Journal Entries
Wednesday 29/01/2002
Posted Jan 29, 2003
Lots of free time this week since there isn't much work in January, so I've been in and out of Blockbuster renting PS2 games. The following few entries will review some of them.
Star Wars: Bounty Hunter. Lucasarts - PS2. Ever since I played Dark Forces and the sequel Jedi Knight, I've been waiting to play a game based on Boba Fett, so when I first heard about this game earlier this year I just knew I had to have it. PS2 games are expensive, however, and I have made it a policy to rent or get a demo of any game I intend to buy, and in this case I have saved myself a lot of money.
It's not that I don't like this game, it's simply that it's so limited. It's one of those level based games that's like walking through a theme park. With very few exeptions all of the levels are designed to guide you along a set path encountering a predetermined set of bad guys who helpfully stand around waiting for you to show up and shoot them. The actual implementation of Jango (not Boba) Fett and his many instrumants of death is just as I would have imagined and the jet-pack is fantastic. The sheer joy of leaping into the air then hitting a short burst from the rockets whilst taking down a group of baddies with the twin blasters makes it worth putting up with the poor level design. The jet-pack also makes exploring these levels easier and is perhaps the reason they sometimes seem so limited.
While player limiting level design is a particular dislike of mine it has a close race for first place with that other cliche employed by the lazy game writer; the end-of-level-baddie. This used to be a feature of all the worst games, but to see it back in this supposedly cutting edge release, by Lucasarts no less, tells me a lot about the people involved in making this game. The ELB show a distinct lack of imagination on the part of the game designers and is often the result of budgetary of time restraints. Personally, the task of blowing up a police assault ship with two blasters from the ground pushes the limits of credibility a little too far. If something that powerful comes for you, you run, but oh dear, all the doors are locked so you can't get out of the building until the ship's destroyed.
So, on balance, this game is worth a renting, maybe just once. If you don't complete it all in one go then download the unlock codes and look at the cinematics, the story's all in there as well as a few extras. I've got the codes if anyone wants them.
6/10
TOCA Race Driver. Codemasters - PS2. Apparently the sequel to some other TOCA games by Codemasters which did quite well on the PS1, though I haven't played these. I am a huge fan of driving games and so have played lots of them. Most of the time you're not required to think too much about what's going on when you're not on the track, but the designers of this game wanted to add something else to this game. So this is a driving game with a plot. You are Ryan McKane, brother of Bobby and son of ... some other McKane who everyone keeps referring to. You father was killed some years ago and seems to be some sort of legendary figure. The question that seems to be behind the storyline is; can you be better than your brother and your father and carry on the family name?
This is all very well, a fairly solid storyline, the problem is with the character that you play. Any good writer will tell you that for a lead character to work the reader/viewer must have some empathy with them. Ryan McKane is an annoying, self-centred, arrogant brat who no one likes much on screen. The characters in this game generally are as two dimensional as you would expect in computer game cutscenes, but Ryan is about the worst of all of them. As for having any impact on the way the story unfolds as the player, forget it. I don't think anything you do, and lets face it there isn't much scope here since you can only win or lose a race or a championship, will make any difference to the story. So the story isn't much good, the characters are all poorly acted stereotypes and there's no interaction that I can see with the player, but what about the racing.
It is in this part of the game that Codemasters are on familiar ground. Their years of experience in the genre are obvious here and there's quite a bit of intelligence in the way your opponents race with you on the track. What makes the races especially exciting is the way other cars make mistakes, slipping off onto grass and gravel-traps, misjudging corners and occassionally slamming into each other and behaving in much the same way as the real Touring Car drivers. If you're lucky sometimes you can dodge around this mishaps and gain places easily, if not you can get wrapped up in a big shunt and find yourself wedged in the middle of a lump of twisted cars.
Generally I have found that the difficulty level for each race is about right so that it's possible to win, or at least score enough points, that the last race of any championship becomes significant. This is a difficult balance to strike and the one that is most often missed by driving games. You're either hopelessly outclassed by your rivals or much better than them, a problem that GT3 suffered from.
One of the things that I was quite annoyed by was the fact that to unlock realistic handling and damage you had to register on-line with Codemasters website. This is not a very satisfactory way for games companies to win fans, though it is becoming the norm. It's more or less crippleware and whilst you don't have to pay to unlock these elements, these so called extras are in my opinion central to the game and should be available from the start.
Like many other racing games TOCA Race Driver becomes quite repetitive after a while and you'll definately get sick of hearing the voice of your race manager who comes over the radio during the race with 'useful' advice such as "keep going" "this is the last lap and your last chance to overtake" or the blindingly obvious "now starting lap two" (this last said in a particularly patronising way). So you may well get bored, as I did, well before reaching the last stages of the game.
Still, at least we should give some praise to Codemasters for trying something different. They are on the right lines with the idea of a backstory, it's just the sort of thing that a racing game needs to make it more interesting, but cardboard cutout characters and a script straight out of a cheap US soap opera aren't the way to do it.
5/10
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Jan 29, 2003
Wednesday 29/01/2002
Posted Jan 29, 2003
Hi everybody, welcome to my journal. Unfortunately my life is barely interesting enough to engage my own interest, so it certainly isn't worth telling anybody else about my trip to the supermarket, my day at work or the eleven hours I spent asleep on my day off. What I could tell you about, however, is what I do in the time left over, which is taken up almost exclusively with a wide range of computer and video games. I might even slip in the odd book, film or TV review, since not even I can play video games all the time.
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Jan 29, 2003
Garak
Researcher U216155
Write an Entry
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."