Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters

I bought the Green Lantern for another easy 1,000 points and was not disappointed for the most part, however, I am finding some people’s opinions on what is easy to be very misleading. In my Terminator Salvation review, I talked about how gamers were avoiding playing the game through on hard and trying to find a way of completing the game on ‘easy’ and getting it to count as ‘hard’ by doing some complicated shit with save files.

One such ridiculous solution was to use a second controller as a ‘tank’ character and play through the game with two controllers. Again, to me this is something that seems like a lot more hassle than it is worth. You develop your character through levelling, thus making the game easier the further you go in it.

Green Lantern was a unique experience for me in that I couldn’t decide which was better – the film or the game. Don’t me wrong, this is based on the film being poor but there are certain comparisons that can be made here. Hal is still a bit of dick, but in the game, it’s more of a sucking-Green-Lantern-Cock type of dickishness than his general twatish attitude in the film. That said, he is more likable in the game and actually has a bit of backbone.

The story itself actually works quite well. It develops as the Green Lantern Corps gets attacked by some evil robot dudes called the Manhunters – a term which is slightly intergalactically racist as they kill more than just ‘men.’ As Hal and company fight back against the machines, they discover that the machines are trying to use fear energy to destroy the Green Lanterns and become the Galaxy police once again. There are several plot twists along the way and it was kind of nice to play a movie game where I didn’t already know the story.

Graphics and sound were both very unimaginative and dull. The level environments were similar to that of The Fantastic Four, however they were a little bit better in that there is a very slight variation in the path you can take in some levels. In most cases, the alternate paths lead to the sparse collectible items.

The gameplay can make or break movie based games and while this one was nearly glitch free, the repetitive nature of the game was not very enjoyable. As you gain levels, you can buy various constructs which give you different ways to destroy the evil robots. What I didn’t realise was that once you unlock the Mech Suit and the Minigun, you won’t need or want to use any of the others, and that it’s a pretty big fail when the power-ups in a game make the rest of the game redundant.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 40 Achievements

The achievements automatically win points for having the ability to play on the hardest difficulty from the start and that they are stackable. This means two achievements in one go from completing the game on hard.

There are ten story related achievements, one for each mission in the game and while playing, you will pick up by default a lot of the construct kills achievements. There are twelve of these which are easy to get on a playthrough and can be easily gained by replaying one mission to grind them out.

In addition to the construct ones, there is one achievement for spinning around in a circle ten times – which I think is playing it fast and loose with the word ‘achievement’ but that can be said of most games – and also two others for using your powers, both of which are obtained by default from playing the game.

The main reason that the achievements are easy is that they don’t make you go over and above just playing the game with minimal need for grinding. There are two achievements for collecting asteroids but there are only 14 of these for another two achievements.

I did have to grind out the last few upgrade achievements but it didn’t take any more than an hour. There is also one pointless achievement for completing a level in offline co-op. This is easily done on the second mission by plugging in a second controller. That’s it. Then play single player.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Definitely an easy 1,000 points. Definitely zero replay value. Slightly better than the film, even if Hal Jordan is giving out free blow jobs to the Green Lantern Corps. There’s not really much else to say. This is not a gamers game; it is an achievement hunter’s game.

Terminator Salvation

Terminator Salvation has created much spite in the gaming community. It has been describes as perhaps one of the most shittiest games ever to grace the Xbox 360 and while I thought it was not the best, it most certainly doesn’t deserve the title of ‘worst game ever.’ It is still really shitty though, but more on that later.

The story line follows John Connor in events that I can only imagine took place before that of the movie as he is not the leader of the rebellion against the machines at this stage. Instead of being evacuated from a random starting battle in the post apocalyptic world, John decides to embark on a rescue mission with one other comrade (co-op utilisation) to save three people who would otherwise have been left to be killed by the machines. It’s meant to be the whole ‘never leave a man behind’ scenario but the story shits all over itself half way through.

You meet up with several people along the way and one of them sacrifices their life to save the others. Afterwards John is upset because he feels responsible for her death, however your comrade mentioned above says, ‘what are sad about? You inspired her.’ And now she’s dead. Well done. And so much for the ‘never leave a man behind’ thing.

The graphics, I was led to believe would be rubbish, however they aren’t as bad as some of the other games I’ve played recently. That said, the environments are pretty repetitive in looks after the first few levels and consist of similar looking blown up buildings and streets. In a game with only nine levels, it is quite the achievement to have such little variety in level design.

In addition to this, you have to fight your way through a series of chest high walls which you can hide behind when robots are trying to kill you. The layout of these is so glaring that you pretty much know when you are going to be faced with a fight due to the series of chest high walls laid before you in the middle of the street along with blown up cars. The cars make sense. The perfectly formed chest-high walls do not.

In addition to the level layout there are a very limited amount of enemies. Let’s see, there’s small flying robot, larger flying dropship, spider robot, two types of man style terminator and... that’s it. There also vehicle sections where you have to shoot from the back of a car taking out machine bikes. That’s six different types of enemies. And nine levels.

The music is in keeping with the Terminator theme however, it was pointed out to me that the repetitive nature of the music was infuriating and I was only playing with company for about an hour so that’s saying something.

The gameplay can make or break a game, however Terminator Salvation was already a write-off before going down this dark path. The aiming is clunky, the shooting accuracy is questionable and you remember the chest high walls I mentioned earlier? Well, John can pop out over them to shoot stuff however, on several occasions, when he would aim ‘around’ a wall, he would fire directly into it instead. It was the most annoying aspect of the game by far. This was even more apparent during the last level when I fired a rocket ‘over’ a barricade only to have it explode in my face. I didn’t die though which made me think that the friendly fire coding is questionable/non-existent as well.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

Earning all the achievements can be gained by playing the game through on hard and despite the gameplay frustrations mentioned above, this can be done in less than five hours. There was only one aspect that was difficult. In chapter seven you have to fight off robots while keeping your team alive. It’s a small area and you have to fight off two of the super hard robots. It is only a matter of figuring out the pattern though and after a few tries firing grenades into walls directly in front of me I got there.

Completing the game on hard caused a lot of debate in the gaming community. Apparently there is a trick where you can manipulate your save file to complete the game on easy and then fix it by deleting your save and doing something with a second profile but it was all a little convoluted and apparently you can have your gamerscore reset by Microsoft if you do it as manipulating save files is against their rules. For a game that isn’t even that difficult on hard mode, it’s really not worth taking the risk, especially with the amount of effort involved too.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I really don’t think the game deserves the horrible reviews despite my unforgiving comments. It’s bad but it’s not bad to the point of burning the disc and sending it to hell. Another complaint is that it is a poor movie adaptation but personally, I would rather play a game where I don’t know the ending rather than rehashing something that would always be better in the cinema.

LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues

This one is simply taking advantage of the franchise. Only one more additional movie and they create another full Lego game? Madness. That said, they have redone the original three movies to give six brand new levels so I can’t complain too much about it being a cash-in.

The idea of story is kind of pointless with any movie remake, especially that of Lego where there is no dialogue. As are the visuals because, once again, it’s all Lego.

That just leaves the sound and the gameplay. Now the sound you would expect to follow the movie franchise and it does. However, I don’t recall the music being as infuriatingly annoying as it is in this game. I can’t even remember that much annoyance from the first one. It is repetitive, drone-like and doesn’t portray the sense of adventure which is present in most other Lucas Arts titles.

The gameplay is absolute shit from the start. I’m not even sugar coating it. This almost allows me to go back and all complaint about them cashing in on the franchise comment but I won’t because I’ve hashed that about five-hundred times already. What confused me though, is that the vehicle mechanics appears to have taken a U-turn and dived into an abyss. This is by far the worst Lego experience... no, make that the worst ever experience of vehicle sections in any game I’ve ever played. They make you play one vehicle specific level per episode so that’s six times I’ve had to subject myself to the painful process of getting into a vehicle, having the vehicle tip over at every opportunity, having the vehicle explode because it caught on a rock, having a vehicle not be able to avoid going off of a cliff, having said vehicle respawn facing the edge of the cliff you just went over so that no matter how you pull away, you drive straight back over the cliff again. FUCK OFF!

And that’s extremely frustrating without even mentioning the fact that you can continuous get stuck on scenery and the standard Lego glitching out and freezing – although to be honest, LEGO Indiana Jones 2 didn’t freeze out as much as the other Lego games I’ve played.

The last gameplay frustration I can think of is the AI. Never before have I played a Lego game that is so geared towards having two people play it. Even more so than LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga which actually had an online achievement. The AI are so lacking in intelligence, that they should just be called A. In many areas, you have to stand on two switches to get things to happen. This requires the AI to be intelligent and work out that you want him to stand on a switch next to you. When he doesn’t do this and get you get fed up and switch to the other character, the character you were controlling moves off the switch and comes over to say hello. FUCK OFF!

There are also airborne vehicles in the ‘sandbox’ areas which exist simply to make the gamers want to hate the obligatory shit camera angles and scream at the TV after having no idea where the next race checkpoint is until it’s too late. They have also introduced a new feature called build your own adventure, but more on that in a bit.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 38 Achievements

I was hoping this would be quick and painless and I was sort of right as I completed most of it in a week. I won’t go into too much detail as the majority of the achievements are for getting 100% and are covered off in that. If you are going to play a Lego game, I don’t see why you wouldn’t strive to that so it’s not going out of your way. However, there are two missable achievements and one of them is for 100% and here’s why.

The other missable achievement is for unlocking all the bad guys and the reason it is missable is because there is an extinguishable item that you need to unlock one character and if you pick this item up, don’t use if for what it is intended for and leave the game, the item will disappear forever. That’s right, you can miss out on 100% completion because of an unintended glitch. And with the technology available to game developers today, the fact that this was never patched is simply unacceptable. Bad coding should never be a reason why gamers cannot play a game in the way it is intended to be played so Lucas Arts and Traveller’s Tales... FUCK OFF!

There are a few achievements for using the Build your own Adventure feature and, annoyingly, they count towards the 100% game completion. This means that you will need to buy everything there is that you can put into your own really-shit-by-comparison levels; build a level; build a character; build your own adventure and complete the obligatory tutorial levels which show you how to use the thing you will resent being there in the first place and never use again once you have earned the applicable achievements.

As with all Lego games, there are also the ‘do x with x character’ achievements which are always secret not obvious and you probably won’t unlock without knowing what they actually are.

And now for my favourite of the lot. Once you have completed all the levels in the story mode, avoided the horrendous glitch mentioned above and fannied around completing nonsense actions, you then get to complete ALL the main story levels AGAIN in QUICKPLAY MODE. For one last time, LEGO Indiana Jones 2, FUCK OFF!!!!1one!

Downloadable Content – N/A

I will not, I repeat not, play this game ever again. I’ve thrown it into the kids arena never to be seen again and have already left the room twice while they have played it. It was one of those games I enjoyed for perhaps the first five minutes and then it shat all over itself and died. No more. Ever again. I will be playing LEGO Lord of the Rings and LEGO Marvel Super Heroes and as stupid as it might be, I’m expecting a lot better from those. Wishful thinking? Perhaps, but I am hoping that LEGO Indiana Jones 2 is the last rushed-out-for-money Lego game. Please. The funny thing is the last Indiana Jones movie was slated anyway.

Discontinued Achievements

With the release of the Xbox One, and the fact that EA are allowed to continue making games with online achievements, there is probably going to be an increase in the amount of games where servers close down and achievements become unobtainable.

In order to try and keep up with this, I will attempt to track them as I find them. The reason for starting this is the recent closure of the James Cameron’s Avatar servers and the fact that I can no longer gain the 1,000 points having earned every other achievement in the game. This post will continue to update over time as more games are discovered – in alphabetical order:

Total Gamerscore and Achievements Remaining

FIFA08                                           40 Achievements             800 Points

FIFA12*                                         42 Achievements             945 Points

Forza Motorsport 2                        43 Achievements             980 Points

James Cameron’s Avatar               31 Achievements             840 Points

Lips                                                66 Achievements             1,660 Points

Pro Evolution Soccer 2009            42 Achievements             820 Points

Pro Evolution Soccer 2010            26 Achievements             950 Points

Project Gotham Racing                  22 Achievements             905 Points

* The EA SPORTS UEFA EURO 2012 DLC has been removed from the Marketplace so if you do not have the DLC you can no longer get the achievements. A new low, even for EA.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (Xbox ONE)

My very first Xbox One Review. How exciting! I followed on from the completion of Assassin’s Creed III and cracked straight on with this for a few weeks, however the sheer vastness of the game caused me to make it an ongoing project which spread out over the next six months.

The in-game world is huge and beautiful. A lot of effort has gone into the development of the game, especially the first area, which makes sense as it is the first place that people see. However the whole world is fantastic. Characters, locations, sailing, everything.

Anyway, enough praise and on with thereview – in a dramatic Assassin’s Creed U-Turn, we actually go back in time and play as Edward Kenway, Connor’s grandfather. Against the grain for linear progression but okay, we’ll go with it. Now, let’s not forget that the whole Assassin’s Creed world is just a simulation. In the ‘real world,’ Desmond Miles is dead and his body has been shipped to Abstergo Industries where you, a new Abstergo employee, are reliving his memories to create a new computer game based on the life of Edward Kenway. How crazy is that? The framing is that we are working in a computer game developing job to create a game where you play as pirate in the West Indies. Ubisoft just love their framing.

Onto the story within the story, playing as Edward you are a master Assassin with absolutely no assassin training whatsoever. It is actually quite funny. Your ship crashes onto a desert island and it is just you and the actual Assassin, Duncan Walpole, who survive. In typical pirate fashion, Edward kills Duncan, takes his stuff including the hidden blade, years of assassins training and all, and goes to Havana and pretends to be him in a meeting with the Templar.

Unlike all of his predecessors, Edward does not possess a moral compass. He is out only for himself and his pursuit of The Observatory is totally self motivated. I don’t know why he thinks the Observatory will give him untold wealth, but at some point he is told it is valuable so he goes after it with no expenses spared.

He makes lots of friends along the way, gets them killed and also makes more enemies... generally speaking Edward is a horrible person and while this was funny for the first thirty or so hours, it did start to wear thin towards the end.

The sounds effects are good for the most part and again I enjoyed the sea shanties that you can collect and are then sung by your crew when sailing the high seas. This is very good as you will spend a lot of time travelling around in your ship looking for various collectible items.

The gameplay has the standard Assassin’s Creed issues in that the free running isn’t as seamless or easy as I would expect it to be. My Edward continually gets caught on various objects, doesn’t grab hold of ledges when I wanted him to and generally acts like a brain damaged moron from time to time. The worst instances of these were his survival instincts or lack thereof. When I jumped from a tall building in an attempt to land in a haystack, several times I died landing right next to the haystack. There was a similar issue in Assassin’s Creed III and to be fair, it has noticeably improved but it’s still something I would be happy to live without.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 60 Achievements

As with all Assassin’s Creed games, the achievements are plentiful and varied with loads of stuff to collect and, of course, multiplayer.

There are 19 achievements obtainable for playing through the game but you will also nab a few others including swimming a certain distance, plundering ships and recruiting crew members. I made a habit of collecting everything every time I visited a new location so I had a lot less to do once I had completed the main game.

Two challenging achievements include destroying all the forts and taking care of the Legendary Ships but once you have fully upgraded your ship it shouldn’t be too problematic once you identify the patterns required to take them out.

There are also the generic achievements for killing certain enemies in certain ways and getting chain kills, etcetera, but nothing too painful. The whole single player element is very time consuming though and despite fast travel, sailing around the map is a bitch.

Multiplayer

I really did think we were on to a winner after the sparse achievements on Assassin’s Creed III however, I was very wrong. There are nine multiplayer achievements (including DLC) to get, the most painful of which is getting to level 55. The easiest way to do this is to play one wolfpack multiplayer map every day to take advantage of experience boosts.

Outside of getting to level 55 there are a few small pain-in-the-ass achievements. Playing a match on every game mode was a struggle as everyone has already decided they didn’t want to play the shittier game play modes by the time I got around to playing it.

There are two achievements I used a boosting session for; killing someone using a booby trapped lift which I may have got through luck, and being the highest scoring player in a game of Domination as The Jaguar. In order to do the second one you have to get the opportunity to select the Jaguar which requires you to have the multiplayer DLC. There is a one-in-two chance of doing this if you have four players and you are the leader for one team. Next, you have to be the highest scoring player which means you need to actually be good at this game mode. Both of these scenarios were unlikely for me to pursue. So I didn’t.

Downloadable Content

The extra 250 points consists of two downloadable packs. The first is the MP Characters Pack #1 Blackbeard’s Wrath which has four achievements, the two I mentioned above and another two which can both be obtained in Wolfpack mode once you reach the correct level to use the abilities.

The other is Freedom Cry where you can play as Edward’s one time friend, Adewale as he liberates slaves from plantations. It is essentially the same gameplay style as the main game, only you get to play as someone whose moral compass is pointing in the right direction. And he is badass. He carries a machete as a default weapon and can use a blunderbuss to kill multiple dudes at the same time.

I had a lot of fun with Black Flag even if Edward’s self destructive personality threatened to ruin everything. There is the option of replaying the game on the 360 but I can’t bring myself to play the whole game again. At least not yet, anyway.

Dead Space

I was intrigued by Dead Space. A survival horror set in space seemed like a new concept to me and it received quite a lot of good reviews. What could possibly be not-to-like?

Firstly, the story. You play as Isaac Clarke, a scientist or technical dude (not really sure), on a mission to an unresponsive space craft stranded near a planet that it was exploring. Apparently it is a repair mission so it probably makes sense to bring along a scientist who knows about that sort of stuff. When attempting to dock with the stranded space craft, Isaac and company’s ship is struck by a stray asteroid.

This is where the alarm bells start ringing. Based on the information we are given, this is a fairly standard approach so for the pilot to fuck it up in this manner, is a little surprising. Anyway the ship ends up crashing and the team is laid upon by the alien/undead lifeforms aboard, leaving only the three survivors. Isaac is of course one of them otherwise it wouldn’t be much of a game.

You have the standard Marine-style leader guy, voiced by and styled on Peter Mensah, who is ‘in charge.’ The woman who wants to be ‘in charge’ and constantly slags off the marine guy. And Isaac. The only one of the three survivors capable of doing anything.

From the first moment it is established that you are the only three survivors, the dialogue is essentially, ‘Isaac go here and fix the tram system.’ ‘Isaac, see if you can walk across the exterior of the ship and destroy the giant space slug blocking our comms array.’ ‘Isaac. Can you fight your way through the corridor of undead aliens and restore the fuel supply.’ And my personal favourite; ‘Isaac, my poison didn’t work so you are going to have to go in there and fight the giant alien single-handedly.’

Are you having a laugh you bunch of lazy cunts? Why doesn’t one of you help me out for five minutes? The best bit is that Isaac is the computer technician slash scientist yet the other two spend most of the game time dicking about with computers while you are trying to survive. Another example of this is when, after being given a distress beacon, you have to place it on an asteroid and launch it into space. In the real world, someone like Isaac would have made the beacon and Marine-Mensah would have killed the aliens and done the leg work.

All of this doesn’t really matter though because despite Isaac not having a weapon when walking off of the space craft he is more capable with them than any of the other fucktards who come with you. A room full of aliens is nothing for Isaac if he has a pistol (plasma cutter) and a stasis module.

Isaac’s weaponry and armour are a little against the whole survival horror genre. You have a fully functional suit, a vast array of weaponry and a shop from which you can purchase ammo, medpacks and new weapons at regular intervals. I have to say I was actually a little shocked that they built in a currency and purchase function, especially after my spaceship crashed on a half destroyed mining vessel.

Despite Isaac’s unexplainable abilities with weaponry, his melee attacks are a pile of garbage. He has two; swing into the air, and if you get in the way it’s your own fault; stamp my foot, and if you get in the way it’s your own fault. There is no manual targeting which means you just swing at the same height or stamp on the floor in a really uncoordinated fashion. In order to stamp, you have to use the right should button. To run slightly faster that walking speed, you have to hold the left shoulder button. Getting these two mixed up at certain points of the game mean you instantly die. Which is not fun.

Sound is usually key to a survival horror game but if I’m honest, I didn’t think that much of it. It didn’t build a lot of tension with me because the gameplay mechanics destroy the immersion so if the sound had been fantastic, it would have only served to make the game pretentious.

The sound effects really annoyed me after a while. When you have to do things outside of the spaceship with a limited amount of oxygen, Isaac will make sounds like he is dying once you get to having around thirty percent of oxygen remaining. This means that Isaac’s suit upgrades in terms of air supply must only increase his ability to hold his breath!

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 48 Achievements

Right, on to the real reason I played the game; achievements. The game consists of 12 chapters and awards one for each chapter. There is a thirteenth for completing the game and an additional four for the boss fights. This means there are seventeen unmissable ones for completing the game.

There are seven missable achievements, all of which are pretty straightforward. Two of these are relatively difficult and involve you having to complete a certain section of the game without taking excessive damage. These achievements are also secret which is an absolute fucker (the golden rule is that secret achievements should be potential storyline spoilers only.) Another one of these is also for completing the game using only the plasma cutter, the default weapon, which incidentally turns out to be the best gun in the game by a long way anyway.

There are 22 fucking around achievements for collecting logs, dismembering enemies, killing enemies in certain ways (more secret achievements here) and getting kills with certain weapons. Now, you would think that all weapons you had to acquire from the shop would be better than the default weapon? No way. The flamethrower is the pick of the bunch for shittiness here. It simply cannot kill anything quickly and amassing the thirty kills required for the achievement was a pain in the ass.

You can do a second playthrough and keep all your crap once you’ve completed it so it didn’t bother me too much that you had one achievement for completing the game with one gun and another six for getting specific weapon kills. However, there are two achievements which caused me to get really fucked off.

Cunt achievement number 1: Maxed Out. This achievement is for upgrading all of your shitty weapons, suit kinesis and stasis units. There are not enough credits in one playthrough to do this and even if you roll over your save, I still didn’t manage this until chapter 11 on a second playthrough. For the record, I hate having to play through a game more than once which brings me nicely on to...

Cunt achievement number 2:  Epic Tier 3 Engineer. This is an achievement for completing the game on impossible difficulty. Why don’t I like this achievement? Well, you cannot play on impossible until you’ve already completed the game. So to legitimately get all the achievements you have to play through the game three fucking times with no extras or changes.

Downloadable Content – N/A

To sum it up, it is a real slog to get all the achievements for one real reason. The game is really dull. The characters are not interesting and it’s hard to relate to a mute main character. I didn’t mention this earlier but Isaac’s girlfriend/wife was supposedly on the stranded space craft and there is meant to be an emotive reason for him being there but this never really materialises due to his mute nature.

You have to play through the game three times in order to get all the achievements and I don’t resent this with a game like Condemned or Mass Effect, as they actually have moral choices built in so the storyline or character traits are different based on your decisions. Dead Space is the same every time so this is a fail in my book.

I don’t really get why it got so highly rated. As a survival horror game, it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It tries to be action adventure while having horror elements and it fails to deliver in both departments. 

Lost Odyssey

Another one from my, ‘played for five minutes and stopped’ collection, however Lost Odyssey is a Role Playing Game (JRPG) which means five minutes translates to about five hours of game time. This made it incredibly hard to drum up the energy to start playing it again. So much so that I had to use the girlfriend selection method to even consider playing it again. But it worked and Hey Presto! , 76 hours of gameplay later and I get to write a review.

Lost Odyssey is a JRPG from the creators of the Final Fantasy series. It has nine playable characters and follows the story of Kaim Argonar, an Immortal guy, who goes on a quest to find out why a giant meteor struck a battlefield. Of course, during the course of said mission, he gets caught up in a quest to save the world, from an evil guy with a bad haircut, with some help from his eight ‘friends.’

Graphically the game is what it is. There are lots of intricately designed monsters to battle against, however they do become quite repetitive in design after a while. The environments are the standard semi open-world with random battle encounters (which don’t happen in towns and cities) typical of the JRPG genre and they are quite good visually, however, you never really notice because you are too busy trying to get to the next safe place while fighting random battles and managing your inventory. It does make me wonder how normal in-game people can get anywhere though, if the moment you walk outside the city, you can be attacked by an ill-tempered, mutated tree or something.

Now the soundtrack is obviously going to play a big part for two reasons. Number one focuses on the background music. You are going to be playing the game for seventy plus hours (which according to many walkthroughs is an average time) so the music has to be either really good or not noticeable. Unfortunately it was neither of these things. It several places, the music is stupidly dreary, repetitive and annoying. It actually got to the point where I couldn’t play the game with other people in the room.

Number two concentrates on the voiceovers for the characters. Now, as the game is an original Japanese release and the voices are English it doesn’t quite sound right. Kaim sounds like he has eaten a ton of gravel for breakfast and one of the other characters, Ming, I couldn’t quite work out. She was meant to be quite posh but I swear some of her lines came out as almost Scottish. To be fair the voices where quite funny in places, however as the main point of the game is the storyline, I would have expected a lot of effort to have to gone into the development of this area, even if they are doing a western translation.

Gameplay... so you basically have a split between characters that use physical attacks and characters that use magic and you have to build a party of five that has a balance between the two. The game is spread out over four discs and this method can be used from disc two onwards, however disc one is the most unforgiving RPG experience I’ve ever had and this makes the gameplay unbalanced.

Another element that differs from most RPGs I’ve played is that it is impossible to over-level to make the game easier. You have to gain 100 experience to gain each level and how quickly you gain experience points depends on the area you are fighting in. It’s an interesting concept but kind of defeats the point of RPGs in that it is meant to be your choice over how you play – taking the long patient approach or trying to smash through the game as quickly as possible.

Walking around the environments was a pain from time to time. I lost count of the amount of times I got caught up on various bits of scenery or debris. Also, they aren’t very varied or attractive and the whole game had a very grey feel to it. It almost took away from the magic and fantasy elements. Don’t get me wrong, there were some bits that were colourful and lively but for the most part it was horribly depressing.

Achievements – 42 Achievements – 1,100 Points

Role playing games tend to be long drawn out affairs and I was quite impressed with my 76 hour finish time (including DLC) only to find that was bang on the average. I was horrendously disappointed. But enough about me, let’s talk about the 42 achievements that resulted in my play time.

Firstly, let’s go through the missable ones. There are five achievements of this nature and for a while I couldn’t figure out why. You have four immortals that need to learn all of their available skills. The reason they are missable is because you can sell one-of-a-kind accessories that will prevent you from being able to learn them all. I couldn’t find this detailed anywhere and considering that money is possibly the easiest thing in the world to obtain during game play, I don’t see why anyone would sell accessories but it could easily happen by accident.

The other missable one is for obtaining all the spells in the game and there are two spells that can only be obtained for a limited amount of time and are unobtainable thereafter. How annoying would it have been had I got in excess of 30 hours into the game, missed this and had to replay the game again? Very. Which brings me on to the last achievement worth talking about... the Treasure Trove Achievement.

The Treasure Trove Achievement requires you to collect every single item you can pick up from the in-game fields. I had to a lot of pre work in order to ensure I got this one which included turning an internet list into a checking off spreadsheet. It was a lot of work but it nailed me the achievement without losing too much gaming experience. However, it was a major slog and I hated having to have my laptop open every time I wanted to play the game.

The other achievements are not missable and can be obtained at the player’s leisure which is how RPG achievements should be. Once I had mastered the battle tactics which made every battle simple, I smashed all of the optional hidden bosses to pieces.

Downloadable Content

There are an additional 100 points under the Seeker of the Deep DLC which gives you a few new accessories to make the game easier and presents 6 new achievements. All you have to do is descend through 25 floors of monsters and kill the boss at the end.

Now, I had done everything above bar completing the final storyline element and this additional dungeon took me around 2 hours to complete. A lot of guides stated that you need to obtain special accessories to give you the ability to beat the final dude in this area but it’s not true. I even messed up my character set up so only 4 were able to do any real damage to him and still won comfortably.

So after 76 hours, I had done everything there is to do and won all the achievements. I did get a sense of satisfaction out of it but it was a hell of slog and I certainly won’t be going back to Final Fantasy XII any time soon. I am in definite need of an RPG break.

Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper

I was intrigued by this game. Advertised with a low level of difficulty I thought, why not give it go? How bad can it be? The answers to these questions are elementary. It is a very bad game which is good reason not to give it go.

Where to start? Story probably. You play as the most infuriatingly arrogant Sherlock Holmes in history whose voice, persona and demeanour and all terrible. Compared to any other reimagination, this Sherlock takes the award in the ‘biggest dickhead’ category. He puts Watson down at every opportunity, is very self-congratulatory over solving the simplest puzzles and is basically a total moron.

The case in the game is that you have to track down the infamous Jack the Ripper, something that Sherlock was never involved in, and this fact is explained away at the end of the game. The storyline involves you having to play through various areas of London and break the law in various ways such as stealing, vandalism and trespassing - none of which matter to a ‘consultant’ such as Sherlock Holmes - to catch the Ripper.

The game is classed as a point-and-click adventure game and has such elements as items that have one specific use, dialogues that have to happen in a certain order and a complete lack of freedom and direction that would otherwise enable you to complete the story in your own way. There are several examples of this through the game, the most notable being this; at one stage you have to move a barrel out of the way of the window. Now, I ‘m not the strongest person in the world but I’ve moved my fair share of heavy objects. This barrel was a reasonable size but like any object of a certain height with a small base, you can apply force to the top of the barrel to topple it out of the way. Sherlock can’t do this because he is too clever. Instead you have to use various bits and pieces scattered around the in-game environment to lever the barrel over – a lot more suspicious that just moving it with your hands.

Visually, it is very poor. I would have expected a lot better to have gone into a game released in 2009, especially one so dialogue driven. There is no effort with character’s facial expressions and you would find more diverse facial reactions in the Oblivion world and that’s saying something.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 40 Achievements

For a game so bland and linear it does offer a lot to do in the way of achievements.... I say that but of the 40 achievements available, 36 of them are main story driven so a simple playthrough leaves only four outstanding. Unlike Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, there is no redundant achievement for completing the game on hard.

All four non-story achievements are missable – none of them are secret and all of them are fairly straight forward. You just need to know when to do them and as it is a linear game, any guide telling you what to do will tell you when you need to perform these actions. The only one that caused me a problem was the Curious achievement which is for looking at all of the items in Sherlock’s apartment. I missed this because I went in with a mindset of just playing through the game. However, a missable achievement that you can replay and get in five minutes isn’t really a problem.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The game was not fun at all. It took a lot longer to play through than I expected and I found myself becoming bored and unconcerned with the outcome of the story, which is a major failure for a story driven game as I do quite often enjoy them.

A quick note on the reality of the story: Jack the Ripper was never caught and Sherlock Holmes was the master detective so combining the two means that the outcome doesn’t quite add up. So how does the game deal with it? Well, of course Sherlock Holmes solves the mystery and uncovers the identity of the killer. But he doesn’t hand him over to the police and instead creates his own brand of vigilante justice. Because, you know, solving crimes for the police is beneath the arrogant son of a bitch.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I’ve never really invested in the Harry Potter series, however when I found out that games were released, I thought, ‘Hello, surely this will be an easy quick 1,000 points?’ I was sort of right, it was easy but it was nowhere near as quick as I thought.

The storyline follows The Order of the Phoenix story only you have to complete various tasks to get students to come to your little party which is the main part of the game. I found it unexplainably annoying that they all refer to Dumbledore’s Army as the DA. I couldn’t help but think of District Attorney every time it was a mentioned and it’s such a common reference that I don’t think it should be used in this way. It’s not confusing. Just stupid.

Visually I thought the game very poor, even by the standards in 2007. It feels like the game was, again, another quick release to market the movie. This is especially apparent with the amount of direct-from-movie cut scenes and the fact that all of the unlockable bonuses are behind the scenes footage from the movie. There may have been more varied bonuses but I have an interest in games, not in the actors behind the Harry Potter franchise, so I didn’t look at anymore after the first two.

Sound effects are normally the best part about movie franchise games and Harry Potter is no exception. The music is very in keeping with the movie which is always good – even if the music is totally fucking annoying, contrived, overdone, etc, etc.

The gameplay... now I’m not sure what I really did throughout the game but it all felt very wishy-washy. Go here, Harry and pick up this thing for me. Now go to class and battle with the horrendous wand controls to mix potions and perform spells. Now fight Malfoy and his followers using your various spells without knowing if they having any effect until you fall down or they do.

Basically the game play is a sack of shit. Most of the game is spent following footsteps to the next location where you have to do something uninteresting that doesn’t mean anything.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 41 Achievements

The game wins point straight away for having no missable achievements. This is good as the whole game is a free roaming environment. There are eight for playing through the game and another for completing it on hard mode.

I was very confused by the concept of hard mode, even more so as a lot of people seemed to think that two playthoughs were required and a lot of people complained that the hard mode achievement didn’t unlock for them. I found a really easy way around this – play the game on hard from the start. Only a masochist would want to play this game through twice a you don’t have to play it through on normal to unlock hard. As the game mostly consists of puzzle solving with set solutions, it isn’t actually that much harder than normal mode anyway.

The other achievements are all collectibles and tasks – basically getting 100% in the game nets you the remaining achievements. A lot of these, such as beating all Gobstones Champions and getting top marks in each of the lessons, are largely luck based due to the intensely poor control system. I came very close to rage controller destruction when trying to get the ‘O’ rating in the charms class. This involves you having to cast the various spells that Harry can learn in quick succession. The problem with this is that it involves having to flick the analogue stick in various ways and the game will not pick up the actions you want to do in a timely manner which was totally fucking annoying especially when you have to do everything really quickly.

In addition to this, you actually have to be really good at chess to beat the chess champions. Fortunately there are a lot of chess simulation programmes on the internet to make this easy.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I did not enjoy Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at all. It was touch and go as to whether I would even finish it. My own stubbornness and a late night won through in the end though and I was able to add this to the 100% pile. I’m not sure I’ll play the next one. I have a lot of other games to work through before descending even deeper into masochism.

NHL 2K6

Like Madden NFL 06, I don’t really know much about Ice Hockey and still don’t after playing the game. The general summary appears to be, get the puck in the opponent’s net and almost anything goes relating to how you do it.

As it’s a 2006 (ugly) game with no storyline, I’m just going to do another play-by-play on the achievements.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 5 Achievements

Firstly, all achievements are difficulty specific meaning that you have to perform said action on said difficulty level – or higher. Here we go.

1.       Score on a breakaway (Amateur). I’m not sure what a breakaway is but I’m assuming it is turning defence into attack and scoring. Every goal I scored seemed to be on a breakaway so it’s a fairly straightforward achievement.

2.       Score a goal with defenseman (Pro). Again, fairly straightforward. Simply give it to a man at the back, have him run at the other team and score. Ping!

3.       Score goal when two men down (Pro). The most convoluted part of this one is actually getting the men sent off. I struggled with committing fouls at first but once I worked out the rules - after an internet consultation - this one was also a breeze.

4.       Score in Under 1:00 (All-Star). I think I got lucky with this. I maximised the in game timer but didn’t need to. The first shot I had went in after only twenty in game seconds.

5.       Score on penalty shot (All-Star). This one was a bitch. With the above difficulty in even committing fouls, it was even harder to draw one from an opponent on the highest difficulty level. In the end, I gave up with legitimate means and did it using four controllers. Once I eventually got the penalty shot (I had to find a video of what this looked like) I was shit scared of missing the goal. Thankfully I didn’t and I was able to put NHL06 away forever.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I did enjoy the gameplay. It was very relaxing and carefree once I had gotten used to controls and I would have pursued more of these but, like I said in my Madden review, EA’s tendency to close servers has led to a lot of discontinued achievements so this may be my only taste of NHL gameplay.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Cloudy with a Meatballs is advertised as another easy 1,000 points and it did not disappoint. The complete score can be achieved within 8 hours of gameplay.

You play as Flint Lockwood and go around various locations to remove the copious amounts of food produced by his... his... food producing machine with a name I cannot remember. The basic storyline is that you have to get from A to B in all levels. That’s it, there’s not really a lot more to it.

In terms of gameplay it is very simple. You have five different tools at your disposal which can be used to destroy the various foods around the levels. Once again, the game play is very clean with very little problems with glitches or the playable character getting stuck and being unable to continue – a common theme in other games.

Visually it is cartoony and nothing more than I would expect from an animated movie adaptation, however it loses massive points for the sound effects. Flint has a name for each of his tools and certain catchphrases for when he selects them from his inventory. These names and sayings become incredibly annoying really, really quickly and what’s worse is that the kids think they are funny and so will repeat them over and over and over again as well, making me scream bloody murder inside my head.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

As stated earlier, it’s a simple 1,000 points with not a lot of variety. You have to complete the game (a given), destroy all the hydrogenated food pods hidden (I use this term very loosely) throughout the levels and use your weapons in certain ways a certain number of times.

I only had trouble with one level when trying to find the hydrogenated food pods and had to use a video to find it, however the others are generally in plain sight. The levels are very straightforward with few hidden areas.

The main problems came from the weapon based achievements. You only get given a specific set of weapons at the beginning of each level and there are achievements for destroying certain types of foods with certain weapons. However, certain foods only appear in certain levels so you have to replay levels a few times in order to get the required kills. The most notable of these is the achievement for cutting 25 marshmallows. You only have the cutter in maybe two levels where there are marshmallows and you need to get 25 of them. I think I had to replay one level seven times in order to get this.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is an easy game that has replay value for kids only; a standard summary for a game that doesn’t break any boundaries in the genre. That said, should a game for kids based on a kid’s film be looking to break boundaries? Probably not, but it does teach kids that sugar is bad and I did feel a little bit sick after being bombarded with all the food!

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

This is the last of Ezio’s games in the series and it sees him travel to Constantinople for some more rooftop adventures... meanwhile future Desmond is trapped in a coma with both Ezio’s and Altair’s memories to get by. There is a lot more to the plot but I won’t ruin it by trying to unravel to twisted mess that involves reliving ancestor’s memories. I also don’t understand why, in order to wake Desmond up, the only way to do so is by living through the said memories.

They have also introduced some weird platforming sections where you have to generate blocks to traverse through first person eighties style blocky environments. I didn’t understand the appeal of this but others must have as there is a DLC focussed solely on this gameplay element, but more on that later.

Visuals and sound are the same as the other Assassin’s Creeds but I did think that Constantinople was a lot more colourful than Rome or the various cities from Assassin’s Creed II. The environments are fun to explore and it was nice to go through a completely new and unique environment.

The gameplay is quite funny in places. The game is set a long time after the events of Brotherhood, and Ezio has noticeably aged. You would think this would be a problem that would affect his ability to climb walls with triple the efficiency of Sean Devlin, however it has not. When Ezio arrives and meets the local assassin (who is also dressed in a really colourful fashion) he is given an extension claw which allows him to jump to the same height as when he was younger!

Age also hasn’t affected his way with the ladies. He meets a woman and begins some kind of weird courtship thing that only Italians can do. The woman is question looks young enough to be at least his daughter. What a legend.

As with all Assassin’s Creed games, they have introduced a new gameplay element – tower defence. And they know it’s shit as they only make you do it once through the storyline of the game. They have also introduced bomb making as a new and completely redundant way of dealing with enemies. I mean, the sheer variety of Ezio’s weapons without adding bombs into the mix was enough – this added extra only makes things more complicated than they have to be. And, as it’s a new feature it is of course built into the storyline to make the fucking things.

Achievements – 69 Achievements – 1,490 Points

With all standard Assassin’s Creed games, you have to use all of the game’s various different bits to get the clean sweep. For Revelations this means that you have to craft the bombs described above and you have to kill a certain amount of enemies with said bombs. In addition, you also have to complete tower defence multiple times to clear the map and there is also one for doing it without using a cannon, which is essentially ‘complete tower defence on hard.’

In addition to the unavoidable storyline achievements, there are also achievements for climbing various monuments quickly. If you don’t know the right path, this could take multiple attempts to do but it’s not too arduous.

There are the standard collection achievements too but these are scaled back in terms of volume. There are 100 animus fragments as part of this and they don’t show up on the map until you have collect 50 of them, so it makes it a semi challenge to find them all, unless you use a guide or map (which I did.)

Multiplayer

Similar to Brotherhood, I had completed all of the offline achievements in 2012 before stepping up to the multiplayer arena this year. In comparison to Brotherhood though, these achievements were a lot less time consuming. You only have to get to level 20 and this was boosted relatively easily. The others all came along with it and it’s the first multiplayer set that hasn’t had me screaming at the TV. I’m amazed that I put it off for so long.

Downloadable Content

There are three different DLC packs for Revelations. Two of them are multiplayer ones. One is an extra characters pack which means that you have to do certain things with each of the characters. This isn’t too troubling and the additional achievements were fairly easy to get in a group.

Another is a set of maps and this was problematic as finding a group with the DLC, or people who were willing to pay for the DLC, was quite tricky. I got there in the end and some of them could be earned solo in the training ground mode. This is also applicable for the above character based achievements.

The last DLC pack is a solo pack called The Lost Archive and as I mentioned earlier, this is just a another version of the first person block placing levels from the main game. It is relatively tricky and there are two of the toughest achievements in the game in this pack. You have to traverse certain areas of the map without dying and I feel like I got quite lucky as I managed to bag these on my second or third attempts.

The Lost Archive was one of the least enjoyable DLC packs I’ve ever played and that is probably because the normal Assassin’s Creed gameplay is enjoyable and I was hoping for a further expansion on that rather than the sections of the game that I put up with.

The multiplayer achievements are the only reason I’ve completed this one so long after the initial release date and I’m glad to see the back of the Assassin’s Creed games and keep up the 100% completion record on these things... Oh wait, now there’s Black Flag to do...

Madden NFL 06

I have to confess, American Football is not my strong suit. I had never watched a game and don’t know who any of the stars are and have even less of a clue regarding the stars and best teams from 2006. After playing the game though... I still don’t really know what’s going on.

There’s not really a lot else to say – it’s a football game – so let’s dive straight into the achievements.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

Due to low amount of achievements I’ll do a play by play (pardon the pun).

1.       Activate RS Card. All you have to do is click the right stick when you start a franchise.

2.       Score a Touchdown. Pretty self explanatory and I did manage to get this without the help of a guide telling me how to play American Football.

3.       Get a First Down. Having heard downs mentioned in previous conversations with people who actually know what they are, I was still stumped.  However, a little research revealed to me that it is making ten yards down the field. I got this one with the above after running past all the opposition on an easy difficulty level.

4.       Complete an Offline Game. Again, self explanatory. Simply completing a game versus the CPU, regardless of winning, is enough.

5.       Enter History Book. This is the same as number 1 – all you have to do is enter a specific screen in franchise mode and the achievement is yours.

6.       Four Sacks in One Game. This is where they start getting a little less straight forward. I had to mess around with some settings to make this easy. By turning offsides off you can stand next to the Quarterback and take him down as soon as he gets the ball. Do this 4 times and boom, achievement unlocked – at the end of the game you are playing.

7.       Rush for 200 yards. Setting the game to low difficulty and always using plays that hand off to players that run rather than passing will get this is one game. The plays are easy to identify. I used Madden’s advice most of the time and every time there was an opportunity to pass to a Running Back, I took it. Having the difficulty down means that you should be able to run past the opposition again. Make sure to pay attention to the amount of yards covered by the player as the achievement won’t unlock until the game is completed.

8.        Pass for 350 Yards. The same as the above except use passing plays instead of running plays.

9.       Win a Franchise Game. This can be doubled up with Complete an Offline Game. The only reason I didn’t get them at the same time was because I was trying to learn how to play the game first!

10.   Win the Super Bowl. The easiest way to claim American Football’s most coveted prize is to start Franchise Mode and select all the teams as user teams. You can then just simulate to the end of the season – you don’t even have to play the Super Bowl match to unlock the achievement.

11.   Complete 30 Years of Franchise. This achievement is a joke but is also worth 400 of the 1,000 total points available. The only real way to do this is to select a team and simulate the 30 years of franchise. Despite skipping all of these games, it still takes in excess of 4 hours to complete.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I do enjoy learning things from games and I have increased my knowledge of American Football from playing this. However, I didn’t enjoy it and I don’t have the patience to learn an entire new sports game to the point where I would enjoy it. I won’t be playing another American Football game but this is mainly due to the fact that the games are made by EA and they have online achievements which have subsequently been discontinued.