The Past and Times of Yore: Jedi Knight II, Jedi Outcast, new look, same Kyle & friends

Release Date: March 26th 2002
Genre: First/Third person Shooter
Developer: Raven Software
Publisher: LucasArts
Platform: Microsoft Windows, Xbox, Gamecube, Mac OSX
Players: 1 and Multiplayer
Classification: T (Teen)

I have a bit of confession to make, as you may know from my review of Dark Forces I had obtained a number of Star Wars titles from the site ww.gog.com (Good old Games) and had intended to play through the Jedi Knight series of games that I have only played one of so far that being Jedi Academy and so after Dark Forces the next one on the list should have been Dark Forces II though in my brief attempt to play this I found that it was very awkward and I unfortunately couldn’t get my mouse to work right and even when I got it going the graphics and jerky controls of the game didn’t cut it for me and unfortunately I couldn’t keep going. It reminded me of that awful Fifth Element game on Playstation which was made around the same time, I think that games around that era had that kind of awkward look and feel to them with the transition to full 3D, where I felt that I would rather play games like Super Mario World on the SNES with their crisp and clean pixels to something like Driver 2 whereas although I’d hate to say it the gameplay was good but the graphics were a bunch of mush. In fact I think that during this era games that were of cartoony characters like the Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot series’ looked the best as the games that were trying to be realistic just didn’t look very good at all, though I spose back then you couldn’t expect much could you.

Jedi Knight Dark Forces 2, oh my eyes

 In any case I wimped out yes I admit, I’ve got this fascination with playing updated and graphically overhauled versions of old games, I love it, or even just playing games on max settings and seeing how much better they look to when I played them back then. Though, fortunately all of the game’s cutscenes have been uploaded to youtube so you can basically watch what happens and interestingly they were made using a mixture of FMV and 3D animation. To sum things up Kyle Katarn still a mercenary along with his companion Jan Ors investigates the death of his father and finds and defeats the evil Dark Jedi Jerec and stops him from corrupting the Valley of the Jedi. The expansion pack to that Mysteries of the Sith is where you play as Mara Jade as a companion to Kyle Katarn who is now a Jedi, Mara goes on a series of Missions while Kyle goes to Dromund Kaas and Mara finds him in the Dark Force Temple or “Sith” Temple rather and finds him insane with the dark side, but he recovers and swears off the force reuniting with Jan Ors. Having watched the whole thing now I have come to two conclusions FMV acting in games is as terrible then as it is now, and damn is Jan Ors hot in those videos. One last thing because I played Jedi Academy a lot first I’m going to try not to refer back to it so much since chronologically it’s set after this one.

Kyle and Jan in the Dark Forces 2 Cutscenes, this was one of the few where it wasn't so goddamn dark

So then we come to Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, made in 2002, the first in the series to be made by Raven Software and was powered by the Quake III Arena engine. As you would probably know this one was the precursor to Jedi Knight : Jedi Academy  which was unofficially called Jedi Knight 3 but was actually the 4^th in the series and as you know from my review, the first one I had played. When I got the rest from GOG.com I had intended to go all of the way through them including the X-wing space combat simulation series and the Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) series, both of which I have yet to finish, but with X-wing series as well I have skipped some too. Jedi Outcast was (and sometimes still is) hailed as one of the best lightsaber combat simulations ever. Having played it now both in singleplayer and multiplayer at a LAN, I could almost agree but not quite due to the lack of dual sabres and saber-staffs, I did find the Lightsaber combat very similar though as both games were made by the same developer. The gameplay wasn't always just shooting and Lightsabering of course, there was a great section involving an AT-ST which was heaps of fun and much longer then the Jedi Academy one. 

The name says it all, kicking ass with an AT-ST

The story begins with Kyle still in his bounty hunter ways with Jan accepting a mission from Mon Mothma to investigate an imperial Remanent base on Kejim though Kyle is taken aback slightly when shown some cortosis crystals which are used to make lightsabers as he no longer wants anything to do with being a Jedi.

Kyle, Jan and Mon Mothma, this time all of the cutscenes are done in the game engine.

Through investigations on Kejim and Artus Prime where the crystals are being mined Kyle and Jan find that they are being studied and also used in experiments on living beings, I had fun doing these sections with just weapons as you obviously don’t have your Lightsaber at this point so I played in first person mode. Though you soon meet Desann, a Chistori Dark Jedi who used to be under the tutelage of Luke Skywalker (who Kyle mentioned once in Jedi Academy as I remember) and his apprentice Tavion Axmis who you all know as the main antagonist from Jedi Academy as well, though this time she is second fiddle to her master.

Tavion and Desann

In your first fight with Desann you are basically set up to lose as you have no force powers so you have no chance against him, it’s only afterwards that when Jan is captured and apparently killed, Kyle goes to the Valley of the Jedi to regain his Force powers and then to Yavin 4 to retrieve his lightsaber from Luke Skywalker. The trials that Kyle re-does and a lot like the ones in Jedi Academy though slightly different, you eventually get your Lightsaber and swing it up in Nar Shaddaa when you have a run-in with Lando Calrissian and then head to Cloud City on Bespin.

Well there's another familiar face

On Bespin Kyle battles the Reborn for the first time, these reborn were actually seen in Jedi Academy as the New Reborn along with the Disciples of Ragnos and are basically the same kind of fight as that game, all dodging and lightsaber swinging and force using fun combat. After battling and defeating Tavion on Bespin, Kyle learns that Jan is indeed alive and Desann and Tavion had tricked him into revealing the location of the Valley of the Jedi. He also soon learns that Desann, with the help of Admiral Galak Fyyar planned to use the Reborn to rebuild the Galactic Empire though I noticed only when reading the wiki was that this was part of a larger plan involving another character called Lord Hethrir and his Empire Reborn which itself is a faction of the Imperial Remnant whew we’re going real meta now. Though eventually through a very lengthy level Kyle defeats Fyarr in his cortosis-based armor (I actually just read something about that which would have made it much easier to beat him XD) and we get a brief cameo from Rogue Squadron who blow up his ship. 

Admiral Galak Fyarr in his Cortosis Armor, and Kyle throwing his lightsaber apparently.

 Kyle then goes to the Jedi Temple on Yavin, fights off the troops there eventually teaming up with the other Jedi to defeat the reborn and Desann himself who was kind of a pushover really despite his huge size and lightsaber reach, I noted that Kyle say that the Reborn are no match for the Jedi as they have been artificially infused with force power and have not had any training in adapting and understanding the force. Kyle decided to be a Jedi again then he and Jan then go to the beaches of Spira and got it on, well I hope.

Kyle defends the Temple with his fellow Jedi buddies

So with both Jedi Outcast and Jedi Knight being made by Raven software they were obviously very similar in most things the most obvious being graphics and gameplay. The shooting and lightsaber fighting was pretty much exactly the same with the same controls, I used guns at the start obviously but didn’t use them much after that except to snipe on several occasions, the force powers were the same as usual getting better and more powerful as you go along. I can’t think of much that was different from Academy, it would have obviously been massively different and improved from Dark Forces II but I’m not gonna go there.

Ahh the good old Stormtrooper blaster rifle

One thing I did find is that I regretted playing it on the “Jedi” difficulty because man there were so many goddamn enemies with lots of hits points, I mean seriously when I shoot someone in the face with a gun or slice them with a lightsaber I want them to die, not just shrug it off but of course you could say the same for me. I eventually had to turn off the 360 degree slow-mo rotation that I loved so much as there were simply too many enemies and it got tedious, next time I will definitely go for the Padawan difficulty. Another thing I found difficult was the objectives and level design, sometimes I had no idea where to go and what to do, though that’s often the case in games I haven’t played before especially Dark Forces and I had to refer to online guides which wouldn’t have been so bad if the game didn’t brighten up with desktop so much that text was almost unreadable when you alt-tabbed. And before you ask yes I did use a trainer with this game as well which worked though I had to keep re-enabling it after every loading screen which got a tad annoying.

Kyle blasts and cuts through a crapload of droids and troopers and eventually confronts Tavion.  Notice how I get frustrated and switch to guns halfway through.

Other than that the game was good and I thoroughly enjoyed the story as I finally knew what happened before Jedi Academy. The game worked well through the GOG system, the graphics were good as usual as the Quake III Arena engine doesn’t disappoint and the sound and music was good too. One of the things I found both awesome and funny was the way the game has non-scripted fighting, so for example in scenes where enemies are fighting it’s basically like two bots fighting each other in multiplayer and looks absolutely ridiculous but it’s great to see that you can be helped by non-playable characters in the story mode. 


Luke and Desann have a non-scripted duel with Luke getting killed at least twice, while Kyle boards the Doomgiver.

I didn’t delve much into the multiplayer, to be honest I didn’t much in Jedi Academy either though we did have a few random free-for-all battles at a LAN which was a lot of fun and absolutely ridiculous as people were playing as all kinds of characters. Some appropriate such as Kyle Katarn’s model but others looked ridiculous playing as imperial officers and Stormtroopers, I didn’t know it then but the Shadow Trooper Model I played as actually did use Lightsabers in the game.

The Ridiculous looking lightsaber battles at Bluewire Lan, footage from me and Ramrod.

I would still say Jedi Academy is the better of the two as being able to create your own Jedi and be a student in the Academy is much more rewarding not to mention the ability to wield dual sabers or saber staffs, nevertheless Jedi Outcast had a great story I was glad to finally get through it. So it looks like I’ve come to the end of the Jedi Knight series having skipped two games now XD, Hopefully I’ll like Knights of the Old Republic since it was made around the same time which will be next on the list of the Jedi Lightsaberin’ series just as X-wing vs Tie Fighter will be next on the Starfightering series if I ever finish Tie Fighter that is.

JD

9/10

Things I liked:

Great gameplay, lightsaber combat especially

Great, engaging story

Use of non-scripted NPC fighting both innovative and laughable.

Multiplayer is awesome fun

Things I didn’t like:

Levels dragged on a bit “oh gawd not another huge room of Stormtroopers”

No Dual Sabers or Sabre Staff :(

The Jedi Outcast Trailer

Force pushing the boundaries

The Past and Times of Yore: Half-Life 2, Episode 2, caves, bugs, slugs and the great outdoors

Release Date: October 10th 2007
Genre:First-person Shooter
Developer: Valve
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Platform: Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Mac OS X, Linux, Shield Portable
Players: 1
Classification: M (Mature)

I hadn’t realised it had been so long since I reviewed Half-Life 2 Episode 1 as it’s been a whole year and a bit since (7 years since my Half-Life 2 review) so I guess it’s High time I get the series review finished though to be perfectly honest the way things are going with the mysterious third sequel I think I’ll have more than enough time before that comes along. As you can probably guess Episode 2 is a direct continuation of Episode 1 running with the same story (and game engine) of Half-Life 2, this was the last of the ‘Episodes’ of Half-Life 2 and the ending has sparked huge anticipation of a supposed Half-Life 3 as well as much quarrelling, complaining and speculating of when it will finally arrive. I’m not going to comment on much about the gameplay or graphics as we all know this is the same as Half-Life 2 so I will concentrate on the adventure inc the story, location and new friends and enemies.

A Hunter, one of the new enemies in Episode 2

So we when we left previously our two heroes Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance they were speeding away from City 17 on the caboose of a train watching the Citadel after the events of Episode One, the citadel then explodes and everything goes black, Gordon then wakes up to Alex freeing him with the Gravity Gun  out of the wreckage of the train, miraculously alive again. The storyline for the game as before is divided up into chapters of which once completed you can re-do at any time. The first chapter To the White Forest  has Gordon and Alyx setting off to the White Forest base to deliver a data packet to Dr Kleiner and Eli Vance who are there currently. I must admit it was good to get outside after being indoors for most of Episode 1 and also in the great outdoors too similar to the coastal run you did in Half-Life 2. 

The spectacular view of the Citidel from the train wreck

 Though this scenery was short lived as after battling through a Zombie infested mine Alyx is injured by a new Combine Hunter enemy which you don’t get to fight just yet and then you are saved by a Vortigaunt who takes you through the beautiful Antlion caves, these caves are quite a sight to behold as they are beautifully rendered and lit with the light shining off the rocks. It’s here that you first meet Antlion Grubs and Workers, the grubs being like fireflies as their glowing bodies serve as the primary source of light in the caves and they are pretty disgusting as you have to hit them with your crowbar or step on some to get past, the workers are new version of Antlion that hurls acid at you that was easy enough to dodge, I had great fun playing hunter with my shotgun and watching them explode when shot was very satisfying.


I go hunting through the Antlion Caves

The next chapter has one of my favourite moments in the Half-Life series, you are led to a resistance outpost in an abandoned mine where you and two other resistance fighters have to defend a group of Vortigaunts who are trying to heal Alyx who is lying on a table. The resistance fighters have a sort of Antlion Detector system going which uses red lights to tell how many Antlions are approaching, the more lights, the more antlions and there is four tunnels they can come from, why they chose this place to heal Alyx I would not know. You are given access to reprogrammed Hopper Mines and Sentry Guns though not quite enough to hold off the antlions by themselves though I was still pleased by this as I love Sentry guns with their auto-firey goodness and I had lots of fun repositioning them accordingly until they both exploded L. It looked bad but then a whole party of other Vortigaunts came and you kicked ass with them, truly a great moment.


Hold the Line! man watching this makes me want to do it again, need more sentry guns

You then follow your Vortigaunt companion deeper into the mines to find an Antlion Larvae to save Alyx and I saw quite a few sights along the way as well as doing a brilliant cat-and-mouse sequence with an Antlion Guardian, when you get back you get a brief visit from The G-Man just before Alex is revived as he says that the was waiting for a time when the Vortigaunts were otherwise occupied (as per their previous hinderance of him in Episode 1) and gives a cryptic warning to the sleeping Alex before she wakes up.

The Antlion Spawning Cave

The next chapters involve exiting the mine and another car driving and stopping sequence similar to the coastal “Highway 17” chapter in Half-Life 2 except this time you have Alyx with you. There was a sequence I liked in “Freeman Pontifex” where you searched through a mining town with Alex supporting you from above with a sniper rifle, really saved some ammo that time hah. The “muscle” car you eventually find has more bodywork this time and room for two people and boy was that thing fun to drive, jumping over bridges and hills though it was only in short bursts as it was always over so quick.

Shotgun!, oh wait I'm driving

 The “Riding shotgun” chapter was good as this was the first time you faced Hunters which are bloody fast and tough to kill though not when you run into them of course :D, you also have probably the closest encounter ever with an Advisor where you can see what they do to humans first hand. You fight more combine soldiers and Hunters and a Hunter-Chopper along the way. The next chapter has a scene where you duck-and-cover through a junkyard with an autogun firing over your head and then get in a massive fight with combine soldiers and Hunters in the White Forest Inn, you also meet Dog again who defeats a strider for you.

The Combine Advisor in the barn

Dog wrestles a Strider

Once you finally get to White Forest you are reunited with Dr. Kleiner and Eli Vance and also a new character Dr. Magnussen, another former Black Mesa Scientist who you saw previously through radio/visual contact, I almost liked him as much as Dr Breen with his grumpy and aloof demeanor. White forest is a large Resistance base where Dr. Kleiner and Magnussen are organising the launch of a special rocket which they plan to use, in conjunction with the satellite array launched during the events of Half-Life and Alyx's data packet, to close the Combine superportal. This part has a lot of speculation for the supposed sequel, Kleiner and Vance decode the message that Gordon and Alyx brought and it appears to be a message from Judith Mossman in an arctic location saying that she has found the Borealis, which is a ship that contained a secret project started by the Aperture Science company who we know from the Portal series. Kleiner and Vance are at odds for the first time, the former saying they should use the technology to fight the combine, the latter saying they should destroy it to avoid another Black Mesa Incident, I feel like this may be a choice in the future, woo that’d be a first for Half-Life. 

The crew discussing Dr. Mossman's discovery iof the Borealis

This is where Alyx speak the “unforeseen consequences” line to Eli without knowing it and then Eli privately tells Gordon that the G-Man spoke those same words to him just before the Black Mesa Incident.  You then have to defend the base from a huge combine attack of Hunter and Striders and combine troops in which I used the muscle car to run over the hunters and the special Magnusson Device which is a sort of sticky bomb that needs to be shot to blow up, in order to defeat the Striders which is difficult to do and had a bit of trouble this time with a Strider almost reaching the base but managed to finish it.


Defending the base from Striders using the Magnussen Device and running over Hunters.

The rocket is then launched and successfully destroys the combine portal effectively stopping the remaining combine from receiving any reinforces from other combine worlds. There is a brief celebration then comes the very climactic final scene where Gordon and Alex are about to embark on a journey to the Borealis in a helicopter and we all know what happens then, if you don’t then play the damn game, all of them if you haven’t, play the entire series do it now! I can’t stress this enough if you haven’t played any of the Half-Life series you should definitely play through the original Half-Life, then 2 then the episodes as it’s a brilliant experience.

The Portal is finally closed

Saying that I can’t remember whether that was the second or third time I’ve done that, possibly the third and although sometimes it can be a bit of a grind, I purposefully play it on easy to get through some of the repetitive shooting of mass amounts of combine soldiers quicker but it’s amazing each time as the graphics are great and the menu design is so click that I sometimes wanna play it just to use it again as there’s nothing like it in other games really.

That slick menu

 So that marks the end of the Half-Life 2 series of games with the exception of Lost Coast but that’s barely worth a mention, now we sit back and wait (patiently) for the next installment. Frankly I don’t know which I’d prefer, for it to be the last in the series and explain everything or fore there to be many, many more but I expect the latter.

JD

Hurry up Mr. Freeman

The Past and Times of Yore: LittleBigPlanet, multi-lane 2D platforming fun with friends

Release Date: November 3rd 2008
Genre: Action, Platformer
Developer: Media Molecule
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
Platform: Playstation 3
Players: 1-4
Classification: E (Everyone)

If I could think of a list of the most well-known Playstation 3 games or characters, Sackboy and the LittleBigPlanet (LBP) series immediately comes to mind. I was no latecomer to the series mind you, I did play the original LittleBigPlanet game over a long period of time at friends houses or anywhere else there was a Playstation3 as they seemingly all had it. But as you know I’m not much of a console gamer and only played the game rarely until I got my own PS3 and decided to play the damn thing by myself finish the Story mode once and for all. Of course I knew this was supposed to be a game you played with friends as throughout the game there was always these various challenges that you needed two or more players to do and I have had to get anyone around, housemate, friends etc to help with them. But I was determined to do it in any case as I had really wanted to see the whole game for a while and at least finish it myself and get some closure. I don’t have many games on PS3 as it will possibly be the last console I’ll ever own though I really need to spend more time off the computer whether it’s movies or console, my love of Emulators keeps me from going back to the Playstation and Super Nintendo, my dislike of the Nintendo 64 controller keeps me from playing that console, and of course you know from my last post I have tried twice to emulate the Playstation 2 to no avail. There’s also Skate 2 which I am trying to avoid playing again as it’s one of those games you have a love/hate relationship with and all of my other PS3 games I’ve now played many times through or had enough of so that just left LittleBigPlanet.

The "first Steps" level in the Gardens, unfortunately I am unable to get any screenshots or videos from the game so the majority of the media you'll see on the page is courtesy of Zebra Gamer's Youtube playthough which was incredibly helpful

Anyway so in case you haven’t heard LittleBigPlanet is an action platformer set in a 3D world where you move to the right in a 2D platformer fashion while avoiding obstacles including traps, pitfalls and other objects which can impede your progress. The difference between the traditional 2D platformers such as the Mario games is that LBP actually has 3 or 4 different “lanes” that you can run and jump in, for example on most long flat surfaces where you start a level you can jump to the background or foreground path which is necessary to pass many obstacles and complete many puzzles. Another difference is LBP introduces and makes heavy use of the characters ability to “grab” things like felt and sponge type objects and also other players using the R1 button. This allows you to pull objects and jump and swing from ones that are dangling from strings, they also provide a way of holding on while you are on a moving object. The story behind the game is that when people dream their dreams get stored in a world called LittleBigPlanet which is maintained by the Creator Curators, one of which The Collector has turned against the rest and is stealing the other curators creations and not sharing them with the world. Throughout the game you help the various curators across the world of LBP which is basically a miniature version of earth made out of felt. 

LittleBigPlanet, in all it's felt glory, this shot was taken from the intro so I'm not quite sure what the arrow is for.

Each of the Curators worlds is set in a particular region for example the first curator The King’s domain is the The Gardens and it is located in Europe, the second Curator Zola is a lion and his domain is The Savannah which is on the African continent, I was hoping there would be domain in Australia but I was unfortunately disappointed, I guess an ‘outback’ themed domain would be too much like the savannah. Each domain has three mains level and 2 or 3 mini-games which are unlocked by finding keys in the main levels, the mini games include endurance tests like skipping and see-saws, races where you have to get to the finish in the fastest time possible and obstacle course which you must complete before the time runs out. LittleBigPlanet has a big emphasis on playing and sharing with others and that is shown by the various puzzles throughout the game which require 2 or more players and the ability to create and share you own levels with others around the world.

Grandmaster Sensei, the Creator Curator of the Islands domain

The game starts in a very unique way, your Sackboy character pops out hole in the darkness onto a bench or something and you have full control over them right off the bat. You then are privileged to hear Stephen Fry’s voice as the narrator and he instructs you on the basic controls of your sack person and how you can change their facial expression and wave your arms around with the bumpers. You are soon on you way to one of the best intro’s I have ever seen in a game. You basically run along a linear path while the main credits for the game along with the faces of the developers appear above you while you run and jump and push obstacles around. I can’t explain the joy I had when doing this for the first time, it was sublime, one of those moments where you are like  “this is amazing, I just can’t describe it”. You also get introduced to your Popit which probably the most important tool in the game, this is where you can access and use stickers and decorations that you have found in order to attach them to certain places in the world to gain more Score Bubbles, Prize Bubbles and Keys, this is also where you can customise your character with the material and costume items you have found along the way. You also have the ability to chat with your online friends, ‘suicide’ in order to respawn at the previous save point and change your poppit colour which actually changes the colour of the Score bubbles you collect and changes your characters clothes colour slightly, I thought this was pretty damn cool when I discovered it.

The intro and first steps done by Zebra Gamer

This basically followed on into the main game but first you were dropped into your Pod, which is some sort of cardboard spaceship where you can see littlebigplanet from afar, this is where you and friends (or in my case just me :’( can run around in before you start a game or when going back to the menu. Apart from you there is basically only one thing inside the pod and that is your Pod Computer which is a replica of a PS3 controller and what’s even cooler is that when your click to use the pod computer your Sack person moves the joysticks and hits the buttons mimicking you which I thought was pretty damn cool. From your pod computer you can access the story mode which is LittleBigPlanet itself, the Info Moon where you can view your info and progress, see your friends list and news and where you can view and try other players level creations, and the “My Moon” where you can create and play your own levels.

The main screen with your Sackboy at the controls, you can see the Infomoon and My Moon in the picture too

 You start the story mode in the King’s Garden and it’s a good introduction to the basics as you would assume, running, jumping, grabbing and pulling and collecting Score Bubbles which are one of the three collectibles found throughout the game as well as Prize Bubbles and Keys. Score bubbles are simply that, a way of keeping score on the levels you complete and comparing to other players similar to the coins in the Mario series though from what I can remember you don’t get an extra life. Prize bubbles have stickers and character customization items in them and keys give access to the mini games. It was fun enough running and jumping over obstacles and enemies and I truly loved grabbing and pulling items and swinging and jumping was great, it was like the old Donkey Kong Country except everything was so much more detailed obviously with the realistic character animation and sewn felt and sponges and wood and pretty much everything. I loved your how your sack character jumped and flailed around realistically while they bounced off objects with blocks bouncing and falling around them with almost perfect physics, it’s all very beautiful to watch.

The Sensei's Lost castle level, damn those rollers haha

The Creator Curators and other characters help you throughout the game with hints and tips and sometimes come in the form of vehicles such as wheeled wooden horses, skateboards, toy cars or odd things such as Don Lu’s Dog from the The Wedding's level, The Darkness in South America. It seems that apart from your Sack person all the other characters are made from art and craft materials like cardboard, paper and wood and speak in a sort of gibberish voice similar to the original Banjo-Kazooie game. Controlling your Sack person is relatively easy, as I said before you can run, jump with the x button and grab with the R1 button, sometimes I found a slight delay on jumping but that may have been because my character was not full on the ground or the particular objects I was on. The base game revolves around making it through the level avoiding traps and obstacles and solving puzzles in order to continue and it’s masterfully done, Some bits I found I enjoyed in particular was flinging myself from object to object like hanging lanterns or spinning windmills, riding characters and vehicles such as the skateboard in the gardens and the car in The Metropolis and dressing up my character of course as I loved how you got a whole new (male and female) outfit for each new world you went to.

Don Lu's Faithful Dog!

I usually don’t have too much to say about the graphics and music but in this case they were both absolutely marvellous. I loved the way the worlds were made up of everyday art and craft materials like cardboard, paper, wood, felt, sponge, plastic etc and how they all looked so realistic, there was so much detail there in the foreground, the background, it’s funny that a game that mimics so many 2D platformers looks so good in 3D but it just does. The detail of all the levels is just amazing especially the European medieval themed The Gardens, the South American Day of the Dead themed The Wedding and the oriental themed The Islands and I remember seeing it for the first time on PS3 and just going “whoa” though funnily enough playing it again much later I can appreciate it more. The music is great as well one of the main ones that stood out was the music from the Wedding world’s “The Wedding Reception” level which introduced you to the day of the dead theme and sounded fantastic along with the beautiful visuals. The sound effects including all the bounces, pops and springs all sound great too, though I would have appreciated actual voices in the game but I guess it’s ok how it is also when you get new items the “You got new item!” popup can be annoying when you get a few at once as it can block your view.

The Subway level in Metropolis, note the found item popup, now imagine it with like 5 of them XD

I didn’t dabble too much into the multiplayer aspect of the game with this playthrough as it was the first few games I played with friends where the multiplayer really shined though I didn’t appreciate it as much then as I do now and getting people to play it now is kind of hard apart from the times I could do the 2 player ones when there was someone around but haven’t done more than two people for a while but I remember it being fun pushing and pulling your friends around. Doing the two player challenges was fun when I could get someone unfortunately I had to skip the 4 player ones and some two player ones as well though I admit the game would be more fun with friends. When playing through the story you actually had the option to “Play online” meaning someone could join you when playing though I found having another person from the internet just annoying as you couldn’t communicate and they just rushed ahead. I had a look at the level creator but didn’t fiddle around with it much, I had much more fun trying out other players levels via the info moon, they were pretty cool, one was even based on Minecraft! and another was a racer which was fun. I must remind myself to go back in and try more of them.

The very explosive Mexican-themed canyons world

In the end there’s not much more I can say about LittleBigPlanet just that it was a great modern platformer and reminded me that we can still have them in these days of Triple A, MMORPGS, RPG’s and FPS’s. LBP was a game that was done incredibly well and with such dedication and love put into it it’s hard not to appreciate it, everything from the gameplay to the visuals was spot on and with the right amount of challenge to not be frustrating. The only reason I could not give this game a 10/10 as it isn’t a game I can continue playing it was perfect enough as is unless of course I went crazy with the level creator but it just didn’t seem appealing enough and doing user made levels is fun but gets boring after a while. But as always I encourage anyone to give this a try, I have not actually played the sequels (of which there are two) but might try to in the future, and maybe even try the karting game if it gets cheap enough, I can never get enough of themed racers hah.

JD

9/10

Things I liked:

Immaculate presentation, great graphics.

Easy learning curve.

Terrific music and sound effects.

Lots of fun with friends

Just challenging enough to be fun.

Things I didn’t like:

Player controls can be a bit fiddly at times

No voice acting just gibberish speak and reading text.

Limited replayability

The LittleBigPlanet Official Trailer

p.s special thanks to Zebra Gamer for his excellent playthrough on Youtube

Might as well jump

My Usual Spiel - Grand Theft Auto 5 PC Online, let's get dangerously communal

Release Date: October 1st 2013(PS3/XBOX360)
November 18 2014 (PS4-XBONE)
April 14 2016 (PC)
Genre: Third/First-person shooter, Action adventure
Publisher: Rockstar Games
Developer: Rockstar North
Platform: Windows, Playstation 3 & 4, Xbox 360 & One
Players: 1 and Multiplayer
Classification: R (Restricted)

Multiplayer Grand Theft Auto… who wouldn’t jump at the chance? I remember back in the days of the first GTA in the late 90’s playing at school and at friends’ houses where LAN gaming was a very new thing, until GTA became available on consoles and multiplayer was largely forgotten about. When the PC versions of GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas came out and there were many player-created mods that allowed for “Multi Theft Auto” as it was called though I didn’t get involved as I thought it would be much too complicated to set up. It wasn’t until GTA4 came around that after finally finishing the singleplayer I decided to delve into the multiplayer, and despite some issues with that awful games-for-windows-live system it worked out ok. Free-for-all was fun where you just drove around the city and shot each other though you always just ended up going to the airport anyway, I loved doing races especially boat and helicopter races, one of my favourite activities was the “Team Mafiya Work” which involved doing ludicrous things for a Mafia gang boss like blowing up vans around the city or finding disembodied heads and throwing them into a body of water. Then of course all that died down and there were less and less people playing in anticipation of course, of GTA5.

The online mode even had an intro similar to the story mode except it was at night and with different camera shots. I especially like this shot of spaghetti junction at night

In this case GTA Online and the GTA 5 Story mode were almost two separate games altogether as such I decided to review them separately as well, as the review would have been much too large if I included both of them. Having finished the story mode and also my review of that part, I was eager to see what the multiplayer had to offer and indeed it looked good. When starting up GTA5 you basically choose whether you want to play online or story mode then still sign in to your Rockstar social club account. I had an interesting time creating my character as it seems as well as the usual array of options and sliders to change your appearance you have an option your parents between a male and a female character and use slider bars to switch the resemblance (some of which I recognised namely GTA3’s Claude, Nico Bellic and Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston). I chose Claude as my father and some other woman as my mother and ended up with a reasonably skinny pasty looking dude, but meh he kinds looked like me and that was fine.

Creating a new character.

Starting the game I actually found that it had a semi-storyline in itself as there was an intro and everything, you’re apparently a friend of Lamar Davis who you’ll recognise from the story mode and he starts you off on a tutorial where you learn the basics of online play, I almost thought there was going to be a story which you could play by yourself if you couldn’t find anyone to play with but this was unfortunately not the case. It turns out that the events of GTA online actually occur before the events of GTA5 as the GTA Online Protagonist is actually referred to in the main story, so you meet some characters like Gerald who you haven’t seen before in the story mode, and Simeon Yetarian who you have seen before. Simeon guides you through the process of fitting a stolen car with a GPS tracker and insuring it which is really helpful as if your car gets blown up or stolen you can get it again, and also being able to find your vehicle on the map is invaluable when you lose it. The last thing you need to do is take part in a ‘last team standing’ style activity which is called a “job” which I’ll explain more about later, where you face off with a friend or random player against another team of two in a shooting match around a particular area.

Gerald and Lamar from the game's intro

After that you are free to roam around the city, which is covered in icons of different things you can do, there are also some very fun random events that you compete with other people in the session, things like a player becomes the most wanted and you have to kill them, or vehicle challenges like how far you can drive without hitting something or who can make the biggest air time. There was even this weird one where everyone had to stay in a circle which got smaller and smaller though I had no idea how you won. As I walked around I found you had most of things you did in the story mode, there was still clothes shops and garages where you could customise your car and tattoo parlours and fairground rides and car washes and barbers etc all the usual amenities stuff, though there was some notable differences like the streets seeming more sparse with cars and people probably because of the overload that players would cause. I noticed that you have character stats similar to story mode like stamina and skill with certain vehicles, I’m glad to say that now my driving stat is up to pro-racer, was probably all those races haha.

The Job setup screen in the middle of searching for players, you can see my stats on the right

 As I spent a bit of time walking and driving around, going to stores and purchasing some new clothes getting used to the controls and options etc, one of the things I had to get used to in this new GTA that I may not have mentioned before was the interaction menu which is separate from the pause menu that has been there since GTA3. The interaction menu was introduced in GTA online and is accessed by pressing the M key, it’s basically a menu to customise your GTA online character and your vehicles. You can do things like change the armor you’re wearing, put on a saved outfit, set your motorcycle helmet and set it so you automatically put on a helmet when you get one a bike (this took me a while to work out) looking it up on the wiki I had no idea you could do that much in the game, it’s also got options for parachutes, fireworks, eating snacks, your character actions when winning/losing, your current facial expression, even your walk which I had fun looking at as they have styles like posh and feminine. Your car options include having it delivered by your mechanic and things like ejecting people from your car or remote controlling the doors/lights plus a whole host of other things from voice chat to killing yourself, truly a powerful tool which I had almost no idea about cause you didn’t use it much in the story mode as it only had a small amount of options including quick GPS, inventory, objectives and mission briefing.

The interaction menu on the top left

You can freely run around the city killing pedestrians or other players, robbing stores and doing random events as all of this gives you both money and reputation points aka “RP” RP is what makes you gain level or rank up and basically allows you to buy more things by unlocking them in stores and also allows you purchase higher end houses and start more jobs. Jobs are the main source of money and RP in the game, you could call these equivalent to the game modes in GTA4 whereas Race is still my favourite kind of “Job” in GTA5, as well as this include your usual simple modes such as Deathmatch, Last Team Standing as like in the intro tutorial. You also have Missions which to make things even more complicated are part of the jobs category, they are basically like the singleplayer missions you do in GTA5 but with other players (maximum 4). They are started by characters such as Lamar, Gerald and Simeon as well as Ron Jakowski , Trevor, Lester and Martin Madrazo, so basically mostly characters from the main story many of which have their own personal introduction to you.

A mission for the new Lowrider series with Lamar

 The missions generally have an ongoing story to them unique to each mission giver and I’d love to be able to do them all in a row but it’s require a lot of time gathering friends or trying to do it with people online though I did manage to do at least some. When not playing with friends I spent most of my time joining jobs that other players had set up and advertised via my job list on my phone , this is a great feature as you can set up a job and invite everyone in the session to join, from the main job menu you could purchase ammo for your weapons and also purchase more body armor. You also had Versus missions which were basically PvP and pits teams of players against each other, these were similar to the Adversary modes added later in the Heists update which has different scenarios, two of which Come Out to Play and Siege Mentality I had a go of.

I play a game of team deathmatch and do ok

Throughout GTA Online’s run since its inception on PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013 it’s had quite a bit of downloadable content which introduced various new content into the game such as, weapons, vehicles, clothes, tattoos and with some such as the High Life Update introducing new jobs and contact missions. So when I finally got into GTA online in 2015 there was already quite a bit there including one of the biggest updates which was the Heists Update which as you’d guess introduced Heists and Adversary modes into the game, something that I actually didn’t realise wasn’t in the online mode from the start. There are actually only 5 heists, but each include a number of missions as part of them so they do take quite a bit of time, especially the later ones. I have done three of them in my time playing and they were all with friends, which is the best way to do it really, as heists require a lot of communication and doing this with people over the internet who you often don’t have voice communication which really doesn’t work. These heists bring out the best experiences in GTA as they are a huge amount of fun when you were with friends or just people who were organised and knew what they were doing. Heists are introduced by Lester Crest who sets you up with The Fleeca Job heist which is basically just robbing a small bank similar to the intro mission for GTA though it only needs two people, after viewing the intro you choose your role of who is going to do what for each . In this heist I was the driver and designated to keeping the hostages in line, in the end we pulled of the job and it felt awesome.
 

Preparing in the lobby for a heist setup, I was a lookout. You can usual see more people in the picture though we were in different setup groups.

 The other two heists I’ve done were much bigger and involved more setup missions, but were ultimately more rewarding and gave me immense satisfaction to actually finish after playing online and failing most of the time with other online players. Of the Heists I’ve done the Humane Raid which led to the The Humane Labs Raid was quite fun as I was in the ground team and had to skydive and parachute into the Humane labs building and “raid the lab” then get out while the air team held off the reinforcements though probably the most memorable part of that whole heist was the Humane Raid - EMP setup which had us sneak onto an aircraft carrier and steal a Hydra jump jet so one of us got in the Hydra and the rest of us got into P-996 Lazer fighters and then we had to defend ourselves from the other fighter jets and man, when Kenny Loggins ‘Danger Zone’ came on while that was happening I didn’t think the game could get any better, it was one of those golden gaming moments and I just wish I knew what I was doing as it took me ages to get to grips with the controls. The other heist, the Prison Break I had a very specific role as the pilot, I just basically had to go to the airport and grab the plane then fly to Sandy Shores airfield and await the ground team as they break the prisoner out, I also had to avoid enemy jets that came to shoot me down but that was done easily by flying behind them though after reading the wiki I noticed all I had to do was not leave Los Santos and the fighter jets wouldn’t come, derp oh well. The mission was pretty hectic as I had to land and take off several times in order to get enough of a window to pick up the ground team while the demolitionist held off the cops in their helicopter. We ended up making it but it was pretty tight, both of these heists were done at the Bluewire LAN party which is the only way to do it I reckon though you do need internet which is a bummer, perhaps with friends on skype would be best.

Stealing the Jumpjet and other with the EMP in one of the setups for the Humane Labs Raid Heist. Fly into the Danger Zoooooooone!

Missions and Heists in particular had a difficulty rating which the session host could change. The difficulty of the job was obviously the biggest game changer of how many attempts at the mission you’d have you’d have as when doing a missions you’d have a set amount of “lives” shared by everyone in the group and when they ran out and someone died then you’d need to start the mission again. on easy you had two lives but got no extra RP or cash for the mission, on normal you get 1 life and a 25% bonus and on Hard it’s a 50% bonus but no lives so if someone dies it means a restart from the last checkpoint, I swear one mission I did we ended up doing it about 10 times before giving up. It really depends on the difficulty and how good you and your teammates are but to be honest I think I’d think I’d rather have unlimited lives to be able to finish the damn mission, sorta like playing Guitar Hero on easy just to listen to the song. There are still ways you can fail the mission apart from being killed, destroying a vehicle or killing an npc that was vital to a mission etc but 8/10 mission restarts were because someone had died. I swear on the hardest difficulty the enemies have much more health and take a large amount of bullets to go down, I can’t remember how many times I was shooting an enemy NPC from afar and hit them in the shoulder etc then they fall down get back up and I’d go for their head again then miss then have to wait for them to fall down and get back up yet again. I mentioned this in my story mode review as well as I swear that blue flash telling you they are dead is a godsend as how many times have you shot an npc then wasn’t sure if he was really dead?

I like this shot of me waiting on the roof above a deal which is going down, ready to ambush

Throughout most of the start of when I was playing I had basically only the weakest type of body armor and a pistol to my name but as I gathered up my money and more levels I found (through the helpful messages you receive) I unlocked more items and I purchased more as I went on, lots of clothes were already available though most were quite expensive so I didn’t really bother I just went with some normal streetwear though I do need to think about buying some gear that’s more suited to dangerous combat in the future. With the weapons as I said before I started off with only a pistol and not even able to purchase the upgrades for it, but now I am up to level 25 and now have access to the SMG, Pump Action Shotgun and Assault Rifle making me a bit more of a force though sometimes the pistol is all you need if you can get headshots well enough. I also got myself some upgraded body Armor which helps a lot though it seems you have to purchase it for each mission which is weird maybe it wears over time. I must also mention that there was quite a bit of DLC weapons available as well but they could all be purchased at once, I wanted to level up before I got access to stuff like that so I just bought the regular weapons which were unlocked over time, I did indulge myself to the Vintage Pistol and a Hatchet though. Having more weapons available does help in missions but if you need something specific it is usually always given to you.\

Err that wasn't me, really!

 I also thought that I’d need somewhere to park my car, so by this time I had made up enough cash to purchase a safehouse through that Dynasty 8 site. I had the idea that my character like me was middle-class so I got a pretty good mid-range house at 4 Hangman Ave in the Vinewood Hills for $175,000 which was a pretty good price, a goddamn bargain by today’s standards. Even though the actual advert says it was astronomically overpriced and it was the most expensive mid-range house, it was an actual house not an apartment and was in a prime location close to one of the high-end apartment buildings where a lot of people lived. My character also preferred classic vehicles inc muscle cars like the Sabre Turbo, street racers like the Ruiner and motorcycles like the Daemon. I also got the Futo as it’s a crazy drifty little compact and also one of my favourite cars from GTA4, I even painted it in the same kind of colour that I always saw it in in that game, and I got the latest version of that classic car the Injection for some off-road madness. So looking at the property on the GTA wiki it lists as having space for 6 cars and two bikes so woo I got two more car and one more bike option available. All my cars I’ve come across by accident and have stolen them myself, I might try and find a Hexer and Sandking XL for my next two.

My "modest" house

My (not yet full) garage of old school classic

I saw huge potential in GTA online, and it’s true I loved creating my own character and buying clothes and weapons and cars and having a house and doing races and missions and heists and riding around with other players. But there was a major issue that encompassed everything about playing with other people, it’s just there was so much waiting and failing, I sometimes had to play for hours before I felt I had achieved anything. There was a few reasons for this the first was that unlike story mode where you usually just loading the game at the start then that was it, the game did a lot more connecting and loading in between, for example when joining a job from a random person you had to first connect then wait for them to get enough people to join and often this took awhile and then if you did eventually get to the job continued failure (i.e. someone dying, especially on hard mode) could break the group and then you didn’t really end up finishing it. It wasn’t all bad of course you still got money and RP even for a half-finished mission or heist but it just had no closure, I’d feel like I had done nothing compared to story mode where if I played for the same two hours I could get a crapload done.

"Please don't let me die, please don't let me die, please don't....." etc

 It didn’t help that the autokick for being idle is pretty damn short and often during playing sessions my game had trouble connecting and I was booted out to story mode though it seems to be better during the last few sessions. Of course you could argue that If I played with friends where we were all communicating with each other the majority of issues wouldn’t happen, though you still have to be good enough to finish the damn thing, also organising friends all the time is quite time consuming these days. I seem to not play that many games with friends these days as you have so little time to play and it’s just not convenient, to be honest I only really get going with friendly multiplayer at LANs as it’s super easy and organised and fun enough, at home it’s an issue of time and whether people want to play the same games.

This is the view you get when GTA is connecting to another session or job, it's like your hanging above the city, pretty, but I I've been waitin here for far too long most of the time.

I won’t deny it, GTA5 online is great fun and I love being able to make my own character in the GTA world, and have my own house and buy my own guns and cars and clothes though to be perfectly honest in a perfect world you could do all the missions and stories on your own and had the option to do it with friends, I would be more than happy to have npc’s with me on the team as long as they couldn’t die or it didn’t matter if they did as there is a huge amount of cutscenes and dialogue and mission content that that is very similar to story mode missions and you don’t have to put up with playing an annoying character. I’ll admit doing the heists with NPC’s would be a bit weird and would require a lot scripting so I guess that wouldn’t be possible it’s just that I want to see more and do more without being hampered by the availability of other players. That said though the PVP and race events/jobs in the game are great as they don’t require you to be staying alive or needing to restart all the time and are great once they get going apart from all of those freakin annoying custom race maps and obstacle courses that I see everyone playing now, so I guess I can always go back to the likes of GTA4 style multiplayer modes if ever I’m feeling frustrated.

Races with this many people were pretty damn epic

 So I concede my qualms with the game are few and could possibly be fixed and my suggestions relatively unrealistic in the long run, I’ve still got a long way to go with the game and I’m sure it has a long way to go in itself but rest assured I will still be playing it well into the future, whether online with strangers, friends, or at LANs and I recommend anyone who had GTA5 to give it a go, you might just have a ton of fun.

9/10

Things I liked:

Creating my own GTA character

Purchasing and owning things such as clothes, houses cars and weapons

Collaborating with others players (when it worked)

Fun and exciting PvP and race modes

Things I didn’t like:

Unforgiving idle disconnecting

Connection dropouts booting you to Story mode

Lots of waiting in general for loading/connected and other players to join

No Solo mode option for most modes of play

JD

Till now I always got by on my own.