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The problems with Pokemon.

This was originally written in March 2010.

So the release of Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver is less than a month away, and i’m not exactly overcome with excitement. Partly it’s shadowed by the release of Final Fantasy 13, but mostly, Pokemon’s lost loads of it’s appeal recently. Still, the original Gold and Silver were my favourite Pokemon games ever so I’m actually planning to give these a chance.

The previous DS generation really annoyed me, mainly because of the confused way in which it was executed. One second you’re forced to use the buttons to navigate the map, and the next minute the ideal control system is the touch screen for battling. If they could’ve integrated an Animal Crossing DS style system of moving about with the touch screen it would’ve felt much more integrated, constantly putting the pen in and pulling it out gets pretty tedious pretty fast.

The new games look like they fix this issue to a point by using the touch screen for most menus, but from what I’ve heard they still use the buttons for navigation, so you still need to switch. This sounds pretty annoying, and makes you miss the days when there were only buttons available.

There was also a little mini-game where you could go underground to dig for things and meet people nearby who were also doing this. Now it does sound cool I’ll be honest, but what you can’t do is battle or trade with the people you meet, so in order to do that you have to go to the wireless bit of the Pokemon center. Effectively all they’ve done is cut the very small amount of people you’re likely to chance upon, while out and about, in half. If it was all integrated into one wireless lobby, you might stand a fighting chance of maybe meeting somebody random to battle or trade or dig with, but no, it’s all fragmented and messy.

The other way in which the first DS generation was flawed was it’s online play. Instead of being able to play live against a real opponent, you upload your team, and then download details of another person’s team to battle, so while you ARE battling someone else’s Pokemon, that person isn’t actually controlling them.

The skeptical (such as myself) may think that they did this to make their Wii game “Pokemon Battle Revolution” more appealing. You see, PBR was a seriously cheap cash in, it was battles, ALL battles, NOTHING BUT BATTLES. The single player mode consisted of nothing but long strings of long boring battles, and in exchange for these battles you get Pokecoupons. These can’t be exchanged for anything in the DS Pokemon games, and your Pokemon from those games can’t be leveled up, so once you’ve moved your Pokemon to the Wii you have nothing to do but improve the look of your character in the Wii game.

Now the one thing this game could have had going for it was it’s online play, LIVE online play with real players. The first true Pokemon online experience, awesome right? WRONG. You didn’t get any kind of reward for battling, apart from the “joy” of the battles themselves, not even Pokecoupons which might’ve made it bearable. The most annoying thing was the lack of any kind of ranking system, you could beat a LV100 Mewtwo with a LV 1 Ratata and the only people that would know about it would be you and the person you beat. Awful, pointless.

Hopefully this time they won’t have any terrible add-on games to peddle, so HOPEFULLY they’ll include real online play with actual rewards in the DS games. I’m not getting my hopes up though.



Another thing that confused me today was when I saw the box for Pokemon SoulSilver. As you may or may not know, the new games all come with a Pokewalker, a device similar to the Pokemon Picachu tamagotchi style thing from back in the day (which I had), which funnily enough had the ability to sync with Gold and Silver on the GBC. Anyway, it’s basically a Pokemon pedometer, or a Pokemeter if you will, haha… Fail…

This device can sync to the DS game, so you can move a Pokemon to the Pokewalker, and as you walk around you’ll be able to earn stuff for it and interact with it. Pretty awesome right? Well maybe for a console game, what I find weird is that they’re putting a portable device in with a portable game, meaning you’re being double portable’d.

On the box of the game it even says “Take your Pokemon with you! Pokewalker included!”. Now this confuses me, surely by the very nature of it being a DS game, your Pokemon are ALREADY with you? I’m not saying it’s not a cool idea, but much like various features in the first DS games, it doubles up on functionality.

Are Nintendo trying to make the DS less and less portable? The recent release of the DSi XL seems to back up this theory, with a focus on “sharing the experience”. All of the promo shots of the device show people crowding around the console in houses, NOT out and about. It’s weird, because they’re kind of making it collide with the supposed functionality of the Wii.

Are they trying to make the DS into a home device? Have they done market research which suggests that most people play their DS at home? Don’t people have time to play games on the go, would they rather have something passive such as the Pokewalker?

I hate not being told this kind of thing, having to figure it out for myself, expected to just accept these strange overlapping decisions. It really annoys me, it’s a lack of vision and it just piles on the useless gimmicks. Still, I think I’ll take the plunge, I guess you can’t expect perfection.

Fallout 3 review.

This was originally written in May 2009.

I came into college for the exam yesterday and sat down outside and Max Compton said he was selling some PS3 games to Gamestation that afternoon, so I took me a look in his bag of wonders and purchased myself some Fallout 3 for a not bad price.

I've got to say I'm thoroughly enjoying the game, the limited ammo and easily breakable weapons make it feel like a struggle for survival, the auto-aiming puts less pressure on your shooter skills (this is primarily an RPG), and the setting is pretty damn scary, especially when you're underground.

Sneaking through abandoned subway stations hoping that mutants don't jump out at you, carefully deciding which weapons to drop and which to keep, scavenging for medical supplies, it's all rather stressful actually but it's very fun.

The storyline of course is that you escape from Vault 101, which has been locked for 200 years since the nuclear war. You're just outside of washington D.C, and it's a WASTELAND. Mutants everywhere and rough little towns built out of wreakage. Washington D.C itself is completely ruined, and it's a practical warzone, so you've got to be on your guard.

The auto-aiming system allows you to press R2 when enemies are near, you can then choose an enemy and select a part of the body to aim for, you can see a percentage on each part, showing how likely you are to hit it. For each bullet you line up in this mode you lose some AP, and once it's run out you have to get shootin' manually, it regenerates slowly though, which is nice.

Everything you eat or inject into yourself and everywhere you go will influence the amount of radiation you have inside you. I'm pretty sure that if it gets too high that you begin mutating, so it's best to keep it as low as possible.

Much like Oblivion, you can take missions from people and do them at your own pace, you can also instantly travel to places you've been which is convenient. In comparison to Oblivion, I prefer the theme of this game and I prefer guns over swords, because you can hit without getting hurt with a gun. Of course I guess you could just use spells in oblivion, but it still didn't have auto-aim, which I'm finding very handy, because the actual use of FPS aiming in the game kinda sucks and is hard to use.

Also you get to choose all the attributes for your character, much like in Oblivion, and every time you level you can distribute more points. In fact, I'd say this whole game is very similar to Anarchy Online. On Anarchy I used to go through abandoned subways avoiding mutants, and the world was pretty damn bleak. The leveling system is also similar.

The PS3 version of Fallout 3 lacks the DLC that the PC and 360 versions got, but I don't think I'll get through what's there in a hurry anyway, so I'm not too fussed. Trophies FTW.

Sonic Unleashed review.

This was originally written in December 2008.

Now I wasn't going to buy Sonic Unleashed, nearly every review I read was crap and of course Yahtzee shot it down a storm. I've been a fan of Sonic a long while, but when Sonic Heroes came out I knew it was going down the crapper, and things just got worse. My faith being so low, I was completely ready to pass this one by, but then when I was in town, I saw the PS3 version on display in GAME for £20, and I thought "for £20 I think I'll make up my own mind".

The game starts with a cool CGI sequence, Sonic fighting Eggman on a ship, pretty standard. Eggman then zaps the world with a giant laser, and Sonic is caught up in it, turning him into the "werehog" (though I've never heard this terminology used in the actual game). What Eggman's done is split the world into pieces, oh you naughty boy.

When you land on earth, you meet this little purple floaty furry dickhead thing called Chip, he's basically the helper of the game, but god, he's SO ANNOYING. Always shouting at you like an attention-deprived toddler. Still, he's cute and somewhat bearable, but pointless and clearly included to keep this little ones happy. I hate the little ones.

The first level is a Sonic level, predictably, and you can tell instantly that this game is awesome. The Sonic levels are all really well designed, smoothly switch between a 2D and 3D view, look really nice and are just very fun to play. Some bits of the level require you to dart left and right to avoid obstacles, but using the L and R buttons, you do a quick slide in that direction. It's like you're on a 3 lane track, and it works very well because you crash much less but it also leaves a lot to reaction time. Speaking of reaction time, sometimes during a big jump or movie event in a level, you'll have to press a series of buttons in the order shown on screen within the time limit. These definitely add something to the gameplay, but what's really annoying si that some of them are mandatory and will decide whether you continue or plunge to your death. This is just a small pick, but a valid one nonetheless.

When you compare a 3D Sonic game to a 3D Mario game, the difference is clearly linearity. Whereas Mario can run around in any direction and take things at a slow pace, Sonic is always running and each level plays out more like a race. Get from start to finish as quickly as possible. This means that much like in other Sonic games, a lot of the time you'll just be watching while holding up or right on the joystick. These bits look good but aren't very fun, but luckily these bits are only occasional, and if anything they add to the experience in my opinion.

In contrast to these levels, you have a second type. The dreaded werehog levels. You've probably heard people go on forever about how crap these are. Well in all honesty, yes they are pretty crap, but not as crap as people are saying. The first thing I should point out is that while a sonic level may take 4-6 mins to complete, a werehog level will average about 20 mins. This is a pretty huge difference, and everything about it just shouts "FILLER".

You run, wait no, you walk through the level until you run into some monsters, then you button bash to defeat them, then walk some more, drop a crystal into place somewhere, walk a bit more. Some parts of the level have swinging poles and other such objects that you need to interact with. The problem is, they're all pretty buggy. There was this one bit where I got flinged across a lake, and had to time my grab of a pole perfectly with no prior warning that it was going to happen. The checkpoint was miles back so I had to defeat the same monsters again to get there. I had to try this bit 5 times to get past, defeating the same monsters every time, imagine the pain! Now imagine losing all your lives and having to redo the WHOLE LEVEL. Ugh.

Eventually you'll get to a huge monster. These monsters require you to reduce their health to half and then do some reaction button pressing. Werehog Sonic will do a cool looking move while you quickly press whatever buttons appear on screen. This is very hard to get used to, and what's more, if you fail, his health goes all the way back up! This can get really annoying when you're running out of lives - yes, the game uses lives! - you're right near the end of the level and you get Game Over. No experience points, no reward, nothing.

Oh yeah that reminds me, experience points, for some reason you gain experience from doing the levels, you can level up Sonic's Speed and Ring Power, and with Werehog Sonic you can level up lots of bits like Power and "Unleash" and Life. This seems slightly pointless, and is clearly included to pad out the gameplay a bit and add replay value. I'm a bit of a grindmonkey so I don't mind, but many people will. Luckily, I only found one occasion in the game where I actually had to try and level something up to continue, and it wasn't that high a level to get it to anyway. If you are interested in maxxing out the levels (there's a trophy in it for you!), prepare to play more Werehog, these levels offer SO much more experience, it's almost as if Sega want us to hate the game.

Linearity seems to work for Sonic, but in this game, Sonic Team have also tried to break it a little. If you've played Sonic Adventure orSonic Adventure DX, you'll be familiar with the "adventure maps", the hub world that you ran around to get to new levels. On there it was pointless but totally bearable because you were hinted on where to go and it tied the story together. This makes a return in SonicUnleashed, but it's the game's biggest downfall in my opinion.

At various points in the game, you'll be told to go to a specific country  but not how to get into a level there, or even which character you should be using. The load times are awful, so if you go to the wrong country, you'll have to load in and out of it again, which takes an age. Also consider that from the Level hub area, you can't go straight back to the world map, you have to load back into the village area and then out to the map, this means they've got a pointless load in there. Also, the game's got the most ugly loading screen I've seen in a while.

Anyway, when you DO get to the right country, you'll have to look around for ages to find the level you want to get in to. There'll only usually be one active one that's new, so in that way it's alright, but you'll run across so many locked off levels that you just know you'll have forgotten how to get to later. When you finally do find the level you're after, Chip will say you need more Sun or Moon tokens depending on the kind of level. You see, scattered throughout every level are these tokens, and if you don't have enough to unlock the next level, you have to replay old levels.

Now you might say "why not just get sun tokens and play only the daytime (Sonic) levels?". In response to that, I'd say it's because that they put way more sun tokens in the night time levels, and way more moon tokens in the day time levels. This means that in order to get to another good level, you'll probably have to play through a bad one again. Mercifully you can go to previously visited levels straight from the world map, and you can see how many tokens you've collected on that level and how many are left, but you shouldn't have to go back in the first place really.

Now the boss levels are very good, even when you're using the Werehog they're pretty fun. Like with most games they're all about repeating the same tactic three times with the last one getting slightly harder, but they are actually fun and well thought out. They also hid tokens on these levels so you might also end up replaying these, but it's not nearly as tedious as replaying a Werehog level, perish the thought.

All in all, I think this game is a must for Sonic fans, but a no-no for everyone else. You see, a Sonic fan will happily grind through the boring Werehog levels and the confusing hub world to get to those oh so sweet Sonic levels. To be honest I don't mind the storyline and the graphics are nice, they also included trophies so that's a bit of extra motivation. It's the best Sonic game in years, and that's a depressing thought.

What's equally depressing is that without the Werehog levels and with a more streamlined hub world, this game would have much wider appeal. Yes it would have less content, but it would all be good. If that were the case, I'd command everyone who liked platformers or the old Sonic games to give this one a serious look, but as it is, I'd recommend you get this only if you see it for £20 or less. Hell I reckon I might have paid a little too much.

We all know what will happen though, all the little kids and Sega sympathisers will flock to the shops to buy this game, SEGA will ignore reviews, count their money and think of the next way to  scam us. I heard originally that this game was just going to be a "world tour" kind of Sonic game, that sounded awesome. When you add the Werehog to this formula, it no longer works. Too much going on. Lots of good content, but it's buried miles deep in shit.