Resident Evil 6

Resident Evil 6 was widely regarded as a total flop. I'm not sure if I'm missing something, because I actually really liked it. Not all of it, but a lot of it.

The first thing I noticed was that the disk was interminably loud inside the PS3. There really didn't seem to be anything wrong with it, but I was aware of the noise for the whole of the game.
The game starts in the midst of a scene that you'll actually experience again later on, but it gives you a taste of how things are going to go. This segment is more of an interactive movie, with brief movement of off the set path
Herbs are now taken in tablet form for health, which makes a lot more sense than imagining a character to be chewing on a leaf while bleeding copiously. Although even tablets don't make much sense in that scenario.
I was struck by just how SHINY all the hair is. It is really distracting.
There is a hell of a lot of adrenaline in this opening part, especially with the helicopter. It's pretty non-stop, but I really enjoyed it.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver

Here's an old favourite of mine. I completed it only a few years ago, but had another blast from the past about it last week or so. I must admit to not having played the predecessor game, LoK: Blood Omen, but since Soul Reaver was not originally intended to be a sequel to Blood Omen, having played it does not seem to be necessary.

The story of this game takes place in the land of Nosgoth. Kain, as well as visually resembling the bottom of a celery plant, has previously been kind of an arse, and so the land is falling apart.
Soul Reaver's main character is Raziel, bearer of a lovely but rare Hebrew name that I surely heard here first. Kain turned Raziel into a vampire - but wait, don't roll your eyes!
Kain is meant to evolve first, before Raziel and his brothers. But one day, Raziel strolls in with a nice pair of wings, and Kain reacts very badly indeed. Water scorches these vampires like acid, and so Kain had Raziel thrown into a big lake of it, after ripping the bones from his wings.

Raziel awakes at the bottom of the lake, as a shrivelled corpse with a missing jawbone. He hears the voice of the Elder God, who encourages him to feast on the souls of his enemies, and off you go.

Hundreds of years have somehow passed since Raziel was thrown into the lake. You first appear on the spectral plane, and need to use the portals to transport yourself to the material realm, where the (sort of) living dwell. You must dip between the planes at various points in order to make your way around Nosgoth, to each of your traitorous brothers (with the exception of Turel, who doesn't seem to be in this game).

While transcending the realms and watching your surroundings warp is rather novel, it can get tedious to go back and forth while figuring out what to do during a puzzle. In the spectral realm, not only is water thin as air, you also can't move anything. But you often need the extra ledges it provides by presenting a decayed form of the real world. There's a lot of to-ing and fro-ing.

It's impossible to truly die in Soul Reaver. If you are too wounded, you slip back into the spectral realm. If you lose all your energy there, you awake once again at the bottom of the lake with the Elder God. This happens likewise, when you load game saves. The progress you have made in various areas is remembered, but your exact position is not. Instead, you activate the warp gates at locations as you find them, and then make your way there from the first gate at the base of the lake when you load game.

Don't kill the humans, even if they do shoot at you.

The controls for this game aren't fabulous. Let's say you want to take a short, precise leap to a tiny plinth ahead of you. Well, Raziel will probably whoosh twenty feet in the wrong direction, over the edge. It really doesn't help that the camera won't automatically keep behind you, and having to hold two shoulder buttons down in order to look around is a bit of a pain in the bum.

Soul Reaver has its fair share of glitches. The main one for me, was with the valves in the Silenced Cathedral. I forgot to close one of the pipes before I turned the corresponding valve. This meant that the valve couldn't explode afterwards and render itself finished with. I went back to close the pipe, but turning the valve again did nothing. This got me genuinely stuck and I had to start a new save file!

Some souls get stuck against surfaces and fade before you can consume them. I experienced a glitch in Malchiah's territory which caused the sounds of a wraith to be heard around me in the physical realm. Dumah completely disappeared during his boss fight. I had to go back and check his throne room twice before he suddenly reappeared.

Creepy.

Other aspects of the game aren't glitches per se, but nonetheless cause some difficulties. It's really hard to move along the top of some pipes, as you just get stuck on the wall. It can be easy to miss puzzles that you must complete in order to progress, but line tracks coming from anything block-shaped can provide clues.
Soul Reaver does have a lot of block puzzles. Most of them are pretty entertaining brain twisters, but they can involve a lot of long-winded movement. There is frankly too much precise jumping in this game, with a character who can't jump precisely. The Drowned Abbey becomes incredibly tedious. Fights with Kain are a repetitive pain in the ass unless you are very quick on your feet.

Zephonim vampires are really quite scary.

The game is pretty good visually. Some textures aren't great and are heavily pixillated, such as those on the boat prior to the Drowned Abbey. In the Abbey itself, even in areas without it, the light on all the walls shimmers as if reflected from the surface of water. In incredibly large areas, the distance simply fades out into a single background colour.

Not being burned is great.

You really mustn't kill any humans. The first one you encounter directly will be firing a crossbow at you, but you've just got to run past. Later on you'll visit the Human Citadel, and it will be much easier to wander around without people launching arrows and flame-throwers at you. Some civilians, however, will still wail in despair when you enter a room.
When you're inside a puzzle area, vampires will often periodically generate to hinder your progress. I find that the best way to deal with this, is to use a pipe or other available stake to impale them, but then not reave the soul, so that it goes back into the body (still paralysed from the impalement), and additional vampires will not be generated.

You really must pay a lot of attention to your surroundings throughout Soul Reaver. Innocuous pipes and ornaments can be snapped off as weapons, while spiked decorations and bonfires can have vampires pushed into them. In the boss fight with Malchiah, there is no direct combat and you must use your surroundings to inflict harm.
Even when you're not fighting, you have to look out for things that line up with each other, especially when it comes to bells and glass.


This game has a really awesome, funky soundtrack which really enhances the moods of its various locations.


There are variations of the themes throughout a given region, and variations thereupon for the spectral realm.


Although strenuous in places, Soul Reaver is a wonderful game, and definitely one to add to the collection.

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation

I'll cut to the chase: This is not a good game. I honestly wanted to like it. It was one of the later games that my sister and I never actually finished, so I was keen to finally get around to it now.

With the exception of an early flashback to Cambodia, the whole of The Last Revelation is set in Egypt, including a trip to some Greek architecture in Alexandria. There are a few new things going on. The theme tune on the main menu, while containing the original melody, has evolved almost beyond recognition at this point. There are a lot of swooping cameras, both on the menu background and at various points in the game.
There is no option to access Lara's mansion on the menu.


The cutscenes in this game are in desperate need of subtitles and the audio quality is appalling. I immediately began to lose my patience with the game during the introductory level in Cambodia.Werner's constant interruptions are very stifling, and the dialogue leaves a lot to be desired. When he's not delaying your progression, he's needlessly chasing boars around.

The decoration of the Egyptian levels is very impressive in places. Some of the levels even rotate; what was once the wall becomes the floor, and so on. That's certainly a very interesting aspect of this game. It does, however, often involve swinging on newly-exposed ropes and climbing on poles, activities which are far more frustrating than they are entertaining.
There are some doors that can be opened by hand, rather than with switches.

There are a lot of dark places, and the flares give off a green tinge, which is both unhelpful and terrifying. My television was at maximum brightness and I still could not see my way around a good portion of this game.
The inventory has changed, and definitely for the worse. Instead of tiers of rings, everything is just in a long, straight line, and it can be a great pain in the ass to navigate to things which have become far apart on that line. You can combine some items together, such as a laser sight with a revolver or crossbow.

The enemies of the game are mostly human, with some mummies here and there. The latter are pretty scary, but their throat noises are quite off-putting. The only way to get rid of them seems to be exploding crossbow arrows.

The most dramatic music of the game seems to be brought out when you're approached by scorpions, and this, along with shooting them, seems to be somewhat of an overreaction. Having said that, Lara is quite in the habit of shooting little bats.

Triggered a cutscene while on fire.

The Jeep-driving segment of the game is very haphazard. The moving clouds above outdoor areas are a nice touch, but they are very pixellated.
You can dip in and out of levels in this game. You may enter and leave one several times before being finished with that area. It's an interesting concept, but it doesn't quite hit the mark for me. There is too much going on with these levels, and it's impossible to get too far without having to resort to a guide. It's not even slightly obvious where you're meant to go, and what you're meant to do with various objects. As mentioned earlier, some doors can just be opened by pushing on them, but you find this out by accident. Monkey swing surfaces can be hard to detect, and you can spend quite some time stuck in an area before you finally notice one.

You also sometimes slide into the beginning of a new level that looks absolutely nothing like the end of the previous one, and this only adds to the confusion.

The worst level for me was City of the Dead, and the motorbike segment was infuriatingly stupid.
I just didn't get along with the formula of this game. It was completely unintuitive, dragged out for far too long, and I'm not sure what the titular "last revelation" actually was, after all that.

This game should not have been such a chore to get through, especially considering it was the last one before Lara's heavily-implied death.

Cold Fear

Here's a game that's certainly very underrated, and for no good reason, as far as I can discern. This was definitely one of the favourites of my mid-teens.

As Tom Hansen, US Coast Guard, you find yourself called to the distressed Дух Востока, the spirit of the east, a Russian whaling ship. The intriguing opening sequence of the game shows CIA soldiers meeting an untimely demise.

You'll quickly discover the cause of the problem to be Exomutants, infected by Exocells. The glowing-eyed, menacing former humans on the boat will dash towards you faster than a lightning strike. You need to get into the habit of aiming for heads, early on.
The human enemies however, are just as much of a pain, although you'd think that since you were shooting monsters for them a second earlier, they wouldn't spin around and turn their guns on you.

Yes, Cold Fear is predictable survival horror, but in an enjoyable way. Light bulbs blow and flashes of lightning glow through the windows at exactly the right moments to both unnerve and thrill you.

The two settings of the game, are a Russian whaler and a Russian-run oil rig, the Star of Sakhalin. This makes for plenty of Russian signage. But don't panic, Tom totally took Russian at school and will translate the sign if you aim a gun's laser sight at it. If you do read Cyrillic however, this game can be a useful learning experience, teaching you words that you might not otherwise come across.

Оружейная (oroozheinaya), for example, is armoury, and you'll want to be on the lookout for that one.
Медпункт (medpoonkt) is medical room, something else you'll undoubtedly need to make use of.

The game has its issues, and there's no denying that. The biggest problem I had on this nostalgic play-through, was a glitch concerning the antidote later in the game. I picked it up from the table. The objectives menu changed accordingly. I had it in my possession. But then I just made no progress. I looped every area several times, and nothing new was triggering in the gameplay. I even resorted to looking at YouTube to see what I was missing. I was rather alarmed to see that everyone else was experiencing totally different events to me.

Eventually, I noticed the problem. The antidote was still on the table. And yet, in my possession. So, I picked it up for the second time, and then the necessary events were triggered.

On-screen error caused by interruption of a cut scene event by a previously-fired grenade exploding behind the enemy.

Glitches aside, some of the intentional features of the game can be a thorn in your side. You don't actually carry medipacks, but instead use them instantly as and when you come across them. This is obviously problematic during a big fight.
It's very easy to run out of ammunition for all of your weapons. You have to loot the bodies of Exomutants for some, but they fade after being separated from their brain matter, so you've got to be quick about it.

It's easy to become overwhelmed in Cold Fear. Before you know it, you've got Exomutants on all sides, Exocells at your feet and healthy humans being idiots with their bullets in your direction. The important thing, it turns out, is to remain calm, not to shriek at the television like I did.

Rapid firing in all directions isn't a good idea. You need to pick one Exomutant at a time, and if you can't be neat about headshots, shoot their middle until they fall backwards, and then stamp on their heads. Later on though, the little Exocells do come out and cause trouble of their own, when you do that.
Don't forget to make use of the environment around you; inconspicuous barrels, fire extinguishers, pipe valves and electrical boxes, especially when dipping into water, can all help you take out a few mutants.

Oh dear.

Unfortunately, you can't save at will, which I certainly did not appreciate when running around for hours during the antidote glitch. You will only be asked to save when going through doorways, before something big is about to happen.
The save menu itself is slightly odd, in that I had to push down ridiculously hard on my controller buttons in order to merit any response.
The opportunities to save the game really should have been more frequent, especially towards the end.

So aside from the glitches, ammo issues, lack of carried medikits and the saving situation, I also have to question an aspect of the environment design; why on earth are experiments in freezer pods lining the corridors? Who thought that was a good idea? Does that not violate some sort of laboratory safety policy? It certainly makes getting around a pain in the bum (because those experiments break out and jump on you).

The musical score of the game did not seem all that varied, but it was nice to hear more mellow versions of the main theme in the background on occasion. There's also a Marilyn Manson song during the credits.


Honestly, the game's front cover pretty much encompasses the whole gameplay experience. There's also some absolutely cracking art on the bonus menu.

It's quite short as games go, and you could probably complete it all in one day or night with some some friends, if you have a vague idea of what you're doing. I may have only done so well because I remembered a lot of things.


So, Cold Fear has problems, and can certainly be very frustrating in places, but I really like it, and you might too.


Cold Fear on Steam, £6.99

Making a PlayStation button necklace

I had a PlayStation 2 controller that was beyond all usefulness. I took it apart but unfortunately could not fix the problem inside. Rather than just discarding the whole thing, I decided to make a necklace with the D-pad and buttons.

I used the following:

1. Broken PlayStayion 2 controller
2. Rolson Archimedean drill
3. Silverline 1mm drill bits
4. A 1mm cord (I used a goat leather cord, but this is a bit soft and you may prefer something firmer, or a chain.)
5. An old pack of beads.

Of course, you can do whatever you like with your buttons and hang them on anything you want. You could even make a bracelet, anklet or keychain.

Start with these (yoghurt optional).

Drilling the D-pad is quite tricky. You need to make sure a hole comes out in the middle.

Try to ensure that you have a clean straight line all the way through a button, for ease of inserting a cord or chain later.

Clean the buttons, then grab yourself some beads and a cord of sorts.

Thread through the holes!

It's definitely quite difficult to do the D-pad. You might need to poke your cord through with a sewing needle.

Tah-dah!

You may wish to glue adjacent beads to each other so that they do not keep rotating to face all manner of directions.




In other news, I now have a television. Granted, it's the old television from my mother's house and it's certainly not state of the art, but it should mean that games can be played and reviewed!

Tomb Raider 2: A Reflection

Tomb Raider 2 has always been a very interesting game to me. I can remember getting easily confused and frustrated with the complex levels in the game (Damn you, Opera House!) and resorting to cheats to skip the level (often resulting in me accidentally exploding Lara...which made me burst into tears). Now, 15 years after I started playing it, when I finally found some time for myself, I got around to completing this game (after completing the first Tomb Raider) and I am glad I didn't let my negative childhood experience interfere with what I have come to find, though flawed, a pretty enjoyable game (the first will always be my absolute favourite). Sure, I had some help with strategy guides, but I'd like to think my adult logic has helped me this time around as well.

So, this game (in terms of both graphics and storyline) is vastly different from the first. For one, this is the first game where we can see Lara's plait (or braid, if you prefer), instead of the weird cut-off bob in the first game. Her figure is more realistic, especially her breasts, which in the first game were pointy and in this game are round. Her movements are somewhat advanced, she can now roll in the air and light flares in dark areas. There's also some awesome new weapons, such as a grenade launcher, M15 gun, automatic pistols and there's the harpoon, which you may as well not have, it's pretty useless as far as I'm concerned. Level wise, some may argue that this game isn't really 'tomb-y' enough. The only 'tomb' related level is Temple of Xian, but if you consider the shipwreck Lara explored in the underwater levels, that could be considered a tomb of sorts, although certainly not in the conventional sense. There's still a lot of different locations to explore like the first game such as China, Italy (Venice, to be exact) and Tibet and there are still ledges, blocks, boulders, switches and keys and everyone's favourite; the spikes and the developers being ever so kind, decided to treat us with some broken glass this time around, too, which is instant death if you fall on it.

This game is a lot more difficult than the first, so without being familiar with the format and controls of the original Tomb Raider game, you may struggle with this one. You do however get to practice everything in Lara's Home, where you get to run around her gigantic mansion while her butler keeps offering you tea (really, though? Obviously I'm not going to want to drink tea halfway through an assault course). The puzzles are somewhat harder, and from the third level onward, you may find yourself getting frustrated and annoyed, resorting to a guide or even cheat codes to help you through. The original Tomb Raider game, for me, started getting hard at the Palace Midas level (level 7), so you could get almost halfway through the first game before it became a real challenge.

Opera House, the third Venice level and fourth overall, is the level I struggled with. It would have been far easier to complete had it not been for the constant string of enemies. I will say that there are a ridiculous amount of Marco Bartoli thugs in this game, sometimes you trigger three at once, which take a lot of your health, so of course medi packs are an essential, but in Opera House, you may not have an extensive collection thus far, which is what makes it so difficult. Every time I complete this level, my health bar is at the lowest, beeping away in the corner of the screen and flashing red. Maybe it's my technique, but in this level, it pays to have your guns out at every corner. And that really goes for most of the levels from this point onwards. And of course, there is the obligatory floating islands level (creatively named Floating Islands), where if you don't know where you are going, you will fall into oblivion and die. But once you get past that, it is a pretty cool level with the introduction of stone enemies, which slowly fly towards you and upon death, fall apart.

My favourite part of this game is the underwater levels (levels 7-10) which explore ship wrecks and this is where we come across sharks and eels, and even some more flame throwers, making me grateful that there are several pools of water. It was nice to see a costume change in this game to suit the environments she would be in (we see another change when we reach the Tibet levels). The loud orange and blue colour scheme was oddly calming and it was a genuinely surprising environment considering, again, it's not a conventional tomb, which did make me re-evaluate the definition of the word. I found the puzzles to be challenging, and not in an overly-complicated way, but for the first time ever playing through this game, I actually wanted to figure the challenges out without resorting to the guides. The music, a booming heartbeat, is perfect for setting the atmosphere of these levels. 

The Tibet levels (levels 11-14) made Lara change into an awesome bomber jacket, and if you didn't struggle with the earlier levels, this is where you may start to. The snowmobile, while awesome, can become instant death if you land at the wrong angle or fall down a pit. There's also a ridiculous part of the first level, Tibetan Foothills, where after picking up a key, a thug comes along and runs you over on one of Marco Bartoli's fancy black snowmobiles, which is pretty annoying. Barkhang Monastery is an interesting level, the monks help you, but you really have to be careful not to shoot them when your enemies show up, because for some annoying reason, Lara targets them, and it gets very messy when they're all attacking each other. It pays to stand back and watch and only intervene if the monks don't manage to kill them. The subsequent levels introduce us to a new breed of antagonist; yetis. Now these terrified me as a child, I skipped Catacombs of the Talion because I was too scared to go down the when the yeti was angrily howling at me. The last snow level was pretty forgettable, but the weird giant chicken boss was pretty funny.

After these levels, you are pretty much coming to the end of the game. Temple of Xian is a very long and complicated level, with spiders and dodgy traps and annoyingly, more springboards (as seen in the previous level). It's a trap a minute, so you need to expect danger with each step and have a lot of medi packs, otherwise you might have a bit of trouble getting through this game. You also have to have jumping through mid air perfected at this point, or you may struggle to reach compulsory parts of the level and despite being good at this technique if I do say so myself, sometimes she just doesn't seem to do it. After the Floating Islands level, you get to fight the Marco Bartoli dragon, which is pretty fun. You get plenty of water to hop into if you catch on fire. But this is not the last of it, once Lara is at home and settled with her new artefact, more of Marco Bartoli's thugs come with their bats and guns and dogs to take it back. You only get your shotgun in this level with only three medi packs (you have to unlock her cupboard, conveniently at the side of her bed) to top your health up with so you must be careful, as there are way too many of them with guns. But once you've completed that, you get a nice clip of Lara beginning to undress for a shower, before telling you nicely to piss off before shooting the camera.

Overall, despite its flaws (excessive number of enemies, sometimes awkward controls, lack of conventional tombs), it has an original, interesting concept and it's part of the franchise that really changed the way we play games today. It is a thought-provoking, challenging game that although exceptionally difficult, makes us feel proud for being able to power through it.

I can only continue to apologise

Our television broke a while ago, and we won't be in a position to replace it for a long time. This means that console games are right out of the question, even when I do feel well enough to play them.



I'm thinking of bringing my sister in as a writer on this blog, so that things won't continue to be completely and utterly dead. I'll let you know.

The Walking Dead

I am undeniably a year or two late to the party on this one. I'm rather ashamed to say, that when the Walking Dead game first came about, I viewed it as a meagre attempt to cash in on the success of the television adaptation. Adding further to my disinterest, was the fact that the characters are not those followed in the television version, but instead entirely new ones. I was convinced that I didn't have any room in my heart for these new characters. Well, they sure as hell forced me to make some room.

My partner and I have a date night once a week. The purpose of which being that we spend some time together in the same room, usually playing a game. Of course we are usually in the same room together anyway, but each doing our own stuff. The Walking Dead is not a two player game, but I got some say in the decisions that were made for Lee.

We played the game on my partner's PC, but with a plugged in PlayStation 3 controller. Although the controller was recognised, the buttons on the screen displayed as XBOX buttons, which led to a lot of panic and confusion when we had to hit the non-existent "A" rapidly to avoid death.
Sometimes the controller decided that an entirely different action was taken to the one that was wanted, but it usually didn't work out too badly.

The Walking Dead is affected by the choices you make as a player. The things you decide to do, and the things you decide to say, affect the options you are left with from that point on, and how people will treat you. Specifically, whether people will be keen to side with you or take you with them if the current arrangement goes to shit.

Personally, we always tried to go for the more amicable and diplomatic-sounding of the dialogue choices, perhaps due to my fear of offending even fictional people. Sometimes, being neutral can still rub characters the wrong way.
You have to strike a difficult balance of being nice to everyone, awful as they may be, in order to secure your survival. But coming first, of course, is Clementine.

Your character, Lee, is being taken to prison in a police car after being convicted of murder. Doesn't sound much like a guy you'll warm to, but nonetheless. The car winds up crashing, because zombies are everywhere. He finds his way to a nearby house where he meets Clementine, a little girl all on her own, who he of course has to take with him. And so the adventure begins.

The Walking Dead is full of a lot of death and risk and panic. You may wind up somewhere horrible, but having made a different decision earlier may have put you in a situation just as bad. The game has a way of making you second guess yourself, and wonder if so-and-so's death would have been prevented if you didn't screw-up somehow. But it's brilliant.

It's a fairly riveting game that I couldn't wait to have another session of. It took my partner and I roughly two or three sessions to get through an episode, and there are five of them in season one in total. Of course, season two is now out, but he isn't keen to start that for a while after all the stress of the first.

[Spoiler alert]

Ōkami HD

I reviewed Ōkami a couple of years ago. My partner downloaded the HD release time ago, but shamefully, I have only just gotten to playing it.

The "HD" in the title implies that the graphics are vastly improved from those of the original game. The imagery in the pre-menu intro is negligibly improved as it is probably the same video rehashed, but there are some differences in the introduction once you've started a game, with improvements in the text and images, and of the transitions between them.

Originally, the non-language-specific narration voice had a wondrous quality to it. This time around, it's rather annoying. This is perhaps because the opening scene has been notably extended. The story portrayed has been padded out, to the point of ridiculousness. It may genuinely have taken me fifteen minutes to get to a part where I was in control of Amaterasu.
There are some parts of the gameplay that allow you to make screen text come up faster by tapping the X button; unfortunately this is not the case for the introduction, and regardless of how fast you can read, you just have to sit there and wait.

My dog Freya becomes enamoured with the screen.