Cars

Another sale and friend recommendation pointed me in the direction of the Cars series and what better way to start a series than from the beginning. Cars is apparently a quick, easy game from the outside but once I got started, it was deceivingly difficult - more on that later.

Cars follows the story of Lightning McQueen, the car who wants to be a racecar. I’m not familiar with the movie as I’ve only seen Cars 2 but I’m working on the assumption that the game loosely follows what happens in the movie. You have to take McQueen through a series of races to get him to become some kind of racing champion. It’s a basic principle but I didn’t get on with the gameplay at all.

Cars is an open world racing game which is great... if the game bothered to provide you with a map. This was a real pain in the ass because when you are trying to find the next location for the next event, you basically have a rough idea of where it is and need to find it without really knowing where it is and without knowing where you are which is just fucktarded in terms of providing an enjoyable gaming experience.  In addition, there is nothing to do in the open world except for collecting postcard things but they are so far off the beaten track you won’t just run into them looking for the destination which means they are the only reason that you would go exploring.

On to the races themselves. There are two types of race, a street race equivalent where you race against other opponents in a normal race, and speedway style events which are almost pointless. You just drive round in a circle and it seems to be up to the game whether you win or lose. You can also wait until the last lap before pitting as, for some reason, this puts you 2 seconds in front which hands you the race unless you badly crash.

Graphically it’s a cartoon with ridiculously annoying music. I also have a hatred for Mater and McQueen’s voiceovers. Mater’s because it’s stereotypically stupid and McQueen’s because Owen Wilson has a really untrustworthy tone which is only enhanced when put behind a child friendly car.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

There’s not a lot to really cover in terms of achievements but there are some awful things it requires you to do. Firstly, you have to win all of the races that are available with achievements attached to them. This isn’t all the races in the game but you can work out which ones you need as the achievement name will match the race. Out of all of these, the most painful one was winning the race as Mater because he is awfully shit and the drifting in the game is really inconsistent. This one still only took two attempts which I was grateful for. You get ten achievements for completing the races and another two achievements for unlocking the additional areas.

The last three are a real pain in the ass too. You have to complete all levels of the tractor tipping mini game where you drive around as Mater pushing over tractors in fields. It’s not particularly hard but it is really dull and I found myself getting caught out because I was not paying attention due to boredom.

The next one, which provided me with the most difficulty, was for completing all levels of the Sherriff Hot Pursuit. This was hard because the Sherriff’s car is really shit and starting a pursuit was often harder than actually catching the offenders. It also takes ages as you have to catch three cars for each level and when you can only close down your opponents a millimetre at a time it becomes massively frustrating.

The last achievement worth mentioning is for collecting all the postcards scattered around but considering the lack of a map, and therefore a reference point, I just used a Youtube video and followed it through from start to finish. A cop out I know, but I was done with the game mentally after the first race.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Cars was not a lot of fun but can be completed in less than 8 hours so isn’t too bad in terms of speed. I will probably still gives Cars II a go to see if they learned from the first one and improved the interfaces. I’m just not sure when I will get to it.

TurnOn

I had seen quite a few people playing TurnOn over the last few months and I thought I would give it a go. It looked to be a bit of a strange one with a quick completion estimate but a hefty achievement list and those two things don’t normally go hand in hand.

The game follows the story of a... ball of electricity which appears to go on a mission to restore power to a town after some kind of experiment, which appears to create the electricity ball, drains the city of power. Your job is to use power cables to traverse across various landscapes interacting with power boxes and other things to turn on all the lights.

The interaction sees you move between planes in 3D as if they are 2D... which isn’t a very good explanation. Basically if you can see a cable in the background but you can jump high enough to touch it you will transfer in to the background. Likewise if you jump off the end a cable, you will be caught by any cable below you regardless of what plane you are in. This makes dying difficult but very possible as I found out. Repeatedly.

There is a three-star score system for each level and you have to get a certain amount of points to get three stars. You get points by collecting small lightning bolts and turning on lights, power boxes and fans. Some of these objects are slightly hidden and you will need to explore in order to get the three stars.

There are also speed levels where you move really fast along mainstream power lines. These are the trickiest parts of game as you almost have to know what’s coming up to avoid dying. A lot. Which i didn’t do.

Graphically it does what it should which is allow you to clearly see your surroundings in terms of what you can and can’t interact with. Musically, my God, it’s annoying especially in certain levels when trying to get three stars and constantly replaying the same tune over and over again. In fact, it was almost like the game didn’t like it either as, at certain points, the music would fully glitch out and stop completely.

Speaking of glitches, the music one was relatively frequent but I also had a game glitch where, on one of the speed levels, the speed of my ball did not increase which made it impossible to make certain jumps. This also didn’t fix itself so I had to restart the game to get it to work properly.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 82 Achievements

Of the 82 achievements, only 20 are truly story related but not many of them are that tough either. You basically have to get three lamps in each level and if you do this as you go, you will get three achievements per level so they come thick and fast.

The normal levels are okay and there is a quite a wide margin for error but the speed levels are where all the difficult achievements are. However, there is a trick. You can ‘die’ and restart from the last checkpoint to pick up any lightning bolts you miss on the first sweep. Despite this trick, I still cocked up loads and had to listen to shit music on repeat.

Downloadable Content – N/A

TurnOn is an okay game. It’s an original concept with a semblance of story without any actual narrative. Achievements wise, it is 82 achievements you can easily add to your collection and if you’re like me (unskilled) you can do it in less than 5 hours.

Level 22

There are several games doing their rounds in popularity at the moment. Level 22 was one I noticed some of my friends playing and thought I would jump in too after reading a review.

The game follows the story of Gary, a really bad office worker who is on the verge of getting fired. He goes on a bender for his birthday and wakes up with a hangover and late for work. Knowing he’s in the last chance saloon, he gets his friend to help him to sneak into work without being spotted by his colleagues.

As a premise it’s a bit out there, but the game play is fairly solid. You have to sneak up through the various floors of the office using tools such as newspapers, boxes and donuts to hide or distract other office workers from noticing you. There are a couple of forth-wall breaking moments too and it was genuinely quite funny in places. Like security guards can be distracted by donuts and you can knock them out by putting the donuts in nuclear waste... that’s not a joke.

Graphically, it is set as a 2D cartoon where you roam in a 3D plane so can’t really go wrong within its own context. It’s not very long and can be ran through it about three and a half hours. This meant that the background music didn’t have a chance to get too annoying although I could sense that it would have if I had been require to spend too long playing it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 23 Achievements

The first achievement you will get it simply for starting up the game. You get another for finishing it too but outside of these, the remaining achievements are 100% collectible based.

There are figurines in each of the floors you explore, not including the boss levels, and for the most part these are quite easy to find. What isn’t easy are the achievements linked to opening all the safes within the levels. These safes contain jigsaw pieces and you have to complete the four jigsaws by opening four safes in each floor. This is fine in principle but some of the clues to find out the safe combinations are so fucking obscure that it was probably add ten hours to the game just looking for them. And that doesn’t even include interpreting the clues once you find them.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Level 22 is a fairly solid, enjoyable, quick romp through an office block. Gary is a weirdly likeable guy and you want him to succeed which highlights the strength of what the game set out to do.

 Achievement wise, with a guide it’s really straightforward so everyone is a winner. Unless you like arduous grinds in which case, this isn’t for you.

Adam's Venture: Origins

There is a point that you have to wait for a game to drop in price in fear of it being shit before you buy it. My price limit is normally around £10 and that’s exactly the price I waited for before buying Adam’s Venture.

Adam’s Venture is a game that follows the story of Adam, a layabout who works for his father, as he goes on a... venture to find the Garden of Eden. He is accompanied by Evelyn (do you get it? Not quite an obscure reference) as they journey around the world following various clues to the Garden’s whereabouts while racing against the evil Clairvaux Company to the end goal.

The gameplay involves exploring and solving puzzles and whereas there isn’t very much to the exploring, the puzzles in game scored points with other critics. Not me though. So many people have said that the puzzles are imaginative and original but I found them either obscure or overdone previously. The one I remember most was where you had to put pins in wires to disarm dynamite but these were just so ridiculous in being able to work out how to solve them, that they were neither fun nor imaginative.

To put it in the simplest terms, it’s basically a poor man’s Tomb Raider without any of the cool boss fights or the ability to shoot your enemies. To make things worse, Adam isn’t even a likeable protagonist. He is a chauvinistic sexist whose constant attempts at showing off always fall flat. I’m assuming this is an attempt at humour, along with his many shitty quips that he feels he has to make every five seconds, but it doesn’t come off and this made it really hard to invest in the story.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

Out of the 15 achievements, 13 of them are obtained by walking Adam through the game. That leaves a solitary two that you have to do stuff to get and I actually missed the first one because of my inability to read and research properly.

The first non-linear one you get is a secret one so easily missed if you don’t know it’s there. What you have to do is not start playing the game when prompted for 2 minutes. This amounts to you having to sit there and watch Adam sleep instead of playing – easy to get if you’re not paying attention but I don’t understand why it had to be a secret.

The other one is for spinning all the globe models in the game. Get this though... there are only three. Two of them are right at the beginning of the game and the other one is in a town further in. The name of the achievement suggests there are loads of these things though so without knowing there are only three you could spend minutes exploring the game’s environments in futility.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Adam’s Venture is nothing to write home about. It’s a very basic game that offers no replayability. The achievements are easy enough and you can race through it in less than 6 hours. These will be a very flat unimaginative 6 hours though.  I don’t normally talk about pricing but I’m not sure how they can get away with an RRP of nearly £30 for this. This is probably one of the worst value for money experiences ever.

The Walking Dead Season 1 and 2

Walking Dead Season 2 was being given away as part of Xbox’s Games with Gold programme. Like a mug, I had passed up Season 1 several months ago as I had already completed both of these on the Xbox 360 Arcade. However, they did not carry the 1,000 points and my memory was that they were quick completions. I was wrong about the second point but they do now carry 1,000 points each.

Season 1 sees you take control of Lee, a guy on his way to prison when the zombie outbreak starts. You then meet Clementine, a girl – not an orange – and the way it plays out is that she goes with you in order to survive.

Now this is where a second playthrough had a bit more value for me and proves to me that I actually enjoyed this series. I said to myself that I was going to do the exact opposite of what I did during my first playthrough and be a dick and get everyone to hate me but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t scream and shout at the little girl who had been abandoned by her parents no matter how much it would

have resulted in a... slightly different gaming experience.

Another example of this is Kenny. I told myself I was going to do everything that favoured Kenny throughout the whole game but I couldn’t bring myself to make terrible decisions based on having him be my friend. That said, it’s definitely another case of following Kenny is the worst option whereas anything else you choose to do is just bad by comparison.

Season 2 puts you in Clementine’s shoes after the events of Season 1 and it’s pretty much the same storyline from the 1^st season with different characters and not as good. Everyone you come across seems to be retarded in some way and the ones that aren’t, die – the exact opposite of what would happen in a zombie apocalypse.

The most troubling thing is how all the grown up characters leave it to Clementine, an 11 year old, to make all the important decisions... and then get pissed off with her when you don’t pick their idea! Take some ownership then, you fucks.

Achievements – 2,000 Points – 88 Achievements

There is actually a bit of variety and stuff you have to do here that doesn’t involve just playing through the story. But it’s only in Season 1 and only in the last episode which sees you control 5 different people at various points during the outbreak.

The first non-storyline achievement is obtained during Russell’s story. A car approaches and you have to jump into the bush where you will find someone who died during the main episodes. You have a choice not to jump in to the bush so this is sort of missable.

The second one is when you are playing as Wyatt. You are driving with your friend and both of you seem completely oblivious to the outbreak... but that’s beside the point. You will hit someone with the car and you will play rock paper scissors to see who goes out to check on the person you hit. You have to win 2 out of 3 in order to get the achievement. It’s completely random but you can quit out just before the third game to try and again, however you have to play through the initial conversations again each time you do this which is annoying.

Other than these two, it’s just playing through the stories and seeing what happens.

Downloadable Content – N/A

This time there is no DLC argument as both games have been released as full packages. They are probably the best TellTale games I’ve played thus far and I don’t have that many left to do as things currently stand.