South Park: The Stick of Truth

I was intrigued by what the South Park game would offer. I assumed some whimsical adult humour that would keep me entertained for a good few hours along with an original story and expected level of ridiculousness. I got the latter two but not the first one.

South Park: The Stick of Truth sees you fill the shoes of douchebag, the new kid in South Park as he starts making friends and hanging out with all your favourite characters from the show. At first, it appears that it’s all to get your dad’s approval but it later revealed that you inevitably get caught up in the epic battle for the Stick of Truth, a stick that has the power to control the universe.

The reality, the Stick of Truth is just the central item to the kids’ game as they LARP around the town playing elves versus humans... or Kyle versus Cartman. The story itself is ridiculous and I stopped paying attention as soon as douchebag got abducted by aliens and anally probed. The story is about as pointless as a chocolate teapot as a driving influence for the game.

The sound effects and music work for about four, maybe five hours before it starts to wear thin and I think this works on the same grounds as the episodes – you wouldn’t watch a single episode of South Park over and over again for four hours. You would get bored. And that sums up the music and filler dialogue present through the game.

As I’ve said time and time again, the game play can make or break a game and The Stick of Truth is very middling, although lots of people would disagree. It’s an RPG with turn based combat where you can pick one of four classes at the beginning and your abilities that develop throughout the game are based on the class you pick. You cannot learn all the abilities to maximum level which kind of limits what you can do and making the wrong choice can make the game insanely difficult. On the flip side, you can also become overpowered – which is what I did by playing as a Jew.

Based on what I’ve said above, you can imagine me not being thrilled about having to do a second playthough but more on that in the next section...

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

 This is where the fun really begins. It is possible to get all 50 achievements in one playthrough using tactical saves which if you enjoy constant jokes about poo and farts then all of the stuff I’ve said above doesn’t really matter. However I got about 10 hours in before I realised I was going to need a second playthough and a second playthough makes all of the jokes and music all the more unbearable.

The last achievement I got was for getting through the entire game without ending any battles with your buddies ‘dead.’ I ended a battle with a dead buddy after about 10 minutes of play and didn’t clock that I’d failed this achievement.

There are so many missable achievements for doing a variety of different things. Some of them involve having to collect everything, like becoming everyone’s friend and collecting all of the chinpokomon scattered throughout the town. Some areas become blocked off after a while (like the alien spaceship) and there is also a point of no return which makes both of these missable.

Others missable achievement involve you having to do one-time actions. One such action involved you having to shrink and go up a character’s ass and then summon said character to help you in a battle. Another, and this is one of my personal favourites, is for farting on the corpse of dead Nazi Zombie fetus (aptly named Too Far). You also have to watch your in-game parents have sex for 60 seconds, which is wrong on so many levels.

I could go on and on about the different missables but we will be here all day if I do. More than half the achievements are missable and while some of these are because of the point of no return, most of them aren’t and will require you to do something specific at some point in the game. I fully recommend a guide if you are planning on the 100% completion.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I guess the summary is if you really like the average South Park episodes, you will definitely enjoy this game, however if you can’t rewatch episodes it’s not recommended and will grate on you before the end. I’ll confess that I found it semi enjoyable but not for the whole game. It also doesn’t have any replay value either but that’s just my opinion.

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition

I had absolutely no intention of playing Minecraft but when I was between games, I thought I would pick it up and hammer it out in about an hour – that was the impression I was given by the really low difficulty that people seemed to indicate came with it. Plus, it only had 400 points as an arcade release so I also thought I wouldn’t have to review it. But thank you Mojang for proving me completely wrong.

Firstly, the premise. It’s one I don’t really understand. You are a blockheaded character in a block world and you have to harvest your environment by constantly punching things until they turn into smaller collectible blocks which you can then use to build other stuff, turn into other stuff or cook in a furnace to turn into other stuff. And all to do... nothing really. That’s it. There is no real end goal that you explore the world to find. There is the Ender Dragon but unless I missed something tragic during my time playing, it’s not clearly advertised as an end goal, even though I suppose it is? I don’t know, I guess I would need to be more invested in the lore in order to get it.

The music is the most horrendous aspect of the game by far. It’s a real ‘kill yourself’ theme. There is no get up and go to it. You are just aimlessly wandering around and the music makes you feel like there is no real reward to survival. Dying makes the music stop. Winning.

I don’t really have a lot else to say about the game. The mechanics are simple enough and anything that isn’t clear is well explained in the tutorial, I just don’t get it myself.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

So when I first started playing, I thought I would be done in five minutes and I would have been if I had a friend who was willing to help me. However, without a friend, it takes a very long time to get the On A Rail achievement as you have to collect enough resources to build 500m worth of train tracks. Unfortunately Iron doesn’t grow on trees and it takes a long time of exploring, building pickaxes, mining coal, mining iron ore, mining gold ore and mining redstone in order to build all of the materials required to craft a mine track of 500m. Oh, and you will need a mine cart as well.

There are 19 other achievements but they are all fairly straightforward and despite what some guides say, you can earn them all in the tutorial world.

There is not an achievement for killing the Ender Dragon in the original 20 Achievements

Downloadable Content

It’s a free DLC which will make people happy and it comes with 30 additional achievements for playing the game. There is more of the same stuff to do and chances are if you like Minecraft you have probably done it all already. However, there are a few ones that are problematic and I would probably still be playing the game if not for Deathdealer108 and Destroyer675000.

The first one is Sniper Duel which you get for killing a skeleton from 50 meters away. This is ridiculous. From 50 meters, you cannot even see the skeleton. This is where my friends come in to play. They have managed to capture a skeleton in a room and created a 50 meter long archery range. You had to aim somewhere in the sky in order to get your arrow to drop on to the skeleton and you had to do this twice with a normal bow to kill it. Doing it in the woods? Impossible. Another guide stated the best way to do it was to get 50 blocks of cobblestone and build a cobblestone tower directly below you after you find a skeleton, then simply shoot downwards.

Another one which I wouldn’t have got without help was the Zombie Doctor one. Deathdealer108 had managed to capture a zombie villager in a hut and had a convenient save slot and the right equipment to get the achievement, but I can imagine this would be a big ball ache trying to do it from scratch.

Selected others include killing the Ender Dragon and entering an End Portal. Joining someone who had already found the End Portal made this loads easier than it otherwise would have been.

The last one worth mentioning, as other people seem to have struggled with it, it is killing a Ghast with its own fireball. I think I got lucky with this. I used my potion of fire resistance and dived into some lava. The Ghast followed me in and I just hovered trying to swim out of the lava, level with the Ghast and just hit his fireballs until he died. This was also a lot easier than some of the videos I watched for it!

The last achievement I unlocked was for the playing the game for 100 in-game days which is the equivalent to 33 hours and 20 minutes worth of play. I did this after I finished my rail track and simply left it running over night for several nights until the achievement unlocked. I understand that this unlocked instantly after getting the DLC for most people as they had already invested this much time in it before. I’m not sure what they would have been doing though.

The only scenario in which I will play Minecraft again is if they release more DLC for it just to keep the 100%. I’m not one of these people who will invest time in it for ‘fun’ as I simply don’t see the ‘fun’ element. I can now officially say that after giving it a go.

Prey

I have to admit, it’s a bit late in the day to be writing this one. I started the game way back in 2007 but then stopped for some reason. Anyway, I’ve recently been reviewing how to bring up my achievement completion percentage and only having 7 out of the 44 achievements for this one made it a prime candidate.

After about five minutes of playing I realised why I stopped. The game is horrendously boring and the main protagonist is about as likeable as a fungal nail infection. And just as interesting.

The game follows Tommy, a Native American who doesn’t like being a Native American and continues to whinge his guts up about the fact he hates his Native American heritage despite having conversations with his dead grandfather, gaining the reincarnated spirit of his dead pet bird and gaining the ability to walk in the spirit world. Yeah. Being a Native American sucks balls.

What happens is that Tommy is chilling in some dead end bar with literally no locals, debating whether or not he is going to tell the pixellated barmaid whether or he loves her. The next thing you know, he is being beamed aboard an alien spaceship full of aliens that are very deadly and experimenting on humans. Despite this completely out of the ordinary situation, Tommy continues to whine about his Native American heritage and just wants to get Jen (above referenced love interest) off of the spaceship. Never mind the fact that aliens have invaded the world. That happens most weekends.

Tommy continues to be oblivious to the incredible things that are happening to him and is solely focussed on rescuing Jen from the spaceship, despite the fact that Tommy has the ability to use every single alien weapon going without any training and he doesn’t question this either. The aliens are killing every human they can find and Tommy is focused on the one thing that is important to him. Basically, he is a selfish dick.

There’s not really much to say about the sound or visuals other than that they are unexceptional and do not add any value to the game.

Now, the gameplay. The gameplay is where Prey wins more points for monotonous mediocrity. You start the game with a wrench and gain about six other weapons. You walk though different areas of the spaceship which all look very similar. There are vehicle sections which seem to have been put in because it was during the time when every game needed a vehicle section. The most confusing bit though, is the fact that the game mechanics mean you can’t die after the first 20 minutes of the game, removing any challenge or need to play the game carefully. This also negates the need for a difficulty level but they still put a hard mode for some reason. In hard mode, there are no health pickups which means you will be ‘killed’ more but just have to play the resurrection mini-game more often than on normal.

The whole thing is very underwhelming and has encouraged me to never to listen to one of my friend’s gaming recommendations again.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

Of the 44 achievements, 23 of them can be gained from slogging through the game on Normal. You can then, and only then, get another from playing it through on the already mentioned and completely redundant Cherokee difficulty mode. Not only is it not really that much more difficult, but it doesn’t unlock until you have already completed the game on Normal which just adds to the monotonous repetitiveness required to get to that 100% mark.

There are another three achievements for achieving certain things on the in game arcade machines. These include playing blackjack, poker and a strange Cherokee version of Pac-Man. These are not particularly difficult but they are secret and missable. Brilliant.

Multiplayer

After you’ve done all that, that just leaves the 17 multiplayer achievements. These can be broken down into three categories; playing ranked matches (and you have to win one), getting kills and getting kills with certain weapons. The strange, and forgiving, thing about these is that you can get Deathmatch kills and Team Deathmatch kills simply by playing Team Deathmatch. You need to get 250 kills in each so it’s quite easy to grind this out and along with getting the kills with each weapon it doesn’t take too long.

The only reason that the achievements for the multiplayer are easy though, is due to the fact that there is literally no online activity for this game anymore. This means that the only way to do it is to find someone else to help you. Or use two 360 consoles. Another forgiving thing about the multiplayer is that you can get the achievements with just two players.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Prey was not an enjoyable experience for me. It’s a very forgettable first person shooter experience but that’s probably easy for me to say as first person shooters aren’t really my forte. It was praised for its original concept which I believe relates to the spirit walking aspect but it wasn’t very well utilised and in my opinion, felt very flat. It has no replay value as the multiplayer is non-existent.

Toy Story Mania

I have to confess, a few games were becoming a grind and I hadn’t had a completion for a while. Toy Story Mania was able to remedy that quite quickly though.

The game is basically a rail shooter that is advertised as being ‘Better with Kinect’ and I do not doubt this for a second. The pointer moves very slowly with a controller and I certainly felt that if I was armed with an actual gun (or variant), I would have been able to hit the targets a lot quicker.

That said, getting all of the achievements quickly did not present a problem with just a controller and due to the simple nature of the gameplay, it kept the glitches to a minimum which is something else to be grateful for.

Visually, it’s what you’d expect from a game set in the Toy Story Universe – everything looks like CGI cartoons except in 2D as the targets are cardboard cut-outs. There are five different shooting galleries to play in, each belonging to certain Toy Story characters.

Backing sound effects are typically awful to the point of wanting to turn it off. Having to listen to both Buzz and Woody give you time updates in exactly the same way become monotonous and makes you hate the sound of their voices. This is becoming more and more apparent with games – it’s like listening to the same CD over and over again. You used to love all the songs, but now the thought of listening to them makes you want to vomit. Toy Story Mania is a slight exception to that in that I wanted to vomit after only three hours of playing.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 49 Achievements

Generally speaking, each level has its own achievement where you have to do something specific and most of them can be cheesed. For example, the Bombs Away achievement for not hitting any bombs in Planetary Slash n’ Defense can be done by not slashing anything at all.

There is one level-specific achievement which could be slightly painful. The Crack Shot achievement requires you hit two targets at once by shooting another target into them and while I managed to get this on my first attempt (which doesn’t happen a lot, believe me.) I can see how luck can play a massive part in actually getting this one.

In addition to the level specific achievements, there are achievements relating to the power ups, mostly for scoring 20 hits while they are active.

There are two relating to avoiding and getting hit by pies and another pointless co-op one which can be done by plugging in a second controller and doing nothing with it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Toy Story Mania is a quick completion but it’s not really that fun. I can’t comment on the Kinect functionality, but hopefully it adds some replay value that is sadly lacking from playing it with a controller.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

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Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Following the two previous catch up reviews, I can now focus on a game I recently finished. I know it seems like OCD gone mad after my earlier review of Assassin’s Creed III but I felt that Ass Creed III was so far removed from this lot that I could weirdly justify reviewing it first.

So anyway, there is one reason and one reason only that Assassin’s Creed III was published before these reviews; I had absolutely no intention of ever completing Brotherhood because of the multiplayer. I don’t understand why a game series I really enjoyed decided to add a multiplayer mode when the single player along was perfectly fine, and I understand even less why people like it so much. More on the multiplayer later though.

I almost didn’t continue with the series such is my disdain for multiplayer and also the way the game was advertised led me to believe that the only function of the game was a multiplayer one and that it had no bearing on the Assassin’s Creed storyline. I can’t remember how I found out this wasn’t true but I sucked it up, purchased the game and actually quite enjoyed the single player experience.

It is essentially a continuation of Assassin’s Creed II only slightly better due t fact it was released a year later. The gameplay elements are the same as its predecessor with two notable differences. The first is that you have a new function to recruit young assassins into your mini club in Rome and send them out across continental Europe to complete missions that are completely unrelated to your main goals. You don’t actually do anything either, other than click on a location and get given a chance of success. If you fail, your recruit dies and you have to hire a new one and start again. It is fairly dull but a good source of money which brings me on to the next change.

Instead of having your own private villa to improve, you now move in to Rome and that apparently means that, as an aside to assassinating people, Ezio has also started work as a building renovator and big businessman in the area. Your goals are to buy up all of the shops in the city and rebuild many derelict buildings including the aqueduct. I haven’t read my history on this but I’m pretty sure that Rome didn’t get renovated by some bizarre rich guy with a white cape and I have to question why on Earth they’ve put this in the game.

In Assassin’s Creed II, city renovation was new and you could say it was fair enough as you were renovating a place you actually lived in. In Rome, you are just rebuilding the city for no real reason. It doesn’t make sense in its own context which is a bizarre area to fall down on.

Also, by this point we are moving away from the stupid ‘stealth’ requirements of the assassin from the previous games such as walking slowly to avoid detection. It seems that Ubisoft have accepted the fact that sometimes people run or ride horses quickly and this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are up to no good. Of course, Ezio still walks around with his giant ‘I’m an assassin’ sign, but he has been in Rome for so long now that the guards probably think he’s an eccentric. Especially when you factor in the fact that he fixed the aqueduct for no other reason that it was a broken. And at great personal expense too.

Achievements – 60 Achievements – 1,250 Points

First off, there are the single player achievements which again are mostly straight forward. There are two missable ones for doing stuff as future Desmond but if you do happen to miss these, it’s not too much trouble to reply until the point where you can get them again.

There are some quite interesting ones involving finding certain items and locations and they actually make the most of the various side stories they have set up, namely that of Subject 16 – but no spoilers here. 

I found the single player mode to be quite entertaining, however completing the game was made a major slog and dragged out for several years due to...

Multiplayer

Earning these achievements was a huge pain in the ass. Firstly, I completed every other aspect of the game years before completing these bits and there are two achievements which were insanely difficult to obtain.  The pick of the bunch for insanity is the Abstergo Employee of the Month achievement. This one requires you to get all of the multiplayer bonuses available, one of which is called extreme variety which you only get if you manage to perform fifteen different bonuses in one match, something that doing in a random match is reserved for those people who, at the time of online popularity, had enough time to play the multiplayer over and over again until they were insanely good at it. And even then, there is a still a massive element of luck to it.

This is Assassin’s Creed’s first venture into multiplayer and you can tell from the Assassin’s Creed III achievements that Ubisoft eventually learned that people don’t like having to complete challenges based on the randomness of other players.

Downloadable Content

There is one downloadable content set with achievements which lets you access an additional sequence where you get to play with all of Leonardo’s inventions. Part of this, involves having to get 100% synchronisation across the DLC, which is actually the most challenging aspect of the game. This is what you want from DLC, something that adds something a little different and an extra challenge – thank God there were no additional multiplayer achievements!

Despite many labelling this as an unnecessary addition to the series, I thought that there was enough content here to justify a full title. I still question the necessity of multiplayer but even if people like it, which apparently they do, there is no reason to have achievements for it. Surely leaderboards and bragging rights is enough for those that enjoy online multiplayer?

Assassin's Creed

Back in my university days, Assassin’s Creed was released and I immediately thought, ‘yes that is exactly my bag baby,’ and went out and bought myself a copy. It was okay, I had learned to survive without food by this point and could spare the forty quid to buy a new release.

Of course this was years ago and I’m writing a retrospective review mainly to get up to date with the recently completed Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

The very first Assassin’s Creed revisits the Crusades where you take on the role of Altair, an assassin who goes about killing Templars because that’s what he is; an assassin that kills Templars. Although, in actual fact you are Desmond Miles, some dude in the future who has been captured by an evil corporation and forced to relive ancestral memories so that the bad guys can find the Apple of Eden, a powerful device that is owned by Altair’s mentor in the twelfth century. Or something like that.

Basically the whole Desmond thing is just there for framing and the main game is jumping about ancient civilisations as Altair.

The first time I rode into Damascus, I think my jaw dropped. At the time, I was amazed. You ride out on top of a hill that overlooks the entire city and you can explore every inch of what you can see. It was beautiful. Modern day consoles will make this look like shit now, but at the time, it was fantastic. I went about exploring and doing side missions and climbing really tall buildings and actually forgot that the reason I was in the city was to kill someone!

This is where the game fails – with the thing that is in the title – assassinations. Despite being called Assassin’s Creed, you spend very little time actually trying to assassinate people and more time doing mini-missions in preparation to the killing. These mini missions are exactly the same, no matter what city you are in, so it feels very lazy in terms of development. That said, it’s kind of balanced with the amount of work that’s gone into developing the scenery and cities, however I’ve always said that you should never sacrifice Gameplay for looks and it feels like that is exactly what the developers have done.

 Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

When I was playing Assassin’s Creed, I was going through a rough time with my Xbox360. It decided that it didn’t like having games inside it and would destroy anything that entered it – much like that movie, Teeth.

My first copy of Assassin’s Creed became unplayable after my Xbox had chewed it up and spat it out. This caused me to send the Xbox off to be fixed which left me without an Xbox for six weeks. This meant it took me a long time to get to the 1,000 point mark due to these unforeseen circumstances and also the fact that there are several collectible achievements in the game which take forever to do.

In my Toy Story 3 review, I mentioned that there was no way of tracking the collectibles. Assassin’s Creed not only has a way of tracking them, it marks them all on your map. You have to kill 60 Templars and collect, wait for it, 420 flags across the different locations. This was at a time when I thought Grand Theft Auto’s 100 hidden packages was excessive.

I think I spent three nights running around collecting flags and kept having the same conversation with my flatmate. ‘What are doing?’ he would ask. ‘Collecting flags.’ I would say. ‘Still?’ he would retort. ‘Yes,’ I would answer. Once I had collected the last flag, I was overwhelmed with a sense of achievement. My flatmate called it a waste of time.

The only real problem with the achievements was the Conversationalist one. In the future framing environment, something I didn’t think I would have to worry about when going for achievements, you have to have all conversations with a girl called Lucy. These are missable and cannot be revisited. I found this out half way through the game and restarted to save a full second playthrough. But I was still very annoyed about it. It added no extra dimension to the game so why they put an achievement in for it, I have no idea.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

Despite the long haul of collecting the flags and repetitiveness of the missions I do have fond memories of playing the game. The scenery is the best part of it and that makes the exploring element much more fun.

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer

This one was bought as part of a four for £20 deal from Gamestation so I wasn’t expecting big things from it. However, even with my initial low expectations I was left with a brand new feeling of disappointment, only achieved by playing probably the worst game ever released.

Anyway as always, firstly an overview. As you would expect the game is based, very loosely, around the plot of the movie with some bizarre additions. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched the movie, which was also a pile of wank if memory serves, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t fight a giant green dude called Super Skrull and I’m also sure they didn’t travel to a Russian Space Station to fight monkeys.

It’s hard to find someone to say a kind word about the film and even harder for the game. To start with, it’s graphically awful. The looks are more at home on an early Playstation 2 game, not the dizzy heights of Xbox360. Equal effort was put into the dreary repetitive soundtrack, and  despite my unfavourable view of these elements of the game, they are in fact the better ones.

The gameplay is probably the worst I have ever experienced in the history of games and that is some award considering some of the games I’ve played in the past. The gameplay is ridiculously unimaginative. There are three areas the developers have worked on.

1.       The gameplay environment. Their work consisted of having six different levels with different wallpaper. They are all corridor based fighting sections where you have to fight enemies and press a button to unlock the next corridor.

2.       The characters’ special attacks. Each character has four special abilities that you can upgrade. They are all used once at some point and then can be completely disregarded for the rest of the game afterwards. The only reason they are there is because there are four characters with ‘special’ powers. As you level up said abilities, they haven’t bothered to improve the way they look or the graphical actions of you performing these abilities, so the only reason you know they are upgraded is because the enemies die faster. The only ability required to complete the game is The Thing’s ground pound attack which makes all of the other character abilities redundant.

3.       The enemies. The same as the above. There are two... no wait, three! Three different enemy types. One that cannot shoot you with a gun, one that can and one that can fly. The lack of development is so severe that when use The Thing’s ground pound attack, this is capable of destroying the flying enemies as well.

This goes back to my Toy Story review of how the game was release solely to make money off the back of the movie and this is even more evident here due to the complete lack of effort that has gone into make the game. This is meant to be the Fantastic Four and the characters are about as fantastic as manure.  

In addition, there are flying sections with the Human Torch because, you know, they may as well make use some of their special abilities (considering flying is about as useful as paper condoms in a corridor based game environment) and these sections leave a lot to be desired. The flight plain and the environment don’t balance which means you spend half the time flying into the ceiling or flying into floor.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 19 Achievements

As per the actual game, the achievements are a load of crap as well. It’s fairly basic to have stackable achievements where difficulty is concerned and it pains me to have to play through a game twice but this was made even worse by my discovery of something new to complain about which fucked me off so badly that I don’t even know what to say about it.

The cut scenes cannot, I repeat, cannot, be skipped. They can’t be skipped and the game wants you to play through it twice. They can’t be skipped and there is a requirement to grind out ability points to upgrade all the characters’ abilities. Why can’t they be skipped?! It is one of the most fucking annoying development issues I’ve ever come across. Do I want to watch the same cut scene twenty times to grind out ability orbs? No! Fuck you Take 2 Interactive, you lazy cunts!

There are also achievements for collectibles which are generally easy to find due to the corridor nature of the levels however, several were hard to find in last level again due to the ‘only having a requirement to use abilities once’ extravaganza. Earlier, I mentioned that the Human Torch can fly but this is pointless due to the corridor-style nature of the levels, however, in the last level there is a raised area that can only be reached by flying. Never has this happened in any of the previous five levels so why now? Just to be different? To add a new dimension to your one dimensional piece of shit game?

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s just shit. There’s nothing else to say other than that. The game play is shit. The aesthetics are shit. The sound is lousy (just to be different) and everything else is complete balls. The sheer lack of effort into the development of the game has led to a very shit and very forgettable gaming experience.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Deadly Intent

Deadly Intent is the second game in the CSI series, not that it matters much as there is no direct linking between the games. It seems a bit futile to label the flaws that were present in the other games here so I will try to concentrate on those unique to Deadly Intent.

After the D-Pad/Analogue stick separation from Hard Evidence, the developers decided to go roughly somewhere in the middle with their next game. You can use either the analogue stick or the D-Pad to cycle through the menus this time, however it seems that the D-Pad has a little more power than the analogue stick. I had a continuous problem of opening a menu and trying to use the analogue stick to select a piece of evidence only for the game to cycle backwards though the evidence to the beginning.

I thought there must have been something wrong with my controller and the hardly used D Pad was getting stuck. My controller is very old to the point that my left analogue stick has lost its shape and the hard plastic underneath has started showing.  Also, the left shoulder button only works if you press on the far right of it.

You may be thinking, ‘how are Adam’s controller issues relative to CSI Deadly Intent?’ Well, considering the above paragraph, I went out and bought a new controller with the expectation of the above mentioned problem going away. It did not. Glitches that prevent you from being able to play the game the way it is meant to be played are the biggest problems with games.

So despite forking out for a new (much needed) controller, I still had to do battle with a fucking computer to select a piece of evidence that I wanted to use! Needless to say, I was not impressed in the slightest.

I know I said I would focus on the main elements of this game, but it’s tough not to mention the characters’ severe personality switches. Another brilliant one revolved around one suspect, who clearly thought they were going to get away with it, who was being really forth coming and nice to us... until we got a sniff that they were involved with the murder and then started being really uncooperative and demanding legal representation.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 28 Achievements

Again, it is a very straight forward run through these achievements. You can net the majority of the achievements on a single playthrough and any that you do miss can be easily obtained by replying one of the cases.

That said, they commit the cardinal sin of having secret achievements that are not story related and you have to do something out of the ordinary to get them. I don’t understand why games do this. It’s like going to work and getting to the end of the day to have your boss turn around and say, ‘You were shit today, you didn’t meet all your objectives.’ which I would then follow with, ‘what didn’t I do?’ for him to then say, ‘I can’t tell you, it’s a secret.’ Fuck. Off.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Bugs and shitty controls aside, it is an easy 1,000 points but the menu control error thing sucked any kind of fun out of playing the game. The series does show that they improved the games as the series went on though. Fatal Conspiracy is by far the best in terms of cleanness, variety and character development and that’s enough to encourage me to get the next instalment, if one is ever released.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Hard Evidence

Being a stickler for playing a series of games in order, I’m shocked at my own lack of research. Hard Evidence is the first in the series and that is evident (ha-ha) straight from the off.

Released in 2007, the controls show a real return to the dark ages. It took a little while to sink in, such was my shock but, you have to use the D-Pad to go through the menus which I found really alien after years of using an analogue stick.

Other than that, the controls are essentially the same as Fatal Conspiracy, although the forensic science bits are a lot simpler which is to be expected from an earlier release. In order to finish the game, you have to complete five cases. Unlike Fatal Conspiracy, these cases are not linked with an overarching story and they don’t really increase in complexity.

The characterisation throughout the game leaves a lot to be desired. You can tell which characters are guilty by talking to them when you don’t have any questions left to ask – they each have one blanket response so if someone is cooperating at the beginning of the case, you know they are going to become hostile because their ‘one-liner’ will be overly aggressive and out of character.

It is also very linear. You can’t progress cases if there is one piece of evidence left outstanding, meaning there is only one way to solve a case. It’s nowhere near as bad as NCIS’s approach of A=B but B≠A, but several times I had missed one tiny thing and couldn’t progress the story. One of the cases, I was required to go and talk to the doctor for a second time in order to progress and the only reason being that it triggers a cut scene, but I didn’t get any prior clues to this and it was just random luck that I happened to look in the one place where there was guaranteed to be no additional evidence! What was he going to do? Perform another autopsy?

Also there were two unexplained game crashes where the game seemed to get confused about whether the menu was open or not and, like all games, when it doubt, completely freeze. This wasn’t too bad because the auto-saves are generally quite good meaning that I didn’t lose loads of progress.

There is a side part to collect bugs in the various crime scenes which does really make a lot of sense from a reality perspective. When you get to the end of a case, you get evaluated on your performance and part of that evaluation is a thank you for collecting bugs for your boss’s collection. This is a great way to suck up but I have to ask the question – how many different bugs can you possibly find (inside luxury hotel suites and casino floors, may I add) that are uncommon?

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 5 Achievements

There is nothing major to add here. 5 cases; 5 achievements. You don’t have to do very well at the cases, just getting to the end is enough.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

It’s a relaxed kind of game where the only element of frustration is the controls. Although I pointed out the errors with the characterisation, is it a nice relaxing 1,000 points but won’t give you much of a sense of achievement, which kinds of defeats the point of achievements.

Viking: Battle for Asgard

As you may be aware I am registered to a site called True Achievements which compares Xbox360 Achievements earned versus those earned by others and generally uses this as a measurement to assess how easy some achievements are to earn.

They also have a section called ‘Easy Achievements’ which looks at games you’ve played with achievements that are ‘Easy’ to earn. This was a bit of a kick in the head as when I chose to look at this, it told me that there were loads of achievements for this game which were ‘easy.’ I had only earned three of these and took it bit personally that the rest of the game was rated as easy, so I went on a 1,000 point mission and was quite successful (hence, the review).

I can’t remember why I stopped playing the game three achievements in, but it did become apparent after about twenty minutes of game time, but more on that later.

The story line of Viking is a basic one. You are the Viking, Skarin and you are working for your God, Freya, and she has tasked you with ridding the world of Hel’s demon Legion forces as they have been trying to destroy all the Vikings on three small islands in the Viking Empire. However, these demonic legions don’t kill the Vikings. Instead they tie them to poles or keep them in cages for no explained reason, especially if they are hell bent on destroying all the Vikings.

The God rivalry between Hel and Freya gets quite bizarre during the last few sections of the game. Freya appears to go a little bit insane with power, to the point where I was anticipating a plot twist and be asked to destroy Freya instead. This never came despite being really hinted at. I could almost imagine Freya, red eyed and frothing at the mouth as she’s telling me to destroy Hel for her. This kind of one-way storyline is very in keeping with the rest of the game.

The whole game feels very flat in every aspect. There is no real variance between the different islands and you have to complete the same tasks over and over again. It goes like this:

Step 1: Go to location A

Step 2: Kill enemies at location A

Step 3: Free the Vikings at location A

Step 4: Complete obligatory quest for Viking A, which means going to location B to kill generic enemy A before the Vikings you’ve freed will join your army.

Step 5: Repeat steps 1 through 4 moving the letters on to B and C respectively.

The game only deviates from this when you have to do the big battles once you convinced all available Vikings to join your army. I have two major contentions with this.

Contention number 1: If the evil Hel’s legion had done what they were supposed to have done, there wouldn’t be any Vikings to save as they would all be dead.

Contention number 2: After saving the ‘already should be dead’ Vikings from their deaths, why do I then have to complete another assignment to prove myself to them before they will join forces with me to destroy the evil forces that captured they in the first place!?

To sum up, the game play is very repetitive and the premise for the whole thing is weak and that is being kind.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Earlier I mentioned that I started playing but stopped after earning three achievements and the reason for this was that I couldn’t be bothered to play the game twice so dived straight into it on hard mode. There are three achievements for completing the game on hard and all of the fifty achievements can be obtained on one playthrough.

Hard mode isn’t that different to normal mode but after clearing location C of demons (see the above description) I must have become bored or moved on to a high profile release. Either way the main difficulty with obtaining these is that you will become very bored with having to do the same thing over and over again.

Also there is no real punishment for dying, other than having to return to the home village to then fast travel back to closest fast travel point to your point of death. The sheer mindnumbingness of the task in front of me caused me to die over and over again in some places.

There are also a few missable achievements for collecting some skulls which I was aware of, but then completely forgot about. This meant I had to replay the first island to get one of the ones I missed. I hold my hands up to this – completely my own fault.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It is an easy game to add to the ‘completed’ collection but it was not fun. I think enjoyed about half an hour of the game but once I’d figured out the gameplay pattern it became so repetitive it made me want to kill myself. The achievements didn’t push me outside of the main game constraints enough to give me a sense of actual achievement from completing it and I wouldn’t recommend this to friends or Vikings. Not that I know any.

LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars

Story 4/10

To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what the basis was for this game which, in terms of the Star Wars timeline, takes place between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, so I had to look it up and found that there is currently an animated TV series. As I had never watched the series, I found it hard to relate to any storyline that was taking place in the background in between the LEGO related fun which caused me to switch off. I thought the cut scenes were a lot less engaging and humorous at the ones in the game’s predecessor.

That said, I did enjoy the clone/droid battle that takes place on the opening screen. It is quite amusing.

Picture 8/10

This one has to go up from Pirates of the Caribbean because the graphics have been given an overhaul. The look of the game is a lot smoother and they’ve made a lot more out of the destructible objects element. When you destroy objects, instead of the LEGO bricks disappearing almost instantly, they hang around for a bit and very often get in your way which is much more realistic, although I’m not sure fans of the series play the games for the realism aspect... but more on that later.

Sound 8/10

Not really a lot to say here, it sticks to the Star Wars tradition with a little up-tempo version of the all-familiar soundtrack and it is very fitting to the game.

Gameplay 4/10

Things can get a little samey in the LEGO world, especially when you are on number three in a series relating to the same franchise. I’ve got a lot of respect for the fact that LEGO Star Wars III tries to mix things up.

There are now two elements to the main game. You have the standard normal levels where you battle through various LEGO environments to fight bosses and save people. However, now you also have these ground battle environments where you have to fight across a load of enemy bases and have to destroy certain buildings or targets.

In short these new additions are really... boring. These levels add an unnecessary exploration element to the game which slows it down. On top of this, if you strive for the 100% completion, you have to do these types of battles twice for both the good and evil sides which I found to be a royal pain in the ass, unnecessarily repetitive and soul destroying.

There are also space missions on each planet which are another repetitive ball-ache where you have to fly around in space destroying various bits and pieces.

Picking up from where I left off earlier, the new destructive blocks that constantly get in your way may be an improvement in some areas but they also hinder the player’s ability to sensibly navigate through levels.

Also, they seemed to have changed the functionality of how the force is used. When using the force you can now move things around freely... in a constricted kind of way. Getting these objects to where you want them to go can be frustrating but it is also quite forgiving in places. However, there is one level where you have to build a stairway out of four LEGO blocks and the user-friendliness of the force was so bad that I could not select the blocks I wanted to move despite trying to stand in about four-hundred different positions. This produced a lot more than the usual expletives to come pouring out of my mouth.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 48 achievements

The biggest problem I have with LEGO Star Wars III is that it is similar to Soul Calibur in that I was done with new stuff about 5 hours before I got to 100%. The last bits were grinding out the stupid space missions and ground battles which was a bit boring to say the least.

The achievements themselves, bar the last two, are quite varied and force you to try most aspects of the game in order to get them all.

I want to take a moment to talk about codes, those useful little things which can aid gamers to get to full completion without having to work too hard.

In LEGO games, you can collect Red Bricks which give you special abilities such as invincibility or stud mulltipliers. I don’t consider using these bricks as cheating if they are unlocked through gameplay, especially as they remove a lot of the monotonous aspects, such as having to replay ground assaults because you constantly die and run out of time. However, I do consider it cheating to use codes to unlock the bricks and I was quite surprised to see that using the codes does not disable the achievements like they do in lots of other Xbox360 games.

The amount of studs you need to unlock all the red bricks is really high and it takes a while to do even using the stud multipliers as they become available. So I don’t really like that my hard work and effort can be mimicked by someone typing a few codes off the internet. Oh yeah, and there is an achievement for unlocking all the red bricks which is incidentally called ‘Cheat!’

Downloadable Content – N/A

Summary

It’s not as good as LEGO Star Wars II but it is another alright game to pass the time, especially if you don’t want to think too much about what you’re doing. This will probably be it for me on the LEGO front for at least another year and unless the next LEGO game I play is remarkably different, I doubt I will post a... a long review about it.

Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth

This is one of the most hard to get games I’ve looked for when trying to rent and buy on Ebay. The reason is that it is acclaimed as the easiest 1,000 points on Xbox360 – a reputation it definitely lives up to. So much so that as a 1,000 point review, there isn’t really that much to say.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 5 Achievements – Quick and Easy

All you have to do is get a hit counter of 50. This is not a combo but simply getting 50 hits without being hit yourself. This can be done in about 4 to 5 minutes of gameplay which makes the rest of the game, from an achievement point of view, completely redundant.

This is only my opinion but I didn’t see the point in playing the rest of the game once I had earned all the achievements and it didn’t look like I would have enjoyed the rest of the game based on the small amount of it I played.

Summary

It is definitely worth it for the achievements and the quickness but it definitely goes on the ‘to rent’ list. People are definitely keen to get these achievements though. It took me months of bidding on Ebay as I wasn’t willing to pay more than £10.00 for a game I wasn’t going to play for more than 10 minutes!