Also Known As: Saints Row 3, Saint's Row 3 [common misspelling], Saints Row: The 3rd Also on: X360, PS3 Genre: Action Publisher: THQ Developer: Volition
Unlike most of my gaming compatriots, I am one of those people who enjoy the first couple of levels of a game, you know the ones, you’ve gone through all that intro stuff and have just started out on your own (or not, depending on the game) and the area (and even enemies) usually seems somewhat friendly compared to the rest of the game at least. My absolute favorite kind of game is when you’re an aspirant of some kind, be it soldier, gangster or Jedi as long as it’s something to do with starting off from not much at all (maybe even from the gutter) and slowly rising up to greatness, but to be honest sometimes I’m just happy as a normal pleb of a fighter with only has access to basic weapons and abilities, it’s just so much more simple when you’re starting out, then when you’ve turned into this unstoppable hero who morning consists of saving the United States of America from a foreign power and afternoon consists of saving your home planet from alien invaders . I have this feeling a lot more particularly when I start a game for the second time or more, it’s just the fact that you know what to do and have a plan about how you’re going to play the game differently this time, this is especially true with MMORPG’s where once I know what I’m doing I can work out exactly what to do with the next character I make and of course there’s a hell of a lot of things to learn when you start a new MMORPG and even more so if it’s your first one.
Aw hell it's in flames already? mah country and also planet need me mo then ever!
One thing I am never fond of thought. are the short “tastes” that they force on you at the start of a game, whether their flashbacks or prequels or important backstory I may begin to sound like a grumpy old gamer but I don’t want to act these things out, I don’t want to be thrust onto the top of a speeding train with no explanation of what I’m doing there and have some random weapon thrust into my hands with no other explanation of what it is or how to use it properly other the screen prompts or to be also thrust (it seems like the perfect word for this situation) into some supercar where I have to race another opponent and very high speeds while being chased by the Po-Leece when I’ve just started then game. Of course many could argue that there’s nothing wrong with that and as an experienced gamer I should know what to do (which I do) and also that I should be grateful that the game gives me such an experience early on. Even so, I am absolutely fine in showing me these things in a cutscene, I like to start off slow and I don’t like to be shoved into some out-of-control scenario where I have to dash around like a madman guns blazing in order to survive to be able to get the “real” starting area.
But strangely enough, in this particular instance I didn’t mind it at all…..
In Saints Row the third you do start with a brief cutscene which shows your gang don their ‘disguises’ which happen to giant mascot heads of one of the gang members and attempt a bank holdup which doesn’t go too good right from the start, then immediately your shooting down throngs of fashionably dressed guards, then SWAT teams before your buddy in a crane helicopter comes to heave out the actual vault itself with you on top of it all the while you’re fighting off SWAT teams and attack choppers one handed with a machine gun. I’m not going to tell you what happens after that as I’d otherwise spoil the brilliant first mission but I will tell you it involves an aeroplane and can assure you it gets crazier, whatever chaffe I had against throwing me in the deep end was obliterated by a number of things mainly the overall feel of the game even when you first start is both wacky and chaotic which suits the graphical style and both the gameplay and also because I was having so much fun. This isn’t a game where you worry about doing it right (all the time) you just aim to have as much fun as possible while getting the job done, you’re not a rookie or a basic soldier pleb you’re the (semi) invincible ass kickin supremo gangsta and what makes things better in my view is that you technically one of the bad guys, the leader of the bad guys in fact so this makes what you do more justified in a sense, but obviously there are guys badder then you which you are required to eliminate, after all you can’t go around killing people who don’t deserve it all the time can you?
Who wouldn't want to be Johnny Gat?
The story (yes there is a story) to Saints Row is relatively easy to get your head around, basically you are the Leader of the 3rd street saints, the bankjob goes wrong and pretty soon you’re in the hands of giant crime syndicate, called The Syndicate… when is split into 3 separate gangs who control certain parts of the City of Steelport. So basically the game revolves around a giant free-roam city main story missions involve you escaping the Syndicate and doing certain key missions and eliminating the three gang leaders along with your gangster buddies and everyone you come in contact with along the way, but really that’s just the driving force behind the chaos oh so, much chaos. Along with the story missions there is a multitude of other activities you can do which include your usual side missions like causing as much damage as possible in the time limit either by yourself or with a tank but it gets crazier when you start purposefully throwing yourself into traffic to claim insurance money and driving a high profile client and escort around the neighborhood while trying to evade TV vans hoping to get a “scoop” and even more bizarre when you have to escort a tiger, yes tiger in your car.
Sit in a chopper shoot enemies, protect friends, simple enough?
As well as that there are the usual assassination missions, car theft missions and gang ‘operations’ that you have to “interrupt”. There are of course various shop in the game that get wackier each one you find, from the Saints Row gear outlets to the “Let’s Pretend” costume store, there are gun stores and car garages scattered across the city and what makes these better is that you can modify almost any gun or vehicle in the game, this is especially great if you want to turn your favorite vehicle into a Saints coloured cruiser. Over the course of the game you ‘acquire’ various gang hideouts (though you’re doing anything but ‘hiding’ in them) which can store cars and sometimes water vehicles and aircraft.
Gangstas in Spaaaaaaace!
Your main point of focus, is none other than your phone (wow, how true to the era), through your phone you can pretty much do everything inside the game, call your gang homies for backup or vehicle delivery, checking your bank account to transfer more laundered city money, and the usual things like accessing the various side missions and the city map. One thing Saints Row does introduce is the upgrades section in your phone, which allow you to spend money to upgrade just about everything, inc personal upgrades such as more health or sprint time, weapon upgrades such as faster reload or blast damage or gang member upgrades such as better weapons or even have them fly in valkyrie style in an attack chopper. Speaking of the weapons and upgrades your arsenal is about as crazy as it can get you not only have a range of oversize and modified pistols, shotguns and machineguns from almost the very start you have access to sky launching missile system which you can eliminate tanks in one hit and not to mention the homing rocket launcher and airstike marker which are in the “special” weapon category. The melee weapons as you could probably guess include a giant rubber dildo called the “penetrator” and various other objects including a giant electrified shock hammer.
Your phone, it's useful, just like in real life
Gameplay and controls in Saints Row is pretty basic if you’ve ever played Grand Theft Auto, or most other Third person games for that matter, you run you shoot, you drive cars etc, what you do and what controls you have vary greatly depending on what you are doing, especially in the story missions when you can be doing anything from flying a futuristic attack jet to shooting enemies with a lazer hand cannon in a virtual reality tron-like world. There’s this kind of slapstick way your character moves and jumps around especially the “Fred Flintstone” way of entering and stealing cars which is kind of hilarious. I found with the vehicle handling it’s almost impossible to drive things slowly and carefully though technically I was using the keyboard so I had the whole foot to the floor full lock or nothing thing with the keys going on, which is one of the things that really irks me about playing games where your half driving/walking. The graphics are as you’d expect though slightly more cartoony to preserve the feel of the game rather than having the dark gritty faces of GTA, I did notice that even under lenient settings the graphics did still seem to chug a bit when out in the open city but that didn’t matter much, I suspect that the graphics could have been mildly worse and it still wouldn’t have mattered we’d all be still having so much fun, or maybe there’s a barometer these days, but anyway…
I like this shot cause it epitomizes how you move around in Saints Row the Third, you don't really seem to have much control of your body (or vehicle) you just flail through the air
So at this point you might be thinking: “So yeh, this is basically just like GTA” well you wouldn’t be wrong, it has pretty much all the usual nuances that we’ve come to expect from a game that this similar but the key factor that Saints Row the Third has is craziness, lunacy, chaos, ludicrisoty if that’s even a word, whichever you use Saint Row embraces the silly and does it very well, this is coming from someone who hasn’t played the first two games, but could probably imagine what they were like. Another thing that Saints Row embraces is senseless violence and sleaze, whether it’s stealing shipping crates full of illegal immigrant hookers or smashing pedestrians bodies to pieces with giant pressure powered fists. This of course isn’t new to GTA but it never takes it as un-seriously and in spades as Saints Row, there was so much comical violence and death and so many lurid sights, images and references that it’s a wonder this game ever got released, but with kids these days (who probably play it as young as 8) you can never know.
They need some lamposts like that down Melbourne CBD
When people ask me what the game is like, I like to say that it’s ”GTA on drugs”, and I think that’s pretty true it embraces the silly rather than trying to be serious and have the player have to make their own fun. I never had a problem with GTA ‘becoming’ serious with the release of GTA4 I just found my own fun along the way, but in Saints Row you just simply cannot play with a either play straight or with a straight face and I can happily say I did laugh out loud, not to something unexpected and funny I did myself, but to a scripted event in the game. I found it thrilling just waiting to see how my character and his friends were going to get out of their current situation and can be honest to say that unlike some missions from GTA in the past, there wasn’t a moment in the story missions where I felt it was getting boring or repetitive (note: murdering people in the most comical way possible apparently never gets boring).
This was the first ever game where I chose to wear a parachute at all times, not out of style, you just never knew what you were going to fall from next. That said it sure beats the lift
SO, if you happen to like the Grand Theft Auto series but though it needed a bit more craziness, lunacy, chaos, senseless violence, sleaze and debauchery, objectification of women, public servant and political mockery, gang warfare, mass egotism, bad taste and general disregard for human life of any kind, then this is the game for you…. which is basically what? all of us.
Also Known As: We Love Katamari, Katamari Damacy 2
Exclusively on: PlayStation 2
Genre: Third-Person Action
Publisher: Namco Bandai
Developer: Namco Bandai
Release Date: September 20, 2005
When I ask people if they’ve heard of Katamari Damacy, most of them look at me like I’m insane (more than usual) of course I couldn’t really blame them for not knowing, the Katamari series has been going since 2004 but has remained (and probably always will remain) a very Japanese game as evident from the intro sequence to We Love Katamari into on the Playstation 2 in fact all I have to do when showing people the game is mention that it’s Japanese and they understand, slightly. I really don’t know how I originally came across the series, I think I was looking for something out of the ordinary something more puzzlesque, something that only the Japanese could think of and basically I just decided “yeh this looks good”, I can’t really remember owning any other games of this type on PS2 or even on PS1, it was one of the more bizarre purchases that I made and I’m glad I did, otherwise I never would have been given the chance to remake all the planets and stars by rolling up objects on earth then vaulting it into space.
The intro, I still show it to people just to get their reaction
The Katamari series has a simple concept, that’s simple in the way of the gameplay is simple don’t ask me about the finer points of the storyline or characters, this game is very Japanese, that’s all you need to know. The basic way to play is that you control the Prince who is the son of the King of all Cosmos or one of his Cousins. While playing you push around a Katamari which is some kind of magical ball that sticks to things it rolls over collecting them on the way in a snowball like effect, the Katamari ball in itself can come in many different colours shapes and sizes to start off with, the Prince and his cousins are only 5cm tall, but are able to push around a Katamari that has grown to the size of a landmass. The storylines have varied over the years, a sort of recurring theme is that the King does something silly then ends up destroying all the stars in the sky then gets the Prince and his cousins to roll up Katamari’s on earth in order for him to shoot them into the sky and turn them into stars. The levels basically consist of rolling up a Katamari to the determined size in the determined amount of time, but there can be variants on this including rolling up as fast as possible or rolling up only certain things.
For example: that rabbit is too big and we've bounced off it
The actual rolling of the Katamari is quite simple, you just use both the Playstation thumbsticks to move the ball in the direction you want and you can also jump over and around the Katamari to do a quick turn and have various pausing camera angles available, though sometimes when you are in tight spaces other objects do get in the way of your view. Basically it’s up to you to judge whether something can be rolled up or not, most of the time it’s trial and error as you bump into things that are too big and sometimes lose items that are already “stuck on”. As you collect bigger and bigger items the Katamari grows until you possible can’t see the original ball or your character pushing it (well they are only 5cm tall aren’t they?)
The gameplay, much easier to understand in action, can you spot the Prince and the cousins under the Katamari rolling it?
My first Katamari Game was on the PS2, this was entitled“We Love Katamari” this was the sequel to the first Katamari Damacy. The storyline in We love Katamari was largely based around the people or‘fans’ of Katamari rolling possibly from the previous game, I really don’t know how you can be a fan of being rolled up by a giant inwardly magnetic ball and repeatedly crushed into the ground but of course I’m not here to judge. I really enjoyed this title all the way from the main menu to the final credits, the storyline was wacky but believable, the gameplay and learning curve was solid, the simple graphics suited the game fine with the trademark colourful blocky style, the replayability was interesting in a way that it made you strive to get better results rather than starting a new game over again. I really liked the way you controlled the Prince or another cousin and you ran around a meadow which served as a menu system and you talked to the fans of Katamari Damacy who talked to you about how Katamari Damacy has somewhere influenced their lives or how they need help and you would be flown up to the King who would give you your task whether it be make a Katamari that is big, enough, rolled up fast enough, made of the right material or just do whatever the hell he says which can be anything from rolling up a flaming Katamari to make a campfire, rolling up students at a school to send them home or rolling up as many animals as you can.
Animalz! we needz da animals!
By playing these levels unlocks a multitude of other things i.e. more levels obviously but there are also Cousins and Presents that can be rolled up, any cousin who is rolled up the first time can be used as a playable character. The presents however are used to dress up whichever cousin you are using at the time, the presents come in 3 different categories, head (headphones/crown), face (long nose/mask) and body (guitar/horsey). Which Cousin you use or presents you are wearing makes no difference to the way you play it is purely cosmetic. Basically you unlock more fans of Katamari from Sumo wrestlers to old ladies with a variety of different ways or reasons to roll a Katamari until you eventually make enough planets and stars to roll up the sun, as you do.
The Select Meadow, most unique menu system I've seen
We love Katamari was great game and a great introduction for me to the Katamari series, I had heaps of fun and put a lot of effort into it and think I did the best that I could, there hasn’t been many games where I’ve tried this hard to get the best scores I could and I think this one had the spirit. Similar to Minecraft I would recommend it to anyone, they might be put off by the initial look of it at first, but after they play it they just might like it.
Also Known As: Katamari Damacy Tribute, Katamari Tribute
Exclusively on: PlayStation 3 Genre: Action Publisher: Namco Bandai Developer: Namco Bandai
Release Date: September 24, 2009
I was quite surprised when I saw that this game had been released, though I understood why when I realized the game had never come out in Australia. I only heard about it 3 or 4 weeks ago and had ordered it online. I was excited that I had actually found a PS3 version of the Katamari series as my only option currently on the PS3 was NOBY NOBY BOY from the same creator (more on this at some point). When I found that this game was actually a‘Tribute’ or a collection for the original Katamari Damacy and the We love Katamari that I had played on PS2 I wasn’t too worried as I didn’t mind replaying the old levels that I’d played and I was eager to play the new levels from the original.
Yes you can roll up the entire solar system
Though this was the same Katamari as before there were a few things that did annoy me first of all, the game's basic graphical style is cel-shaded, now this looks ok (it does cause slowdown in some places which is kind of odd) but if I want to switch to the classic graphical version I should have the option right from the start. In Katamari forever you have to randomly unlock the other graphical versions which and so far I've completed most of the game and have only found the 'wooden' style and even then you can only play the other style once you have played the level once already. This really disappointed me as I was not a fan of the cel-shading from the start.
The new cel-shaded style
The classic style
The 4 graphical styles avaliable including wooden and comic.
The storyline of this escapade was that one day the King was teaching the Prince how to do a super jump then he jumped too high and hit his head on a meteor knocking him unconscious.The Prince and the cousins then decided to build a Roboking in order to do the King's work, but the Roboking malfunctioned and you guessed it, destroyed all the stars in the solar system yet again. So basically you do missions for two kings, Roboking's missions revolve around the usual making the Katamari as big as possible or a certain size whereas the King's level are more object or special process based i.e only picking up animals (as before) or only picking up hot things. The King is dreaming so all the objects are in shades of grey until you pick them up and he remembers them which makes things kind of hard in some special missions.The storybook menu layout is pretty good though not all of the cousins will be on the screen at the same time.
One of the menu screens, this one shows the cousins and presents screen where you can select which cousin you want to play and what they are wearing.
Some chnages to the game was the Prince hop where you can now jump with the Katamari to reach higher places and the Kings and Roboking's heart and broken heart which pulled items toward you, so you had to work out when to use them at the best possible time. I found the levels to be varying in difficulty, there was some where I struggled to do well or even complete whereas others I could ace by just doing my usual thing but the new content and variety made it good enough. The music was fine although a lot of it was remixes of the past songs from We Love Katamari which didn't sound that good.
A broken heart powerup.
We love Katamari was adequate, it was good to play some of the levels from the original Katamari on PS2 and the PS3 definitely needed a Katamari game for anyone to discover the series. Despite a few shortcomings that I found it was fun and entertaining enough to warrant my purchase and I do concede when you buy another game of the same series it is not as good as the first, but between the two games I love Katamari the most.
Also Known As: Skyrim, Elder Scrolls V: Sky Rim, Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Also on: X360, PS3 Genre: RPG Publisher: Bethesda Softworks Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
I for one am not thoroughly schooled in the world of RPG’s (Role Playing Game), I only ever tried Diablo 2 once and frankly I felt it was all too late as I couldn’t really play with the dated graphics and interface and also you just seemed to be a bit too far away from your character. During Diablo’s heyday I was much more involved with RTS (Real Time Strategy) inc Warcraft, Starcraft and Total Annihilation. I’m not exactly sure what exactly classifies a game as an RPG, I think though the easiest way to tell is that with an RPG the user usually has an inventory to store weapons/armor etc and other items most of which they can browse and use usually at any point, such as The Legend of Zelda, whereas in a more action style game such as Grand Theft Auto you still control one character and the game has a storyline but your ‘inventory’ is very minimal and usually just restricted to weaponry which you select by the number keys or the mousewheel. Speaking of which, I have played all the GTA’s I have played Just Cause 2, I have played Spyro the Dragon and American Mgee’s Alice games, but none of these different types of games can really be classified as proper RPG’s. Of course I have played ’the’ MMORPG of all of them World of Warcraft but I have never delved fully into classic titles such as the Chrono Trigger, The Secret of Mana, Deus Ex and KotoR (don’t even ask me about Final Fantasy). I’m not exactly sure why this was, maybe because I was into more action and RTS games that were more multiplayer based and simpler whatever it was I never played an RPG for a lengthy amount of time until I happened to give Dragon Age: Origins a try.
Dragon Age Origins
Dragon Age was a big step for me, I just decided to delve right into to a predominately challenging game in a genre which I hadn’t really had much experience in, but to be honest I liked it, at the start at least. I liked the way that your selected race, sex and class determined where your starting area would be, what the story was behind it and what would happen in the initial stages of the story, also you did actually choose a class (Warrior, Rogue, Mage) which no matter how simple is something I thought I would want mandatory in an RPG with no predominate named character that you play as. Dragon Age was fun at first, but then there was a few problems, firstly the game, as I had mention before was quite hard especially the boss fights, even on easy, secondly I found that throughout the game you were accompanied by NPC companions. What this meant was, throughout the game you not only had to make sure you were doing the right thing in battle and organising all of your own gear and items, you had to organise the battle tactics and gear/items all of your group members as well, this made things very complicated as say you found a ring which granted extra health, which pretty much all of your group members could use you had to check the inventory of every single group member and check if their rings were worse or better, and when you have the 5 or 6 other group members, this is one hell of a lot. This coupled with the game being fairly difficult in certain parts made it quite a hassle to play and I found myself (as Zero Punctuation described) starting new characters and using different classes, races and sexes until I got bored of it, so that was that, until…..
Skyrim title and Logo showing a portion of Alduin's Wall
Skyrim, just the name sounds epic, this time, I told myself, I was going to give it a decent go, which was not the case with Oblivion. I actually tried Oblivion before I tried Dragon Age, it was the first of the Elder Scrolls games I had tried and although I did have a brief play of it, the whole classless character, (semi)complicated inventory and weight system along with the seemingly hundreds of items you had to sort through to see if you needed them and also the fact that at that point I was heavily into World of Warcraft may have had an adverse effect on my likeness of the game and I only played for a few hours. So in short I feel I didn’t give Oblivion enough time and thought, the only thing that made me seem to want to go back as the visuals, which I found be stunning. But this time was going to be different, and I was well rewarded for my patience things just had to be worked out I quickly and easily got by the non-class problem by deciding to be a warrior from the start and choosing the appropriate race for the style of play, choosing the Warrior Stone I made a good choice with the Nord as Skyrim is home to the Nords and also they well fit for using a two-handed weapon in which I used different kinds of greatswords and warhammers for most of the game. My character ended up looking quite freaky as I had selected a big tall bulky guy as fit for the two hander, then I had decided to choose the almost entirely white eyes and the black eye paint so along with his yellow tinted skin made him look half-dead, so for a bit I was roleplaying I was some invincible warrior who was back from the dead but I stopped after a while as there really wasn’t any way of expressing it in the game, and also I got married (more on this later).
I'm one freaky looking Nord
Once I had my thoughts set on a Warrior style character things just fell into place from there, I’m not going to spoil the opening for you but it’s quite epic I have to say, in the middle of this you pick your race and sex and can change your appearance and name and as usual with the Elder Scrolls no picking class, that’s it. Race plays a big part in Skyrim as I said before I chose Nord because I wanted to use 2H weapons but this is really just the opening stats and abilities, I really didn’t use the Nord main “scare enemy” ability at all you can really do anything with any race it’s recommended and/or easier to do a particular playstyle (for example to play a pure Mage it would be recommended to go as either High Elf or Breton). So after the epic opening there is the usual linear cave to get you used to the controls and gameplay, and after you get out it’s the same reaction as Oblivion, “wowee do the visuals look awesome” I’m probably a bit more enthusiastic then that but you get the idea, but they truly are, Bethesda definitely have a tick in that box, it’s something that’s very hard to describe (and that’s why I have screenshots), everything looks pretty much up to scratch as you’d expect, the shadows, textures and models are pretty realistic and have ragdoll in death though being a WoW player as I always seem to have fairly low expectations when it comes to graphics, but I quite impressed not so much blown away as in Oblivion, or when I first played Vietcong for that matter. The actual land of Skyrim itself is beautiful, rolling hills, rocky ledges, snowy mountains, dragons randomly appearing etc, the game actual has a very interesting physics system when it comes to ledges as it seems if you move slowly enough you don’t seem to fall of any of the rocky ledges no matter how steep they are. Overall Skyrim looks fine, it has the difference that Oblivion lacked which was basically just copy one beautiful area over and over again.
The Area near Riverwood
The gameplay in Skyrim is what makes it shine, I have only really scratched the surface with abilities at the moment as I’ve played a lot of the game now using only a Greatsword or Warhammer and have forgone all spells apart from the shouts so I don’t exactly have much feel for other weapons or spells. I feel it’s best to pick a certain style of play and pick the correct race and manage your perks (or ‘talents’ ‘specialties’ whatever you want to call them) to best fit your style of play, you don’t have to block yourself into playing a particular style for the whole game although you can change from a warrior to a Mage quite easily, but unfortunately (unless you use PC console commands) you can’t change around your perks. I played a as a Nord Warrior the first time around and I started off thinking I was going to use the safe option and use a one handed weapon and shield, though I soon found that using a two handed weapon was way cooler and that’s how I worked it out, and let me tell you it makes things a lot easier in the perks department, of course I did have to use the console commands to change around my perks to reflect my new chosen style of play and you aren’t able to do this with consoles so that’s the risk you take. The perks take in the form in the manner of constellations in various trees which you zoom around to view each (which can I say makes them freakin difficult to navigate, no pun intended) There is a tree for skills in one-handed weapons, one for destruction spells etc letting you specialize in your chosen field, there is also minor trees such as speechcraft which improves your skill at persuading and intimidating people and bartering with merchants.
A Nord with a two handed Sword.
The Skyrim perks screen
Some things I found kind of annoying but forgivable is that even though I was swinging around a big 2H Sword or Mace I didn’t feel as though I was quite making the impact until the killing blow, the reason for this is of course when you strike a killing blow on an enemy they ragdoll then fall in the direction they should after your strike, but unless you land a power attack which sometimes staggers your opponent they don’t always seem to be adversely affected by your swings which makes it seem like your wildly flailing around until you land that killing blow, the best ones of course are the cinematic kills (which can only be done with melee weapons) which there is no question that you didn’t finish off your opponent proper brutally. One other thing I did find a bit limiting is the way that you can only use 2 spells at a time “one on each hand” thing, it means you’re constantly freezing the game so you can switch spells and equipment around, of course this is all up to you, if you want to use 4 or 5 abilities or weapons in the one fight then that’s your decision, of course your always freezing the combat anyway to skull, health, magicka or stamina potions or some other kind of elixir that gonna help save your weak ass.
Yahh get away from me!
And weak it may be when you first start playing the game but to be honest, the game isn’t exactly too hard and has a difficulty setting too and you’ll pretty much start out finding it kind of hard and put it down to a nice friendly novice then find it easier and easier and put it back up again, at least that’s what happened with me, I of course who is not the best with action RPG’s but any hardcore RPG fan will have no trouble at all. The most annoying problem I think for people of any skill is the vendors, I’m always trying to sell things that I make or find but don’t want as the NPC’s have limited money for bartering and of course with your weight problem (that’s weight that your carrying thank you very much) your only carrying the very expensive things worth bartering which the NPC’s never have enough money for, this situation can be remedied by joining the thieves guild who supply fences who have a much larger pool of money or taking the ‘speechcraft’ perks, which I admit I am going to give myself all of them using console commands as soon as I start my first character as I am sick and tired of running around everywhere trying to find a vendor which has some money left.
Penny Arcade Comic: Thulsa Broom
One of the best parts of Skyrim is the way you interact with other creates and peoples, you’ve got your usual Bioware style questions and responses in conversation which is always fun to do, I try to take the sensible route each time but the ‘arrogant prick’ responses are sometimes hard to resist just to see how the npc’s react. There are a lot of quests and quest chains around Skyrim, you pretty much just pick them up while doing other stuff and if you’re the kind of person who likes to do things linear and in order i.e. finishing one area then moving to the next then you’re not particularly going to like this as there’s shit to do everywhere especially after the initial part of the game. The main storyline of the game revolves around you being the Dovakiin i.e. Dragonborn,Dragons play a major part in the main storyline of Skyrim, most notably their return by the hands of a certain other that is the basis of the main storyline, and you are a human who was born of dragon blood and can take dragons souls, and you use these souls by finding various dragon words in dragon shrines so you can use dragon shouts which are basically different spells with 3 stages. For example you automatically learn the first word of Unrelenting Force,after you kill your first dragon, which knocks enemies back slightly and gets stronger as you learn the next two words until you belt out 3 shouts in a quick succession and watch as your enemies go flying across the room, or off a cliff which is my preferred example. Though later into the game Dragons seemed to be turning up more frequently and it almost turns into a chore rather than a fun and epic experience, you’d quick travel to a place where you’d battled one before and sure enough then there would be another one, you’re just running along trying to go about your business then sigh as the music starts to get louder and more dramatic and you hear the roar up above you,” Here we go again…” *cue the Benny Hill theme song while you battle the dragon while in fast forward*.
Penny Arcade Comic: Their Name Means Big
There’s various quest chains that you can do some especially the Imperial vs Stormcloak missions do have a lasting effect on the game world there is a main storyline you can do it any time but there is also various things like Mage and Warriors guilds, random game world quests and other activities such as alchemy and blacksmithing to delve into. The game world is vast and you’ll spend most of your time exploring the various dungeons, castles and caverns you find while travelling to your next destination, some of which are important to quests/etc while others are just another bandit hideout or tomb with puzzles and lots of skeletons and minor things such as becoming a Thane of a City, buying a house there and getting married, yes that is a minor thing, in order to find a mate all the Nords do is wear a certain amulet showing their "available" and after you've selected your mate (human or otherwise) you have a full ceremony. and you live life together happily, apart from having them accompany you in battle or move to your home or vice versa, they don't change things all that much just the "fun" of gettin hitched I suppose. As far as completion is concerned, I think I timed my quests very well, as by then time I had finished the main questline, joined the Stormcloaks and ousted the Imperials, joined the Companions and finished their questline, and also finished pretty much all of the other quests I could find in all of the towns, barring of course the ones I missed and the other questlines which I either didn’t want to do or was inappropriate for my style of play, i.e. Joining the Dark Brotherhood or the Mages Guild.
"Lovely to see you again dear, did you remember to get the dragon meat"
Skyrim on the whole is a very tight package, it can get repetitive at times and I have to admit I was not able to get to level 50 in the one go (I was 37 when I stopped), which begs the problem of why they let you finish the main questline before getting to max level?, I will never know for me it was a kind of anticlimax but that also happened with the whole Stormcloak series. I think Skyrim has restored my interest in singleplayer RPGs (if I had any in the first place) and I could probably guess that if I spent a bit more time with Mass Effect 2 I would have lasted a bit longer. Skyrim was clean cut and (somewhat) simple to play, it looked beautiful and it was easy but technical enough to keep things interesting. There were a few issues but there were overlookable, the Elder Scrolls series just have this feel about them that’s different to other RPG’s of course that could be led back to them all being made by the one developer. You’ll find lots of other Dovahkiin around and be able to chat about shit you gone and done in the world and of course your dragon kill count. Due to the fairly easy overall difficulty of the game I would definitely suggest this to casual gamers and non-RPG players alike.
I ain't tellin you where or what this place is, it's a great shot nonetheless
I had a great time the first play and look forward to playing again with a completely different style of play (probably Pure Mage), and that what makes Skyrim stand out, you’re not forced into playing separate classes, be one thing and change either 3 hours into the game or three weeks, it’s up to you.
I have had some queries about my ‘reviews’ of games about having a score out of ten or having pros and cons at the end of the posts, I have actually considered this, but have decided against the idea for the moment as there is enough places that give you that kind of thing. Though I call them ‘reviews’ this site is more my musings on the various games I play and aren’t intended to be akin to a commercial website, I suppose if you wanted I do a sort of sum-up at the end of posts which you could read if you wanted the basic jist. I just don’t want people to base their judgement of the game by my opinions cause (let’s be honest here) they may not exactly be correct and if I have a section right down the bottom that someone may skip to and read the “quick facts and score out of 10” they might get the wrong idea, of course who says anyone on sites such as IGN & Gamespot reviews are %100 correct either it’s all (mostly) based on opinion.
I will think about it for the future, but for now if you just want the bare minimum, skip to the bottom and read my final ultimatum or go-a-searching through the world-wide-sea of game review sites, there will be plenty more on the matter I assure you.
I leave you now with a cartoon from Scott Ramsoomair of VGcats.com whose comic has kept me occupied over the years as a pleasant alternative to Penny Arcade
One thing that makes me sad about doing these reviews for past games is that I sometimes never get around to playing them again, it would be wrong to review a game that you haven’t played for a decent amount of time which I think is what happened with my Battlefield 3 review, I had only just finished the singleplayer and hadn’t played that much of the multiplayer and apparently it did show with feedback from some people I guess I was just in a hurry because people wanted to see the review and I wanted to deliver. This is not the case with Vietcong however I have played the singleplayer and multiplayer extensively in the past just not that recently, usually with‘The Past and time of Yore’ reviews I have replayed the game and wrote the review within a short period of time. To be honest it’s only because of the quiet period at work brought on by Christmas and New Years that I decided to write this review as my time at home is currently filled with Test Drive Unlimited 2 which I have previously reviewed and of course The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim which I possibly intend to finish (to some degree) before I write the review.
Release Date: March 26, 2003
Exclusively on: PC Genre: First-Person Shooter Publisher: Gathering of Developers (aka GOD Games) Developer: Pterodon Software
It’s been awhile since I’ve played Vietcong, and will probably be some time before I play it again, if ever, and this isn’t because I don’t particularly like to play the game of course, it’s because I love it and have possibly played it a bit too much however I have tried to replay the Fist Alpha expansion with some success but did not finish due to some strange bugs happening with it. You may have heard me mention it in my Battlefield 3 review, I did have a lot to talk about in regards to the Vietcong’s singleplayer mode which greatly outshone Battlefield 3’s even by today’s standards but I’ll get into that later. Vietcong was one of the first games I ever played online, the first possibly being Starcraft or even Quake 2, I’m honestly not sure but as I’ve said before it was the first one where I was serious, serious as in I was in a clan as was online at specific times in order to play for “wars” against other clans, Vietcong was a great game in a way that it had a great multiplayer and a great singleplayer which is a great achievement for an FPS. I think the first time I played it was a friends Lan and instantly I was amazed by the authentic Vietnam war style and very realistic (2003) graphics. The only First Person Shooters (FPS) I had played before this were Doom and Quake (of course) which were all sci-fi alien invasion shoot-em ups and were obviously not based on anything real whereas Vietcong was my first taste of a realistic tactical shooterwhich would eventually lead to many more.
Vietcong Main Menu
Vietcong, as you probably may have guessed already is a realistic shooter set during the Vietnam War, you play as some American army dude called Steve R. Hawkins who along with 3 other American army dudes and 1 South Vietnamese army dude (ARVN) you live in a dirty camp and pretty much every day go into the jungle and kick ass and kill commies, well that’s the basic jist of it. Of course the storyline is a bit more in depth than that, you arrive at Nui Pek camp in the middle of the jungles of Vietnam as the new sergeant, replacing the previous one who had been shot dead by the good ol Vietcong. The Fist Alpha prequel which had a similar setup to the first game you play as Sergeant Douglas (the man Hawkins replaced) and you had the same team except for Nhut, who joins later once the previous guide is killed. The story this time is about how your whole team including the Captain moved from the Plei Ku base and constructed Nui Pek and the events that led up to them destroying a major Vietcong base in Cambodia. I loved the opening scene of the first game where you were travelling in the helicopter while talking to Hornster, one of the squad and were able to look around during the whole thing, and when you land and the usually army banter happens between two of the soldiers, and you are able to walk around and take a look at the camp and meet the rest of the crew.
The Nui Pek US Special Forces Camp
After that you soon meet your commanding officer and settle in to your new room/office and then after some shooting practice with your new best friend Hornster, then you were ready for your first mission along with el Capitano. Vietcong has a great storyline, you play as Hawkins for the whole game a new sergeant going into a new base during the Vietnam war, you have your office and quarters where you can read your diary, previous mission reports and many other documents you also have a firing range you can go to and pick any weapon you had unlocked or picked up to test out and take on the next mission, (even enemy weapons) then when you’re ready you read and accepted the mission brief and there is almost always a meeting in the briefing room which was heaps of fun to watch before you went out on your mission and on several occasions you could walk around the whole base.
The Weapons Room at the later stages where pretty much all of the weapons have been unlocked and are available. you could select any weapons (even Vietcong) pick it up, try it out at the shooting range then take it on a mission.
As far as I have seen, very few modern shooters have that sort of thing, It took almost half an hour of playing before you got into the actual shooting of enemies and even then it was only about 3 or 4 until you get to the next mission and go through the whole walking through the jungle thing again until you see something, of course this is the Vietnam war, and that’s what things were like. Modern Warfare and the Battlefield series boots you right into the action immediately, I’m thinking I now prefer games like the Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis which was very much like Vietcong in the slow singleplayer story mode sense, and come to think about it. I’ll have to try out the new one sometime too. I really haven’t gotten into many shooters since Vietcong, I basically followed on from Vietcong with the Battlefieldseries starting with Battlefield 2, which I still have in high regard as my favourite multiplayer first person shooter ever. Of course Battlefield was all about multiplayer and no singleplayer, Vietcong has what I would think a healthy balance, I must have played Vietcong’s singleplayer over and over again eventually trying to perfect each mission as what started as quite a hard game eventuated into something quite easy and nostalgic, this was mainly due to the fact that my hardware upgraded over the years.
*insert Flight of the Valkyries here"
Graphically Vietcong looked absolutely awesome for its time, I’ll never forget the first time me and the team made our way into the dense jungle, with birds flying out of the way and just the tense atmosphere of the whole thing. It was such a change for me from playing things like Doom and Quake which are as stealthy and quiet as a bangin pots and pans parade and about as realistic as Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X is to a real flight simulator so this was a welcome change I suppose. Of course little did I know that I pretty much wouldn’t be going back to the days of the running rocket launching jumpathon, no siree bob, from then on most of the FPS games that had come out were based around the tactical shooter model which varies through World War 2 to modern day wars. Vietcong was the first game I played that pretty much required you to use your weapons iron sightswhich were required in harder levels and were taken out entirely in most multiplayer servers which used the ‘Vietnam’ difficulty skill which removed pretty much all objects on the HUD as well as the crosshair.
Back then, scenes like this blew me away
This along with the gritty weapon sounds and blood splatters made for a great experience, one of the best being that a lot of the time you couldn’t even see your enemy, this would have frustrated the hell out of more action style FPS game players and you found yourself shooting in the general direction and hoping you’d hit something (aka spray and pray). In singleplayer your squad consists of you as Sergeant Hawkins, a calm and common sensed Medic named Crocker, a nervous but straightforward Radioman named Defort, A black friendly Engineer named Bronson, a hot-headed Machinegunner named Hornster and an enigmatic Pointman who is played by the South Vietnamese ‘Nhut‘ all of which have their own personalities which add immensely to the situation with either situational character or humour. It’s hard to explain how well the singleplayer holds together with Hawkins experience in Nui Pek and the surrounding area I guess it’s just a great way to tell a story.
The Team from left to right, Crocker, Defort, Hornster, Nhut, Bronson
Hawkins aka you, you can also see some LLDB (Vietnamese SF) behind Hornster
Vietcong was one of my first fortes into online gaming, (the first possibly being Starcraft) one interesting fact being that this is the time I coined my usual gamer name; JDman. As you could guess my time online was quite different to the singleplayer as you were fighting actual people, the main game mode played was Capture the Flag (CTF) where you either played on the US or Vietcong team and tried to steal the enemies flag from their base and bring it back to yours. Two things I think the multiplayer in Vietcong did best was the two sides and the classes, for one the two different sides had completely different weapons this kind of thing was unheard of in Counterstrike of course in Vietcong this was because of the reasonable amount of historical accuracy as the Vietcong had mostly Russian weapons and the American’s had their own, this did keep things at a bit of a disadvantage at times but I think it worked.
Also the classes true to the singleplayer you could play as the soldier with the largest array of weapons, the medic who could heal other players with a limited selection of weapons, the engineer who could place traps such as claymores and tripwire grenades and had access to shotguns, the radioman who could call down artillery on certain places of the map, the machinegunner who had access to the heaviest weaponry and the sniper who of course had access to the longest range weapons. I loved this setup and played a medic most of the time which most people did not and it was heaps of fun to be able to heal myself and others, and otherwise do something other than killing in an FPS game and this was a big moment for me. This might sound silly but person-on-person killing in FPS is not my forte so you could understand why I’ve strayed away from games such as Counterstrike and Call of Duty and I constantly find new ways of helping the team while indirectly killing them. Though this is much easier in the Battlefield series then it was in Vietcong.
Multiplayer Capture the Flag Game Spawn Screen for VC, note the limited weapons for Medic
It wasn’t long before I was introduced to a clan. Clans in Vietcong were made up of players who had banded together to form a team either out of online or real-life friendship and the purpose of these clans was to have scheduled “wars” with other clans, which sometimes included “training nights” this was quite a weird experience for me (and even weirder explaining it to my parents) as it was almost like playing a sport, except it was played using a computer and the‘sport’ was killing people. This started with simple messaging over MSN Messenger then went on to actually talking to people using a microphone and the Teamspeak software chatting with people I had not even met, some of which from other countries. Over the years I was in clans called “Band of Brothers (BB)” “Aus Nite Crew -=(ANC)=-“ and “Warcorps (VV)” which eventually led into Battlefield (until ADP) and WoW and as you can see each had their own “tag” that you put in front of your name.
A score display of one of the largest battles I ever had, 2 clans vs another 2 clans
I met a lot of new people during this many I did manage to meet in real life and got introduced to web forums and of course internet drama and clan politics which frankly I think are pretty interesting and sometimes funny and don’t bother me much. I tried many times to get people to play different maps and different game modes i.e. “Real War” which was a point capture mode and a map that was based on a singleplayer mission that was almost entirely thick jungle. This experience led to me driving reasonably long distances to actually meet up with my ‘clanmates’ or the people I played the game with at LAN parties, this was the first time I ever did this and honestly it was scary once you think about it, but always had a great time once I was there and Vietcong is one of the best LAN games around.
Me at my first lan with people from many different clans
Once the Fist Alpha expansion was released things really got started for example there were a few extra guns and a few extra maps to keep things interesting, and also more multiplayer game modes. The thing that made most of the difference of course was the custom made multiplayer maps, these added a whole new flavor to the same old thing, and I enjoyed having many ‘wars’on these special and fun maps Multiplayer was indeed a fascinating and fun experience and kept me going for a long time, you don’t know how challenging a game is until you played the multiplayer against actual people and there are many different aspect you can add to the equation for example you can hide and they don’t know where you are, and also the general teamwork and playing with genuinely friendly people. After Fist Alpha, Vietcong never had any real content after that, there was Red Dawn, which was basically just a new fairly long singleplayer mission along with some new maps. And there was also the downloadable custom map mode and pack made by the community. The sequel to Vietcong, Vietcong 2 came out in 2005 but to my dismay was poorly received by the rest of the community and was never indulged with clans or warfare, at least in Australia which I felt was a shame , as I did enjoy the multiplay and singleplayer, though I admit it did lack the quality and overall experience of the first but that’s a story for another time.
For Vietnam!
Vietcong I can say was definitely my best experience of singleplayer First Person Shooter to date, just missing out on the multiplayer by a worthy opponent. Vietcong multiplayer has pretty much died now in Australia at least, but don’t get me wrong, Vietcong had one of the best multiplayer experiences out there and that’s the reason why it built up such a strong community that lasted quite a while and one which I was glad to be part of it was what got me into multiplayer games and the general community even more then Starcraft did. It wasn’t too long ago that I played the both of them, but that was probably the last time, I’d be worried if I played again that it would start to get stale, but in this case I wouldn’t be so sure. So if ever you’re at a LAN or store and you have a chance to play or pick up a copy of the game, please do, I can’t guarantee but I’m pretty certain you won’t regret it.
