Driver: San Francisco

I got this one as a Christmas present from my mother, who hardly ever buys me games, back in 2011, I think. I must have been going through a phase because I requested this one and Need for Speed: The Run, I game I completed before I started writing about completions.

Anyway, Driver is another one of those games where I completed the single player a million years ago (hyperbole) and left the multiplayer because I didn’t have a sickness. Well, now the sickness has developed and I went back and put the effort into finishing the multiplayer... by buying another copy of the game, but more on that the later.

The story sees you take control of Detective John Tanner... sort of. Driver is an open world game where in order to streamline the gameplay, John is in a coma and his subconscious is floating around the city taking control of cars in order to catch the guy that put him in the coma in the first place. Yes, it’s that bizarre.

Along the way you will have to do lots of crazy stunts in various cars as you progress through the game. The driving game play is pretty solid to be fair but saying that, they did create an open world and then circumvent any real exploration factors by comatosing the main character – a bit of a bizarre decision.

The music and graphics are acceptable for the type of game. The music is good but gets very repetitive after a while. When I was playing the multiplayer, I kept getting 5 year old flashbacks to having to listen to the same tune over and over again when driving around the city.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Of the 50 available achievements, 11 are story related but in reality there are loads of other small ones which you will naturally attain. There are only a handful that you have to really work for.

Some of these harder ones involve completing the in-game activities. You need to do 50 of these to get an achievement. You also have to do all 80 dares throughout the game. From what I remember, these aren’t too difficult, just time consuming. Other time consuming and awkward things involve having to purchase all the cars from the garage, switch into vehicles 1,000 times and drive 1,000 miles.

The last achievement I picked up from my single player experience was for collecting all 13 of the movie clip things – shocking considering there are only 13 of them. They are put in really hard to reach places and you have to be pretty inventive to be get them, using car transporters as ramps. Getting the position right was painful though.

There are two other notable achievements. One of them pays tribute to Back to the Future by having you complete challenges in the Delorean. The other wants you to be really stupid and complete a Getaway Activity in a Car Transporter. I can’t even remember how I did this but it pre-dates my use of guides so I must have got lucky as it’s apparently quite difficult to do.

Multiplayer

So the reason this is a late 2016 (still behind on the reviews) completion rather than 2012 is due to the multiplayer that I didn’t even attempt. All of the achievements bar three can be obtained with two players so I went through the painful and repetitive process of grinding out most of these alone.

The three that require other people involved having to play Blitz, Capture the Flag and Carry the Torch and do things a certain amount of times. This is made even more annoying because you have to get to certain multiplayer levels before some of these game types even unlock – this made it even more necessary for the second copy as I had to get to the relevant levels before I could play these games with other people.

The rest of it was just horrible grinding up to level 38 to unlock the Master achievement. In relative terms it didn’t actually take me that long but it was still a shitty task that I’m not proud of completing.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Driver is a solid single player driving experience that I remember as an enjoyable escape for the most part. The multiplayer is unnecessary and considering the age of the game, will now likely be impossible to complete legitimately. If you are a completionist and bothered about legitimate online play, then steer clear. It’s still worth it for the single player though.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2008

Urgh. When I’m older and I look back over the things I’ve done in the past, this one will probably make me sick. Completing a football game released in 2007 in 2016 is just painful. I made a vow never to play another football game again after FIFA 2012 and will definitely be sticking with that. There are too many good games out there to waste more time on repetitive rubbish like this.

So what does Pro Evolution Soccer Offer? Well, there is League mode, Tournament Mode and Master League. Oh, and naturally the obligatory Xbox Live multiplayer rubbish that goes with every sports game released since 2008. The only real part of this game worth mentioning is the same thing everyone says and that’s Master League but I really didn’t get into it and here’s why.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 38 Achievements

The first thing I’m going to do is complain about the game some more. The in game gallery menu has something that appears to be an achievement tracking system where all the achievements are listed and are called titles. Only it doesn’t fucking work. Upon completing the game, I have all the achievements but two of my ‘titles’ were missing. Oh, and they were for the online things I was supposed to do which means I had to have an internet connection when I did them. So, so stupid.

There are six achievements that aren’t for winning the various leagues in the game but are for beating every single team in the various leagues and for beating all the international teams. The five  club leagues were not a problem but I obviously cocked up at some point when doing the National Teams. As the game struggled to keep up with its own title system, I didn’t really stand a chance that it was going to store a record of which National Teams I had beaten. So I had to play nearly all of them again. It’s a good job I left it about 5 years between attempts otherwise I would have lost my mind.

You also have to win all the cups in the Master League and this is a total fuck ass because it means you have to not win the league. That’s right, because of the way it’s set up, you have to win the game’s equivalent of the Europa League which means you have to finish outside of the top six. It’s so weird deliberately trying to lose and draw matches and getting fucked off when your rivals fail to win leaving you ahead of them.

A lot of the basic achievements require you get certain stats in matches but these only trigger after you have played 100 games. I wouldn’t worry too much about this though as you will reach 500 games or more if you are going for the clean sweep.

So yes, outside of the online the big one is for playing 500 games, scoring 1,000 goals and winning all leagues and cups. The games and goals will come with the leagues and cups but this is where the game really fucked me over. You unlocked special players for winning the leagues and after I won the English League for the first time, I had the special players at my disposal. However, I noticed on my track record that it hadn’t actually given me a time stamp for winning the league. I played through the rest of the leagues and everything else I needed to unlock the achievement, only to find that it didn’t unlock. So I had to play the full English League again. Then, to really add to my issues, it still didn’t unlock. Only when I went into the track record to investigate did it finally give me the fucking thing. Cunts. Cunts!

Multiplayer

And further cunts. These achievements are totally unnecessary. I couldn’t be fucked to do battle with the arbitrary dickheads who still play this online so I took the easy way out, got a second copy and smashed them out in afternoon. Mostly straight forward but the one for scoring a free kick takes some work if you don’t want to be there for hours. What I did was take China, make their goal keeper absolute shit, make their defence really aggressive, get a free kick in a decent position, remove their wall and let Beckham hammer it in. The one thing that is annoying is that if the keeper gets a hand on it, it invalidates the achievement even if the ball goes in. Poor.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I’m glad to see the back of this one. It looks like Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 will be the last Konami football game that will be fully completable too. All newer titles have had their online culled. Even so, I wouldn’t recommend this one to achievement hunters. If you want to play football games, you will and you probably don’t care about achievements anyway.

The Swapper

The Swapper is another really easy completion that costs... well, a little bit more than free if I’m honest. Obviously I was suffering the after effects of an unforgiving completion in Saints Row II, so targeted a few things that were easy and quick. The Swapper fit the bill but it was also quite challenging.

The Swapper is a puzzle game. You are an astronaut and you crash land on a strange moon. You go in search of a way of repairing the spaceship and stumble upon an old research facility. While exploring here you find the Swapper, an experimental device that had the ability to clone you into positions you could not otherwise reach. It is a bit strange in that you control all of the clones and yourself at the same time so that if you walk left, everyone walks left. This is the puzzle element.

The premise of the game is that you need to find all these energy orbs to further explore the facility to try and find your way off the planet. You soon discover that you are not alone... and this is as far as I will go without ruining the story. It’s worth playing and I would recommend it.

I’ve complained about a lot of space games recently where they try to create the atmosphere of isolation by making the music severely depressing and The Swapper is no exception to this rule. It further loses points though due to the graphical issues that the game suffers from. I’m sure it’s meant to be dark in order to add to the atmosphere but there’s dark and there’s ‘so dark, you can’t see fuck all’ which is just stupid when you are expected to find stuff in a semi abandoned space facility.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

It’s another short one this week. The ten achievements each relate to individual computer screens that are hidden throughout the game. When I say hidden, what I mean is that you need to know where they are in order to find them. Some of them are so obscurely hidden that there is no way you would stumble upon them by mistake, or even for want of looking.

Another thing that’s worth pointing out is that The Swapper is another one of those games that, achievement wise, doesn’t care if you finish it or not. There was no end game reward but tellingly, I finished it anyway. Read into that how you will.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Swapper is short and sweet with some difficult puzzles that will present a real challenge without video solutions. It scores even more points for creating a story that made me want to see it through to conclusion – rare for a puzzle game.

NBA 2K17: The Prelude

The premise for this is absolutely bizarre. We are going to release another annualised Basketball title (one I have absolutely no intention of playing by the way), so let’s have a free to play game that showcases the career mode... or pre-career mode? It makes no sense as a concept but what the hell, we’ll run with it.

So the story (yes there is a story) follows The President, a high school basketball star who makes his way through college to eventually gain a professional career. Along the way he is faced with the standard trials and tribulations of college – school work, friends, distractions, fast food and girls.

So what is there to experience in The Prelude? Well, there are a couple of basketball matches and some stats stuff... but that’s it. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that most of the time you will spend in the game is looking at the unrepresentatively long loading screens between cut-scenes and basketball games. And there are more cut-scenes than games.

If I’m being kind I would say it looks pretty. That’s all I can say though. The Prelude isn’t here to showcase the game’s sound track either. For the short time I was playing, it must have given me same stupid song five or six times. It didn’t help that I’m not a fan of popular music either.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

For completing the ‘experience’ you will get 7 of these achievements. That just leaves 3 achievements that you need to go off the not-so-beaten track to get. You need to play a tutorial game, equip a custom animation and purchase an attribute upgrade. This last one is the only troublesome one in that if you don’t get enough points to get an attribute upgrade, then you will have to use cash money to get it. I was fairly horrendous at playing the game and still had enough points to do this so it shouldn’t be too troublesome.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s a short review but it’s a game short of any mentionable content. It’s not even a real game. It’s a preview of a game. With achievements. A Gamerscore hunter’s dream but nothing more.

Saints Row 2

After months and months of laborious grinding, I have finally managed to add Saints Row 2 to my completed collection. The multiplayer and co-op were the only hold ups for this one and I’m glad to see the back of it, and all Saints Row multiplayer for that matter.

So the story of the second Saints Row follows on from the start of the first one in that you are a gangsta, in prison after being apparently double crossed. You are broken out and need to go on a mission to rebuild the Saints and take out three new gangs in the city of Stillwater. Alongside that you have the activity and reputation format that goes with the previous game. It’s basically a more polished version of the first.

The co-op requirement was totally fucking pointless. You have to play through the whole game with someone over an internet connection which adds a handicap in that it’s glitchy as fuck, randomly cuts and generally is a poorer version of the main game. With longer load times.

The gameplay is again a carbon copy of the first one and is basically a whacky GTA clone. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself but I did find the activities and missions a bit repetitive after a while and it makes you do most of them at least twice to the point where if you fail at the end, you will most likely scream or throw your controller against the wall.

Graphically it’s superior to its predecessor, however considering the length of time between release and this review I think it was good at the time but compared to more modern Xbox 360 releases, it doesn’t hold up very well and this is coming from someone who recently put a good 25 plus hours into the monotonous gameplay.

It has a fully licensed soundtrack with artists you may actually recognise compared to the guys who just wanted to kill hookers, do drugs and rob people in a really boring way in the last one and the soundtrack is actually one of the highlights. Driving around listening to Wolfmother is as a good in game as it is in real life.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 60 Achievements

Okay so this is quite the haul but most of it is a repeat of Saints Row, minus the multiplayer, in a new skin so I won’t go into too much detail over the single player requirements. You have to obviously play all of the missions, find all the shit scattered around the city, jump and fly through various bits and complete all of the activities – insurance fraud is a pain. There. Now on to the more irritating ones.

Like most games, there seems to be a requirement to do a certain thing a certain amount of times despite the fact that doing these things this amount of times does not benefit you in the slightest. You have to mug 50 citizens, gamble $500,000, shot people in the baaaawls 100 times, taunt 50 gang members and grab 50 human shields. It’s very grindy but helps towards one of the bigger achievements – play the game for 50 hours.

This is the main block of the single player but there are also some little things that need doing like singing along to the radio, throwing someone really far and surfing on a vehicle for a three star award.

Multiplayer

There is a big debate in the online gaming community over which online is the more ridiculous. Saints Row had a true skill system which could almost lock you out of the Kingpin achievement if you played and lost too many online matches in all game types. In Saints Row 2 there is no such system. Instead you have to play in this thing called Strong Arm where you get money for how well you do. In order to get the 30 multiplayer badges required for the Kingpin achievement, you need to play the online ranked multiplayer to accumulate nearly £800,000. When me and my boosting partner (massive shout out to H3rmitard!) were at the end of this, we were only earning between £5,000 to £6,000 per 15 minute game. So it takes a fucking age.

You also have another 20 badges to get from doing other things and we worked our way through all of these too. Most of the require you to rinse and repeat the same shit over and over again and it’s just sinfully horrible. The two worst badges are for spraying fuck loads of tags and the Arr... badge which is for playing the game on either the 19^th September (when I got it) or 5^th December. For pirates and ninjas day apparently. It’s utter bollocks.

I’ve already mentioned the co-op requirements and it was a massive cunt having to drag my ass through the whole game again in co-op, activities and all. Thankfully there was no requirement to collect all the fucking picks up and jumps again – that would have been far too much.

There are a few other multiplayer achievements but these all pale in comparison and are relatively quick compared to the Strong Arm shit.

Downloadable Content

There are two pieces of DLC for this one and both of them are horrible. They only offer a couple of additional single player missions and across both of them there are only 3 achievements for single player. The rest of the majority of the achievements are blah multiplayer but one adds to fuckassery above. Corporate Warfare introduces a Stuntman activity and you have to win 20 rounds in a co-op game. It takes FORVER to win 20 rounds and doing this with someone else is double that. It’s not even fun.

To sum up, Saints Row 2 offers a solid single player experience with a sizeable but mediocre multiplayer tag on. If someone asked me to get all the achievements again I would tell them to fuck right off. I may be slightly crazy but I’m not a total masochist.

Minecraft: Story Mode

This one, I didn’t really understand. I bought it for the children and fancied playing something mindless one day so put it in, mainly to see what the fuss was about. Everyone seemed to be raving about this latest instalment of the Tell Tale Games’ point and click adventure series but I didn’t see how Minecraft could be turned into an engaging story.

Obviously it’s my opinion but I was not a massive fan of the storyline. You play as Jessie, a sexually ambiguous boy/girl who has some friends who want to win some kind of building contest. From here, the world gets threatened by destruction from the wither storm, a nasty thing with lots of heads that kills everyone.

The storyline gets gradually more depressing as you play and by the end I was struggling to pick up the controller to carry on. This is partly down to Tell Tale’s moral choice game play where it’s a case of, ‘in which way would you like to fail?’ This is what grinds my gears about all of these Tell Tale games. The choices you make never lead you to a good ending where everyone survives. It’s basically a case of choose who will die.

The main game (excluding DLC) is 5 episodes long and Tell Tale did their usual thing of releasing them periodically. I, however, chose to play it after all the episodes were released which meant I could do it back to back. In hindsight, this is probably why I found it so depressing.

Achievements – 1,375 Points – 50 Achievements

Now the initial release just includes Episode One but the main game is effectively the first five episodes so that’s how I’m choosing to view it. Looking at the achievements, there are some choices that were made which were quite confusing.

In Episode one, you have to make a lever when you are supposed to make a sword and complete all the chapters. Episode two actually had an alternate path achievement for acquiring two different characters so you have to play that one twice. Episode three has an achievement for talking to your pet pig over and over again until there are no more dialogue options. After that, there are no more different things to do and the achievement list reverts back to completing the episode and nothing more.

I know I’ve said this before but I don’t understand this approach. You have an achievement system; you sort of started using it... and then thought ‘na, fuck this’ and just continued to list completing the chapters as achievements. I don’t get it.

Downloadable Content

Tell Tale released a further three episodes for this shit which is more than they’ve done for any of their other franchises. You basically get stuck in a never ending circle of doors that lead to different worlds. Jessie only seemed to have ‘be a cock’ dialogue options which means you no choice but to come across as totally knob-jockey for three hours.

The achievements are more of the same –just complete the episodes if you can stay awake long enough to do so.

MInecraft Story Mode did nothing for me in terms of narrative engagement or exciting game play. I also found that it didn’t hold my attention which meant that I missed a lot of dialogue options. Not that it mattered as being missing all dialogue choices for the whole game wouldn’t have made me miss any of the achievements.

Agatha Christie – The A.B.C Murders

Having seen a few of my friends playing this, I thought I would carry out my own investigation into a game adaptation of Agatha Christie – a concept I thought was very weird. I was wrong about it being weird and, in fact, it was quite the boring experience.

You play as Agatha Christie’s Poirot and you are on the trail of the ABC killer, a killer who is targeting victims in various locales starting with the letter A, then the letter B and so on. This isn’t much of a spoiler – the clue is in the title.

The nearest like for like comparison I can make is to the Sherlock Holmes series and I have to say that the Sherlock games are a lot better. On Poirot’s investigations, you have to solve various puzzles, interrogate victims and suspects and piece together clues to reach a valid conclusion. The puzzles and interrogations are fine for the most part but piecing the clues together is very, very subjective and it suffers from the same problems as other games of the genre where it wants you to reach its conclusion without you making any of your own. I don’t understand this style of gaming unless building the functionality to allow you to take shortcuts, after you’ve worked stuff out for yourself, is incredibly difficult to build.

The puzzles, while okay, aren’t going to win any awards for ingenuity but a few of them may win some points for obscurity, especially towards the end. Some of the puzzles required you to have some kind of psychic connection to the thinking of the developers as there was no real way to identify the steps required to solve some of them.

Graphically they have gone for a cartoony look and feel which is suitable for the game type and allows Poirot to look sensibly different from David Suchett. The music is also in keeping with the genre with the exception of the puzzle sections where an overly ominous track plays in the background despite the fact there is no punishment for failing or time limit to complete any of them – a strange choice.

The last comment I will make is that they seem to have tried to match Sherlock with how much of an asshole Poirot can be. He comes across as majorly condescending at times, especially towards Hastings, the one guy that is meant to be his friend. I don’t understand the need for these games to create a completely unlikable protagonist for you to play as. For me, this is a buzz kill and made this game a drag to get through.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

A welcome return to the 50 achievement format here but to get all of the achievements takes some planning if you want to avoid extra playthroughs. 32 can be obtained on a single playthrough without issue, however the other 18 are completely missable.

At least a second partial playthrough will be required as you need to make eight mistakes during the course of the investigation. There are counter achievements for taking the right approach but you only get one save so tactical saves won’t work and the mistakes achievement is cumulative in one playthrough. To get eight mistakes in one playthrough you need to get as far as nearly the end of the game so it’s practically two playthroughs that are required.

Agatha Christie – The A.B.C Murders

Having seen a few of my friends playing this, I thought I would carry out my own investigation into a game adaptation of Agatha Christie – a concept I thought was very weird. I was wrong about it being weird and, in fact, it was quite the boring experience.

You play as Agatha Christie’s Poirot and you are on the trail of the ABC killer, a killer who is targeting victims in various locales starting with the letter A, then the letter B and so on. This isn’t much of a spoiler – the clue is in the title.

The nearest like for like comparison I can make is to the Sherlock Holmes series and I have to say that the Sherlock games are a lot better. On Poirot’s investigations, you have to solve various puzzles, interrogate victims and suspects and piece together clues to reach a valid conclusion. The puzzles and interrogations are fine for the most part but piecing the clues together is very, very subjective and it suffers from the same problems as other games of the genre where it wants you to reach its conclusion without you making any of your own. I don’t understand this style of gaming unless building the functionality to allow you to take shortcuts, after you’ve worked stuff out for yourself, is incredibly difficult to build.

The puzzles, while okay, aren’t going to win any awards for ingenuity but a few of them may win some points for obscurity, especially towards the end. Some of the puzzles required you to have some kind of psychic connection to the thinking of the developers as there was no real way to identify the steps required to solve some of them.

Graphically they have gone for a cartoony look and feel which is suitable for the game type and allows Poirot to look sensibly different from David Suchett. The music is also in keeping with the genre with the exception of the puzzle sections where an overly ominous track plays in the background despite the fact there is no punishment for failing or time limit to complete any of them – a strange choice.

The last comment I will make is that they seem to have tried to match Sherlock with how much of an asshole Poirot can be. He comes across as majorly condescending at times, especially towards Hastings, the one guy that is meant to be his friend. I don’t understand the need for these games to create a completely unlikable protagonist for you to play as. For me, this is a buzz kill and made this game a drag to get through.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

A welcome return to the 50 achievement format here but to get all of the achievements takes some planning if you want to avoid extra playthroughs. 32 can be obtained on a single playthrough without issue, however the other 18 are completely missable.

At least a second partial playthrough will be required as you need to make eight mistakes during the course of the investigation. There are counter achievements for taking the right approach but you only get one save so tactical saves won’t work and the mistakes achievement is cumulative in one playthrough. To get eight mistakes in one playthrough you need to get as far as nearly the end of the game so it’s practically two playthroughs that are required.