Old school FPS action with the Judge in Dredd vs. Death

Dredd vs Death was another game purchased recently just for the pure co-op lulz. Originally made over 10 years ago back in the heady days of the sixth console generation, the game feels a little clunky by todays standards but is still worth it for a decent co-op shooter romp.

Mega-City-One is again under attack from a malevolent force. This time it is the Dark Judges, a group of 4 undead Judge spirits from a parallel dimension who see all life as a crime to be judged. At the start of the game, they are safely imprisoned but manage to effect an escape and it is up to Dredd to find and stop them before they can destroy the city.

The game plays like any early 2000s FPS in that you move like a tank at a pretty much constant sprint. There are the usual plethora of different guns to pick up like shotguns, machine guns, grenade launchers and such, but the Judge's signature gun, the Lawgiver pistol is one of the best throughout the game due to it's ability to fire a wide range of munitions ranging from armour piercing to ricochet high explosive. This gives you a wide variety of options for different situations, but sometimes finding the right ammo quickly can be troublesome so it is not without it's disadvantages.

The game also gives you the ability to Judge people who surrender to you willingly. Once they kneel down with their hands in the air, you can cuff and Judge them where it shows the perp's crimes and sentences. These can be quite amusing as it seems damn near everything is a crime with such things as "Owning a goldfish without a license" popping up on some perp's details. You also get a law meter which shows your adherence to the law. If you only fire in defence and arrest rather than kill when you have the chance, this meter will stay high. If you shoot and kill everything without asking questions, then this meter will deplete and if it totally empties, it's game over. But I shot almost everyone I could see and this rarely happened so you need to be very very unlawful for this to happen.

One downside, which is common with older games like this, is that due to limited graphical capabilities and such, many areas look the same and are not sign posted. Combine this with often ambiguous and poorly explained objectives and it can result in a lot of time spent wandering around trying to find your next objective or simply ascertain exactly what the next objective is. Checkpoints can also be quite sparse which again, was quite common at the time but co-op adds to this problem because if one of you dies or fails an objective, you are reset to the last one. These are small annoyances though and usually didn't detract much from the murderous fun and hilarious no-nonsense gruffness of the Judge. Who is monstrously ugly in this particular incarnation and I wonder how his fellow Judges do not often shoot him mistakenly thinking he is some form of hideous monster.

Dredd vs. Death provided fairly standard issue but still entertaining co-op FPS action through and through with some minor annoyances along the way that are easily over-looked. A blast in the face from the past to be sure. Nothing new or shocking here, but still fun for those who like shooting dudes in the face.

An enjoyable RTS set in a crazy alternate timeline

Strange as it may sounds, I have never played a Command and Conquer game before. This is my first. And the only reason I did was on the recommendation of my regular co-op buddy. I have played my fair share of real time strategy games before such as the amazing Homeworld series, the Dawn of War series, Halo Wars and others but it’s usually not a genre that I swarm to like a moth to a flame. I was promised this one was a lot of crazy mad cap fun though so I went in optimistic.

And it was a lot of mad-cap fun. But apart from that, it was a fairly standard RTS affair with a few exceptions:

• A huge all star cast with the likes of Tim Curry, Jonathan Pryce, George Takei, J.K Simmons, Jenny McCarthy and more.
• The action takes place over land, sea and air meaning you have to watch all 3 fronts at once.

The plot picks off after Red Alert 2 (which I had not played) where the Soviet Union was about to be done in. But conveniently, they have invented a time machine and travel back in time to kill Albert Einstein and change history making them and the Japanese Empire both global powers again along with the Allies so all 3 are at war again. But due to the lack of Nuclear weapons, some new super weapons have been invented such as satellites than can pull units from space, huge mechs, and vacuum bombs. All very fun stuff and makes each side have it’s own drawbacks and benefits.

There are 3 campaigns, one for each side, each with it’s own story and while none of the campaigns are terribly long in number of missions, they do still take quite a long time because the difficulty ramps up quite quickly and considerably meaning most of the later missions will take you many many attempts. We only did the Soviet campaign and even it took a good 10 hours.

It was also an incredibly demanding game for the year it was released (2008). I was playing it on a machine built to a good spec in the same year and even it was struggling. But because of this, it does look very nice indeed.

Apart from that, there’s not a huge amount else I feel I have to say about it. It was a normal RTS kind of encounter and one you will enjoy if you are an RTS fan but fairly unremarkable otherwise apart from the hilarious cast and scripting. A solid effort.

The much anticipated sequel to the 2011's surprise platformer hit

I'm sure by now, we've all seen the stories about how this sequel to the awesome Rayman Origins started life out as a Wii U exclusive much to the pleasure of Wii U fans and owners. But then, quite close to the launch date, Ubisoft in their infinite wisdom decided that the Wii U had far too small of an install base to justify an exclusive and would never make their money back if they did so, so they decided to delay release for another 6 months and bring it to almost every other platform too.

While I'm sure this was an irritant to said Wii U fans and owners, I myself am quite glad they made that decision because I do not yet own a Wii U and may not get one for quite some time so I was happy it came to a platform that I could play it on. Namely, PC.

I'll get the bad things out of the way first and to start with, there is the problem that they did not take out the very Wii U centric features that were designed to make heavy use of the special touch pad Wii U controller like the character Muffy who can be controlled by a 2nd person using the touch pad to move platforms into place for player 1 and take out enemies. In non Wii U versions, this guy is simply controlled by pressing a button and he instantly does the action the other person would have done. While this is probably simpler and quicker, he still feels a bit redundant being there and the levels that featured him were quite annoying sometimes because you would often forget to use him. There are also a lot of scratchcard mini games that were clearly designed for touch pad left in there that you now just waggle a thumb over with the stick. Yeah okay, but seems a bit pointless. There are also annoying progress walls where you need to collect X number of arbitrary things before you can do Y level. Which I do not recall Origins having and you could progress freely without having to go back and re-do levels to collect more things. Speaking of re-doing levels, there is also a "Back to Origins" section in this game where you can unlock a number of levels from the predecessor game. And while this is a nice extra for those who did not play it, our playthrough of it found it necessary to play these levels also to get the required number of items to progress so this felt like more re-treading and padding. The game also felt considerably shorter that Origins though, despite this. It was also quite a lot easier and the final levels came about as a bit of an easy and sudden surprise after the face melting difficulty of Origin's final levels.

But those are all minor quibbles. I mean just look at the screenshots sliding past above here. The game is achingly gorgeous and joyous to play. Every level is filled with beautiful scenery, epic music that keeps pushing you on. It's just so happy and so much fun. Even when it's kicking your ass, you can't help but have a smile on your face. Yes, actual gameplay wise, it's pretty much just more of the same as Rayman Origins with a few new features, but it was amazing, so why would that be a problem?  The plot of the game is....well, who are we kidding?  There basically is no plot, just like Origins.  You just run through levels kicking ass and collecting things.

The huge bosses are back again and this time will transition between multiple 3D planes mixing the battles up more. Each one is different and frantic and yet more ass kicking fun. And at the end of each world, there is a fantastic running level done to the theme and rhythm of awesome tunes. These are undoubtedly some of the best levels in the game. Fantastic game from start to end. If you liked the first one at all, play this immediately. If you didn't, play this immediately. Even if you didn't play Origins, play this immediately. The one caveat I would give is that if you are a Wii U owner, go with that original intended platform so all the features intended for Wii U will not look so out of place.  Oh yeah, and those awesome music levels? Here's a taste:

Defending towers from zombies in extreme low detail

Defending towers from zombies in extreme low detail

I got this title a few years ago in one of the many excellent Humble Bundles but apart from doing one or two levels for a Steam Christmas challenge, I have not played a lot of it.  But me and Eugene were stuck for something to play the other night due to his rig, Shepard, being out of action from an RMA’d Corsair H100 cooler.  And this was a very fast one to download, so we went for it.  And we were pleasantly surprised.

I didn’t care too much for this game the first time I played it, but I was just trying to play it in a hurry to get the Steam badge.  Having more time to get into it, I enjoyed it more.  It’s your basic normal tower defence game only with some twists on the theme.  You are fighting a campaign against zombies (referred to as Zeds) in the 60s and the game board consists of a number of territories.  Zeds spread across the territories, as they do and it’s your job to contain them.  You do this by picking a zone and going in there. Levels of infestation can range from 1 (a small town with not a huge number of Zeds) to 4 (A huge city completely covered in them).  You can win in one of two ways:

Kill all the Zeds before nightfall (this is when they swarm you).  This is the harder option, but nets you the territory which will give you campaign points each turn for as long as you can hold it.

Evacuate a set number of people from the city before they are eaten.  This is the easier option, but the Zeds will still hold the territory giving them campaign points each turn.

We started off trying to play it the latter way, but were getting thoroughly trounced over and over again so when the Zeds had got all the campaign points they needed to get the overall win, we restarted on a slightly lower difficulty and went with the Zed killing and territory holding route and this worked out much better for us.

The actual tower defence part is the main meat of the game and you are assigned different units for each turn, up to 5 in total.  These units can range from very useful, like a mercenary who you can point to wherever you want and will kill anything he sees.  To quite useless like barricades that can be used to filter Zeds to one place and that’s about it.  The units can be upgraded as you get experience and time and success will unlock newer and better units that can bring in or rain down much death on the Zeds.  It’s all very tactical and trying to make the best of the units you have can make the difference between winning and losing.

It’s all a lot to take in at first and it seems quite easy to lose a campaign or two before you figure out what you are doing and have even a chance of winning.  But once you do, it gets to be a lot of fun.  The co-op mode allows two people to control different units at the same time.  So one can direct soldiers and the other can direct artillery for example.  Meaning less multi-tasking and getting caught out.  It’s an interesting way to do co-op tower defence that I can’t recall too many examples of and playing with a friend always makes it more fun.

The writing is quite funny as well and the descriptions of the various mercenary units and archive of the campaign are very good reading if you can stay away from killing Zeds long enough.  The one minor down point, if it really is one, is that the graphics are extremely basic.  And I do mean extremely.  You view the city top down and all the Zeds and people and most units are simply different colours little square dots.  Even the city itself is very low detail not being much more than a series of grey squares.  But one could argue that this is to allow you to focus on the tactical side and not get distracted.  I didn’t mind it much really.

A fun but short Zed killing romp that has a lot of replay value packed in there should you want to return to it and explore further.  Sadly, I did not get any screenshots of this one myself, so I will just post a few from the internets here:

This all feels unusually familiar. Only a stupider.

And so we find ourselves back on LV-426 again.  Hunting Xenomorphs as the Colonial Marines.  This game has had a long and checkered development but it’s finally here.  So was it worth the wait?  Well, probably not.

In itself, it’s quite a standard FPS with probably more negatives than positives.  The only positives that come to mind are the attachment of the Aliens franchise, the 4 player co-op and getting to use things like the Pulse Rifle and Loader from the Aliens films and impressive distant vistas and backdrops.

Very large negatives include but not limited to:

• Fantastically stupid Alien AI: they will just spring at you and then put up their hands like they hadn't thought that far ahead.
• Sub-par voice acting: Michael Biehn said doing this game almost put him off voice acting meaning we almost didn’t get the amazing Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
• Nonsensical plot: something about rescuing marines? Main characters were generic and unforgettable. The only ones you care about are returning original characters. Fans of the series say that most of this game’s plot shatters the canon of the franchise.
• Awful visuals up close: Despite the backdrops and scenery looking very nice, the up close scenery and character models looked awful
• Odd and disruptive co-op warping system: if one co-op player got too far ahead of the others, those lagging behind would halt, fade to a black screen and fade back in near the person furthest ahead. This seemed to work when you didn't want it to (like in simple corridors) and not work when you wanted it to (like when players were trapped in rooms full of deadly gas)

I could go on and on about the bad points all day but even despite that, overall it was not as awful as I was expecting it to be.  And despite the never-ending string of awful reviews I thought it was serviceable and not as gut-wrenchingly awful as I was prepared for.  This is by no means to say it was a good game.  Hell no.  It was not.  But again, the reviews made it out to be worse than it really was in my opinion.  Of course, this opinion may have been aided by the fact that I played it in 3 player co-op with 2 good friends and we were having as much fun laughing at the awfulness of it as we were shooting things in the face.

But to be fair, with all the debacle that was revealed after it’s release about the horror story of it’s development and how many times it changed hands and was outsourced and such, it never really stood a chance.  Give it a go if you dare.  But bring some friends so you have someone to laugh through the tears with. 

Quite a yarn. An Epic yarn, if you will.

Kirby is a series I have never played a lot of bar the odd spin off title here and there.. I've always kind of wanted to play more of the series and it's not like I'm not presented with many many opportunities but I just never seemed to get into it. However, when this title was brought to my attention by my good friend Phil and fellow co-op game enthusiast as a new game for us to play through and already having seen videos of it's unique art style, I was quite intruiged so away we went.

Gameplay wise, it's quite similar to most traditional Kirby games in that it's easy-going family-friendly platforming action. Kirby's usual ability of eating enemies is replaced with capturing them in a yarn lasso and then throwing them at other enemies. The fact that you are made of yarn also affords you the ability to reshape easily into all kinds of cool things like cars, trains and ships for speed, umbrellas for floating, submarines and dolphins for swimming and many more contraptions. The fact that the entire world is made out of yarn also gives you the ability to manipulate it by stretching parts, peeling parts away , moving things and so on which adds more interesting touches to the environments. It was quite easy and short but I didn't mind that as it was quite soothing and peaceful to play which is a nice change of pace. The lullaby-like soundtrack also helped this quite a lot. The bosses were some of the best levels and although again, not terribly difficult each one was different and interesting and required tactical adjustment.

But by far and away the best and funniest parts were the narrated slide shows telling the story in between worlds where the narrator would rattle off what seemed like a trippy piss take of a childrens story.

Hilarious, ball-tripping and non-stressful fun platform action from start to finish. Maybe I should pick up some Kirby games after my backlog is finally cleared. They do seem fun.

More of the same with superpowers

Went into this with great anticipation after loving the 3rd game and feeling lucky to get it at all after THQ's collapse. However upon starting it, it felt like a continuation or expansion pack of the exact same game. Same engine, same world (mostly), same mechanics, same vehicles, same abilities, mostly same weapons, mostly same characters, same rewards scheme, same logistics, etc. Only differences are the plot, main enemy, the addition of superpowers and some new vehicles and guns. So starting off from scratch at level 1 again having to regain all abilities, money, weapons, upgrades etc felt like a bit of a kick to the nuts.

It did start to improve as it went on and more powers were unlocked, but it felt like they were being drip fed and feeling that I should have been able to keep everything from Saint's Row 3 never really went away. The story was cool with lots of back references to the previous 3 games. I got most of them, but not the ones to the first game because I didn't play it. Thankfully in this game, the optional side missions and main missions were separated and labelled so you could avoid the small ones if you weren't so keen to do them. There were also a lot of nice piss-take references to other games like Splinter Cell, Mass Effect, Metal Gear Solid as well as films like Armageddon, They Live, The Matrix, etc etc. Overall lots of mad-cap fun that turned the insanity up even beyond what was in the 3rd. Many parts were awesome, but it still ended up somehow feeling tiresome compared to the 3rd because much more of it was the same than was different and yet you had to start out all over again.

There were also quite a large number of technical issues when I played this co-op online on the same network. Many repeated crashes, lock-ups, events not happening, necessary NPCs disappearing textures disappearing and so on and so on which added to frustration.

It's good to have the Saint's Row franchise as an alternative to the more serious things like GTA because it's just pure madness. But after the setting and plot line of this game, I'm wondering where is left to with Saint's Row 5....If there is one....I still preferred the 3rd game to this though for some reason. It just felt more coherent, tense and epic.

Side note: This is the 122nd game I have finished this year. Already taking me over 2011's total of 121. And we're only 2/3 through the year. Plenty of time left to beat 2012's total of 138.

[Edit] As I was requested to state: there were many many wubs in this game also that greatly added to it's hilarity.

Don't know why this got such a slating in the reviews. It was nowhere near as bad as it was said to be in all the reviews. It wasn't stellar either but it was fun for what it was: a simple 3rd person shooter with a Left 4 Dead ish co-operative element to it based in the Resident Evil universe. It was cool to see events happening in Resident Evil 2 from a different perspective, but it did seem to make all of the situations much more intense with way more enemies. There were some complete canon shattering moments though (mostly the ending) but it was still enjoyable zombie murdering action while it lasted (it was very short). Only complaints would be that it needs to make it more obvious when you're about to die and it needs some kind of quick jump/dodge maneuver to get out of the way of shit. But all in all definitely worth a shot for fans of Resident Evil. It probably just got chewed to bits because with a franchise as old as Resident Evil a lot is expected of it now and it didn't fill all of these expectations. But it does not deserve the thrashing it got.

Wow. Hardly know where to begin. Approximately 4,000,000,000 % better than the previous entry. No more tedious grinding for respect. No more crap boring missions. No more scrounging for cash and guns and vehicles. Respect is not needed, cash, guns and vehicles all come easily allowing you to focus on just having lots of fun. Pretty much every mission was just rampant insane mad cap chaos. And lots of fun. The only possible exceptions were the activity tutorials which were dressed up as minor missions but they were still fun too to just do once.

Lots of voice talent too including Hulk Hogan, Jessie Ventura and of course, Mayor Burt Reynolds. Everything is vastly improved over the old game including vehicle handling, shooting, combat (which is hilarious), flying, voice acting, script, plot, everything. Just everything. Just madness. This series has gone from being a boring GTA clone to realising what it should be and having it's volume turned up to 15 to just make it mad as hell. This is what games should be. Just non stop roller coaster rides of fun. And even better in co-op. Can't wait for the fourth.

Started this on 8th of December 2012. Took over 7.5 months to finish it on and off. Extremely slow start. Albeit not as slow as the first game which I abandoned completely out of sheer boredom. Not something I do too often. But it did pick up later on when the missions got more exciting. The developers seemed to slowly realise that they have to stop trying to be GTA and just be sheer nuts. Something which seems to have carried on to the 3rd and soon to be 4th games.

This was a decent enough sandbox shooter but felt like quite a lazy port and it was very hard to get the PC controls to sync up well to a keyboard or another controller. And as usual with games of this size and scope, it did have its fair share of bugs and glitches. But all that being said, once you got into the good missions, got good gear and vehicles and got some momentum going, it was a lot of fun moving through the missions and it did have a very good story involving the Saints taking over the town from 3 rival gangs and then a huge corporation. But far and away my biggest complaint was the padding used to make you require doing the optional side missions in order to earn the respect required to activate the main missions. So annoying. On to the next one in the series. It seems like it will be way less fluff and irritants and just much more madness.

Very fun. Not very scary because of 2 people and constant shooting but still plenty of awesome shooter action. With a good twist on the co-op in that the 2 characters had very different play styles and approaches. Also freaking gorgeous for such a little known game. All round winner. Unfortunately, this is probably the end of the F.E.A.R series because the publisher isn't interested in making more. Shame. Would have liked to see more from this dysfunctional family.

Fairly standard movie-tie in game kind of deal. Decent enough shooter with some very frantic fire-fights but lacked polish overall and did feel like it had a lot of fluff in it. But a bit of bro-op shooting is always welcome. Also fun to be a crazy Kirk-Spock duo with their witty back and forth banter.

Didn't quite feel like Army of Two... Too serious. They did warn us about this. I had hoped it wasn't true. But all the brofisting is gone and it's very serious and dry. Also the new characters are very boring. Events picked up a bit towards the end, but definitely a step down from the previous 2 games in the series and fairly bland average through and through. Good to get some classic co-op shooting again though. Been a while.

Another classic Gears installment. Same old awesome game mechanics as always, but the plot was pretty inconsequential this time round...felt like it didn't matter hugely and the new side characters are pretty forgettable. But the star performance per area system did give things a new twist. But I feel they broke the canon a few times with having enemies and guns and stuff show up that shouldn't have been there...

Gradually departing further from the series' horror roots and going more towards action. Just like Resident Evil... The addition of co-op was nice but also made it less scary. Still a lot of fun for an action game. Thankfully, the micro-transactions were not that noticeable. Apart from some upgrades/weapons needing a huge amount of resources. The art and levels and enemies were all their usual gorgeous selves. But can't help but feel it's losing it's way... I think that Visceral had their hand forced by EA to put in most of the more negative parts like the micro-transactions and cover-based shooting.

Almost 2 years on and off to complete this one. And man was it hard.... Definitely fun though

Really not a lot to do on the moon. Besides weld shit. And that gets old pretty quick

More classic shooter action. And an even more nonsensical plot

Fun shooter action. Pure classic SEGA cheese and terrible voice acting

Awesome awesome game. Production values of even the big console MGS installments. Looks, feels and plays like them too even despite the PSP's limitations. Bravo to the team for pulling this off on the hardware. Shame it didn't sell very well... Co-op is also extremely well implemented. Nothing too complicated or forced gimmick moves, just 1 more person there to back you up. Only complaint (as usual with MGS games) is the weirdness of the story, particularly in the final hour and how some things (some quite major plot points) just happen without explanation, rhyme or reason. One of the best parts is undoubtedly sky-hooking enemy soldiers out of the field and back to your base. Usually full of bullet holes. Bravo Kojima. Bravo. Hope there will be more like this even though it seems unlikely. Co-op works excellent in tactical espionage action.