SEGA Mega Drive Ultimate Collection

This is another game I bought in the hope of earning more quick achievements and I wasn’t disappointed. Also a trip down memory lane was long overdue. I used to love all the old games on this compilation from my younger days. Well, some of them anyway. I hadn’t played a lot of them before as they were before my time. Some are even released before I was born!

The first thing I realised when playing was that games have become a lot easier since the Megadrive days. I swear to God, I was better at these games when I was younger, but if Sonic Generations proved anything it’s that I will never be good at Sonic again, no matter what version of the game I’m playing.

Dying became something of a regular thing throughout these games. Having a limited number of lives before having to start again is something that modern games don’t really do. I can’t think of a modern game which punishes you half as much for being careless. It’s no wonder I found these games so difficult as modern games have dulled my abilities.

I used to walk through Golden Axe without a care, fighting my way through the hordes of enemies and I swear I’ve managed to get to the end of the game before. On the Ultimate collection version however, I can’t even make it through to act 4 without having to use at least 1 continue.

There’s not really a lot else for me to comment on. We all know that the older games are vastly superior and can’t be criticised for looks so let’s dive straight into the...

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 34 Achievements

With a compilation of this size, it was disappointing that there were only 34 achievements. There are quite a few for playing the individual games but not all of them. I was especially disappointed that there weren’t any achievements for completing any of the Phantasy Star games or even any achievements for individually playing them.

One massive improvement from the Megadrive generation is being able to save your progress and reload. This was great because, as I mentioned in the Sonic Generations review, a lot of the games are very much trial and error. This cut potentially hours off both of the Vectorman achievements.

Most of the achievements are hideously unbalanced as well. Why oh why do you have to play the first five to ten minutes of some of the more enjoyable games, yet you have to complete Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine which is not only a horrible game to play but insanely difficult to boot.

Downloadable Content – N/A

On the whole it is an easy set of achievements to gain with the exception of Dr Robonik’s not so fun Bean thing. Some of the others were quite tricky as well such as getting to a certain stage without dying and I think I got lucky during some parts.

However, it was an enjoyable game to play through and certainly has a lot of replay value which is more than can be said for the majority of modern releases.

Sonic Generations

Sonic has received much criticism over the years. His gaming franchise has gone downhill with some poor releases and his popularity on the GameFAQS Character Battle has seen him lose to various inconsequential characters over the years (However, that competition’s integrity went flying out the window when the L-Block from Tetris won the damn thing.)

That said, Sonic Generations is the most fun I’ve had with an Xbox360 Game for a long time.

The premise for the game is that Sonic is having a birthday party when it is crashed by some evil time demon thing. In order to get back to his party, Sonic must destroy the time demon thing, however when the time demon thing destroyed his party, it caused a rip in the space time continuum which enabled two Sonics to exist at the same time! (I’m not going to go into the obvious paradox here.) They combine forces to battle through levels in 2D and 3D to face the enemy and restore the flow of time.

When I played through the levels for the first time, I was reminded about how bad I am at speedy platformers, but this stops being a problem as the all the levels take less than ten minutes to complete, meaning that replying levels isn’t too much of a repetition issue. Also, there are several different ways of getting through a level so finding the fastest way is a challenge in itself.

 The graphics are simple enough but they’ve done exactly what they should have done and kept it simple like the Sonics of old. This also means that there are very few glitches and this might be the first time I don’t complain about glitches ruining my gaming experience.

The in game music I enjoyed, but everyone who was around me while I was playing cried their eyes out about how annoying it was. It is definitely a case of if you’re the one playing then you don’t notice it.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 49 Achievements

It’s nearly a perfect review, however it fails on the achievements front, albeit only slightly. We’re back to my problem with secret achievements that aren’t story related. A few examples include the fact that you have to kill the final boss without taking damage. This achievement is a fuck-ass for two reasons: number one, why is it a secret achievement and how on God’s Green Earth am I expected to be able to know that the game wants me to do this? Number two, it was impossibly difficult to realise when the boss actually hit me.

There were other secret achievements but these were covered by the fact you had to collect all the red things so it wasn’t too much of an issue.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Sonic Generations gets a thumbs up from me. It was an enjoyable game and challenging enough to give me a feeling of satisfaction upon completion. I’m a little disappointed that I have to give it back to my friend.

NCIS

Another game included in the Gamescore push, NCIS offers a similar style of gameplay to CSI, albeit more dumbed down. The story follows the characters from the series in what I can only describe as a light-hearted fight against terrorism in the United States.

Like, CSI you have to play through various investigations which are inherently linked to a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb and kills lots of evil Americans. The characters are the best bit in the game for me but only for the first two episodes. After that, the self congratulatory one liners, of which each character has only one, really begin to destroy any kind of likability they have built up to this point.

The gameplay elements are about as close as ‘click here to solve’ as possible and I thought CSI was quite basic. There are two elements to investigating a crime scene. You have to take pictures of everything. In NCIS, taking a photograph can delve through a wall to obtain bullets, collect forensic evidence from bodies and take moulds of anything that could assist in the investigation. In CSI, you had different tools for all of these things. If real forensic scientists could get their hands on an NCIS camera, it would make their work much for efficient.

In addition to the crime scene investigations, there are also interrogations which are simply laughable. In order to extract more information from witnesses, you have to press A to ask them a further question. The further question is normally, ‘Are you sure about that?’ which then causes the witness to completely change their previous statement under next to no pressure whatsoever.

The worst aspect of the gameplay is the deduction board. After analysing all the evidence, you have to make it work so that the evidence points to a suspect. So instead of working it out from the evidence, the game makes you go through the deduction board to piece it together in exactly the way the game wants you. It takes it way too far as well. You have to combine the evidence by selecting two bits at a time, however if you select the two in the wrong order it won’t let you compare them and asks you to try again. Comparing ‘B’ to ‘A’ is the same as comparing ‘A’ to ‘B’ no matter how you look at it, so fuck off you fucking game.

When you successfully manage to combine the two items in the right order, you then have to pick from four statements picking the correct link. Some of these statements mean exactly the same thing just worded differently, so being punished for picking the wrong one was a amazingly patronising from a game as complex as a ball and cup.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 26 Achievements

There’s not really a lot to say here. There are 26 achievements and I think they are all impossible to miss on one play through of the game. There is no additional challenge and due to the nature of the gameplay, it becomes very irritating having to listen to the characters’ dialogue very quickly.

That said I reckon the whole thing can be wrapped up and tossed aside within three hours so for quick achievement hits, it’s second on the list behind Avatar: TLA: TBE.

Downloadable Content – N/A

So it’s a quick game and easy achievement points for this one but it’s not going to be the cause of a game revolution and is the weakest game in a sparsely populated genre. The characters could have saved it but their underdeveloped personalities and dialogue destroyed what could have been the game’s saving grace.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation Fatal Conspiracy

This is a new concept of gaming for me. I tried the CSI games on the recommendation from a friend that they are good to play as a couple. I couldn’t agree more.

I’ve never really watched CSI but you don’t really need to in order to play the game. It’s essentially five episodes which have an overarching storyline and you are basically on a mission to crush Beatrice Salazar’s drug empire.

CSI’s gameplay can be easily compare to the old point and click style adventure games where you have to investigate crime scenes in order find evidence and prove murders. You have a lab in which to analyse the evidence which includes DNA, chemicals, microscopes and computer analysis to name a few.

There are also interrogations where you can use the evidence to force people’s confessions.

And that’s pretty much it. It is a very simple game which can be really frustrating when you can find that last piece of evidence in a scene. However there were several moments that were actually quite funny as result of under development of story and just horrendous gameplay.

Covering the story element first, some of the characters are really under developed. The interrogations could have been a lot better. You gather all the evidence to nail someone with the crime and they will deny it until they are blue in the face. Then you present them with a piece of circumstantial evidence that could be easily thrown out or argued against but instead of expectedly arguing on, the suspect folds instantly like a wet napkin and confesses everything!

What we found most annoying is that we were figuring out what had happened and what we needed to do but then the game would send us patronising emails telling us what we already knew. We had the hints set on low as well so this was exceptionally irritating. We were also thinking of different questions to ask suspects based on the evidence we had collected but didn’t have the option to ask the suspect because we hadn’t complete a prerequisite to another part of the investigation. It was like the game was saying, ‘No you can’t solve this your way. You MUST solve it our way!’

As far as the gameplay goes, the microscope stuff was very, very irritating. We couldn’t get past the first investigation because of the bloody thing no matter how many different combinations we tried.

We were tasked with analysing a piece of evidence under the microscope. The tutorial indicated that we could move the microscope around to look at different bits of the piece of evidence, but in reality this was not the case and you were fixed on the one area.

There are three levels of zoom you can use and you can adjust the focus accordingly but after trying every possible combination, we resorted to looking it up online. Apparently we had to adjust the zoom first and then the focus in that exact order or else it won’t work. We only had this problem for the first microscope bit so I can only imagine that it is an unfixed glitch.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 25 Achievements

There are no missable achievements and I think they are all story related. There are three which may require replaying certain missions but it’s not too time consuming to do so.

Downloadable Content – N/A

So CSI is another achievement farm but it is fun to play with others. The one issue with this type of game is that there is next to no replay value as once you’ve played it through, you know what will happen. Due to the hand-holding nature of the gameplay, there are no alternative routes to the solution which is its biggest let down by far.

Saw

I went on an end of year achievement spree and found a list of ‘easy’ games online. Saw was one of the games I picked up for a quick hit. I’m not a fan of movie/game adaptations and Saw was no exception to the rule. However it did have some good points as well as bad.

The story of the game takes place between the first and second movies and is quite well constructed in that it uses Detective Tapp as the protagonist assuming he didn’t die after being shot at the end of the first movie. Instead, he was saved by the serial killer only to be put into a mental hospital to punish him for his ‘obsession’ with catching said serial killer.

They put quite a lot of work into the story to make it fit with the series as well as work as a standalone. Detective Tapp has to face all of the people whose lives he has destroyed in his quest to catch jigsaw and, with a few notable exceptions, the characterisation in done remarkably well for a movie adaptation.

They have put a big emphasis on lighting as well. You need a light source to get through dark areas and you pick up different light sources throughout the game. One of these light sources is a camera which you can use the flash to light up dark places. This was great in the movie and really added to the ‘jump’ factor when Adam was being hunted by Pigface. However, in the game you cannot see where you have to go before it reverts to total darkness again so it doesn’t work as an adaptation. At one point I had to navigate through a bomb-filled corridor which would have been straight forward with the lighter, but it made me very angry when I switched to the camera just before having to do this bit and without being able to backtrack and switch to the lighter.

The gameplay elements consist of fighting bad guys and solving Saw style puzzles. The puzzle solving element was okay, but there were only five different ones throughout the game so after the first two sections, it became a bit repetitive.

The combat sucks a fat one too. It is unintuitive and the game would be better without it. The last fight is bizarrely flawed in that all you have to do is stand there and grapple with the boss for five minutes before he dies. Most bad guys can be killed in the same way despite their class differences – what is the point of have a ‘berserker’ type character that isn’t berserk and fights in the same way as a regular minion? I would have expected Tapp to have to employ different methods of dealing with different foes but it is all very samey.

In all games there is always a major element designed to piss off all gamers and in Saw, it is the booby traps. You can’t see shotgun trip wires until you’re dead and then you have to go back to the last checkpoint which, in some cases, can involve a lot of backtracking... only for me to forget the trap was there and die again!

Achievements – 1,000 points – 46 Achievements

The achievements in Saw are varied but not exhaustive. For example, there are achievements for getting kills with various weapons but not all the weapons. There is an achievement for finding your first asylum file but not all of them. By adding achievements such as ‘Find all asylum files’ could have added a little reply value.

The non-exhaustive achievements have good and bad points. On the plus side you are not going to be frustrated looking for that last file or trying to find the only weapon you haven’t killed someone with. On the negative side, it felt very unrewarding getting to the end of the game, almost like a hollow victory. This is a real shame because the achievements get everything else spot on.

All the secret achievements are unavoidable and story related. There are two achievements for both endings but you only have to replay the last section to get both of them. It’s almost like the developers have realised they have a repetitive game and don’t punish their gamers by making them play the whole game again.

The only achievement that required me to replay certain levels was stomping five evil dudes to death. This was mainly due to the inconsistency of evil dudes falling over when I was punching them and the horrendous quick-time events required to stomp them to death.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Saw is definitely good for farming the points but is not a great game and isn’t very rewarding for completion. I wouldn’t play it again for fun and it hasn’t changed my opinion towards movie/game adaptations.

Alan Wake

Story 8/10

Most of the points for the story go to its originality. You are Alan Wake, a writer who travels to a lakeside town to rekindle his relationship with his wife and not to do any writing – the opposite of the cliché. However, when she reveals that she set up a typewriter, he goes ape shit and storms out. And then his wife is kidnapped by dark forces and he goes on a quest to save her. With a torch.

During a week of unconsciousness, the dark forces make Alan write a novel which has the power to release them from their prison and destroy the world. And that’s where I gave up trying to understand what was going on and started playing the game.

Picture 6/10

I honestly thought the majority of the scenery and the enemies were quite poor in their appearances in comparison to some of the other games released at the time.

I gave it a six because the developers obviously were looking at lighting at being the key selling feature of the game. For example, when you shine your torch in the face of one of your allies, they will cover their eyes. I thought this was a nice touch.

However, other lighting effects were annoying and did not add to the atmosphere, which I believe was their intention. Some lights blind you for no reason other than to fuck you off. It doesn’t add to the atmosphere and ruins my gameplay experience.

Sound 5/10

The sound effects don’t really pull any punches and don’t go above and beyond trying to be a little mysterious. There were no jumpy bits enhanced by the sound so it was pretty safe and middle of the road. It didn’t stand out as a negative factor though, so that’s a major positive.

Gameplay 4/10

The majority of the game is walking from one place to another shooting bad guys after shining a torch on them. After the second episode, it became very repetitive and I found it a hell of a slog to get through the rest of the game.

The added element of having to shine a light on an evil dude before shooting him is a pain in ass, not scary and simply annoying.

Considering the main element of the gameplay is shooting, I was really surprised that you gain absolutely nothing from headshots and the only way to speed up killing dudes is by using flare guns or flashbang grenades. The game becomes more about hording the good stuff for the tough parts which adds to the boredom even further. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to rename the game Alan Asleep although that is a pretty obvious joke.

Achievements – 1,500 points – 67 achievements

In terms of earning the 67 achievements for this one, it is not too taxing and the biggest problem is falling asleep while playing. The game commits the cardinal sin of making you play through the game twice to get all the achievements. This is due to the Nightmare difficulty not unlocking until you have completed the game on a lesser difficulty first.

I really resent being told by a game that I can’t play it on the hardest difficulty until I’ve proved myself on some lesser one. It’s like the game has some kind of bizarre God complex.

Other than that though, the achievements were varied enough to keep me playing. There was one other one that I must complain about though.

If you are going to have an achievement for making it through a large section of the game without dying – or turning off the console – you absolutely cannot leave any room for glitches. For example, the achievement, Run-On Sentence  for completing The Signal DLC without dying was made to be overly frustrating when I was forced through the graphics and got trapped under a building, unable to continue and having to restart wasting half an hour of my time!

Downloadable Content – Value for money?

I thought that both DLCs were value for money and add to the gaming experience. The second DLC, the Writer adds a bizarre twist to Alan Wake’s world and mixes it up with semi-tricky platforming sections.

The biggest addition to the game is the amount it adds to story though, however it still didn’t reach a final conclusion and it also frames the whole thing as the writer’s internal dilemma – a bizarre spin to put on a computer game.

They add an additional 500 points to the Gamerscore and the costs are very reasonable, especially now that they have abandoned this Microsoft Points system which means you can pay the actual price rather than overpaying for the Microsoft Point packages.

Summary

It is definitely worth getting from an achievement perspective. The game was repetitive but the storyline got me through the first playthrough which was enough to net the majority of the achievements. There is next to no replay factor though, and most of my deaths on the Nightmare difficulty were due to me not paying attention due to increased levels of boredom.

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.