Origins Schmorigins

While I'm far more Marvel than DC, Batman has always been one of my favourite superheroes. He's miserable and kinda messed up and reacts to the death of his parents by playing weird vigilante dress up. And he's not even really a superhero, he's just rich and smart and angry.

I enjoyed the old campy TV show, and the stylised Tim Burton movies and the gritty Christopher Nolan movies. I even enjoyed Arnie as Mr Freeze and George Clooney having a batsuit with nipples. I've only read a couple of the comics (I generally stick with non-superhero comics like Hellblazer and Preacher. All right, they're kind of superheroes, but not in the traditional sense.) but I liked those too. So it's no real surprise, that while I wasn't desperate to own Arkham Asylum, I got it eventually.

And it blew me away. I loved everything about it. Punching bad guys in the face, or creeping around in the shadows, sniggering as they lose their shit in fear. Scanning for the solution to riddles and finally managing to line up that elusive dot with the familiar question mark. Running into old favourite enemies and getting to know new ones. (I'd never encountered Zsasz before, but thoroughly enjoyed being creeped out by his increasingly deranged voicemail messages.)

So when Arkham City came around and it was billed as bigger and better AND YOU GOT TO PLAY AS CATWOMAN!!! I was mega-excited. I built it up in my mind to be the best thing evar in all the world. So it was kinda obvious I was heading for disappointment. I found the story somewhat below par (although I was impressed by the ending) as it appeared overstuffed with bad guys (within the first couple of hours, it's possible to encounter Penguin, Joker, Harley Quinn, Mr Freeze, Two Face, Black Mask, Hugo Strange and Ra's al Ghul) and the lack of sympathetic characters to speak to left me wondering what I was fighting for. Arkham Asylum managed to convey a sense of putting things to rights, whereas Arkham City felt too far gone for redemption.

However, on a second playthrough, there was more to appreciate. Catwoman's sections really are great, and playing someone more morally ambiguous brings a much-needed change in tone to the relentless bad guy encounters. (I tried to find a bad Catwoman cosplay to illustrate this point, but all Catwoman cosplayers are total badasses. There really were no bad ones. So look at Anne Hathaway instead.)

The sidequests and the stories they tell are actually far more compelling than the main storyline. The softer side of Mr Freeze conveyed in his side mission leaves you feeling like Batman's actually been kind of a shit to that guy all along. The Identity Theft killer is about as dark as Batman gets, and the desire to give Ellis what's coming to him (a desire that is denied) is overwhelming. Following Azrael around the city, at first intensely irritating, gradually becomes more and more intriguing, until his final enigmatic words. It was these stories that left me really wanting more. The Joker's demise had really opened things up, Crane's bits and bobs lying around indicated that the Scarecrow was going to be the next big baddie, and although I was hugely infuriated by some of his segments in Asylum, I also found them to be some of the best in the game. And that's before you even get on to finding out what Azrael was on about and giving Ellis a good kicking for being a weird face-slicing little nutbag.

Lion-o hasn't aged well

But then, it happens. First, the news Rocksteady won't be taking the reins with the third Arkham installment, instead offering advice to WB Montreal as they assume creative control. They don't seem very experienced, having only made a Scooby Doo game and Lego Legends of Chima, which seems to me to be a blatant Thundercats ripoff, but Rocksteady were unknown when they got Arkham Asylum, so it's not a big deal. Okay, okay, I can get over that.

But then it all comes out. Arkham 3 is going to be an Origin story. Another bloody origin story. I'm sick of origin stories. I don't want to see heroes all weak and bumbling and pre-heroic, I want to see them kicking ass and taking names. I'm fed up of the Joker. We get a reprieve from Mark Hamill this time around (I am not a fan of his work) but he'll still be wisecracking and doing that laugh that sounds like he needs to clear his throat and being overly familiar. Oh, Bats again, is it? How do you like Jokes? How's that for a nickname? How about I call you Clowny JJ? Jo Jo the Clownface Boy? Little Joey Jokepants? Don't like that do you? No. So shut up.

There's also the stuff that doesn't make sense. Like how come, when he first started out, Batman's level of crime scene analysis was far more sophisticated than it is now? Did he just get jaded and think; "Yeah, this utilising hologramatic projections of crimes is too much like hard work. I'll just stick with plain ol' detective vision. What's a few people's lives and escaped criminals when compared to the effort of  having to use technology that takes seconds and improves my chances?"

Hopefully Arkham Origins will prove me wrong and be something so amazing I'll overlook that annoying inconsistency and be waiting desperately for part four. As long as it's not another FFXIII, we're good.

Acknowedgementy bit

Why Do You Hate Me, EA Sports Active 2 Personal Trainer, WHY?!

Mario, you smug prick.

It's no big secret that I don't like exercise. I was picked last for everything in PE at school and rightly so. I was more likely to score an own goal or incapacitate a member of my own team, due to a mixture of extreme inadequacy combined with a pathologically short attention span and a determined lack of enthusiasm for any sport that didn't involve a horse.

I'm one of those trick thin people, where I don't actually have any muscle and all the muscle I appear to have is actually cunningly constructed out of fat. Because of this, and my love for all chocolate and cheese-based foodstuffs, my beloved frequently worries for my health. He knows that while I'll consider 8 hours of tactically sniping aliens time well spent, I begrudge spending even 20 minutes doing exercise. (Unless a horse is involved, obv.) So he got smart, that wiley Northerner, and bought EA Sports Active 2.

Shut up.

At first glance, this is just one step up from a workout DVD. A chirpy fuckwit orders you around,
cheerily giving pointers to help you be the you you know you can be, or some other barely coherent motivational bullshit. You sweat, and you strain, and you get out of breath and at the end of it nothing's different except you hate the instructor even more than you hate yourself.

But then it throws in gamey stuff. There's trophies for things like burning more calories, or completing 2 hours of exercise, or trying one of each exercise type. The leg and arm bands it makes you wear monitor your heart rate and how well you recover compared to last time and plots it into a little chart, encouraging you to beat your last score. You can construct your own workouts with the handy tools and then get rewards for completing them.

And EA have done something really clever, though possibly unintentional, with their trainer. Rather than being comforting and encouraging, she's actually a patronising cow. Her praise ("I know you worked hard for that!") is just as infuriating as her taunts ("C'mon, you're going to have to run faster than that to keep up with me.") Even as I find myself in a sweaty heap on the floor, illogically waving the leg monitor in front of the TV so she can see it and screaming "I DID COMPLETE THE REP!!! I COMPLETED THE REP YOU BITCH!!!" I know I'll still do another workout on my next training day, because I don't want to give that pissy little cow the satisfaction of being able to say; "It seems like you missed a few workouts... never mind, I'm sure you'll catch up."

I might've known.

Acknowledgements

Freeze and Burn - Just Cause 2

I'm not sure how I feel about demos. Jesse Schell recently suggested that demos negatively affect sales. In my experience, they have had close to zero effect on my purchasing choices. I hated the Mass Effect 2 demo so vehemently, I vowed never to buy the game. Bioware inexplicably chose a mission in which pretty much nothing happens, and it also froze my PS3 several times before I managed a complete playthrough. Fortunately, my dear husband forgot [zoned out] my moaning and bought it for me anyway, and it's now one of my favourite games of all time.
The Heavy Rain demo took 12 hours to download on my shitty internet connection and confirmed what I already knew to be the case - that it felt like a playable movie, wouldn't be for everyone and that David Cage could probably make a game where you shoot puppies in the face for nine hours and I'd buy it because I'm a pathetic slave to Quantic Dream.
Enslaved was a great demo and I WILL buy it some day, and probably would have with or without the demo anyway as it's beautiful and story driven. In fact, the only reason I say close to zero rather than zero is Just Cause 2. This demo froze my PS3 repeatedly too, but there was no way I was gonna let that put me off buying it...

I never played the original, and I'm guessing it doesn't matter. Here is a game that really doesn't look like something I'd usually play. The story's a thin excuse for blowing shit up. The main character is a sleazy South American stereotype who swaggers around in a leather vest with a scorpion on it. The women look tough, but they all need Scorpio (Oh didn't I mention that? Yeah, his nickname's Scorpio. So he wears a scorpion jacket. Or maybe it's because of the scorpion jacket. As I say, didn't play the first one where this vital plot point will obviously have been explained...) to blow shit up for them, and call him their hero when he does. His main ally is an irritating Texan gasbag who likes anagrams, because the developers have mistakenly thought including this only mildly relevant fact would inject him with some much needed personality. The game is so packed full of stereotypes, it's like a Conservative Party handbook on racial profiling. The 'Panauans' (The game takes place on the fictional island of Panau) manage to be offensive to Koreans, Russians, Indians, French and Malaysians via an assortment of awful voice acting, terrible accents and cliched wardrobe decisions. In fact, some accents were so bad, I couldn't even identify the intended country of origin. I *think* there may have been an English guy and a German bloke in there, but I really have no idea. I expect the final showdown with Kim Jong Il... I mean... Pandak Panay will involve trying to kick him over a balcony while he sings 'I'm So Ronery.'

BUT

The game is so fun! It's a simple thing that a lot of developers (and yes, my hero Cage is also guilty of this) sometimes allow to fall by the wayside in favour of being emotionally affecting or demonstrating groundbreaking new development techniques.
Just Cause 2's determined ignorance of physics becomes endearing (although also dizzying) as you zing around with your grappling hook, pulling down statues of Panay and blowing up state owned petrol stations because reasons. Hearing the guards yell "Catch him laaaaaaaaaa!" is as funny as it is embarrassingly crass and stupid. Just Cause 2 allows you to be a spy in the most ludicrous, bombastic manner, racing speedboats, riding motorbikes off cliffs and then parachuting to safety, hijacking helicopters in midair and setting charges in munitions factory chimneys before basejumping clear as it detonates. I could literally do all that all day long.

Yep, that pretty much covers it

Acknowledgements and Stuff

Skip to the End

Okay, so I gave in. Final Fantasy obviously didn't WANT me to finish it, or it wouldn't have been so goddamn tedious. I watched an ending video on Youtube to make sure I wasn't missing anything. It didn't make a whole lotta sense. I googled 'FF13 ending' and there are a whole host of forum discussions about what it all means. What I took it to mean is; the writers couldn't write for shit.

Cieth Fang - bringing sexy back

To cut a (ridiculously, unnecessarily) long story short, Fang goes Cieth and wrecks the place up, everyone else kills a Falcie, Cocoon turns to crystal and everyone from Cocoon, including people who were previously dead or crystallised, turn up on Pulse and all live happily ever after because presumably the massive killer creatures that dogged the party's steps for the entire game are no longer an issue. So, that would have been worth playing 80 hours for, right? Mmm. So sad to see a franchise die on its arse like that. No wonder part 2's down to £10 in Grainger already.

Should've seen it coming though. All the clues for abysmal storytelling were there pretty early on:

1. Sazh is a Danny Glover analogue

He even says, repeatedly, "I'm getting too old for this."

2. Brand placement

This guy made good life choices

Positioning of female's brands: Fang - arm, Vanille -upper thigh, Lightning - tit.
Positioning of male's brands: Hope - wrist, Sazh - collar bone, Snow . . . wrist. So, the writers could picture three body parts on ladies, two of which are rather saucy. And on men . . . two. I'm not saying they had to give Snow a scrotal tat or anything (although that would have evened things up a bit) but am I alone in wanting a big ugly brand right across Hope's pretty little face? Just think it could've added another dimension to his character is all. Giving him a healthy 2 dimensions.

3. They couldn't think of more than 4 vehicles...

In my version, he's called Grunzolo

So, the Eidolons are all transformers right? And all those transformers are based on modes of transport? The Shiva twins are a motorbike, Odin's a horse, Brynhildr's a midlife crisis car, Bahamut's a dragon/jet. But Hecatoncheir and Alexander? Let's leave their shitty names to one side, and consider that Hecaton is a ride-on gun, and Alexander is a walking castle. WTF? I can think of at least five things they could've been that would've been cooler and made more sense within the context of the other Eidolons. For a start, by settling on one or the other for Bahamut, they could've left themselves with a dragon or a jet. Then they've still got: griffon, tank, helicopter, truck, dinosaur, and that's without really going into fantasy vehicles, spaceships and animals. But nope, FF13's writers went to 'Castle' before they went to T-Rex. And I know a lot was made of Alexander representing Hope's desire for safety and stability, but if he couldn't feel safe riding a robot T-Rex then the kid's a fucking asshole.

So now, it's on to Just Cause 2, which is proving to be just the fast-moving, mindless antidote I needed to all this pseudo-deep shit. Round up on that in the next installment.

Equus Ferus Computerus

So, I'm still doggedly plodding through FFXIII. Just got to the top of Taejin's Tower and am now thoroughly stuck on Dahaka. Can't remember him being a problem last time, so I'm not sure where I went wrong on this playthrough. Forums are filled with helpful tips like 'Use Saboteurs to debuff and then heal when he harms you.' Oh, really? Because I was just feeding him cakes and holding the controller in my feet.

So, too bitter to blog about that, I thought I'd instead do a companion piece to the 4 Worst Horses in Games and bring you:

The 4 Best Horses in Games

1. Odin

My, what a big gun you have!

When I was a kid, I didn't have the usual crushes. Unlike my sisters, my choice of future husband wasn't Marky Mark or one of New Kids On the Block. Nope, for me it was a toss up between Adam Ant and Thirty Thirty from Brave Starr. For some of you, this may come as no surprise. Therefore, I guess it was obvious I'd love that other robotic man-horse, Odin. Not in a sexy way though. Thirty-Thirty's the only transforming equine mechanoid for me.

2. Ixion

Sticking with FF then, we have Ixion. As all craft aficionados know, the way to make anything cooler, is to put a bird on it. Games designers and fantasy writers follow a similar rule. Put a horn on it. If something usually has no horns, give it one. If it normally has two, give it four. Three horns? Put six on that bad boy. Good job nothing in nature has five horns. That would be getting crazy. Anyway, it's true Ixion looks kind of like a poodle with 'roid rage, but the guy shoots lightning out of his massive sickle shaped horn. What more do you want? I need to stop saying the word horn now.

3. Ponyta/Rapidash

Okay, so Ponyta (and his evolved form Rapidash) isn't my favourite Pokemon. That honor goes to Bulbasaur, who was doing the whole "My name is the only thing I say" thing waaaaay before Hodor. (I know, lots of the Pokemon do that, shut up.) But the other rule of game design is put flames on things. Flaming sword, flaming armour, flaming charity kitten. Rapidash follows both rules. Already had flames, so the only room for improvement? Horn.

4. Ruin

Ruin is actually my favourite game horse of all time. He turned up in Darksiders at a point where Mark Hamill's shitty acting as The Watcher had me on the verge of embedding my controller in the TV. Winning Ruin's trust is a brilliant and exhilarating part of the game. He brings in some much needed camaraderie and can be employed to devastating effect against enemies. He's fast, he's smart, he has flaming hooves. Horn? Ruin don't need no horn. He's got an armoured saddle with skulls on.

Acknowledgements

Are We Nearly There Yet?

Three years I waited for FFXIII after completing FFXII. Three long years. Final Fantasy is one of the few franchises I'll break my 'never-buy-on-release-day' rule for. So when Edge got a preview, I rushed out to buy their hands-on review...

I couldn't believe it. It must just be some new reviewer trying to make a name for himself, I told myself. Their online critic was even harsher. I told myself they were wrong. I told myself that inspite of my earlier misgivings, Square Enix just wouldn't do that! So I went and bought and the game at launch and, as they usually are in the vast majority of their reviews...

 

FFXIII breaks so many rules of games and storytelling, I'm frankly astounded it got a sequel. I've been replaying it for the purposes of this blog (I would never have touched the thing again otherwise) and keep thinking that the three years I spent waiting for a new FF game didn't seem as long as the linear 'opening' section of the game itself. 25 hours! 25 hours until you can stop being shunted along through the dreadful storyline with all the usual emo dickweeds and actually do what you want. Although seeing as there are no towns and only one extremely long and tedious side quest, it doesn't really seem like much of a relief . All the most interesting parts of the story happen offscreen, so we're instead treated to lots of cutscenes of Lightning's only expression (brooding) or Hope's wide tear-tearfilled eyes as he tries to come to terms with the death of his mother or the seperation from his dad or his friend's debilitating case of I-don't-give-a-fuck. 

The Many Faces of Lightning, The Kristen Stewart of the Gaming World

Another thing about Lightning that makes me very uncomfortable is how thin she is. At least she doesn't have ridiculous balloon breasts with a life of their own (although bit part player Jihl Nabaat has that covered anyway>) but something about her skinniness really nagsat me. I think it's because she's a soldier. Her wetter-than-a-tissue-paper-diving-suit sister Serah is equally skinny, but why wouldn't she be? She farts around in lacy stockings and clearly has daddy issues. But Lightning's supposed to be some bladegun-toting badass with military training and L'Cie special moves. She shouldn't look like she lives off salads and coffee fumes. 

Having said all of that, I am at least finding it playable this time around, as I now have sufficient understanding of the crystarium and paradigms to not have to go through the deplorably dull tutorials. Maybe I'll even make it to the end this time. Maybe the end will be so revelatory and glorious, I'll be compelled to rush out and buy part two and spend even more time with Lightning's miserable fizzog. Who can say?

It's been a while...

...so, what's happened during my long hiatus? Well, I joined the games industry, left the games industry and now just have a toe in it. And what better way to celebrate my triumphant return to this blog than the...

4 Worst Horses in Games

1. Agro in Shadow of the Colossus

I know there's a lot of love out there for Agro. He's your only friend in a harsh landscape populated with huge creatures. But my complaint doesn't really lie with Agro himself. It's not his fault he looks like that. It's the fault of a development team that spent many hours creating expansive vistas and mind-blowing bosses, but couldn't spend fifteen fucking minutes to check which way a horse's knee bends. Don't even get me started on when he's galloping around and all four limbs become jointless noodley appendages. If a vet saw him flailing about like that he'd have him shot in the face on the spot.

2. Any Horse in Skyrim

Skyrim horses on the other hand, look all right. They're not going to win any Best in Show rosettes, but their legs work. They're just total dicks. Sure footed to the point of ridiculousness when you're just messing around, as soon as you actually need them to not fall off a cliff and plummet to their doom, that's the first thing they do. They're also aggressive nutters, leaping out to take on armed bandits and dragons while you're hiding in a bush trying to snipe them quietly from a distance. Idiots.

 

 

 

 

3. 'Stealth' Horses in Metal Gear Solid 5

Another logistical nightmare. Anyone who's ever ridden a horse knows they are creatures incapable of stealth. When they're not freaking out because the bush they've walked past a hundred times before is terrifying today, they're farting loudly and unashamedly. And I know that's not really the point in MGS5, but even taking into account that the horse itself isn't supposed to be the stealthiest, Snake's enemies must be monumentally thick to think nothing of a horse strolling past them in full tack keeping one side completely hidden from their view. Y'know, like horses do.

4. Jade's Horse in Pippa Funnell: Take the Reins

That's it, don't acknowledge my presence in any way, just how I like it

My husband bought me this game as a hilarious joke. Cos I like games and I like horses and I'm not opposed to Pippa Funnell, so obviously it was the 'ideal' present. The problem with Jade's horse is he demonstrates all the traits that are likely to put people off owning horses. He's disobedient, slow to react to aids, plunges into or refuses jumps, misbehaves in the dressage arena and requires constant, repetitive patting, grooming and mucking out, which he accepts woodenly with no discernible signs of appreciation. Or maybe I just wasn't very good at the game.