My Usual Spiel: Saints Row the Third , Gang-bangin' rocket shootin' good taste abusin' fun

Release Date: November 15, 2011

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 3^rd 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.

everyday i'm parachutin'

My Usual Spiel: We Love Katamari & Katamari Forever - Keep on rollin'‏

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.

naaa na na na na na na naaa.....

My usual Spiel: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, give it a chance son, you won't regret it‏

 

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.

You are not your dragon kill count

My Usual Spiel: Test Drive Unlimited 2, return of the obscene wealth simulator‏

Also Known As: TestDrive Unlimited 2, TDU2: Test Drive Unlimited
Also on: PS3, X360
Genre: Racing
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Eden Games

Hello again everyone it’s time for another spiel and this time it’s the next installment of my favorite driving game series ever. The title comment for this review comes from the CVG.com review I read of the first Test Drive Unlimited (TDU) it was immensely funny reading it at first as it was quite true, it was the essence of what the first Test Drive was, pretty much all about cars (and bikes) and I ask myself, has much changed? I guess not, after all Test Drive unlimited is a racing game, and a racing game has cars but this time other features have been made more accessible, but just barely.

I will start with a brief review of the first Test Drive Unlimited which I had the pleasure of playing through multiple times, I first came to read about the game when I was looking to entertain myself with a new driving game. The last one I had played was Need for Speed Carbon which was the second last of the underground car modifying subseries of EA’s Need for Speed (NFS) line of products being released, the last being Undercover which quite frankly I didn’t even notice. So when Shift rolled its way out into the third generation of consoles with its real-life tracks and legal races I decided I’d need to get a (semi) realistic racer that I could get into, I’d been a fan of NFS Hot Pursuit 2 which was an earlier incantation of semi-street racing on large tracks with sports and supercars back in 2002 but I wanted to get away from the NFS series. The other thing I wanted to get into was getting online in a driving game especially in an open-world environment with a bit of multiplayer racing thrown in there as well and Test Drive Unlimited looked the way to go.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2: Beautiful looking for the time and functional

 The first test drive unlimited shined in its graphical quality, giant open world, customization of avatar and selection of vehicles which includes dozens of cars and sports bikes. I had great fun buying cars of different classes and racing them in events all across the island which as well as normal and knockout races included things like taking models to their photo shoot, car delivery and believe it or not, drug delivery. As well as that you could buy clothes and houses to store your growing collection of cars and bikes. It faltered with its online aspect which was possibly the worst multiplayer system in any recent game I have experienced, the flaming hoops you had to jump through in order to get any kind of multiplayer event organized was ridiculous, at the time I was playing there wasn’t much multiplayer races going on, probably because they were so hard to manage that a lot of people didn’t bother with them entirely. Another very annoying problem was that the friend system was appalling. It was so hard to do the simplest things like marking someone as a friend and even harder to work out who was your friend and whether they were online plus the people who were around you seemed totally random all the time, I tried to meet up with a friend who played the game too and we organized to drive to the same place in the game world but we couldn’t see each other. There was next to no multiplayer interface and you could only chat to people nearest to you with no chatbox and no other chatting tools i.e. whispering which I think is the most basic thing you need for any kind of open world multiplayer.

Test Drive Unlimited 1: Cars and bikes

 It was clear there was a fair amount of improvements to be made on the multiplayer front, but as far as the singleplayer aspect went it was well worthwhile. So when I heard that a sequel was in the works a lot of people had quite high expectations of an improved multiplayer system, as did I to a degree, but somehow I knew that it was only going to be mildly better. I bought Test Drive Unlimited 2 (TDU2) for PC namely because I wanted to focus on online playing and to be honest I would rather rely on typing then talking and trying to hear people through your speakers and/or headset, though now I kind of wish I had bought it for console because the chat system in the game is pretty much exactly the same as the first one. There’s only one chat channel when you’re in the open world and it’s only for people relatively close to you, this changes in the multiplayer matches of course and you can talk to your friends, but I really I found myself just wanting to use the Steam overlay (which doesn’t work by the way cause I didn’t buy the game through Steam) to talk to friends or just playing in a window. You are able to join a ‘club’ (kind of like a racing version of a guild) but I’m unsure of whether this has a‘club chat’ option.

I’d hate to use World of Warcraft as an explanation of how things should work, these games are both old and new but still have great ways of communication, WoW is held up by its mouse related interface of course but it’s a testament to the tools we should have to communicate with each other for example things like a search to see who’s online at the moment, the ability to speak to the one person (aka whispering) the ability to invite others to a group and only speak to the people in that group and/or guild and most importantly have a chat channel which everyone can talk in. The lack of these things make the online world a hollow experience, and of course you could argue that WoW has been out for a very long time and is much more popular and that’s true but there’s no reason why they could not learn from this. Minecraft which is in its earlier stages is an example which has been massively enhanced with hundreds of modifications by a very large community allowing all kinds of chat options as well as tools for playing the game. There’s a reason that these two games either have great text-based communication options already or have good ones added by a modding community , it’s because they were both made specifically for computers and are very popular games with very large fan bases. Test Drive Unlimited 2 sadly is and has neither of those things, this is one of the things I have realized then dealt with pretty much from when I started playing the game and what a lot of people (namely these few) were afraid of and that is the PC version of TDU2 is pretty much a direct port from the xbox360 version. This is mainly noticeable in the interface as the coloured buttons are the shapes of the xbox system controller and the menu system doesn’t have enough functionality and the whole thing have this big and clumsy feel to it, especially when trying to use the mouse to move around, the icons on the main map are way too big as well cluttering it up but it’s functional to some degree.

Notice the XBOX360 (and possibly PS3) resemblant coloured buttons?

Though I digress, I’ve never really played a MMO style Racer so I really don’t know what’s good and what’s not and I guess comparing it to a third-person long standing MMO really isn’t fair, also another problem that hinders multiplayer is that there it seems there is quite a lot of people from non-english speaking countries so there’s both lag and the language barrier. I feel I shouldn’t complain as I always see a decent of people playing TD2 when I come online but it’s still so hard to find random multiplayer matches, I could honestly not remember how many times I’ve seen a visual ‘occupied with players’ flashing ring around an event in the world only to find that there are no players playing in it, I just want to scream “just give me a list of every single multiplayer race going on both islands whether it’s ranked or not with some decent filters i.e. race type, players, not empty, not full, ping etc!!!” then I realize it’s kind of a long and complicated statement to scream out. Maybe because the first game’s multiplayer system was so terrible that it’s going to take them awhile to get things up to scratch, hopefully that’s by TDU let’s say‘4’ (that’s a good number) there’s actually a solid PC multiplayer system of course my wishful thinking never really rewarded me much in life.

Multiplayer lobby with people in: I don't get to this stage much but it's fun when I do

 Well now that I’ve got that off my chest, and believe me I do apologise for those 4-5 paragraphs about me complaining about the multiplayer and interface. I will continue now with something I enjoy about test drive, the actual cars and the driving. Believe me I for one aren’t the best sports car driver in games or in real life, I have never driven very fast for an extended period of time, but I have a decent amount of mildly realistic car game experience, while nowhere near the kind of stuff you need to do any good at the likes of Gran Turismo 5 or Forza Motorsport. I play driving games with my old Logitech Rumblepad 2 which is basically a PS2 Dualshock controller for the PC so I use the joysticks to steer and accelerate/brake instead of the bumpers that the PS3 controllers have, but it still works well enough. I’m slightly ashamed to say I play the game on the middle road “sport” setting of the driving assistance. In my defense I did try the higher level (hardcore) but could not handle the more powerful cars as I was pretty much permanently with no grip cause of the huge amount of torque and besides there’s only 3 levels anyway (the other being “full assistance”). So that’s that I may not be great a virtual driver but Test drive makes it fun no matter what skill you are and soon you’ll be cornering and hitting those gear shifts like a pro, and yes even with automatic transmission you still can’t just floor the accelerator, unless you want to do a burnout that is.

At the next intersection, turn left

And now for the cars, the cars are obviously a big part of Test Drive as before they are divided into classes of type and engine power (roughly) the car types are Asphalt (A), Off-road (B) and Classic (C) each type having a range of tiers A1 to A7 etc and annoying to some people you have to do pass a couple of trials to acquire the license to drive every single one of them, but I don’t mind, the tests are pretty helpful. Type C and B only have 2 classes though and this makes the A class seem kind of an overhaul as it has much more cars than the others and the A7 and A6 tiers only have 3 and 4 cars respectively which doesn’t exactly give you much choice seeing as you have to get at least one . This is what gets you buying a lot of cars and a lot of houses to store them in (as you do) and the varying kinds of vehicles make it more interesting it’s great fun going from screeching around in a modern sports car to cruising in a 1950’s Cadillac, even more so is the new off-road tracks and cars that just about makes the game worth playing by themselves, there’s something very non-realistic (and environmentally baneful) about roaring down a woodland path at 200kms an hour in a huge SUV but oh man is it fun. Another big point about test drive is the various camera views you can use both while driving and in the replay mode, and what’s more you can use your controller’s D-pad (or appropriate keys of whatever you are using) to look around the car in outside view or with your head in the interior view. TDU has always had very good interior detail, and it’s fun to watch your character steering and changing gears or just not looking at where you’re going for fun’s sake.

The garage/showroom in one of my houses, yes plural

The environment in test drive has improved a bit I would say, the new starting island Ibiza has very picturesque scenery with rolling fields, woodland forests and western style rocky mountain ranges with a bit of change in the environment compared to TDU1 which apart from the inner cities did not differ that much. Unfortunately though the graphics are reasonably good looking they do somewhat pale in comparison to the like of Forza and GT5, the cars and environment does look good, but not as good as they could so to speak though I like to think that their good in their own special way. There also has been the exciting addition of roundabouts which are a nice touch of realism but technically no-one apart from the traffic goes round them the right way and their a ripe spot for hooning players (just like in real life). As well as the new island with its new scenery and roundabouts you get pretty much the old game for free as the whole island of Oahu makes a return, the only difference being that there is now off-road tracks and you get there via a different airport and starting location, the layout and scenery in Hawaii are pretty much the same as before just given a bit of a touch-up but it’s good to have it there again, I’m especially fond of the way the edges of the road are very wide and don’t count towards ‘running off the road’ penalty which they have removed in Ibiza. There is also a new reason to do some exploring, various car wrecks of certain cars are scattered around the whole island and if you happen to drive near them your “car wreck radar”will start bleeping depending on how close you are (just like in Aliens) finding 10 of the same car wreck awards you with a new free car to add to your collection, tis a nice little fun activity to do that beaks up your usual everyday activity of driving really fast expensive cars with no regard for your own or others safety (well most of the time).

 Tres magnifique

 Unlike the previous game there is now a story mode where you start with that old cliche movie ‘dream sequence’ “where you’re a huge star then you wake up to reality and you’re really just a ordinary bloke with a shitty job” in this case it’s a valet driver and you end up joining this big racing championship for rich people which is the basis of the singleplayer mode. The different events coincide with the car and class types so there’s a C4 event and A6 event etc and for each type of car and about 5-6 events inside that inc normal race, time trial, eliminator (last man standing), speed limit which is basically:“keep above this speed without crashing for about 2 minutes” and checkpoint where you have to basically break the law by going through the speed cameras as fast as possible (hey, we’re rich and drive hugely expensive cars who gives a stuff?). Additionally to this there is a Championship every so often where you drive cars from various classes and types and all this is accompanied by various cutscenes of you and all the drivers and your‘rival’ for this particular event. In my opinion this storyline and cutscenes are basically fun to watch for all the wrong reasons. I usually go easy on cutscenes in games, unless they happen to cheesily replace them with a picture and text explanation of what’s happening (I’m looking at you Tenchu 3) but the cutscenes are made laughable at best due to the terrible and cheesy voice acting and the outdated and animatronic look of the human models, I enjoy a good storyline to break up the usual race-o-rama etc but frankly most people would not have the required attention span. Also there is all your usual random events such as giving attractive ladies a lift and some new ones including seeing how fast and crazy you can drive and tailing someone’s girlfriend to eventually find they are cheating on them, this always seems to be the same guy who gets you to do this, and judging by the amount of times this type of challenge appears he kind of has a serious woman problem.

This is about as animated as the character models get.

 One of my favorite features of the first Test Drive was the huge amount of wealth you seemed to accumulate while doing nothing but racing cars (and bikes) and spending it on nothing but cars, bikes, clothes and houses of which were of no real use other than to store your increasingly large car collection. This is what makes Test Drive different from other racing games, in TDU2 you aspire to be some sort of cashed up celebrity racer with pretty much no regard for the safety of others or Hawaiian residents for that matter, with your incredulous wealth you can buy cars and upgrades, houses, clothes and even things like haircuts and cosmetic surgery (yep, it’s truly celebrity). One thing I have noticed however, is that through the Test Drive games the clothes have been somewhat ridiculous looking, and in TDU2 this is no exception for example, would you wear a blazer with a hoodie underneath? would you also wear a blazer with no shirt? would you wear bright shiny red tracksuit pants with the same colour high top shoes? Most (normal) people would not, so I suppose that the idea is to dress outlandishly like the crazy celeb you are supposed to be. Your house (or houses) is now slightly more interactive as you can now walk around inside them and access various things such as the TV or your laptop which give you access to various info including stats and game announcements, you can also now modify the interior of your house with different floor and walls, couches, dining tables and chairs which is a nice touch, not that you can actually sit in them (or the pool for that matter), but at least you can walk around and outside not to mention your cavernous garage where you can ogle your cars from every angle, even the interior. The actual customization of the cars is minimal, as this is no Need for Speed Underground, it is limited to tuner stores which have a pretty over-simplified way of upgrading your car for money and also a “sticker shop” where you can apply new car paint in various styles and/or decorate your car with a very limited graphics system.

Mah house, I like the 'island' feel

 There has been one DLC (Downloadable Content Pack) so far for the game, this was the Exploration Pack which gave access to both new challenges and new “car wrecks” to find to acquire new cars as well as a few other much needed tweaks. To be honest though what I am waiting for is bikes, I very much enjoyed the motorcycles in the first test drive and now (halfway through my second attempt at the game) I find that they are going to be released in the next DLC packthat has been announced for release around February 2012. Though this isn’t all flowers and roses, there appears to only be 3 bikes two Ducati’s and one Harley Davidson, and there will only be new multiplayer not singleplayer challenges added for bikes. So whoop dee doo 3 bikes, though at least we actually do get a Harley style one I suppose, it seems that bikes were a thing that Eden Gamesnever meant to put in and are just giving bike fans (like me) something to make us shut up. So in retrospect I really shouldn’t complain, I can at least ride bikes soon, but due to all the restrictions on the singleplayer races (and the removal of the no class requirement races) it doesn’t look like I’ll be using the bikes in the singleplayer races at all. Also I sincerely hope the new cars that come with the pack will fill up the A classes with not many cars too choose from, though I doubt it as they look to be mostly superfast A1/A2 style machines and I also hope that the new clothing stores have less freakin silly looking clothes.

Hoodie and blazer? I blame the Rappers

Or hey just ditch underclothes altogether

Epic shoes, I just noticed she's wearing legwarmers with high heels

 To be perfectly honest I would not recommend this game to a hardcore driving simulator enthusiast, nor would I recommend it to an arcade style racing enthusiast, Test Drive Unlimited 2 is for those people in between who like the other things you do (or could do) in car games without all the motorsport and car technicality or mindless pedal-to-the-metal-slamming-into-the-wall-in-order-to-turn gameplay. TDU2 is for the people who want a pleasantly realistic racer who are into cars but not toointo cars if you know what I mean, it’s a good game if you’re able to look past the flaws, The graphics do look a bit dated for this day and age and I’m not even going to mention the character models, I’m still not a fan of the way multiplayer is set up, but as I said before this is the first time I have tried a so called “Driving MMO” but I maintain the fact of the direct port from console does not help. The driving experience seems to vary, sometimes the driving feels like a chore, especially with the knockout races, other times I’m so entranced I’m paying more attention to the scenery than I am driving other times I’m having so much fun driving I’m switching camera angles like crazy as if I‘m making a movie while I’m driving.

The new island of Ibiza, the blue lines are the highways that i've traversed, zoom in further and you can see more roads

 I enjoy Test Drive Unlimited 2, it lets me race classic and new cars in a great environment. If you want a semi-realistic driving game set in two and want to be a millionaire celebrity racing superstar and also be able to meet and race with other players, then this is the game for you.

JD

Caution: Multi-millionaire insensible tourists in ridiculously powerful cars ahead.