Technically Bad Games.

[Sly Reflex]

Sometimes, you get a hankering for a certain type of game. Recently I have been playing a lot of pinball games, what with Dreams, Fantasies and Gottlieb Pinball Classics. But, I was running out of tables to master. An itch needed to be scratched. I could have bought Pinball FX or Zen Pinball. I can't play though on my PSP though, so I went for Extreme Pinball on the PSN, a game released on the PSOne back in 1995. This was the same year Pinball Illusions was released on the Amiga (which was made all 3D under the guise of True Pinball and released on the PSOne and Saturn) and a full 3 years after Dreams and Fantasies. It must be better than the aforementioned given that it's running on the superior PSone technology, right?

- The Extreme Pinball boxart. If you see this you'd do best to avoid.

Sadly, the game is a massive fuck up on all perspectives. Really. I'll start from the very beginning. The load times are fucking atrocious. The game weighs in at about 25mb, which isn't very big. On my connection it still took a few minutes to download. Then I fired it up and waited what seemed an eternity. First the PSOne logo shows, the SCEE logo follows and then the blue text that states it is illegal to copy games comes up. You then wait even longer for it to present you with the main menu. Basically, I managed to download the fucking thing faster than I got into the game. Shocking. Even back in '95, the load times on this would be classed as 'a bit slow'. So after going through all the loading screens you are presented with a menu that says play, change table, options etc. At the top is the table name which rotates when you press on change table. As far as menus go, I have seen better interfaces on those pirated gameboy carts with the gazillion games on. It's OK though, as long as the gameplay is good everything will be hunky dory.

So, the game loads up and I see the 1st table. Now tables should be clean looking, uncluttered but complicated enough that it presents an interesting challenge.

Like this.

This.

Or this.

Or like this.

But instead you get this.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="

name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="

type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

This.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="

name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="

type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

This. Which is the best one so far, but that's not really saying much.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="

name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="

type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

And this. Monkeys are awesome, but even monkeys cannot save this table.

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="

name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="

type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

The tables are so badly designed you can't see fucking anything. Why they had to make the graphics so muddy and indistinct is a loss to me, especially when you look at the older games where the graphics are crisp and precise and don't clash so that you lose track of the ball. Which you will do. Speaking of the ball, for some reason on one of the tables, the ball isn't the silver type like you would think, for some reason it is the planet earth. Yes. The earth. Why? I don't fucking know. What I do know if that the graphics on the earth don't relate to how the ball is rolling, so you get the impression that the ball is skidding round the table instead of rolling. It's fucking stupid. Now the tables are confusing to play. Never have I seen a ball teleport around a table as it does in this game. The ball physics are seriously off. Like broken off. The only way you would see a ball react like that on a pinball table is if you were on a boat on choppy waters in a storm. It speeds up, slows down, changes direction and generally acts like it shouldn't. On one of the tables you unlock a stopper that blocks the gap between the flippers at the bottom of the screen. It makes it impossible to lose the ball. Unless of course the ball starts teleporting around and making a dive for the gap that it clearly shouldn't fit though, hence losing the ball. It's just fucking wrong man and I couldn't be more pissed of with this game unless if flashed me the Activision logo right at the start. The only redeeming feature I can think is the music, which is OK. The sound effects on the riot table are pretty sweet, but apart from that this game is an utter definition of shite in binary. If anything it has made me appreciate other pinball games more for what they do.

Overall.

[retroed]

Oh yes.

...It's just fucking wrong man and I couldn't be more pissed of with this game unless if flashed me the Activision logo right at the start...

[Bob]

I have played this pinball game you speak of. Really is shockingly bad. Worst thing for me was that the big flashy 'you got points bitch' bar was at the bottom, covering up the flippers until the moment the ball touched them which is normally too late. I honestly wasn't enduring any more of that loading to see how shit the other tables were.

[Sly Reflex]

This is a game about 3 mercs. One we don't care about, she is your typical big breasted woman and we don't care about them here. Beefcakes FTW baby. So basically the story is this. Some crap happens at the start with a cigar chomping Damon Wayans and Techno Viking which isnt important. You make some enemies and that's it. Then Damon Wayans escapes with Techno Viking, but Damon gets a cap in his arse and vows revenge or some shit, I think that's the gist. I think everyone has Diaphoresis in this game, as there seems to be layers and layers of oily sweat on every fucking person in the world. Especially Damon who is literately waxy with the shit.

So, Damon and Techno decide to go shoot Venezuela up and all the people in it. Well, I say all the people, just the factions mainly, but you know, air strikes aren't too fussy when they come to maiming and crippling enemies. There is a load of other stuff I don't really understand yet, but I am sure more playing of the game will net me an understanding eventually.

"So Sly?" you ask... "Why have you put it in the technically bad games folder?"

Well, its inherently broken. In the short time I have spent with it, enemies have killed their own by accident, the vehicles are like balloons covered in silver foil when it comes to taking damage. The tanks have a control scheme straight out of the early 00's, a battle where we had to take down a few hostile helicopters resulted in a whole block been flattened without any damaged to the choppers. A car skidded across a dock as we ended up in the sea, and a NPC decided to vanish into the ether which ended in us doing suicide pact to go back a checkpoint, calling a helicopter in to take a a pallet of money away just landed next to it and then vanished when Bob ran over it with a tank. At one point while we were under heavy attack, Bob died and his corpse flew up on top of a hangar where I couldn't get to, after restarting the checkpoint the game spazzed out and gave us about 10 different map markers. Cars randomly explode when driving and some even fall apart for no reason whatsoever. My favourite glitch so far was watching a security van been hijacked by Bob, only to see it start bouncing like Snoop Dogg's lowrider until it bounced about 10 ft up in the air and pirouetted onto its roof before exploding. We are talking bugs like Saints Row 2 here, I have not laughed so hard for quite some time, but this game has brought the lulz. Hopefully it will carry on bringing the lulz too.

Also, as a footnote, for a game that is subtitled World in Flames, it has the worst fire effects I have ever seen. Seriously, they are PS2 style cardboard cut out fires.

[Sly Reflex]

Some people are not going to like this one bit. Don't even try to argue with me, because you know I am right.

Pull up a chair over rated game, you about to be schooled. If you have not played and you intend to play, don't bother reading as there will be SPOILERS. You have been warned.

OK, lets get the good stuff out the way first, because it does have some very good bits about it. The graphics in general are awesome, some of the best I have ever seen. The graphical effects are lovely too, at points I would stand and just look at the environment and just gawp at it. It's one of the best looking games I have seen this generation. The animation is also breathtakingly good on certain characters, a lot of effort has been put into it. The music is of the highest quality too.

Now, onto the bad bits.

Kratos is possibly the worst protagonist I have ever had the misfortune of controlling in a game. For such a so called high standing is terrible. Seriously. Now, I have not played the other GoW games, but Kratos makes Master Chief from Halo look like Stephen Fry. I do not know how this is even possible.

"Grr, kill this, I will get my revenge! ARRGGH! You will not get away with this!" etc wears thin about 5 minutes into the game. Not cool. I would have thought that Kratos would have had at least some sort of personality given that he has stared in some of the Playstation's most popular games. Sadly he doesn't have any, and his vapid persona makes you not give a fuck about him. A good character can inspire love or hate, Kratos just inspires nothing. And I mean it, I have absolutely no feelings for him whatsoever. Remember Gladiators back in the 90's? Well all of those had better and deeper personalities than Kratos. Which is pretty sad considering it was their job to beat contestants with a giant cotton wool bud.

Now, this isn't a hard game by any means. Although, it can be slightly unfair at points. Remember all those coin op side scrollers you played as a kid? When you got knocked down and couldn't get back up because you as you was standing you would get smacked down again? Well that happens here. And it's fucking annoying. What's even more annoying is that some areas have no walls, but have invisible walls to stop you getting smacked out of arenas. You might as well flip a fucking coin to whether these invisible walls actually save you. It's pretty fucking annoying. On top of that you have certain enemies that show up quite far into the game that can impale and throw you over great distances. They often show up in groups of two or three and if you don't get rid of them ASAP they chain throw you all over the place until you are dead. Or thrown through an invisible wall that was meant to save you. These are the most problematic enemies you will come across and they reek of cheap.

Kratos arsenal is awesome. It looks really nice and each and some of the combos you can pull of are amazing once you have learnt to do them. However, the hit detection is utter balls. If I swing blades round on chains, I expect everyone within the vicinity to take a hit. This doesn't happen though, and it isn't a case of the enemy blocking, even breakable items clip through the chains, which quite frankly is bullshit. Why is this? I do not know, but it shouldn't be like that if it was a design decision. You can grapple enemies from a distance whist using the chains, however, the auto lock on is fucking broken, and you will often grapple onto something you don't want to, or in some rare cases miss everything even in a crowded room. At one particular point in the game, you are inside a cube that has spikes coming up from the floor, at which point you have to grapple a flying enemy until they are gone. The broken to fuck grapple means you'll spend most of your time missing flying enemy and getting instakilled by said spikes.

Instakills are fucking horrendous in this game. Kratos can take been slapped by a hand the size of France, but he can't take drops off platforms where he isn't meant to go, even if it is only a 4ft drop. If he can go to a certain area he can drop as far as he wants. These are never sign posted. Sometimes these section have the invisible walls I have talked about, and sometimes they don't. It's pot luck whether the platform you are on can be jumped off of, or whether you will scrape against said invisible walls. Of course, when you would expect said invisible walls to be there, you will dive off and take a plunge to your death. Fucking retarded game design. Every platform section in the game is the same. I fucked hated them with a passion and if it wasn't for some clever designed puzzles they would have probably made me put the game down for good. Sometimes the detection for grabbing hold of ledges and the like is so off you think you need to back track or something.

The camera. Oh the fucking camera. It is fixed, there is nothing you can to to alter the movement of it. On a whole, it does an OK job, but there are times when it will kill you via one of the other wondrously sloppy designed features of this game. On one boss fight you can swing round the back of him and the camera is meant to follow. Except it fucking didn't and it got me killed on a few occasions. Fighting in enclosed spaces makes the camera zoom in on Kratos, which is no fucking good as you can be surrounded by enemies. When this happens your best bet is the chain grapple, but guess what? Because it's fucking retarded you are likely going to try and grab onto something off screen that will either parry your grapple or slap you down when you arrive at the destination. It is especially bad at going round corners, you will get hit tonnes of times because you can't see WTF is hitting you off screen. If they had made it so that the camera always span to face the enemy then that would have worked, but to me it seems that they are more interested in showing Kratos up close of fucking waving the camera round to show you nice bits of level design rather than the shit you should be killing.

Because of the way the camera reacts, it makes some of the puzzles harder to do than they should be. Whether you are setting fire to something to placing blocks to bar something in place, the camera always seems to try its hardest to make life difficult for you. While we are talking about puzzles, a lot of them require you to hold R1 to manipulate whatever you are meant to manipulate. The zone that you need to be for this R1 prompt to come up is fucking tiny. This goes for pretty much everything in the game that uses R1 to trigger it. You have to line yourself up perfectly, it actually got to a point where I was like 'Fuck it, I can't be arsed to open that because I don't want to spend time manoeuvring Kratos into a position where I can fucking open it'. That is bad.

The flying sections were worse, just give me a cut scene of this shit and let me get back to the fighting. They were totally unneeded and I can't see why anyone would enjoy them.

The voice acting in this game is terrible. Like PS1 era terrible. There are a few stand out performances, especially from Rip Torn, Malcolm McDowell and Kevin Sorbo. The rest is horrendous though. I don't think I have seen anything this bad this gen from anything where one person voices one character. Oblivion was pretty bad with its cast of about 3 people for 500 different people, but in a game where each character has it's own voice actor it really is unforgivable. As soon as cut scenes start it broke my involvement with the story of which I had very little understanding, I won't pick that apart though, as I have not played the other games. I dunno if it's because I've more or less come straight from Batman:AA but overall the voice talent sucked arse in massive amounts.

Despite moaning about all it's faults I still enjoyed the game when it concentrated on the fighting. It just isn't the AAA title most people herald it as. I wouldn't even say it was AA, or even an A title for that matter.

[illdog]

Its a terrible early day COD clone which imagines "an alternate history in which Winston Churchill dies in 1931, eight years before the start of World War II, presenting the possibility of what could have happened to Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world without his leadership". What it actually manages to do is realise what games would be like if game play died and coding was utterly shite.

The aiming is awful. You can shoot near an enemy and it acts as a hit, you can hit him dead center and it doesn't register. Ive never got stuck on scenery so much ever and the graphics are a fucking abortion. Its just an embarrassment of a game. A dark day for Codemasters, stick to racing games.

I cant be bothered with an epic Sly like post, just avoid this steaming five pounder.

[Hendo]

I think I might have played the demo of that, truly awful!

[dante76]

I saw you playing that and was waiting for you to respond here.....

[Sly Reflex]

Sit down you ugly fuck of a sopping wet bleeding cunt. I'll be back later to fucking whine and rant what a piece of fucking of badly designed fucking garbled arse this really is.

You fucking piece of fucking shit. I hope everyone responsible for you dies from cancer ridden syphilis.

[Sly Reflex]

Seriously, just fuck this game. Last time I played it co-op we were so strained that we actually threw the towel in at the last section of game. What fucking shit. It's worse than shit, it's shit from a shit that was having a shit. A shit shit.

Look out, there's a mounted gun! This is without exception the worst fucking game I've played this gen. Look out, there's a mounted gun! First impressions are the graphics, they are muddy as fuck. Look out, there's a mounted gun! Everything is all red, the walls, the enemies, the floors. Look out, there's a mounted gun! I know China has t hing for the colour red, but I doubt it is like this. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The controls are the next thing that strike you as ballachingly fiddly. Look out, there's a mounted gun! Why not assign the primary and handgun to Y, and the other weapon to dpad? Look out, there's a mounted gun! No, because that would make sense. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The characters move about like they are full of water that's sloshing about in them preventing any sudden movements. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The guns are pretty pointless, the one that you start with will see you through the game. Look out, there's a mounted gun! There are quite a lot of options for altering the look and handling, but bar putting the biggest ammo capacity in them I couldn't tell the difference. Look out, there's a mounted gun! Adding sights onto the guns however makes the game fucking harder than cracking diamonds with your teeth. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The previous AoT was quite a nice ride regards difficulty, here it's all over the fucking place. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The checkpoints are quite possibly the worst I have seen for ages. Look out, there's a mounted gun! Sometimes it'll check you every room, then other times it wont check you after 10 or 20 minutes game time. Look out, there's a mounted gun! Occasionally the game get confused and checks you forwards to the next point without rhyme or reason. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The game regularly bugs out making it impossible to continue. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The music is utterly ear searingly bad. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The hostage situations have invincible soldiers if you don't do things the right way. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The level design is dull as fuck, I've spent the last few sessions playing it and I couldn't tell you anything about it, apart from the fact that it sucked massive donkey balls. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The sound balancing is all over the place, I seriously have no idea what the fucking story was because every time Rios and Salem went to talk the music would often drowned them out. Look out, there's a mounted gun! There were no options to turn the music down. Look out, there's a mounted gun! There were no subtitle options. Look out, there's a mounted gun! What little of the story I did catch was absolutely absurd. Look out, there's a mounted gun! We killed more enemies than people live in China, although for some reason, some of them were African and some where American. The moral choices were viciously stupid. Look out, there's a mounted gun! Even though we picked all good, often they would turn out bad. Look out, there's a mounted gun! The shout outs were so annoying that they actually became funny. Look out, there's a mounted gun! Look out, there's a mounted gun! they would say. Look out, there's a mounted gun! Every time it would be Look out, there's a mounted gun! Look out, there's a mounted gun! If you have sat and read this, then you have had Look out, there's a mounted gun! approximately the same amount we would have had in a 5 minute session. Look out, there's a mounted gun! Sometimes they would even shout it even they wasn't even a mounted gun to shout at.

The best bits of the game were the buddy celebrations and playing paper scissor stone. Oh, and the fact that we'll never see Army of Two 3 because Salem shot Rios dead at the end. Yeah, I spoiled it, mainly because I dont give a fuck and more importantly you guys don't give a fuck.

Never has a game wound me up so much. I feel like going through this post and changing all the commas to fucking and all the full stops to shit just to reiterate what a log it is.

[Sambob]

Hahah quality, all reviews should be this filled with hatred.

[HandsomeDead]

So this wasn't a technically bad game. Look out, there's a mounted gun! But a genuinely bad game?

[Sly Reflex]

Dull, glitchy and badly designed with fun sapping gameplay. It felt really padded out too, you know like in Uncharted where you will kill a room full of enemies, then more burst through a door. It's like that in every encounter. The body count after one section could get into the 200's. The set pieces were totally forgettable, I literally am struggling to remember any of it now, apart from the thousands of identikit enemies. The aggro system didn't work either, they managed to break something which worked as it should in the first game. Other stupid design flaws include pressing B while having a special HUD up to spot enemies. The other player cannot see them unless they have their special HUD up, the HUD is timed. What it doesn't tell you is that pressing B disengages you from any activity. The game will tell you to use a machine gun nest and spot, but every time you spot, it puts the mounted machine gun down. Blind fire is useless, so inaccurate and because the aggro system is baulked it's pointless doing it. Pressing A sometimes slides you into cover, while other times it'll vault you over cover. It's never clear how much damage you have taken. The DBNO system is literally the worst implementation ever. The running take down only works when it wants to. The wrongs of this game must spill into the hundreds.

[Sly Reflex]

Get used to hearing Jeyne Kassynder name. You'll hear it approximately a billion times. I actually heard it that much that I started to tune it out every time they mentioned it.

Lucas, the main character never speaks when you're out and about. His voice can only be heard in the Mass Effect inspired conversation trees. Not to worry though, the other 3 people in party never SHUT THE FUCK UP. I highlighted that last part because that's what you'll be saying every time one of them opens their mouths.

The delivery of said lines is taken from a voice actor that makes Hendo's voice seem a flamboyant and flowery in the way it hits several octaves over every sentence. Have the characters seen a nasty monster? Same voice over. Have the adventurers seen a beautiful vista? Same voice over. Are the squad being barraged by cannonball fire? Same fucking voice over. There's no emotion. No nothing. It sounds like they trapped some people against their will and got them to read each script out in a stuffy cubicle. I thought we'd left this shit back in the 90's. Obviously not.

Enemies are hella stupid. On numerous occasions we took on single mindedly sub-bosses that were more interested in menacingly pursuing either of us than the other person kicking shit out of them. We actually took the piss with one of them and just kept laying down an area of effect that made it look like the guy were were fighting just passed out of exhaustion.

All the characters are about as lazy as they could be designed. Anyone that has facial hair or more than a shaved head either looks like they've had fuzzy felt attached to them or they are wearing a helmet. One of the characters looks like Brad Pitt, with little circular glasses on. This guy had a key part in the story, although I've no idea what it was because he looked so out of place.

The goblins in the game look a cross between Dobby from Harry Potter and a sex offender. In cut scenes they all loop the same pointing and gesturing with their hands. The animation on their walking looks like someone pirated Blender and submitted it to Obsidian.

The textures laid upon all the characters in the game are terrible. Pixelly at worst, muddy at best. Even the main characters have this shitty muddy graphics on their armours and robes. You spend a lot of time looking at these twats, at least make them look nice.

The story is about as gripping as a school play, and about as well constructed. The numerous twists and turn can all be seen coming a mile off. I'm trying hard to think if a game has had a story as bad as this and I'm coming up blank. I cannot even give names to the characters other than The Dapper Gent and Jeyne Kassynder, and even then thats only because you have their names fucking forced down your throat for those sections of the game.

Levelling up is next to fucking pointless. I love how it makes you think you are selenting a specific build when all you are doing is being held by the hand unknowingly by whoever designed it. Why would I take benefits that made me more money when I got a kill? In all the time I played I didn't spend one fucking gold piece so making it so I could get more gold is pointless. The loot in shops is shittier than what's dropping. Why would I drop coin on that? If you're not going to make the currency useful for anything just take it out the fucking game.

Balance between the characters is fucking terrible. Mika picked a sword and shield guy (Lucas) and he was soft as fuck. Being the tank of the squad he should have been able to take damage, except he couldn't. So, let me get this stright, his damage output was fucking shocking. I think his super uber move did as much damage as one of my normal ones. Yet, despite wearing plate armour and having a shield, he couldn't mitigate damage for toffee.

Compare that to my guy that could take most bosses down in about 20 hits max, that's a bit of a pisstake. Not only that but I had a dodge move that acted as a teleport. Every time I teleported I could stun every enemy around me. How is that fair? To sum it up, I could put a big circle on the floor that damage everyone in it, make a copy of myself that would run around attacking stuff, and then just teleport around the battle stunning everything so it couldn't get hit. This is before you factor in the fucking death dealing thunderbolt which made bosses walk overs, and the chain lightning which locked all enemies in place by dazing them. Also there was a flamethrower spell that did a similar thing to the chain lightning but healed party members. Why the fuck stack all these on one character? It's like the hero of the game (which most people will play as) is penalised for no reason at all.

Onto the bugs.

The guy I was playing as was useless on slopes. I mentioned this in the main thread for this game, but he really is a joke. The way the mana system works is stupid, you need to attack with either 2 of your vanilla attacks to amass mana. The ranged attack doesn't related to the environment. It clips through everything, so fighting on slopes doesn't fuckign work. Amusingly because of this clipping error you can clear out areas behind locked doors before you have the ability to unlock them. Nice one. There were several bosses and mobs that could fire stuff at you, but most of them fell into the same trap that made their attacks ignore any change in elevation. So fucking stupid.

The way the game is set you can completely miss cut scenes. If you happen to be in your inventory or whatever you can miss them. Sometimes it drags you out of menus but not all the time. There were times when either of us triggered a cut scene and the other player just had to wait it out until it was over. It made following the story impossible. Another nasty habit of the cut scene is that it cut short any buff you had going. Buffs were triggered by saving up these purple orbs that charge up over time in battle. If you were running low on health you could exchange an orb for a 20 second buff that would replenish 50% of your health or mana. If a cut scene happened to jump in right after you triggered this, then tough shit. You need to charge those orbs up again and exchange them again. You know where cut scenes would just cut the action? Boss fights. So you'd be in low health, trigger the buff and then suddenly the boss would decide it was going to smack talk you in a cut scene and you'd only had a couple of seconds of you buff. Unforgivable.

Speaking of smack talk, it's nice that they give each character about 2 lines. When you are circling a fight looking for an opening you hear the same few soundbites over and over again. It's really funny, it makes them sound like they have anger tourettes or some shit. It's not as funny as the usual kill fodder having about 6 screams between all of them though. At times it doesn't even mix them up either, you'd kill 10 bandits one after another and they'd do the same few yells.

Level design can be quite bad, there's a few occasions where we got trapped and couldn't move and had to back out to menu to let the game try and dislodge us. I'm not so fond of the missions either, a lot of them revolved around back tracking over a lot of shit. The rest is just uninspired. The random levels in Torchlight were more fun to navigate. The way loot was given seemed like when you get to later stages in loot games where only 1 in every 100 items is any good, even in the beginning portion of the game.

When you are in menus the computer takes control of your character so others don't have to wait about. This is a good thing. The bad thing is that it plays like a fucking knobhead. Why it has to heal itself when it got hit once I do not know. It's so wasteful.

That's what I can remember off the top of my head. I really wish I'd have had a notepad next to me so I could have wrote down everything that annoyed or pissed me off. I've actually had more fun slating this piece of shit than I did playing it.

[dante76]

I'd like to add Just Cause into this.

It starts pretty awful, and generally collapses into the horror of The Wicker Man remake.

All the cars control badly, drifting in a straight line, blowing up easily and generally being annoying. Combine this with the controls which are overtly context sensitive, and your having a barrel of laughs. For example, I'm swimming in the water, and decide to swim to a ladder to get to dry land. A is dive, forward is swim. Yet A is also climb ladder, but only in a very small random area, meaning I now spend the next 5 minuites trying to climb a ladder but diving underwater every time. To make things more awkard, the controls then change if your underwater, so you spend even more time swimming.

The combat is lax and careless. Just aim your reticule in the generall direction and kill everyone. The blow something up, then repeat, then get a flag. Do this enough times, and you gain control of an island. Do this enough and you win the game. Thats all there is to it. The boats are useless, the agency won't drop supplies or pick you up in a city, even if you control it, so you then have to go on foot outside the city for that to happen, which can be a good 5 minuite run (if there was a run button). I'd steal a car to do it quicker, but even in friendly areas you'll get chased by helicopters for doing so.

The voice acting is minimal.

There are apparently racees, but there actually time trials, which would be easier to do if the word CHECKPOINT was emblazzoned on your screen for 10 seconds in 5 foot writing. Makes driving to the next checkpoint a tad difficult.

The island makes no sense, with Air Force bases without airfields or planes.

Theres probably more but I'm drained of life after this.

Oh and Sly, I got my brother that game for Christmas. I havn't heard back from him yet....

[Sly Reflex]

It's a really old game is Just Cause. I remember it doing the rounds on the 359.

Oh and Sly, I got my brother that game for Christmas. I havn't heard back from him yet....

He's probably wrapped it up and is going to give it back to you this Christmas.

[leeray666]

The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword

Yes, I said it.

This is the first game in about twenty-odd years to force me to throw the controller across the room in frustration.

The motion controls are a mess, and at most times completely unnecessary. Quite why they had to tack on some motion element to everything that you do I don't know, but when you have to keep centring the controls in the menu every twenty minutes or so something is terribly wrong. It's most frustrating when you are battling hordes of enemies, trying to traverse a difficult area or fighting a tough boss and the controls decide that they're going to fuck up. The straw that broke the camels back was during the "Kill-eight-bosses-in-a-row-with-no-item-pack" mission in order to get the "special" shield. I played this about five times, each time getting to either the seventh or eighth boss and the controls began to mess up.

However, motion controls aside, this game is poor. Sure, I'm not saying that it doesn't have some good bits, because some of the dungeons were great, and the desert before one of the dungeons was also great, but the rest was below par as far as I am concerned.

The biggest crime being the amount of padding. "Ooohh, you can spend up to around seventy hours on this game?" Yeah, doing menial tasks that involve you travelling to one area, collecting an item, travelling back and showing the item to the person, only for them to tell you to you've got to use the item in the place where you just got it. (Or something along those lines).

I came across a dude in Skyloft who said that his sister had disappeared and asked if I could find her, so I got onto my flying duck creature and flew to the near bottom of the map and found her on a small island, she told me that her duck was sick and needed medicine, and that I had to go back to her brother in Skyloft. So I went back, and he gave me the medicine and told me to go back and give it to her. So I went back and gave her the medicine. And all I got was a Gratitude Crystal.... Sigh. That took me about twenty whole minutes. Couldn't I have found her and then gone and told her brother and have him deliver the medicine? Could he not have flown his duck alongside me in the first place?

Also, it's all pretty boring. The places are boring, the hub world is boring and there's not very much to explore.

Plus, that Fi... She's an annoying cu*t isn't she? "There's a 90% chance that key will open a door somewhere in this dungeon"... Well Dur.

Man, I tried to enjoy this game, I really did. And at times, during some of the dungeons and the areas before the dungeons there were moments, but honestly, with all of the other shit I've forgotten what those bits were. And that to me is bad game design.

In a time where we would all like to get the most for our money, I still would prefer a leaner, shorter and more concise game (like Ico or Portal) than a game where well over half of it is just padding. Just because I've got no money, doesn't mean I want to spend hours going back and forth collecting crap.