. :3
With some nice RPG elements and awesome humor to it, that makes it really fun.
Of course, hardcore RPG fans might feel it's way too simple a game, as there isn't much customization, I loved it.

 

[Ceremony]

Crash Team Racing (PS1, 1999)

First off, insert here everything I said about Rayman 2 being a classic which can't be lost to time and which seemed much larger and vaster as a child.

After the first three Crash Bandicoot games came Crash Team Racing, where Sony and Naughty Dog presumably saw value in Nintendo's foremost mascot deciding that after killing his biggest enemy so many times they could go go-karting at the weekend together as a more civil way of settling their disagreements. Not possessing the same sort of shamelessness that sees Nintendo release as many Mario games as they do there is some semblance of a plot in CTR: There's an alien trying to take over the earth and only the best of this ragtag bunch of anthropomorphised animals from Australia can stop him.

To do this there's an assortment of tracks with power-ups to decide who's best. It's pretty much all good. The designs of each track, in terms of the backgrounds and the circuit layouts themselves, are varied, challenging and distinctive. Crash games have always had great design and great colours and stuff and that's the case here. Each track would feel different if they all looked the same, so factor in the challenges of the circuit with the distinctive setting and you get a real sense of depth and creativity.

The classic art design extends to the mixture of weapons, ranging from standard guided/non-guided projectiles to Crash elements like TNT boxes. These are all balanced quite nicely in terms of keeping races competitive. I think there's a balance between the weapons doing this and whatever standard rubber banding the game features, at least a balance which is handled so well you never really notice it. Not even when you've been hit with three missles and a Nitro crate and fell off the road and caught back up to the leader within half a lap.

It's been a long time since I've played this game with someone else but the CPU is generally enough of a challenge. As there's actual progression through the single player ('Adventure' as it's called, if I remember) by the time you reach the end and have tournaments rather than single races the difficulty gets raised and it actually feels legitimate rather than cheap. Adventure has standard races you have to win but then adds a classic Crash feature in time trial races with relics and boxes for you to hit to slow down time. There's also the CTR races where you have to pick up the letters dotted around the track in a sort of Tony Hawk S-K-A-T-E homage, and although each of these features are quite easy the different goal in each of them adds yet more gameplay to an already extensive-feeling array of tracks. There are five different 'worlds' in total and each has an extra level where you have to collect crystals in an open area rather than a circuit. I think I can recall playing these levels against someone, I know I can remember the Super Mario Equivalent. Sadly for single player there's little added by these, but it's nice to have something a bit different.

The actual gameplay is just what you want from an arcade karting game like this. Even after all the years I've had this and the amount of times I've played it there's always that momentary lapse of about ten seconds when I'm remembering what all the buttons do, then I press jump as I'm going round a corner and start boosting, then it's the most natural thing in the world. Being able to combine the actual fluid driving like this with the unpredictable elements of the combat is a good challenge too, particularly if you're power sliding round a corner and having to dodge a hazard, or hit a turbo pad or weapons box. Again, it's nice too that by the end of the game there is an actual legitimate challenge when you're in the Cup races or up against bosses where there's a need to have perfected this sort of driving style. The game can be casual and is for the most part, but there are advanced techniques it ultimately pays to master.

And on that note, not to brag, but in my rematch with Nitrous Oxide (what a name for a racing obsessed alien) at the end to finish the game I hammered him. Three lap race, I got in front towards the end of the first and ended up miles ahead of him. Every weapon I threw behind me he hit. Very satisfying. At the end when the credits come up you get some classic wacky back story to all the characters, making this one of the few games where I've ever let the credits run through in their entirety. The irony being I didn't look at any of it.

Since the game's 18 years old I suppose there's nothing left for me to say of it except that it is just as good as you remember it being from that time and that quite why it wasn't included with the recent remake of the Crash games is beyond me. As money-making enterprises go, an HD edition of this with online multiplayer is literally guaranteed to be a success.

 

[Lost Horizons]

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy 9 out 10

 

[Ceremony]

Dishonored (PS3, 2012)

I first tried to play this two years ago and had a similar experience with it as I'm having trying to write about it now, having finished it. I still can't. Although my eventual playthroughs of the game were successful and much more comfortable than my brain is remembering them as it's not enough, I can't get past this sense of great annoyance and disconnect. With that in mind I'll try and carry on, although aspects which presumably were so outrageous to me that two years ago I had to stop aren't going to be met with the usual scorn. They'll just be pointed out and laughed at.

Dishonored is the story of Corvo Attano, bodyguard to the Empress of the City of Dunwall, a port city somewhere in a region beset by a plague. The game starts with Corvo proving quite useless at his job as the Empress is attacked by like three guys, and killed. Corvo is framed for her murder. Corvo is a silent character which is especially hilarious at this point, as the game then jumps ahead several months with Corvo due to be executed. At no point in those intervening months did Corvo attempt to explain what happened to anyone. Sigh.

Naturally you break out of prison and attempt to uncover the conspiracy that framed Corvo. The bulk of the gameplay is a mixture of stealth and platforming, with each mission being centred around a certain area and a target within the area that must be neutralised. I say neutralised because there are different ways of dealing with the targets - you can either destroy everything in a frenzy of righteous slaughter or you can take the (literal) high road and get rid of them some other way, without killing them. This forms the basis of the game's moral choice system, which is hilariously flawed and which I will come to later.

I'm bad at stealth games. My abiding memory of playing this the first time was of being in a level, getting past one or two guards in what I saw as 'properly,' taking them out, hiding the body, carefully planning my next move before opening a door and entering a room with four guys in it waiting to kill me. Cue throwing grenades and stuff and running away. I don't know if there's a post on here from me about Hitman Absolution which I enjoyed, but there's something inherently frustrating about a gameplay mechanic centred around trying to do something which requires a great amount of precision but which doesn't afford you much capacity for being precise. For instance you can lean out from behind cover and remain hidden, but if you have a clear first person view of open space, you never feel certain you're still in cover. Even then the game seems to confuse you deliberately with some of the stealth elements. You can pick up stuff to throw and attract guards, but they never actually move anywhere. "What was that?!" they'll say for the fifth time as an ever-expanding pile of broken glass appears five feet to their left. Of course you usually possess the ability to fly past them, but then it's like the game rewards the easy way out rather than trying to approach things logically.

To get around any problems with stealh (at least the movement aspect) there's an assortment of weapons and magic power upgrades you can get by finding collectibles throughout the levels. The problem which arises here is the way the game presents its outcomes and consequences of how you play it. I'd call it a moral choice system but it's not really. You get 'punished' for killing enemies rather than avoiding them or taking them out non-lethally with a darker ending. The problem I had here is I didn't kill out of any sense of badness or glee in killing (I couldn't either, since the way I went for the trophies meant my 'bad' playthrough had to be done without any upgrades), I killed first out of necessity because I was useless, then out of a combination of weariness and frustration. I do still remember playing it the first time years ag, trying to play it 'properly.' Sneak around and choke two guys, hide them, then walk into a room with four of them. Great. This time around a similar thing happened, I'm in a corridor, I take out one guy and hide him, wait for the next one to turn a corner before seeing how I can get past him, then a set of double doors open and a guy walks out. Suddenly I have three of them on me and I need to get the gun out, ruining everything.

And here lies my biggest problem with this game. In terms of gameplay it's somewhat rewarding once you get used to it and can jmp around the levels avoiding being seen. To get to this point though you have to go through loads of trial and error which dulls any real sense of immersion you might have in what is a rich and interesting world. Having goals in levels which can be reached in different ways is fine, but when you try three that fail because you can't use the controls efficiently enough you resent the game so much that a lot of its impact is lost. I could play it right now and be able to Blink around the map and stop time to do whatever I like (as an aside, the upgraded Bend Time power that stops time makes the game a complete joke and nearly impossible to fail) and if I did that I'd think yeah, this is a decent game and I'm having fun but it's still undermined by the struggle I went through to get to that point.

The one other thing I want to add is the setting and the characterisation. Aside from the obvious problems of playing as a silent character (who is regularly spoken to by other characters and engaged in conversation in that stupid Mass Effect way with the reply options on-screen) it has that strange Bethesdaean quality where every conversation is at you rather than to you, where it feels like every person speaking is to someone behind you in the room somewhere and where in lieu of exposition and world-building layered in subtlely anywhere there's just loads of handy explanatory texts thrown around the levels for you to read. The amount of books that you can find about whaling and whale oil almost makes me think this was supposed to be inspired by Moby-Dick. Even then the silent protagonist and the well-established scheming loyalists who plan to avenge the Empress's death (by framing Corvo, again) all speak so confidently and casually about the world which isn't explained well enough create a disconnect in the same way the frustrating gameplay does. It's like the game is an exhibition of something which is nice and shiny and functional yet never as engaging as it thinks it is.

There's other stuff too which is never explained very well. There's a mysterious oracle-type guy who appears to Corvo when he's getting collectibles for new powers, but he doesn't really serve any purpose other than to attempt to give voice to someone who doesn't have any. Why not write Corvo as more interesting? If he's supposed to be special because he's magic, why was he so woefully incapable of protecting the Empress in the first place? How come none of the Overseers or Assassins you encounter in missions can sense when he's around? The level design is strange as well. There's separate missions in distinct locations but they're always bookended by a return to some sort of hub that's only accessible as you play through the story regularly, if you replay missions individually you can't get it so you can't access upgrades or any smaller dialogues which set the missions up. It's like a cross between an RPG and an FPS and open world and linear level design and they all contradict each other. Of course, none of this really helps the problems I have in trying to get into a game where I'm being put off by the trial and error style of gameplay or the strange character interactions.

I know I said I had one other thing to complain about earlier (which I still got two paragraphs out of) but I will actually end on this next bit. Of the two endings, the bad one seems to make more sense, as far as the actions of the NPCs goes. If you kill everyone they're all paranoid and expecting death while the world is constantly dark and raining. If you go non-lethal they're all silent and contemplative, accepting that Corvo was just too damn fabulous for their feeble powers to match. Even then two of the main bad guys have killed themselves by the end so you wonder what the point is.

I'm glad I did eventually finish this game and I have a higher opinion of it than I had two weeks ago, but Dishonored is certainly not without its flaws. Although you can overcome these by playing through them it ends up feeling more like you're exploiting something which has been made too easy rather than being challenges in any way. Any chance you have of feeling immersed in what is a deep, intricate and distinctive world will subsequently be eroded, especially if you end up like the poor person in the accompanying image here who had to rid a whole brothel of its guards before accomplishing any of their goals.

Fake ed - I just remembered before hitting submit - there's a mission halfway through where you have to infiltrate a party to take out one of the guests. Since it's a costume ball all the guests are masked, and happy coincidence, Corvo wears a mask. So this mysterious escaped magical deadly assassin who is recognisable in a mask and hooded cape wanders into the biggest house in the city with dozens of guards walking around who will talk to him and treat him like a normal guest. There's even an optional mission here where you can duel with some Lord and shoot him! With guards present as witness! Who thought this was plausible?

 

[Unaffiliated]

I dropped Dishonored about 40 minutes in when I got it cheap a long time ago.

Problem was that I was playing Chivalry: Medieval Warfare quite a bit back then, and obviously the combat mechanics in Dishonored were incredibly shallow in comparison.

It's kind of like playing any 3rd person action RPG after having played a Soulsborne, or watching most TV after The Wire. I can't help but sound pretentious saying it, but it just doesn't hold up.

 

[Commander Clueless]

I agree - Dishonored doesn't have good combat. To be fair, though, I don't think Dishonored is really about the combat.

It's a stealth game through and through, with magical abilities and lethal vs non-lethal decisions.

 

[Unholy Diver]

Far Cry Primal 7.5/10

Pretty good game, dragged a bit at times compared to FC3 and FC4

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Dying Light - 5/10

I didn't beat it but I'm done playing it. Mechanically speaking it's fine, it looks nice and all, but I feel it's just boring and suffers from Borderlands syndrome with the whole "you have to play it with friends!" argument for why it was considered so good. Even playing with a friend it was only fun for the first couple of hours and got old fast. Especially once you start getting guns with how easy it is to get ammo for them. You can load up on ammo quite easily from stores for about $1,000 but legendary weapons which aren't nearly as effective cost $50,000. The story couldn't even keep me going. Overall, if you really like zombie games I guess I'd recommend it but looking at it objectively, it's solidly average.

 

[aleshemsky83]

I dropped Dishonored about 40 minutes in when I got it cheap a long time ago.

Problem was that I was playing Chivalry: Medieval Warfare quite a bit back then, and obviously the combat mechanics in Dishonored were incredibly shallow in comparison.

It's kind of like playing any 3rd person action RPG after having played a Soulsborne, or watching most TV after The Wire. I can't help but sound pretentious saying it, but it just doesn't hold up.

I think even soulsborne has its own flaws, especially with how some of the bosses (looking at you laurence you rat son of a *****) break the z targeting, and how heavy the reliance is on invincibility frames, but if you like those games you should eventually get around to Nioh and The Surge. 2 very good souls-like games. Was really surprised by The Surge especially since apparently the developers previoulsy did Lords of the Fallen which from what I hear was and is awful. The Surge is really faithful to the dark souls formula and level design and storytelling telling in a lot of ways is way better. Yes the audio logs get kind of corny but I much prefer it to having to scour the game for every item and read the descriptions. It actually tells a real interesting story and the environmental storytelling aspect actually is real interesting.

Also I really prefer the Surge boss fights, they're not just the same erratic attack patterns that you have to memorize or power through, theres puzzle aspects to each boss that you need to solve.

Nioh unfortunately is not available on PC but The Surge is and runs fantastic to my understanding (though I played it on PS4 where it also runs great).

Edit: Oh yeah, and its actually possible to complete a couple character side stories without referencing a guide every step of the way in the surge. As you can tell I really have my gripes about the souls games. I really like the Surges take.

 

[Ceremony]

Quantum Conundrum (PS3, 2012)

A long time ago I bought the Orange Box to see what the big deal was with Portal. I'm pretty certain if I were to go looking I'd be able to find a review of that game where a combination of frustration with some of the mechanics and being naturally bad at puzzle games led to an extremely embarrassingly written rant against the game and everyone who pegged it as some sort of transcendent masterpiece because what's largely an exercise in physics has some attempts at humour spoken throughout it. Maybe if I still had the Orange Box I could play it again and not be fixated with the thought of people on the internet going "The cake is a lie!!!!!!!" and not hate myself the whole time. Come to think of it, I'm surprised Portal and its sequel haven't seen 8th gen rereleases. Surely it's easy money.

Anyway, Quantum Conundrum is a first person physics-based puzzle platformer made by the same person who was in charge on Portal. It features a disembodied narrator leading you around the seemingly doomed and inescapable location where all the puzzles are. And I don't hate it! Even considering my complete inability to play puzzle games, I still don't hate it! You are a boy sent to the huge mansion of your Uncle Quadwrangle, an inventor who's built remarkable things and who appears to be missing, although he still talks to you. While working your way through the mansion to find him you have to get through rooms by solving puzzles based around dimension shifting which affects the objects in them. You can make things light, extra heavy, you can slow down time and you can reverse gravity. As you progress you unlock more dimensions and the puzzles get more complex. I'll leave aside the questions about why anyone, inventor of time machines and dimension-altering gloves or not, would have a house with things in the wall which shoot out safes and furniture across huge holes in the floor.

One of my main problems with puzzle games which combine movement with changing some aspect of the physics of the world or character for a solution is being able to press all the buttons in the right order. I press the wrong thing and fall through the floor, or I miss catching an object, something like that. For the most part with Quantum Conundrum this isn't really the case. Playing through it the first time the levels are structured in a way which allows for a lot of trial and error with little consequence. Even if you die you can restart quickly again, and there's lots of checkpoints throughout meaning you're mostly right back where you were before you failed. Although it's centred around these four different dimensions there's also a limit on the amount of 'things' you can actually do, so trying to work out how to solve something isn't going to take forever or require you to do something extraordinary. Maybe my problem with games like this is overthinking them. That didn't happen much throughout this game, and I have a much higher estimation of it than other puzzle games I've played.

The platforming element isn't something I had a lot of problems with either. I know a lot of people struggle with first person stuff that requires this level of precise movement. You jump around on small, moving platforms and have to speed them up and slow them down, or move them up and down, it can be, or rather it can feel precarious. Especially when you're trying to do a speed run and finish the levels under the goal time, which I did. Even then, I played through nearly all of the game and its DLC with a broken controller that kept throwing me left and off of whatever I happened to be standing on and I didn't really have a problem with the platforming. On occasion it struggles with something I remember happening to me most in old Mario games, where you jump off of one thing and on to another, and as you quickly press jump to go off of the second platform it doesn't register and you walk straight off. I've not experienced that since I was about nine years old and I forgot how annoying it was. As I think about it though it felt like this mainly happened on one particular level, one particular object in a sequence even, so maybe it was just that particular location. Even then, when it happens, oh, it's annoying. That's about the worst thing I can think of for the platforming though. The movement controls are similar to the dimension shifting stuff in that they're very functional and when you're comfortable with playing the game, very fluid.

Although you're in a mansion with all these inventions the setting can feel a bit repetative. It's very nice and very distinctive but it's very consistent throughout. Although the dimension shifts creates different backgrounds like you can see pictured here in the heavy dimension, you end up shifting between them all so much they become as commonplace as the original one. The result of this isn't necessarily bad, but it doesn't really help engender any sense of progress. The first level looks broadly the same as the last one, and this coupled with the great functionality of the gameplay and the puzzles means nothing really stands out. It's saved somewhat with the narration which, provided you don't die a lot and keep hearing the same thing over and over again, helps flesh out your surroundings a bit and make it feel like an actual interactive game rather than a mechanic fulfilling exercise. The two DLC episodes of the game show how crucial the narration is, as their six levels apiece don't have any and feel much less immersive as a result. They're also much longer, harder and more complex than the standard levels which doesn't help, but they're a great extra challenge if you enjoyed the main game.

I don't really have any complaints besides the things I've described already. I think Quantum Conundrum sets out to do a lot of things and does them well. I don't think there's much else it could do which wouldn't fundamentally alter the style of game it is. Having beaten all the goal and shift times for the game and the DLC I'll say that it's the best sort of puzzle game you can get, something where trial and error and natural exploration of an interactive environment feels large and rewards that element of experimentation, while being equally fulfilling when you've mastered everything and do everything as 'well' as possible. I barely even had to use youtube to figure out most of them.

 

[Ceremony]

Limbo (PS3, 2010)

A long time ago when on a Games Are Art kick and when I bought games from the PS Store because they had trophies, rarely actually finishing any of them, I bought a game called Braid. A highly-stylised side-scrolling platformer, I remember reading somewhere that it was heralded as 'Mario with a story,' although while this sentiment has stuck in my head I'm pretty certain it's Mario in the same way that BioShock is Call of Duty or Battlefield Earth is science fiction. Either way, despite its actually quite pretty artwork and challenging gameplay mechanic of manipulating time to move platforms and enemies around, the game combines two of the worst traits possible for something in that genre - it's hard and it's unfulfilling. Trying to work your way through the puzzles is a nightmare and the story is appalling. Middle class man gets drunk on a night out with his girlfriend and makes a shit game as penance. Riveting stuff.

Had I waited a year or so I could have had the no doubt extortionately priced Limbo, another 2D puzzle platformer with arty pretensions. Although it's made predominately by Danes it predates the fad of a few years back for Danish crime dramas, so you know it comes from some sort of pedigree regarding setting, atmosphere and brooding narrative subtleties. You control a boy who wakes up in a wood and has to move. Well, there's nothing else you can do in a game, is there?

The game itself is short and, gameplay-wise, fairly unremarkable. On my 'first' playthrough before finishing it now (having first played it on PS+ years ago) I think it took about three hours for me to finish, a time roughly similar to Journey. Once you know what you're doing you can speedrun it in under an hour, but the areas with puzzles are frequent and thought-provoking enough that trying to work them out strikes the right balance between engaging challenge and not being off-putting. This is helped by the controls being simple - he can move, jump and grab on to things like the box in the picture to push them about. Occasionally there are switches to activate.

When you're playing through the game blind there's a good chance you'll die a lot, and the deaths are gruesome. The boy's limbs have a tendency to vacate his body with remarkable ease, and given the amount of large things that can crush him, the amount of saws that he seems to fall towards, the amount of huge drops with hard landings and the fact he can't swim, you're going to be experiencing brutal deaths in this stylised ethereal platformer quite often. The handy checkpoint system alleviates any frustration while not quite mitigating the shock here, you'll generally always have a chance to start right where you left off from. This was noted as a key design point by the guy in charge of making it, who included the brutal deaths to discourage players from trying to do things the wrong way. Of course, it helps create an attachment to the nameless, silent boy since you don't want to see him in little pieces.

The design is very basic and is pretty much what you see in the picture - an assortment of blacks and greys, indistinct backgrounds and a wide-ranging audio background that does more to set a scene than narration or description could ever manage. While I do think the soundtrack can only be properly appreciated by playing the game and understanding its nuances relating to the area of the game world you're in, I can still tell you that it's good. I'll go into the specific sections of the world in a bit more detail later but the soundtrack follows and is suited to each area perfectly. The sound effects of objects the boy interacts with often punctuate them well, with a fantastic juxtaposition between the ephemeral dream-like state caused by the art and the background noise punctuated with more mundane and abrasive sounds from the foreground. You can probably tell I'm trying to avoid describing the soundtrack as "music" because it isn't, it all varies and loops perfectly in a way which doesn't suggest beginnings or endings. The sound that frames all of the action is indispensable in a way that what you'd traditionally consider background music isn't.

So, what is the game about? Really, I don't know. I can't say for certain. You'll find various theories on the internet but there's one fairly obvious recurring motif that all the boy's actions seem to centre around. A girl. Since they're small and there's no real sense that there are any adults in this game it's fair to assume they're children, siblings. At various points in the game the boy will reach a female figure in the distance only for some calamity to befall him before he can reach her. The first time the ground falls away, the girl is revealed to be hanging by the neck from a rope stuck to the wall. Later she's sitting playing in a clearing (the same one which closes the game) and just as you're about to reach her one of the gameplay mechanic pops up, a bug comes down from the ceiling and prohibits your movement, forcing you back in the opposite direction. By the time you get back, she's gone, in fact the place she was in is gone too. You know, I don't even need to know why I'm supposed to be trying to reach this girl. The implied innocence of everyone involved, particularly through the tranquillity of the scene where she's sat playing compared to the rest of the game, means it doesn't matter. There's just something you have to do, and a horrible assortment of worlds you have to traverse to get there.

I realise at this point that my opening diatribe about Braid serves a purpose beyond trying to make me look good for playing allegedly thought-provoking games. Braid consistently tries to tell you why you're doing what you're doing in a long-winded, waffling style that even I would be embarrassed to put my name to. Limbo manages to do much more with much less, the ambiguity of perception and interpretation allowing you to do it more effectively on your own. The game's title obviously makes reference to that quasi-religious term of a certain placelessness of a person. Not necessarily in death but in life - someone can be in limbo if they're without a location or apparent purpose. It's a state of being rather than a specific place or series of events, or at least it can be. I think with this and the motif of the girl as an end-goal in mind the sense of limbo the game tries to convey is quite obvious. A boy's sister has died and he spends his entire life, which is represented by the various parts of the game, trying to return to that idealised state of childhood memories. If you haven't played the game you probably should in order to even try to care about what I'm typing, but I'll try and go through the whole thing to explain this.

The first area of the game is a forest. It has trees and bits of water and living creatures - birds and spiders. Or rather spider, since one of the most notable images from the game is of this huge spider chasing you. I think the size of the spider here is interesting since it's made quite plain that you're controlling a child, yet the spider is considerably larger than him. After the spider section there's a part of the game featuring other boys who clearly represent some other danger or sense of isolation in the boys life. They hide in treehouses that you can't reach, they have a big contraption that mimics the spider's legs trying to stab you, they come chasing after you trying to shoot darts through straws that kill you. This first section is quite alarming in terms of the apparent brutality of the human characters. I mentioned earlier about the graphic nature of your deaths, when there are other human characters in the game who're able to do this - silently and without expression, of course - it amplifies the sense of isolation and danger for the boy you're controlling. All of the innocence of childhood is lost by the sister's apparent suicide, but it's clear the boy was ostracised by his peers at this point anyway. Whether this is down to his sister's death or not, I don't know. Whichever the case, it's harsh and constant.

The boy is able to survive these attempts on his life as he grows up, or at least passes through the conventional stags of life. Everything I'm typing here is my own interpretation, but as the game shifts from natural set-pieces like trees and animals and into more mechanical elements it represents a shift into adulthood and work. The other boys end up crushed by presses as they're chasing you. There's a gameplay feature I mentioned where a white bug attaches itself to your head and forces you to move in one direction until you move into light. While this is an interesting take on the platforming genre as it effectively forces fluidity and consistent movement onto the player it's something else which I think has a hidden underlying meaning. When it's first introduced you see the bodies of other children dead with the bugs still sticking out of their heads and there are times where you have to use these bodies to progress. I was going to say I think the bugs represent jobs but I think that's overly specific. I think they represent unavoidable commitments in life which (try to) prevent you from pursuing whatever interest you actually want to - this ties in with the concept of limbo, of a person's existence being outwith their control. While this sentiment is the underlying point of the game, it obviously needs to exhibit the phenomenon in verifiable,
tangible ways.

The loneliness of the boy's 'adult' life is best represented in the Hotel sections, where you first have to jump along electrified signs spelling HOTEL without dying before being deposited in a ruined building below filled with saws and electrified platforms and other things to jump on. I think the symbolism of various areas is just that, the symbolism is in the area rather than the specific puzzles themselves. As the game progresses the platforming gets more elements added in and becomes harder, different hazards to negotiate and such, which I suppose mirrors life in that as you get 'older' you have more and more difficult things to do, at least it would appear that way to someone who is still inhabiting the mental state of a child as the boy you control is, 'growing up' and trying to negotiate his life while still yearning to be young. In the last quarter or so of the game the world starts moving, turning around to add an extra dimension to the platforming and I think this mirrors this internal struggle very well. There are sections too towards the very end where gravity is reversed, in fact there's a build-up there I'll expand on.

When you first start manipulating gravity it's in smaller sections. You can move a box up to a second platform where you need it. Then you need to be on the roof of an area to move boxed into place you can climb on when you right the gravity. Then by the end of the game the shifts are happening themselves and you have to jump, negotiating huge saws as you fly through the air. While the distinct stage of the freedom of childhood represented by the forest, the deaths of the boy's peers representing his ascent into adolescence before the mechanical elements and the domestic ruin interiors the work and loneliness of his adult life, by the very end of the game I think even as an 'adult' the boy is unable to handle being in that state and is more at the mercy of the world in which he finds himself than ever before. After the last bug, the last extraneous responsibility keeping him from his sister is gone, the world becomes more and more unstable (there are automatically firing guns added towards the end, and there are occasions too where the lighting is effected making the platforming harder) until at the very end there's a leap of faith you have to time perfectly and one last reclamation of individual control to change gravity and avoid a saw before breaking through an invisible barrier of some sort to return to a wooded area. A wooded area similar to (but not exactly the same as) the one in which you started. Where you have to wake the boy up to move. Where you walk along to find your sister playing, facing away from you, where she sits up as if something has caught her attention right as the game ends.

I'm not going to say I love this game or hold it high amongst my personal favourites with many others I've rhapsodised over on here over the years. I'm not going to claim that everything I've said is correct or valid or even justifies itself and the praise I've given it, although leaving aside that which is my own personal interpretation of the symbolic aspects of the game the praise is certainly genuine and justified. The art, sound and gameplay all deserve praise and are the true core strength of the game as an immersive experience. All of this coupled with the fact I had to play through it in full five times to get all the trophies makes this a game which, although short, you get more out of the more you play. If I'd played it once in that trial and error style I certainly wouldn't have thought of any of the nonsense I've typed here, or appreciated the way the soundtrack complements the gameplay and the setting. I wouldn't have thought about all of the platforming sections as representing anything other than an obstacle to be overcome for the point of the game itself. Replayability has always been a hot topic in gaming for whatever reason and I think here is something of a paradox of the question. In terms of gameplay there's nothing to be gained from multiple playthroughs other than a sense of smugness if you don't die, yet all of the things represented in game become clearer as you experience them over and over. Maybe that's the whole point of the concept of limbo being the focus of the game, the repetition or feeling of repetition until you're able to move on, as the boy is by the end.

I'm going to try this last paragraph again. I'm not going to say I love this game or hold it as an essential transcendent achievement in gaming. What I've written here has been a somewhat callous exercise in analysis rather than an impassioned plea for you to play a philosophical masterpiece. I do absolutely think it's worthy of your time and I stand by everything I said, yet I don't feel personally affected by anything I've played or written. Maybe I've reached the end of my own limbo without realising it and am beyond redemption.

 

[Ceremony]

Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars (PS3, 2009)

Have you played Rocket League? Of course you have. Do you enjoy it? Of course you do. Did you play Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars before, meaning I don't resent you for playing the deservedly successful sequel to a brilliant, overlooked game from the early days of the PS3? Well, you know your stuff then.

Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars is a game centred around an obviously simple mechanic. You play football with cars. There's a single player mode that's a mixture of learning the game and challenging you with different AI set-ups. In the Mini-games you have to do stuff like drive around the pitch collecting as much boost as you can, stop shots taken at your goal and boost to hit balls in mid-air. Then the Tournament section is centred around the standard competitive set-up, with different team sizes and AI levels where you have to win by a set amount of goals to pass.

These are all quite short, although they can be frustrating. The AI is a strange mix of predictable yet infuriating. Trying to win games when the AI is 'Merciless' and your own team-mates are getting in your way, of worse, not able to finish when you set them up. Although this game is much more basic than I believe Rocket League is, there's still a tremendous amount of fun to be had in the split screen mode, which can be played with bots. Even on hard they're useless (and it's strange/a shame that the split screen only offers three difficulties while the career has a much greater variation in difficulty) but then you can count these matches as practice for the career and, more importantly, online.

As far as I'm aware the online for Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars was recently discontinued. I've still played it a lot though, since I have all the trophies and one of those is for scoring 500 goals in ranked matches. There's certainly a big difference in playing a human compared to playing the AI, and I remember when you had to try and figure out how to beat a person it was strange because you would expect them to play the way you did. The potential for strange bounces and varying levels of ability meant that you never got bored of the game, the short matches meaning the replayability was constant and engaging.

I'm glad Rocket League is so successful and I can't wait to play it. Although Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars is at times basic there's still a tremendous amount of fun to be had even now. The gameplay is simple to pick up and although difficult to master, it's intuitive and responsive enough to make any frustration you feel be your fault rather than feel like the game's which is a much better sensation than it sounds. On a larger scale game I'd hope there's more variation in maps and cars and game modes and I'm sure there is, but the original inspiration for all of it has enough about it eight years later to show why.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Sonic Mania 9/10

If you liked the old Sonic games, this is a great game to play. It plays just like the old one but with a few modern amenities that add to some great level design. For example, one of the levels lets you switch between the background map and the foreground map. There were some really neat concepts that came into play that I never saw in a 2D platformer before so as well as having the great gameplay as the originals, it still had enough freshness to it to make it even more entertaining. Most of the boss battles were great and innovative but some of them were just frustrating, not even difficult, I felt like poor boss design. Overall, it was a great experience. It's only about 4-5 hours long on a single playthrough but still definitely worth your time and money IMO.

 

[Ceremony]

Red Dead Redemption (PS3, 2010)

A while ago I played Red Dead Redemption and posted a somewhat half-hearted review of it. A few months ago, I played it again.

Red Dead Redemption. One man and his horse. Big gubmint. All that wholesome American stuff set on the cusp of the Old West dying. The pioneer spirit that took the pilgrim settlers further and further west until there was no more west to go to. Except in this game the final map area you end up in is the most easterly. You are John Marston, outlaw turned attempted farmer who is being blackmailed by the newly formed federal government into bringing his former gang members to justice. The result is an experience incomparable in games and in just about anything else I've ever seen.

By my count I've completed this game four times. Except on the fourth time which preceded me writing this I didn't actually complete it properly. Shortly after returning from Mexico I managed to accidentally overwrite my save file. I had decided to save my last trophy before the platinum and I wanted to complete the game again before and I didn't make it to the end. I replayed the missions I had left from old files but it wasn't the same. I missed things I'll come to later. It's a mark of the effect of them that watching videos of what are really quite passive moments of gameplay on youtube doesn't compensate. It's also a mark of how affecting they are that I'd played them all loads of times and still feel weird about having missed them now. Not enough to start again and herd f***ing cows again or go on cross-Mexico stagecoach rides multiple times, but there's a sense of loss, of having missed out on something which is quite strong. I think feeling down about missing out on something you've done lots of times says something in itself, but I'll come to those again later.

The game, as I'm sure you know by now, is effectively Grand Theft Auto with horses. A bold choice given the main point of GTA games seems to be the enhanced childhood memories of people playing San Andreas and thinking that yes, the WACKYness that's in Saints Row 3 and 4 is comparable and what a GTA game should be and what all open world games should seek to emulate. Eh, no. It's especially bold given the control problems which can arise. Driving your horse off a cliff for instance is a thing I've seen other people do. This is done more easily and has greater repercussions than driving a car into a tree. The lowtech transport extends to your weaponry with only period weapons readily available. Unless you have the GOTY edition like I do which has an explosive rifle available which is as much fun as it sounds. Come to think of it, although stealth elements transplanted into games for the sake of variety are universally terrible you do have access to throwing knives which you aren't given enough opportunity to fully utilise. There's one mission where you sneak around briefly killing people unseen but the opportunities to use them throughout the game aren't extensive enough, especially when the combat and the mission objectives can suffer from modern GTA syndrome and be somewhat repetitive.

This isn't to say that the combat and the horses don't have their positives. Your basic third person cover shooter works, mostly. You hide behind rocks and wagons and stuff and shoot at people. The most distinctive aspect of the gunplay is the Dead Eye meter, which slows down time and allows you to mark your targets and fire on them automatically. Since even with auto-aim trying to hit targets from horseback with non-automatic weapons is about as difficult as it sounds, it's a good feature. It does run out and need recharged so you can't take hours to line up every shot you take. You can use consumables to top it up but the process for this is about as annoying/ridiculous as using medicine to stop yourself from being killed, so you probably won't use it. There's also the obvious problem of wondering how to steer your horse when you're aiming at someone behind you. The game claims that if you hold X (the button you're constantly pressing to go faster) the horse will 'follow' the road/path it's on, but this doesn't happen. Fortunately the Dead Eye allows you to dispatch most enemies quickly enough that you can take back control of the horse before you ride off a cliff. As far as variety goes in the weapons themselves there isn't much. The only real difference between pistols and repeaters is clip size. There's a sense of satisfaction from using bolt action rifles but that only works on foot given the amount of time between shots. Much like the throwing knives the opportunities to use sniper rifles are underutilised. You can pick off enemies from far away, great. But then when you approached wherever they are there would be enough cover to hide behind while you were able to take them out normally. It seems like the sort of thing which would work much better in a multiplayer setting of some sort, but I don't know how prevalent those opportunities are.

The GOTY edition I have actually adds two weapons: tomahawks and the explosive rifle. The tomahawk is the ultimate in luxury weapons, effectively being a more expensive and harder to aim version of the throwing knife. Remarkably the latter goes too far in the opposite direction, effectively liquifying anything you're able to hit. Still, you can take out a whole wagon with one shot, I guess that's cool.

Filling up an open world which is effectively a giant desert is a difficult task. One of the most memorable aspects of this game is riding through this emptiness, so trying to make an inhabitable world that has this sensation of scale and vastness yet is by its definition restricted isn't easy. Outside of the actual landscape features and towns, the smaller incidental stuff which creates a sense of realism varies. Mini-games range from poker and blackjack (blackjack is rigged and is impossible to win while poker is the opposite) to arm-wrestling and five-finger fillet, otherwise known as putting your hand flat on a table and stabbing into the gaps between your fingers with a knife. Aside from poker it's remarkable how easily you tire of these games. When you have one which isn't just pressing buttons in order like horseshoes, effectively a ring toss game, there seems to be no order or reason to controls. Even the only worthwhile end result from them - money - is pointless, as there are much better opportunities to rack up the cash.

In the actual wilderness itself there are a range of features which make the world seem active, vast and overdone all at the same time. Naturally there are wild animals around which you can kill and skin in order to sell. This is fine, although the volume of them isn't. Oh look a pack of six wolves, I'll kill all of those and make a fortune! Just a small detour on my journey. Then once you've killed all of the wolves you ride on for twenty seconds and get hit with another pack. The novelty wears off. Then, naturally, you ride a bit further and a cougar jumps out of a bush, killing your horse. Before you've heard its snarl and realised what's going on it's hit you and you're on the deck, then it hits you again and you're dead. And you lost all the wolf pelts and hearts you had before. Since there are challenges which require you to kill/skin a certain amount of animals to progress through each rank, being killed in this manner is really annoying. While this is ridiculous the sense of saturation will be lost among your mixture of tedium and rage, but it's still felt elsewhere. When you reach the final part of the map after progressing through the story you're in a snowy mountain region. Without wanting to get too into the description of the landscape yet there's an eerie serenity to this area, especially at night. So if you're exploring there and you see an elk you want to shoot, purely for the manual thrill of feeling like you're actually hunting you'll pull up and ready your shot. You won't be using Dead Eye at this point because it's cheating, it's you vs. the wilderness and the wilderness can't fire bullets. So you have this shot ready and then a bear runs out of the trees, silent, and knocks you down. After learning your lesson with the cougar you enter Dead Eye straight away and spam a full clip into its face (the elk has f***ed off by now), after you've fired two shots it's still not dead and is in the motion of hitting you again so you still end up near death even after you've shot it a dozen times. Then another bear comes running out to do the same thing. And probably another after that. As much as this wildlife is interesting and does represent a genuine threat from the wilderness itself (ie one that isn't human) there comes a point where you just get fed up. Even moreso when you're skinning these bears and you have to sit through the extended version of the skinning animation because it's bigger.

The challenges I mentioned there, these would work in theory if they could ever really be a focus. At the lower level they're simple - kill and skin a wolf or whatever - working up to more and tougher animals and tougher conditions (I'm sure killing a bear with a knife is required somewhere) but the amount of animals you regularly encounter make it feel like an exercise rather than a challenge. Especially when you have to kill something which never shows up anywhere like a beaver or an owl, they're awful. There's another series of challenges which I think is called Sharpshooter which are focused more on the killing aspect and they're more interesting, there's usually a few where you have to kill birds which are more difficult. The problem is with the amount of animals you encounter naturally these challenges don't feel like anything unque, they just track your slaughtering progress for a while. The other challenges include a treasure hunter series which is self-explanatory, this is much better. Encouraging exploration of and familiarity with the map and features of it (the treasure maps you look at have a rough drawing of some notable landmark you have to go to and search) is a good thing and doesn't ever really make the map feel small or limited. It helps strike that balance between something vast and something restricted. You see all of these things which are lengthy horse rides away from each other, so you never think of the fact you can go from one end of the map to the other in half an hour. Plus, the resultant sale prices of the treasures makes it much more efficient than killing animals. Anything which encourages manual exploration of a world like this is a good thing, at the same time your exploration will influence your opinion of what you're seeing.

The final challenge based on an aspect of the landscape involves you collecting various different types of plant. There is no point to this. The plants don't do anything. You can sell them. Great. You can't even combine them to make medicine or something. They serve no purpose at all besides making you spend a few hours traipsing round looking for each kind on your minimap. This is an example of bad interaction with the world. Occasionally you'll have to find a certain type of plant for a side-mission. Then once you've given up all of your wooly blue curls the next level of the challenge will require you to go out and pick a dozen. Oh and the final level of the challenge just needs you to go and get another hundred of each. Or some number like that. Terrible. Somewhat similarly, the random characters you meet when travelling become as tedious as quickly. The first time you're riding along and a woman calls to you for help before a bunch of guys jump out from behind a rock as you slow down, that's alright. That's interesting, but it ends up happening far too much. The same goes for the amount of incompetent police who seem to be in the middle of nowhere letting prisoners run away. Hopefully they're all disciplined when their bosses get fed up of them bringing dead bodies back to the jail, because you'll get bored chasing them and bringing them back alive. Special scorn must be left to the lazy idiots who have a wagon stolen. If you come across someone who has a horse or a wagon stolen you have to stop the horse and return it to its owner. Fine. If it's a single horse you can lasso it and bring it back, that's easy enough. When you hear "Hey mister he stole my wagon" and immediately enter Dead Eye, kill the person driving the wagon that's stopped twenty feet from the clown who's been robbed who then doesn't move and waits for you to get off and go through a forty-point turn to take it back to them, those people, those ones I get really sick of. You're quicker shooting them and hoping nobody notices. After about three of these incidents you quickly learn to just ride on and ignore them.

But then on the other hand, when you're in a town and an old drunk is trying to stab a hooker and you stop him, they feel much more realistic and much less contrived. This helps contribute to the sense of each settlement, north and south of the border, feeling unique and active. While this can be true there's still a problem with interaction with a lot of them. In the first main one you're in, Macfarlane's Ranch, there's little sense that it is a ranch. There are story missions where you herd cows with purposely stupid AI (just let it sink in how stupid they must be) and help out but when you're left with the ranch itself with its empty corral and its constantly repeated NPC dialogue, it feels a bit hollow. In towns like Blackwater, the symbol of modernity, pavements and brick walls at the end of the game and Thieves' Landing, contents self-explanatory, there's a bit more going on to compensate. Other towns feel too much like things for observation only though, if you spend too long in them. It's not a massive problem and generally the strength of the other elements of the world like background music and general design help make it feel real and lifelike, if not necessarily engaging.

The game world is set in three areas. Fans of Rockstar games will be familiar with a map that opens up as you progress through the story. The first Rockstar game I ever played was GTA 4, some nine years ago now when I first got my PS3. Even now I feel like the overall consensus for what such a game “should” be is some semi-mythical, entirely unfeasible hyper-idealised San Andreas. You can do so much stuff! You can run down the street and ride bicycles! You have the freedom to go to all of these different places right away! This approach to sandbox games has never been one I take as a priority. I don't come away from sandboxes thinking about the freedom in the way I feel as if everyone else I've ever seen or heard talk about video games does. It's always been secondary to me, a pleasant addition to the objective driven focus which is sort of the point of games. As a result, the world in Redemption is somewhat paradoxical. It still has all of that freedom I'm talking about but it's only available as you progress through the story. You start in New Austin and you can't cross the border. None of the bridges have been built. Your ability to explore with complete freedom doesn't exist until you've reached a certain point in the story. The 'player' is free to explore, but the 'character' of John Marston isn't. This isn't something I have a problem with, and I never have. In all my times playing the story I've never tried to move outside the first area. Even going back to GTA 4, I'm interested in the opening scenes, the establishment of the character you're playing as and the world they're immediately thrust into. The other aspect of this, at least in GTA with streets and buildings, is that I generally spend most of my time trying to remember where everything is. One problem with this in Redemption is that Marston is on a mission to find the members of the criminal gang he was in to bring them to justice. So he rolls up, you get off the train in a town called Armadillo, you walk into the nearest saloon and ask after the local fort they're supposed to be hiding in. You go on to Fort Mercer after some more nice exposition from your guide where Marston laments how horrible his life is, how the government is blackmailing him by holding his family hostage to make him do their work and how the life he and his peers lead is threatened. You get to the fort and find the man you're looking for. Marston is promptly shot, once, in the stomach, and is unable to move. While I don't have an issue with these events in themselves the reality is so at odds with the basic game mechanics it seems somewhat disingenuous – if necessary – to open with it. But I'll come to that later.

The story is as I've described. The first section of the game with that one map area is centred around rallying together a gang of rogues to help you break into the fort and find the man you're looking for. In theory this is perfectly acceptable were it not for one other thing you can do in the open world – gang hideouts. There is an assortment of gangs throughout the map who hide out in various locations. These range from an abandoned town, to a mine, to some buildings in the desert. Standard stuff. Except, of course, the otherwise impenetrable Fort Mercer is a gang hideout which you can sneak up on and climb into through a conveniently-placed crumbling wall. You then kill everyone inside to complete the hideout. I don't have a problem with the hideout mechanic. I don't even have a problem with this early focal point of the story being used for a string of secondary objectives. I don't expect them to be able to include something as integral to the story somewhere in an open world game while making it otherwise inaccessible. But then later in the game you technically gain access to Marston's actual home and farm land, but you can't get in until you've reached a certain point in the story. It's just a property you own, no different from any of the others. That's fine, you can bypass it. Fort Mercer though, this early symbol of challenge and the virtuous and life-threatening quest that Marston is on, you can wander in and out of at will.

I'm not sure I feel as if I'm being fair when I'm criticising this part of the game. It's not something I've ever thought about in any of the times I've played it but it does feel contradictory now as I'm thinking about it. One other criticism I will throw at it is the significance attached to this. The tedious build-up missions you have to do suggest a real climax. You have to repeat several seemingly unrelated missions beforehand. Nigel West Dickens, a snake oil salesman, has a carriage you can hide a big gun in so you have to get him to help you. Two of his missions involve winning a horse race. Two involve turning up at demonstrations of his “tonic” to save him from being lynched. Considering the first time you encounter him you save him from being killed, the rest of the busywork you have to do to get to use his carriage seems a bit rich. The other characters that are prominent in this early part of the game are all classic Rockstar. By that I of course mean that they're all batshit insane. I like this. Seth the necrophiliac and Irish the drunk (naturally) provide a good balance to Marston's world weary realism and repetitiveness. Yes, the government took your family. Yes, you don't want to be doing your work even though everyone thinks you're an agent. Maybe it's a symptom of the expectation of the length of the attention span of the average gamer but Marston certainly enjoys repeating himself.

On the topic of characters though I think I need to make special mention of Marshal Johnson, the top law man in Armadillo, the main town where a lot of the missions are centred around in the first third of the game. As Western archetypes go he's nearly as stoic and cynical as Marston is. He's old so naturally he's seen the change in the land and the people. He's especially distrustful of the government he thinks Marston represents. There's a good balance in the character though because although he's clearly above the people he's in position to protect – and although his two deputies are a drunk and a stutterer – he projects a genuine sense of being left behind by the development facing this part of the world in 1911 when the game is set. He is a perfect embodiment of that group of civilisation because the world he is certain of is being altered in a way he can't understand. Yet even in the town of Armadillo itself this modernity and its effects are being felt. The trains which go round the map in various routes pass through Armadillo. Yet with Johnson you at one point go to the nearby town of Tumbleweed, a place which is now abandoned (and one of those gang hideouts I mentioned) yet which was much bigger than Armadillo. When the railroad was built it didn't go past Tumbleweed. So, soon, neither did anyone else. This is an effective comment by the writers on both how aspects of old western life are being eroded, yet the people who are complaining about this are unaware of the aspects which predated them being previously destroyed in the same way.

As the sole in-game representative of the player Marston of course can't embody these subtleties. He's just a reluctant government stooge trying to please everyone and repeating the same lines to anyone who tries to tell him different. What good fortune then that when the assault on Fort Mercer proves unsuccessful in turning up his old gangmate he flees to Mexico and stumbles upon a civil war in which he can fight on both sides with impunity. Before I get to Mexico though I have to, well, go to Mexico.

The mission where you cross the border first is actually a microcosm of all the criticisms you can have of the game. You have to put up with Irish's hilarious tales of drunken debauchery while Marston resolutely goes on about how much he loves his family. The gameplay is effectively a rail shooter, you on a self-steering raft going along the river while endless enemies pop up on the cliffs shooting at you. If you ever run out of ammo (which you won't because by this point you go into it with 100 pistol bullets and 200 repeater bullets at least) there's a box on the raft. Every now and then you at least have something interesting to do as there are for some reason boxes of TNT next to the heads popping up. Firing a body fifty feet up in the air and into the river, hilarious. Dutifully picking off fifty guys whose bullets are deflected by a raft made of wood and chicken wire, not so much. Outside of the mission itself I like the gentle shift from America to Mexico here. Even riding up to the start of the mission you can see a distinct difference between the landscapes. You come out of a lush Eden with trees and sun and moisture, you look across the river and see red stone cliffs, square whitewashed walls perched on top impassive and ominous. Then the raft eventually hits land and you're in Mexico.

If you know anything about this game you know about the subsequent section and the other occasions where songs play an important role in establishing the atmosphere. This isn't to say songs or a soundtrack in the conventional sense though. They're not like the incidental background music that has trumpets when you're in Mexico and a lone whistle like a Morricone soundtrack when you're in America. It's not even really a set-piece either, it's still regular open world gameplay where you can interact with all of the things I've described. Just with music playing a little more loudly than usual over the top until you do. The song is called Far Away by Jose Gonzalez and it's worth listening to now even if you're familiar with it already. The simple way of putting it is that you ride into the country with a song playing. You can look at this on youtube and get some sense of the effect it imparts on the player but it's not the same. I still remember my first journey through some narrow paths on the side of a mountain. I'm pretty certain I fell off and went into the river. But then when I play it later and know what I'm doing the sense of profundity is still there. Not since Journey, a game which you'd think should have a different effect on later playthroughs because you know what's going to happen, have I seen this level of replayability. I think it says something that for a game world as rich and content-full as this one it can bring all of it back down to this one ~five minute period of intense solitude. It speaks volumes of the success of the game's attempt to inhabit the Western genre that it can flick between those two mindsets so readily and maintain both of them so effectively. The end of the invincible raft puts you straight onto the horse and there's no jarring sense of anything being out of place.

For all of those aspects of the Western I think the lone hero on a horse trope is embodied perfectly here. For its place in the story, the journey comes at the perfect time. Marston's exploits in America have gained him an amount of notoriety and there's a need to escape. Feeling over the border to an apparently lawless place has always seemed the appropriate destination in this sort of thing and it's suitably fitting here. The travel to Mexico however and the story's subsequent focus on that area marks a genuine shift in the setting. The story missions in the game's second section all take place south of the border. You don't travel back into Mexico at any point unless you do it in free play. This separation of the two areas in the story helps increase the immersion in the area because when you play there isn't any suggestion that you should be anywhere else. I've talked about the separation of open world and story missions already, I can't say if it's just my impression or priority when I'm playing a game but to me the focus you have on one specific area of the map and the events therein is natural. When I'm playing the game and I'm in Mexico nothing compels me to leave. I'm never struck with a desire to leave and treat it as an open world game again.

And what of Mexico? There's a civil war of some kind on, because of course there is. Your first arrival after the journey with Far Away playing bears mentioning. Turning up in a classic Mexican town with the tiled ground and the flat, open buildings, considering the colour and design palette of the game is very similar from area to area it's quite a striking difference. On my most memorable playthrough I went into Mexico just as night was falling which adds another layer to the feeling of running away from something. Having to flee the country under cover of darkness. For all the stunning set pieces in the game and the landscape ironically it's at night where the game often looks its best. When the sky is clear and there are endless stars in the sky, there's a vastness that you don't get in the day time. When you see the sunset as a backdrop to your entering Mexico and your first encounter with the people being a trade-off of racial insults before a gunfight ensues it shows that the respite Marston has gone to find will elude him. In a way it's a fitting contrast to the musical episode, one brief moment of solitary reflection then straight back to business. All from a game where freedom of movement is supposed to be inevitable and free to you whenever you choose. It's like the Lemon of Troy Simpsons episode when the boys make a huge deal out of crossing the border into Shelbyville, then in the background you see the girls running back and forth while playing. Except in this case the boys are completely right. It does matter. An open world game has succeeded because it makes you believe you are or should be confined to one area of it.

This isn't to say everything in Mexico is perfect. Much like the top half of the map it has strengths and weaknesses. The diversity of the landscape is perhaps the most interesting. One half is raw, red stone desert with huge, angular rock formations and the other an almost white scrubland with undulating hills and cactuses. Although the actual map area which is Mexico is larger than the American half you've been in the diversity in the landscape makes it feel like a bigger difference than it actually is. One immediate drawback which comes as a result of this scale is that the stoic solitude of travelling from mission to mission is undermined by the sheer volume of it. Starting a mission in the western-most settlement that's a government stronghold? Oh, it's time for a stagecoach ride to the opposite end of the country to go climb a mountain. Before I go back there I'll head to this new mission that's appeared at the bottom of the map after a twisting road to get there, oh wait I can't, I can only take missions from here between 2 and 7AM. And I can't save anywhere to forward the game a few hours so I'll head back to Escalera. Oh look another mission where I have to sit on a stagecoach for half an hour to actually get to the start. Except this time all the possible dialogue was worn out on the previous trip so now you don't even get to listen to Marston explain over and over about how bad the government is and how much he wants his family.

I'm still not sure if the cultural depictions of people in this game is accurate, exaggeratedly mocking or a mixture. The government side of the war in Mexico is almost surreal. The crooked Coronel (it is always Coronel) Allende drinks so much he vomits, immediately before grabbing a local kidnap victim to have sex with. He's a murdering pig. His lapdog De Santa who you do missions with encourages you to partake in the festivities. There actually is some legitimate subtlety with De Santa who is gay but whose sexuality is only ever hinted at. In terms of character development it's one of the few cases where someone in the game isn't rigidly defined and representative of one specific aspect of the Old West. This isn't to say I'm criticising the game for its characters being repetitive or dull, they aren't. But, by the nature of what they're appearing in and how the player will interact with them, they have to retain a level of continuity. Perhaps it's no surprise that someone who only appears for a few missions has this level of intrigue attached. Of course, when Marston eventually shifts to being on the rebels' side full time it all blows up, so the lead-up to that moment of revelation becomes all the more convincing after the fact.

Once you're on the side of the rebels the real fun begins. Here you have near enough every stereotype about Mexico and its people ever distilled into one person, a liar, a coward, an even more tedious bore than Marston who goes on about writing poems and corridos about how he saved his country singlehandedly when everyone else actually did the work. In the end, after he overthrows Allende and becomes state... governor? Guy in charge. After that, Abraham Reyes is revealed in a newspaper report to have proven to be exactly the man he said he wouldn't be, that he was getting rid of. The signs for this are obvious to Marston and the player if not to Reyes who does and says pretty much all the things the man he's trying to depose does. The only real purpose of the story being in Mexico is to lead Marston to some of his old gang members – he ends up finding more than the one he was after, which leads to more problems with the government. It's almost a shame there isn't much cross-border involvement in terms of missions. I think I was wrong earlier, there are one or two missions where you briefly cross back while being chased by something. None of these crossings have the same impact as the original one. Maybe that's a comment on how the border isn't actually profound at all, that two cultures seemingly so distinct and antagonistic to one another are separated completely – as the missions in the story are – yet are still ultimately right next to one another, with you having the freedom to transfer. Yet never feeling the urge to utilise that freedom.

My complaints about the setpiece of Fort Mercer in part one is only partly mirrored by the eventual overthrow of Escalera in part two. For all the time you're free to spend in it as a normal town it is a government stronghold and you do have to assist the rebels in their strengthening before attacking it. Certainly it doesn't feel as much of an anti-climax as Fort Mercer does, but I think this is purely because Mexico and its story missions feature so many more big setpieces in terms of locations and the more varied ways you can kill people in them. The diversity of the landscape I talked about extends to the towns and a lot of the side missions. Even the gang hideouts south of the border are more varied, although they're a blend of pro-government/pro-rebel attacks so I'm not sure how those are supposed to work. Maybe they're why everyone says to Marston that he's a sellout fighting for both sides. Poor guy. Maybe someone will listen to him when he says he just wants his family back. Elsewhere in Mexico I'm surprised at the amount of Spanish that's spoken both in mission cutscenes and incidentally in the background of various places. While the latter might not be that surprising in towns where there's only English spoken when it's directed at the gringo, the amount of it in story missions seems high given Marston speaks about four non-English words in the whole game. The initial stand-off when you first arrive in Chuparosa after crossing the border epitomises this clash between American/Mexican, but for important figures in the story who can speak English readily, you'd think they'd do it more. At least the background NPCs have this level of cultural depth and realism which contributes to the overall depth of the world. Rather than feeling like the same random pedestrians are all over the game world they feel distinctive, it feels bigger, more realistic.

I like that there's a similarity between Armadillo in the north and Chuparosa in the south. Both have a distinct yet similar feel to them, for although they're as different as possible in terms of physical layout/structure – Armadillo the classic Western town with its street and wooden facades, Chuparosa arguably the Western Mexican town equivalent with its open market, border wall and Alacalde as a focal point in the centre – they're connected by something surprising – the lawman in charge. I mentioned Marshal Johnson from Armadillo. Chuparosa has Landon Ricketts who seems to have been a notable figure in popular culture in Marston's youth. With a trench coat almost as long as his moustache and a voice somewhere between the Stranger in the Big Lebowski and three bottles of whiskey, he serves as an example to Marston. Partly because he effectively teaches him Dead Eye, partly because he seems to have escaped a similar life to the one Marston's trying to get out of. I think of all the character relationships in the game the one between Marston and Ricketts is the most interesting. Both of them recognise themselves in the other and neither seems to want to. Ricketts keeps telling Marston what he has to do to survive what he's going through, Marston misinterprets this and just doesn't want to be a faded star living away from his home. It's probably a mark of how caricatured all notable Mexicans are in the game that of all the characters in the section I find an American the most interesting, but I think he represents too much of the game's conduit with the player to not be more significant. Or maybe I'm just burnt out from having to listen to two sides of the same coin complaining about the same things when I'm going from one end of Mexico to the other that a relative voice of sanity seems more relatable.

Once you've finally killed or captured one of your gang members you take him to the border crossing where your favourite government agents turn up in a car to collect him. They're perfectly placed on a nice island between the two bridges of the main crossing. It's a bold move for a game to not introduce the main villains until the start of its final third but they're menacing enough for it to work, though I'll come to them later. The other key aspect of why this works is simply that for all of the story missions you follow there's rarely any question of where things or going or where you'll eventually end up, you're just following what happens without question. Although the first big setpiece of taking on Fort Mercer to catch a guy is undermined by his not being there and doing the same thing in Mexico is undermined because there's still more for you to catch, this ultimately proves to be the point. The game's opening cutscene shows the government letting Marston loose and at that point he has one job. But then the government always wants more. They don't understand anything about what Marston's done or why he's done it, but it's not enough. But, again, I'll come to that later. I don't think there's much to say to close about Mexico that I haven't said already. Certainly the entry to the country is much more important than the exit. As with your presence in this part of the map, once you leave you're not obligated to return for any of the story missions. By this point you probably will at some point anyway if you do some side missions or you need some stupid flowers for your challenges, but Marston the war is over and he's leaving Mexico to get on with what it gets on with. The fact that you can leave behind such a distinctive and varied part of the world just adds to the sense of scale again though, as the notion of there being a whole separate country in the game still lingers. When you go into Mexico and experience the differences cross-border it's only then you realise there are any differences at all – the same goes for your return to America.

Before a return to the story I think I'll mention some of the side missions at this point too. There's a difference between the activities and mini-games like arm wrestling and the random encounters you meet in the wilderness. The Stranger missions are an assortment of character studies dotted throughout the world offering specialised social insights compared to the main story. While there's obviously no proscribed order for you to do them in (save for some only being unlocked after progressing past a certain point in the story) I'm pretty certain the first one you can encounter, at least the one I remember doing first, is a great example of one of those classic character archetypes in the genre. You find a naïve young girl who was on the train in the opening cutscene as Marston was going to Armadillo. She was having her head filled with nonsense by a preacher who was hastily covering up the logical fallacies in his argument about why she should be god-fearing. Now she's on the ground in the middle of the desert, and the Lord has sent her salvation in the form of Marston who gives her medicine because she's wearing a huge puffy dress in what must be hideous levels of heat. The amount and range of Stranger missions in the game helps add some variety to the world in the form of a distraction from the story missions. In those as I've said there can be a sense of repetitiveness, either in what you're actually doing or from the dialogue that's in them. In the side missions you have a bit more depth and representations of other social concerns of the time and setting. You have filmmakers and writers trying to make their careers out of the landscape. You have the occasional crazy person, whether it's a senile old woman in a wedding dress looking for her husband who was put in the ground years ago or a cannibal who's making people disappear. Or a man who wants his horse back a little too much. Some of the economic concerns of the time are exposed too, as you get to act in conning a man out of his water-rich land. Those stupid plants make a reappearance in several though, including in one actual interesting mission where someone's trying to build a plane. Apparently you can make wings out of beaver tails and flowers. Even then once you've helped this guy build a plane and it's crashed the wreck lies on the ground at the bottom of the cliff for the rest of the game afterwards, so there are at least some tangible results for some of the missions which is rare. For some of them it's financial rewards which are most notable, but as discussed, they're largely meaningless.

The moral aspects of society show up in some missions and they're linked to some extent to one of the game's most poorly implemented mechanics: the honour system. By now moral choice systems in games are widespread and understood, even though they're rarely thought out very well. Redemption has two, effectively. A fame rating which goes up the more things you do regardless of whether they're good or bad and an honour rating which is affected by doing good and bad things in missions and in general. If you go around shooting people and horses you'll be a dick. The problem is it serves absolutely no purpose. If you play through the game normally and don't treat it as a GTA clone from your youth which is what the game encourages then you're not going to benefit from the perks of a high honour, like being able to commit minor crimes without being chased or having slightly lower prices in shops. Likewise, if you go for the bad options then... it makes no difference. What happens, people say mean things to you in the street? The sheer amount of things you'd have to do to get to a fully notorious state would be boring in themselves and the effects would be so imperceptible to be a waste of time. The thing is though, with the nature of the story and the point of what Marston's doing there would be no logic in him going for the immoral option in a lot of cases. Even to add to this, there's an option of buying a bandana which you can use to cover your face and carry out whatever crimes without it affecting your honour. I genuinely don't know what the purpose of putting this mechanic in the game was. Everything about it seems antithetical to all of the things you're able to do. Not only does it provide at best only cosmetic differences to gameplay it actively distracts from the extensive character study of Marston himself. I understand that in an open world game there has to be some sense of freedom imparted on the character you're playing as. Allowing the player to control someone with as much freedom as is in a game like this and only providing wholly pre-defined routes for the character development to go down, that's as bad as not providing any at all. The result of that is an open and interactive world which is undermined in the eyes of the player because it's all pointless. But the attempt at changing that is so redundant in itself that you wonder if there's any legitimate purpose to it in the first place. The fact that the story missions have a net positive effect on your honour rating really shows how poorly thought out it is.

Ironically the thing which saves the player from any of this over-analysis while playing is the very insignificance of the system itself. When you consider it alongside the actual characters and the things they say and do they're effective enough in themselves. Hey, the guy whose house you just bought for two hundred dollars is delighted even though you know the guy you've bought it for it going to make thousands from the land. You refuse to profit from the alarmingly large amount of people who're involved in the drugs trade, although this is in part because the game suffers from GTA 4 syndrome again in that the main character (eventually) ends up fixated with money even though the money you personally can actually earn is both limitless and useless. Even later when you get to Blackwater, beacon of civilisation with its bricks and pavements, the side missions are about political blackmail (a side-note: the political situation in America isn't given nearly as much attention as I think it could. There's someone running for governor and he's crooked, or useless, or something, and this is suggested throughout at various points but the subplot has little bearing on the story. I think it could have been more prominent than it was, certainly the potential for comparison with Mexico's politics exist.) and prohibition, which would have been an emerging social concern in 1911. I don't know if it says more about me or the state of video games in this decade that I seem (am) surprised by a game being worthwhile on its own merits and content rather than through some separate system of rewards and achievements but I think that for the amount of side missions in Redemption, for them to have such a high hit rate of thought provocation shows the extent to which the game succeeds. If you can feel as contemplative about tertiary characters who see very little screentime as you do about the main characters I think that's a good thing. Certainly it adds to the sense that the border states the game is set in are a genuine, structured world which is worth exploring. Even the amount of flower collecting they inspire can't break that.

 

[Ceremony]

(continued)

Back to the story. Back to the impeccably dressed men and the final area of the map which is about half the size of the first part yet seems as large, with one part being rolling plains, one part being snow covered woods and mountains and one part town so large it has suburbs outside it. The third and final section of the game is itself split into two parts. You join forces with the “enlightened” academic McDougall of the time who believes in phrenology and eugenics, ably assisted by hilarious amounts of cocaine and Nastas, the educated Native American who dispels all the prejudices held against him by pretty much every white man you encounter by this point. The racial element brought in here rings a bit hollow given the carnage you left behind in Mexico. You're still hot on the trail of your old gang members except now you get to chase the leader, Dutch, and what he's been able to cobble together from the local natives. Any complaints I had before about the lack of cross-border tension being explored are largely answered by the large native population which is aligned with Dutch. The problem is that this section of the story is squeezed into so little time there's very little real exploration of it. I don't think you get past more than ten missions before Dutch and the gang are gone. Nastas, the one you know and who represents the complexities of these race relations, is killed even sooner than that. I know there are a lot of things in this game, a lot of good and complex elements but there are parts of the end of this game which feel rushed for whatever reason, or at least included and not explored to the full extent possible. My melancholy about this deficiency is helped I think by the atmosphere of the plains and the forest where this section of the game takes place. I think I mentioned earlier about the forest at night, it's remarkable. The same goes for the plains at dusk, the scenery and the colours which go into them are genuinely amazing even seven years on. I recently saw a Sony executive claiming people don't want to play old games because they look bad (or, he doesn't want to) and in playing as many PS3 games as I have and still am I question the value of trying to go further with regard to graphics. There will always be technological improvement and scope for further realism which isn't bad, but with the nature of the gaming industry and the technology which enables it, sacrificing everything in the name of progress isn't something to be celebrated. Not when legitimate artistic achievements like this, hell notable achievements purely in gaming are discarded because they look old.

I might come back to that later if I'm still alive. What I should have ended that paragraph with was an assertion that the monochrome view of the snow-covered woods at night (with the soundtrack of a frothing, violent river right next to it) giving way to the swirling clouds of the plains outside of daytime – it's another example of the diversity of the world and the subsequent sense of scale imparted by there being so many distinct views.

My one problem with this final area of the map is the lack of interaction with it afforded to the player. Although there's a lot of story stuff up in the woods and mountains there's very little to actually do when you're there outside of story missions. It suffers in part from Fort Mercer syndrome, in that part of the area is used by Dutch's gang and is full of them when you fight them, yet completely empty when you go there on your own. I wouldn't mind so much if it weren't so interesting. It's effectively a giant army camp entrenched in the mountain, with passages up onto cliffs. I think it would make a good set location for multiplayer games but in my limited experience with the online I don't recall matches of any kind being focused in that area. Shame.

On to the positives of the area and that town with the suburbs, Blackwater. For all the archetypes the other settlements embody Blackwater manages to be distinctive again, featuring the classic Western town tropes along with burgeoning signs of modernity. It has a harbour, it has a train station with a platform on either side, it's almost completely filled with brick buildings and has paved streets and roads. The policemen have uniforms and aren't just people that look like Marston. A symbolic reminder that the law is no longer in the hands of the general population. The government officials you do some missions with even have a car but, of course, with Marston's sage advice over the top about the old ways being the best it inevitably breaks down and you get ambushed by a dozen guys on horseback. Back to Blackwater though, I like it. Although the harbour doesn't serve any purpose besides cosmetic niceties it's a nice place to stand and observe what's going on. The sounds and sights are distinctive here even compared to another street in the same town, so the sense of it being bigger than the other places you visit is there. By virtue of it being 'last' on your travels it can feel as if your time there is limited. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it reinforces how fleeting this modernity is, Marston spends the whole game struggling against it and its proponents and almost as soon as he gets to experience it he's sent back to his farm, then it's gone. I would have liked the opportunity to sit on the benches at the harbour though.

For all my criticisms of the gang camp in the mountains it's home of the game's defining moment. Once Marston has gone through every hoop the government wants him to, once he's found every former gang member (every time he finds one they pop up with another who just happens to be a short distance away, you wonder how they're so useless at finding these people) he ends up finding Dutch. After chasing him up a mountain (as an aside here, Dutch is wearing one thin top while living in a cave up in a mountain range where there's snow on the ground. Go on, google “Dutch Van der Linde” and tell me he's dressed properly for his surroundings) he and Marston share a conversation I have to share with you:

Dutch: We can't always fight nature, John. We can't fight change. We can't fight gravity. We can't fight nothing. My whole life, all I ever did was fight.

Marston: Then give up, Dutch.

Dutch: But I can't give up, neither. I can't fight my own nature. That's the paradox, John. You see?

Marston: Then I have to shoot you.

Dutch: When I'm gone, they'll just find another monster. They have to, because they have to justify their wages.

Marston: That's their business.

Dutch: Our time is passed, John.

Dutch then falls backwards to his death. Marston goes down to be met with a chiding for not shooting him. I know that in isolation this passage sounds as obvious as I've complained about before. As repetitive as Marston often is Dutch's insights here aren't any different, they just happen less by virtue of how present he is in the game. Certainly I've avoided including any more quotes in this because I could have doubled my word count if I had. I think the significance of this moment is twofold. Dutch describes the ongoing deterioration of a way of life, of a country's way of life which Marston has witnessed throughout the game. For all of the conflict and social changes he's been involved in and all of the individual characters in the game who embody this Dutch is the only one who's stopped fighting it. Or to suggest the other characters in the game are engaged in some exercise in futility, that's unfair. They're just making the best of the life they've got even though they don't understand why that's all they can do anymore. The whole notion of westward expansion throughout American history was the sense of the pioneer spirit, of exploring and conquering the wilderness and making it your own. Dutch's gang attached their own Robin Hood-esque sense of conscience to it, rectifying what they saw as moral wrongs. Now the development of American civilisation has reached a point where that individualist spirit is being stamped out by a new wave of something which is apparently unanswerable. Marston is never able to satisfy the government agents. He's blackmailed by them to do their work but does it count as blackmail when there's never any legitimate intention of allowing him to be free? After all, that's the point of the government. They're oppressive. Even at the end, when Marston is faced with the one positive role model he's ever had in his life, he doesn't believe him. When Dutch is the only one to realise it and tell him the truth, he doesn't believe him. This is why this game is as effective as it is. In order to transmit these onto the player there has to be an established and persistent emotional connection with the character the player inhabits and everything I've described manages to achieve this through Marston. The player is only left to do whatever the game tells them to do in the same way Marston is forced to do whatever he is told. I don't want to get into a philosophical argument as I have before with BioShock and the nature of objectives or a political one about the influence of the government but in Redemption they managed to find the perfect balance in Marston between everyman in an explorable open world setting and legitimate character with his own distinctive motivations and reactions which are then imparted on the player, increasing the emotional investment in everything that occurs. As a result, even now at Dutch's end and the end of Marston's mission for the government, you know it's not the end.

Happily, right after this transcendent moment of realisation you have another musical journey, leaving the woods to go back to your farm which you can now interact with, and where your family are. I think it's a bold move to have Marston's family as such a strong motivator for him throughout the game. While they might be a legitimate motivation for him, the most prominent reminder he has a wife is the inability to sleep with the prostitutes usually found in Rockstar sandboxes. So it's almost jarring to remember there was an end goal in sight for him. But then there's a moment of silence, he gets on his horse and an acoustic guitar starts up. I said earlier that I always remembered this sequence more vividly than the border crossing and I think this holds true now as I'm reading this. I don't know if it's because the underlying sentiment of Marston returning to his wife and family is more relatable for me compared to crossing the border and the multiple associations you can attach to that act. Maybe it's just something I'm more used to in life and in media, so it allows me a greater connection. Maybe Marston's constant droning about how he just wants his family back paid off. Maybe it's just because I prefer the song. Certainly the physical landscape in this area is as striking as that of your journey into Mexico. Although the Mexican crossing is impactful in that you're entering the country and experiencing it for the first time, the later journey through the woods feels just as profound. Perhaps it's because it's the end of a journey rather than the start. You can feel a sense of progress in it at least, you come down through the snow and the trees and they fall away until you're out in that open plain at dusk. Again it's the sense of a unique sequence of interaction with an open world which sets this moment apart, as there's nothing different going on yet it's made so much more memorable. Even the muted sounds of Marston geeing his horse along add to this, distracting briefly from the dreamlike state the music has on the journey and reminding you that you are still playing the game normally.

Something else which makes these two passages in the game so important is the fleeting nature of them. Because they aren't technically missions they can't be replayed. The only time they happen is when you're playing through the game normally and have completed the preceding missions and are returned to the open world. I discovered this to my cost when I managed to save over my most recent playthrough, as I mentioned at the start. I was a few missions in to this third part of the game and I still feel cheated. Not least because my plan to 100% the game again before getting my last trophy before the platinum – for shooting the final buffalo, which I'd left alive out of a sense of principle – was boring me and I loaded my old save and tried, tried to shoot it but couldn't and the subsequent guilt was overpowering. So after this I resolved to at least finish all the story missions, but once Dutch was gone so was my journey home. A youtube video doesn't do it justice. Mainly because when you look one up you get annoyed at the route he takes which is different from mine:



That complaint in itself is an example of how effective the game is in these moments because everyone who plays it will have a different experience of the same thing. There's a comment on that video from someone saying a bear attacked and killed their horse. Classic. A blending of the game's worst fault and its best moment. Maybe it's this sense of flawed genius that makes me like it so much. Maybe that's what makes me feel so down about missing out on something I've experienced several times already and can see various renditions of whenever I want. It's the perfect reward for what you've experienced throughout the game up to that point. Marston's redemption is complete. He has atoned for the mistakes of his past and can now live the honest life he wants to. Even at this point there's an irony that the final story missions are mostly centred around farming and hunting. Teaching his son Jack how to hunt (albeit at this point with remarkably scarce wild animal supplies and the laughable pretence of needing the family dog to sniff them out) and heading back to the Macfarlane ranch to herd over some cows to have on the land. The game comes full circle here in a way which to some extent justifies Marston's motivation as I pondered earlier. Although you can't identify with his mindset that much because you haven't experienced his attempts at an honest life the fact that the closing missions he was striving to return to echo those at the beginning (and the strong sense of family espoused by some of the characters he interacts with in these early stages) helps to some extent. This is me being charitable. If I didn't like the game I'd complain about having to stop those same stupid cows from running in front of a train or having to go catch and tame wild horses to keep the farm afloat when I could go out and capture an unlimited amount normally or go to a shop and buy dozens with the money I don't have. But you don't resent these missions as much the second time.

In the section about the side missions and my complaints about the poorly implemented attempts at morality you may have spotted something notable missing. One sequence of Stranger missions in particular, titled I Know You, involve Marston finding a man in a tuxedo and a top hat at various points in the world. Every time they meet Marston seems on the verge of recognising him, but he never does. This despite the man suggesting he knows Marston, or is at least aware of his past. The first two times you meet he sends Marston on quests centred on morality. The first is to encourage or dissuade a man about to cheat on his wife with a prostitute. Again, there is no tangible result to either outcome in terms of gameplay. If you pay attention however there's a corpse in a chair with a sign saying CHEATER around its neck in front of the bar where the man is, so that serves as something of a warning. The second time you meet the man he tells you there's a nun at the local convent collecting alms, and that she needs protection or she could be easily robbed. Anyone could rob her. Especially any man of questionable moral standing with twenty different weapons on his person who just happens to go by, wink. But come on, who's going to go up and rob a nun? The final time you meet the man (you meet him once in every section of the map) he's standing on a hill behind Marston's house. Nice spot this, isn't it? Damn you! Yes, many have. He walks away, Marston fires three times and he doesn't die. Marston looks at his gun in disbelief, then when he looks up the man's away. I don't want to act as if a game including a sequence of side missions where God walks Earth in a physical form is some sort of unique life-defining experience but I remember looking this up online after first playing it and the level of shock and excitement that went through me when I realised what was going on. The implementation of the morality system here goes beyond gameplay mechanic and fully-fledged existential crisis inspiration. Where is the judgement falling? Is it on Marston the character in the game? Marston the character who exists before the game? The player? The player believing they are Marston, that the Marston they're controlling in-game embodies their motivations, reactions, justifications?

The suggestion that the man is God is handled with some amount of tact in that he is depicted as a judge of humanity rather than an explicitly religious figure. The nun is simply a woman of religion trying to achieve good. There isn't any suggestion of a connection between the two. There are several other side missions which feature a religious element, including saving several women from illicit relationships and 'saving' them by sending them off to that convent in Mexico. Much like that drug addict in GTA 4, come to think of it. There's one notable woman you save in Mexico though after paying off her boyfriend she goes off to the convent. You go to the convent later on and discover her boyfriend came back to pick her up and ended up killing her. You then duel the boyfriend and he dies. Although the God in the side mission doesn't reference these events specifically the subsequent sense of judgement of Marston by him and by the player as a dual observer and participant in it means he doesn't have to. Given the nature of the interactions with other NPCs that occur as a result of these meetings there's even a potential interpretation that the meetings and conversations are purely metaphorical. Or that Marston is hallucinating from being in the desert so much. Or that he's dreaming, I don't know. Whichever the case is and whatever the missions are supposed to represent the thought-provoking nature of them means there's probably no definitive answer any two players could agree on. Things like this elevate Redemption from above average sandbox to legitimate artistic achievement. Through moments like this the game is elevated above an objective-driven exercise based on reaction and skill of the player (which is what games are, remember) and into another plane entirely. No game makes the player question their role in events in the way Redemption does. Games with moral choice systems often fail because of the absurdity of the full extent of the choices and the subsequent disconnect between them and what happens to the story – Infamous' inability to communicate with any other characters undermines the result of the choices you make. Something like Spec Ops: The Line comes close in terms of blurring the definition between something which is unavoidable for the player following a pre-decided path and something in which the player/character embodiment is directly responsible for what goes on but it doesn't have the same quality or quantity of outsider observance as Redemption. The game and its effectiveness doesn't hinge entirely on the I Know You sequences but it is perhaps the finest example of why the game is as layered and transcendent as it is.

Once you've failed to kill God you'll eventually realise you've marked the graves of Marston and his family. As I said somewhere earlier, the final story missions all centre on Marston's life back on his farm. He has achieved his redemption, his son gets to read books and not grow up to be like him. Yet the apparent state of crisis the farm is constantly in actually works out as a good preparation for the game's conclusion and the persistent sense that this desired way of life for the Marstons can't last. Maybe it's having played through such a large and varied game for so long (by this point if you've played it the way I've described your play time would have to be at 24+ hours) but there's a terse inevitability about this final section. Any sense that the game might be rushed here isn't really that strong because it ultimately reflects what's going on. Marston would be trying to compensate for the time spent away from his family, wanting to be a role model to his son. To make up for lost time. I'm sure I've explained away narrative faults as necessary evils of gameplay in reviews before but the ending of this game feels different. I've mentioned Marston's redemption a few times and I have this nagging feeling I've inherited this interpretation of the title from a youtube comment many years ago, but it bears revisiting. Marston's redemption is focused in his attempts to atone for his past. This isn't something relating specifically to the events of the game since he'd left his gang and gone straight beforehand. This way of life which Marston represents being eroded and bemoaned by so many characters is what ultimately sees a more important redemption than Marston the individual. In the face of the changes already underway in the game, in spite of the people he meets' experiences with these changes, it is the ways this remnant of the old time represents which succeed. Marston is able to conquer whatever challenges he's faced with because he's an experienced gunman and has Landon Ricketts' experience providing him with magic bullets. While Redemption is among many things a tale which cautions against progress and employs many traditional and alternative means of expressing this caution through the medium of a video game it's still realist. It's still reflective of real history. Blackwater is what all the settlements will become, the land is being changed and the political and social structures of a vast, varied country are being changed by a tiny minority of people. Marston is able to beat them. His redemption is for the people and the land he represents as much as it's for him as an individual.

I've made a frequent point in this review of criticising moments where the gameplay is dispensed in order to accommodate the story. The final mission however sees the worst case of this. That cloying sense that the time on the farm wouldn't last proves true. The army is sent to Beecher's Hope. It has to be said that the final mission is very poorly designed. You have multiple men on horseback approaching from every direction and the cover for you to hide behind while trying to shoot them is terrible. It amounts mostly to some flattish rocks in the garden. I can't think Marston would be as naïve to think he would never face a band of people trying to raid his home, so I can only presume this is an oversight on behalf of the developers. Certainly if I was picking a place to try and defend I'd pick Dutch's cave with its multiple Gatling guns along the way. Once you've fended off most of the army you take cover in the barn. Marston sends away his wife and child knowing the rest of the army and the feds are coming to kill him. When they're gone he peeks out the barn door, then he pushes it open. You have a split second to survey the scene before you enter Dead Eye. For some odd reason the game defaults to one of your revolvers here, as if you'd pick a gun with six bullets rather than twenty two in this situation. You can pick some off with Dead Eye but you can't win. If I'd been given the freedom to hide upstairs in the barn and pick them all of from a window though, yeah, I could manage it. f*** the pigs. This instance of the game throwing away its own reality is obviously different from the fort you can conquer alone in two minutes any time you want though. I think by this point I'll let it get away with something for a change.

After Marston is killed there's a fade of his wife and son crying over his grave. Then a fade, you see a grown up Jack (with appalling facial hair) leaving flowers on his mother's grave. I want to say it's always raining at this scene because the way I always remember it but I might be making it up. Either way, this vibrant world being doused in completely grey rain is as fitting as it gets. As much as all of the scenery I've described is bright and striking when it rains that's all gone. Completely. You can see the polygons in Marston's hat. It's ugly. Even the ferocity of the weather doesn't make up for it, a thunderstorm with that amount of rain is still just ugly greyness. Then there's a brief musical interlude which is barely even comparable to the previous ones I've raved over in terms of length or interactive allowance. You get a voice like a latter-day Johnny Cash singing Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie. Perfect. A song which epitomises this entire concept for the developed world, growled over its conclusion. There's only a few lines of the song and rather than a single journey they cover the fade which encompasses three years and all the struggles in them. It's the perfect song for this moment as Far Away and Compass were earlier. As much as the background and incidental music is successful throughout the game in establishing the depth of the world these small, comparatively secluded moments are just as atmospheric. This combination of music and ugly grey rain is perfectly fitting for this site where three graves now lie, a place a mysterious man with a top hat and a moustache described a nice spot which holds Marston, his wife and the hilarious “Uncle” who for all his faults seems much better at running a farm than Marston ever was. I always felt as if the three shots Marston fires should just have been for his wife and son, the final grave not existing until Jack dies whenever he dies. It would add a nice sense of pessimistic dread to proceedings, especially now Jack is being forced to take up his father's place in the world – literally, since you end up controlling him and being able to do all the things John did. The post-game then is Marston Jr. in 1914 rather than 1911, with no difference to anything. The world doesn't change any. Jack is his father, in a different time but still, seemingly, the exact same place. Maybe (and I am weary of the maybes by now) this is a ham-fisted way of saying the more things change the more they stay the same, that the inevitable changes aren't so inevitable after all.

Or maybe they just needed to give you a post-game and couldn't find any logical conclusion to the story which kept John alive. At some point in the future when I recant my Fallout 3 experience for you I'll complain about an open world game which doesn't offer a post-game after the main story, but for now it's probable you'll still have things to explore and experience. You do have one final mission which is technically a side mission, Jack hunts down and duels the man who killed his father (one of the agents he was interacting with the most, who was pictured after John's death having been a shooter but who was of course never able to be shot while you were in Dead Eye). And that's that. The end of a game like this is something of a challenge for anyone to balance I suppose. You have this incomparable open world centred around its sense of scale and incentive to exploration which you can't cut the player off from. Yet you have a story which by its nature must destroy the conduit through which you experience the world. I think I like that there are no changes as Jack becomes the playable character. In the newspaper you read about the other characters in the story and what's happened to them but while this contributes to the sense of time having passed the things you read about have left no tangible impact on the world as you interact with it. None of them are around, so the corrupt Mexican state Reyes has presided over is just empty, the struggling Macfarlane Ranch presumably still struggles, though there's no interaction between this son of a recently dead friend and business partner. Maybe in taking up his father's role in life Jack tries to get away from that life as much as he can, or at least as much as the mechanics of the game allow him to. At this point though I think I'm really over-analysing.

I don't know where to go with this review at this point. I had planned a summation of how I feel about the game but I think the connections made between Marston and the player that I've noted all apply to me anyway. Rather than one distinct impression left on me the game creates many, with a mixture of pre-defined moments like the musical journeys and with my own explorations of the world. I've never understood the mentality of fast travel in open world games (although as I type this I strongly remember doing it in Borderlands, for some reason) and peoples' reliance on it and my bemusement is at its strongest here. You can effectively travel anywhere you want at any time, you pitch a tent and can travel to any place you've been. You can set a way point on the map and jump on the nearest stagecoach to take you there. As with GTA's taxi journeys you can skip the sightseeing altogether and just arrive at your destination immediately. I don't understand the mindset for this in any game, especially not one with a world as engaging as this one. Yes the random encounters get very tedious very quickly but you can ignore them anyway so it doesn't detract from the experience too much. One thing I didn't note is that aside from the landscape which is so striking and the world which is so immersive the physical act of the journey is just as important as an expositional tool. Although it's a constrained world and isn't 'true' exploration in the sense that it's a contained world with set destinations and ways of getting there the act of travelling contributes to the empathy that builds between Marston and the player. The affinity you end up having with your horse is remarkable. One of my playthroughs saw me ride the same horse for the whole game. When I got to one of the hunting missions with Jack I accidentally got on his horse after skinning a wolf, he got on mine. Panic. What can I do to get it back? Will it still be there after this mission? Can I shoot him? His horse? Will that reset the mission, will the horse (which I realised later I could recall at any time since I held the deed for it) come back afterwards? As much as missions on horseback and just travelling the same way could be frustrating because of how close the horse's stamina gets to running out and throwing you off the attachment you have to it goes far beyond the negative impact on your honour if you shoot it. My own attachment to this single horse certainly contributes to my sense of the game as a product of the Western genre, where the lone rider is by definition affiliated with a horse which serves him much more effectively than the villains'. Although it can be hard to properly define my own personal attachment to something which is both cosmetic and disposable it exists because of the same reasons I've described for having an attachment to Marston himself. As much as my three full garages in GTA Online are something I'm very proud of (there's something to be said for having won lots of races to get the money to buy and customise all of them, and now I'm thinking about that convertible Ferrari lookalike and really needing to put that game on) there's something different about Redemption's horses.

Why do I feel as if I've missed out on something by not finishing the game again properly? It's not because I potentially undermined all I've said and all I feel because I got bored and wanted to finish quickly. Something video games have always struggled with is the notion of replayability. I won't try to speak for everything that's ever been made but in my own experience when you were younger and your parents bought your games there might have been a need to play the same thing over and over again because it was all you had. They might have been shorter than modern games and Redemption which would contribute too. I know from past experience that being able to finish Rayman 2 and collect all the Lums within six hours isn't representative of the amount of time I spent playing it when it came out or the length of time it took me to ever beat it, never mind the collectibles. At the same time there are aspects of 100% completion I'm glad I managed to allow myself to avoid. The flower collecting challenges are right up there for this but the bounties too, which I realise I haven't mentioned. Wanted posters go up in towns, you ride off to kill all their henchmen and bring them back dead or alive, depending on how much money you want. And to get 100% you have to do this twenty times, I think. Aside from this providing another contradiction in the landscape by making these notorious criminals appear one at a time and only when you actively try to seek them out it's dull. It's repetitive. It's arguably a crucial or at least a significant aspect of the time period which the game is celebrating so much yet even trying to spread the bounties out rather than doing them all at once doesn't really affect your engagement with them. Even the fun of lassoing them to tie them up and bring them back alive doesn't mitigate this, it just adds a layer of frustration. If this is all I can think of to be glad for missing out on I think the game has done rather well, however.

That notion of replayability though is something I still find interesting. Aside from my own psyche and appreciation of games and art changing over the near five years since I first played this I'm not sure if there's any great change in what's going on. The game I've played is still the same. I'm a bit more thorough now in games since I actively collect trophies but in my final tidying up of this I just had incidental stuff to get, like breaking certain horses or getting in bar fights in every town. I eventually killed that last buffalo and I think it's nice that a game mechanic was tied into a trophy which represented the major themes of the game. All the animal species in the game respawn infinitely except the twenty buffalo found in Great Plains, symbolically the last area your progress brings you to. The trophy for killing all of them is called Manifest Destiny and without going into a treatise on American Exceptionalism which I know less about than anything I've talked about already it just seemed too fitting of an end to this game for me, for now. The last time I posted about this on HF I said I was resolutely avoiding the trophies, not wanting to spoil my appreciation of it with a fixation on meaningless virtual icons. After spending a long, stressful time on the glitched multiplayer and playing through all the DLC I don't think my appreciation of the game has been diminished any. If volume of thought is anything to go by it definitely hasn't.

I suppose I should mention the fact that I've been playing the GOTY edition that contains all the DLC, most of it focused on multiplayer. If you don't know what I mean by glitched lobbies online it's near enough impossible to play most game modes legitimately. There are a lot of interesting team v team modes which I think could have been fun when the online was active. I vaguely recall seeing some chatter about an online in Redemption 2 that's modelled on the GTA V style and I think an active open world in the same guise can work. If all the game modes from this game are included I think they'd be quite popular. I know I'd love to try proper horse racing against real opponents. I say this because I have no doubt I'd be much better at it than 99% of people who'd run their horse off a cliff at a tight corner at full speed. In combat modes though rushing on to capture objectives is pretty standard third person cover shooter stuff and I think it would offer a refreshing change from the at times stale gunplay in the single-player. Part of me dreads a return of the co-op modes in Redemption which are fun and challenging but at times too difficult since Dead Eye isn't implemented fully. There's also a co-op mission where you have to herd some cows, because of course there is, and protect them from an endless supply of people trying to shoot them. That mission is bullshit, if you'll pardon the pun. There's also one where two people have to fend off an entire army from a town which is under cannon fire from a nearby hill. In the dark. Even still, the co-op missions present something different enough from the story missions and more substantial than most of the side missions, so it's still an engaging addition to the game. They help to remind you that there is some gameplay to be employed throughout this world which must by this point of what I've been saying barely seem like objective-driven interactive entertainment. There's definitely room for both sides though, and I hope if the mode is present somewhere in the sequel that it's just as good and with more variety.

When I finished the Undead Nightmare DLC I don't think I wrote anything about it on here and I'm not going to now. It's sort of strange that something which a majority of people would have played after finishing the main game is set before the end, ie before John is killed, but it was released as a standalone game too so I suppose it works. There's still some degree of social commentary in there but I feel as if it's more critical of modern society than that of a century ago. I remember being quite concerned at how much of it I found pertinent just 3-4 years after it was released when I played it, so if I ever go back to it with more of a critical eye I'm sure I'll end up even more horrified. I still remember the surreal meeting between John and a crying sasquatch upset at being hunted. “But you eat babies. Everyone says you do.” Creating empathy for Bigfoot. At this point I don't think there's anything the game can't do.

I'm sure someone more eloquent than I would be able to write about this game more effectively. They could write more clearly, more definitively about everything I've noted and many things I've missed or forgotten. If they had the exact same experiences I have they'd probably be able to articulate the resultant feelings better too. I like this game. I like it because it's like so many things I have played yet it's like nothing I've ever seen in any form of media (well, not necessarily true). I like it for the moments like the musical journeys and the dawning significance therein that you're not in a game any more, you're in a life. I like it for the vividness of the landscape and the sky, the fact that at times jaggy textures on characters and outfits is compensated for by striking visuals elsewhere, from spectacular light to remarkably realistic looking water, which is a shame since you can't swim. For its few faults in gameplay and narrative the game not only has enough content to compensate but to overpower them completely. If you're bored with doing one thing you'll always have numerous choices to go somewhere else and do something else. That this philosophy underpins the whole sentiment behind the story and the social realities being depicted surely isn't an accident. And the story itself, under the constraints of the realities of video games and the things required of them to still be marketable and profitable, the story succeeds in a way incomparable to anything else told through the same medium. There is no open world game with a main character who a player can identify with so much. There is no character who at the same time embodies so much characterisation both in game and outside of that story. Marston is caught between two competing times of social order and tries to be both at the same time. He can't. America couldn't. It probably still can't. The secondary and tertiary characters are all as varied and significant, even if many of them border (titter) on semi-racist stereotypes. But then, based on how much of this game is based on historical accounts and realities you wonder how exaggerated some of it is. The typical game mechanics the game employs to tell parts of the story don't feel the way they do in other games. Everything is raised and improved by the nature of what they've been attached to. Basic things like scenery, music, the technical aspects of the game (and special note for the voice acting which is all as authentic as you can imagine) are all delivered perfectly and help make the world what it is. It's a rare case where the game is made up of several aspects which are exceptional in their own right but when combined manage to create an experience greater than the sum of its parts.

It makes me sad that the nature of the video game industry is centred around progress. The focus on the technological advances means that old games and hardware are no longer made and experiences gone. Playing remasters and remakes is one thing and can be important in preserving gaming's legacy but even then certain tangible sensations of a game are eroded – the start up screen for PlayStation, the noises and visuals from certain consoles and old games. Maybe the upcoming Crash Bandicoot remake will show what I'm trying to say better. Playing the original is a strange experience nowadays and I feel as if it is genuinely let down by technological constraints. The controls are terrible and I'd never be able to finish it because of the way Crash moves. Even beyond that the graphics are obviously distinctly of a period but is this necessarily bad? Does it devalue a game? Of course it doesn't. Old films and books aren't lost because we find new ways of producing them, they persist and they persist because they are worthy of it. Maybe gaming will reach a point where services like PlayStaion Now will allow the entire back catalogue of companies to still be playable through whatever means but that's going to be far away and maybe it always will be. I've never used one of these services and I know that 8th gen consoles allow digital games to be partly downloaded and played while waiting for the rest – but this obviously brings its own natural restrictions with it. Consider the fact that Redemption came out seven years ago. What will video games be like in seven years from now? What games will have been made? What cultural effect will they have on society in a wider sense? What platforms will they be on? Will there still be the same dual platform affair we see now where huge companies like Rockstar and Activision can put hundreds of millions into games that don't necessarily offer anything more for that money than a small indie developer putting out something that's 2D and three hours long? I don't want to live in a world where games like Red Dead Redemption and BioShock are lost to the past. I don't begrudge but don't necessarily want to have to buy a new remaster of it every generation to still be guaranteed to play it. I understand that the audience focused on longevity and legacy is small in comparison to the one who will buy whatever is newest and drive the industry with that money but I think that every part of the gaming industry, developers, writers, publishers, anyone who makes games regardless of the scale or content should be doing more to preserve what they're creating. It's almost like this struggle between the past and the future is something which was in the game.

I don't think this even is solely to do with games being taken seriously as an art form and comparable in that sense to literature or film or paintings or any other form of artistic, cultural expression and creation but the lack of legitimate legacy planning is inexorably tied with this. This game deserves it, so do many others. People deserve to still be able to play them, to know what came before and inspired whatever flavour of the week they've got now. Throw in the fact that you have various different gaming companies now and more from history who are defunct and it makes you even more concerned for the precarity of the medium. The shift to digital content is even more concerning in this light, the security of having the games at least replaced and worthless if the infrastructure providing access to them is ever removed. Games like Red Dead Redemption deserve better. Video games as a concept deserve better.

Any attempt at a conclusion I try to attach to this will either be a repetition of something I've said already or a tenuous elongation of some point which by now barely has anything to do with what I was talking about in the first place. If you haven't played Red Dead Redemption you should. I hope that regardless of when you read this you are still able to do so.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Fear 3 - 6.66/10

The game is incredibly short, only took me about 3.5 hours with a friend of mine and feels solidly average. I would not recommend it if you're playing solo but the co-op is pretty well done. It's not even scary, all the moments where jump scares happen are super obvious, I was never spooked nor did the atmosphere in the game ever feel scary. It hardly feels like a horror game at all. I would normally give it a 6.5 for what it is but I'll give it the extra .16 since it is October and because the song in the credits was Danzig - Mother.

 

[aleshemsky83]

Megaman 7 and 8

These games were pretty hard, and Wily in both these games was way harder then 9, but 7 especially was made extremely easy by the rush suit and 8 had its moments of being challenging but fair.

Either way very good games and I prefer the art style over the originals. Although the snowboard sections in 8 were waaaaaay too unforgiving and most if the time there was no checkpoint after the sections so you had to do them again after you died

7.5/10

Megaman 9

What can i say, I've got zero nostalgia for NES graphics. It was before my time so I can say in all honesty theres no nostalgia goggles here (yes I realize this is a newer game but you understand what I mean), this game was just unfairly hard. I made use of the checkpoint system and prevented the game over screen. I just don't have time to go back to the beginning of levels, that's not what games should be about in my opinion. So with that I realize I can't claim to have beaten a true NES-hard game even if this does meet that barrier. So with that out of the way, I actually still liked the game. Pretty fun game but all the same, I still prefer the accessibility that came with the snes era.

I rate this about the same as the snes and ps1 games but the inferior graphics take it down a peg.

6.5/10

 

[misterchainsaw]

I actually just played through all the MM games through the legacy collection as well. I would not exactly call MM9 hard on the default setting. With Protonan? Sure, that was hard, and there are a couple of annoying jumps, but in the base game you can buy all the E-tanks you want. If having to continue annoys you, just make sure not to start levels with 0 or 1 lives (i.e. kill yourself without trying and continue to start the level with your full compliment of lives).

Anyway, the biggest issue I with the actual NES games in the first legacy collection is the awful slowdown, so I'll only grade the ones on the second collection (7-10)

MM7: Not a fan of the way they changed the rush adaptor to be full suits, and something just felt off on this one compared to the rest of the series. Also not a fan of breaking the bosses into two sets of 4 (which 8 did as well), and the first Zero fight is obnoxiously difficult. I really think this is the weakest game in the entire series 6.5/10

MM8: Still not a fan of the bosses being split into two groups, but the gameplay mechanics are much improved from the SNES game and I really enjoy the vehicle and bullet-hell style pieces to some of the stages (and I don't think they are overdone). Probably one of the easiest MM's, not the least because you don't have to start the stage over when continuing - and the upgrades to your power shot are devastating. 7.5/10

MM9: Went into this a little bit above, but the difficulty is frustratingly imbalanced on the default difficulty. None of the robot master levels are particularly difficult, except for the unforgiving pits and spikes that will instantly kill you. It never felt like I was in danger of running out of health in the stages and as long as you had the robot master's weapon they were quite easy with Megaman as well. The ability (and added challenge) to play as Protoman was a welcome addition, although taking away the store seemed like a little bit of a low blow. I ended up having to restart the Wily stages once because I ran out of E-tanks and definitely couldn't handle the last boss while taking double damage without them . I haven't really explored the two higher difficulty levels they give you to play throuh with Megaman...Protoman mode was hard enough. 8/10

MM10: They did a much better job balancing the default difficulty between enemies and platforming insta-kills in this one, and in addition to being able to play as Protoman (which is a pseudo hard mode to go along with the game's actual difficulty options), they allow you to play as Zero, who is much easier to play with than Megaman. I beat the game without continuing with him on normal, and probably could do it without dying if I started a game while still familiar with the stages and the correct boss order. This game is certainly a step up from 9 and I think is just as good as the classics in the series, especially when you consider the replay ability of having 3 different characters with 3 different difficulty levels. 9/10

 

[Ceremony]

Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (2002, PS3 HD rerelease 2013)

Since I played Dishonored recently I decided to fire up another stealth game. Since I bought the Hitman HD trilogy after playing and enjoying Absolution a while ago I thought he, it's about time to finally play it. Who knew, a glitchy port of a 15 year old PS2 game is a vastly different experience to a game where you're magic and can teleport up walls and stuff.

You are Agent 47, a man named for the number of functioning hair follicles in his head (c/o Yahtzee Crowshaw) and you have to kill a bunch of people. I have no idea what this game is about because it's batshit insane The Italian priest 47 is living with at the start of the game is kidnapped by some local Mafia types and in your quest to get him back you end up thwarting a Russian guy's attempt to steal nuclear weapons from Afghanistan by laundering them through a Malaysia-based cult and by killing some people in Japan, for some reason. I think. It's nonsense. It's not even entertaining nonsense, because it's completely impossible to follow.

So if the story is unfathomable, does the gameplay compensate? Not really. I'd say I can't judge it fairly because I played it predominately with trophies in mind and used walkthroughs to that end, but having played on the highest and lowest difficulty it feels like it's really hard to try and find a balance in terms of gameplay and approach. While the full extent of a stealth approach can be found on youtube (and includes one mission where to avoid detection when assassinating a target in a moving motorcade you can stand at the side of the road with an axe and kill him by swinging when he drives past, playing it like a normal person, it's hard to fully utilise all the stealth mechanics. 47 walks so slowly you need to wait for an opportunity to neutralise people if you have to, and even then it's not always easy to avoid detection. The result is gameplay which isn't delicate and considered as much as it is badly paced and frustrating.

The other option is to just grab a gun and shoot everything which moves. While this is cathartic and very satisfying, it's not really the point. When I've played old PS2 games upscaled to the subsequent generation I've had varying opinions. To compare this to others I hadn't played previously - the Prince of Persia and Team Ico collections - I don't think I would have cared for them much if I'd played them at the times. I think the subtleties and delicacy of the genre makes it difficult to fully realise them in a game with technical limitations to this extent. While it's certainly ambitious and spectacular on the rare occasions when it works, when you play it in what you assume to be the 'supposed' fashion it feels like there's something off besides your own limitations in playing it. I've started the next one in the collection - Contracts - since finishing 2 and I really wish I had started playing Thief instead.

 

[Ceremony]

I played Hitman Contracts and it's basically the same except a bit shinier and with more nudity. And a minigun, which is great fun.

 

[GlassesJacketShirt]

I played Hitman Contracts and it's basically the same except a bit shinier and with more nudity. And a minigun, which is great fun.

All the old Hitman games felt a bit rough around the edges with regards to player movement, often felt rather robotic.

I do remember Blood Money being a significantly better game than either SA or Contracts though. Its levels were generally better structured and there were some far more interesting ways to dispatch targets (with the exception of the tutorial level and the White House missions).

 

[Frankie Spankie]

I thought Contracts was great, I actually thought the movement in Blood Money felt the most awkward, to the point where I didn't even want to finish it. Also, for what it's worth, Contracts does have a couple new missions but it's mostly remakes of older games.

I definitely think the newest Hitman is the best one though, it is seriously so damn good.

 

[Frankie Spankie]

Wolfenstein 2 - 9/10

I loved this game, even more than the first I think. The characters were all amazingly written and the story was great. Every cutscene had something great in it whether it's meaningful or just funny. On top of that, the gameplay is incredible as well. The only problem I really had with the game was the fact that it crashed so much. Despite the crashes, this is definitely my game of the year.

Never Alone (And Foxtales DLC) - 4/10

Platformer with very basic puzzles and kind of a neat story. Gameplay feels kind of clunky at times. Overall, just a pretty average platformer with nothing to write home about. The DLC has some better puzzles but it was still really easy.

 

[Oscar Acosta]

Guardians of the Galaxy - PS4

It's a Telltale Game, so you basically just have a lot of QTE's and chat options to mould your own story.

It serves Guardians of the Galaxy well, Star-Lord in this game is actually a lot funnier and more charming than Chris Pratt in the live movies. Drax is equally hilarious in his literal warrior everything. It has a great soundtrack and a fun enough story to watch.

And that's the thing, you spend most of your time watching. Walking around for chats with the team members. Watching cut scenes. Chat again. It actually starts decent enough with some action for you to play but it slowly winds down over the episodes. By episode 4 it feels like a chore and when it's over you're happy it is.

Also the dynamic of Telltale games is getting old in the "options" you have. You're ALWAYS going to piss someone off, except the people you actually want to piss off. Always driven into a corner that no matter your choice you feel like shit about it. Want to make Gamora happy well now you're the worst person on earth according to Drax. Respect Drax wishes, well now Gamora friggin hates your guts. It gets annoying and depressing that no matter what you do, it's not good enough - this isn't supposed to be real life.

Overall it was fun, made me laugh at times but there is very little gameplay involved.

6/10