Christmas, New Years and Gaming

Happy New Year! I know this is a bit late and I've neglected the blog, but I hope you all had a good Christmas and New Years. I got several games over the holiday season, some are great. Some...not so great. I'll go over a few of them here.

Assassin's Creed III
PlayStation 3 (also on Xbox 360, PC and Wii U)
Ubisoft Montreal
Ubisoft


If there's any game to indicate that the current gen has outstayed it's welcome, it's Assassin's Creed III. It's obvious that this game was designed for the next gen of consoles and PC, and the PlayStation 3 simply cannot cope.  Running at an almost constant sub-30 FPS, it's almost impossible to have a smooth enjoyable experience that was present in previous installments. Graphics wise, it's pretty bad too. Hard shadows, lack of any anti-aliasing and a pathetic draw distance make this look like a launch title PS3 game, not one at the end of the system's life span.

Moving onto the gameplay, it's hard to believe that this is a sequel to Assassin's Creed: Revelations (2011). For some bizarre reason, the controls have been completely redesigned. This is the fifth title in the series, and to change the controls at this point is just awkward. You can no longer go around swinging your sword as you please, and as such killing civilians can only be done with your pistol. I know quite a few people who took great joy from slicing holes in innocent civilians and they're quite upset that this freedom has now been taken from them and they're railroaded onto the main story.  Countering is no longer a 'instant win', and instead you repel their attack and open them up from an attack from yourself. This is one of the few improvements of Assassin's Creed III.

Assassin's Creed III is a very disappointing title and a terrible way to end what was a very interesting series. 4/10.

PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale
PlayStation 3 (also on PlayStation Vita)
SuperBot Entertainment
Sony Computer Entertainment


Also called Sony Smash Bros, this is a mascot based fighting game where you take control of a number of PlayStation All Stars and beat the crap out of the other all stars.

To get a knock out, you must build up AP by beating up the enemies. If you can chain a combo, you get more AP. Once you get a certain amount of AP, you can use your All Star move. This will KO the opposing player. This is the only way to KO someone. This makes the matches drag on forever, as skilled players will easily dodge the other skilled player's All Star move. You can see what Sony were trying to do - copy Smash Bros, but make it different. But, I wish they had just gone all the way and made a clone of Smash Bros. At least that would have been fun to play. Depending on the all star move to KO someone just makes the game boring.

There isn't much to say about the game, other than it could have been so much more, but was screwed over by terrible design decisions. Also, why are there two Coles? They could have included a different character in the roster instead of having two versions of Cole MacGrath.  5/10.

Halo 4
Xbox 360
343 Industries
Microsoft Game Studios


I thought we 'finished the fight' back in Halo 3, but here we are again with Halo 4. Master Chief jumps back into combat again, although it seems the time in stasis has made him more chatty. I'm not complaining, Master Chief in the original Halo trilogy was pretty dull and only spoke during cutscenes. Just in the beginning mission of Halo 4, Master Chief speaks more than he did during the entire trilogy. I'm happy that the story of Halo 4 is more involved than the other games, having Cortana talk to Chief during the gameplay.

But the gameplay is the problem. There's nothing new to draw me in. I loved all of the previous Halo games, as something grabbed you right from the start. Here it's just more of the same. Nothing seems to have changed from Halo Reach, with the exception of the graphics, which look amazing. I still can't believe that the Xbox 360 can handle this.

Moving onto the multiplayer, it's annoying that most of the features are locked if you don't have Xbox Live, but that's not the game's fault and is most likely Microsoft insistence. From what I played of the multiplayer, you can tell that it's taken a huge inspiration from Call of Duty. You unlock weapons by playing more of the game, and allowing you to customize your loadout. Another thing is killstreaks. Get three kills in a row, and you can call down some assistance. Call of Duty anyone? 5/10.

Virtue's Last Reward
Nintendo 3DS (also on PlayStation Vita)

Spike ChunSoft
Rising Star Games

Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors was one of the best games for the original DS. Combining solving ingenious puzzles with a fascinating narrative kept me hooked for hours attempting to get all the endings, and finally the last puzzle. I'm not going to spoil it, but if you haven't played it and you have a DS - get 999!

Virtue's Last Reward is the sequel to 999 and it manages to improve upon almost everything. You play as Sigma, and you've been kidnapped by someone called Zero and forced to play the Nonary Game with eight other people. Your goal is to open the door with a nine on. To do this, you must get nine points. How do you get nine points? You play the Ambidex Game.

You go around solving very hard puzzles with two other people which tax your brain to it's limit, all the time being presented with clever dialogue before returning to the Ambidex room. You are then presented with a choice - Ally or Betray. You can ally with the people you worked with before or betray them. If you both choose to ally with each other, you both get +2 points. If you choose to betray and the other person chooses to ally, you get +3 points, and they get -2 points.  If you both betray, nothing happens.

You start off at 3 points, if your points reach zero, you die. I've got a confession, I was pushed to choose betray and betrayed a young girl as she chose to ally with me. She's only got 1 point now and is close to death. I felt terrible as I reduced her to tears. I can't wait to find out what this means in the future. 

In short, this is probably the best game on the 3DS and well worth a try if you have a 3DS.  You'll be drawn back constantly for it's interesting story and finding out who exactly Zero is and to try and solve these incredibly clever puzzles. 10/10.

End of the World (or not)

So, as you may have gathered, the world did not end on the 21st of December.  The end of the world topic got me thinking about games which portray the apocalypse in them, and how it can relate to the player. The most obvious one would be, of course, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Which I must confess, I've never played. Feel free to shoot me some hate mail. It's regarded as the darkest the Zelda series has ever gone, with the moon (pictured) going to crash into the world in three days and it's up to Link to stop it. I do want to play Majora's Mask, but I just haven't got around to it. I'll have to fire up the Wii and load it on the Virtual Console some time. 

Another 'end of the world' game would be Sonic the Hedgehog (2006). This is a bit of a spoiler, but the game is so rubbish, I doubt you care. Sonic dies and the human girl who he's been getting unnaturally close to cries. This triggers the end of the world as her tears cause an monster called Iblis to be released and fuse with Mephiles to create the demon Solaris. Solaris splits up the planet into seven stages, which coincidentally have seven chaos emeralds on. It's up to Sonic's friends to find the Chaos Emeralds and bring Sonic back to life.

What follows is some of the worst platforming I have ever seen. Forgetting the abysmal camera, and the glitchy terrain which can suddenly kill you if you step on it wrong, you have to fight against black holes which are pulling you in, enemies shooting fireballs from off camera and a general messy level design as you play as everyone but Sonic. If you run out of lives (which you will. Multiple times), then you have to start right back at the beginning of the stage. I forgot to mention you play as Amy in one of the stages. She moves at a snail's pace and has to be right next to the enemy to attack. It's as fun as it sounds.

But getting back to the topic, the story about the world being destroyed is well done, especially the scene where the world gets enveloped by a giant white light and all the civilians screaming and panicking.  I would not recommend you play Sonic '06. I'll probably complain about it some more later.

The Fallout series doesn't actually show the end of the world, but rather after the disaster. On October 23, 2077, China and America initiate World War III and bring down a nuclear apocalypse upon the Earth. It's not known who fired the first shot, but it doesn't really matter in the end. The Fallout series takes place around 200-300 years after the event, where humanity is still living in vaults built from the pre-war era. These vaults were designed to protect humanity in the case of a nuclear attack.

You take the role of a survivor in the vault who goes outside into the wasteland for the first time and has to learn to survive. Everything is hostile, from the Super Mutants to the plants, and you've got to keep an eye on that radiation counter. Fallout is one of the most atmospheric games I've ever played. If you get chance, I definitely recommend you pick up Fallout: New Vegas, which I consider to be the best in the series. Minutes will become hours, and hours will become days as you sink time into this post-apocalypse series. I've always been fascinated by Nuclear War stories, maybe because we came so close to it happening in reality and stories based on that frighten me more than any horror tale.

Three Stage Studios

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm the team leader and producer of Three Stage Studios. We're a team formed around May 2012 to design a game for the Third Year project on our Computer and Video Games course.

Our original name was Zero Entertainment, however, that was quickly changed to Three Stage Studios to incorporate the three stages of game design that we're following. Design, Art and Programming.

The members of Three Stage Studios are:
Iain Walsh, Producer and Team Leader.
Ryan Bradley, Environment and Prop Artist.
Ali Malik, Character Artist and Animator.
Abdul Ahmad, Programmer.
Dan Donnan, App Programmer and Photoshop wizard.

The music for the game is being designed by Scott Elliott, who I'm good friends with and have worked with before on a second year game called Time Punch: Prologue.

Time Punch: Prologue. Saving the universe, one punch at a time!

Introduction

Hey all, and welcome to my blog. I'm Iain Walsh, and I'm a third year Computer and Video Games student at the University of Salford.  On this blog I'll be talking about games, how my group game is going (Fletch: Dawn of the Golden Eagle) and how I'm generally getting on both in the course and with life.

To start with, let's talk about Fletch: Dawn of the Golden Eagle. This is a 3D Platformer that my team, Three Stage Studios, are working on. Powered by Unity, it follows the adventures of a janitor ferret named Fletch, who must embark on a mission to retrieve his stolen comrades before the evil golden eagle, Klauss, can take over the world! Fletch can take full advantage of three suits which can be used to overcome certain obstacles. A platform too far away to jump to? Use the agility suit? A tough enemy beating you up? Use the combat suit. Need to sneak past the guards? Use the stealth suit. Each suit comes with it's own strengths and weaknesses meaning the player has to plan out in advance about what they're going to do.

Fletch making his way across the lily pads to get to the turtle village.