Category: ps3

My Top Five All Time Most Favourite Computer Games Ever

1 Arkham City. Playstation 3.

So this list in my favourite games, but I think this would probably top a list of the games that I think are the best games. You can be Batman. And it feels like you are Batman. The game is so superbly designed.

I finished the game last night (except for the Riddler’s Revenge challenges which to be frank, I’m a bit pants at) and I can say it’s the best designed game I’ve played. As in Arkham Asylum, there were a few of the Riddler Trophies that I couldn’t work out and had to Google but this is partly due to my stupidity and partly due to being a boy and not reading the instructions on some of the gadgets I was given.

Also, I have an inexplicable crush on Harley Quinn.

2.Micromaniacs. Playstation.

My second favourite game would have been Arkham Asylum if I didn’t think it’d have been a more boring list. So instead, it is Micromaniacs on the old school Playstation.

For those of you that didn’t play it, it’s basically the Micromachines game that was on the Megadrive but instead of micromachines, you control little characters who run around the track and all have special powers. My favourite was Maw Maw whose special powers were farting in his opponents faces and extending his tongue (he was some sort of mutant creature) and biting off other player’s heads so that their controls got reversed until their head grew back. Genius.

Probably my all time favourite gaming experience is when there were 8 of us playing this on the Playstation in teams of 4 and my team was so awesome at the game that we won the race before we got to the first corner.
I discovered a while ago that you can play original playstation games on the PS3 and I’m looking forward to giving this a proper run out sometime soon.

3. Goldeneye. N64.

This is the game that prompted me to buy my first console of my own. There probably isn’t anyone of my generation who doesn’t look back on this game fondly. It was the first first-person shooter game that finished. Come to think of something, that probably also makes it 50% of all the first-person shooter games I have finished.

The single player had great replay value by encouraging you to complete levels on certain difficulty settings in a certain time in order to get amusing or fun cheats for the multiplayer game which – frankly – was what the game was all about.

Getting 3 mates around to run around one of the brilliantly designed levels shooting at each other was brilliant fun at the time – as long as no-one cheated and went for Odd Job – and is one of the reasons why I don’t want to taint the memory by setting up my old N64 and seeing how much it has ages or playing one of the undoubtedly unfaithful remakes that have come out on recent consoles.

4. Freddy Hardest. Amstrad CPC 464.

This gets in the list as both the first computer game my family ever owned and the first computer game I ever finished. I don’t expect many of you will be familiar with it. It doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. From what I recall, it’s a 2 level platform game which involves running along and smashing up aliens.

Freddy had an amazing blonde quiff and a giant chin and to be honest, I think I probably thought I was going to grow up to be him. The game was in two parts and when you finished the first one you got a code so that you could put in the tape to load up the second game which usually took around 5 minutes and then you could type in the code and complete the game.

This reminds me of a quaint time when I wasn’t entirely sure if the game was going to load or not. If the tape had a bit of fluff on it, or had got twisted or fallen some similar fate, then you could be waiting around only to find that you weren’t going to be able to play the game after all. This is the reason I never finished Taipan. Kids these days don’t know how hard they’ve got it when they have to spend 20 seconds cleaning a bit of dirt off a CD.

5. Dead Rising. Xbox 360.

I love smashing up zombies. I love smashing up zombies with a chainsaw or a sword or a sickle. But I also love putting toy heads on them or throwing teddie bears at them. This game is possibly the most fun way I’ve killed zombies or indeed human beings or aliens or anything else.

This game gets the nod over the second game as I think it was more novel at the time and perhaps even a little more fun, especially as the second game didn’t really expand the concept as much as perhaps I would have liked.

One of the novel things about this game is that you had to attempt to take pictures of zombies which would score points based on the content of photos being gruesome or amusing. The fact that there was an on screen zombie kill count is great motivation to keep playing and smashing.

Why I didn’t like Dead Island

I have just finished playing Dead Island. I would not recommend it and I am going to tell you why.

The main reason for doing this is because the game got almost universally positive reviews with the notable exception of Edge who I will now be using exclusively for game reviews.

I felt like I should pre-warn anyone who is thinking of buying the game so they can make an informed decision, especially as the game looked so promising in the trailer which is a beautiful piece of cinematography but which bares minimal relation to the game itself.

Me and Dead Island didn’t get off to a good start. This is mainly due to a bug (now fixed) in the PS3 version which meant that checkpoints didn’t always save. I ended up playing the first 8% of the game three times in total.

There is no real in-game tutorial and so if you want to know what the controls are then you would need to read the manual. Who does that in this day and age? I was three quarters of the way through the game before I accidentally learnt that my character was actually able to run. Compared to Assassin’s Creed which I started playing this evening and which seems to be explicitly forcing me to learn every single control, Dead Island seems poor.

I can’t help comparing it to other games either, and almost every time it comes up short. Want a more fun zombie-smash-em-up? Play Dead Rising. Want a better RPG? Play Oblivion. Want a better shooter? Play just about any other game with guns.

The guns… ah the guns. Guns in Dead Island are basically rubbish. I wanted to shoot shotgun bullets through zombies and see giant holes in their bodies. I never got to even hold the shotgun because by the time I got there, I hadn’t levelled up enough. I hadn’t levelled up enough because I got bored and started racing through the game as fast as I could hoping to get my stinking mitts on a shotgun. Lesson learnt.

The weapons expert however, very rarely got to play with any. I guess  probably just as much as any of the other characters although I can’t stomach playing through the game again to find out. Guns only came into play when you encountered human enemies who had them. You then had to kill them, take their ammo or guns in order to use them against the other human enemies. If you were lucky you might have a few bullets left over afterwards to shoot a zombie or two.

There was a Fury system whereby if you got angry enough – I’d be pretty angry that there were zombies there anyway – then you could activate your special power which in my case (I don’t know if it’s different for other characters) was a gun that was automatically aim and enemies and do substantial damage. So if you could save it up for a bit bad guy, you could get past him without any real challenge. I never did figure out why the fury meter didn’t seem to be in any way related to when you could actually use the power.

The melee system initially seems well thought out. After a few attacks with a weapon, you will have to take a breather to regain your stamina. That’s pretty logical. However, your other attack is to kick zombies. When you run out of stamina and zombies are continuing to attack you, you will end up kicking them to death because for some reason, kicking doesn’t use any stamina. I’m not sure the games designers have played football but I can tell you for a fact, kicking can be a little bit tiring. When you’ve got an array of exciting weapons in the game, the fact that you spend half your time booting a zombie in the face is a bit frustrating.

The aiming system is also lacking. It’s very difficult to select which part of a zombie to attack, even when you have a them on the floor. So your amazing machete that you’ve just picked up will end up hacking away at a zombie’s arm rather than attempting to slice clean through their neck as any sensible zombie hunter would attempt to do.

It was also very annoying that you could create awesome weapons like turning a machete into a shock machete, manage to shock a zombie (which happened randomly and I never fathomed why) and watch them have a fit for about 10 seconds only for them to come back at you. If you have a weapon that awesome, the zombies should die. I don’t care if they’ve still got health left. You’ve done something fucking cool and they should be gone. End of.

The map itself is just too big. You keep going back and forth on yourself. They have a fast travel and vehicle system which wouldn’t have been needed if they didn’t put everything so far away in the first place. Eventually, I ended up just running past zombies to get to where I was going rather than fighting them which should be the most enjoyable part of the game but provided me with a minimal amount of fun.

The fact that you could by and large run past enemies, coupled with the poor health system which would not penalise you for dying but instead spawn you extremely nearby with full health meant that you could essentially charge through the game without having to take part in any fights.

As you would respawn with no consequences when dying, there was very little need to have energy drinks and food around to replenish your health or medical kits to take with you. I think I ended up using med kits three times, and one of those was by accident.

You may ask why I finished the game when I didn’t really enjoy it? There’s a few reasons. It did actually look awesome, especially on the occasions when you managed to slice a zombie’s head clean off. As previously mentioned, I was hoping to eventually come across a shotgun, and finally, I’ve developed slight OCD about video games and from now on will probably have to complete every one that I play.

It may well be that this is the type of game I am not built for and that thousands of others are genuniely loving the game, in which case I am pleased for them. However, I for one will not be playing it again and shall be trading it in or selling it at the ealiest possible opportunity.