Pokémon Bank, or Pokébank came out last month after long delays and Pokémon masters the world over rejoiced except for Japan who had the damn thing since Christmas. It was a great day and there was peace everywhere.
For those not in the know, Pokébank allows players to transfer Pokémon from earlier games, namely Pokémon Black and White and Pokémon Black 2 and White 2 to the newest games in the series, Pokémon X and Y. Because X and Y do not have the full 718 species of Pokémon available for capture, those of us who still wish to catch ’em all need Pokébank to send over their Pokémon from earlier games.
It’s also a way for those of us who have Pokémon that are close to us to use said Pokémon in the newer games. It is a shame that the application was not available at the launch of Pokémon X and Y, but I can understand why that would be a bad move, but more on that later. With Pokémon Bank finally released, players now have access to the full Pokémon experience.
So, the question is, why wasn’t Pokémon Bank released at the same time as X and Y?
The first reason is servers. When Pokébank was initially released on December 27th, 2013, the number of people who attempted to download and log on was impressive. So impressive, in fact, that the servers could not handle it. This type of thing seems to be happening more and more recently. We saw it with GTA V and Elder Scrolls Online. Game developers seem to chronically underestimate the demand for servers. It’s a damn shame because even though a game may be released on a Tuesday, the online will not be playable until the following Monday because the demand for online play is so much that the servers give up the ghost. Indeed, when Pokébank finally came back online, the servers were fine, but it took them almost a month to get the damn thing sorted.
The second reason is simpler: challenge. If Pokébank had been released on day one, people could just transfer over their superpowered ‘mons from earlier games and decimate the competition both online and in-game. Even if the transfer system had not been released until you completed the full game, you would have people rushing through and not appreciating the game just to get their old ‘mons back. Also, you would have speed gamers who get there first and create some sort of embargo on trading and battling. Which brings me to….
The third point: trading. When X and Y was just released, people quickly realised that other Pokémon now had value. Because there were a finite number of people playing the game at any one time, there were a finite number of resources. People can only get a legendary Pokémon once per game, thus they became valuable commodities. So valuable, in fact, that one lucky player was able to amass over thirty legendary Mewtwos by trading the then-super-rare Cyndaquil or Treekos over the GTS (Global Trading System). After the release of Pokébank, Cyndaquils and Treekos are no longer that valuable.
Pokébank does, however, allow me to be reunited with my old Pokémon with whom I have a very personal connection. It is also a place for me to store, safely, all my big legendary Pokémon, valuable shiny Pokémon and specially-bred ‘mons.
It is also the place where I will store a special Togepi that I bred the day my neice was born, and named it after her. If Pokémon is still about when she gets older, I will gladly give it to her. Aww factor there.
Let me rap with you for a minute about Pokémon. A Pokérap, if you will.
Back in 1998/1999, my friend Blain, now a father to a wonderful child and husband to a wonderful woman, was but a preteen. As preteens do, he was pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable. Most preteens do this by staying out late, drinking, smoking, doing drugs, being antisocial or any combination of things to create tension and show that they were (slowly and very laboriously) becoming adults. I know that I (attempted) to do that and then stopped pretty quickly when I found out that smoking sucked and that if your dad found out, you got in deep trouble.
You fools. Your dad is going to go mental. Source.
Blain was different in that his rebellious boundary-pushing had less to do with impressing his friends and more to do with impressing himself. Blain was a marvel with computers. He had an analytical mind and was what an 80’s sci-fi movie would call a “whizz-kid”. Later, Blain would teach me how to install graphics cards, change components and – eventually – build my own computer. At this time, in 1998/1999, Blain was more focussed on piracy.
Back then, internet piracy was in its infancy. Unlike now, where thousands of websites close and open every day, creating a revolving door of portals to anything you can dream of – books, TV shows, programs, music – back then, with our slow internet connections and our poor infrastructure, piracy on the internet was all about sending lots of tiny packets of data that would entertain you for (hopefully) as long as it took you to download the damn thing. This was before Napster and before Torrents. The form of piracy that Blain had set his eyes on was called Emulation.
For those who do not know, an Emulator is a program that is designed to run games from specific consoles. Emulators run games on tiny files called ROMs. Emulators are, as far as I am aware, legal, as long as you own the original console and the games, much like how you can rip a CD and store the music on your PC. Emulators are a backup. I am ashamed to say that the first Emulator I used was not a backup.
In school, one day, Blain handed me a floppy disk. On it, were scrawed the words Poké Blue. I didn’t know what the hell this was, but a blue movie was a porn movie and maybe Blain was giving me his secret stash of images. When I got home I found out, not disappointedly, that Poké Blue was an Emulator and ROM set for the as-yet-unreleased Pokémon Blue. It is worth stating that I played the Emulator for only a short while as my sister’s friend was given both Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue for her birthday and liked neither so gave them to my sister, who gave Pokémon Red to me. However, this story is not about sisters or friends or Emulators. It’s about Pokémon.
From that first moment where I saw a Gengar pitted against a Nidorino (or Jigglypuff), I was hooked. I knew a small amount about Pokémon, but that was enough to blow my mind. An RPG where you train a team of tiny monsters to do your bidding? They gain moves as they level up? You can trade and battle your friends? As they level up, they turn into different monsters? There are 150 of them? Awesome!
Bearing in mind at the time that RPGs were still a tiny game genre. Final Fantasy VII had been released in 1997 and was accompanied by big posters and advertisements on the TV, almost film-quality. The only game I’d played before with RPG elements (other than FFVII) was Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. All this was very new to me. Pokémon and Final Fantasy (especially the release of Final Fantasy VIII) helped cement this genre in my mind as one of my favourites and with the release of Deus Ex in 2000, I suddenly had a genre that had melted and mixed with my other favourite genres.
You might not have wanted this, Adam, but I did. Source.
It’s worth noting that at the time, I couldn’t name 150 different enemies across all the games I had played. Super Mario Bros had about sixteen different enemies and a number of them were idential other than a different colour or the addition of wings. Final Fantasy VII had about three hundred different enemies, again, many of them reskins or identical to other enemies other than a minor alteration. But FFVII was on the PlayStation and PC. Pokémon was in my hands.
This, coupled with the Pokémon anime meant that Pokémon became a big part of my life and it still is. Pokémon, for me, is a constant. I have left it on a number of occasions and always return to it. People complain that all Pokémon games are the same and there are similarities between each title, but it is these similarities that comfort me. Other people have soap operas or a book series or a toy from their childhood. To me, Pokémon is just another toy from my childhood, it’s just that this toy is a six foot dinosaur with a flower on his back named Bob.
Spec Ops: The Line came out in the Summer of 2012 and was met with positive reviews. The game itself did not instantly appeal to me because it just looked like every other wartime shoot-em-up that comes out once every week, a fact that I later found out was purposely done. In fact, I didn’t give the boxart a second look until a friend of mine saw it in a games shop, pointed at it and said, “That is a fucking good game.” My friend in question has similar tastes to me and would not recommend a game unless he was sure that I would like it. He and I share the ethos that if a game has good gameplay, then it can be forgiven for having poor plot and vice versa.
It wasn’t until almost a year later that I picked up a copy of Spec Ops: The Line when it was going on sale for £8 in a local game shop. I bought it instantly and it lay on my gaming shelf for a number of weeks before I finally popped it in, thinking that I had a few hours to kill.
The game took over my life and for about six hours, all I did was sit and be enthralled by the plot, the characters and the settings whilst also being disgusted at myself and the game for making me feel this way.
So what is it about video games that makes us feel this? How are video games different from other forms of media and how are they just as important as books in helping us understand the human condition?
WARNING: SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW. DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU HAVE PLAYED THE GAME OR DON’T MIND HAVING THE ENDING RUINED.
The plot of Spec Ops: The Line is one of its strongest features.
Spec Ops: The Line is set in the opulent city of Dubai. Six months after a series of sandstorms have buried the city, Captain Martin Walker along with his team, Lieutenant Alphonse Adams and Staff Sergeant John Lugo, have been sent into Dubai to check up on the status of the 33rd Infantry Battalion of the US Army, known as the Damned 33rd, who were returning from Afghanistan when the sandstorms hit. Their mission is to find the Damned 33rd’s commander, Colonel John Konrad, and call for extraction.
It all does not go according to plan, however, as it is quickly ascertained that the Damned 33rd have been running Dubai under a constant state of martial law. Looters have been murdered and hung up for all to see, bodies have been left to rot and civilians have been killed all in the name of maintaining order. In retaliation to this, the Damned 33rd split in two, with one side maintaining the twisted order and the other side fighting against it, with the refugees of destroyed Dubai stuck in the middle. In addition to this, the CIA have appeared and started rounding up refugees to attack both sides of the Damned 33rd. In the middle of all this, Walker’s Delta Force group appear and slowly make their way through Dubai, attempting to complete their mission.
About halfway through the city, Delta Force come up against a small army of Damned 33rds and release a number of white phosphorus artillery rounds onto them. It is only afterwards that Walker realises that most of the people he killed were civilians that the 33rd was attempting to protect. Enraged with himself and the 33rd, he drags Delta Force across Dubai to find and confront Konrad. He sees the disgusting attempts at peacekeeping (hanging looters up for all to see) and the mass graves that the Damned 33rd has left behind. After losing a teammate and suffering from hallucinations, he finally makes his way to the largest tower in Dubai, where Konrad is holed up in the penthouse. There, he confronts his old friend for the last time.
The twist and its ramifications
The big reveal of the game.
After Captain Walker unwittingly releases the white phosphorus onto innocent civilians, two big things happen: he starts to see and hear things that aren’t there. Some of these hallucinations are incredibly obvious (seeing the world turn to flames and suddenly become extinguished; an enemy with the face and voice of a dead teammate; mannequins moving and becoming insurgents etc.) and some are a bit more insidious. It is these insidious and sinister hallucinations that are the best, because they lend perfectly to the game’s second half: the breakdown of the mind.After unleashing white phosphorus onto innocent civilians, it is clear that Walker is losing his grip on reality, but we, the viewers, are unaware as to what is real and what is fake. The game is excellent at scripting these situations and changing the camera to hide points that would point out that these are hallucinations. The game forces us to think that only the big hallucinations are fake – the flaming world, the dead coming alive, the moving mannequins – and we assume that everything else is real. At the end of the game, it reveals that Konrad has been dead for quite some time and his voice that Walker hears through a walkie-talkie is all in his head. Indeed, the walkie-talkie is actually broken.This “Konrad” speaks only to Walker and the enemies react in ways that are contrary to how Konrad speaks. In addition to this, most of the events that Konrad shows to Walker (including a famous morality choice where Walker must choose between a refugee that stole water and a soldier that went to apprehend him and killed an entire family) do not exist either. Again, they are presented in such a fashion where Walker’s teammates express disgust at Walker’s actions as opposed to Konrad’s (in the above example, both men were actually hanging corpses. To his teammates, Walker just fired upon a dead body.)Because the hallucinations begin after the white phosphorus attack, we do not know what is real and what is not. The entire game is a series of macho video-game situations where a small group fights off an increasing number of enemies, murdering people needlessly left, right and centre. How are we to know what actually happens and what is a figment of Walker’s imagination?
The ending reveals a number of times within the game where Walker’s hallucinations and reality clash, but they are by no means exhaustive. At the end of the game, Walker meets Konrad face to face in a Fight Club-style reveal. Walker must choose between shooting this fake Konrad or letting fake Konrad shoot him. If the player kills themselves, then the game simply ends with a repeat of Konrad’s original distress beacon call of, “This is Colonel John Konrad, United States Army. Attempted evacuation of Dubai ended in complete failure. Death toll: too many,” as the camera pans over the burnt and ruined Dubai.
If the player chooses to kill Konrad, we see Walker continuing to hallucinate as the scene changes to an epilogue where he is wearing Konrad’s uniform (and sporting a generous beard) as the some US Army Humvees appear to extract him. Again, the player has a choice: drop his weapon and join the rescue effort, or fire upon them. If the player is killed, then we see probably the nicest ending to the game, one where Walker is finally at peace, having found the death and punishment that he has been striving for throughout the game. If he surrenders, he goes off with the Army a broken man and if he kills the rescue effort, he simply sends a message back to the patrol and returns to his seat, probably destined to repeat it over and over until he is finally killed.
The thing is this: we have no idea whether these endings actually happen or not. The game is great at misdirection and it lies to us continuously. What we think is real is revealed to be false and we have no idea who is sane and who is not. Maybe Walker is fine and the rest of his team are hallucinating when he fires upon dead bodies. If we extrapolate, we then have no idea if his teammates even exist.
At the start of the game, we are treated to a short scene where the team are barrelling through Dubai in a helicopter. Walker shoots other choppers out of the air with a minigun and the sequence ends before revealing itself to be a flashforward as we see the team first arriving at Dubai. Later in the game, we replay the scene and Walker says, “This isn’t right. This has already happened.” How does Walker know that this has happened?
There is no answer given and the game continues as normal. But what if this was just another of Walker’s hallucinations? What if everything from the white phosphorus attack is a hallucination? What if he’s still standing there, looking at the dead burnt bodies and enacting this revenge fantasy in his head?
What it means to us as gamers
What does playing this game mean to gamers?
The main purpose of video games is to entertain. Just like movies, TV shows and books, it needs to fulfil that or it has failed. Spec Ops: The Line does just that. It creates an interesting narrative inter-spaced with exciting set-pieces. It does have its issues in the form of control and AI, but it’s a short, fun game that kept me hooked until the end.However, once we begin to mix the narrative and gameplay together, they juxtapose with one another. The game forces you to do certain things in order to move forward: there is no other way. If you refuse, you die or the game simply does not move forward. Indeed, inaction is usually rewarded with death from the beginning of the game all the way until the end. Therefore, we are forced into completing sections of the game and doing things that we do not want to do. The game understands that we can simply switch it off and throw the disc out the window, but it is refusing to negotiate with us. We do as it says or we stagnate.The interesting thing is how the game reacts to us being forced to take part in the atrocities. After the white phosphorus attack, I replayed the section and did not fire upon the civilians (who appear only as white dots on the map). I died. The game would not allow me to complete the mission without killing innocent civilians. In fact, the game may be designed around that fact. After the attack, Walker blames the Damned 33rd. “We were forced into this,” he tells his teammates. Although I began to hate the 33rd too, I knew that my anger was misdirected. The Damned 33rd did not pull the trigger, I did. I couldn’t even blame the game or the developers because I knew what my actions would accomplish. It was entirely my fault and I was stuck in the same hell that Walker was stuck in.Throughout the rest of the game, Walker and his teammates argue about the decisions that they have taken throughout the game. They seek to blame other people, never turning the pointed finger upon themselves. Someone else always made the decisions for us. At the end of the game, Walker just talks to himself, but his words are ambiguous. He says, “This wouldn’t have happened if you’d only stopped.” He is clearly blaming the player as much as himself and the player blames him right back.
The game is punishing us for enjoying the gameplay and the entire thing becomes this symbiotic relationship. We want to complete the game because we want closure, but we are aware that in doing so, we will dig a bigger hole for ourselves. The game makes this harder for us by making the last half of the game a lot of fun. We want to have fun but we don’t want to have the guilt that comes with it.
And here is where it gets interesting because all of the cutscenes are skippable. In fact, someone could play the game and miss the plot out entirely and see the hallucinations as some LSD-style nightmare. Out there, someone has completed Spec Ops: The Line and is not affected by the needless murder of women and children. Someone out there is a lucky bastard.
To us as gamers, we see that moral ambiguity can be pushed upon us from all angles and that we are not in control of it one hundred percent of the time. As gamers, we get used to having Peter Molyneux-style moral choices thrust upon us and having the ability to choose from one or the other: murder an entire town of children or play with some puppies. Here, the choice is removed but we still want to go forward. In other words, the whole carrot-and-the-stick has changed slightly, wherein the carrot is being fed to us whilst the stick is smashed repeatedly over our heads. Our only reply is, “More carrots, please.”
Morality in games
Why morality is so important.
Games have the ability to affect us emotionally because we are in direct control of the characters. If we spend hours and hours with a character, controlling their actions and hearing them talk, we begin to feel a little bit or adoration for them. Similarly, if a character is annoying, we begin to hate them a little bit. My girlfriend and I have a love-hate relationship with Ellis from Left 4 Dead 2. She hates him and I love him, both for different reasons. When she played online, Ellis would always be controlled by AI because her friends always chose the same characters and Ellis would be left alone. The AI is vastly inferior to human players and would cost them many battles through sheer stupidity. While she was hating Ellis and cursing his name, I found his inane statements hilarious and would repeat them at parties in an attempt to seem interesting.Spec Ops: The Line shares a lot of similarities with another emotionally charged game: Gears of War. They have almost identical control schemes and even similar images for buttons and icons. Both games affect you emotionally: Gears of War 2 has the infamous “Maria Scene”, closely followed by the even worse “Dom Scene” in Gears of War 3. These, along with some of the memories from Lost Odyssey, are amongst the only games to have made me actually cry, a feat that has only been equalled by Ultimate Spider-Man, TV shows that last more than three seasons and movies with Tom Hanks.The big difference between these two games is that Gears makes all their scenes both tragic and heroic, whereas Spec Ops just makes them tragic. After Dom drives that van into that tank, you can’t help but feel elation that he went out with a literal bang. You spend most of Walker’s mission wishing you could turn back time.Within the RPG genre, there are numerous games that allow you to make choices that affect the gameplay. Some are simple and small, like choosing between a long-range or short-range weapon. Others are more complex, like choosing between which character you want to kill. A lot of these choices, however, do not necessarily walk hand-in-hand with the genre’s open-ended gameplay. In Mass Effect, I had to make a choice between two teammates. One was to die and the other was to survive. However, the game selected two teammates that I never used and so the choice was null. To some, it must have been a horrible point in the game, but I couldn’t care less.
Similarly, Fable 3 has such choices as: burn down the orphanage and enslave the orphans or save it. The only reason you would want to burn the orphanage down is because it nets you a bigger reward. However, because we don’t know any of the orphans, we are further distanced from the choice. There is no morality here, really. It’s just you choosing from two distinct choices and neither have any ramifications beyond the initial reward.
In The Walking Dead, you must constantly make choices which have a downside regardless. In GTA 4, there are two massive parts where you have to decide on which characters survive. One of the choices is between two brothers. One is a corrupt cop. The other is a degenerate drug addict. You have to make the choice between them and deal with the fallout. There is no third option. You have to murder someone.
The range of moral choices here is staggering and, no doubt, you can find a place where you’re happy to tread. Spec Ops: The Line does not offer this. You must do what the game tells you to do or not play it.
Morality is important because it allows us to look at choices that we have made and take the blame for them. I wanted to burn down that orphanage. I chose to kill my teammate. I chose to spare the drug addict.
Spec Ops and other media.
How Spec Ops: The Line is defined by what came before.
Walt Williams, lead writer for Spec Ops: The Line, has stated that the primary influence for the game has been Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness was later developed into Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Much like both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, Spec Ops deals with the morality of war and obsessions with people behind the curtains. Indeed, the character of Konrad is inspired by Kurtz.Spec Ops deals with the horrors of war, similar to Band of Brothers, The Pacific, Saving Private Ryan and other wartime epics. However, unlike these, the violence within Spec Ops is ramped up to eleven and it gleefully shows mutilated and dessicated corpses strewn throughout the world. In fact, although the image of the mother and child is horrifying, by that point in the game, I was desensitised to the violence and shrugged it off. The fact that the game kept coming back to it and it didn’t affect me says more about me than the game.Spec Ops takes a lot from run-and-gun games like Call of Duty and Gears of War. We run into these situations and happily spray lead about whilst the game itself is having some sort of seizure. When you’re badly hurt, the screen turns grey, the sound becomes fuzzy and Walker’s face becomes distorted and horrified. This fades when you heal up, but for a while, I just watched his features as he swung madly between anger to genuine fear. In fact, this may be one of the only games that is best watched than played for its emotional appeal. The cutscenes run to around an hour and are available on Youtube below.In the end, Spec Ops is more of an experience than a game and one where I am ashamed of taking part in the atrocities, but similarly glad that I played it.
One last thing.
Here is a video of the Spec Ops: The Line cutscenes. It really is a game to be played first and watched later. Take the time to watch this hour-long video to see if your detachment changes your outlook.
EDIT: This was supposed to be published on February 9th 2014. It didn’t get published until February 16th 2014 due to some error on my part.
In 2004, a company called People Can Fly crawled out of the woodwork and created a game called Painkiller. Their aim was to create a horror first-person shooter that incorporated the old-school elements of Doom and Serious Sam, and they succeeded, to a certain degree. People Can Fly also released a Painkiller expansion pack named Painkiller: Battle out of Hell. In 2007, they were acquired by Epic Games and helped make the PC port of Gears of War as well as Bulletstorm and the new HD remake/port of this very game, Painkiller: Hell & Damnation.
Story 4/10
You are Daniel Garner, a man who, along with his wife, Catherine, has been killed in a car crash. While Catherine ascended into Heaven, Daniel is kept in Purgatory. After a number of years, he is approached by Sammael, a messenger of God.
It seems that Purgatory is the ideal ground for Satan (or Lucifer) to plan his attack on Heaven, as it is directly between Heaven and Hell. Thus, Satan has been amassing his army of demons in Purgatory and has been slowly taking all of Purgatory’s souls down to Hell to make his army grow ever larger.
Sammael gives Daniel a proposition: help destroy Satan’s advancing army and gain entry to Heaven. Daniel reluctantly accepts and, with the help of Eve, has to take down four of Satan’s generals to stop the invasion.
There’s Daniel to the left with Sammael. Doesn’t Sammael just look evil? He’s supposed to be an agent of God. Source.
The plot, though, has no relevance to the game, really. The levels change from graveyards to castles to towns to factories to bogs in a seemingly unrelated fashion. The enemies are dependant on the level, but can be ninjas, ghosts, witches, necromancers, zombies, knights, armour-bound skeletons and everything in between.
The plot is only revealed through the cutscenes that appear every five levels or so, and seems like almost an afterthought, as if the game was created first and the story second. Which is good, because the story, although intriguing, doesn’t affect the gameplay at all, and vice versa.
Daniel is voiced by Cam Clarke, more famously known for voicing Liquid Snake in Metal Gear Solid. He’s one of my favourite voice actors, up there with Troy Baker and Nolan North. I used to rate games entirely on how much dialogue Cam Clarke had. I have his album too. That’s a bit off-topic.
Gameplay 8/10
Ohhhhhhhh, such fun to be had! The gameplay is rather simple: You are thrown into a level. You follow the onscreen arrow to an area, which will, more often than not, be locked down, encasing you in there with about twenty bad guys, who you then shoot until they die of death. Upon doing this, the area will become unlocked and you follow the arrow to another area and then go crazy in there.
Sounds boring doesn’t it? Well, you are, in fact, very wrong for thinking that and shame on you. The game actually excels in this simple premise. The levels, as I have mentioned, bear no correlation to anything else that happens in the game. You can move easily from a medieval town to an underground cave to a graveyard to a construction site in the space of a few levels. Although the bad guys appear in relation to the level (crazies in the insane asylum, workers in the docks, knights in a palace etc.) the order in which they appear makes no sense, either temporally (renaissance towns appear at the same time as modern-day machines on a bridge) or in space (from Japan to England, for example), it seems as if the games creators threw together a game filled with all the set pieces they could think of, and then added the story in on top of it, as I have said before.
But who cares? Cos we don’t want mind-numbingly complex stories, do we? No, we wanna shoot wooden poles through zombies and blow up entire legions of hellish knights. And that’s exactly what Painkiller delivers. Of the five weapons, each with a secondary function, you can find numerous ways to deal death to Hell’s minions.
Painkiller is also a Judas Priest song, for those of you unwise in the ways of the Priest. Source.
Your initial weapon is the Painkiller, a cross between a lawnmower and a magnet. The primary function allows you to mow zombies down in their droves, whilst the secondary fires out a shot that attaches onto the bad guys and pulls them towards you, allowing you to saw them into tiny pieces.
Your next weapon is the Shotgun. The primary fire is, of course, a shotgun blast. The secondary function, however, is a blast of liquid nitrogen, freezing your enemies in their tracks. Any attack, even from other enemies, sends the frozen shattering into pieces.
Would have been better back in Salem. Too soon? Source.
The Stakegun is, without a doubt, one of the most original and fun weapons I have ever had the pleasure of shooting. I suppose it probably started life as a melee weapon of some kind – the standard stake – however, the developers attached these sticks o’ pain onto a catapult and let them get fired towards the enemies, impaling them and sticking them onto the wall. The secondary function releases a grenade that bounces towards the enemy and detonates, sending them flying in all directions.
The Chaingun is a handy machine gun with a rocket launcher attached. Ideal for taking down crowds of hellish scum.
The game uses ragdoll physics of the Havok 2.0 engine, which is particularly pretty when you lob an explosive into a pack of enemies and watch them scatter through the air. A nice addition to the physics is that when you hit an enemy with a powerful weapon, such as an explosive or shotgun blast, instead of just spiralling into the air, their body actually disintegrates into pieces – generally a torso, limbs and head – and scatters about the place, spraying blood in all direction. The enemies will also occasionally grab other enemies to use as shields, which is nice.
When the game first came out, the Havok engine had only been out a short while. Max Payne 2 had made the best of it at the time by creating entire scenes for the sole purpose of watching enemies and objects get bounced about rooms. Painkiller was one of the first I played that had Havok physics and, although it wasn’t perfect, it kept me entertained no end. Nowadays, it’s normal to have ragdoll physics and almost every game has them, but back then, it was amazing to kill an enemy and have them fall down stairs like a real being as opposed to lying in mid-air, anchored to the ground only by their ankles.
Life was so hard before games remembered about gravity. Source.
When you start the game, you get to choose your difficulty. By starting at the easiest difficulty (Daydream) you can have fun playing the game without any difficulty, however, you won’t get the full game. By advancing into the higher difficulties, you unlock more and more areas. Also, the higher difficulties allow you to use the Black Tarot cards.
When you play a level, the game will set you a specific task such as “Kill all the enemies” or “Don’t use explosives” or “Collect all the money”. If you complete the level within the given parameters, you are given a Black Tarot card. These have special powers that can be given to you such as quad damage, extra health etc. and can be activated during the game. To equip these cards you need money, and this is easily found in the game as there are destroyable artefacts such as coffins, vases, crates etc.
When a bad guy is killed, his soul is released. If you pick it up, you get a little bit of health back. Collect 66 of them and you’ll turn into a demon, which kicks ass as your vision turns black and white, enemies show up bright red, and any attack shoots a blast at your enemies, killing them in one shot. Powerful.
Graphics 7/10
The graphics were and still are incredibly good. At the time, they rivalled F.E.A.R. but were shot out of the water a year later by Crysis. The lighting effects, the massive locales, literally dozens of enemies, as well as the ragdoll physics makes this game amazing to look at.
For instance, take the town level. The whole thing is in night time and has narrow backstreets with fires blazing in houses, casting shadows over the walls; enemies stumble towards you, throwing pieces of themselves at you; you lob a grenade at them, they scatter like bowling pins, spiralling through the air. Beautiful. The textures are amazing, very detailed, and the explosions, sparks, particle effects and everything else are a sight to behold, especially on a souped up machine, where it all flows perfectly.
The review that featured this image said that the weapons were “boomtacular”. That’s not even a word. Source.
The only downside to the graphics is that some of the enemies look very “spiky”. That’s all well and good when they’re biker skeletons where spikes are part of the costume, but sometimes the characters appear “pointy” when they’re supposed to appear “smooth”. This is probably due to technical limitations – the models had to be constructed of as few polygons as possible so as more can be fit on a screen, so its acceptable, especially as you rarely notice this during the game as its so fast-paced.
Sound 7/10
The sound effects are very well-done. Monster’s growls and shouts sound decent enough and the weapon noises are quite authentic and meaty. The music is generally ambience and moves into heavy metal as you fight some bad guys, which is gets you worked up, but tends to be repetitive. Other than that, the sound is quite satisfactory.
The ending theme sounds like Ozzy Osbourne but it’s actually done by a band named Mech. They’re Polish and split up in 1986 before reuniting almost two decades later in 2005. Wow.
The menus are all laid out with gothic imagery, which works well. The level selector is also nicely made like a pentagram, and the level loading screen shows you some concept artwork of the level. The HUD shows you all the usual information, such as a pointer to tell you where to head to next, health, armour, ammo and amount of souls you collected this level. Pressing TAB also brings up information such as objects destroyed, time in level and monsters killed. Tasty.
Control 10/10
The controls can be customised fully, but there isn’t really many of them to customise to be honest. Your standard movement buttons as well as primary and secondary weapons fire and scrolling through weapons is all you need to worry about.
Extra features 6/10
If you play the game on the harder difficulty settings, you get a few more levels, as well as the power to use the Black Tarot cards. I suppose if you want to, you can collect all the Black Tarot cards, but, apart from that, there’s not much extra within the game.
Play Time 7/10
It should take you about ten hours to complete the game normally, give or take a few depending on the difficulty setting and if you want to replay levels in order to collect all the Black Tarot cards. That’s if you fly through the game, but more fun is to be had by strolling through it, enjoying the massive expanses and having some fun killing the monsters. To get the most out of the game, you’d need about fifteen to twenty hours.
Replayability 6/10
Besides playing the harder difficulties for the extra levels and attempting to get all the Black Tarot cards, there isn’t a reason to play it again unless you want to relieve some stress by shooting up some zombies. That’s still a good reason, like.
Buy or rent? 10/10
Buy. It’s been remade and it’s very cheap and you get a good few levels of shooting up the undead with shotguns and lawnmowers.
All in all, a fantastic game. Doesn’t have much of a plot, but its great for relieving stress and just playing a game for the sake of playing a game.
Percentage: (The separate scores added together) 72%
I would give it: Some souls I had knocking about the garden.
You can almost have them for free because they will not shut up. Source.
EDIT: This original review was posted on GameFAQs in June of 2006. At the time, I really, really loved Painkiller. I played Battle out of Hell as well as Overdose and have now bought the Hell and Damnation remake. I don’t know what it is that keeps dragging me back to the game, but it might be Cam Clarke.
Now, “retro” gaming is a big thing. With more people gaming on their phones, the market has evolved this huge “mini-gaming” alcove where games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush Saga can not only exist but carve entire businesses out of quick, short bursts of fun. This, coupled with the popularity of voxel-based games like Minecraft mean that a lot more people enjoy games that would have been on a website like Newgrounds only a few years ago. Recently, Flappy Bird has become a massive game and it, like a lot of these mobile games, is just a rehash of old games I had on the Amstrad. In fact, if I just dragged myself over those 5.5 inch floppies, no doubt I’d find a goldmine waiting to be shoved down the masses throats.
Painkiller, in a way, start this. People were so caught up in creating ground-breaking huge games like Just Cause and The Godfather that created sprawling, huge open-worlds akin to the very popular GTA that they forgot that some people don’t have a hundred hours to pump into a game. Whenever I started Painkiller, I had played WoW and Final Fantasy VII to death. I had more fun with the handful of levels in Painkiller than I did in the entire world of Azaroth or chasing after Sephiroth (though I spent considerably more time doing both than I did nailing skeletons to walls, but that is beside the point).
Even now, I will instinctively go for RPGs yet will have more fun with simple arcade games. It may be a form of muscle memory, I do not know. Until I can understand why, I guess I’ll keep spending hours micromanaging inventories and minutes enjoying blowing monsters up with electric shurikens.
In the month of April, I will be taking part in the A-Z Blogging Challenge. Excluding Sundays, April has 26 days. There are also 26 letters in the alphabet. Don’t think it takes a genius to figure out how the challenge works but if you need any help, please, go to the dedicated site and read there if you want to join up or follow those brave souls who are taking part.
I will be creating posts that alternate between book discussions (A, C, E etc.) and video-game discussions (B, D, F etc.). Although, knowing me, I’ll probably just end up chatting about feelings or anime or a hat I found that looks like a banana.
Not the banana hat I was looking for, but it will do. Source.
If you are planning on taking part in the A-Z Blogging Challenge, please drop me a line or link that sheet in the comments below to that I may add you to my blogroll.
Waaaayyy back in 1985, back when A-Team was (and still is) the greatest TV show of all time, back when, as Bowling for Soup sang, there was “Stringsteen, Madonna, waiting for Nirvana,”, I was born (yay!) and a lot of other pop culture references, a video games company by the name of Nintendo started a game that would later be released in 1986. This game was named The Legend of Zelda.
From this simple game about killing goblins and spiders, thus began a legacy resulting in a load of sequels, prequels, toys, food, soundtracks and even a cartoon show. This is where it all started. This game was big for several reasons. Besides it obviously starting off the Adventure/Action genre on home computing, but it was one of, if not the first games to have a chip installed that allowed you to save your game. Before, you had to complete games in one single run. Now you could play, quit, have a break and play again at the same point that you left off. Woo.
If you remember these, I’m sure there’s a group somewhere to help you overcome this horror. Source.
It is also worth noting that, as with all games, this review is written comparing it to other games based on the same games system. So, even though it was released damn near 30 years ago, this review will be based on other games released around the same time. Just to keep it fair, you understand.
Story 6/10
The story, if you can call it that, was mediocre at best, but, as many videogames back then didn’t care for a plot or narrative, having a story, even one as skimpy as this, was at least an upside. A long time ago, in a land far, far away, there is a kingdom called Hyrule. In this Kingdom, an evil pig-demon called Gannon has decided to rule the kingdom his way and has captured the princess of Hyrule, a young blonde called Zelda, and take over the kingdom, Reynolds-style, by infesting it with his evil minions. Cue Link, a young man who is on his merry way walking through the kingdom when he spies, out of his little eye, an old woman getting beat upon by the aforementioned evil minions. He totally flips out and saves her, and the woman reveals herself to be Impa, handmaiden to Princess Zelda. Impa tells Link to save the princess, and he, being a nice chap, agrees.
The kingdom in question has a treasure (as most kingdoms do) called the Triforce, which is a sacred triangle, consisting of three, smaller, separate golden triangles, each of which has a specific power. The Triforce of Wisdom, for example, gives the user the power to see into the future, make prophesies, etc. That particular Triforce is held by Zelda. The second, the Triforce of Power, is held by Gannon, possibly stolen by him in his siege of Hyrule Castle. That gives him immense strength and power to be more evil than usual. The third is the Triforce of Courage. Zelda, knowing that she would soon be either killed or kidnapped (As princesses generally are) smashed the Triforce of Courage into eight pieces and scattered them about Hyrule in many different dungeons, thinking, “Gosh, this’ll stop that mean Gannon getting his grubby mitts on it,” forgetting, of course, that heroes might also want to get the damn Triforce and save her as well.
Anyways, its up to Link to get the eight pieces of the Triforce back and make sure things get crazy-go-nuts and all returns to normal again. Easier said than done.
Gameplay 8/10
The game is played from above, in a top-down viewpoint. We see little Link in his wee green undies and hat skip about fields and dungeons on his merry killing spree. And it’s great fun. You come equipped with a wooden sword from a creepy old recurring and badly translated man and a secondary weapon that can be anything from a bomb to a boomerang to meat. You have your little health meter, represented by the now-familiar row of hearts, and you have your purse that can be filled with rupees, the currency of Hyrule, up to a total of about 255. This money can be spent on extra weaponry, health, items, shields or anything else that takes your fancy. The map is split up into many separate screens, so when you venture to the edge of one, you’re brought onto another, and so on and so forth as you dander through the kingdom. Eventually, you’re going to walk into a dungeon, and that’s where the fun truly starts.
In a dungeon, you can move through the rooms, smiting evil and collecting new items. These items can then, usually, be used to reach new areas of the kingdom, which therein lies more evil, more dungeons, and, eventually, more items. At the end of each dungeon is the obligatory end-of-level boss that, predictably, have a single weak point that you must find, take advantage of and destroy. Once you kill ‘em, you get one single piece of the Triforce. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
Although it sounds monotonous, this is one of the greatest games ever made. Each dungeon is made differently, with a different scheme, different puzzles and different enemies. Each time you play it is a different experience. Also, this was one of the first games to feature mini-games, in the form of a gambling game with a crazy old man. Excellent.
I got this game when I was six and I loved every second of it. It was frustrating, yes, and it was not perfect. The thing is, Zelda was released about the time when games weren’t meant to be huge, amazing and (although I loathe to use the word) epic experiences. Games were supposed to be just little time-fillers in between doing other, less frustrating things, like taxes or travelling back in time in a car.
Because of this, games were usually designed to kill you rather quickly so that you could start over. This is one of the reasons the term Nintendo Hard exists. Games like Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden and Mega Man only lasted a few hours if you were good at them. There’s a reason I only completed Mega Man 2 once, and that is because once I defeated Dr. Wily, I burnt the cartridge so that no one would ever be hurt by it again.
The Legend of Zelda bucked these conventions. A game was built where death was not a punishment, but a genuine learning experience. If you died, you didn’t start from the beginning of the game, you just respawned a couple of screens away and started your slog back to where you died to try again. Yes, it was annoying the fourth of fifth time, but by the sixth, you knew a boss’ movements or weak spot and you knew what to anticipate. By then you became the boss. Back in the day, I could complete this game without picking up any heart containers. That’s what Nintendo trained you to do: play a game so much that you could boast about your stupidity later on in life.
In short, the gameplay of Legend of Zelda was revolutionary, but it was still a nightmare to play when you were a preteen.
Graphics 6/10
Compared to the other games at the time, this game was top notch. It featured a variety of enemies as well as different colours of clothes for Link to wear, upgradeable as you got new rings in the game. True, most of the sprites in the game were cloned and the colour was changed to show it was a different enemy, or a harder one or whatever, (this is called palette swapping. Famous palette swaps include Ryu, Ken, Scorpion, Sub-Zero, Reptile, Noob Saibot and most Final Fantasy enemies) but it still ruled. Due to the limited range of the NES’ graphics chip, some of the battles were hectic as hell, with Link hitting enemies, who flew back and flashed, shot rocks at him and surrounded him in high numbers. Good, for 8-bit graphics. Until Mario 3 came out and shot it out of the water. But that’s a different story.
Sound 7/10
Nice little ditties that will have you humming them for years. Also, you can hear the original, unmixed versions of many songs that were repeated in later Zelda games. The dungeon music is as atmospheric as the NES would allow and the enemy sounds sound just like what they should, each having a specific sound bite to warn you of their presence. The only annoying thing is the constant bleeping when your health is low, but that’s about it.
Only one menu to choose from, which allowed you to name your save files – another first – in whatever name you cared to choose. They held all the information including the colour of your clothes and how many hearts you have acquired. The Inventory screen shows you everything you would need to, but doesn’t tell you what specific dungeons you have conquered. Annoying at times, but it was 1986 after all.
Control 10/10
The NES had two buttons, four if you count Start and Select as buttons, plus a D-pad. The A button makes Link use his sword, and the B button uses your extra item. Nice, as it allows you to slash, throw a boomerang, or bomb, and run without too much difficulty. Select pauses the game and Start brings up the Inventory page, showing you everything you need to know about the game but where afraid to ask.
Extra features 6/10
None, really, bar an extra adventure if you put your name in as “ZELDA”. It’s the exact same game, only harder, with stronger enemies. There’s also a gambling game in there, and the chance to complete the entire game without picking up a sword. Stupid, but possible.
Play Time 7/10
Nowadays, it would take you a few hours, but back when I was six and my hand-eye coordination wasn’t that good, it took longer. About, say, five hours to complete the real quest, if you’re good, and about an extra three if you want to get everything in the game.
Replayability 6/10
Besides playing the second, harder adventure, or replaying it for the pure hell of replaying it, there isn’t much reason to pick up the controller again. You’ll do it anyways, though. I did. I still do.
I’d say buy. It’s been re-released on the Nintendo store for 3DS, DSi, Wii U and countless other Nintendo consoles. And it rocks, so there’s no reason NOT to buy it, goddamnit.
All in all, a fine game, and a great addition to a NES collection. Classic.
Percentage: (The separate scores added together) 73%
I would give it: All the hearts I can spare. I love the shit out of this game.
EDIT: This review was originally posted in GameFAQs back in August of 2004. I took it from there, added a bit and changed some facts to make it more like the review I envisioned. My love for the Zelda franchise has not died since then (although I have neglected to play the newest ones). This game has a special place in my heart. A lot of people scoff at so-called “retro” games and how people love nostalgia in a hipster oh-you-weren’t-there kind of way, probably similar to advocates of wife-beating and Semitism.
The fact is that this game kick-started my love for fantasy, RPGs and video-games. Until Zelda, I played because my cousin had a NES and Duck Tales and Mario. Once I played Zelda, video-gaming moved into being a hobby. It still is a hobby. I read about video games every day. I listen to the music and collect the art and buy the consoles. If it weren’t for Zelda, I wouldn’t be the person I am now and I certainly wouldn’t be here talking about a game almost as old as I am.
I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing but I wouldn’t change it either way.
It must be incredibly hard to write a good story with very complex and mature themes. It must be equally difficult to write one where the main character is a child and the two combined would be verging on impossible. Many times, within books, I have found myself trudging through cack-handed descriptions of actions and events from the point-of-view of a child. To find a book like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time where the main character is a teenager who has to deal with death, betrayal and lies without it seeming too forced-childish is amazing.
It is especially interesting because the teenager in question is also autistic.
The story starts off rather simply: Christopher is a teenager with autism who finds that someone has stabbed his neighbours’ dog to death with a pitchfork. Christopher is initially blamed for the crime but we know that it was not him because Christopher does not lie. So, our hero decides to become a detective and solve the mystery of the dead dog Wellington and, through his investigations, he uncovers a web of lies and deceit that goes back for years.
With video games and movies, I can forgive bad storytelling for the spectacle and vice versa. No one is going to state that Gears of War is the next Citizen Kane, but there is a section where you have to get inside a monster the size of a city and tear its heart open with a chainsaw rifle.
In the same way, though Final Fantasy VIII‘s gameplay becomes monotonous about halfway through, but the story kept me going until the very end.
The same goes for books. The story is rather simple, but we can forgive that because the characters are so interesting or the style is fantastic. In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the characters are not given a great deal of description because Christopher does not understand how to describe things properly. So, instead, we are given little snippets of them and, from their words and tone, as well as tiny descriptions that Christopher picks up, slowly build a character in our minds. He may notice that a man has green shoes and a freckle on his cheek but would completely miss their entire personality, how they held their body, the colour of their skin, the laughter in their eyes etc. What we are left with is a skeletonised selection of characters that are stripped down to words, slight movements and odd mannerisms.
Because Christopher cannot understand things like metaphors, similes or undertones, he takes everything at face value. It’s a good use of dramatic irony when we understand everything about Christopher’s world but he knows nothing until he is told about it explicitly. Even then, his difficulty with emotion means that he is more likely to be upset about his food touching than he is about, for an extreme example, his entire family dying in a house fire.
I think it says a lot about me when, at one point near the climax of the piece, I am more concerned about the safety of Christopher’s pet rat, Toby, than I am about him, which leads me onto what I consider to be the weakest points in the book.
There are inconsistencies within Christopher’s actions. Clearly this is used to show us how different an autistic child’s brain is to someone who does not have autism, but it just made me feel anxious. By the end of a book, I like to feel like I know the character, like I can imagine and guess their next moves – after eight seasons of 24, I knew exactly what Jack Bauer would do next. I understood him. Not so with Christopher. I felt that he was like an orang-utan (an animal he speaks about at length at one point), dangerous and unpredictable.
Another inconsistency is the use Toby, Christopher’s pet rat. As an avid fan of rats, I enjoyed reading the descriptions of the pets movements and looked forward to seeing how he would interact with it, yet that was very vague. Also, rats should be in groups of two or more, something that you would think that an autistic child who wants everything to be perfect and right would want for his pet. At one point, he gives a list of items in his pocket, including five rat pellets for Toby. Later, he recites the list again, but the rat pellets have been reduced to three without any reason given.
But maybe I’m being factitious.
I enjoyed the book, but I found it a bit gimmicky at times. It broke my heart and made me get the feels. I would recommend it to anyone, especially those who, like me, deal with people, especially pupils, who are on the autistic spectrum.
I give this book three bags of rat food out of five.
When I was younger, around about ten years old, I was obsessed with books where the main character was an animal. Babe had just come out in the cinemas and so our school had bought every Dick King-Smith book in existence (and at that time, he had written around eighty novels, most concerned with animals). I had flown through them with such gusto that I barely remember them now. I know that one involved a mouse whose husband died on her first birthday. I also remember that the novel that Babe is based on is, confusingly, named The Sheep-Pig.
As time went on, I stopped reading about animals. They were very hard to understand and although I learnt a lot of interesting facts about them (birds don’t really use their sense of smell or taste), I just wasn’t interested enough in animals as characters. Also, I found an awesome book on Greek mythology at around the same time and read that instead. There was a little toerag in my class who told the teacher I was looking at the naked pictures inside and I got in trouble.
When I picked up A Lab Report, I expected that it would contain much the same content that King-Smith had given me when I was a child: a story from an animal’s perspective that rarely featured humans and had animals acting quite unlike you’d expect them to act. In a way, I was right: A Lab Report is a story from an animal’s perspective, but humans are featured throughout (and play a vital role within the story) while the animals act like animals.
A Lab Report is a series of episodes in the life of Rosie, a black Labrador puppy, who is adopted by Amy and Rob and brought to live in their home near Edinburgh, Scotland. Amy and Rob already have two other dogs, Coco and Brambles, and the first few episodes deal with Rosie slowly easing into her life as the baby in her new family. Rosie is not the most humble of narrators and a lot of the comedy in the book comes from her cockiness and self-aware nature. In fact, the role she plays is very much like the toys in Toy Story or the babies in Rugrats – she knows more than she lets on and prefers to play to people’s assumptions that she is “a daft wee lassie” (as my boss occasionally says). She regularly causes havoc in order to complete her objectives and revels in torturing her humans.
The episodes follow two years in her life and move about the place, snapping forward and backward in time as Rosie relates stories to the reader, often allowing herself to get sidetracked for the sake of entertainment. Although she is often shown as a level-headed character, her hubris does occasionally get her into scrapes and one particular adventure near the end of the book is incredibly interesting to read as Rosie is completely unaware of the situation she is put in, though the reader is. A lot of this dramatic irony is played out through Rob and Amy, her humans. In the most poignant chapter of the book, Rosie cannot grasp the complex emotions that are being shown through Rob and Amy and is left to describe the scene in confusion, asking questions that are left unanswered.
Though the episodes do not form a plot of sorts, we do see a realistic and entertaining character study emerge. Rob and Amy are like any other couple – they laugh and love and argue and although we only see them in relation to self-centred Rosie, there are snippets of their lives away from their dogs. Likewise, Coco and Brambles do not share Rosie’s ability to converse with the reader, but still have distinct personalities and idiosyncrasies. Even Rosie seems to evolve, though it is difficult to see as she considers herself to be the pinnacle of canine evolution from the outset.
A Lab Report is an entertaining and interesting novel which I would suggest reading in as few sittings as possible to fully enjoy the episodic nature.
I give this wonderful book five Labradors out of five.
That one there on the right is Rosie. Always different. Source.
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