Gray Matter

Before I gets balls deep into this one, I want to give a brief opinion on point and click adventure games as I seem to be playing a lot of them at the moment (if you count the CSI games). They are obviously very tricky in their own right as many of the classic games, such as The Secret of Monkey Island, have really convoluted ways of getting from start to finish. I can see the unique challenge in this, however I think that point and click adventure games should have a strong storyline as their main selling point.

I don’t think I’m clever by any stretch which is why I had to use a guide for Monkey Island and I’m not ashamed of that at all. I wondered around the dock for about three hours before giving in and being forced to look up the solution. This brings me to my next point for these games – the music has to be good because if you are stupid (like me) and playing properly (not like me) then you are going to be listening to a lot of background music –more on this later.

Anyway, on the matter at hand. Gray Matter, that is!

Gray Matter is a classic style point and click adventure game designed for easy use on a PC. The story follows Sam Everett, an American orphan trying to make her way to London to become a full on magician and member of an exclusive club. Her bike breaks down in Oxford and she wakes up in a strange house with her rabbit Houdini. Seriously.

She later entwines herself with reclusive neurobiologist David Styles with hilarious consequen... I can’t even lie about that, there is nothing hilarious about the game. Like I’ve said above, the main selling point of a point and click adventure game is the story so I won’t go into detail. But I will say this – it’s horribly depressing.

Along those lines, the music is also dreary and depressing. I was playing at around ten o’clock at night, not to subject any other members of my household to having to watch me play it, and I fell asleep twice. The storyline – coupled with the music – is enough to drive anyone to the verge of suicide. If you are going to play this, make sure you put aside an hour of gentle comedy to cheer yourself up after you’re done with a session.

As intricately put together as Gray Matter is, it was mildly disappointing when I discovered that the characters have generic responses similar to the witnesses from CSI: Hard Evidence. You play as David and Sam and at one point, as David, I had just witnessed a traumatic incident. But when I returned to my house afterwards, the housekeeper asked David how he was which he responded to with a quite cheery, ‘Fine thanks!’

He does have a moment of pure quality towards the end of the game. He makes a phone call to get some information and gets given loads of confidential information... so fully lays into the person on the other end of the phone and reduces them to tears!

In other positives, the Oxford depictions are really close to those of real life. They do look a bit dated though and the whole game feels very Americanised. The English speaking characters are clearly Americans and the lack of any kind of vehicles and cobbled paths seems to indicate that America thinks England is stuck in the nineteen-fifties.

In terms of the gameplay, point and click adventure games are best played with a mouse but in a world where we have an analogue stick... sorry, make that two analogue sticks, I don’t understand why I have to hold down the right trigger to be able to click on stuff. Basically, the point and click interface registers a -9 out of 150 in terms of user friendliness and this is the main reason that playing the game was a fucking ball ache.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 41 Achievements

As far as the achievements go, most of them are simply story driven with a few missable ones sprinkled in. It gets it completely right it terms of secret achievements though – all the missable ones are non-secret.

I do have one massive issue with one particular achievement called Fast Play. You get this achievement for completing the game in less than five hours. Now, a game of this type is not designed to be played in less than 5 hours. I’m pretty sure that it can only be done by skipping all the dialogue and by knowing exactly what to do before you do it. This makes playing the game properly completely redundant.

I used to be the kind of person who would aim to get all the achievements in a single playthrough and this can be done with a guide but what’s the point? I took the extra hit and played the game properly once before getting Fast Play but I don’t think a game’s objectives should make the game redundant.

Downloadable Content – N/A

To sum up, it’s not the most straight forward 1,000 points I’ve ever earned and the puzzles are a massive let down in terms of what they offer. It’s a gettable 1,000 points, but not necessarily the most enjoyable. Unless you’re a masochist of course.

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.

Assassin's Creed III

The third numbered game in the series is actually the fifth in the franchise after the super-extended Assassin’s Creed II which followed the career of Ezio the Italian Legend until he is a withered old man swinging around Constantinople on a metal hook.

After the close of Ezio’s story, we are whisked away to a completely unrelated character in the American revolution. I have no idea what the link is between Ezio and Haytham Kenway, but there must be one there as they are all supposedly ancestors of Desmond Miles. They did the same thing with Altair in the first Assassin’s Creed and I would like to see these connections explained at some point!

As for Assassin’s Creed III this is the first instalment where we play as two different characters in Haytham Kenway and his son, Rat’atokene... Connor. Haytham comes from England to America with some kind of key to look for some kind of door and accidentally fathers Connor with a native Indian. The result is; Connor, a half-native American who can speak perfect modern American – complete with the accent – and also in a perfect Native American tongue.

In the modern day as Desmond, we are exploring the memories of Connor to find Haytham’s key that can open a door to save the world from a solar flair. Apparently no one cares about the framing of the story but I thought it was really interesting as to why they bothered to come up with a bizarre backing story in an attempt to make delving into ancestor memories have meaning.

Anyway, the main element the story (within the story) is that Connor is born, becomes a self-righteous prick and goes on a mission to destroy the Templers because he has Daddy issues. His other notable traits are his ability to dictate to the likes of George Washington on how to run a revolution, commanding a sailing ship with no prior experience and leadership and raising a community who love him by allowing people to settle on land that isn’t his and speaking in a monotone which shows no interest in their lives.

As you have probably guessed, I didn’t really care for Connor. I found him to be boring and up his own arse.

Visually however, the game is stunning. You can explore pretty much as far as you can see. The only problem is once you do, you have to come all the way back again. There are very few fast travel points when you are outside of the major cities which means that you have to navigate on foot which was quite time consuming. Oh wait, no they do give you a horse but with all the forests and cliffs littering the landscape, they may as well have given me a hippo with three legs for all the extra efficiency it gave to my travelling ability.

In addition to the main storyline and the obligatory collectibles that almost define Assassin’s Creed, they now have naval missions where you can captain a ship and sail around blowing stuff up. It added an extra element to the gameplay which was quite enjoyable and actually done quite well for the most part.

Achievements – 1,350 Points – 64 Achievements

This was quite the haul of achievements boasting no less than 4 pieces of downloadable content. But more on that later. The majority of the achievements can be gained through playing the main story but there a certain amount for killing dudes in certain ways, including the new cool feature of being able to hang them from a tree.

There were two achievements that really pissed me off. Number one; having to observe all the lazy twats on the homestead not doing any work. This was very unforgiving as a lot of the time they would just be pissing around or doing the same thing they were doing the day before. You have to record all of the fucktards doing three different activities. It would appear that the woodcutters, who are the first to join your homestead, don’t cut down any trees and just smoke pipes, go fishing or play bowls. The achievement was ridiculously tedious and only worth ten points.

Number two; getting 100% on all missions and the only reason I’ve listed this as twatish is because of one naval mission. In order to get 100% sync on this mission you have sink all three ships by firing on their weak points. In order to get the weak points to appear, you have to ram the ships at about two miles per hour or shot them in a very specific place, both of which had inconsistent results. The ships would either sink straight away or the weak would not appear after seven shots in the same place... and the ship would then sink anyway. I think I spent more time on this one mission that all of the other naval missions put together, however this was the only part of the naval missions that could have done with a little more development.

Multiplayer

I’m not a fan of multiplayer achievements and for those of you that can view my gaming history, you can see that I didn’t even bother trying to get the multiplayer achievements on the previous two Assassin’s Creed games.

However, I saw this one through and here’s why. There are two reasons why I don’t like multiplayer achievements. The first one is do with EA and the exact reason why you won’t see a review of FIFA 08 on here. EA decided to close their servers which means it is now impossible to get the online achievements in that game.

The second one is they are a pain in the ass to get if you don’t play the game within its first year of release because everyone stops playing it.

I was very grateful to the online community for sticking with Assassin’s Creed III. This meant I didn’t need to go looking for a boosting session to earn the achievements. Also, the people still playing the game, bar one or two exceptions, still haven’t figured out the best way to play Wolfpack mode which I thought was really funny.

Including the DLC there are only nine online achievements and none of them require a great deal of fucking about. You only have to get to level twenty and there are even a few you can do solo.

Downloadable Content

There are two aspects to the game’s downloadable content. There are four of them; one online and three offline.

The online DLC has clearly only been downloaded by achievement hunters. Could I find a multiplayer game on the additional Wolfpack maps? No. Did I try at every conceivable time of day for a week? Yes. Is that really sad? Yes – I have absolutely no life.

Luckily, I managed to get the achievement which related to the additional maps by myself so no need for too much swearing.

The other three DLCs are totally fucking insane. I don’t understand why there are three separate DLCs for the same fucktarded alternate universe that is The Tyranny of King Washington other than as a major money spinner for Ubisoft. You play in the same three environments from the main game with some extra abilities that make the game easier and the whole episode has no bearing on the main storyline whatsoever. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t played it yet but at the end I had one question on my mind – ‘What the fuck just happened?!’ and not in a good way.

So, to sum up the multiplayer was probably the best bit about the game. The main story was really slow and incredibly frustrating at times. The lack of fast travel points made me stop playing more often than not.

In terms of achievements it is very doable and still accessible and I did get a sense of achievement at the end even if it was related to my ability to stick at the game even though it continuously tried to shit all over itself. Next stop, Assassin’s Creed IV! That will probably be sometime in July.

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.