THE BEST GAME EVER: BALDUR'S GATE/BALDUR'S GATE 2

A workmate told me to do a retro review, so I am. Yeah, it's not Sonic or Mario or some other figurehead game, but it is the best game series that Bioware ever released AND it first appeared 14 years ago. That's before the games market became focussed on prepubescent kids playing the gaming equivalent of paintball on crack, and also before consoles even had the opportunity to go on the internet (apart from the Dreamcast. God bless you Sega).

If you think of RPGs nowadays, you'll no doubt think of games where overpowering is a familiar problem. Games where content is so deep that by the time you've explored for a while the storyline quests become these rediculously easy, offhand kind of occurences. This wasn't always the case. BG was one of the original cadre of point-and-click, "fine, go level up then, I'll still bust your balls" kind of games. This is mostly due to the fact that it's a direct port of the Dungeons and Dragons rule book and is set within it's universe. I know, at this point you're probably thinking it's a nerdy as shit game that involves 20 sided dice, elves, orcs, dwarves and bullshit like that. Not going to lie, it does. And you will fucking love it. If you like RPGs, then this is like the mother, father and cousin of all of them and without it you haven't lived. Can't juggle hitting an healing? autopause after every round of attcks. Not sure if you can hit an enemy? Click on it. Where are you going? Open up the detailed, excellently rendered map. What can you equip? CHECK THIS:

Arrows go to quivers. each type of armour gets put on each type of symbol. Weapons go on weapons. 16 slots in your inventory for items at the bottom and the current weight/weight limit is over/under the bag. EASY. (note: for old gamers: I am aware that Minsc should have Boo the miniature giant space hamster in his quick items, yes.)

This game laid down so many conventions that haven't been beaten in over 14 years. I for one have never played a game with an inventory system as easy to manage as this. Fuck, you can even quick change the colour scheme of your gear by clicking the brown/black squares on the right. It's just fucking glorious. None of this "just put a dot next to the item" that leads to you going: "Wait, so can I wear a robe AND trousers? And can I wear multiple rings/necklaces?" ONE SLOT, ONE ITEM. DEAL WITH IT. Each item has a description for you to read that includes everything you need to know, for those who don't know whether to equip a halberd or a flail.

Now, there is a nerdy, maths heavy area with equipping things too. You have an armour class that lowers depending on the equipped gear/class, and it also affects other things as well, but essentially: the lower number in the banner on the mid-right of the inventory the better. And once I got it to -27. When you've played this game you'll understand why that's a big thing. 

Enough about the decididly excellent user interface and more about the actual game. The story is good, not Oscar winning, but good. With your father murdered you have to leave home to get help from your father's friends and end up saving the world. Standard affair. But the it's as deep as you want it to be thanks to it being set in the DnD universe. Hell, for those of you geeky enough to have read the Dragonlance Chronicles, you get to meet a knight of Solamnia who was accidentally teleported from another dimension. There's just the right touch of humour as well, such as a character who whenever you meet him will scream in terror and dissapear in a puff of smoke and who's identity only becomes apparent in the final expansion pack (in a cruel and hilarious twist of fate). Or Biff the Understudy (look it up). Or the Big Metal Unit (again, look it up). On top of that they pile on suspense, engaging NPCs, perfect companions, romance options, a pretty decent reputation scheme that actually allows you to benefit from staying neutral and personal moral choices that will always cause someone to be upset. 

Obviously this game isn't perfect. The first time you play it you WILL spend a large amount of it going: "what's a critical miss? I spent hours to get one level up and that was all I got? How do you fail to copy a spell to your spellbook?" but it's just one of those things that you need to plug at. In the end they become a critical factor to this games success. If you play the core rules then checking speed factor against dice rolls becomes natural and the gambling system of "will the spell be memorised correctly" is tense. You don't have the money to spare to make mistakes, unlike modern games where you could buy the country you're playing in by the end.

An important thing about this game is how it rewards the gamer who plays the entire series. Items and people you meet in the first game will crop up in the second game and even the second game's expansion pack. Of course, it's not necessary to play the first game first, but once you have you start to appreciate the game for what it is worth and understand the characters and why they join with you, and it will have you coming back to play the game in a different way each time. It's this kind of thought out approach to the games that has cause Bioware to be one of the forerunners of RPGs today, and they even use a lot of the same story mechanics and multiple-game-spanning choices as they did back here in the nineties.

So yeah, it's not for beginners and it's probably not for very casual gamers, but if you want a genuinely rewarding game where completion is an achievement and levelling up never loses it's boredom then this is for you. Just get used to tapping Q to quick save otherwise you will regret it. Especially when you go into a vampire coven and your only Cleric gets level drained. Every. God. Damn. Time.

Cliff Notes: A true RPG that isn't rushed and can't be rushed through. Requires thought, practice and effort but is far more rewarding than a lot of modern Action RPGs.
Rating: 9/10
Would I recommend it to my friends: If you're my friend, then chances are I've already told you to play it. And you should.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (Or: How To Confuse Fanboys)

So way back in September I played this game at GameFest and thought "hey, this is pretty neat!". Since then Capcom basically told everyone a few even neater facts, namely that you can kill Leon and you fight Nemesis/Mr X. Then they released trailers and stuff and everyone thought this game looked mad good. And then they bought the game. And then traded it back in, or would have done if Game hadn't have gone bust. And then I wrote this review.

GOOD SHIT

Right, so, the big thing with this game is that you get to play a squad based shooter against zombies, then against UBCS (Spec Ops people), and then against BOTH AT THE SAME TIME. That might not sound like anything special but when you're in a pitched battle against people who are basically dicking on you and then you get attacked by zombies: fucking frantic fun. Swinging in with that is that if you cause an enemy to bleed, he'll attract almost all the zombies over to him which is pretty much a game winning outcome. And super satisfying. The zombies also infect people sometimes, which for a while will protect you from zombies but also turn you into a zombie if/when you die  (if you don't have an antiviral spray. But they seem to drop out of half the zombies asses anyway). Again, mega satisfying to do to enemies or to do to yourself if you don't like your team-mates online....

That's all the good things about the gameplay, so before I slag it off here are the other neat-oh things: Every level has a "SHIT, I REMEMBER THAT!" section. From the fire escape ladder or chief of police's office in the Police department to the tram lift and round by Kendo's gun shop, there's something for every fan. The fact that the game starts you off with standing outside Birkin's lab while he gets shot up and then running away from his transformation shows just how hard they've tried to make this fit in with the events of Resident Evil 2/3. The part in the Umbrella facility where the security cameras feature is used to see Leon say goodbye to Ada, which almost made me cheer with fan-ish happiness. Hell, they even explain how Leon did that stupid 180 in his car at the start of Resi 2. And that's pretty much where all the happiness ends.

BAD SHIT


So a cover based squad shooter. Seems sound, right? Not if they make it so that to aim out of cover your character has to actually crouch halfway out of cover to do so. In the end I stopped trying to shoot from cover because you leave yourself so exposed. This doesn't make any sense seeing as it is one of the core foundations of this type of game, and they've basically fucked it up. Aiming down sites is piss-poor too, with the sniper rifle not hitting where you aim it or hitting invisible cover instead and the handgun weaving all over the place. Bullet drop shouldn't happen in a Resi game. It just makes everyone angry. Which means fighting the almost invincible Nemesis is fucking hard just because of the core mechanics being terrible.

The AI is fucking awful. Even worse than Sheva from Resi 5. They took her ability level and spread it over 3 people so they're all only 33% as good as Sheva is. More bullets land on them than the zombies. And yet them and their stupid accents still don't die.

Most enemies in the game can be taken down with one or two bullets to the head apart from big names (and lickers, even though it's their weak spot). I was standing at point blank range and emptied 20 shotgun shells into Ada's face and she wouldn't go down. She just wandered off. Nikolai took untold amounts of sniper bullets to the forehead and just shrugged and moved on. Now, I understand the need for bosses to be hard, but maybe the design shouldn't have allowed me to have the barrel of my gun against people's foreheads and them not go down. It just doesn't make sense and in a Resi game just looks fucking stupid.

The big thing about this game is (as I've already said) the appearance of old stuff. Unfortunately most of it is really off hand and is just thrown away. I appreciate that this squad needs to be kept in the shadows for the most part so that it doesn't conflict with the canon of Resident Evil, but every time you see something from the games...you just skip away with a big "lol, fuck that". Examples: You see Birkin, run away, he's never mentioned again. You chase down Nikolai, he runs away, he's not mentioned again. You fix the broken Nemesis, run away, he's not mentioned again. I had no idea what I was doing for most of the game and no idea why there were so many mercs fucking about in a zombie infested town. The real sad point of the game comes at the end when you've hunted down Leon and Claire and have to kill them. For untold reasons Leon is a rookie cop who is now a crack shot with a sniper rifle and Claire could 3 star every Angry Birds level with her ability with the grenade launcher. On top of that is that they are being protected by an army of mercs for no apparent reason. Mercs who can't set up a simple baricade to stop you just running past them in the final battle...

And that's when shit gets weird. You have Leon and Claire at gunpoint at the very end of the game and then you are told to make a decision: Kill them or save them (obviously you kill them, because who wouldn't?). You're magically transported to an arena style area and told to kill off half of your team and Leon/Claire EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE AT GUNPOINT. And when you win? There is a 6 second ending of: "Time to die", fade to black, gunshot. The big selling point of the game was mearly a 6 second afterthought. Disappointing. And anticlimatic. Seems to be a theme nowadays.

Cliff Notes: A squad shooter that fails at both shooting and squading plus a pointless level up system. I didn't even play the versus matches because I honestly couldn't be arsed to play any more of this shit.
Rating: 4/10
Would I recommend it to my friends: GOD NO. But if they got given it then it could make a fun-ish campaign multiplayer mode. Anything's an improvement on having doors blocked by retarded AI just standing there.