Archives: Games
Far Cry 2
December 16, 2008 at 02:08 by Mike McQuaid
It’s been a frantic few months at work and with doing lots of different stuff outside of work (helping lead worship at church, helping lead an Alpha group and rock-climbing) but on my time at home, when I’ve shunned the invitation of a £4 pint (South-East London, you are awesome but you are expensive 
) I’ve found some time to unwind with some of this seasons great games.
My most recent addition was Far Cry 2. It’s available for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
The following video gives you a nice feeling for the combat and some gameplay without any real spoilers:
As you have seen Far Cry 2 is absolutely stunning, the video really doesn’t do it justice. When you see the shadows cast by the branches of the trees, the beams of light through mist or your first sunset you will truly be amazed. It’s definitely the most visually attractive game I’ve played and this level of polish is consistent throughout the game. The voice acting is pretty good, the weapons sound meaty, satisfying and realistic and the open “world” is spacious yet varied. The best thing about Far Cry 2 though that it actually plays well on reasonable hardware unlike some other beautiful games we could mention. My machine hasn’t been upgraded for a year and a half and it still was the best looking game I’ve ever played. Obviously it’s not going to run on your Pentium III but if you have a reasonably decent machine or a console be prepared for a treat.
Something that really adds to Far Cry 2′s immersion is that you are always kept in first person, regardless of what you character is doing. You can see this used to great effect with the healing animations video below:
If you’ll excuse the clichéd simile, computer games are much like women. When they are excessively attractive (like my better half) that may initially pique your interest. However, if they are boring or no fun then it’s game-over (unlike my better half). Far Cry 2 is a beautiful woman but not one that will appeal to all those who admire her on looks alone. As I keep saying, it really is gorgeous but it’s gameplay is perhaps not what you might expect from a very mainstream shooter (like COD4 or Half-Life 2). Although it is filled almost wholly with action (don’t expect any deep RPG-style interaction here or a dynamic “quest”) it allows the player a large degree of freedom in choosing what to do at any current time. Want to avoid the enemies? Take a boat down the river or go diamond hunting. Want to get around quickly without any interaction? Take a bus. Want to just blow stuff up? Take an assassination mission. Want to get a better selection of weapons? Take an arms dealer mission. True, most of the missions involve blowing stuff up, capturing things and then killing the guards before they kill you but this is countered by the to travel between missions and and exploration whilst diamond hunting.
This may sound like a repetitive game and, to an extent, it is. Despite this, I can’t personally recall ever being bored as I was free to just chose to stop doing anything I didn’t feel like at the time as almost nothing is time-critical. This isn’t a game for RPG/RTS types; it isn’t particularly cerebral, the story is decent enough but not as strongly driven as I’d perhaps have liked through the main missions. The buddy characters you’ll meet introduce some nice gameplay elements and add a bit of diversity through their random assignment (you’ll get different buddies on each playthrough). I would that even with the above downers this is the best straight-FPS game I’ve seen since Half-Life 2 and its Episodes.
If you are at all into FPS games or ever have been I strongly recommend picking up a copy and giving Far Cry 2 a shot. Let me know what you think!
Posted in Games
Spore
September 23, 2008 at 19:00 by Mike McQuaid
My recent forays into gaming on a computational device have taken me to playing Spore, the latest game from Maxis which bewilderingly doesn’t contain the word “Sim” anywhere in the title.
Personally, I hated all the SimCity games, I found them boring and directionless. I hated the Sims series, they just seemed to be either more boring than my life (in which case I wondering why I was playing them) or more exciting than my life (which made me sad ). Reading most of the build-up for Spore made me think it was going to be just-another-boring-sim-game. When I read that Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civilisation 4 (a game more addictive than any drug), was working on it my interest was piqued.
I got the Creature Creator partly as it was £5 and I thought it might entertain me for a few hours by creating some grotesque creatures and watch my girlfriend make some pretty ones but, despite my expectations, I actually ended up getting quite into it. The intuitiveness of the tool and the sheer variety of creatures that were getting created really excited me so I bought the game.
For the last two weeks I have been living like an addict, waiting to get the next fix of the game. I think yesterday evening may be the first since I bought it that I didn’t played it (instead I just read about computer games). I don’t just play for fun, I play to elevate the Globby Empire to greatness!
Xora is a friendly fellow. By which I mean he’s eaten all his fellow cells, ripped his fellow creatures to bits, massacred his fellow tribes, nuked his fellow civilisations and blown up the planets of his fellow space empires. In Spore you can be friendly, evil or somewhere in the middle. Sadly, blowing up planets and eating other creatures has proved to be far more fun than talking to them or forming trade routes.
I realise you don’t care about Xora or his mighty empire but you would if you’d created this creature from a single cell (with a mouth, but I’ll give Will Wright the right to give cells mouths) and evolved it to a mighty space-faring empire.
Really this is just a really fun game. It continuously rewards the player through the multiple stages and in-stage checkpoints and the badge/achievement system strongly appeals to the more obsessive types like me (HAVE TO GET THEM ALL) it’s just a really enjoyable experience. Add this on top of the ability to subscribe to Sporecasts and your friends feeds, meeting them in game and you just get a really fun community experience.
I highly recommend buying and playing Spore. It’s one of those incredibly innovative games that everyone should play, regardless of their preferred genre.
Posted in Games
