Tales of the Stalker: The Shadow of Chernobyl

 I walk through the thick grass, careful to avoid the pulsing anomalies that wait in the foliage. A hard rain is falling from a dark, sullen sky. I'm short on ammunition now; the zombie pack I was asked to wipe out used the last of my assault rifle rounds, I'm down to two shells. I'm hungry, thirsty and need to find shelter. A blowout is coming; a fire storm that will clean me of my flesh like the wrath of god. I run as the warning goes out, but I'm getting tired so quickly. The sirens howl as I reach the dilapidated warehouse with seconds to spare, and hunker down with the other stalkers by the fire, and wait for the cacophonous storm to play out outside. This is the world of Stalker. Welcome to Chernobyl.

It's not very often that an original game does get totally overlooked, especially not in the days of Steam and Desura where indie games thrive and get discovered with surprising ease. Stalker was one of those games that everybody knew about before release but totally ignored when it finally came out. To this day, I haven't met anybody who has played it. If I say 'post apocalyptic shooter with role playing elements', people immediately say 'Fallout 3'.

In fairness, I will admit Fallout 3 is a great RPG shooter with a great open world to explore, but for some reason it has always left me rather cold. Probably because it doesn't feel much like an apocalypse. Fallout 3's wasteland is a wasteland only in name. The gaming world of Fallout 3 is infinitely larger of course, but in a world desperate to remind us that we walk through the ruins of human civilisation, the surprisingly fantastical array of lasers, giant scorpions, cyborg implants and other similar technologies jar my sense of immersion. While its retro fifty stylings do give it an undeniable charm, this artistic choice does result in making the future look more awesome than it probably would be. It's the truth of Stalker that resonates with me. Stalker feels more real to me than any of the Fallout games, and although I know Fallout 3 is probably the better game by direct comparison, Stalker is the game that feels more real.

Fallout 3 might seem pessimistic, it having taken place after a nuclear catastrophe, but try out Stalker's apocalypse for size. Scavenging for food and bandages in a partly irradiated and utterly lethal wasteland that never ceases trying to kill you, the pessimism and general nihilism of the game feels infinitely more sad. Stalker sees you playing a soldier of fortune with no memory (okay hardly a new one, but bear with me) who ends up in the extensive fallout area of Pripyat - where the rather notorious Chernobyl power plant is located.

The game plays with the idea that the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 did more than just irradiate the grasslands of the Ukraine, but also mutate the creatures and create anomalies of astounding value and supernatural quality. This world was first created in 'Roadside Picnic', the legendary science fiction work by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and which found its world utilised by Andre Tarkovsky for his film 'Stalker'. It is the title of the latter and the world of the former that set the scene for 'Stalker: The Shadow of Chernobyl'. The men who hunt the dessicated forests and fields looking for artefacts are the 'Stalkers' of the title. The world of Stalker is based on the actual environs of Pripyat, which gives it a disturbingly authentic edge. Cracked roadways, overturned vehicles and abandoned buildings abound. Worse still are the houses, with rotting children's art trodden into the floors and rusting bicycles in the grass. It is a poisoned, brutal world.

Now there are technically three Stalker games, but I will be treating them as one since 'Clear Sky' and 'Call of Pripyat' were actually add-ons rather than sequels, even if they are practically stand alone games themselves. it expanded the world of the original Stalker it was notoriously broken on release and the real leaps and bounds came in Call of Pripyat. Upgradeable weapons made an appearance in Call of Pripyat, for example, and the arrival of emissions, terrifying radioactive storms that force you to run for cover . There may have not been a myriad system of perks and skills that Fallout did, but to be honest such things have absolutely no place in Stalker's world. It is more shooter than RPG to be sure, but the world still has its own economy - that is to say, money is still a useful object, but only for getting food and weapons. It may not have the scope for quests in the manner Fallout 3 does, but it is an incredibly lean and intense open-world experience. Out in the wilderness finding an artefact when you hear the alert for an emission coming? Tough luck. Run like hell and find somewhere close to hide or be irradiated to death in seconds.

The game's graphics were a touch basic even when it was released, but with numerous graphical upgrade mods available for it now, it competes easily with the big boys. It is also unfortunate that the best new weapon upgrade and gameplay systems only arrived with 'Call of Pripyat', by which time GSC Gameworld had begun to collapse and would soon close...only to reopen again a few years later and carry on making Cossack games but leave the Stalker label dead. Thank god for the modding community however, as a lot of these have been grafted back on to the first games (even the ability to drive vehicles, a system not even available in Call of Pripyat, has been reintroduced). Its amazing people have the determination to do such work because the game engine for Stalker is really a gigantic piece of doggy doo - prone to endless crashes and with bugs oozing from every crack - but somehow they take this as a challenge rather than just a barrier and make it work.

The fact it has such a dedicated following says so much about Stalker's compelling power. Rotten hulking buildings, abandoned streets and overgrown homes surround you as you walk through this ruined world alone. It is a real survival game, and demands your commitment. If you ignore your thirst meter, you will drop dead of dehydration. Forget to eat? Starvation. Food does not fully restore your health either, that is an entirely separate series of stats you have to look after. Ammunition is incredibly scarce; very often, your enemies do not carry the same weaponry or ammunition as you so your best bet is to scavenge their equipment and sell it at the nearest trading post for the equipment you do need. This game does not mess around.

If you want a great experience in a post-apocalyptic world, I don't think you could find a better one than Stalker. And since you can get all three for the same approximate price as 'Fallout: New Vegas', I would suggest you try them out and mod all of them. You will not experience anything quite as ghostly or beautiful in any other game.

RETRO SHAME - Daikatana

I don't know why I bother, really. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people who claims peer pressure forced them nay goaded them into reviewing terrible games. I bought this for myself, for my own delectation. And I don't want my money back, because at £1.50 this kind of god-awfulness is to be treasured. The thing that baffles me is that I worked really hard at finishing the game, putting myself through every moment of it just so that I could say I had experienced this game from beginning to end.

Yes, I finished Daikatana.

From the perma-green swamps of the far future to San Francisco in a slightly less further future, I played it through. Which is probably more than the actual level designers did. This legendary unholy grail is a first person shooter, concocted by then Wunderkind Jon Romero, who was given so much creative control over his pet project that its production costs spiralled out of control and ended up being delayed by almost three years. When the jewel in your crown becomes the running joke of the gaming industry, things do not look good. The infamous 'Jon Romero is going to make you his bitch' ad campaign probably didn't help much either. Basically, it was all a little embarrassing and when it was released to universal indifference, it was the platinum standard for botched releases until Duke Nukem Forever ended up being delayed for fourteen years - a game that was not much better.

One of the many weapons more interested in harming you than the foe.

In the far future, you play a samurai called Hiro, who is tasked by a dying old man to retrieve a time-travelling sword and stop the evil Mishima Corporation from taking over the world, in perhaps one of the most overwrought introduction movies ever put into a game. There is a lot of tedious time wasted before you are finally dumped into the game (literally) and start your quest through time to retrieve the titular sword of the game's title. For reasons best known to himself, Mishima is dressed in full samurai gear and exposits lengthily to you at the end of each episode. It's a long game, rather longer than you'd like. Admittedly most of your time is spent staring at a loading screen, but still that counts right? At the very least you're getting plenty of content for your money. The problem is that I wanted the game to end after half an hour, not ten. 

The time travel locations add nothing to the story itself, mostly acting like padding because their actual supposed character and story developments have either no impact on the 'story' or most of the stuff you need to know is explained to you by the game's boss in the aforementioned manner. Their actual choice of location is sort of confusing in itself. Why in the hell would Mishima send you back to Ancient Greece? And why is the default plan to go and kill the medusa to charge up the sword and go from there to the 10th century? Why does everyone have a non-descript plague? And then futuristic San Francisco? What the shit is the connection between San Francisco and 10th century Norway? It is clearly a product designed by lots of different people working in different teams, and while they do have different arsenals for each time zone, all are hamstrung by lacklustre design and brainless artificial intelligence. 

One of many features trumpeted by the Daikatana PR team was a system of sidekicks, whereby you would be aided in battle with smart AI team players who could be ordered around in battle. It's a great idea in theory, and would be useful if it actually worked. The 'sidekicks' are infuriating. They constantly get stuck in lifts or against obstacles, and just love to get themselves killed. What is doubly annoying of course is that the game ends as soon as they die.It seems sometimes as if the game just wants to stack the odds up against you by artificial means. The games creators went on the offensive about that, saying it was a 'hardcore' shooter and not designed for newbies. Jon, let me explain something to you. Weapons that cause you more damage than the enemy are not hardcore. Sidekicks who spend their time running at walls grunting orgasmically and taking every opportunity to get themselves slaughtered are not hardcore either. And most of all, neither are mechanical fucking frogs.

Oh, screw you Romero.

The game's individual episodes vary in quality, the worst being - appropriately - the first. It is a mix of nauseatingly neon locales that look like somebody has painted every location in sambuca shots and infuriatingly bad design populated by the aforementioned frogs o' annoyance. Sewer level follows swamp level, and with it all come enemies with terrible path finding and weapons that harm you more than they do them. It seems to go on forever, and when you do finally make your first time hop, the banality of Ancient Greece comes as something of a relief. The problem with all these themed locations is that the best design is always at the start; there are some genuinely good ideas, and it is frustrating to see them wasted. The levels start off sort-of-good and then just taper off, like the creative team lost interest in their job after these first maps. Or that they went off and played Tekken or something instead of working. Oh, wait. They did. It is almost playable when you get to the final section, San Francisco. By then however, it's just too late. Any goodwill some of the better parts of these levels had are totally forgotten, and you end up focusing on comedically stupid looking sharks and bad platform jumping puzzles.

Moments later, they ran off a cliff.

When Daikatana finally stops - I say stop because I would not say the conclusion of Daikatana is in any way 'an ending' - It feels like wasted time. Very rarely will you have wasted so much time on something that took so long. It's not difficult per se, although it is unintentionally made that way by your suicidal sidekicks and buggy level design. The bugs are another fun part of Daikatana. This game crashes often and it crashes hard. Believe me. Often it will just dump you out altogether, and on a few occasions, renders itself totally unfinishable, such as a mind-numbingly stupid boss in the medieval hub who just often breaks the game by running in the wrong direction and not activating various triggers that the game needs him to. If he does go in the wrong direction, and he often does, you will have to do the entire level again because the game is now stuck.

That is actually a magical sceptre, you perverts.

So yeah, it's a mess on all levels. The worst thing about all of this is that despite the level design, the inane AI, badly implemented weaponry, insane use of coloured light and utterly baffling sidekick systems, is that somewhere in there, there IS quite a good game. I am really stretching the definition here, but my point remains. Deep inside this broken, irritating, badly designed mess there is a good game waiting to get out, but no amount of modding and fixing will ever do it. I am also quite adamant that this game never be given a sequel, if only because doing this will give the game legitimacy. The fact is that Daikatana must stand on its own as a monolithic testament to ego and excess, and a warning that no videogame company is better than its audience. This has to be said because in an age where Shaq Fu, one of the worst games in history, is getting a sequel because of ironic fans giving it a kickstarter - the danger is that someone may well try and launch a Daikatana sequel. No, leave Daikatana as it is. As a rather sad tombstone to videogame's most excessive golden age.

   

   

   

RETRO GLORY: The Streets of Rage Trilogy

Here is a somewhat surprising thing I have to tell you. I fucking HATE streets of rage. Hate, hate hate it. But I love it. I loves it I loves it. This is somewhat schizophrenic I admit, but playing Streets of Rage is somewhat like being in an abusive relationship in that rarely do two conflicting emotions struggle for expression like they do here. The trilogy of games, originally mega drive classics but now released on iPhone, are really old-school Sega side scrollers. The first game doesn't even bother with a story it's so basic, the second involves kidnap (they always do) and the third involves killer robots. But of course. The joy of these games is the simplicity of play, the feeling of kicking arse in a morally and ethically dubious fashion not epic tales of blood and villainy. The titular streets of rage are in an unnamed city in the 'future' in which a 'syndicate' has infiltrated all levels of government and now the city is a corrupt, unsafe place that needs cleaning up. I always wondered what it must be like to live in these cities. How on earth does its economy survive? Every street is a bloody warzone; want to get onions for that stir fry? If you can dodge the bat wielding motorcyclists and the electric-whip wielding dominatrixes, then good luck because I'm ordering in. Sheesh, and there was me thinking the cities in Just Cause 2 had it bad.

 'Seriously dude, I'm just trying to get to the frigging Chinese!'

So yeah, you beat up a huge range of bad guys and take down a shit ton of aggravating bosses. Each game is slightly different, the best and most possible one being number two. This is because the designers thought that maybe it would be quite nice for it to be possible in single-player, which is more than can be said for the first or third instalments.

The first game is bastard tough; your character being unable to move with any celerity makes boss battles less of a battle of skill and more a test of how quickly you can reverse your character's lazy butt out of the way of a debilitating special attack. Unfortunately because this game was quite an early generation Mega Drive game (screw you, it's the Mega Drive, not the Genesis) the controls are stickier than a stick insect's treacle factory on Sticky street. The purpose of bosses in SOR1 was to make you feel inadequate as a human being, and make you wonder why you didn't just bring a fecking gun to fight men who can breathe fire at you.

Like this image? You will see it a hell of a lot.

There is also the niggling fact that the common enemies in SOR1 often have attacks or defences that your character has no real way of countering. A particularly ludicrous version of this is the whip wielding harpies who can dodge any attack you throw at them by crouching. Fucking crouching. The worst part is you can't inflict a single blow on them when they're in a crouch, and the moment your back is turned they quite literally whip your arse. Although the challenge of the game is reduced in two player mode, you will spend the majority of your time accidentally kicking your co-op partner in the face thanks in no part to extremely strange collision detection, which goes numb when you're trying to make a hit connect, and sensitive as a toothache when you happen to be in spitting distance of the guy you're trying to save the city with but, gosh, he just really wants a hug. While special moves become the preserve of instalments two and three, the first had none. What it did have was a special attack which, when you hit the A button, summoned a police car from offscreen to rain explosive death upon your enemies. Ignoring the fact it was annoyingly easy to unleash this attack totally by accident courtesy of a slipped thumb, it was immensely useful for thinning down the crowd. So of course it never appeared in any Streets of Rage game ever again.

Pictured: A useful feature.

Well, obviously. Streets of Rage 2 really varied the level design, with more interesting sub bosses and a greater variety of characters and moves. The only unwelcome addition is Skate, a gobby skating child who is the cousin of Adam from game number one. He is the the Jar Jar Binks of the Streets of Rage franchise.

FUCK YOU KID, FUCK YOOOOOOUUU!!!!

This more imaginative instalment is possibly my favourite of the games. Whatever SOR1 lacked it improved on, and lacks the deliberately mean-spirited toughness of SOR3. Its balance is perfect really, and thus suffers a bare minimum of my wrath. Well, some weird character names aside - bad guys called Donovan and Bono for example.

Or Slag. Um. Yeah.

It is a hard game but in an enjoyable way, and calls on you to kick phenomenal quantities of arse. It may sound as if I have nothing to say about it, and to be honest, I don't really. No it's not what you'd call revolutionary, but if it ain't broke then you don't fix it. And talking of messing with a perfect formula, this brings me with some reluctance to Streets of Rage 3. It is not a bad game, don't get me wrong, but it is utterly evil. Sega's development team hated your guts in the third game. Oh sure, they brought in the ability to run and the forward roll but SOR3 suffers from the same problem Golden Axe 3 had, in that the game is so ludicrously difficult that it quite takes the pleasure out of playing it. SOR3 pelts you with rancid shit from minute one - your enemies have projectiles, one of the first games bosses is a regular enemy here (the fire breathing fat man) and the first boss is utterly hateful. Oh sure, I love the first damned boss to have every advantage over you imaginable - the ability to fly and twice the health bar you have to name only two. Did I also mention he is able to counter most of your standard moves? This is the first boss, mind. The FIRST BOSS.

Welcome to the third screen of Streets of Rage 3.

It suffers from a problem of quantity over quality; you are simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of obstacles and bad guys thrown at you and there are no extra lives in the early levels.
It is also the first of the trilogy to include cutscenes, with predictably laughable results. Here is a verbatim conversation from one of the game's cutscenes.

Skate: 'I can't believe it. No one told me a thing.'

Dr Zen: 'We're wasting time fighting these punks.'

Blaze: 'I think I have an idea of where to go now.

Dr Zen: 'I hope you're right.'

You wouldn't believe these characters were having conversations on the same planet let alone in the same room. I know it's only text, but if you do insist on unskippable cut scenes then the least you could do is write dialogue that sounds like humans would actually speak it. Oh and Skate now plays an even bigger role in this game. Joyful. Ironically, on a technical level it is definitely the best game. The controls are smooth and responsive, hit detection is crisp and the levels are gorgeous to look at - well for 16 bit graphics anyway. It's just too damn hard. I'm sure some of the more hardcore nerds out there could beat this game using only their penises, but to them I say only this: If your idea of fun is getting your genitalia skewered by a kangaroo in denim shorts and fetish jewellery, then be my guest and enjoy - but don't think that waving your amazing *snort* skill will impress me much.

You thought I was kidding about the kangaroo, didn't you?

Streets of Rage was pretty much the high point of the side scroller beat 'em up, though Final Fight and others were other contenders for its crown. The genre pretty much gave out after the birth of the 32 bit era, and various attempts to resurrect the series have failed with even fan versions not really going anywhere. Taken as a whole, the Streets of Rage trilogy is rather fun. They're classics to be sure, but if you're going to play one, I'd suggest playing the second as it has the best of the other instalments in the one game. It's a damn sight better than bloody Golden Axe any which way you slice it.

VINTAGE GAMES - Unreal Tournament

Here's a surprising confession from me: I am not very good at first person shooters. I can do a passable job on normal mode, and without selling myself short I have decent enough reflexes to shoot my way through most games with only the minimal amount of creative swearing. When you start going into games with hard and expert modes however, then I struggle like a chimp trying to grasp relativity. The problem is, I cannot aim too well and often take too long over shots. It is also probable I do not see a lot of the enemies around me – in Far Cry 1 & 2 this is less a probability and more an iron-cast certainty where most enemies can hit you from the other side of the world.
    But I digress. In single player this is not quite so important but suddenly gets an urgent wake up call the moment multi-player comes into play. I am not a gracious loser unfortunately, but then the people I play more often than not are not gracious winners. The people I often end up pitted against are so good it is actually embarrassing, even when you take into account you are fighting people who match your 'skill' level, but who then go away and do a Rocky-esque training montage to absolutely slaughter you the next time around. Since I have lots of money to smoke in a huge pound-note reefer and lots of models to sit in hot tubs with, I have no time for such things really. Which is why I have never played shooters online. The ideal situation for me therefore was the feeling of playing online without the inconvenience of actually fighting all the low-vocabulary fuckwits you often meet online. Hence, Unreal Tournament.

     Oh, the game does its best with the smack talk, but at least it isn't 'U SUXORRZ! LOLZ' and nobody tries to teabag your corpse afterwards. The game is pretty old now, and shows it. Skyboxes that looked so sophisticated back in the day glitch hilariously when you fly the camera into them, and the random pointless types of coloured lighting that the Unreal engine loved to use in such abundance are present and correct, making the game feel less like a deathmatch arena and more like an industrial discotheque. It is however, still the most demonically fast deathmatch game in history and is balanced to an absolute tee. I am quite serious.

This is completely and totally awesome.

Unreal Tournament is the creaky great great grandad of the current breed of Digital Extremes productions such as Gears of War, made back when they were the edgy challengers to Quake's crown and not what they are now, specifically corporate manufacturers of sludge brown low-wall crouching tedium. Now, I never really played the Quake games, so I will not compare them, but I shall mention that Unreal Tournament is still the best entry in the entire Unreal series. The first Unreal, though looking damn pretty for the day, has not aged well. It is a pretty boring and uninspiring game, the first levels containing so few enemies they might as well have just been tech showcases. The second Unreal, though looking absolutely luscious, was pretty mediocre. Yes, it had a few flashes of brilliance here and there but by and large it was just quietly bland.
            The Unreal Tournament games fared somewhat better. The successors to Unreal Tournament, specifically editions 2003 and 2004, amped up their graphics engines and level design to improve what made the original so good. And yet despite all the additions, the huge levels and new explosive weapons, they never quite recaptured the near perfect balance of the original Unreal Tournament. UT2003's big cock-up was the inexplicable removal of the sniper rifle, replacing it instead with the horrific lightning gun. Gee, thanks guys. It also wasn't anywhere near as fast as Unreal Tournament had been, and dropped the best deathmatch mode in the whole damned game, specifically Assault mode. Oh but they kept domination, so that's good...if you're a sadist.

The most satisfying feeling in the world is pictured just above.

Which is why I play Unreal Tournament mostly these days, and their successors lurk largely at the bottom of my dusty games boxes. Okay, so UT isn't looking too hot, but I cannot underestimate my main point; this game is fast. Make no mistake, thinking is barely an option. Find ammo, kill, choose spot, shoot bang bang bang. Each mode used this aspect in a different way, and I find it astonishing no game has done it like this since. You had standard deathmatch and capture the flag modes, but also two other variants which I have mentioned before, domination and assault. The weaker of the two is domination mode, essentially a 'king of the castle' game where the capturing of certain energy points on the map adds to a points score: the longer you hold them, the more points you get. The idea is to keep hold of them as long as possible, though there are three points so you have your work cut out. The point counting seems random at best however and occasionally you feel like you are playing the game yourself as your teammates run like headless chickens constantly getting their arses handed to them by superior enemy AI. Not that the mode isn't fun, I just mean be prepared to do most of the work yourself. Although why Digital Extremes decided to retain this mode and drop the far superior Assault mode is beyond me.
    Assault mode is brilliant fun. You and your teammates assault a frigate, castle or what have you and then you have to defend it for longer than it took you to attack them the last time round. Admittedly, when the team numbers grow it becomes less a strategic assault and more a bloodbath in a shopping centre, but hey, that's the fun of it. The weapons are largely souped up versions of weapons from Unreal, and thank goodness they are souped up. The ripper, a weapon that fires sawblades at high speed, is one of the happier weapons passed over, whereas the Ges-Bio rifle, a rifle that fires toxic sludge is just plain annoying. The rocket launcher is a brilliant little weapon that is capable of launching multiple rockets depending on how long you hold down the fire button (with a maximum of eight), and the sniper rifle is one of the best from any videogame ever. Which is logically why it was removed from the follow up game, we can't be having fun can we?

Pictured: Fun.

My memories of this game largely involve getting absolutely destroyed at it by my dorm-mates back in university, when we all needed a fast and furious game that worked on everybody's PCs. Needless to say, I preferred playing single-player. This is because the bots are surprisingly effective, all of them obeying the games' rules and having no more advantage over you than you would expect, and their skill level is completely scalable. This does lead to problems, given that I prefer to play at a slightly lower difficulty and therefore my teammates do the tactical equivalent of the charge of the light brigade because hey, what's an energy turret gun if not for charging at? Annoyingly however it does score the members of your teams individually, meaning there is little or no incentive to let anyone else capture the flag or whatever. So to avoid the embarrassment of an 'average' skilled bot actually scoring more highly than you at capture the flag you often find yourself crossing your fingers and hoping that they drop the buggered thing so you can pull a chariots of fire and run for your sodding life, flag in hand.

The Game of the Year edition had a ton of extra maps, which vary in quality, but which do manage to pass the time once you are done with the single-player campaign. It never quite recaptured the magic, even though UT 2004 reintroduced the sniper rifle, and once Half Life 2 came out online-only shooters of that scale were pretty much a thing of the past. True, there has been a reinvigoration courtesy of the Half Life creators themselves, but the 'pure deathmatch' game never really made much of a comeback. Plus the Unreal and Quake franchises pretty much gave up in their second and fourth instalments respectively. Now that the whole rivalry between the two franchises has died, its fascinating looking back. You should too, and at gog.com for barely £6...why the hell not?

Crap game of the day: Resident Evil - Gun Survivor

It seems ragingly appropriate to me that, seeing as how Resident Evil is one of my favourite ever games, that I'd get my knife out for this one. Not only am I getting my knife out, but I'm murdering this game in the senate house and leaving it to bleed to death. Gun Survivor is one of the most painful piles of crap I have ever been forced to play. Everything about this game is horrible; the graphics, the enemies, the gameplay, the story, the acting, the characters…there is nothing redeeming in this game. It’s just horrible. Lott and Lilly Klein, the token children-that-need-protecting of the piece, should both be shot and ground into powder. Ark Thompson, the guy you play, has the natural appeal of a shop mannequin with body odour problems. His voice sucks too. The shock is the way Ark Thompson is crowbarred into the story; Capcom never give us a dull or unimaginative story in Resident Evil, and yet in this game they relied on the awful cliché of the Secret Agent type waking up with no memory of his surroundings or who he was. Controlling the game is clunky and difficult, fighting off anything that moves faster than a slow motion athlete is challenging and your enemies are just really badly used. You get attacked by different Tyrants (boss characters from the previous Resident Evils, for those who don’t know) approximately every thirteen seconds, and dogs are painfully awkward to shoot. Oh yes, and the canny ‘auto aim’ boasted by the game only starts working when the enemy is right on top of you, which is really amazingly useful. Also, deaths are just crap. There’s an explosion of red which does not visibly damage them at all and they just drop to the ground before fading away. In most screen-shooters there is a sense of achievement; zombies explode beautifully in the House of the Deads, and in Time Crisis the physics is just insane, enemies flying off balconies and the like. Yet in Gun Survivor we drag our really fucking slow moving arses through each area, picking up ammo bonuses and extra health. Ammunition is one of the best contradictions of Gun Survivor; they put microscopic amounts of shotgun shells, bazooka ammo and other special types scarcely around the level, but because this is Gun Survivor and not any of the other games, the designers give you unlimited Beretta bullets to make the contradiction complete. The game also tries to do a full length Resi story, which I suppose is laudable, but you can’t do a story that long or complex in a game that gives you one life and which also happens to be a lightgun game, games in which it is somewhat easier to be constantly attacked in. A glowing review I read of it said it forces you to adapt to your surroundings, which is a ‘clever trick’. It certainly is a clever trick. Such a device forces you to work out where the enemies are going to be in ten minutes time, so you can start turning around in preparation for their arrival.

This guy enjoyed this game as much as I did, apparently

Yet, in the words of General C. H Melchett, the crowning turd in the waterpipe is not the insipid characters, the boring combat or the tedious controls. It is the non-existent save system which the manual enigmatically claims is ‘in the options screen’ but blatantly fucking isn’t. So yes, if you die later on in the game, you have to start the whole sodding game again – and you can’t skip the cut-scenes. So as well as being badly plotted the game is just not worth playing. There’s only one mode, and no co-op. Probably a good thing actually, since the poor bastard who would get lumbered with trying to play this game with the PSone controller would probably kill you for it.
Gun Survivor is bad, bad, bad. It is not surprising that in the lovely glossy Resident Evil ‘Umbrella Archives’ book, this particular Resident Evil adventure does not exist despite its supposed story contributions to the canon, ignored for inclusion just like Gaiden. The game remains what it is, an embarrassing failure for Capcom, and no amount of time passing has improved it any. Avoid.

The Top 10 Worst and Most Pointless Weapons in any FPS

1. Landmines (Dark Forces I & II)

The fundamental flaw of this otherwise great sounding weapon is that it explodes as soon as you put it down, making it less of a cunning tactical device and more a m

ethod of instant suicide. You may at this point wonder why a weapon such as this found its way into the brilliant Dark Forces II?

Presumably because they needed a shitty explosive weapon to headline alongside the really good railgun, and therefore ‘bring balance’ to the weapon list. Well, that’s my guess anyway.

2. GesBio Rifle (Unreal/Unreal Tournament)

   

You can forgive Unreal the Ripsaw and its chain-gun, since they underwent excellent modification for UT. However, a weapon standing at a consistent level of crapness throughout is the GesBio rifle, a launcher that fires globs of toxic waste at your foe. It damages you regardless of how you use it. If you use it while moving? Damage. If you hit someone at close-medium range? Damage. Long range? Well, if you can hit something from long range with what is essentially a glorified jelly launcher then I’d give you kudos.

3. Knife (Soldier of Fortune I & II)

A weapon that you will never use, basically. It does the job it is supposed to, but there is simply never any call to use the damned thing. The pistol does all the work you need to in the opening levels, and after that you just stick with the other various weapons o’ destruction. The knife is always supplied, but rarely used. Rather like the knife in Wolfenstein 3D, but with marginally better physics.

4. Absolutely everything (Ken's Labyrinth)

   

An obscure entry, I will agree, but I don't recall ever playing an FPS with such a painfully useless arsenal. Your main weapon was a tomato thing (pictured above) that had a range of...ooohh...six feet at least. Other than being horrifyingly bad, this game also presented its players with a huge selection of crappy weapons. Fortunately I was not able to play the game much because I hated it so much, but its weapons were dull, lifeless and should never be replicated.

5. M.U.L.E Launcher (Gunman Chronicles)

‘It has’ the developers gushed when they were marketing their new Half Life engine based game, and came to talk about the MULE ‘Over 30 different configurations! It can fire proximity, heat-seeker or dumb-fire, you can choose its range, impact and number of rockets release, and many more!’ It sounded great at E3. Which makes it something of a surprise that this ‘wonder launcher’ is utterly hopeless in combat. Realistically, can you be bothered to take the time to test more than two different combinations? Or go through the six or seven status screens to set up your perfect config when you’re in the heat of battle? No, you can’t. The MULE is therefore an utterly pointless weapon in that it completely fails to make its use easy and essential. It doesn’t help that the thing looks like a hammerhead shark that has been repeatedly banged against the wall.

6. Riot Gun (System Shock)

This cheerfully useless weapon is often celebrated in System Shock communities because of the extremely low level of damage it inflicts, juxtaposed with its rather confounding location - near the end of the game. The concept of accumulating a huge and powerful arsenal and defeating increasingly tough bad guys before you find the videogame equivalent of an inflatable hammer waiting for you on the floor is a staggeringly funny one to behold.

7. Lightning Gun (Unreal Tournament 2K3+4)

I am unable to explain the decision of Epic Games to replace the fantastic sniper rifle with the lightning gun in Unreal Tournament 2003, but suffice to say they reintegrated the sniper rifle in the 2004 edition when they realised just how horrifyingly bad the lightning gun is as a sniping weapon. It has a zoom, yes – but that doesn’t matter. No, because its technology is so far ahead of its time, it doesn’t have to worry about those trifling little things such as ‘accuracy’. The reason the sniper rifle was good was because it required skill to hit, and when it did hit, it was deadly accurate. The lightning gun sort of fires vaguely in the direction of who it is you aimed at. It’s blindingly unsatisfying to use and its fire rate is extremely erratic, as if the gun keeps running out of batteries or something. I’ve had more fun games when all you have are GesBio rifles. Come to think of it, I think there are more fun tracheotomy operations than there are Lightning Gun games. A truly horrendous weapon.

8. Nuclear Fusion Cannon (Turok: Dinosaur Hunter)

‘But this weapon is amazing!’ I hear you cry ‘It’s so destructive!’ Indeed it is destructive - and then bloody some. The concept of a weapon that fires a nuclear blast is a brilliant, but immediately impractical one. The weapon takes maybe ten seconds of charge time before it fires a glowing red projectile into your chosen target. The resulting explosion decimates everything in its path, and that does include the person who fired it. The problem with such a weapon is that firing in an enclosed or reduced space means an instant fiery death for the user of the weapon. Therefore this means in order to get one satisfying shot out of the gun, you have to have an open area of map roughly the same size as Woking. I think my point is made.

9. Pepper Spray (Deus Ex)

In a game where there are high-tech mercenaries with infra-red, heat-detecting, night-vision visors, gas masks and huge automated gun platforms walk around the streets looking for trouble, you also have large quantities of pepper spray available to you. Yes, the same stuff teenage girls are given to spray in the eyes of molesters. Maybe it will have use with a few civilians, but the result of a soldier with his crowd-dispersing assault rifle aiming to shoot at your fragile skull while you charge him with your can of pepper spray is a somewhat predictable one.

10. Cow Launcher (South Park: The Game)

This heinous weapon is just appalling on every level. It breaks every rule of shooter weaponry and not in a good way; it is hideously powerful and extremely easy to hit your target, it is based on a joke that is funny for about thirty seconds, but which ends up being repeated four hundred billion times for the rest of the match and you can pretty much use it on anyone anywhere on the map with no effort. It completely obliterates the need for any of the other weapons in deathmatch. The only reason it cannot always be used in single-player is that the endlessly re-spawning chickens cannot be attacked that frequently with it. The premise of the weapon is that it launches a cow, which lands on you with your head up its arse. It reduces your health quickly, and then you die. It sounds amusing for a while, but I’m fairly certain that cannibalism is also amusing for a while. Frenetic death-match games with such a weapon suck beyond every definition of the word. A weapon that frankly should never have been invented. Like the game, in that regard.

Just a welcome...

The least impressive thing you've ever seen - me in the flesh


Here's where I write stuff about games I think or just enjoy writing about. That's pretty much my intro, really. This is where I'll post random retro reviews, Top 10s for fun and just stuff I enjoy writing about that largely relates to games. So this is my beginning. Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

And trust me, my posts will be funnier than this one.