Gun, Scalping and the Wild West…

So, I finishedGun today. It took me about five hours and I got through it in four or five sittings, with me dying a total of six times. It wasn’t at all challenging in other words. 

Gun - better than I thought, but still not great.

That said, the game was more enjoyable than I originally said. It’s just that the tutorial section for the game goes on way too long. It isn’t until about an hour in that you actually get to do some free-roaming and horse-riding. Then the game picks up dramatically. The controls were still clunky, but managable and I grew to really like the gunplay in the game, despite the fact that it was so easy to engage bullet time and kill swathes of enemies with headshots. 

As time went on though, more faults emerged to replace these ones. The game is pretty repetitive mainly and the quest themselves are very easy – it’s always a case of just shooting someone once, grabbing them and knocking them out. That or running errands. 

The world itself is pretty small too, with only two towns to go to and nothing much to do in either of them. There’s three types of quest, plus poker, but you can only do so many of them before you have to advance the story and unlock another set. That ends up feeling really contrived.

Scalping bothered me also in that there was no need for it and, while I saw comments from developers saying it was supposed to be an easter egg, I highly doubt that. You buy the knife in the first shop you go to and are prompted to do it on every wounded enemies, so it isn’t exactly hidden. The publishers themselves threw up what I expect is a very false controversy about scalping being featured in the game when it was originally released. Seems to me that they should have either let you do something with it, or cut it out altogether – but instead they left it in needlessly to try and give the game an edgy, gory feel when you look at the feature list. 

The story was pretty good and there were a few moments I got shocked or drawn in, so that was cool – but it was held back a bit by the graphics. Ah well. It isn’t a bad game and was probably worth £10, but no more than that.

Hannah and I went out looking for places to live yesterday. We liked Walton-on-Thames. 

Out, Joe

Ode to the Forgotten Genre…

Hannah and I went shopping the other day and I, on a whim and as a result of listening to the soundtrack to Outlaws too much lately, decided I would buy myself a Western game. There’s been a few over the years that I’ve been meaning to pick up with no idea of their quality – I settled on Dead Man’s Hand. 

Unfortunately, nowhere had it in stock. So, I picked up a copy of GUN for the PC on Steam today for £10. 

And let me tell you, yes it’s been a while since the release and I am only just through the training mission, but I can’t see how PC Gamer ever gave it 92%. Sure, the story seems interesting enough – but the graphics are sodding awful, even for when it was released. The controls are woeful too. Mouse sensitivity, even with everything set to minimum, is all over the place and the consolified targetting system makes more of a hindrance of itself than you’d think possible. Bullet collisions are way-off and everything about the game feels muted and diappointing, while at the same time demanding a huge level of precision. The HUD takes up half the screen and the voice-work is as convincing as my claim to the throne of Bulgaria. 

And PC Gamer said it was a “Must Play”. Sigh. I’ll push on with it for a bit to give it the benefit of the doubt, but I’m already disappointed. 

It’s a shame really – the Western genre is so ripe and so massively under-used, but it seems that everyone who tries to explore it only does the same stuff over and over. It’s like how every sci-fi game has a laser gun – each Western has to have very limited selection of weapons and some sort of quick-draw power-up. 

Someone suggest a good old game for me that I might enjoy and haven’t played, please.

Joe, out.

Wil Harris makes good soup…

Coincidence?

This struck me as funny, as I have no idea if those two have even met, ever. For this and a hundred other co-incidences from my life, go somewhere else.

Out, Joe.

System Shock 2 vs. Resident Evil 4…

This is why I shouldn’t write columns when I’m not in the office. At the weekend, at home, I always have what I think are good ideas for columns. Usually when I’m washing up. Some of my best ideas come to me when I’m washing up and it was there that I came up with the structure for the This Isn’t About Monkey Island, Honest, which is a piece of work I’m very proud of.

My latest effort at a column however wasn’t as good. I had an idea while I was washing up that maybe I was ruining all my favourite games for myself by replaying them so often. I was about to start replaying Baldur’s Gate II, you see and the thought occured to me that not only was I ruining it by replaying it but by force of habit I wasn’t even getting distinct experiences out of it anymore. I was just playing it on auto-pilot and trusting my Quest-sense to tell me how to get the best rewards and not my own sense of morals to give me an interesting experience. 

That would be a good idea for a column, I thought. I promptly sat down and wrote a rant about it, exploring along the way the idea that PC and console gamers differ in this attitude. I went off on a tangent (I do that when I’ve been drinking) and started talking about how PC gamers were in a difficult position because they could do this where console gamers couldn’t because of the closed nature of a console. I started specifically comparing System Shock 2 to Resident Evil 4 on the PC and GameCube respectively. The whole point of the column shifted into a backwards compatability PC-is-better rant. 

Then I remembered that all the current gen consoles have some level of backwards compatability in them and promptly lost my train of thought, breaking the article in the process. I’ll probably try and pick the idea up again next weekend, but this should serve as a reminder to me not to drink and draft. 

Out, Joe.

Full Throttle movie…

No, Tim Schafer isn’t making one and Lucasarts had nothing to do with it but there is a movie. Somebody recorded themselves playing the game, then re-edited it to make a movie based on the game. It’s a neat idea and it works pretty well, clocking in at 65MB and 1 hour of video. Get it here and then go see Brendon Chung’s new website. Nice.

That’s all I have for now. 

Joe, out.