Games In Retrospect # 1: The Saboteur

I've recently been catching up on this little WWII sandbox romp, which came out last autumn, and have concluded that it's a pretty decent effort from Pandemic Studios.

It's rough around the edges in as much that the graphics, voice acting and controls could all be better, but it's a mostly solid game otherwise. It's also single player only, so no co-op or multi-player option at all.

You play the role of Sean Devlin, who's an Irishman that gets caught up in the invasion of France at the start of the Second World War and ends up helping the French Resistance in Paris and surrounding areas. This typically takes the form of engaging in acts of sabotage, such as destroying guard towers or fuel dumps, and carrying out a variety of missions for various people around the city and countryside, while trying to track down the guy that killed your best mate.

The map is not an accurate depiction of Paris or the countryside of France, but is reasonably nice to look at regardless. The city especially looks good when you're working in areas that have yet to have their morale lifted, because they're depicted in a moody black and white noir style, which is really when the game's graphics look their best. Once an area's morale has been lifted sufficiently, the colour returns and although the colours are warm and colourful, the game simply looks better in black and white.

The animation of the main character is pretty fluid and he's able to scale most buildings and fences with relative ease, similar to the Assassins Creed or Uncharted games. Although, the animation isn't as good as either of those series of games, but it still looks competent.

The music is all period music and fits perfectly with the setting, creating a nice ambiance as you drive about town looking for Nazis to gun down.

The controls for shooting take a little while to get used to, but don't pose any real problems when dispatching SS goons in their droves.

The driving is bog standard and won't really set the world on fire. The cars do feel a little bit 'stuck' to the road at times and don't have the same physics that you expect from games of this kind nowadays, like GTA IV. For instance it's unlikely that you'll flip your car in this game. However, this is a minor criticism, because the driving model serves its purpose sufficiently enough not to ruin the game.

One thing that may well grate on your ears, though, is the awful accent of the main character. And some of the dialogue is corny. Why can't they just get an Irish actor to play an Irishman? There's also a Scottish character with another fake accent, which will come as no surprise to any Scots. Again, get a Scottish actor to voice a Scottish character. Or at least get someone that can do the accent.

Overall though, if you can overlook less than perfect graphics, acting, driving and shooting, lack of multi-player, and just want to immerse yourself in the task at hand i.e. killing the shit out of Nazis, then this game is really worth the price you'll get it for, now. Amazon.co.uk are flogging it for £17 at the time of writing. It's well worth £17!

ModNation Racers

I've been playing this karting effort from Sony for most of the day. First impressions are that it's a pretty solid racer, with lots of nice little touches and race modes, etc. But where it really comes in to its own is in the customization department. It's very much akin to LittleBigPlanet in ethos i.e. it allows you to customize your character, your kart, and even create your own tracks which can be shared with the online community. You can rate other people's efforts, too.

It's too early for me to say whether this will have the same long-term appeal that LBP has had for me, but it's certainly a lot of fun so far. Admittedly, I've never really been a huge racing fan, so it may be that I lose enthusiasm for it sooner rather than later, but it's definitely worth at least a rental.

Red Dead Redemption, Alpha Protocol, Yakuza 3, Sam & Max, etc.

As a completely inadequate introduction to this blog of sorts, I'm going to summarize what I've been spending my time on, PS3-wise, recently.

Red Dead Redemption

This monster of a game after five years in the making and costing $100 million of your finest greenbacks landed on our shores on the 21st of May. Well, when I say landed, it was more of a slow crawl of death up the beaches of Normandy, due to supplier shortages and shit, but it 'technically' hit the shelves then. There's places on the intergubbins where you can find all the tech-minded comparisons of the Xbox and PS3 versions, with the former seeming to be the 'best' version. However, seeing as I'm not a sucker of Satan's cock, I don't have an Xbox to compare them for myself. I made do with the PS3 version, natürlich.

This game has pretty well nailed the cowboy experience for me. Unless your only experience of cowboy media was that Brokeback mountain bummer-a-tron, then it's got pretty much everything that a fan of westerns could hope for. Stetsons, horses, lassos, whores, gunfights, robberies, trains, Indians, stagecoaches, gambling, etc. It's got something for everyone. Even cannibals.

The story is pretty standard western fare: A man is forced to track down his old gang to save his own family. Although it's a bit of a cliche, Rockstar pull it off with some good writing and a good cast of actors who deliver their lines, on the most part, with due diligence. Needless to say there's some twists and double crosses along the way before the story ends. but that's par for the course.

I've been deliberately vague about the plot and such, so as not to ruin it for you. But basically, it turns out that John Marston wants to bum Jake Gyllenhaal.

The multiplayer is a pretty big improvement, for me, over GTA IV. It's just so much more fun riding with a posse across the barren wastes, killing shit right up. Try it for yourself.

Yakuza 3

This is the third installment - the clue's in the title, I guess - of a series I've never dabbled in before. It's a much heralded Sega franchise in Japan, and garners much attention in the rest of the world from all the 'cool' kids. This didn't come out in Europe for an age after the Japanese version, due to Sega feeling that these games don't sell well enough here, or something. Anyway, I decided to give it a go, and I was mostly pleasantly surprised. I say mostly, because there's some really annoying aspects of J-RPGs which always put me off. Can't stand Final Fantasy because of lengthy cutscenes and random battles, which is pretty much ubiquitous in J-RPGs, so it was surprising that I enjoyed Yakuza 3, because it contains a lot of lengthy cutscenes and random battles galore. However, I think the quality of the acting helped with the cutscene department, and although the story isn't believable, in the slightest, it's enjoyable. The fighting is pretty fun, but not terribly complicated or difficult. I think I used square, square, triangle pretty much through every single fight. It worked like a charm. However, it was enjoyable and the violence was quite graphic. Which is what we all love.

As a side note, although I said the acting was a deal-sealer, let me point out that the cutscenes are all in Japanese with English subtitles, but it sounded like they knew how to act, if you know what I mean. Of course, any Japanese person reading this might think I'm crazy. And they'd be right. Except I'm not. Mostly.

Anyway, give it a whirl if you fancy something uniquely Japanese, or some jolly japes around a nicely realised Tokyo and Okinawa.

Alpha Protocol

Oh, man. I pre-ordered this, because it had winner written all over it. Obsidian, the makers of KOTOR 2, developed this. It's their first own creation. They tend to do work on other people's franchises, like KOTOR for Bioware, and the upcoming Fallout: New Vegas for Bethesda, although they do comprise a crew of people that were Black Isles studios who made the original Fallout games, so they do have some pedigree. It was this pedigree which made me believe that this action RPG spy thriller would be excellent. If anything could be further from the truth, then the truth would the the centre of the known Universe and this would be somewhere beyond the extremity.

There's so many faults with it that it's going to make me cry going over them. Crap animation? Check. Crap shooting mechanic? Check. Linear missions? Check. Rubbish mini games for lock picking, hacking, etc? Check. Stealth system that does not work at all and results in laborious combat with every bad guy in the area every single time? Check. Cover system that is clumsy and broken? Check.

Essentially, avoid this at all costs.

Sam & Max

These guys have made a welcome appearance on the PS3. There's five episodes being released over a five month period and having played the first episode through, I can't recommend it highly enough. There's loads of excellent jokes, dialogue and puzzles and should keep you entertained for 4-5 hours per episode. It gives me hope that traditional adventure games can and do work in the modern age. Fingers crossed that Broken Sword, and Beneath A Steel Sky can be rejigged for the PS3 sometime, too.