Toy Story 3

The reason for Toy Story appearing on the list is that I was subscribed to Boomerang Games in order to rent simple games instead of paying real money for them. I had James’ Cameron’s Avatar sitting on my shelf gathering dust for the best part of three months before I realised this endeavour was a giant waste of fake money. So I returned Avatar and cancelled my membership – but not before they dispatched Toy Story 3. This effectively gave me a week to complete and return the game to avoid being charged – cue an epic three days of charging through the game.

Playing the game at breakneck speed made me notice all the massive flaws with it, but I will break this down as I go through. The first thing I noted was that, considering the age recommendation of ten-plus, this game is insanely difficult. I remember watching my nephew play it a few years ago and he was just wandering around the Wild West and I thought to myself, this could be an easy 1,000 points. How wrong I was but I’ll cover that in the achievement section.

The first thing that pissed me off was that, after completing the first ‘real’ level, you are put into the mini-game environment of Woody’s Roundup. I say ‘mini-game,’ but in essence this portion of the game will take you longer to complete than the actual levels.

However, this wasn’t the frustrating thing. In a game designed for ten year olds, I thought that I had to actively find the next level within Woody’s Roundup. It wasn’t until I got fed up with it and turned it off for the evening, that I found out that the main missions were outside of this area. There was no instruction on how to get back to main game board and it was only after playing round up for a little while longer that I discovered there were warp areas that take you back up there. A prompt would have been nice, or even better, as this is a game for ten-pluses, a walkthrough of how to do it would have been more appropriate. To be honest, I may have missed a prompt, but if I missed it, how is a ten year old supposed to get it??

Now for my favourite subject, and not one I get to talk about a lot – glitches. This game is glitchtastic! There were several instances of being caught on scenery, crashing into invisible walls, and falling through the floor, which all adds to a fantastic gaming experience.

Vehicles make the game even more impressively shit. The controls for vehicles are shoddy at best. The driving functionality seems to stop at, ‘we managed to make it go forward and turn left and right and plug it full of boosts and power ups.’ Either no one said, ‘great, now let’s work on putting those functions into the gaming environment and smooth it out so that it works properly.’ Or no one cared about it in the first place. I think the latter is more likely because it was released at pretty much the same time as the movie and so I can only deduce that this was done as a money spinner.

Oh yeah, and on top of that, graphically it’s a pile of wank (hence the glitches as well) and also, as much as I like a sound track to stay true to its source material, the Toy Story theme is annoying at best but after listening to the clinky-cluncky bullshit in a repetitive game environment, it actually becomes quite depressing.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 38 Achievements

The main focus of the Toy Story 3 achievement set is collectibles – 11 out of the 38 achievements relate to collecting things. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with this because generally speaking, games will have one of two things; an inbuilt way of tracking what you’ve picked up or a useful non-official site where you can create your own tracking of what you’ve collected. Toy Story 3 really goes out of its way to make this harder for you because not only does it not have an in-game tracking system for the 100 plus collectibles scattered throughout Woody’s Roundup but once you’ve collected one, it doesn’t tell you which one it is anywhere, meaning that you can’t track what you have and have not collected yourself, which again feels like another shortcut. I mean, how difficult would it have been to put the names of the collectibles under the collectibles once you have collected them? I suppose it is a lot of work if you are trying to rush a game out to match the film release.

This essentially means that if you want to track what you have and don’t have, you need to know about the achievement before you start playing Woody’s Roundup – which, in my humble opinion, is stupid.

The remaining achievements are story based and you don’t have to go too far out of your way to get them. However, the glitchy nature of the game made even the easiest of tasks very tiresome.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I will never play this game again for fun because it’s not. I’m glad I rented it and that it doesn’t have to sit on my shelf collecting dust. I managed to get through all the achievements in three days and I will tell you now, these were the longest most arduous three days in my gaming life.

007: Quantum of Solace

Life is all about lessons and I learned a very important one before playing this game. Never let your girlfriend/wife pick your next game. Mine are listed alphabetically so she just picked the first one on the shelf. I suppose it was a good thing in a way because I wouldn’t have played it for another 5 years otherwise.

 A little history of my involvement with this game; I bought when I was still drunk after an all-nighter at University probably at some point during early 2009. It came with an Xbox360 custom front plate (which I never used) and I also bought nine other games. Bad times.

Anyway, after spending in excess of thirty quid on it, it became an ornament until the later part of 2013 when the conversation in the first paragraph happened and I broke the plastic seal and started playing.

Normally I wouldn’t offer much comment on the storyline of a movie based game as standard practice assumes that you essentially play out the movie. However, I didn’t think there was enough action in Quantum of Solace to warrant a video game and Activision agreed with me. Halfway through the game, we switch movies back to Casino Royale and play out the entirety of that one as well, before returning to the Quantum of Solace theme for the final mission. So it doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin.

Music wise, it hits all the right notes and I have to say, this is normally the best part of movie based games. It doesn’t give out high hopes for the rest of the game if the sound is the best part though as, in my opinion, it’s the least important factor in the complete game experience. Visually, it’s okay. It didn’t make my jaw drop or irritate me in any special way.

Gameplay wise, it is just another shooter where you have to navigate through a series of conveniently placed chest high walls, making it a cross between Gears of War and Call of Duty in what it offers. To me, it offered very little in terms of enjoyment and I doubt it would offer anything to fans of the first person shooter. Because of my huge balls (and unwillingness to do two playthroughs of game unless it can’t be avoided) I went straight in on the hardest difficulty level and didn’t encounter too many hold ups. I’m pretty shit at shooters, so this makes it an unchallenging unoriginal game.

The biggest issue I had with it was the quick-time events which are surprisingly affected by difficultly. On the highest difficulty level you have somewhere around about half a second to act. This didn’t effect the overall difficulty of the game as if you fail, you start back at the beginning of the quick-time event. It is just fucking annoying to have to repeat something three times because I don’t have the reactions of a fly (which, incidentally, is a really annoying insect.)

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

The single player was hassle-free bar the quick-time events. There are a couple of level specific achievements but nothing too taxing and nothing secret! The collectible achievements are also stress free with only four or five collectible per level and a clean up only takes a few hours max after an initial playthrough on the hardest difficulty. However, the 1,000 points was not completely straightforward because...

Multiplayer

... of the horrendous ball-ache, pile of shit, pointlessly bollocks multiplayer achievements. The first time I reviewed a game with these achievements, I pointed out that they are horrible additions to most games for two reasons, one of them being that they only have a limited time where people will play online before moving on to other things. There was no one playing this game when I tried to start legitimately earning these achievements which means I was left to try boosting for them with others. I have to extend my thanks to the multiple people I played with to clear this and some of the conversations we had made it less of a pain in the ass but there were a few aspects to this which made the whole episode far more painful than it could have been.

Firstly, another reason that I don’t like playing online is that there appears to be no restrictions on the types of people who are allowed to interact with others. There was one guy who came into our group chat to say ‘I am retarded’ over and over again. It’s not true though. He wasn’t retarded. He was a fucking moron.

Secondly, the multiplayer doesn’t allow for you to be put restrictions on your matches. We couldn’t stop random players joining our games if we didn’t have eight players. I don’t understand a game with online capacity that doesn’t give you the option of putting these kinds of restrictions in place. It meant that we were unfortunately subject to more of the garbage mentioned above.

Thirdly, the one achievement that has us all playing for ages was ‘For England, James?’ which requires the players to get 100,000 credits. We were playing Golden Gun Mode where each player can score 970 credits per game. Each game is 7 minutes long. This means that, playing in this way, without any allowance for 12 year old dickheads mentioned above, it takes no less than 12 hours to get this achievement and that’s using a boosting method.

To put this into perspective, there are other achievements for buying all of the weapons for online play and the total cost for this is less than 100,000 credits... what is the point is playing once you unlocked everything there is to unlock? I suppose this is reserved for the people that actually enjoy the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

In summary, the single player was short and sweet and the multiplayer was arduous and shit. I did make some friends though so it wasn’t a tragic loss although I am amazed how easily people can come together in common hatred for something...oh wait, hang on...