Monopoly

I was casually browsing online as you do and was surprised to find that a Monopoly game even existed for the 360, nevertheless one that had been one since 2008. I had recently started playing Monopoly as a board game on a semi-regular basis so figured that the Xbox 360 version would be an easy completion as well as confirming the actual rules for the board game without allowing anyone to cheat.

While I was a hundred percent correct with the latter, I was slightly off with the former but more on that later.

The sound effects are seriously irritating throughout which seems to be the standard for these kinds of games. At least the music during actual gameplay is relatively quiet, however that doesn’t stop Monopoly Man from being the most sinfully annoying NPC is the history of the world.

The gameplay is where the game really falls down for lots of small reasons. Introductions and tutorials are all very well and good when you start playing a game but after that, they should be completely optional, skippable or maybe have a fast forward button attached to them. This is not the case for Monopoly. During every game, you are subjected to the ‘how to play’ information at the beginning of every action which turns even the shortest game into a drawn out affair.

I may have already mentioned that Monopoly Man is seriously annoying and here is why. He has a comment to make after every single move any player makes, even the NPCs. By the end of the first game, this could be conceived as charming. However, after the fifth game, he makes you want to climb through the television and beat him to death with his own cane.

Another minor quibble is that the menu to manage your properties take a lifetime to open (at least it feels that way with every other drawn out piece of crap building up to this point) and once you are there, the interface is really unintuitive and also glitches out from time to time. There is a button you need to click on to come out of the menu and despite having the cursor over this button, it will not let you click on it. So you have to move the cursor off of the button and the move it back on in order to get out of the menu. It’s almost like EA get more money for the more hours people play their games for.

The above only covers the classic mode of the game. There is another mode called Richest which consists of mini games and massive amounts of luck in order to win. There are four players and you each roll a dice. Then you compete against each other in mini games and whoever wins the game gets to select a dice. The number on the dice reflects how many squares of the board you occupy. You can play different types of this mode but the object is to be the richest player at the end of however many rounds you chose to play. So it’s completely luck based in essence but you can influence how much luck you get by selecting the most appropriate dice, high at the beginning and low towards to end.

Richest is more fun than Classic for the sole reason that the game has less opportunities to draw out the game with poor interfaces and unnecessary dialogue but it STILL has the unskippable tutorials which are present in every game you play.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 34 Achievements

Firstly, Monopoly is made by EA, the most evil game company in the world, and I wouldn’t have even considered playing it if it had online achievements. The servers would have most likely been shut down by now, and heaven forbid they would allow local hosting even for a game with a maximum of four players and very little power required to play.

Anyway, enough about those twats - on to the achievements.

With the two game modes, come different achievements. There are 19 available in Classic and 15 in Richest. Now, the beauty to most of these is you can use local multiplayer to fix most of the skill based achievements that you don’t get playing legitimately. There are some notable exceptions to this, however, namely the 100% luck based achievements.

Rolling a double six is fine and is bound to happen in a few games of classic anyway. However, rolling three doubles to go to jail - an anti-achievement - is ridiculous. It took me ages to get this one and the only way to guarantee it is to keep playing over and over again which really hit home the gameplay issues above.

Other than that, the only other one which is problematic – and by problematic, I mean drawn-out and pointless – is the Globe Trotter achievement for landing on every property on the World Board. Factoring in the luck required to roll three doubles in a row, you now need the luck to land on all of the properties in one game. Without going out of your way, this is nigh on impossible to attain as it takes three hours minimum factoring in random chance to even get close to landing on them all. Playing a legitimate game would end long before that, even with the unskippable in between moves commentary.

There is also a time spending achievement which is for landing on every property on every board in the game. This can be done over multiple games though, so isn’t difficult, just time consuming.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It was nice to play an electronic version of Monopoly for all of two games, but after that it stopped being fun. Achievements wise, it is a monotonous grind. If you are going to go for the completion, I would recommend finding something to listen to/watch in the background. Either that or just don’t play it.

LEGO Harry Potter - Years 1-4

I’m sure you are as sick of my Lego reviews as I am of the games. I bought Lego Harry Potter for another easy win and thankfully it was a lot easier (quicker) to complete than Lego Lord of the Rings.

As with all the previous Lego games, you follow the plot of the movie while exploring Hogwarts. You are familiar with the drill, it’s Harry Potter. It’s one of the early games and as such it’s not the best looking and occasionally bugged out. I only had the one crash that caused me major upset though, so it again wins points over Lego Indiana Jones 2. But scoring points against that is pretty much shooting fish in a barrel.

I’ll keep this quick and concentrate on the new shit. As you are Harry Potter, you are diametrically opposed to killing any other human being or their pets. This means the combat elements have been completely dumbed down and replaced with wand fun - and I’m not speaking metaphorically.

You can use your wand for pretty much anything; casting spells, picking stuff up, Lego building, picking your nose, picking on Ron, etc, etc. You have to learn the various spells that you need as the game progresses. In addition, there are also potions which allow you do to certain things such as; be as strong as Hagrid, turn invisible, become an old man... I’m out.

While there are main story missions that cover the first four books slash movies, there isn’t really a lot of action to be translated to the game and you can really tell as most of the levels lack diversity. You have to learn about eight spells and craft three of four potions, one of which you only use once in the course of the main game.

Achievements –1,000 Points – 49 Achievements

Aside from getting 100% (which like most Lego games, constitutes at least two thirds of the achievements) there are very few other things to do but some of the others feel like they are just there to be annoying. Notable examples of this are Chilled, Boo!, Good Dog, Arachnophobic and Lumos Solem. All of these achievements require you to do a certain action up to 50 times, which is in no way fun, and these can’t really be obtained through normal play.

Considering the game was published in 2010, I would have expected a little more thought to have gone into these achievements. I would have preferred level time trails to this repetitive, boring, doesn’t feel like you are achieving anything, style achievement.

While I say that the 100% covers most other things, there is one annoying exception in this game. Glitched and bugged achievements. There are two ones I know about. Some people have reported not being able to find one of the students in peril, which blocks the 100% and the achievement for getting all of the students in peril.

Another one, which is worse as it’s down to bad coding rather than an actual glitch, occurs in the game’s hub where you have to clean up a shop to get a gold brick to appear. The thing is, you cannot see the bits that need to be cleaned. I went over the shop about three times before the brick actually appeared.

It is these kinds of things that lead me to really hate on games and developers and unfortunately I think these kinds of things will just get worse with the ability to add patches and fix issues – an option that all game developers have but choose not to use because it’s not profitable to fix their previous mistakes.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Glitches and coding issues aside, it is an easy, if not under-rewarding, completion. The one thing I will say is that the collectibles are a lot more forgiving that other Lego Games as there are only seven collectibles per story level instead of ten. It’s the small things in life.

N3: Ninety-Nine Nights

This review is nine years in the making after earning my first achievement way back in 2006. I think I bought the game simply because it was in the best-sellers chart at some random game store but at least it wasn’t one that just sat of my shelf for years. That said, I am glad to finally have this one done with but more on that later.

N3 is a Japanese hack and slash which follows the story of Inphyy, a Temple-Knight with a questionable moral compass. Her personality traits involve a weird superiority complex over her brother Aspharr, a horrible squeaky voice that makes her sound like a power mad 5-year-old and an unquenchable thirst for blood which ultimately drives her mad.

In addition to Inphyy, there are six other playable characters with their own stories that have absolutely no bearing on each other despite their paths crossing at several points in each others’ stories. To be honest, the whole story concept is weak. It seems like a great original story but it is very poorly executed and could have been much better than it is.

The sound effects are... how can I put this... very Japanese. The menu and mission scrolling music is very epic-sounding despite the fact nothing epic has happened yet and I found it horribly disconcerting to hear this sort of music after Inphyy has killed a fuck load of innocent goblins. So I suppose that’s my main criticism of the music in that, for the most part it’s not in keeping with what’s going on in the game.

Now a lot of what I’m about to say is probably completely biased as I’m not a fan of the hack and slash genre but I found the gameplay dull, underwhelming, inconsistent and simply not fun. There is a lot of repetitiveness in the combos and I don’t know if other people’s experiences are different but I found that every character has one combo that worked which also served to make all their other moves redundant.

Aside from the combat, there is one other element to the gameplay; walking from one fight to another. This is just an episode in frustration from start to finish. Your character is not generally fast and the only way to get somewhere quicker is by using the evade move which is good for some characters and atrocious for others. It is a very tiresome and boring aspect of the game, especially when there is a requirement to replay the boring missions.

Another awful flaw with the gameplay is the boss fights. When your allies are attacking certain bosses, it makes it impossible for you to attack them and cause any significant damage. For some reason because a boss is being attacked by your archers this means you cannot interrupt that damage chain. Probably because it’s unfair on the AI or something. A bit twatish, but there you go.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

Don’t be fooled by the low achievement count. This takes utter hours. There are a relatively easy seven achievements for completing the game with each of the uniquely shit characters but after I did that, I decided to take a nine year break. When I came back to it, I understood why.

Now, I’m not one who wants to replay anything that I didn’t have a fond memory of. In fact, the only games I would consider redoing are Oblivion or maybe Mass Effect. With this in mind there was no way I was replaying the full story missions for each character again so I looked up a very basic guide on how to complete the special mission and gain achievement 8 of 10. The guide said to spam the same move on the final boss. Great. More hack and slash fun.

After I have got this one down, my next quest was to get an A rank in all missions. When I left the game, I only had one mission (two if you count the special mission) left to get an A rank in. I had to read several opinions – I don’t think these count as guides – on the matter before I was able to do it and I still think it was more luck and the game feeling sorry for me that I actually earned this. The mission I struggled with was the Ywa-Ue-Uar Forest level but I heard other has some problems with Ashpharr’s final level as well.

Anyway, the main issue with the forest level is the fact that you don’t have a lot of opportunities to kill enemies, everything is really spread out so getting anywhere is a bitch and you have to fight the massive frog king thing which was the main cause of my earlier frustration around boss fights. After about 20 attempts, I finally scored the A Rank and was able to move on to the final achievement.

That just leaves the last achievement of which the description states, and I quote, ‘Build every character up to Level 9.’ Translated, this actually means, ‘get every character to level 9... and then recomplete all of the levels again. Gotcha!’ Now, I think I can be forgiven for looking up the unlock criteria for a poorly labelled achievement like this. Despite me not liking to replay pointless shit for no reason, I managed to complete this arduous task through will power and a good iTunes playlist. I nearly cried with happiness on seeing this unlock and finally being done with this piece of shit game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

On a side note, I really did take exception to one of the guides on IGN for this game. The guy who wrote it clearly hated it more than I did so my question to him is; why would you write a guide for a game that you clearly didn’t like? My statement to him is; I don’t care about your opinion, I just want help. If you wanted you to give your opinion, then you could have written a review where you tell your friends and me to fuck this game in the ass with a lead hammer wrapped in sandpaper. It’s not worth playing even if you love hack and slash games as there are much better ones out there.

L.A Noire

I actually bought L.A Noire somewhere around the time it was released and then subsequently let it gather dust on my shelf for the best part of 3 years before it finally found its way into the game console.

L. A. Noire follows the story of Cole Phelps, an Ex-Marine in the late 1940s trying to develop a normal life as a policeman offer. Apparently, he has a real knack for pointing at things and picking up empty beer bottles and cigarette packets that make him a really good detective. He quickly gets promoted from beat cop to detective and starts an emotional rollercoaster ride as he tries to be a good cop in bad city.

Cole’s personality can be a bit schizophrenic at times, especially when he is doing interviews slash interrogations. One minute he can be nicely warming up the interviewee into giving him information, then in the flick of a switch, start screaming at them when he thinks they are lying. This is especially funny when the person has been quite nice up to this point, then takes exception to Cole’s manner... and starts screaming back at him as well.

Now, the main selling point of L.A Noire is the character facial expressions and a quick check on IMDb reveals that, for the most part, they are quite accurately based on the faces of the actors that voice them, which is a nice touch. I did think that a lot of the women in the game looked quite samey though.

They also spent so much time on the faces that they forgot to fully shore up the cars. When it rains, it rains inside the cars – a slight graphical oversight there, I think.

The music is also a good selling point. It is in keeping with the settings of the late 1940s and forms an excellent backdrop to what’s going on - for the most part. There were a couple of scenes where the music kicked in like there was going to be some kind of chase but in reality, you are just making your way to the next destination.

The gameplay almost plays second fiddle to the story such is its depth and strength and where it is strong in some areas, it is weak in others.

Firstly, it is an original idea combining third-person shooting with driving in a sandbox environment whilst the main game mechanic is actually more of a point-and-click-adventure game style, interspersed with interrogations and interviews.

The crime scene bits are well structured and contain various things for Cole to inspect - using his index finger - that do not always relate to the case. The game is kind enough to let know you, via music, that you have found all the clues in the crime scene.

The interviews are another matter. You need to be able to tell whether the person you are interviewing is telling the truth or lying. You can use clues to prove the lie or simply doubt what they are saying. The problem is that sometimes you need to have psychic abilities to work it out which means that this can become a game of trial and error between truth and doubt.

The free-roaming and driving about, which also includes the occasional car chase, are really well done. The sandbox is a bit large but they have also built in a fantastic fast travel system where you can get your partner to drive everywhere. This means that you will never get fed up with having to drive around everywhere. I have to admire the developers here. They have taken the most monotonous part of the game and made it entirely optional which is great for keeping you immersed in a story-focussed game.

That leaves the third person shooting aspect which I found to be pretty poor in comparison to the rest of the game. You can use cover but it doesn’t go as far as to having chest high walls placed every five metres apart which is good, however Cole is so ham-handed that actually aiming at the bad guys is an exercise in frustration.

As well as Cole’s inability to aim, there is also his willingness to shoot to kill every mutherfucker he comes across, regardless of their crime. But that’s more to do with life in 1940s America than the game. Can’t get a confession? Kill them. They won’t be able to argue otherwise.

Achievements – 1,400 Points – 60 Achievements

There is quite the haul of achievements in L.A. Noire and they are quite varied. That said, there are a few non-story-related secret achievements which scores negative points with me. I don’t quite understand the achievement for racking up $47,000 worth of damage. It’s not much of an achievement to do stuff that makes your score worse but hey, it just adds to the variety.

There are a few case-specific achievements but these are not missable as if you do not get them on the first run through, you can replay missions. You will most likely need to do this to get the Shamus to the Stars achievement for getting 5 stars in every case (unless you are using a guide on your first playthrough which would completely negate the point of playing the game.)

The most annoying achievement by far is for driving every car in the game. Most of the cars look completely identical and there is no in-game list that you can access to check which ones you have driven. Even if there was, it would be next to useless because of the lack of variation in the cars. To top it off, there are 95 of the fuckers and it is not the most enjoyable task roaming round looking for the last ten cars on the list. To top it off, this also counts towards the 100% completion achievement so it’s a pain in the ass for two reasons.

There are also 50 golden film reels to find and I was amazed that by the end of playing through the story, I had only managed to find one!

Downloadable Content

There are four DLC packs for L.A. Noire which each offer an additional 100 Points and an additional case. Also included in this lot is one of the hardest achievements in the game (in my opinion). Now, I don’t think that the shooting was the main gameplay seller in L. A. Noire so I was a little dismayed when I found out there was an achievement for shooting two guys in cars before they get out. This would be fairly tricky in a first person shooter, let alone an over-the-shoulder third person game when the gun accuracy is equivalent of pissing into gale-force winds. I got there in the end though and was able to add the game to my 100% list.

L.A. Noire is one of the best games I’ve played for a while, albeit I’m slightly late in my playing of it. The only trouble is that it offers no real replay value. There are no alternative endings or different pathways to solving cases so it’s all a bit linear. Still, if you haven’t played it, it is definitely worth investing in.

Ben 10 Omniverse

Christmas is a wonderful time of year. It gives you an excuse to buy games for younger people and then play them for easy achievements. This was exactly the case for Ben 10 Omniverse. I managed to smash the whole thing out in the space of an afternoon in just over 5 hours.

Anyway, I don’t really know that much about Ben 10 but the story seems to be some evil dude that absorbs technology absorbs Rook’s energy gun from the future when Rook accidentally gets teleported into the past and bad things happen in the future. Rook then teleports between the future and the past as Ben and Rook try to fix the timeline (featuring two different Bens in the future and the past.)

As this is a game for kids, I won’t even talk about the continuity issues with someone continuously travelling back and forth through time but the one thing I did like is that the game does acknowledge the problem with it, even if it doesn’t do anything about it.

Looks wise and sounds wise it was alright. Cartoony graphics are exactly how the game should be and I have no idea how authentic the sound is because I’ve never watched the show. However, it didn’t get annoying but that may be because of how quickly I completed it.

The gameplay... despite all of the plot points focusing on Rook, you actually play as both Bens in the future and the past. Ben has the Omnitrix which allows him to transform into several different aliens, all of which have completely the same attacks, heavy or normal. As they level, they develop the same combo attacks and the only things you really need to use anyone other than Diamondhead for is he individual alien-specific actions.

What I am laboriously trying to get to here is that there is a lot of potential to develop these alien creations to be variable and different, however the developers have decided not to do this and have them all behave exactly the same in combat. That said, this may have been an actual decision as the game is intended for a lower age bracket.

I only came across two issues with the gameplay. The first one, and the worst one, is the mishaps with the AI. There are several instances where you need computer controlled Rook to stand on a switch, or do something useful. There was one occasion where he wouldn’t do this so thinking I was being clever, I plugged in a second controller and moved him to where I wanted him to stand. However, this caused the game to glitch out and the camera not to follow me through the rest of the level – game breaking fail.

I’ve actually thought of something else while writing this – the AI combat is stupid. Rook will constantly get in your way and steal your kills instead of fighting other bad guys in the area. This is very frustrating but I’ll go into more detail on this later.

The final issue I had, which is probably more to do with me being shit at games, is that the bottomless pits and jumping capacity seem to be a bit unbalanced. You have to time your jumps exactly right in order to get over some gaps and if you miss it is instant death – quite unforgiving for the younger generation – and led to several hissy fits from the 8-year-old playing it. Honestly.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 46 Achievements  

Throughout my first playthrough, I managed to nab all but two of the achievements. These included all storyline based achievements, all the achievements for the kills with each alien and for fully upgrading both Rook and Ben.

Normally I don’t complain about the ease of achievements, but the fact that Rook auto-upgrades himself throughout the game seems a bit silly. The game builds the character for you which is like having a reward for doing nothing.

The other issue I had was with Rook continually killing the enemies I was fighting when trying to rack up kills as Ben. This really began to fuck me off as you fight four enemies at a time and he always started attacking the one I was working on.

The two achievements left at the end was for collect all Codon Crystals, which basically means I missed one collectible item and for opening 75 Tech thingies which I don’t think is possible in one playthrough anyway.

Downloadable Content – N/A

And that’s it; a really easy game for the achievement collectors and possibly some fun for the kids as well. I won’t be going back to it though.

LEGO Lord of the Rings

There are only a handful of Lego games missing from my collection and now I can tick Lord of the Rings off of the list, but not without some degree of effort.

As easy as they are, the Lego games are a grind and a half. This is second open world Lego game I’ve played (I’m not counting LEGO Indiana Jones 2 because it was a bag of wank) and the open world stuff was, to some degree, more enjoyable than the actual story missions.

The story missions follow the main story of the three Lord of the Rings films and I found I suffered the same issues with the game as I did with the film; I found the Frodo and Sam bits really boring and looked forward to the Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli bits.

I don’t know why they insist on doing this but they always have an obligatory vehicle level in every Lego game, even in Lord of the Rings. This one features the Warg attack where you have to fight off the Orcs on Dogs. To be fair though, they seem to be learning from their mistakes as the level is very short.

In terms of game play, it’s okay. It’s the not the best Lego game ever but it’s by no means the worst. The levels are slowly becoming the worst part of the game. I hate having to reply stuff that’s easy and I find it really annoying that you have to replay the story levels in order to collect all of the extra stuff as you have to do a free play run through to collect all the shit you couldn’t get in story mode. This is even more unnecessary not that they have introduced the open world function. Why not limit the running around and collecting things to the open world and only subject the players to one playthough of the story?

There were a couple of glitch-outs which also meant that I couldn’t complete some levels and had to turn it off and come back to it later. Also, there were a few bits of the game that weren’t really clear and it took me ages to figure out what I had to do. There was one part where I had to get one character to stand in a certain area while the other character did something else and there was another section where there was a moveable block that did not stand out and it took me ages to figure out it could actually be moved.

However, linking in with the first stumbling block, the worst thing about the game is the AI controlling the second character. The amount of times that I needed to use both characters to do a specific thing and I got one of the characters in the right position then switch to the other only for the other character to abandon what I had asked it to do, was stupid.

While the music is good and in keeping with the theme of the movies, it reminded me how horribly depressing it is, especially the ‘ring is draining your soul’ style music which, most annoyingly, appears to be the most used in the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 48 Achievements

It has the standard complete every story level and get to 100% completion which covers off 29 of the achievements but it should be mentioned that while this is not difficult, it is one hell of a slog. There is always the achievement for the 100% completion but I swear that the makers of these games are continuously trying to make their games even longer and slog-like.

In addition to the 100% related achievements, there are the standard, do weird shit with the Lego characters achievements, including some secret ones which you would in no way consider doing during normal play.

Some are actually quite funny. There is one for throwing Isildur into the fires of Mount Doom in the prologue which is called ‘it won’t be that easy.’ There is also another for walking into Mordor on the open world map coined ‘One does not simply...’ referencing a famous line from the film.

There is one challenging achievement that took me a few goes and it involves clearing the Mines of Moria in under fifteen minutes, a task that I thought was impossible and is not helped by the character switching issues I mentioned earlier. It fact, it is made worse by the fact that you have to do this in story-mode where you have the option to switch between the nine different characters. With the questionable AI functionality and the fact you are on a timed run, it puts the achievement more down to luck than skill which is really annoying.

In addition to challenging there is also fucking stupid. There is an achievement for collecting 10,000,000,000 credits, money that you will never spend and takes ages to accumulate even with the stud multipliers activated. And the best part is, once you’ve done it, it will just sit there not needing to be spent. Brilliant.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Lego Lord of the Rings is much more of a slog than I thought it would be and the music made it even more difficult to come out of the post game depression coma. I’m going to need a quick and easy win to get over this one.

A-Train HX

This is possibly one of the most bizarre games I have ever played. I’m not even sure what was going on half the time but here goes.

A-Train HX is a train simulation game where you have to build an enterprise surrounding the railway system. At least that is what I think the premise should be. It is really hard to tell because there are no in-game tutorials and the instruction manual is next to useless. At this point, I gave up at any regular attempt to play the game normally and looked up what others had done to earn the interesting sounding achievements.

Due to the nature of money in the game, there is a very basic - and really stupid - way of ensuring you do not go bankrupt. You have to build a big train station and build hundreds of convenience stores around the outside. I’m talking in excess of a few hundred convenience stores around the station. It looks bizarre and sounds even worse. There is no infrastructure at all. People simply get off the train and start spending hundreds of thousands of pounds in your convenience store empire in the middle of nowhere.

Now because I couldn’t be bothered to play it properly, I am removed from making any ground breaking comments and insights into the strategy required to build a bustling metropolis around the trains and stuff, but I can comment on the horrible controls. Whenever you get near the edge of the map, the camera will not rotate outside of the map zone and instead will zoom in automatically to the closest square to the edge of the map and not go back out. This is really annoying when you consider that the game is impossible to play when it is zoomed in to the max.

Building stuff underground and over water is a massive pain in the ass as well. There is one map that is mostly surrounded by water and in order to get new materials into your world map, you need to build train tracks to the edge of the map. However, for some bizarre and unexplainable reason, if you build the train track all the way to the edge of the map, the trains won’t come in. For some reason, you need to build the last section of track separately to allow the trains to enter the map.

The last thing I have to mention is the music. The music is, to be polite, absolutely horrible. No one could stick sitting it the same room as me when I was playing the game such was the clinky-clunky nature of the music. Another aspect of the music that pissed me off when playing the game was the almost celebratory noise made when the game takes it’s ludicrously high amount of tax. This aspect also makes me think that if you play the game properly, every year when they take the tax payment, you will probably get completely screwed over.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 24 Achievements

There is not much point in me talking about the achievements in this game as I didn’t bother doing anything properly which therefore led to me obtaining them all really easily. Actually, thinking about it, there are two problem achievements.

The first one is for playing the stock market to earn over 10 billion dollars worth of profit. This isn’t overly difficult but it does require you to not play the game and just stare at changing stock prices for a stupid amount of time. A reward for not playing the game feels really stupid.

The less forgivable problem achievement is the one for completing all the default maps. Many people have reported this as a glitched and I thought to myself, in regular cocky fashion, this won’t affect me. Indeed it has been a very long time since I’ve been adversely affected by a glitch however, this one did get me and it was really fucking irritating too. Having read up on the various causes of this one glitching out, I avoided downloading any extra maps, I entered myself on every leaderboard for each of the maps and when I completed the last map and it still didn’t unlock. I then got cross and didn’t play the game for a week.

When I went back to it, it was late at night so that I could get through all the maps in one sitting without causing any undue stress to my family members due to the terrible music. This caused the achievement to unlock but it was about 5 hours of extra gaming I didn’t need.

Downloadable Content – N/A

A-Train HX is an achievement hunter’s game. I personally didn’t find it fun but I’m not a simulation game enthusiast. If I had managed to avoid playing through the whole game twice, I may have nicer things to say but there is no excuse for developers not fixing their games in an age when you can release title updates whenever it takes your fancy.

The Testament of Sherlock Holmes

Following the last Sherlock Holmes adventure and his fictitious pursuit of Jack the Ripper, we now join him on another quest to solve murders, only this time he has a far less annoying voice. That’s the only real difference though. He is still an arrogant son-of-a-bitch who continuously breaks the law. During the course of his ‘investigation,’ Sherlock Holmes commits a series of crimes including but not limited to; springing a convicted mass murderer from prison; blackmail; arson; countless amounts of vandalism and, my personal favourite, murder. While on a murder investigation.

Still the most intriguing part of the game is Sherlock’s relationship with Watson. He is constantly mugging him off, undermining his intelligence and making him an accessory to his crimes and yet Watson still thinks this is okay, probably because Holmes occasionally refers to him as ‘Mr Dear Watson.’ There is no way any other human being would take the level of abuse subjected by Holmes and still call them ‘friend.’ It is bizarre.

Visually the game is okay but I would have expected a little bit more from a game in 2012. For the most part the sound effects and background music win points for being spot on with the atmosphere of the game and in keeping with the period, however there were a few exceptions to this. In the prison area, the pace of the music is really fast and completely out of context with what you are supposed to be doing. The music is so fast paced that it implies you are in a rush to do what you have to do there which is not the case at all.

Gameplay wise there is only one criticism – some of the puzzles are ridiculously hard to work out what you have to do. I’m not talking about the ones that require you to solve mysteries with the clues you are given but more specific when you have to define chemical compounds at Sherlock’s flat. There are no instructions on how to use the chemistry set and I had to look it up to figure out how it worked.

On the other side of the coin, the environment-based puzzles are really good. They give a great sense of achievement for figuring out what you need to do from the clues provided and most of this involves using your own intuition.

I do think that the character dialogues and interactions with the environment could use some work. I’ll discuss the dialogue in the achievements bit as one of the achievements relates directly to this subject. The environmental interactions feel a bit silly at times. For example, you can choose between third person and first person perspective. The differences are that in third person, your character handles badly, can’t easily interact with the environment and walks like a robot crossed with a brain-damaged rabbit. It’s awful and there is no real need to use it as it seems like the game was designed to be played in first person anyway.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 32 Achievements

Okay so there are 19 unmissable achievements for playing through the main story of the game and three which are completely missable.

One of the missable achievements is for having three separate dialogue conversations to enact Sherlock’s love of blackmail. Although to be fair, one of these conversations is Watson’s, but still. Anyway what I would have liked to have seen from the game would have been a variety of different dialogue options that had a variety of different outcomes. You have three opportunities to blackmail people but they are only there for the achievement and to make Holmes look like an asshole. They have no bearing on any character outcomes or the overall storyline. Basically, it’s one of those areas that had the bare minimum work put into it to allow the game to function.

My complaint from an achievement perspective is that there is scope for variety here which is unused. As well as the 19 out of 32 achievements being story related, the other 10 non-missables are for completing the individual puzzles in the game and the reason they are not storyline related is that there is a feature that allows you to skip the puzzles if you are not able to do them. While there is no conceivable problem with this, it is kind of weird that this story driven game allows you to get its final reward (the ending) without making you complete any of its challenges.

Another one of the missable achievements is for finding one item and fully examining it. This item is in no way connected to the storyline of the game so it begs the question... why only include one achievement of this type? It feels very strange, almost like there was a plan to have a much vaster game experience but it wasn’t completed and the game was forced into an early release.

The last missable one is for completing all of the in-game puzzles that you can skip, missable obviously because of the in-game ability to skip the main content of the game. You have to do this on one playthrough though so it makes sense, seeing as you’ve paid money for it, to actually play the game through properly as there are no conceivable short cuts to unlocking this one.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s another Sherlock game that can gather dust or be sold once completed as there is no replay value to the puzzles and no alternate ending. It feels very rushed and underdone but in its defence, the puzzles are good and offer a sense of satisfaction if completed without aid.

Top Spin 2

After taking a trip down memory lane with Bioshock, I went on a cleanup operation with Top Spin 2. After completing all of the offline achievements, I went back to complete the three multiplayer achievements and add this to the completed pile.

Gameplay wise, the standout comparison to make is to Virtua Tennis. It took me a while to get used to the Top Spin controls but once I did, it was apparent that they were more deliberate and accurately calibrated than that of its direct competitor and it is also a game based more on skill. I used to play it with my friend who was quite experienced with the game and closing the skill gap on him was a real challenge - one I didn’t quite accomplish!

As with all sports games with a low amount of achievements here is a basic run through of what’s on offer:

1. Win first exhibition match – Win a match in Exhibition Mode.

2. Beat all female pro players – Beat all the female players in the game. This can be done in exhibition mode simply by working your way through the characters on the menu.

3. Beat all male pro players - Beat all the male players in the game. This can be done in exhibition mode simply by working your way through the characters on the menu.

4. Win first match in Career Mode – Simply win a match in Career Mode for this achievement.

5. Win first Career tournament – Simply win a tournament in Career Mode for this achievement.

6. Complete first career – Simply finish Career Mode to unlock this achievement. You can simulate the 5 year career but this is not recommended for the following two reasons. 

Missable Achievements

7. Reach #1 World Rank in career – The easiest way to do this and the one below is to make sure that you win the majority of the tournaments on offer. If you build your player character, winning matches should be a breeze for the last three years of the career which should net you more than 1,000 Points and the number 1 rank.

8. End Career with 1,000 points – as above. According to my findings, not a lot of the people that played the game managed to do this but it’s probably because it requires the player to do a lot of the same things. Like play tennis. In a tennis game.

Multiplayer

I can’t really say much about the multiplayer experience because I didn’t have one. Top Spin 2 was released in March 2006. The online community is not existent over eight and a half years after release so my ‘guides’ will reflect this.

9. Win first Ranked Match – to win a ranked match you have to first have a player created character. Ranked Matches cannot be played with the in-game pros which makes sense as everyone would simply play as Federer. After creating your character, you will have two choices. First choice is to find someone else out there who needs the three online achievements. The second is to get a second Xbox360 – these can now be purchased for around £70 (Elite version).

10. Win 25 Ranked Matches – As above.

11. Play 50 Ranked Matches – As above. With a friend you can get both of these in about 2 and a half hours, the key being to forfeit the match at the right time. When I was doing this I forfeited about 20 matches too soon and they didn’t register which meant I had to do them again, which makes me an even bigger loser.

In terms of gameplay, it is probably still the best tennis game out there to date, though I am yet to sample the latest Top Spin or Virtua games. However, with the lack of online activity, it is probably not a recommended buy if you are looking for full completions. However, it is an easy 775 points and cheap if you are not that bothered.

A side note on the two Xboxes method, I am not recommending you go out and buy another console. The only reason I was able to do this was because my original Xbox started churning up discs so I bought an elite as a replacement to the old one. Only do this if you are hell bent on getting full completions – or if you have kids, get them an Xbox 360 and use it for achievement hunts!