Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2

On to part two and thankfully the end of Pac-Man’s Ghostly Adventures... 2. The first thing I noticed is that it is almost a carbon copy of the first game. Rather than repeat myself again – something not really considered a bad thing by Bandai Namco – I will attempt to point out some of the differences.

The game is longer than the last one. I didn’t view this as a good thing at all. I questioned whether I would actually finish the game after I laboured through the first five levels of the first world. There are in excess of forty ‘different’ levels in this thing and most of them are the same except with different scenery and a few other exceptions to be listed below.

They have removed the arcade games and replaced them with vehicle levels. This isn’t a bad thing at all. It means there is more variety to the main game levels and these provided a nice break from the monotonous killing of ghosts and jumping from tree to tree.

The level designs are more intricate... but still linear. There is only one exception to this rule. One of the last levels in the game has a split path. All the rest have a single direction of travel that you follow from start the end.

For two boss battles, Pac-Man gets specially abilities. You can turn into King Kong to fight a T-Rex and get really big to fight a robot. They are one-offs though so it doesn’t add another level of gameplay.

Now for some of the similarities. There is a completely pointless ‘home’ zone where you can walk around having even more pointless conversations with the other characters. You can also unlock some challenge levels in the home area but you don’t get anything for completing these.

Pac-Man is still the most sinfully annoying character ever. This is naturally made worse by the fact that I’ve had to put up with him for two games.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

It’s got 25 achievements so you would think they are the same as the last game right? Well, they’re not. For the most part.

There is only one achievement you will unlock through playing the game and that is for killing 5 stone monsters as granite ball Pac. This is by default a main storyline achievement because you have to kill 5 or more stone monsters to finish some levels.

You have to complete one of each of the different vehicle levels without losing a life. There are 3 of these. You also have the same kill enemies with various Pac forms including the scared ghosts, which will net you another 5 achievements, however another difference here is that you have to use each form’s special move to kill the ghosts. You can’t just chomp them. This was quite frustrating as Metal Pac because his special move attracts ghosts but all you have to go is release the special button to kill the ghosts for it to count. It treats it as a special kill score wise if you press the normal chomp button so I thought my kills were counting when they weren’t. Annoying.

There are two achievements for exploring the home area. You have to speak to all of your friends, which takes a few minutes of exploring, and review all of the character bios which is just flicking through in-game screens about the characters.

There are a few other self explanatory misc ones but if you are playing for the 100% these will come naturally anyway. The biggest pain, and time sync, is that you have to complete all of the levels getting the top score. By default, this will get all of the achievements for playing the game that I have mentioned but you get one achievement for getting the top score in each level of each zone. There are five zones and what I consider to be an excessive amount of levels.

To get the high score, you have to collect all the fruits in each level which carries another achievement. To get all the fruits, you have to visit all arcade zones within each level which carries another achievement. What doesn’t make sense is that there is an achievement for getting all high scores in each of the five zones and then another one for getting all gold medals – which is the same thing as getting the high score in all the levels so it’s redundant.

I mentioned above that there was only one level with a split path and incidentally the creators actually used this to make you replay this one level to net a separate achievement. They are betrayus challenges throughout the game and an achievement for completing all of them. All of them are story related except for the one in this level which is found by going down one branch of the split path. On the other path is all three fruits you need to get the high score. It seems like a really bizarre choice to have only one level out of nearly 50 that has two paths to completion – and one I can’t think of a decent explanation to. Just because?

Downloadable Content – N/A

Ghostly Adventures 2 is a sequel that doesn’t really try to do anything different and offers the same gameplay from the first game. If you liked the first game, this one will be right up your street but if you didn’t like the first one, this one isn’t going to change your mind.

Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures

I downloaded both of the Ghostly Adventures games as part of another Xbox deal and rather than sit on them for months/years, I decided to give the first one a go. It had a relatively easy achievement list coupled with a friendly child feel and a low estimated completion time (something I will start focusing on more over the coming months) so I thought it wouldn’t take up too much of my time.

I managed to complete the game across three real-life days but my word, it was a slog and here’s why. While the overall completion time is relatively short, the game itself is monumentally repetitive. Most levels are the same and don’t offer a massive variety of gameplay elements.

Ghostly Adventures is a basic platforming game when Pac-Man double jumps and chomps his way through various levels. He can also change into six different forms but most levels are an episode of repetition – follow the path, eat the ghosts, get the fruit. There is a storyline running through the reasons why you have to do what you have to do but it has no bearing on the gameplay in any way. This isn’t really a criticism but more of a point that the story didn’t add anything to the game for me.

In addition to the main game, there are arcade games that unlock as you progress. These do offer some different gameplay elements but not a lot has gone into making them and they feel tacked on.

The most annoying part of the game, however, is the sound effects. The music is ‘plinky-plunky’ and repetitive as with most games of this type, however the most annoying thing is Pac-Man’s voice. He makes Spiderman look modest with how often he refers to himself as ‘awesome’ and this continues throughout the entire game. As there are quite a few levels, which is noticeable when they are all essentially the same, this really began grating me towards the end. Despite what he says, his voice is generally annoying too.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

The achievement list is fairly straight forward if not frustrating. You get 9 achievements for playing the game from start to finish.  There are achievements for killing 100 ghosts in 5 of pac-man’s forms, but not Rubber Pac for some reason, and another for killing 300 scared ghosts. I targeted the scared ghosts when I realised it was an achievement and got that before the end of the game. 4 of the others came with generally playing it but I had to grind out ghost kills as Metal Pac as you only use him three or four times while playing – which is shocking considering the lack of variety in the game.

The arcade levels I mentioned above each carry an achievement for completing all the levels they contain. I found these fairly straightforward and managed to get them all on my first attempt which saved me having to play them repeatedly.

On top of these there are a few other for doing certain things like getting 50 lives in one go and getting Pac-Man’s health up to six, which you do by obtaining cheery pie things and multicoloured slime pick-ups which you get throughout the game. Neither of these needed to grinded out though because the last achievement for collecting an arcade coin from every level requires you to play most of the repetitive levels once more to add to the repetitiveness. That’s a whole lot of repetitive.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As I think I’ve repeatedly mentioned, Ghostly Adventures is quite repetitive but I suppose it is to be expected as it is a kid’s style game. It’s a fairly easy completion on the face of it but I did find it quite boring, especially towards the end.

Enchanted Arms

JPRGs used to be quality gaming experiences back in the day of Final Fantasy VII. So much so was my nostalgia for the genre that I simply had to get Enchanted Arms for the Xbox 360 2 years after it was released. Okay, so maybe I didn’t get it straight away but I did play it as soon as I got it.

However, once I got it and started playing it, I committed the RPG sin of getting stuck and then never playing it again. As time passed me by and my achievement hunter OCD kicked in 2011, I kept looking at it thinking it should be an easy finish. All I have to do is pick it up and start playing it again. But that involved revisiting the point at which I was stuck balls deep into a game I haven’t played for 5 years. Then 6 years. And so on. And I kept putting it off. Anyway, I eventually got my courage up and dived in to the game again this year.

It was as expected, I had no idea how the game worked anymore and spent the best part of two hours trying to get to grips with the control system again. Once I did, however, it all came flooding back to me and I was able to get out of the tight spot I was in and finish the game a mere 15 hours later - a small amount of time in JRPG world. That said, my total play time was double the average so I sucked this one up big time.

The story follows Atsuma who takes the Japanese-English conversion award for Most Annoying Protagonist by a country mile. He is whiney, stupid and never listens even when wiser characters are giving him advice. In fact, he goes on ignoring everyone right until the end of the game. I’ll cover this in the achievements section because it irritated the shit out of me.

Atsuma has got something wrong with his arm that means he is a secret destructive weapon of some kind. It could have been explained to me but the beginning of the game was so far away from me completing it that I can’t remember what was and wasn’t said – for more information on the story, use Google. But basically he goes on a quest to save his friend after the Ice Queen attacks his home town. Along the way he makes some new friends, makes some enemies and finds other people who are also annoying, but nothing compared to Atsuma.

The gameplay mainly focuses around a grid based combat system and uses random battle encounters as its way of dealing with combat. Random Battle Encounters is now archaic based on any new RPGs I’ve played recently where you can see the enemies in the field and chose to avoid them. That said, it worked for Lost Odyssey which was pretty good so no complaints about random battle encounters from me. The grid combat system makes more sense in general fighting principles. You take it in turns to move and then strike, which adds a much more tactical element than I’ve seen previously.

In addition to your main party of four humans, there are hundreds of golems to collect which will fight alongside you. This again makes the tactical possibilities and outcomes almost endless. This can have its own issues though as you can be spread quite thin and finding the best combinations to win fights could be time consuming in its self. That said, the combat is quite forgiving in that you can win the majority of fights by using the core of the main human characters.

The sound effects are annoying. I won’t say more than that. The world design is intricate but it’s not expansive. There is no world map and the exploration is limited to three dimensional planes which limits secret and optional location areas. They still built in the ultimate dungeon though but I will confess to not completing it – there wasn’t an achievement requirement me to do so.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

All of the achievements are earned by playing through the main story which is why they are all secret. However, there is one massive caveat to this. Toya, who is one of Atsuma’s friends from the beginning of the game, is being controlled by the Ice Queen. At the end of the game he will ask you a question. If you answer this question in a certain way, you will cut off the main story before you can get the last two achievements available to you if you don’t have back up save files.

So two pieces of advice; always have a back up save and follow Atsuma’s idiot personality to the end or else you will lose out on 30 hours of gameplay and have to replay the whole thing from scratch. You have been warned.

Downloadable –N/A

Enchanted Arms is a mediocre JPRG with irritating characters and questionable storyline. It doesn’t offer replay value but then again I can’t think of a JRPG that does other than Final Fantasy VII. This one won’t live long in the memory though and I’m glad to see the back of it.

Sleeping Dogs

Shamefully, it took me a long while between purchasing this game and playing it as it did get a lot of good reviews and, more importantly, was recommended to me by several people.

Sleeping Dogs follows the story of Wei Chen, an undercover cop going balls deep in the triad in order to destroy the drug trade in Hong Kong. He has at his disposal; the ability to kick anyone’s ass; the ability to carry just one gun at a time; awesome driving skills and more mojo than Austin Powers.

Everyone seems to think that Wei is on the verge of joining to triad and chucking in the cop scene despite your in-game actions of making loads of drug busts, killing rival gang members and avoiding hurting members of the public.

To be honest, about half Wei through the game, I wouldn’t have blamed Wei if he had gone triad. All the police types seem to hate him and think he is a loose cannon and all the Triads give you nothing but praise. But Wei is a man of his word and sees his undercover stuff through to the end, partly because one of the Tried dudes knobbed his sister or something.

I don’t want to focus too much on the story because it is very much worth playing the game through to see this for yourself. I found it very immersive and Wei is a likable chap in some ways.

Aside from his police colleagues, Wei also manages to generate a lot of dislike from the female population of Hong Kong. Basically he will meet a girl, bang her, meet another girl, bang her and so on. Some girls completely disappear from the game, others get kidnapped and sold and some find out about each other and give Wei a hard time. I thought he was a lad until one mission where you have to follow one of your supposed girlfriends because someone reckons she is cheating on you. When he confronts her, she is like, ‘So what? You are slagging it with that tramp from that other place.’ And Wei is like, ‘Baby that was for work.’ And I was like, ‘No Wei did you just use that excuse!’

The game itself it a face-paced version of Grand Theft Auto and there is nothing wrong at all with that. The open world is well designed and also not overly large. I mean, it’s large enough for you to spend a considerable amount of time exploring but no so big that will resent having to drive to the next town. In addition, you can explore nearly the entire map from the outset which is great.

A lot of work has gone into the visuals and the various locations are intricately designed. That said a lot of the scenery can be problematic when exploring and I found I had a lot of issues with invisible walls when trying to get the collectibles. But it does look nice.

Sound effects can be broken down into two categories; voiceovers and music. The voiceovers are really good. The actors seem to buy in and invest in the story which is great and just adds to the immersive nature of the game. On the flip side, the music is atrocious. It’s not so much that the focus is on J-Pop (and everything sounds very Japanese), it’s the fact that it is almost completely broken. In the latter stages of the game, I found that the radio got stuck and was repeating the same 30 seconds of one song over and over again. As you can imagine, this was mind-destroying.

As it’s a Grand Theft Auto clone, there are several elements to the game play. The first one you are introduced to is free-running. The game opens with an action sequence at the end of which Wei gets arrested. You have to run through a market place, jumping over things, sliding under things, jumping over walls, jumping through windows and it is very effective for setting up the kind of gaming experience on offer.

There are also the standard driving and shooting elements but the way these combine is great for a game, but less so for realism. Wei can use a submachine while driving, looking behind him and is accurate enough to shoot out tyres at over 500 metres away as well as shooting guys off of motorcycles. Seriously cool – but not realistic. Not that it’s a major issue of course.

Aside from the GTA gameplay elements, Sleeping Dogs offers a greatly improved hand-to-hand combat experience. You can teach Wei new moves at the Dojo making him an unbeatable Bruce Lee style physical specimen. Once you have learned all of his moves, gunplay becomes obsolete and you can destroy everyone with your fists of fury.

The one major complaint I have about the game is the Wei in which the camera reacts when I’m trying to do intricate driving. For some reason the game assumes that when I touch the accelerator, I want to be looking straight ahead of me despite the fact I had just manually adjusted the camera to look in the direction I actually wanted to be looking in. It was so frustrating. Bad camera angles really kill a game for me. Fortunately, Sleeping Dogs was very good aside from this.

Achievements – 1,225 Points – 59 Achievements

Sleeping Dogs offers a lot of variety on the achievement front. The main story only accounts for eight of them leaving lots of scope. Outside of the main story, you can collect the vast majority by completing the skills. One of the overarching achievements is for getting gold in all your skills and this is where it gets a bit drawn out for the achievement hunters.

One of the gold medals is given for driving for thirty minutes at maximum speed. You cannot get a car capable of doing the maximum speed until later in the game (some crazy people may argue against this but it’s not easy) and the only way you can realistically drive for thirty minutes is to do laps of the freeway. It will more than likely be the last thing you do.

Another thing that is slightly tricky and repetitive is the Ultimate Fighter achievement. This requires you to get all of the Triad upgrades and this can only realistically be done by replaying the story missions, once Wei has learned more skills, to maximise your Triad scores.

There was nothing majorly difficult with the remainder of the game, it’s just time consuming -  but an enjoyable time consuming experience is fine with me.

Downloadable Content

Sleeping Dogs has two DLCs on offer which give you an extended playing experience. The Year of the Snake shows Wei take on some weird cultists as a beat cop. The achievements here are not too bad, the most taxing being finding all the evidence bags.

Nightmare in North Point is just plain bizarre. Supposedly, it’s a Halloween style level where everyone in North Point turns into Zombies and you have to take down the reincarnated spirit of some guy who was turned into catfood. It’s not in keeping with the rest of the game and I completely switched off from this.

This DLC comes with an extra five skills to get gold awards with and once again will have you driving around for an inexcusable amount of time looking for enemies to kill. The game had stopped being fun at this point, mainly due to the nature of the DLC than anything.

Despite the Nightmare in North Point DLC, I had a good time with Sleeping Dogs. I thought it was a very well executed game that didn’t try to do too much and achieved the right balance between story and gameplay. It tried to shoot itself in the foot with its DLC offerings and the camera behaviour while driving but only than that it’ a solid game.

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.

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.

Prison Break: The Conspiracy

I purchased this one for another hypothetically easy completion. I had never watched the Prison Break series despite many recommendations and I was afraid the game could ruin the storyline of the series. However, as it states on the back on the box, you play as Tom Paxton, who has a job to ‘interact with and influence the story of season one.’ This put my mind at ease because any interaction with the storyline would have to be nullified as Tom does not play any role in the series.

The storyline is what you would expect from such a game in that it isn’t really under its own control as it tries to fit around an already established cast and plot while still trying to make sense. It does achieve this but it does feel quite forced and although I haven’t seen the first season yet, I’m sure there will be parts of it that don’t make sense.

In terms of the standalone story though, it isn’t too bad and that’s mainly because of the main protagonist, Mr Paxton. In a world of characters doing unbelievable things for their stature and age, Tom Paxton is a thirty-something secret agent hard man who is the perfect protagonist for completing an espionage mission into a prison full of dangerous criminals. His voice is also the right balance of intimidating and aggressive, even when he is not trying to be intimidating. Or aggressive.

The game’s environments are visually underwhelming, but the character facial expressions are actually pretty good. Mind you, Tom’s facial expressions are actually really easy when all he has to do is look intimidating or aggressive.

The gameplay elements are stealth missions interspersed with some fist fights. It never gets any more advanced than that and the only way of doing stealth is to avoid being seen or heard. You can’t lure guards or take them out silently to make your way through areas so it is fairly one dimensional.

That said, I did sort of lure at one point by allowing myself to be seen so that a guard would investigate whether he actually saw something. I don’t think this the intended way to do it though and was more down to my risky cunning than gameplay mechanics.

A few story elements were really lazy as well. At one point, Tom makes a phone call to his boss when he is stuck and his boss tells him he needs to talk to a specific inmate. After the call, the specific character is sitting on the bench right behind Tom. Similar things like this happen throughout the game.

The fighting mechanics are also underwhelming.  You have three things you can do: quick attack, heavy attack and block. You can also use the block button to do a counter and once you figure out the timings, it makes fist fights a procession as opposed to a challenge, especially when one counter move knocks your opponent down allowing you to kick them. Do this twice and the fight is over.

There are a couple of things about the fighting don’t make sense either. When you knock a guy down, you can kick him but he can’t do the same to you. Normally I complain about the AI being able to do things that player characters can’t, however this one felt really unfair. The second thing is that in order to end a fight you have to do a finishing move, triggered by a quick time event. The amount of times I missed this and then had to beat the guy up again was ridiculous. If I knock someone down and kick them over and over again I wouldn’t expect them to keep getting back up.

That brings me on nicely to the issue of quick-time events. I’m not that critical of quick-time events as I believe they have their place and that place is certainly not in Prison Break. You will face quick-time events throughout the stealth sections and they often involve having to rapidly press one button then press another immediately after. There is a small noise that triggers the change and then less than a second before you have to press the next button. Failing a quick time event is game over. As you can imagine, this lovely little feature led to a lot of game overs for me until I had failed enough times to know exactly when to stop tapping one button and pressing the second. As I’ve said in previous reviews, I am not a fan of ‘trial and error’ gaming.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Firstly, as always, 30 of the achievements are obtainable for simply playing through the story. There are three additional ones you can earn by playing the game on hard (Shark) mode; one for winning one hundred fights; one for winning a fight without taking any damage and another for completing the game on hard.

In addition to the hard (Jaws) achievements, there are six grinding achievements. The Mogul achievement for collecting $5,000 dollars can only be done by completing fights in the underground fighting arena. This is coupled with your winning one hundred fights above, getting six tattoos (which is the only thing you can actually spend your money on), spending ten minutes on the two items of gym equipment (which made me realise how long ten minutes is), winning fifty fights and performing fifty reversal moves (counters) in fights.

The biggest challenge of the above is getting over how tedious it is to do it all, especially in a story-driven game environment. We are put in the prison to observe the main characters from the first season, not to make loads of money by competing in underground fights. It’s meant to be a covert operation but I’m pretty sure if you go in and beat up everyone going and get $5,000 for your trouble, you are probably going to attract quite a lot of attention. In addition, part of the story has you bribe a guard to get a specific room, however for some bizarre reason, you cannot use the £5,000 gained earlier and instead have to... compete in another underground fight to get the money??

Lastly, there is one missable achievement for playing through the whole game without getting spotted –so no continues basically. I was actually excited about the prospect of only having to do one playthrough of the game as hard (Bruno) mode was available from the start. However, I didn’t want to play through the game using a guide and it became very tedious resetting the Xbox every time I came across a new area and got caught straight away, so I sucked it up and played through the game a second time on easy to smash this last one out and take the 1,000 points.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Prison Break is a very ‘meh’ game. Playable but it didn’t take my breath away. A stealth game with only one way to play has absolutely no replay value either so I won’t be playing it again. Overall, the experience is underwhelming and disappointing.

NBA 2K6

Another sports game from 2006 when developers only put achievements in because they had to. It has five achievements that take a maximum of thirty minutes attain if you do it right.

There’s not really that much to say. The controls are as simple as NHL 2K6 which makes it an easy game to pick up and play and the graphics and sound effects are as expected from a 2006 release.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 5 Achievements

All achievements can be unlocked in one game if you get it right:

1.      Get a Triple-Double – All of your players have six in-game stats by which they are measured. You simply you have to get ten of each of three of them. Easily done by tackling, assisting and scoring with the same player.

2.      Score 50 Points With Any Player – Self explanatory.

3.      Score 140 Points With Any Team – Again, self explanatory.

4.      Make 15 Three Pointers In One Game – Score 15 times from outside the area in one game.

5.      Grab 20 Rebounds With Any Player – This was the only one that posed an issue for me in that I didn’t really know what a rebound was. What I did was go long from the half way line, hit the back board and score from the rebound. I managed to do this 20 times with three players before the end of a twelve minute game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

And that’s pretty much it. One game; five achievements; boxed and returned. Simple. It is probably the second easiest 100% I’ve done behind Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

I didn’t know much about Matt Hazard before purchasing it. I’ve got into this habit of looking at games in shops and looking up the achievements online before deciding whether or not to buy them. Matt Hazard was not advertised as difficult but I didn’t look further than the fact that they were all offline achievements. I saw this as meaning an easy game and it will be the last time I use that as a measure!

The game follows the story of Matt Hazard, a video game ‘star’ from the 80s who is about to make his comeback and I’m not speaking metaphorically. He is a game character making his comeback. The story is the best part of the game which is something of a rarity for shooting games.

You have to take Matt through several levels of bad guys as the owner of the company that makes the Matt Hazard games tries to kill him. I mean, in the game ‘kill him’ so it’s not like he will actually die but I found the whole breaking-the-fourth-wall aspect incredibly funny. Especially the way that Matt interacts with Sting Sniperscope, the guy who is meant to be replacing Matt. He constantly mocks him and in generic computer game script, Sting can’t quite deal with it.

Another gem from the in game dialogue occurs in level six when Matt has a face-off with a bad guy from a fake JRPG game from before voice actors and has to physically scroll through dialogue boxes. When he asks to talk the JRPG out of fighting, he responds with ‘...’ which causes Matt to go a tirade about the use of ellipses and how much of a gamer’s time is wasted scrolling through ellipses.’

Another aspect that made me laugh is how many other games Hazard pokes fun at. As mentioned above there is a general pop at JRPGs but there is also mockery for World of Warcraft, (Bill the Wizard) James Bond (Kitty Abundanza – who also highlights that everyone loves Bond even though he continuously cheats on women), Halo (Master Chef) and the surely copyright infringing Captain Carpenter (who is Mario in a blue costume and is a carpenter instead of a plumber).

In addition to the storyline, the sound, inclusive of in-game music and voices, are really well done. The music is very fitting to what’s going on in the game and has a very catchy ‘success’ theme. Matt himself is voiced by Will Arnett and Wally Wellesley is voiced by Neil Patrick Harris and it is amazing how much extra credibility the characters have because of this. It actually feels like they care about the characters and invest in them.

Visually the game is below par, but that could also be to do with the parody from the story. And it is in keeping with what the game is trying to do.

However, no matter how much parody you introduce, at the end of the day a game is still a game and it is there to be played. If you are going to execute the above stuff really well then please, please get the gameplay right.

Matt Hazard is a cover based over-the-shoulder shooter and the major problem with this is that Matt  constantly gets in the way of enemies, preventing me from seeing or aiming at bad guys until it’s too late. This is annoying but not as annoying when I try to take cover and prevent myself from being shot, Matt will just casually strafe to the right. All the time. Into the line of fire, mid-reload without a sense of self preservation and then shout at me like it’s my fault! This is one of the worst kinds of game bugs out there and it sure as hell isn’t my controller either (testing carried out).

Also the over the shoulder camera means that the shooting becomes based more on luck than skill. First person would have been much better. The amount of times I was killed with one shot while in cover was ridiculous towards the end. Other criticisms include a limited variety of bad guys, and the fact there are only eight levels, however towards the end of my playing of the game I was grateful for both of these.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Generally speaking most of the achievements can be earned during a single playthrough. Without going out of my way, I managed to bag 36 of these on one playthrough. You get four at once for completing the game; five if you do it on the higher difficultly available from the start. This seems like they wanted to have fifty achievements for the sake of it.

Other achievements include getting 50 kills with the various weapons in the game. I had two of these left over at the end and the only reason for this was the fact that they are secret for some bizarre reason.

There are two achievements for collecting 20 each of the in game power ups. This required additional playthrough time as I didn’t see enough of them in one playthrough to get twenty.

A few others that I missed were bizarre scenario-specific achievements with varying degrees of stupid. One of these was to kill all enemies in the butcher shop with headshots. The scenario itself was straight forward but when you factor in the fact that it is a secret achievement, it becomes stupid. Also in the same level as the butcher’s shop you have to traverse a dance-floor area without killing any of the dancers. This is also secret but the dancers can be killed by the enemies who are trying to kill you, which puts the achievement into the luck-based stupid pile.

The achievement for destroying potted plants is repetitively stupid because you need to destroy 30 of them and there are only seven throughout the entire game. Luckily they are all in one place and they are at the beginning of a level but still, making you replay the same minute of a level is stupid.

Another few stupid ones are for killing a bandit from behind, destroying all the meat in the butcher level (secret) and my personally stupid favourite, killing three testers with one grenade. This is a special one because there are only two points in the final level of the game where three testers will appear at once. And only once in a blue moon will they appear in a place where they can all be killed with the same grenade. This is also at the end of the level which makes the preparation for trying very tiresome and just slightly inconvenient.

And lastly, completing a shitty game (in the area of gameplay) TWICE because you can’t play it through on the hardest difficultly from the start is totally fucking stupid. Several people have said that you can use a code to unlock the hardest difficulty level from the start but I didn’t find this out until after completing my first playthrough.

Downloadable Content – N/A

When you factor in the above gameplay complaints with playing the game on the hardest difficulty, (for a second time) it becomes a monotonous chore where I found that my survival was more dependent on luck than my skill at aiming without being able to see my targets. I certainly will not be touching or even going near the game again, which is a real shame when you consider the amount of effort they put into the story and characters.

I didn’t mention this above because it was low on my list of annoyances but the cut-scenes aren’t skippable either which is extra stupid on a second playthrough. The level of the story almost made me forget this though which is a testament to how good I thought it was.

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.

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!