Review: Defiant Map Pack for Halo: Reach

Halo: Reach launched last September to much controversy among Halo players. Some people loved Armour Abilities, others not so much – some liked the smaller tweaks like bloom and the removal of the Battle Rifle – others thought it was the worst thing to happen to the series (talk about hyperbole, right?).

Indeed the Halo player base is so diverse it seems that the community can’t seem to agree on anything – so from what point of view am I reviewing this map pack from? I consider myself to be in between the casual and competitive crowd – I’m probably average in terms of player skill, and I generally don’t care if I win or lose a multiplayer game. If you’re the type of person who rages about Armour Lock and Bloom this review probably isn’t for you.

An interesting note to make is that these are the first maps for Reach that aren’t made by Bungie, the developer of the game. Instead this map pack was made by a division of Microsoft called 343 Industries (Or 343i as it’s often called) and Certain Affinity – a developer made up of a number of ex-Bungie employees, and it’s also played a hand in some previous Halo related content – such as the Blastacular Map Pack for Halo 2.

The Defiant Map Pack was released on the 15th March and comes with three new maps: two are traditional multiplayer maps, and the other is a new Firefight map. The Defiant Map Pack will set you back 800 Microsoft Points (approximately £6.85, or $10). So lets get this review underway by taking a look at each individual map:

Highlands

Highlands is the biggest map in the Defiant Map Pack – and it’s suited to 6 v 6 or higher games. Highlands feels like it could be a spiritual successor to Valhalla from Halo 3 – with two bases on either side of the map and key areas in the middle of the map that are worth defending.

On paper Highlands has all the right pieces to be a good map – there are key areas to hold, some vehicles to play with and different paths around the map so everyone doesn’t get congested in to one spot (an issue that Valhalla in Halo 3 used to suffer from). Instead of placing power weapons in the middle of the map, they’re placed on the sides, giving you some breathing room.

The trouble with Highlands is that there’s too many different places to go – the map is generally too big and there are too many places to go. In a 6v6 match (the only way you’re guaranteed to get a match on Highlands at the moment) the map feels empty and I found myself getting bored of wandering around with nothing to shoot. Objective games like Capture the Flag give the map a little more focus, but it’s not enough to save the map from becoming a complete snoozefest. If Highlands was a little narrower things could be better – what’s worse is that the Forge palette for Highlands is extremely limited, so if you want to change the layout of the map by adding in walls or doors then you’re out of luck, so what we’ve got is a map that’s too big for most game modes with no easy fix.

Condemned

Condemned is the second multiplayer map in the Defiant Map Pack and focuses more on infantry combat rather than the more large scale, vehicle focussed affairs provided on Highlands. The general layout of the map is simple: A large circular structure with a small, low gravity room in the middle.

Condemned works well for 6v6 games and is probably the best map in the map pack but it’s hard to imagine it working for less than twelve players unless you’re playing a free-for-all game. The middle, low gravity room is a fun gimmick, but you quickly realise that the entire room is a death trap since you can’t jump (or fall) as quickly as you can in regular gravity, opening you up to fire from all sides.

Condemned features a slightly better Forge palette than Highlands does but it’s still something that could be improved. You can spawn small scenery items and items that change the special effects on the map (Like changing everything to black and white, increased colour saturation, etc) but there aren’t any options for adding in doors or walls to block parts of the map off – so if you’ve got an idea for a cool map varient then you’re out of luck.

While playing I found that Condemned worked particularly well for Elite Slayer (as seen in the video above) and other objective game modes, but I found that the experience fell flat in standard Slayer modes.

Unearthed

Unearthed is the Firefight map that comes with the Defiant Map Pack – and promises to provide a more vehicle focussed take on the survival game mode. Similar to Beachhead (a Firefight map that shipped with the full game) you get a Rocket ‘Hog to ride around in.

Those of you who don’t feel like slaying hordes of xenophobic aliens in a four wheeled death machine with an unlimited supply of rockets (and if you don’t – what’s wrong with you?) can take advantage of the elevated walkways to get the jump on some unsuspecting squid heads. Bip Bap Bam!

Unearthed is a great map – and it’s nice to get some more Firefight maps that take advantage of the arsenal of vehicles within Reach – it’s just that I think that 343i are missing a trick with this one. So far all of the Firefight maps in Reach only have Rocket ‘Hogs, Ghosts, Wraiths and Mongooses – but what about the rest? No Falcons, no Banshees (none that you can use at least), no Revenants, and no Scorpions. I’d really like to see future Firefight maps that properly take advantage of the vehicles in the game, rather than just having Beachhead 2.0.

The biggest problem with Unearthed isn’t necessarily with the map itself, but rather the monumental effort it takes just to get Matchmaking to give you a game on it. It took twelve attempts over the course of about 30 minutes just to get one game on Unearthed – and after that I decided that I couldn’t be bothered any more. Perhaps this is a situation that’ll improve over time as more people get the Defiant Map Pack, but my initial thoughts weren’t positive – what’s the point in a new Firefight map if you never get to play it?

Overall thoughts

The Defiant Map Pack isn’t bad – but it’s not great either – we’ll file this one under “it’s okay”. More Firefight maps are a welcome addition but I feel that these should be bundled separately from the other competitive maps – so that way people who aren’t interested in Firefight don’t get forced in to buying a map that they don’t want.

Beyond that the two competitive maps are okay, but nothing revolutionary or groundbreaking, and at times lack the smooth flow and focus of other Halo maps, with Highlands in particular being devoid of any action in even the most populated game modes.

Only the hardcore Halo fans need apply here – more casual players will probably be content with what’s already on the map, or would be better off buying the Noble Map Pack that was released several months ago. I feel that there’s a serious issue with the value that these maps provide – since outside of the dedicated Defiant Map Pack playlist it’s unlikely that you’ll see these new maps appear in Matchmaking. Is it worth paying 800 points for three maps that you’ll rarely get to play? I’m not convinced that it is.

Opinion: Why the Sony Xperia Play could keep me on Android

I have long bemoaned the state of mobile gaming – the Android and Apple App Stores are chock full of mobile games that I ultimately think could just be free flash games on the Internet. Angry Birds? Yawn. Flight Control? Meh. Heck – the only mobile game that I’ve played that engaged me for more than five minutes has been the fantabulous Game Dev Story – and even with that I thought “This would be so much better on the PC if it let me build my own game studio Theme Hospital style”

The truth is this: the large majority of the games on mobile platforms are casual games – which is fine, but as a core gamer who likes headshots and drifting around corners at 100mph these games have little to no appeal to me. There have been attempts of course to port older games over to these devices but using an on-screen control pad doesn’t feel right. You need the feedback of physical buttons to play properly – something that Android and iPhone handsets to this date don’t have at all (or at least not in the sense in that they’re laid out like a control pad).

Well it seems that someone has finally listened to what people like me are asking for: given that the fine chaps at Sony Ericsson have devised the Sony Xperia Play – also known as the PlayStation Phone. So we’re halfway there – we finally have some decent hardware on a phone that I can use to play games with. But what about the actual games? If the majority of Android phones only have touch screens with which to game with surely all of the games available for it are just going to be the aforementioned casual games?

Well apparently not. Later this year Sony will be releasing the PlayStation Suite for Android 2.3 or higher. With this Sony will be releasing older PlayStation 1 games as well as some new games too. So it can play PlayStation games – cool, but why not just get an NGP for that?

The answer is simple: emulators. The Android Marketplace is full of emulators for the NES, SNES, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance, and a whole bunch of others. I’ve used the free versions of these apps on my HTC Hero and they appear to run games pretty well. Unfortunately due to the Heros slow processor and lack of physical buttons playing games is a bit of a chore – but given that the Xperia Play has a 1Ghz processor and has a traditional gamepad attached to it then playing a whole bunch of games on it will no doubt be a breeze. I see the Sony Xperia Play as the ultimate in gaming convergence to date, being able to play todays casual games, new games arriving on the PlayStation Suite and games from the consoles of yore.

The only thing I’m worried about? The pricing. Sony has been very enthusiastic talking about the hardware itself and all of the features that it’ll have but they haven’t uttered a word about how much it’ll all cost – and to me that sends signs that I’m about to be hit with some bad news.

Opinion: How Microsoft might lose me with next-gen consoles

It feels somewhat difficult to believe that we’re five years in to this console generation – if this were 2006 we’d have just seen the release of the Xbox 360 a few months ago – with the PS3 still to arrive on British shores. Traditionally this is the point in a consoles life cycle where we start to get glimpses of the “next generation” of consoles – the successors of the current lineup that we saw in the mid 2000′s with the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii replacing the original Xbox, PS2 and Nintendo Gamecube respectively.

And yet with tough economic times it seems that console manufacturers are finding it difficult to justify releasing a brand new £300 games console to the masses – especially since there’s nothing really wrong with the current lineup that we’ve got now. People are buying the software – why bother fruitlessly making them buy a brand new box?

Both Sony and Microsoft have made it clear that they want their consoles to have a ten year lifespan – meaning that the Xbox 360 probably won’t completely die out until late 2015. That gives the 360 about four more years left in it.

Though it may sound odd I’ve already begun considering who I might side with come the next wave of consoles. I had a PS1 but swapped it for my uncles Xbox (I know, right?), and then I just naturally transitioned over to the Xbox 360. Halo was a big franchise for me and, well – I couldn’t go and miss out on finishing the fight now could I?

It was only last year that I bought my PS3 – some time after E3 and over the course of the year I’ve decided that if Microsoft don’t change a lot of things I’ll almost certainly be jumping ship to the PS4, or whatever Sony decide to call it.

Xbox Live needs to be free

Charging for an online service was something that Microsoft could get away with for a while – no other consoles were doing a good job of it in the previous generation of consoles, and the PS3 was suffering from poor sales until a few years ago. Microsoft were dominant because they were so much better than the competition.

But now Sony are starting to catch up with basic online functionality and the PlayStation Store occasionally has some good sales on. Xbox Live seems insistent on giving me more stuff that I don’t want – I don’t want Twitter or Facebook on my Xbox, I’ve got a computer for that. No – all I want to do is play my games online. Why should I stick with Microsoft and pay £40 a year for the pleasure when I can get the exact same service on a different system for free?

This also causes problems for customers – I’m a huge fan of the BBC iPlayer and bringing it to the Xbox 360 would be an absolute joy – but it’s not happening because Microsoft would want to charge you for it (which would be illegal for the BBC to do). The PS3 and Nintendo Wii have been enjoying access to iPlayer for yonks. iPlayer on the Xbox probably wouldn’t even cost Microsoft anything – since the content is streamed from the BBC and the app would most likely be developed by the BBC as well. Thanks for nothing, Microsoft.

Ditch the in-dashboard advertisements

This sort of ties in with Xbox Live being a premium service. I’m paying £40 a year for a service that should be free and on top of that Microsoft deems it appropriate to bombard my dashboard with irrelevant advertising. In the last week I’ve seen ads for Lynx and a brand of Margarine.

Advertisements for music, movies and games are fair enough – by all means point out products that I might be interested in, but everything else strikes me as irrelevant (Margarine, really?). I’d be fine with such advertisements if Xbox Live was free, but it isn’t, so I’m not.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen ads like this on the dashboard either – Wired UK editor and chum Nate Lanxon had an almighty whinge about the situation over a year ago and it would seem that things still haven’t changed.

Microsoft points need to be abolished

Does this really need to be explained? Display everything in the users local currency – I’m fed up of looking up how much some DLC costs on the Internet. Just display everything in real money. Simple.

Exclusive games

Each big console manufacturer has exclusive (or first party) titles. These are the heavy hitters – the ones that can be the deciding factor in which console you purchase, and in my honest opinion this is an area where Sony have an enormous advantage: its exclusive titles are generally of a higher quality than those published by Microsoft.

Sure they may be two completely different genres but which would you buy? Peter Molyneux’s bastard child of an RPG or one of the most charming, beloved, and creative platformers of our time? It’s a no brainer. The only “must have” franchises that Microsoft own for me right now are Halo and Gears of War. Halo developer Bungie has gone multiplatform and won’t be making any new Halo games, and you could argue that the PS3′s counterpart to Gears of War is the Uncharted series – so by jumping ship I’m not particularly missing out on anything.

Physical media

We seem to be living in a world that’s pushing digital downloads more than ever – the music industry is doing it, movies are slowly warming to it and with video games it’s already a reality – full games are already sold on services like Steam, Xbox Live, and the PlayStation Network.

Unfortunately digital downloads don’t provide all that many benefits to the customer. Sure you get to play the content “instantly” and it doesn’t take up shelf space, but then I’ve got a degree of patience and am able to wait for the postie to work his magic and as for taking up shelf space then yeah, that’s kind of what shelves are for. While businesses keep pushing for digital downloads I discover just how much I value the real thing.

I like owning my games – rather than a “license”, I like being able to resell them, I like being able to carry a disc around with me to play at a friends house, I like being able to let someone borrow a game from me. Digital downloads let you do none of these things, and for me a console that doesn’t support physical media is a no go – this applies to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo.

Thankfully Sony appears to be in favor of physical media – perhaps learning a harsh lesson from the failure of the PSP Go – but that’s a point in their favour, and with Microsoft claiming that digital downloads are “the future” that’s a mark against them – though I’ll have to wait and see if the next Xbox features a physical media drive or not to be sure.

Reliability issues

Through the course of owning an Xbox 360 I’ve gone through two consoles (I had to send one of those in for repairs too), at least seven headsets, three play and charge kits and three controllers just through normal use. Why is Microsofts hardware so hideously unreliable? I can accept the typical wear and tear but come on – seven headsets?  Throughout the course of my original Xbox I had one headset that lasted me longer – and I only had one controller break on me. I’ve never known of a console to have hardware problems this bad and it puts a serious dent in Microsofts reputation. I’m not paying for its mistakes again.

Of course a lot of this stuff is speculative but right now all of the signs are pushing me to favor Sony – a free online service, reliable hardware, better games, and a more open attitude towards what can go on its platform. If Microsoft doesn’t get its act together then I can’t see myself sticking with its platform come the next generation of consoles – and I’m sure that I’m not the only one.

Review: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit

• Developer: Criterion Games
• Publisher: EA
• Platforms: Xbox 360 (reviewed), PlayStation 3, PC, Wii

Need for Speed has suffered a somewhat troublesome past – with some rather mediocre offerings in the mid 2000′s. You simply have to look at MetaCritic to see how the franchise suffered near the beginning of the console generation. Need for Speed: Shift revived the series back in 2009 but as someone who isn’t particularly interested in racing simulators I was still sat there waiting for the triumphant return of the series.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is that triumphant return I’ve been waiting for.

Hot Putsuit feels very much like a sequel to 2005′s Need for Speed: Most Wanted – a game that had you and a gang of other street racers well, racing. But the twist was that you had to avoid being taken in by the police, who got harder and more faster cars as the game progressed, and I had long considered it to be one of my favourite racing games I’d ever played.

Hot Pursuit is similar to that sans the obnoxious douchebags and excessive green-screening. Hot Pursuit ditches the bloat and simply gives you what you want: a cheap excuse to drive expensive cars really fast. Though this time you get to play as the police as well as street racers – offering a different angle on gameplay by providing you with more objective based gameplay over traditional point a to point b racing.

Hot Pursuit doesn’t make too much of a fuss over any kind of plot or story – all you need to know is that you’re in the fictional racing wonderland of Seacrest County – a huge, open world area ideal for high speed racing – there are moments where it takes itself too seriously or is just flat out strange (why would a car manufacturer want to give a notorious, illegal speed racer a car to test drive?) but it’s never enough to spoil the game. Much of the “plot” is just told through mission briefings in the menus so you don’t even have to pay attention to it.

Playing as a street racer is effectively the same as it was in Most Wanted but with a few improvements. As you progress through the game and level up you gain access to power ups like deployable spike strips, a jammer to put a halt to enemy attacks, an EMP that stuns other drivers and an epic turbo boost should you want to fly ahead of the competition.

The Police get some toys to play with as well – along side the exotic cars that the street racers get, EMP and deployable spike strips the cops also get to call in a road block or a Helicopter to try and put a stop to these street racing mavericks. It adds some depth and strategy to an otherwise excellent and finely tuned arcade racer. Of course – racers can avoid these with precision driving or by taking advantage of the numerous off road shortcuts to avoid any potential hazards.

Controls are responsive and easy to grasp – making Hot Putsuit a great entry point in to the series. The AI of other cars remains challenging throughout the game but never really gets unfair. Usually if you fail to win a race or an event you know that if you just try a little bit harder next time that you can do it better. Of course if you’re not doing so great in the main events of the game then you can always do a free roam of Seacrest County to try and hone your skills.

Or if you’d like you can take things online – all of the progress that you make online and offline is the same – meaning that you can still unlock new cars and power ups by playing with your buddies if going solo isn’t your kind of thing – though it’s worth mentioning that you’ll need EA’s online pass to play, so keep that in mind if you plan on getting Hot Pursuit used.

Hot Pursuit looks beautiful – as you can no doubt tell by the screenshots and video in this article. The game runs at a silky smooth frame rate and the environments look gorgeous – though some times the world around you looks a little lacklustre when you stop to look around while taking a sreenshot – though I suppose that’s something to be expected when you’re blazing past scenery at 200 miles per hour.

Something that I feel is missing from Hot Pursuit is the customisation options that were available back in th’ day. You can change the colour of your car but that’s about it – while Hot Pursuit gets the racing part right there’s a part of me that yearns to be able to do more with what you get – it’d be great to share your creations with your friends online too.

As a whole package Hot Pursuit is a great game – the single player will keep you occupied for weeks or even months and the online suite only adds to that – Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit is simply the best Need for Speed that I’ve played in years.

What the game looks like

Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit in action

The verdict

Good: Huge open world to race in, beautiful graphics, solid and refined controls, challenging AI

Bad: Requires online pass for multi player, little car customisation, environments look a little bland in photo mode

Opinion: Changes that Crysis 2 needs for its retail release

I was fortunate enough to get the original Crysis with the video card of my computer that I custom built way back in 2008. Unfortunately I found the game to be rather boring – with convoluted suit controls getting in the way of an otherwise fine run and gun shooter – playing the game with a 360 pad helped, but after about 3 – 4 hours I got bored and didn’t play it again.

Crysis is used as a benchmarking tool for PC gamers to get to know how good their rigs are. If your computer could run Crysis at the highest settings then you were some kind of Internet god. Crytek – the developers behind the game announced that the games sequel, Crysis 2 would be getting releases on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. “Finally!” I thought. Something that I can benchmark my 360 with!

With the multi player beta released on the Xbox 360 just a few days ago I decided to give it a spin – and indeed my complaints about control issues seem to have been addressed (well – partially, I’ll get on to that later). The graphics look gorgeous even if they take a noticeable hit on the Xbox compared to a high end PC – though there’s still a lot that I can criticise. With this being a beta I decided that I’d write down what needs fixing come the games March 25th release.

Proximity Alarm perk needs to go

Crysis 2 – like every other FPS game on the planet uses an EXP system to rank players – giving them points that they can spend on new weapons and perks as they go, Call of Duty style. This is fine – though one perk in particular, Proximity Alarm should be ditched.

Reason being that this perk has a chance of promoting camping when everyone discovers what it does. Given the close quarters nature of the multiplayer map in the beta and that you can turn invisible at will (more on that in a bit) makes giving people a warning alarm for when an enemy gets close a potential game breaker. Why walk around and get myself killed when I can just hide in a corner with my shotgun and wait for my alarm to go off?

Cloak needs nerfing

Using your armour powers is a big part of the core gameplay with Crysis 2 – somewhat akin to the armour abilities found in Halo: Reach. Hitting the left bumper hardens your armour – allowing you to absorb more hits at the expense of movement speed. Hitting the right bumper lets you turn invisible – useful for moving through open ground or sneaking behind enemy lines without being seen.

The problem is that this doesn’t seem to have any kind of disadvantage – which can make it difficult to distinguish invisible enemies from the scenery – and can at times make camping problematic as enemies simply hide in corners without any real warning signs to the player.

Taking a page from Halo: Reach – it may be best to make it jam a players radar, or perhaps have it slightly impair the players vision – simply so that it provides the user with an advantage that’s not too overwhelming. Nobody wants to play a game that just involves people hiding in corners.

Clunky movement controls

As far as where the buttons are mapped on the controller Crysis 2 is perfect – but the movement speed of your character feels clunky and sluggish – certainly not as rapid and responsive as you’d expect from a super soldier. I don’t really need to go in to great detail about this: movement controls need to be more responsive – and slightly faster player movement wouldn’t go amiss either.

Melee needs to be toned down

In a first person shooter melee should always be a last resort at close quarters – but in Crysis 2 it feels like every enemy encounter finishes up with a melee. People use cloak and sneak up on people because the melee is an instant kill, people will storm through hails of bullets to melee you. Even the almighty shotgun is sometimes bested by a smack to the face – in a game about shooting people this isn’t the way forward.

The range that you can melee someone by needs to be seriously reduced – as does the power of the melee. Make it a one hit kill from behind, but a two hit kill from any other side.

The killcam is… erratic at best

Much like the fabled Call of Duty series Crysis 2 shows you how you died from the perspective of the person who killed you – or at least that was the plan. Sometimes the killcam will give me a third person view of myself as I died, others it’ll glitch underneath the map, and in rare cases it’ll actually work.

The killcam also seems to lie about player positions during playback. Sometimes you’ll find that your character is in the wrong place, or that the person who killed you flat out missed all of his shots and still some how killed you. Problem with collision detection or just lag? Either way it needs to be addressed.

Connection issues need to be resolved

This is a beta and I have no doubts that this issue will be resolved – but waiting in a lobby for several minutes only to have the connection randomly cut out on you when the match starts isn’t cool.

In its current state Crysis 2 is looking promising – provided that Crytek can sort out some of the big issues with the multiplayer then Crysis 2 definitely has the potential to be one of the multi player greats of 2011. Here’s hoping that all goes well for the 25th March!

Opinion: Pokémon Ruby – the best Pokémon game?

Pokémon could probably be the series that I could credit with introducing me to video games – or at least is certainly one of the first series’ of games that I started following. It started off with Pokémon Gold (though I had played Red, Yellow and Crystal on my cousins GameBoy Colour).

Of course I was super excited for Pokémon Ruby and its counterpart, Sapphire. I had owned a GameBoy Advance for some time but I was always stuck playing Pokémon Gold on it – with a very small amount of GBA games for it. Pokémon Ruby possibly represents the biggest leap forward that the Pokémon series took, and here are my reasons for why it might be the best one out of the lot:

It’s in colour! (Also sprites > 3D)

Technically speaking the previous Pokémon games were too, but lets be honest – things didn’t exactly look great back on the GameBoy Colour. Ruby and Sapphire took advantage of the extra hardware and really fleshed out the game world – there were even neat little effects like reflections in the water, and environmental effects like rain and sandstorms.

I’m of the belief that the sprites used in the GameBoy Advance games look better than the 3D effects in the games on the DS. The DS simply doesn’t do 3D very well and ages badly. Sprites on the other hand generally age quite well. Look at the screenshot above for example – Pokémon Ruby was released way back in 2003 and it still looks great. The 3D models on the upcoming Pokémon Black and White? Not so much.

Hoenn is just fun to explore

Every new major instalment in the Pokémon series takes place in a new region – Pokémon Ruby introduces gamers to Hoenn – the biggest area that we could explore at that date and was just a joy to explore.

Again this is mostly in part of the huge boost that the GameBoy Advance brought us – Game Freak really went to town to flesh out the environments and have crafted a fun world to explore with a wide variety of environments. From sandy beaches, to lush rainforests, urban metropolises, a desert and a floating city – exploring Heonn for the first time was an exciting prospect because you didn’t really know what to expect next.

In many ways I think that the forth generation of Pokémon games overcomplicated things. In Diamond and Pearl we had to contend with areas covered by fog that impacted the accuracy of your Pokémon – often turning battles in to a chore (yeah – apparently creatures that can breathe fire and shoot electricity can’t see through some fog). And do we really need to have a bazillion different HM moves just to get from A to B? Ruby and Sapphire found the sweet spot by giving us a huge, expansive world to explore without getting too carried away.

2 vs 2 battles

I can fight with two Pokémon at once now? Mind = blown.

But in all seriousness – this wasn’t just some cheap gimmick, it changed the way that the game could be played – especially when fighting another real human player. Being able to fight with two Pokémon at once opened up new avenues for battle strategies, trying to find two Pokémon that could complement each other properly, using attacks that could work well together, it really added some extra depth to the same old battle system that gamers had been used to for the last couple of games – it’s just a shame that this couldn’t have been more fleshed out until the arrival of the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection on the Nintendo DS with the next games in the series.

Secret bases

Secret bases were cool additions to Ruby and Sapphire that didn’t make it in to the later games – at least not in a way that I would have liked. With a secret base you could fine a tree or a cave to discover an area that you could decorate. Though this seems superficial it actually has an additional purpose when you mixed records with other players.

Record mixing allowed players to swap data – integrating another players actions in to your own. For example – TV shows would start to tell stories about the people who you’ve mixed records with. My favourite feature of record mixing was that it saved your friends secret base in to your game that you could visit – and you could even battle your friend “offline” with the Pokémon that they had on them at the time.

Due to the lack of secret bases in the future games, this is something that Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, Heart Gold, and Soul Silver didn’t have – a shame, since this was a good way to gain EXP for your Pokémon more easily without having to resort to excessive grinding.

Pokémon abilities

Another small and seemingly minuscule addition but one that actually provided some neat effects were Pokémon abilities – typically unique among a particular species. Some Pokémon would pick up items as you went along, some would gain boosts to their stats under certain conditions, or some Pokémon would become immune to a particular type of attack. A small change – but one that changed the game both in and outside of battles.

Pokémon before they looked stupid

I consider the third generation of Pokémon to be the final set of Pokémon that were released that were well designed – providing us with a wide variety of new Pokémon with various new abilities and strong designs. It was after this time in which we started to get ridiculous designs that demonstrate that Nintendo is simply running out of ideas. Nintendo need to spend more time investigating new avenues of gameplay instead of just saying “Here’s 649 [yes, there really are that many now] Pokémon. Gotta catch ‘em all right?” Surely we have enough now?

Of course these are simply my thoughts on the matter – and I’m aware that some old school Pokémon fans can be fanatical about Red and Blue being the best of the bunch – though I’d have to disagree given that you can’t even rematch other trainers in the game – I’m of the personal belief that Ruby and Sapphire have made the biggest leap forward for the series since the original games.

It’s also worth pointing out that I’m not here to put down the other games in the Pokémon series – I place a great deal of sentimental value on Pokémon Gold given that it was a childhood favourite – and for what its worth Pokémon Platinum was a great deal of fun to play as well. Here’s hoping that the future Pokémon Black and White can be just as fun as the previous games in the series!

Review: Monday Night Combat

The Xbox Live Arcade is still an area that’s a bit hit and miss for me – games released on the platform are always on the opposite ends of the spectrum for me: a game can either be amazing (See: Battlefield 1943, Geometry Wars 2, and Scott Pilgrim vs The World). But at the same time I find that all too often I find myself regretting my non-refundable purchase just a few hours after buying (See: Splosion Man, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, Tutles in Time: Reshelled, and even Shadow Complex).

This makes it incredibly hard for me to commit to purchasing an Arcade title these days, I’ve learned through the years of owning an Xbox 360 that quite often the demos for Arcade games often just leave you playing the best bits of the game. It’s with great relief then, that Monday Night Combat isn’t one of these regrettable purchases.

Released back in the Summer of 2010, Monday Night Combat is third person shooter meets tower defence meets Team Fortress 2 – which seems to have caused a great deal of unfounded controversy. Sure – it’s obvious that Monday Night Combat borrows its cartoony art style from Team Fortress 2 but that’s where most of the similarities end. Dismissing Monday Night Combat based on the art style would be a huge mistake to make.

Monday Night Combat pits two teams against each other: the Hotshots and the Icemen (essentially red vs blue) in some kind of futuristic bloodsport – I’d love to go in to more detail, but Monday Night Combat is strictly a multi player only affair without any single player. The objective of each game is simple: destroy the other teams money ball. To do this you’ll have to escort your bots over to the enemy base – as they’re the only ones that can destroy the money ball shields. Once they’ve done that you can let loose until it’s destroyed.

Bots spawn automatically every couple of seconds – or you can increase your number of bots by spawning some of your own. Each class in the game; Assaults, Assassins, Gunners, Snipers, Supports and Tanks each have their own special type of bots to spawn.  Of course you’ll need to defend your own base against enemy attacks too, so you can build turrets in certain areas to slow down the enemy attack.

This combination of fast paced combat and tower defence gives Monday Night Combat a unique style of gameplay over pretty much every other game available on Xbox Live. The classes are well balanced against each other and the levels are well designed. Everything in Monday Night Combat feels like a tight and refined multi player experience. The design of the maps can sometimes make spawn camping a problem, though this seems to be a rare occurrence (a well organised team attacking your money ball with often try to prevent you from leaving the spawn area).

It’s unfortunate that the high level of level and class refinements appears to have come at the cost of content – there’s only four maps (with an extra one available as free DLC) and there’s no single player part to Monday Night Combat – which is an even bigger shame than the lack of maps. All of that life and personality that’s in the trailers? Very little of that makes its way in to the actual game. Even just a few bot matches with some cinematics in between them all would have been a welcome addition. There’s a co-operative mode where you can fight off several waves of robots, but with only a single map to choose from the experience can get a little old.

Regardless of this Monday Night Combat is simply fun to play – even in matches when I’m losing I’m still enjoying myself, which is refreshing in a shooter, where losing often means that you’re subjected to several minutes of unbearable arse kickery. Monday Night Combat should be a definite buy for fans of competitive shooters – especially if you like Team Fortress 2.

What the game looks like

Monday Night Combat in action

The verdict

Good: Refined and well balanced gameplay, fun character personalities, unique blend of third person shooter and tower defence gameplay

Bad: No single player, lack of maps and game modes, spawn camping can be problematic at times

Review: Battlefield Bad Company 2: Vietnam

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 ranks as one of my favourite games of last year with its epic 24 player multiplayer on an assortment of huge multiplayer maps to fight it out on. I was both excited and impressed by the return of Oasis and Harvest Day from the original Bad Company in the seventh map pack for Bad Company 2.

Last month saw the release of the Vietnam expansion pack for Bad Company 2 – giving gamers a plethora of new content: 5 new maps, a bunch of new weapons and some new vehicles with a different setting. Getting Vietnam seemed like a natural purchase for me. I loved Bad Company 2 – so I’m bound to love more of it, right?

First things first: I’ll give Vietnam its dues. It’s an expansion pack with high production values, rather than just being tacked on – new weapons and vehicles feel like they’d fit in to Bad Company 2 just fine, most of the usual perks are here, Destruction 2.0 is still around and there’s some nice introduction videos while you’re waiting for a level to load. This is by no means a half arsed effort.

So what’s wrong with the Vietnam pack then? Almost everything else: my main grievances come with the level design. Every map in Vietnam is plagued by other players camping in the large bushes or hiding around corners. Contrary to popular belief, being killed by some douchebag who’s hiding in a bush waiting for someone to walk past isn’t fun.

Cool hiding spot bro.

And that’s ultimately what Vietnam is: camping. After a couples of games I found myself tired and frustrated at the people playing the game. I’d even go as far as to say that camping in Call of Duty: Black Ops isn’t as rampant – and to find your shooter in that situation is a grim thing indeed. At least in Black Ops I can feel like a badass by diving through windows.

Another problem with player behaviour is that if someone isn’t camping then they’re most probably waiting in the base waiting for a Tank or a Helicopter to respawn. Waiting for the latter is of particular confusion to me because the Helicopter is simply awful.

Yes, the Helicopter has miniguns and rockets – but at most I’ve seen the Helicopter fly in the air for about 30 seconds before being shot down – if even that. The Helicopter can be taken down so easily with Light Machine Guns that it’s a totally worthless asset. Oh boy! Who wants to get in to the flying death machine?! Lots of people, apparently.

After deciding that I was done with Vietnam I decided to play some good old regular Bad Company 2 – some Rush on Harvest Day to be precise and I had a blast. Huge, wide open battlefields, fighting off what feels like an army of tanks, close, intense infantry combat. My team lost the game, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t have fun. Why spend 1200 Microsoft Points on a campers paradise when you can have much more fun out of what we’ve already got? If you’re really itching to spend some cash, then I’d instead recommend getting Monday Night Combat (Which I’ll be reviewing shortly – but rest assured it’s awesome).

What the game looks like

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 in action

The verdict

Good: High production values, good value for money if you can stomach it

Bad: Camping runs rampant, vehicles are almost worthless, regular Bad Company 2 is better

Opinion: The faults of Fable 3

Peter Molyneux is somewhat notorious for being known as the “used car salesman” of the video games industry; promising so much and yet delivering very little. He’s a man with good ideas but not the person who you want to execute them. Case in point: Fable 3.

Unlike many of my gaming brethren I actually enjoyed the previous game in the series, Fable 2. I enjoyed it enough to play through it several times and I even bought the DLC for it. It wasn’t the most technologically advanced game out there, it wasn’t the most engaging either – but I appreciated its odd sense of humour, and the appearance of the game world changing depending on the decisions that you made throughout encouraged me to play through enough to try and see everything that it had to offer.

It is with great disappointment then, that I found myself bored with Fable 3 after only a couple of hours of play. Though I stuck around to finish its modest 15 hour story I couldn’t help but feel that a lot of things that made Fable 2 good are missing from the third instalment.

Moral choices

Making moral decisions has always been a big part of the Fable formula – though the choices that you make are always very clear as to whether they’re good or evil actions. The great thing about Fable 2 were the choices you could make in the different stages of your life. The decisions you made as a child effected Bowerstone Old Town, and throughout your adulthood the rest of Albion would change depending on decisions that you made.

Fable 3 has this, sure – but the only substantial choices that you make are in the last 2 – 3 hours of gameplay when you’re the King/Queen, which means that the other 13 hours of gameplay lack anything interesting to do. Why is the biggest appeal to the Fable franchise resigned to the last few hours of gameplay?

Hold B to kill everything on screen

Fable has never really had any remarkable depth to its combat. Press X to use your sword, Y to use your gun, or press B to cast a spell. The problem? You could probably play through the entire game using only your magic.

Sure, you’d probably have to buy a couple of health potions (lets face it, money isn’t exactly difficult to come by), but it’s better than being surrounded and mobbed by Hollowmen. Near the end of the game I certainly found myself just sitting there, holding B for a few seconds and wiping out everything on screen. Badass? Yes. Fun? Not really.

No continuity

In Fable 3 you play as the son/daughter of the character that you played as in Fable 2, which implies that the events of Fable 2 couldn’t have happened that long ago in the Fable timeline – but none of the actions that you perform in Fable 2 really effect the world in the sequel.

With the Fable series relying so much on moral decisions it seems stupid that the series doesn’t implement a feature that reads your saved game for Fable 2. It could be interesting to see how the moral decisions that you made in Fable 2 effect the world in Fable 3 but that doesn’t seem to be here. Instead, Fable 3 seems to assume that you played through as a good guy.

Evil guy turns out to be not so evil

Note: This section contains spoilers.

If you’ve been keeping up with information on Fable 3 then you’ll know that your brother in the game is the King of Albion, and is running the country as a tyrant. It’s obvious that he’s bad news: he forces children to work, publicly executes civilians and just generally runs the place as a dictatorship. Heck, from the video above alone you can tell that he’s evil.

Oh but it’s okay, he’s not really evil – he’s just doing it all for the greater good. Threatening to burn down cities and forcing his people to live in poverty and starvation? Yeah don’t worry about that – he’s a nice guy really.

You hated those jobs in Fable 2? Well here’s some more!

Nobody, and I mean nobody liked the jobs that you did in Fable 2. They were universally despised – so why bring them back as glorified quick time events? Also on the topic of stupid jobs…

Holding hands is stupid

Okay, so in some situations holding hands isn’t stupid – but there are times when it is. Example? Catching criminals.

In Fable 2 a town guard would ask you if you want to go and bring down a criminal – usually involving you going on a quest to go and kill some bandits. In Fable 3 you run off to some part of town and… hold the criminals hand?! I can appreciate that Fable has an element of humour to it but this is just stupid.

You get to run the country as you want to

Note: This section contains spoilers.

Except that you don’t. Not properly, at least.

Becoming king or queen of a country and making decisions on education, taxes and the general well being of the country is something that you don’t see every day and it’s a nice idea. Problem? It’s poorly implemented.

As you go through your rise to power you discover that Albion is about to be attacked by an evil creature known as The Crawler and his army. You have a year to raise as much money as you possibly can in preparation for the attack – otherwise everyone in the kingdom will die.

Playing as a good guy will give everyone a high quality of life, but it gets everyone killed, whereas playing as the Tyrant will allow everyone to live at the cost of child labour, poverty and starvation. The problem with Fable 3 is that it assumes that the only way that you can raise money is by becoming a Tyrant. Of course you can donate your own Gold, but it barely makes a difference to the amount of debt that you can accumulate as a good player.

Why can’t you create shops and stalls that are owned by the crown and have the proceeds go to the treasury? In addition to this there seriously needs to be more than just two fetch quests for items that you can sell. Why not let people hire themselves out as bounty hunters? The whole king/queen aspect of the game isn’t as good as it should be.

There are of course a lot of improvements over Fable 2 – you no longer have to hold the right trigger to gain experience after fighting enemies and co-operative play is much better now – but Fable 3 still falls short of what it should be.

Top 5: Best games of 2010

2010 has been somewhat of a roller-coaster ride for gaming – at the end of 2009 I was raving about how 2010 was going to be a great year for gaming – and while the year doesn’t go by without some disappointments we also need to recognise the great games of the year – and this is where I do it.

5 – Blur

Kart racers like Mario Kart are awesome. Arcade racers like Need for Speed or Burnout are awesome. What do you get when you combine the two? MOAR AWESOME.

Easily my favourite racing game of the year, Blur gives us the power-ups that you expect from a Kart racer with the look and feel of an arcade racer. The power-ups in themselves aren’t particularly revolutionary – mostly borrowing ideas from games like Mario Kart but it feels a lot more refined to allow for more skill-based gameplay.

For example: in Mario Kart you’ve got that blue Spiny Turtle Shell that ruins everyones fun – in Blur you can place three EMP fields in front of the guy in first place – it gives the players who aren’t doing so well a chance, but also allows the guy in first place to avoid them if they’re good enough. Skill based gameplay, we likes it.

Easily approachable to casual players but deep enough to create a large skill gap. Blur is one of the few games that is still fun even if you’re not doing so well – it’s just shame that the future of the games developers isn’t looking good.

Check out my review of Blur on wired.co.uk

4 – Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is my favourite adversarial multiplayer game this year – it’s simply kept me coming back for more. The games single player can get a little tedious over time but the games strength is in its adversarial multiplayer. 24 players, tanks, helicopters and lots of explosions result in an incredibly immersive multiplayer experience.

Bad Company 2 rewards players for working as a team – and is well worth looking in to if you have a few buddies who like to play together. Granted, Bad Company 2 contains a few cheap tactics, like camping on the lighthouse in Valparaiso or hiding around corners with shotguns – though most of these tactics can be overcome by simply destroying the building that your foe is hiding in. Yes – Bad Company 2 lets you destroy buildings. Call of what?

Check out my review of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on wired.co.uk

3 – Halo: Reach

In 2007 we finished the fight – but it turned out that there was a little bit more fighting to be had in Halo: Reach – a prequel to the first Halo game. Reach would have us fight a losing battle against The Covenant on a planet called, well – Reach (which is a rather odd choice of name for a planet planet if we’re honest).

As a competitive multiplayer game Reach had some appeal for a few months – but I mainly enjoy Reach as a co-operative experience these days. Co-operative campaign with four players is a blast – and the games Firefight survival mode can make for some great blastin’ and relaxin’ too.

And Reach is a generous package too – you get a decent length campaign, firefight, competitive multiplayer, a map maker, a theatre mode and online stats tracking that’s miles ahead of the competition. It’ll certainly be interesting to see what Bungie do next.

Halo: Reach is also home to one of the greatest gaming innovations of our time: being able to drive forklifts!

Check out my review of Halo: Reach on wired.co.uk

2 – Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

It’s amazing to think of how far Assassin’s Creed has come in a relatively short space of time. The original game was plagued with overly suspicious guards and frustrating horse sections – Assassin’s Creed 2 fixed most of these issues last year and brought us to Italy.

I was mildly worries about Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – a new game released only a year after the previous? What seemed worse at the time was that Ubisoft were focussing on the multiplayer rather than the excellent single player offerings of the previous games in the series.

It seemed that my concerns were rather misplaced – not only does Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood have a single player that’s arguably as good as those in previous games, it also has a surprisingly good multiplayer offering. All this within the space of a year? Impressive stuff – there’s a lot to do in Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

1 – Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2 gets the top spot this year without question. The surprising part? A year ago I didn’t care about the Mass Effect series. Now I’ve put over 150 hours in to Mass Effect 2 – played it six times, bought all of the DLC and am currently salivating at the mouth for Mass Effect 3.

Mass Effect 2 does almost everything right. Solid voice acting, good writing (a rarity in the games industry), interesting characters, interesting alien species’, beautiful graphics, and about a million different ways to play through the game. Mass Effect 2 is a game that’s so good my vocabulary fails it.

Mass Effect 2 is unique in that your actions from the first game carry over in to it – and your actions in Mass Effect 2 will transfer over in to Mass Effect 3. That gives the game an incredible amount of consistency – and it also means that the moral (and sometimes tactical) decisions that you make actually have some weight. Mass Effect 2 comes out on PS3 next month – if you own a PS3 and you haven’t had the chance to play then you owe it to yourself to pick it up.