The Importance of Being Idle

Thoughts On Games

Total Overdose: I read a review of TO which basically said it was the best bad game they'd ever played, and I feel that's a pretty fair assesment. There's really very little here you haven't seen before in Max Payne and GTA, but somehow the game transcends it's inspirations and limitations, and is just damn good fun. I personally quite like the chunky style of the graphics, and the texture work is very nice, although the draw distance is short and can make driving fast even harder than it already is. And yeah, the driving in particular is ropey as fuck (the cars seem to be on the moon, traction is an alien concept, and the whole physics thing is so inconsistent that attempting to understand how your car handles will surely lead to the bitterest of disappointment), but the atmosphere and the shooting, ah the shooting bits, are so very very glorious that the designers of the game could come round to your house and kick you in the nuts for five minutes everytime you boot the game up, and you'd STILL play it. Make of that what you will.
Burnout Revenge is still impressing. The AI is indeed less infuriating this time out (I've not had the opposition 30 odd seconds in front with no hope of ever catching them in this one) it seems well balanced to make all races close fought things, which is obviously anathema to anyone who plays proper racing games and expects their skills to be rewarded but it's bloody good fun. The tracks and car selection are great, although I miss the continental run type point to point races from Burnout 3: Takedown. Crash mode is still better than last time, but the extra gimmicks just make it less good than the pure and simple genius of the BO2 crash junctions, and particularly what you need to do to score well is often painfully opaque (the prime mechanic here seems to be the number of cars caught up in your crash breaker), with what to the player look to be extremely good crashes scoring very poorly. In fact the ranking system as a whole needs a little tweaking I reckon, all too often (this is particularly noticeable on burning laps) you can race a really good, clean fast race, and only be rated Great, whereas you can be ten seconds slower, crash a couple of times but use boost almost constantly and be Awesome (which is better than Great, in case you wondered), but again this is easily solved by doing what the game wants you to do, which is drive fast and drive dangerously. So its not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but just like last years installment, its a game that constantly rewards you for having fun, and it rewards you with even more fun things to do and crash into. It's just one of those games you HAVE to buy. NOW!
Resident Evil 4 is still the best game of the year though, and there's nothing on the horizon that has a chance of surpassing it until, well until next year when Nintendo get the new Zelda out. Will that be Nintendo's last hurrah, or is the Revolution really gonna kick ass? Only time will tell...

posted by BadMonkey @ 6:12 PM