Quality guaranteed?

I always found whilst I was growing up that there were certain things about a new game that got me excited about it. The genre, reviews and screenshots in magazines (this was before I had the internet people!) were of course a part of it but one thing above all else made me salivate and yearn for a game to come out; the word 'Squaresoft' printed on the cover. Back then if I saw that logo I was buying that game. End of discussion. I cottoned on to this notion that Squaresoft games were awesome long before I realised, for example, that I will almost certainly love a Christopher Nolan film. Hell I was noticing this even before I started reading different books by the same author after reading one I liked. This realisation has revealed two facts to me. Firstly I like video games more than other forms of entertainment (granted this was not a shocker) but also that the games industry can have a dramatic effect on their customers, at least equal to that of directors and authors of their movies and books.


Unfortunately Squaresoft no longer exist. Over the years they have degraded and become what we know today as Square Enix, a company turning out tripe like Kane and Lynch 2 and the biggest disappointment in my gaming life to date, Final Fantasy XIII. The changes to this particular series need to be rectified very quickly indeed.


I'm not saying trying to say that the Square Enix logo is a sign of a poor quality game, you only have to look at Deus Ex: Human Revolution to see that that would be an absurd statement; it's just that the Square name is no longer a sign of the superb quality we used to get. They have now branched out into so many different things that I think they've lost their focus on the games and instead turn their hand at anything, such as Mindjack...don't even go there with that one.


This wasn't intended to be a Square shooting gallery so I'll change the tone and introduce the company that now represents an almost sure fire sign of a great game, Bioware. I've always like Bioware games and hold both the Baldur’s Gate and Mass Effect games very highly. The one thing I have found that is true of all Bioware games is that they are well written; even Dragon Age 2 which I didn't get on with quite as well could not be said to have poor writing. I am aware that i hold this particular attribute of a game perhaps more highly than a lot of people but it is certainly important to the immersion within a story and I can't think of anyone who does it better than Bioware.


Right now I find myself in the odd position that the last game I desperately wanted (Deus Ex: Human Revolution) and the next (Star Wars: The Old Republic) are split between my old and new favourite companies. I worry slightly that Deus Ex won't live up to my expectations as at time of writing I have yet to play it (cursed Steam download taking ages, I bought the damn disc why make me download the... stopping there, ranting imminent) but I hope that Square Enix have brought out another gem for me to enjoy. My only fear about SW:TOR is that I will lose friends as all my free time is spent glued to my PC.

I should go... but I don't think I will!

            Recently I decided to finally get round to playing a game I should have played before, especially since I picked it up dirt cheap around Christmas last year. For some reason I never played Mass Effect 2 when it came out, I played the original and enjoyed it but the sequel was one of those games that I wait for but don’t pick up. Before I dived back into the Mass Effect universe I bought myself a 360 copy of the original so I could replay that and have a save file carry from 1-3 when I play that next year. In light of my experience re-running Mass Effect that one will definitely be a day 1 purchase, special edition already on pre-order. At time of writing I have still not started Mass Effect 2 but this piece is actually about how incredible the original game is.

            At the heart of this epic Sci-fi action RPG lies the incredibly written story, as you can expect from a Bioware title. The game follows your own created Commander Shepard in your quest to save the galaxy from a rogue Spectre, a special agent of the Citadel Council which is the governing body of the central hub serving Citadel. Early on Shepard is promoted from a marine to a spectre him/herself and you must travel around the galaxy chasing leads and gathering information to locate and stop your quarry. One of the things that really makes the game stand on its own is a genuinely good morality system. You can often choose to be neutral, good (Paragon) or not so good (Renegade) and these choices effect a variety of things including character interactions and even the side missions you are allowed to take. Naturally for these my own Commander Shepard is a Renegade who takes no shit from anybody and puts bullets in the heads of people who try to give it. That said I ended up with a few dirty Paragon points because I was nice to my team, partly because I wasn’t sure if any of them would leave if I was a bitch to them but mainly because that’s how I feel I would react if I was in the shoes of Shepard in reality. Given the situation you are thrown into from the offset I don’t understand the Paragon approach but that’s just my feelings on it.

            It’s this freedom of choice which makes it so easy to identify with Shepard and thus it feels as close to you yourself making the choices and having the conversations as I have ever experienced. You grow to be close to your team, you will of course have favourites and I quickly settled on Garrus and Tali as my primary squad mates and ironically the characters I felt most separate from were the other 2 humans available. That said I still cared about them and when… actually I’ll stop there, spoilers and stuff! Suffice to say there by the end of the game there was a bond that I haven’t felt in a game since Final Fantasy VII.

            Now to hark back to a subject of a previous article, why are new games not as good as old? Well Mass Effect is an exception to this rule, as obviously there will always be. The weirdest thing to me is that I didn’t remember how phenomenal the game is even having played it the whole way through before. On top of the story is a sound cover based shooting system, a good character development and ability set and more side missions than I’ve seen in a while so it keeps you going if you want to do everything. I am relieved that I replayed this game. I wish to thank a few of my friends who know who they are if reading this, for re-introducing me to an incredible series and an amazing gaming experience. Now Mass Effect 2 beckons.

I should go.

Score Whoring?

            Whether you play Xbox, PlayStation or indeed Games For Windows Live titles on PC or the Windows phone you will now be intimately acquainted with a system that gives you virtual rewards for doing things in games. Microsoft started it all by adding Achievements to their 360 games and shortly after someone over at Sony realised it was a good idea and ‘borrowed’ it for their own Trophy system. Both of these systems are essentially the same, granting you little pop ups that you get for completing certain objectives, killing x amount of enemies with such and such a weapon, reaching a certain level etc etc. Now at first this seems like a really cool idea, I mean it gives you challenges that extend the life of the game… right?

            I’m going to throw this out there, I’ve never been much of an achievement hunter, in fact there are only 2 games I have 100% points on, Fallout 3 and Assassins Creed 2, and that’s because I fucking love those two games. Now I wager that even without the achievements I would have played both of these games for just as long as I did to get the 100% and the combined 2000 and something points it added to my Gamer Score. I’ve played both for hours after I got to this point so that’s just testament to my theory here. Compared to a lot of people I know my Gamer Score is fairly low and my Trophies score is abysmal because most games I get for my 360 and my PS3 is at this point pretty much a BluRay player only until the next interesting exclusive comes along. Neither of these facts bother me in the slightest.

            I have no qualms with story based achievements/trophies or ones that are genuinely fun to get, but there are some bloody stupid ones out there that don’t bear thinking about. As an example I shall take Fallout: New Vegas which has an achievement/trophy for healing 10,000 points of damage by eating food. Food restores bugger all health so this would take forever. Furthermore food takes time to heal you when Stimpacks are abundant, instant and heal more damage. Other ones that piss me off are the ‘Secret’ ones that aren’t story based. Seriously whose stupid idea was that? ‘Here’s an idea, we’ll stick this achievement in where they have to do this really complicated thing, but not tell them what the complicated thing is!’ What really worries me is that these guys aren’t getting fired on the spot like they should be but instead being LISTENED to. Actually while I’m thinking about people who should be fired, anyone who proposes an insanely difficult task and awards it 1pt as well as the people behind any that give you a reward that is not a multiple of 5 should be next in line. Seriously I care very little about the number but when it was XXX3 I had to try rather hard to get the 2/7 (forget which) pairing to make the damn thing right.

            What I’m rambling towards is that I really don’t understand why people try so hard to increase that number. I’ve seen people buy games they openly admit they don’t like but know the achievements are easy. Forgive me but that is a terribly stupid reason to buy a game. You may have heard about the Avatar game that lets you get 1000pts in minutes, by pressing the same button over and over while standing in one place. The game is terrible but because of this one fact it was sought after in really quite silly numbers. I could see the appeal of increasing my Gamer Score if it was actually a measure of skill, but games like this and other less extreme but similar ones negate the score meaning anything at all.

            I can’t even begin to describe how I feel about multiplayer achievements either, but let’s have a go anyway. Now I don’t normally mind swearing but I shall have to engage a language filter on myself here because my true feelings on this are rather un-publishable, even on the internet. This rant is more aimed at Xbox who force you to pay to play online but it is applicable to PS3 as well. Nobody should be forced to play online to 100% a game if that is their wish. Playing multiplayer with random people is generally an unpleasant experience and it is inexcusable to make people engage in this should they want to ‘complete’ the game they have been enjoying thus far. I shall cite Assassins Creed: Brotherhood here. The multiplayer on this game is innovative and actually pretty fun, doesn’t mean that I want to spend hours and hours trying to get in certain situations that cause that little pop sound and give me more numbers for my E-ego.

            It saddens me somewhat that a lot of kids will never know gaming without this system. When I was playing games growing up the achievement was finishing the games without cheating. There was one difficulty, finite number of lives and when you ran out you went back to the very beginning and had to start all over again. We’re pampered now with save points, infinite lives and other such ‘continue from here’ methods that cheapen the achievement of actually getting to the end, which when you think about it should be the biggest one there is. Instead actually completing the game takes a back seat to killing a shit-ton of enemies for no reason other than because a little text box says you will get 30pts for doing so. Don’t get me wrong I definitely wouldn’t give up the modern methods completely; I just think everyone should experience the elation that comes from completing a game like ‘Sonic The Hedgehog’ on the Sega Megadrive.

           

ST Oh no... more problems for Cryptic

             As you may know I recently purchased a gaming PC and once everything was set up and ready to go I thought to myself ‘Hmmm, it’s been over a year now since Star Trek Online first came out, I wonder if it’s fixed yet?’ For some background on this we travel back to February of 2010…*wibbly memory music*

            The situation: I have played the beta and thoroughly enjoyed myself despite a few niggles, but after all it’s beta so what do you expect? I pre-order the game and play in the 2 week ‘Head start’ for either pre-order holders or lifetime subscribers. I point out here that I was both of these after having being conned by the beta, but more on that story in a bit. The start of these 2 weeks are plagued by server problems and downtime but again, a new MMO launches and I expected a few hiccups at the beginning. Head start finishes and oh boy here comes a metric fuckton of problems. Server wait times are huge, quite often the server is down though so you don’t have to wait. The Klingon side of the game basically doesn’t work; you have 3 charcter slots and have to pay for more if you want them and worst of all is the lag that makes the game damn unplayable. Now the lag problem may have been at least partially down to my machine but everything else? Not so much.

            It was at this time when I regretted buying the lifetime subscription, which at the time seemed like a great idea. I mean the beta was fun and I’m a massive Star Trek nerd, what was not to love? I try every now and again to play the game over the next year and handful of months only to give up because of horrific lag. However once everything was installed on my new rig things were…smooth. I pressed W and immediately walked forwards, a quick press of 2 on my Naga mouse fired my phaser’s alt-fire straight away. There was still a lot of ‘Go to the C-store to buy X’ and I think this is a unforgiveable. If you make an MMO do EITHER monthly subscriptions OR micro transactions, both is simply greedy and I can think of a C that describes that store, and I tell you now it’s not ‘Cryptic’. Despite this though things seemed to be looking very much in the upward direction.

            This lasted for all of 5 or maybe 6 days before they released the next big ‘Season 4’ patch. First time I log in after said patch I’m playing for about a minute before I’m looking at my desktop somewhat bewildered and reading a ‘Fatal Error has occurred’ message. Low and behold it happens every time I try and play now and I thought that maybe it was just me, I mean my internet connection is truly shocking at the moment so it must be that I foolishly thought. A quick check of the forums shows me that I am most definitely not the only one experiencing difficulties with the new patch.

            This is such a shame because in STO Cryptic Studios have something that could be incredible. The space combat is genuinely a joy and I love that I have (sort of) command of my own Starfleet ship. I just wish they could sort out all the technical difficulties and actually let me play the game I so want to love. I’d rather it not take about 18 months this time either, it’s not fair on the people who put their faith in the game and bought the lifetime sub but in a way it’s even less fair for those customers paying monthly and not being able to play the game, but surely still being charged for the privilege of reading error messages.

Had to happen eventually...

I promised myself I wasn’t going to do this but with bugger all having come out at the moment I have decided to break my promise and review the greatest game of all time. Ever. Without question. At this point if you know me you will know the game of which I speak, even if you don’t you should know anyway; Final Fantasy VII is obviously the game in question.

I’m only going to mention graphics once and I’m going to get it out of the way right at the start. They are not that bad. You must remember that this game came out in 1997and therefore cannot be accurately compared with the hyper graphics of today. In fact working with such simple character models whose only facial features are eyes Squaresoft achieved far more than Square Enix was able to do with the gorgeous looking (only complement I have for this) Final Fantasy XIII. I care about the simple little guys in VII; in XIII all I wanted to do was punch Hope in the face and rip out Vanille’s voice box.

The story is by far the most engaging, well written, heart tugging video game plot ever written. The characters start out as a rebel group thinking big but acting, in the grand scheme of things, small. By the end of the game you are fighting to literally save the planet upon which they live. You may think this sounds unoriginal and in a sense you may be right, however it’s the journey from one state to the other, both literally and the individual journey each character has to make to get them to the point at which they can fight that fight that is the true draw. The protagonist, Cloud Strife, obviously has the biggest trials to overcome but he is by no means alone in this as each character has their own demons they must face.

The dialogue between the characters is superb. You feel like the things they say are realistic, by that I mean what those people would be saying to one another in real life, without the insane censorship that would prevent companies from doing this in new games today. For example, during a long stair climb (which is optional so may be missed) Tifa says to the complaining Barret “Shut up and climb you retard.” There’s no way you could get away with saying that these days and this is a shame, not because it’s funny but because it’s real. Something else you couldn’t do in a game of this rating in these days where everything must be voice acted, badly, is the amount of swearing that particularly Barret and Cid come out with. Again this seems real and how these people should be talking, you can’t hide behind %^&#* anymore. While I’m on the subject and closing out this paragraph, what the hell was wrong with games having entirely text based dialogue? They gave you the chance to imprint your own personalities onto the characters within the game and surely that is better than the pre-described bullshit you usually get now. I guess we aren’t trusted with our own imaginations anymore.

The game itself is huge, we’re talking proper RPG length here folks with upwards of 60 hours if you want to do everything there is to do. It won’t have the same significance now but when I first stepped out onto the world map those years ago my mind was blown by the scale. Fortunately despite the size you are, at least in the beginning gently lead through the main story by conversation prompts and a map design that means you can’t go everywhere until you have a certain vehicle to allow you to cross terrain features, for example the buggy that allows you to cross quicksand and rivers. It all opens up once you get the airship but again you will never be lost as long as you listen to the dialogue and even if you forget you can talk to people on the bridge for a reminder.

The thing the game hinges on, second to the story anyway, is the battle system since you will spend a lot of time in battles as you progress through the game. It is a simple turn based system with the option to have the enemies turns paused whilst you are selecting commands from windows. This option means you can take your time over what abilities you want to use and not have to worry about getting attacked while you do so. You can of course turn this off so there is always a sense of urgency to the battles, in particular the bosses later in the game.  The abilities you can use are what make the battle system come alive. Each character has a set of unique attacks called Limit Breaks in addition to the basic ‘Fight’ and ‘Item’ options. As you take damage a bar charges and when it fills you can unleash one of these powerful moves with varying effects. Each of your weapons and pieces of armour also has a number of slots, some linked and some single, and into these slots you can put materia. Materia are spheres of varying colours which do different things. Green materia are magic spells, red allow you to summon monsters as special attacks, yellow give you special attack abilities, blue adds effects to either your attacks it’s paired materia and finally purple enhances your base stats. The sheer number of combinations and pairings you can make means that there are some incredibly potent pairings. The materia system is truly a triumph and to this day is the best ability management system I have come across because of the freedom it allows the individual player.

Nobuo Uematsu (composer of Final Fantasy soundtracks and lead of the epic band ‘The Black Mages’) has composed a hauntingly beautiful soundtrack to accompany the game. The boss music gets the heart beating, the battle music doesn’t get tedious and the different music for the various towns gives each one its own personality. For example the military city of Junon has loud, impressive music suitable to its own grandeur and massive coastal defence cannon. In contrast Cosmo Canyon has an earthy, tribal tone which compliments its natural red rock setting, building styles and back story given in the game.

I honestly believe that in Final Fantasy VII we have as close to a perfect game as there has ever been and, to be honest, ever will have. The story, character developments and relations, music and mechanics are faultless. If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to say something negative the only things I could provide are that since O is the select button I find myself accidently cancelling things in other games after I’ve played it for a while and that I can’t use the analogue sticks to move around due to them not being on the controller when the game first came out. That is literally it and neither of those is really a problem or indeed much to do with the game. I urge you all to play this game; it is a masterpiece in every sense of the word.

99% (only because I feel that 100% isn’t viable as a score, because I guess technically something better COULD come along, however unlikely that may be)

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D

            I hope you’re ready for about 1000 words of gushing praise because that is pretty much exactly what you’re going to get this week. I have previously mentioned that the original version of this game is one of my favourite games of all time so part of me just wants to use this re-release as an excuse to review it, so I shall.

            The very first thing you will notice is how amazing this game looks on the 3DS. The colours are bright and bold and, for those of us used to the original, everything is very smooth. The faces of characters are less angular and the whole thing is far crisper and cleaner. I must admit I was slightly worried about it being a direct port without doing much if anything to the visuals but all those worries have been put to rest. I assure you the game is stunning. The 3D works remarkably well for the most part; it adds depth to the game and genuinely enhances the visual appeal which I was, if I’m honest, not really expecting.

            The music is simply divine from start to finish as well, the backing tracks are well suited to their individual environments and the melodies you play on the ocarina are great. Given that there is a musical instrument in the title this seems somewhat fitting and I cannot think of a game I would put forward as a contender for having a better soundtrack…well at a push Chrono Trigger but I still think this one edges it. The nostalgic value of stepping out onto Hyrule field for the first time in too many years is an amazing one for those of you lucky enough to have been there before.

            Right on to the game itself. The plot is a fairly normal one, young boy thrust into a huge adventure and needs to go on a quest to save the world, going through dungeon by dungeon gathering new equipment as you go allowing you to progress. That said the game will take you a good chunk of hours to complete and is not at all linear in that you can wander Hyrule and search for extra Heart Containers to increase your health or Great Fairy Fountains to gain new magic spells so you never feel forced down the story path.

            The gameplay is sound and remains mainly unchanged from the origins but the introduction of the touch screen has led to some interesting and beneficial changes into how it works. Where before you would have to pause the game and hit L or R until you got to the right menu screen now you simply touch the tab on the bottom screen and that’s that. This makes switching out your assigned items much quicker and less irritating which was one of the only complaints I have about this classic. This is further aided by having 4 active items at once, 2 mapped to X and Y and 2 on touch buttons as well as the Ocarina having its own dedicated button so there’s never a need to have it take up an item slot. Also now when you select the ocarina you can open a tab which has all the songs you have learnt there for you so you can read it off and play. This is a vast improvement on the old way which meant that if you forgot the song you had to quit playing, pause the game, rotate the menu to the correct screen, find the song you wanted and then attempt to memorise it. Not a great method if your short term memory is a s bad as mine!

            Possibly the biggest change in how the game works is in the first person viewing mode and the aiming for ranged weapons. You can still use the circle pad as you would an analogue stick and aim around as you normally would but there is now another way. Once you have the weapon drawn or have zoomed into first person you can physically point and move the 3DS around and the screen moves as if you were actually looking around in the game world. This is great except for a few small issues. First among these is that if you are playing with the 3D on the image splits horribly if you don’t move your whole upper body around to keep the head on view the 3D image requires. This coupled with the fact that, at least in my handheld gaming posture, you don’t get that much of an arc to move in, it made me feel like one of the guards from Metal Gear Solid who can only ever see in a cone shaped spot directly in front of them.

That is one of only two complaints I have about this game, the other is so minor I feel it’s hardly worth mentioning but I will in an attempt to bring some semblance of balance to this fan boy fuelled rambling. Once while I was riding around Hyrule Field I attempted to jump a fence and glitched on top of it, unable to get off at all. This however was easily sorted by saving the game, quitting and reloading since unless you are in a dungeon when you restart after you quit you go to either the Temple of Time or your House in the starting village.

To conclude, I adore this game. I have done ever since I was much younger than I am now and will continue to do so into the future. The story, although somewhat basic, is charming and the game itself is a fantastic example of a near perfect adventure game. As an added bonus the Mater Quest option is available after you have finished the game which is mostly the same game but with more challenging dungeons. There is also a boss challenge mode which does exactly what it says on the tin and requires no explanation. In all with the slight 3D niggles involved in aiming aside I genuinely feel that with this re-release Nintendo have improved on the near perfection that this game already was, if I had the option to play it on big screen with the DS acting as a bottom screen (Wii U compatibility may be a possibility for this in the future…) I would be even worse than I have been in terms of praise. As it stands though there are a few things that could be tweaked to make it better, just a little bit better but not a lot. Thank you Nintendo for bringing this game back into our lives for those of us with fond memories, and for bringing it to the new generation of gamers to experience greatness for possibly the very first time.

96%

L.A. Noire

Here we have the latest release from the creators of one of the triumvirate of most over-rated games of all time and as such everyone’s in quite a stir about it. Of course I’m talking about Rockstar and their new offering of L.A. Noire. Now if you couldn’t tell from the above I’m not their biggest fan but Red Dead Redemption was outstanding and Noire looked promising from the previews so I picked it up with quite a degree of anticipation. I was not disappointed, so keep hold of your fedora because you’re in for one hell of a ride.

L.A. Noire puts you in the shoes of ex-military now police officer Cole Phelps, beginning as a humble patrol cop and working up through the LAPD. The Patrol section serves as a tutorial and is quickly followed by a brief stint in Traffic before being promoted to Homicide, Vice and finally Arson in that order. Sort of weird as I was expecting to end in Homicide or Vice but it works with the story so it’s not too bad.

The cases are split up into a few sections, there’s the crime scene investigations, interrogations and open world driving/running to be done in between, with the odd bit of witness stalking and chase sequence thrown in. The chases and tailing sequences are lifted straight from GTA IV and either involve catching up and incapacitating or keeping up and remaining unseen by your target but it’s the investigating and interrogating where the game is most concerned and comes into it’s own.

Investigation sections have you walking around the crime scenes looking for and inspecting clues. The controller will vibrate when you get close to an item you can interact with and upon pressing action Cole picks it up so you can turn it about and see if there’s anything relevant, if it is you can sometimes investigate further by opening the item or some other such action. My only real gripe with these sections, and it is a small one, is that there are items you can pick up that are useless and Cole will say so. Now obviously they had to put things in that weren’t clues to avoid Cole being some kind of super cop with magic vision but there are times when you look at, say, a shelf and not one of the items on it will be relevant. Couple that with the slow animations for picking up and moving items and it’s slightly frustrating. Luckily once you have all the clues the game subtly lets you know by playing a sound effect that is totally fitting with the backing music and then slowly fading said music out.

While I’m on the subject I feel I have to say a brief something about the music in this game. Simply put it’s brilliant. The investigation music is spot on and is never obtrusive but creates a great atmosphere. The songs the radio plays on in the car are very fitting and set the game very firmly in the time period it is emulating. Right tangent over, back we go!

The interrogation sections involve interviewing witnesses, suspects or other such people and asking them questions from your trusty notebook. Each question gives a short scene where you ask it and they answer, as you may expect, however it’s after the question has been asked where the game makes use of its trump card. If you’ve read about, seen or played the game then you will know about the lengths that they have gone to recreate realistic facial expressions during these interviews. The technology is superb and is an absolute triumph in what it does, the characters faces do move incredibly accurately. Unfortunately it is never difficult to spot if someone is lying to you because the lie animations are very obvious. This was probably always going to be a side effect of what they were trying to do so it is forgivable, just a touch anti-climactic.

So anyway, once you’ve asked the question and listened to the answer you choose whether you think they are telling the truth, lying to you because you have evidence to the contrary or think they are lying but have no evidence which is labelled ‘doubt’ in game. Now the problem comes when you know the person is lying from the animation and you have to choose between lie and doubt. What happens occasionally is you will think the answer is doubt but they are in fact lying, it’s just that the small piece of speech after you have picked lie is the bit where the evidence becomes apparent. Obviously this point is too late because you have already picked doubt and scratching your head wondering what you did wrong. To avoid this you can always say it’s a lie first because you can back out of an accusation and change to doubt if it turns out you don’t have the necessary evidence but this shouldn’t have to be the strategy. The other thing with these sections which is far more immersion breaking is that you have to follow the logic of the script even if you have a legitimate point yourself. To give a few examples from early cases, I found a broken pair of glasses at the crime scene and when interviewing a woman about her husband’s involvement she said he’d just bought new glasses. ‘BAM’ I thought, ‘got you!’ I say lie, present the glasses and Cole yells like a psychopath at the poor woman and it turns out that wasn’t actually what I should have said. A second was a little further on where I found a pair of muddy boots and a wet coat as two separate clues. The witness said ‘How can you prove I was out last night?’ and I had a 50/50 choice between two pieces of evidence that both would prove it. For the record the jacket is the wrong answer, I chose it and promptly rage quit cursing the game for not letting me be logical about it.

             These issues in mind the game is still very good it’s just got a few irritations that could be ironed out in the inevitable sequel. What really needs fixing though is the general gameplay mechanics. They are pretty much taken straight from GTA IV and as such the driving is terrible, cars don’t handle well and handbrake turns are not at all useful. Also the AI drivers would never have got licences in real life; they will plough right into you as you turn at intersections and make no attempts to get out of the way if you’re forced into the oncoming lane. Perhaps even more stupidly if you have the siren on cars going the same direction of you will pull over to the right as you come up behind them. Useful if you’re in the left hand lane but useless when you’re in the right hand land and cars to your left pull out of the way right into you.

            The on foot controls aren’t perfect but aren’t horrible either and not having to tap A to run is a breath of fresh air. The cover based shooting sections do work nicely and luckily are minimal since they would ruin the feel of the game if they were more frequent. There are the odd stupid ‘action’ sequences that ruin the flow quite well though, apparently Rockstar think people will just stop playing without the odd set-piece regardless of how ridiculous they might be.

            Something I find unforgivable though is the horrible rain effects in this game. Now in a film noire inspired setting one of the first and most important things to get right should have been the rain. It’s necessary for pathetic fallacy and setting of atmosphere and in this game it seems like they just stuck a rain filter in the foreground. It’s rubbish and will need to be sorted out if/when a sequel is done.

            Don’t get the wrong impression; this is a fantastic game that’s well worth playing. The story is interesting and well written and the investigations and interrogations and fun despite the odd annoyance. The game successfully emulates the film noire style as it set out to do and it feels good to piece together the evidence and work out what happened. The face animation is no doubt the future of games and it’s very pleasing to get this new style on a classic point and click adventure on the map. If you like the Ace Attorney series (and if you haven’t played those you definitely should) you should feel very much at home with this too as it’s the closest thing I can compare it to. Even if you didn’t then there’s still enjoyment to be had here, but you should seek help because there’s clearly something wrong with you!

78%