The Halo series is, simply put, one of the most popular games of all time and has achieved not only a world wide following, but allegedly a certain level of perfection amongst the gaming community. For a long time I refused to believe it. If ever asked what I thought of the series, or if someone began talking about it, I’d immediately feel compelled to argue what a poor title it was. The problem with this was that my experience was limited to Halo: Combat Evolved and half of Halo 2 (I got bored, and played on my Wii instead).

Being a decent human being, I didn’t extend my thoughts and opinions past that point, knowing full well that the latter games may appeal to me if the quality improved (not that I thought it could get much worse) and, after the release of Halo: Reach, I took it upon myself to play through the entire series again, for two reasons. The first was to see if perhaps revisiting the early games would give me a different reaction than my initial findings, and the second was so that I could give a definitive opinion on the whole of the Halo franchise. After playing through Halo 1-3, ODST and Reach, I can say without a shadow of a doubt, that If I never ever play Halo again I will die a happy gamer.

Yes, I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy it at all, and even that is a massive understatement. I pushed through wave after wave of Covenant and Flood to come to the conclusion that this is one of the most over-appreciated games series I’ve ever come across. I wouldn’t mind so much if people didn’t heap constant praise on all of them for their “contributions to first person shooters” and how they helped “redefine a genre that didn’t know it needed redefining”.  Now, I don’t know what moron was responsible for the latter quote – I happened to come across it whilst browsing Wikipedia – but the very essence of this statement makes me want to smash my own head in.

To start with… the genre itself, I would argue, was already going through a redefinition of what it actually was and was brought about three years prior to Halo: Combat Evolved, by Half Life. Regarded as one of the finest examples of the genre, even by today’s standards, Half Life showed us that a first person shooter can be about more than just gameplay, but can also focus on an immersive plot, involve detailed and varied environments, as well as useful non combatant AI. It demonstrated that it isn’t necessarily the gameplay itself that matters but what the gameplay revolves around; something that had been considered an afterthought prior to its release. I would also argue that the original Halo took some of its cues straight from Half Life rather then defining the genre itself. I appreciate that there will always be a case for one game learning from another in order to better itself, but it’s important to understand where the original creativity came from. Everyone’s quick to label certain first person shooters as Halo clones, due to the god awful template they follow, so it’s equally important that we appreciate where Halo’s roots stem from.

During this recent playthrough of the Halo series, it also struck me how bland and repetitive the levels were,  and I can concede that ODST and Reach did improve on this, but for at least the first three titles, the stages just seemed to merge into one. If you showed me a screen shot, even from a specific part of one of the games, I’d likely be unable to tell you which one it was from. In fact I’m pretty certain that Halo 2 and 3 have just merged into one large grey / green mass in my mind; the levels seems to follow a simple design of open area and closed areas and while I understand that most games do have a mix of this, it just seems so forced rather than something that flows naturally. It just seems that every time we need to get somewhere new, it’s just an excuse to go outside and have to fight a total onslaught of vehicles, usually aided by a Warthog… a Jeep that the UNSC decided needed to have springs installed on its base so that it gave an effect similar to Flubber hitting a wall every time it hits a bump, which is totally helpful when facing down a Wraith and multiple Banshees, Choppers or Spectres. To focus more specifically on the levels themselves, however, they appear to be nothing more than a repeat of what’s come before; every single interior of a ground based building is grey. The exterior is grey. The area leading up to it is either sand or grass. The lack of features, detail and general content on the inside is shocking, unless it’s a plot-specific area, and then it’s simply littered with all kinds of crap you don’t need. Generally I consider the aesthetics and variety of the levels to be poor for such a highly regarded game, although it seems that ODST and Reach picked up on this, and actually had some slight variance to it’s interior areas.

Another thing that confounds me is the combat. With a name like “Combat Evolved” I’d expected something, well, evolved. Instead I was treated to the most boring and repetitive combat I have come across since I played Timeshift, and even that had the ability to manipulate time to make up for it! Fighting in Halo boils down to one of three things: if you’re fighting the Covenant in an open space, you simply have to take out a ranged weapon and pick them off. They won’t come near you, they won’t fire back, and they’ll eventually just get taken out… once you’ve got through their shields, oh how I hate thee regenerating health. When there are vehicles involved, it literally becomes a case of pot luck whether you manage to live through the odds that are stacked heavily against you whereas indoors, it’s a simple case of waiting them out, as they rarely come looking for you. The fact that you also have regenerating shields just makes the whole thing a waiting game.  If you have to engage the Flood, it’s an exercise of back tracking while firing, as they have a habit of just throwing themselves at you, regardless of what’s going on, making them extremely easy to kill and more of an inconvenience then anything else.

The problems with the combat don’t end there either. For the majority of Halo you’ll play as the Master Chief, the last of the Spartans, and labelled as humanity’s last hope, it falls upon the shoulders of a man who can only carry two weapons at any one time to save mankind. Well I’m relieved. For a minute there I thought we were fucked. This is ridiculous. This is the future; we’re fighting aliens, I’m driving a trampoline on wheels, I’ve got an artificial intelligence plugged into the back of my head, and yet carrying a rifle and a pistol is my limit. I won’t hear any arguments about realism. If the protagonist is some super-soldier then I should be able to carry whatever the fuck I want, when I want. The whole two weapon system stifles the gameplay so heavily because you literally have to have a long range weapon if you want to survive an encounter with a large number of enemies, and the number of short range weapons is so high, that some are woefully underused or forgotten.

My concerns continue with the feel for the combat itself. Despite the fact we are in the future, all the weapons appear to be both weak and under-powered. The shotgun feels more like a loudcracker that fires, what I can only assume is more of a minor nasal irritant than shotgun shells and the opposition, on occasion, stumbles back, somewhat confused by this sudden change in odour. It doesn’t feel like I’m handling a weapon from the future though, and the machine guns and rifles feel and sound ridiculous, to the point where I may as well grab a hose and spray them with water for all the effect it’s having. A first person shooter should (routinely at least) empower the player when using the weapon, rather than make them feel like they would be better off using their fists.

That said, when you do have to get up close to the opposition, you have a melee attack, which I can only describe as looking like a nervous jerk rather than someone who wants to hurt a murderous alien race. A melee attack should flow, as it comes from the arms in a swing or push movement with the weight of the body behind it, as opposed to someone who’s receiving electric shock therapy.

Halo was a launch title for one of the most anticipated consoles of all time; it had a cooperative campaign, supported sixteen player LAN multiplayer, and generally marked an important step in video gaming with consoles finally being able to compete with PCs in the first person shooter genre. My theory is that Halo’s short comings were massively overlooked in the face of the fact that this a first person shooter for a console, and one that offered the sort of experience that PC gamers had only been able to experience until that time, and although Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are also of a high quality, they could only offer four player multiplayer. I genuinely believe that Halo literally arrived at the right moment to receive a reception that it does not fully deserve. There were simply better games out there, such as Perfect Dark, Medal of Honour, and Timesplitters to name a few, none of which were in the position that Halo was at the time of release.

Overall, I can’t explain the phenomenon that is the Halo franchise. I can concede a slight improvement in Halo: ODST and Halo: Reach, but I think that’s due to a much better story line, and a more dramatic feel to the proceedings at hand. I can’t see why people regard Halo as being a perfect example of the first person shooter genre because, for me, it’s one of the worst.  So the real question in the face of all this, is if I’m right then why does the series always score so high? Why is it one of the biggest games of all time? To quote a phrase from an equally highly regarded game:

“The right man in the wrong place, can make all the difference in the world”

Hugh Laurie's other job

It’s been twelve hours since you pressed ‘New Game’ and the credits are rolling, it’s all over. Your quest to save the world has been a success, you are the hero of the land and everyone is safe, all thanks to you. The credits come to an end, all characters are fictitious and any likenesses to persons living or dead are entirely coincidental, now go and play something else.  Apart from the ‘twelve hours’ part, the above was very much the mainstay of video games as a kid. We’d happily sink whatever time we had into the adventures of a space marine, man in loin cloth or freak of evolution animal without so much of a bat of an eyelid once it was all over. Most games didn’t bother with a plot, just a simple system of progression where things just got a little tougher for you, and the music raised its tempo just enough to make you think that it was somehow more important for you to reach the end of the level.

These days games have to have a carefully laid out plot, with clear indications about who you are, where you’re going and why it’s so important that you get there. Everything is so plainly telegraphed that the endings are often a disappointment, you knew that all of this was going to happen and you will only be thankful if it’s you that’s allowed to do it, rather than being forced to watch as a cutscene takes that pleasure from you.

Enter, the twist.

No, not the popular jive dance from ‘mid-nineteen fifties no-one-gives-a-crap’, just that tiny little thing you didn’t see coming, which makes the ending that little bit more eventful, throwing you bolt upright from your casual slouch and switching your brain into overdrive twelve hours later than the game probably should have. It’s perhaps become the norm now to even expect the twist, having you second guess every little detail in the characters and the plot along the way, which the writers have designed to convince themselves that they’re the next J.J Abrams. Sometimes that doesn’t always pan out quite like they’d hope and, come the end of the game, you’re just left standing there, with more questions than answers and less satisfaction than you expected for the price you paid in cash, time and effort.

With sequels being the primary requirement to selling a great game these days, this is made even worse when the twist comes, smacking you in the face as hard as it likes and then laughing loudly as it runs off into the sunset, knowing that the sun doesn’t rise again for another eighteen months. Of course, it’s never just eighteen months, so two years later when you’re hoping to get those answers, imagine the disappointment you feel when the writing staff have been shifted to a different project and a new team bought in.  A new team with different ideas that conflict slightly with the old ones, meaning that those answers you’ve been waiting for are either going to be tied up so fast you’ll blink and miss it or otherwise get left by the wayside altogether.

It’s rare these days that we can stick in a game and play the whole thing through from start to finish, moving on into the multiplayer with a feeling of satisfaction that you haven’t had in quite a while. There are few developers these days that have the luxury of being able to do that, ignoring the cries of the publishers to leave a few bits out so that it can be sold as DLC later on down the line or kept back for a stopgap sequel in the next primary gifting period. With multiplayer proving the most popular feature in a game these days, maybe it’s just not as big a concern as I believe it to be, with the hungry horde of millions all too happy to forsake advancement in the campaign for XP gains in the multiplayer component. But sometimes, it’s just too jarring for as passionate a gamer as myself to ignore.

Take Halo 2 for example. The anticipation was always going to outstrip the experience, but few could have foreseen the burn Bungie had waiting for them at the end of its heavily criticised, short campaign. Coming off the back of the neatly contained Halo: Combat Evolved, it’s probable that the developers never foresaw the need to lay the foundations of the trilogy it would go onto become, and so all of that work had to occur in Halo 2. This left the game becoming entirely bogged down in politics and backstory you just didn’t care about and, just when the tempo was reaching something recognisable as satisfactory, the game ground to an absolute halt. The final scene with Master Chief telling Hood he had returned to Earth to finish the fight, followed by a rousing chorus of the game’s main theme was exactly the kind of upright, trigger-finger clenching sitting we had spent this game waiting for and the credits which immediately followed Chief’s declaration couldn’t have been a bigger slap in the face.

It wasn’t the ending we were expecting but, then again, what would have been? Had the game continued and Master Chief dived down to the planet surface, ready for one last fire-fight, who would he have fought that would have quenched our bloodlust? To have just entered into one last battle with the Covenant would have just been a repetition of the game’s opening, with still no clear or identifiable way of closing out the game without a complete routing of the Covenant from Earth. Perhaps Bungie could have extended that fight long enough for Gravemind to be seen crashing the High Charity through Earth’s atmosphere, giving the player the satisfaction of knowing they had won one fight, but started another, ready for Halo 3.

Where Halo 2 failed, Halo 3, of course, prospered so ultimately it’s something we’re all too happy to forget and forgive Bungie for. With the might and money of Microsoft looking out for you though, Bungie knew that they could take such a risk with Halo in a way that very few games are willing to. Were it that we played one of the Grand Theft Auto games and saw its story die of a sudden heart attack, just as one of its many plot twists takes centre stage, we’d all probably rally together in a crusade on Rockstar’s offices that would make them wonder if Celtic and Rangers were playing that day. Sure, if they still left us with the keys to the city, some of us would be content enough to just send along an angry note with our overly enthusiastic friends, carrying on jacking cars, running over the owners and then launching the vehicles into the sea just for funsies. We’re fickle like that.

Other times, we’re just too loyal to say anything bad about our beloved games and, like a religious nut who denies the existence of the Easter bunny, we just won’t stand for that kind of talk. Half-Life is probably the definitive game of my life. It changed the way I viewed narrative in a game and taught me more about solving a problem from its first person perspective than any wannabe pirates or American tourists ever could. The game is a masterpiece in my eyes with but one flaw…

Half-Life’s ending was just bizarre. Having spent the best part of the game looking for a way to escape Black Mesa, the rest of the game, spent avoiding containment by the military and somehow fighting off the Alien invasion while doing so, seemed perfectly reasonable. The decision to travel to Xen in order to stop the Resonance Cascade with little hope of ever coming back feels a little out of place, for sure but, as the hero of the story, it felt like a sacrifice that just had to be made. At the point where you reach the Nihilanth, you’re starting to wonder if they’re not just making this all up now, trying to give you one last funny looking bug-eye to stand victorious on, only for that moment of glory to be stolen from you and switched with a bleary eyed confrontation with the G-Man. To be told that this whole thing has proven to be little more than a violent episode of The Apprentice for some kind of shadowy Alan Sugar overlord isn’t so much disappointing as it is disorientating. You don’t quite have the time to ask ‘WTF’ nor the ability to process those three simple letters in the first place. It’s a better ending than most but, much like Halo 2, it’s only truly alleviated of its bizarre ending by its successors efforts to help explain it.

But what makes for a good ending? Can we ever be happy, knowing that we’ve exacted revenge upon the figure that saw us take to arms in the first level? Do we need to feel the consequences of our actions and, if we do, do we then accept that our choices have validated our feelings towards our chosen conclusion? Or do we just need to be shocked and awed by the developers so much that we’re made to forget any questions we may have.

I recently completed Red Dead Redemption, after a solid year of drifting in and out of its campaign. I never did sink my way into the story quite as comfortably as others, feeling as frustrated as Marston that I was tasked with trivial hand holding along the way that ultimately dragged me clean out of caring for the fate of his family at all. Having logged on to the Rockstar Social Club a few nights before making that one final push, I was told that I had but ten missions left to complete, yet I knew that the very first step on the path to the credits was the final chapter in Marston’s tale of revenge.

I didn’t know that from a ‘spoilers’ point of view either, it just felt natural that Rockstar were finally going to give me the carrot they’d been dangling in front of me the entire duration of the game. But the carrot isn’t the end. Once you’ve finished eating that carrot, you pick up the stick that the lure was tied to and you scratch your head with it, wondering where you go from here. Like a Schizophrenic Alzheimer’s patient who has pissed themselves in somebody else’s house, you then walk around the final nine missions of the game with the odd sensation that something’s not quite right, and fear the game’s reassurances that trouble has finally left paradise as actually being something rather more sinister.

It’s yet another entirely unique ending to a video game that winds you down from your life of high-strung adventure and on-the-run and gun gameplay, into a sensible form of retirement that no other game has ever provided. For the first time in years, the game left me feeling satisfied when the end credits rolled in a way I just wasn’t expecting. I’d spent the entirity of RDR so disconnected from the story that I was only ever finding myself enjoying the game in its absence, riding the dusty trails with a poor innocent shopkeeper lassoed behind me, headed straight for the cliff’s edge, ready to leap from my horse at the last possible second and letting Binky and Marv go a tumblin’. Stopping Dutch became a fairly low priority in the game, sitting somewhere just above saving the family I’d never met, but considerably lower than waiting at the side of a rail track in the hope a bunny would hop his way into a train’s path for my own amusement. It was only in those last few moments that I finally felt a solid connection with John Marston and it amazed me that a game that had otherwise bored me to tears had managed to do that. While the ending itself was far from a happy one, I felt happy that I’d been a part of it.

Whatever happens with video games in the next few years is anyone’s guess. They say we’ve seen just about every story there is to see in one medium or another, but if a game like RDR is able to throw up those moments of purified surprise, without needing to promise a sequel or beg you to stick around for the multiplayer so that you feel like you’re getting your monies worth, maybe we haven’t seen everything yet. With so much pressure on the developers to turn a profit and garner enough support to provide them with the opportunity to invite you all back eighteen months down the line, maybe we’re doomed to suffer the promises of a happy ending more than the happy ending itself. Perhaps it’s less about the destination though, and my real thoughts should be on the journey, happy in the promise of cake and content enough in that to ignore that there is no cake at the end of the tunnel?

What are you mad?  Screw that, I’ll have my cake and I’ll eat it thank you very much.

Okay, so it’s never that bad in reality, but we all have guilty pleasures in life. Whether it’s music, TV shows, films, books, people, there’s always something in life we find ourselves doing or wanting to do that we normally wouldn’t enjoy otherwise. Despite all reason, we can’t help ourselves, there’s no way we should be doing it, but it feels so good. That exists in gaming too.

I’m just as guilty of it as everyone else. One such guilty pleasure is when I find myself becoming immersed in fictional entities and worlds within games. If a game spends the time to create a great fictional world, a lot of the time, I’ll want to know more about it, or find out more about it. From the hidden lore in the Metroid Prime games to the websites in GTA4, I’ll be into it. In Brutal Legend, I’d not only find myself trying to learn as much about the world as I could, but I always felt really sheepish whenever the characters would call Eddie Riggs ‘Edward’, because I’d forget they weren’t addressing me directly. I spent most of my time after unlocking it playing the Kabbage Boy’s “Girlfriend” song that plays in the game’s opening sequence because they spent the time creating a fictional band and creating a song that acts as a perfect way of parodying everything they want to with that band. I sat listening to the Midnight Riders songs over and over whenever they ended up on YouTube because Valve took the time to create the fictional band, like Double Fine did with Kabbage Boy, and both ended up as examples of musical guilty pleasures crossing over into gaming guilty pleasures too.

However, my biggest gaming guilty pleasures involve the fact that I have way too many games to play. I’ll constantly end up denying myself a play on one game because it’d take me an hour or two more investment before I started truly enjoying it, instead deciding to dedicate those hours pissing about in a virtual world or playing something that can’t truly be beaten, instead. Those games in themselves are another guilty pleasure. I’m someone who tends to prefer games where there’s a more distinct beginning, middle and end, or a fully defined open world. I’m not the biggest fan of games in which the primary mechanic is just trying to get the highest score possible, or games you can’t possibly define as having an ending, but in rare cases, they can be a guilty pleasure and take over my life. I’ve lost countless hours to Team Fortress 2, Audiosurf and Beat Hazard in the last year over games that I can physically complete. When I bought Animal Crossing: Wild World, I played it every day for an entire year. When I bought Brain Training, I couldn’t put it down until I’d gotten a Brain Age of 20 for 3 months running. There’s something about those games that, despite having no real incentive for me to keep playing, will just keep calling to me and taking over all my gaming time as my list of games to beat just climbs higher and higher.

However, guilty pleasures are something that vary wildly from person to person, especially in gaming. And what’s the best way to make those pleasures not so guilty anymore? By admitting it to the most judging, evil people around. Internet People. With this in mind, I thought that it would be best if I consulted the other GamingLives writers, and coerced them into admitting their own Gaming Guilty Pleasures below.

Adam
Gaming for me as a whole is a guilty pleasure but to really hone in on it reveals my greatest sin. I love co-op gaming, I think it’s one of the best things to happen in games and when controller 2 was starting to become a bit of an abstract concept, I started to worry a little that it would be lost forever. Online gaming obviously stepped up to the plate and once we’d all gotten past the stage where we enjoyed nothing more than bashing each other’s brains out, it was great to finally get back to overcoming obstacles together. Xbox live really took off for me in a big way with this one with games such as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Halo 3 and Gears of War really showing the rest of the world how great it is to play a game with a friend. But this isn’t my guilty pleasure.

That really comes in to play when having already beaten the game in single player, I manage to get together with a friend of mine who prefers playing co-op than slogging through the game on their own. This means I get to waltz my way through a game knowing exactly where every enemy is hiding, how every puzzle is solved and where to be standing, watching, when the big dogs come out to play. I can keep my friend safe without them ever knowing and without even trying. I can tell him to stop at certain points and look over in ‘that’ direction, imagining the look of ‘OMGWTFBBQDISHWASHER’ on his face. And best still, I can come across as an absolute hero the entire time we’re playing. I wouldn’t swap that for anything.

Ben
I think my guilty pleasure would have to be MMOs. It’s something that, despite the amount of time they swallow up – ensuring I don’t play any new games for months at a time, I still put myself through.

I’m not sure why I do it to myself, but there’s just something about an MMO that just draws me in, it’s like a sign in a cake shop window that simply says “free cakes, all stock must go”. It’s not just the gameplay aspect I enjoy (character development and so forth) but, once I get into an MMO, it starts to spill over into other areas. I end up reading up on the world’s fiction, I think there’s currently around seven Warcraft books on my shelf, all of which I’ve read more than once. I get engrossed; I shouldn’t do but there’s just something about the MMO world that teases me, it tempts me. And I like it.

Lee
Sometimes I cant help but do the most evil things.  In most of those choice based RPGs (Fable, Mass Effect etc) I tend to just play the game as if it was me making the choice rather than playing the whole black and white thing.

That was just an innocent stagecoach... and you saw what I did to that!

My choices tend to lean towards the good but will often take a swing the other way when faced with a big choice, like at the end of Mass Effect 1. I love doing little things when I can get away with it, like slipping a grenade into peoples’ pockets in Fallout 3 or chasing after the man whose car you stole just to run him over. I quite enjoyed shooting NPCs in Red Dead after you have completed their missions, and car piles… I love car piles, just pile up as many things that’ll explode that the game will render, and throw a grenade in then sit back and watch the frame rate drop. I’m also a complete git in online racing games, I wont take people out that are in front but if someone is trying to overtake then they are going into the wall.

Lorna
I’d say one of my guilty gaming pleasures would be something like Sea Life Safari for XBLA. It is pretty much Pokemon Snap Underwater – mellow, tranquil and real ‘do nothing’ gaming at its best.

Let’s be honest, a game where you do little but take photos of fish isn’t exactly going to set the world alight but, at the end of a stressful day, there was nothing I liked more than sloping off upstairs, kicking back in a comfy chair, and idling through coral reefs and sunken ships, tracking down those elusive shots and golden shells… most of the time I would end up asleep and drooling into my chair – it was that relaxing. Of course, it is light years away from exciting, dynamic titles full of guns, hookers, and headshots, but it’s that game I keep secretly locked in the attic for shame… the one I tell visitors is just the pipes rattling… that there is nothing to really be scared of.

Markuz
My guilty pleasure, well my greatest, is pointless repetition in order to satiate my desires as a collector. In Oblivion, I had my home in Skingrad kitted out with all of the legendary weapons I could find… making sure that they were themed, of course, so rings would be in one display case and amulets in another. I’d have a room where every surface had an enchanted helm with boots lining the walls. If it was legendary, named, or came from a specific kill whereby there would only be one in the entire game… I kept it. Doesn’t matter how crap it was, I was keeping it and it’d be out on display.

My playthrough of Fallout 3 was the same, with my home in Megaton littered with objets d’art such as the Antagonizer’s helmet, a Deathclaw Gauntlet, even down to silly little things like trinkets from Abraham Lincoln – I just couldn’t bring myself to give them away or sell them. Unfortunately, neither Megaton or Tenpenny Tower had rooms large enough to display the collection and so most of it lurked within filing cabinets and desk drawers. With Borderlands, it took on an entirely different level of insanity. According to the developers, there are a total of 3,166,880 different weapon combinations and that meant there MAY be better weapons available than those already in my backpack. This led to me doing the unthinkable… killing Crawmerax The Invincible (he’s not, you know) over and over again as many as twenty times in one night JUST so I could browse through the weapon drops. On one particular evening I had a total of thirteen kills without clearing the previous weapon drops so the lag was incredible… but the sight itself, moreso. My guilty pleasure is collecting. Unnecessarily.

Richie
My guilty pleasure is the good, old-fashioned lemon. By that I mean the cheap and cheerful 4 for £20 bargain basement zesty B-list games that get frozen out because IGN, or somewhere equally busy wanking themselves to death over Gears of Whatever, gave it 6/10.  It’s gotten so bad that every time GameStation do a big pre-owned sale, I’ve generally bought all of it. Sometimes it pays off (Blazing Angels 2, Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom, EDF) and other times it really, really doesn’t (Fantastic Four, FEAR, Beowulf) but for me the pleasure I get in seeing a lemony game do something well is much more than I get from watching a supposed AAA title woo the masses with little more than good presentation and a Nolan fucking North voiceover.

Rob
When it comes to gaming I must admit I have a couple of skeletons in the old closet, some well kept secrets that have never seen the light of day, and probably never will. When I was younger I was always the one watching my Dad game, hence why I have such a love for first person shooters. I would spend most evenings after school watching over my Dad’s shoulder as he played games like Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem and Doom. Sure I played them too, but I found that watching my Dad play them was slightly more enjoyable, probably because I was so young and I sucked. This leads me on to one of my biggest gaming guilty pleasures that hasn’t come to light until today.

Back in Uni I found myself in the same situation that I was all those years ago watching my Dad play FPS games, but instead of watching my Dad it was my Uni mate, and instead of an FPS game it was Viva Pinata. Bet you didn’t see that coming. I have no idea why, but I was transfixed by the shiny colours and the sheer variety of animals. The first game seemed more appealing than the sequel and, for some reason, I found myself wanting a small lemur type creature as a pet. With this creature you had to entice into your garden with a moon on a stick. Why did I want it so much? Probably because every now and again it would spin its tail and shout “Woo Woo Woo!”. If you tell anyone about this I will hunt you down… oh wait… it’s now on the internet… *FACEPALM*

So there you go! We here at GamingLives have given you our guiltiest pleasures in gaming. Think you have a better one? Are you able to empathise with us? Do you have your own similar experiences? Before checking in to see a psychiatrist (I know I am!), why not leave a comment below? Nobody’s judging you. Except me. And the Internet.

<3

Something is changing with the way we play our games and the way we interact with our friends; games are getting social. The idea for this article came about while I was playing Blur last night – it’s rammed with a whole host of sociable features: Twitter, Facebook and its own little social site in the form of blurthegame.com, all of which exist outside of the game.

Twitter and Facebook… man those two words must annoy the hell out of anybody who isn’t in to the whole social networking thing. They are everywhere! It seems that every TV show, soft drink, film, website and religious figure has a “like” page on Facebook, a Twitter account or both.

Jesus has returned! And he's on Twitter

In a completely shameless plug so is GamingLives, and links to both are at the in the top right hand corner of the site – ohhhh glowey buttons.

It's Mario Kart meets Wipeout .

Right let’s get back on track. So in Blur you have a plethora of different options: after finishing a race you can post from inside the game to either your Twitter or Facebook accounts what your position was in the race or the time you finished the race in. Your friends or followers will then see it and can try and beat it if they want. If you’re not into the social networking thing you can challenge your friends from your friends list and the next time they play the game a little pop up tells them they have a challenge, and if they beat it you get notified and can try to better that. There is even a menu option that keeps track of your scores against your friends.  This isn’t a review for Blur by the way so I’ll stop banging on about it but the way it lets you interact with your friends is something I think we’re going to start seeing more of in games. You can upload any photos you take in game to Facebook too, which was nice.

Anybody that knows me knows that I am a complete social networking whore! Even as I am writing this my Facebook is open on the other half of my screen and Twitter is open on my iPhone. Sad I know, it has almost become an addiction; if I’m not gaming I’m reading your profile and looking at your pictures. Err I mean updating my status.

Red Dead’s free roam is another new experience for console gamers, the PC bunch have been at it for years just on a bigger scale with the likes of Warcraft. Flick the switch over to public free roam and suddenly there are a handful of other posses roaming around the west all doing different things, one group could be trying to knife bears to death while another is stealing gold from a mine and the rest are having a shootout in the middle of Armadillo. Everybody is playing in the same space, its great… well it’s great until you get a bit carried away shooting lawmen and a large bounty is put on your head.  At that point there are fifteen other people that all want the xp reward for killing you – my advice is head north and hope the bears get them before they get you. Red Dead’s great anyway, have a read of Ben’s review if you’re still on the fence.

A small selection of the GamingLives crew - Try and guess which avatar belongs to who

Now do you remember the days before party chat on Xbox Live? You’d talk to people and make new friends it was a sociable place, I’m sure I’ve mentioned it in a past post but some of my best friends I’ve met on Xbox Live. To the casual gamers among you, that might seem what you call “sad” but it’s not… while you’re watching The One Show I’m knocking a new friend off his horse in Red Dead Redemption or ramming Kat up against a wall in Blur. But when party chat came along all of a sudden we were all playing with our friends in our own comfort zones, it’s a great feature for Xbox Live and it’s good to have it, especially when you’re catching up with friends and you’re all on different games. I don’t think I’ve touched the old “private chat” since it was added but party chat has made us a little anti social – we don’t talk to the randoms anymore. I’m not saying I hate my invisible friends, I love them all to bits in a “fist bump for the dudes and cuddles for the girls” kind of way but I also miss the razor sharp wit of Xbox Live gamers. Some of the funniest things I’ve ever heard were on Xbox Live. I remember playing Forza 2 late one night with friend, some random Americans and a few others, and if you have never played Forza online… it’s an odd experience.  It’s kind of an unwritten rule that you have to be polite, not crash into anybody and warn the person in front that you are over taking them so that they can politely move out of your way. It goes without saying that I don’t race this way – I just want to win. I won’t actively crash into people but I’m not letting people pass, eventually somebody bumped somebody in this one race and an American span out and wrote his car off.  He was not happy, and I won’t repeat what he said, but just think about every bad thing you ever heard on Xbox Live – it was just like that. Then, after he’d calmed down, a soft voice with a hint of brummie (that’s somebody from Birmingham for our international readers) says “it’s no good moaning mate, your six hours behind the rest of us. You should be more alert”.  Halo 3 is another place to hear the brilliance of Xbox Live users – some of the best disses I have ever heard come from a Halo lobby and, without question, these guys have the sharpest wit of us all.

Gaming is good fun but we know that.  If it was like work we would all want paying for it, but it’s even more fun with friends. The extended network us gamers have built, and the services we use around our gaming habits are, for me, some of the best things about gaming,  whether your preferred methods be forums, Facebook or Twitter. Can you believe I just said the best thing about gaming is not actually gaming?

Just one more thing...

That seems like a nice point to end on but like Columbo there is just “one more thing.”

On behalf of GamingLives and all the writers I want to say thanks to everybody who has ever commented on a post, signed up to the forum, @mentioned us on Twitter and “liked” us on Facebook. The only reason we do it is because we love it and it means a lot that you guys get involved. We’re not even close to our first birthday yet but the amount of you that read these articles and visit the site is really amazing.

We live in a cynical world. A cynical world. And we post in a business of tough competitors.

We love you.

You… complete… us

Oh, and I’ve been playing Bad Company 2…

Don't cross the streams!

This review itself is in fact late. Or at least later than I had planned for it to be. A good reviewer would tell you at this point that this was due to squeezing every last drop of gameplay out of the game in order to give you dear reader the absolute best and most complete verdict that is humanly possible. However a) This is the first review of any kind that I have ever written, and therefore to make claims about my goodness or otherwise at it would be at best premature and b) I am pathologically honest – always have been, ask any one of my ex-friends (honesty doesn’t go down as well with people as society tries to teach you it does). The net result of which is that I will tell you that I have taken this long to write this review because I have been playing the damn game with every spare waking second that I have – its like a crack habit but without the necessity to take up a life of crime/prostitution to support it and that attractive ‘waif who hasn’t eaten a decent meal in a year’ look. I just realised that the excuse I could have used and the truth are pretty similar – probably could have blagged that if I’d paid more attention…

Anyhoo, I digress – here is my review for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (henceforth BC2 to save my poor fingers). As I mentioned above, I’ve never done this before so lets just dive in shall we? Anyone who is offended by patently amateur games journalism (in which case why are you even here?) should probably leave now…. Ok? Good, then if you’re all sitting comfortably children, lets begin.

House could use a bit of work to be honest, but at least there's room to park the tank! We'll take it!

CAMPAIGN

For those unfamiliar with the franchise, a small history lesson is necessary. If you’re bored then you may skip this part, but don’t come crying to me later when you can’t answer any of the questions in Part A of the exam.

Battlefield began life – as did so many popular FPS franchises – as a PC game. Specifically though, it was an online multiplayer WWII FPS PC game. There was no ‘single player’ to speak of. It did well. VERY well, and spawned a few add on packs and a sequel. As consoles stepped up a gear and came closer to what PC’s were capable of, a number of previously PC-only titles made the leap across, and Battlefield was to be no exception. Of course, this was in the days of the PS2 and Xbox, when online console gaming happened, but not so much. Still, DICE decided to bring Battlefield to ‘the masses’ (read: to those of us who don’t want to bother upgrading our ‘gaming rig’ every 6-8 months)* and so of course they decided that there must be a single player ‘campaign’ element to the game to keep us all happy. Battlefield 2: Modern Combat was thus born to the PS2 and Xbox. It was a fairly respectable title. Sure, the online could handle only a fraction of the number of players that its PC big brother could handle but that was ok because there simply weren’t that many people online playing it. The campaign though, well… At best you could describe it as a shooting gallery, a way of learning the controls and weapons for the mulitplayer game. It was very formulaic, being essentially a series of ‘missions’ loosely tied together by a (largely forgettable) plot, all of which involved a structure of ‘Go to point A and fend off wave X. Then move to Point B and capture Objective Y, finally move on to Point C and kill enemy Z, rinse and repeat’. Now of course, most such games are objective led really, but in an accomplished single player game this formulaic skeleton is covered by a lovely story and plot which help disguise the fact you are just doing what the computer tells you to. This was absent here, so if you had the game but no online access (like me at the time) then it wasn’t bad, but it was by no means great. The one truly unique feature was ‘hotswapping’. This meant that if you could draw a line of sight to another soldier in your force you could press the ‘hotswap’ key and be instantly transported into their shoes together with a spiffy ‘swoosh’ effect. Great if you’re an assault soldier getting pummeled by a tank but can draw line of sight to a bazooka armed demolition guy. As we all know though, one innovative feature does not a great game make.

Fast forward a few years and the new generation of consoles got a new kind of Battlefield game. Battlefield: Bad Company had arrived, and by now console online gaming was very much more mainstream. So you’d think they would’ve concentrated on doing what they did best and crafting a mutliplayer only game right? Well, wrong because it seems that when developers and publishers take chances like this *cough Shadowrun Cough* NOBODY BUYS THEM. So it is now written in the bible of games development ‘Thou shalt not release a multiplayer only game on consoles at retail in case some of the oiks don’t have a subscription’ or something. Anyway, for BC, DICE had created a whole team of loveable misfits and an actual plot – surely they were onto a winner? Well, no. As good as the original BC was, it had nothing to do with the campaign. It may have had loveable rogues for characters, and an actual (if nonsensical) plot but the truth was that these were all just veneers. It was still very much the A-B-C routine of before, and again just seemed mainly to serve as an extended tutorial for all the weapons/vehicles etc to get you into the multiplayer. Still, at least they tried.

So, for the new game, have they learned? Well, ish. The opening mission begins in WWII as you play out a prequel to the events of the main game. I won’t release spoilers here for any who have yet to try it but suffice it to say that if you have never played a Battlefield game before and you start with this then please stick with it past this opening mission. I don’t know why but the WWII opener just feels stilted and weird, and to be honest I was almost crying with the disappointment as I played it. However, when it finished things got interesting…

It seems that DICE have eyes you see. They saw the success of a certain other game set in the modern day about soldiers shooting other soldiers (Modern…somethingorother I think) and they obviously took copious amounts of notes. For all that they managed to cram in dozens of sly references to the competition (a line about snowmobiles being for pussies springs instantly to mind) they are obviously mindful of the success of Infinity Ward’s beast. And you know what they say – if you can’t beat them, then copy them. Thus we have a campaign that sees our heroes jumping from one part of the globe to another with each mission. We also have set pieces. Lots and lots of set pieces. To be fair (though it breaks my heart to say it) I’d say that MW2 still has the edge in terms of sheer adrenaline fuelled set piece laden shiny havoc. Then again, BC2 has 2 things massively in its favour. 1. It has a plot that actually makes sense (its silly yes, but it follows through logically) and 2. It has the majesty that is the updated Frostbite engine.

One of Bad Company’s main selling points was its destruction. ‘Nowhere is safe’ proclaimed the blurb ‘Cover can be blown away in an instant’. Well, they were exaggerating a bit. What you actually got was trees/fences etc that could all be levelled and buildings that could be reduced to skeletal structures with all the walls/doors/roof missing which would then become indestructible. It DID change the way that you played (Halo 3 never felt the same afterwards with its insistence on you using the doors it gave you, rather than allowing you to rifle grenade your way through the wall) but it also didn’t quite match the hype. Bad Company 2 rights this. Completely. Every single building in the game can in fact be reduced to total rubble with enough ordnance. Far from being a gimmick, this means that you genuinely have some leeway in how you complete each objective. It also means that you can’t just hide behind a strangely rocket proof tree whenever your health is low. It makes each fight more tactical and tense, and potentially no two people will quite have the same solution. Of course, there is a downside and it is that the AI is not great. Not terrible by all means, but it will give you few surprises. I breezed through the whole campaign on Normal difficulty in less than a day. Still, whereas its no MW2 beater in the SP stakes, BC2 shows that DICE have made genuine progress in this area, and I can only applaud the effort. It helps that the characters really are just that – characters, with genuinely funny banter and engaging personalities, much better than the oh so po faced and serious one dimensional action heroes that MW2 throws at you. A solid thumbs up then, but with the same caveat often given to MW2 – if you don’t go online consider rental rather than purchase.

Gotta love quads on the beach... any minute now Steve Guttenberg is going to burst in, I swear!

MULTIPLAYER

The meat and bones of the experience, and the REAL reason why anyone should buy this game. The reason why the first BC game rarely strayed out of my 360 for the first 6 months I owned it was that it simply offered the best kind of online play for me – teamwork. Now, Halo, COD et al – they all get a bit better with teamwork sure. But BC DEPENDED on it. If you had a team of Rambo’s, all intent on running out on their own then your team would lose, and lose BADLY more often than not. The main reason for this was the classes. Instead of COD’s ‘create a soldier with all the types of guns you like best’ template, what BC gave you was a number of different TYPES of soldier, each of which had their place in the team. So Recon’s had sniper rifles and could deploy motion tracker grenades so that you could tell when the enemy was sneaking into your base, support could call in mortar strikes and also carried med kits that could be thrown down to help heal injured comrades and so on. There were 5 classes in the original BC, and when the early press releases announced that BC2 would only have 4 then there was concern – would it really work with one less class? Which one would they get rid of and why? As it turned out, all fears were unfounded. What they did was to amalgamate certain characteristics and swap some bits of kit from one class to another in a way that totally makes sense. So what you now have is soldier (assault as was) who can drop crates of ammo for the team and has a standard assault rifle/pistol default combo, Recon, who comes with C4 and mortar strike capabilities (when unlocked) and a sniper rifle/pistol combo, Medic, who comes with med kits as before and de-fibs which are new and enable you to revive ‘dead’ team mates if you’re quick enough and an LMG and pistol start up and Engineer, who comes with a rather nifty repair tool for fixing damaged vehicles and an SMG and rocket launcher combo startup. What this means in real terms is that if you want to have a chance of winning you need a balanced team. A team of 4 snipers or 4 soldiers is going to struggle to get much usage out of vehicles and is going to die a lot. A squad of 4 medics is going to run out of ammo a lot. But importantly, this also means that everyone can get progress. Points are handed out for doing your thing – if you’re a medic you get healthy amounts of points dished out to you for every revive or heal that you do – ditto for repairs as an engineer and ammo resupplies as a soldier. So its not just a case of all the ‘l33ts’ with the mad shooting skillz getting masses of points and topping the leaderboards – if like me you’re happy to hump it around after the squad dishing out the meds and reviving people Lazarus style with the paddles then you too can reach the heights.

Of course, the Frostbite engine adds immeasurably to the experience. More so than the single player, it really adds a whole layer of tactical depth that other shooters can only dream about. Of the two main multiplayer modes, I have only played RUSH, which involves one team defending and one attacking. The defenders must defend a series of crates (two at a time) whilst the attackers must attempt to destroy them. Rush sounds limited, especially when you consider that there are only 5 maps for it. However, with the versatility offered by being able to blow everything up, coupled with the strong emphasis on teamwork, this simply is not the case. Set charges on the crates and attempt to defend them until they blow up, shoot them from far away with rockets or a tank, or simply keep pounding the building that they are in with shells until it collapses on the crate and kills any enemies in there as well – the choice is yours. Conquest, the other main multiplayer mode has another 5 maps, and is essentially capture the flag but on a fairly large map and with multiple flags all needing to be captured. Again, I would imagine that the Frostbite engine and team play of the game only add to the experience, but I can’t tell you for sure. Yet.

And of course there are the vehicles. Oh god the vehicles… Being as how BC2 has bigger maps than MW2 you see, they can adequately fit vehicles on them as well. And what a selection you have. From Helicopter gunships through main battle tanks to jeeps, quad bikes and jet skis, there is something for every petrol head here. And joyously, they all work properly, controlling like a vehicle of the type should. So many FPSs try and shoehorn in vehicle sections that are awkward and frankly rubbish and it is to the developers credit that the vehicles in BC2 never feel anything other than a natural part of proceedings.

Of course, there must be balance in every good review. Yes I love this game and no I don’t see me playing much else online for the forseeable future, but its not without its issues:

1. Lack of maps – yes the environments are huge and the destruction possible means that they will last for ages. Still, 5 for each mode (assuming that you buy brand new and get the code for the two unlockables) seems a tad stingy. More are allegedly on the way (again early brand new adopters will get the initial ones at least for free) but still, its hard to not feel that the EA of old is in danger of rearing its ugly head again. Speaking of which…
2. When are EA actually going to release an online game where the servers are actually adequate to task from release? I know that thanks to the vagaries of online pre-orders and unscrupulous indies (and no I’m not telling you which I used) several of us were playing the game a day early but it took TWO WEEKS before the servers were working silky smooth for the majority of playtime – and even now they’re not perfect. For a game this big, with this expectation attached this is unacceptable. Just because IW haven’t managed to properly fix the MW2 servers yet is no excuse. This happened with the original BC and with Battlefield 1943 (BC’s WWII based Downloadable multiplayer only little brother) so ignorance is no excuse.Naughty EA, naughty.
3. The Sniper class – maybe its just my play style, but I really don’t like the sniper class now. I think perhaps its tailored to the ‘l33t’ gamers who would normally be playing COD – certainly all the snipers I have seen so far in the game are happy to camp at one end of the map and rain snipey death on all. Bearing in mind how closely intermeshed the other 3 classes are in terms of teamwork it just doesn’t really fit – the snipers don’t even have any kit that helps others. Bear in mind this is a personal gripe of mine rather than an objective criticism of the game though.
4. There are glitches and annoyances – its inevitable with a title of this magnitude and ambition I guess, but its still irritating when people are shooting you by glitching their guns through solid walls. More importantly, they mapped the melee attack to a specific button this time around (good times) but its so bloody clumsy to use that more often that not you just end up in a weird dance that looks like your and your opponents soldier are both having a fit until one of you either a) pulls out a gun and shoots the other Indiana Jones style or b) randomly (and I mean randomly) manages to knife the other. It CAN be done right – MW2′s knife attacks work fine – so I don’t see why it was still cocked up here.

Screw you guys, I'm going home... to replay this mission and pick up some cheevs!

Overall though, I have to say that I have immensely enjoyed the games I have had so far, and look forward to many more over the coming months. If you have a few mates who are into online FPSs and you fancy a game where teamwork is crucial then you will find no finer game to suit your needs than this and I heartily recommend a purchase. If however you have no friends and/or you’re not online then I’d say rent it for a week.

Thus endeth my first review – wake up at the back there!

*Please don’t write and complain about this comment – I love our PC gaming brethren, the truth is that I am just too lazy to join them

At least this guy has his prorities right... make the house out of ice yeah, but make sure you can still get on XBL

It takes a lot of work for this site to run as well as it does. Some people might take Victor’s Twitter whoring, the fantastic forum or the regular updates for granted but behind the scenes, there is a fair amount of co-ordination. Being a lowly writer, the majority of my behind the scenes work centres around making sure my articles don’t cover the same topics as something that is due to be published – and working on blueprints for an unusually large Gaming Lives jizzgloo for Markuz, but that’s confidential. For example, I know that fellow GL writer, Ben is currently writing about the culture of female gamers hiding under the idea of ‘girl power’. The whole “I’m a gamer and a girl! OMFGZ!” culture is a rather annoying and borderline sexist one; you wouldn’t see a male chef saying “I work in a kitchen and I’m a boy!” for example so why girl gamers need their gender pre-fixed to their hobby is beyond me, but that’s not what I’m here to discuss.

While girl gamers seem to be all the rage, being a (guy) gamer and a self professed geek still comes with a lot of stigma. Despite the majority of households in the UK owning at least one console, gamers are still seen by the general public as nerdy, reclusive virgins which is only half true and while I don’t really give a damn what the general public think of me, this image of a basement dwelling, sex starved man-child; controller in one hand, Warhammer rule book in the other is very debilitating when trying to find a partner. Without trying to brag, I have had a fair few girlfriends but none of them really embraced my inner geek. They could accept it, but they never quite understood it. We’d never cuddle up on the sofa and have a quiet night in front of the Xbox, we never once had a discussion about why a Utahraptor would win a fight against a Japanese spider crab and we certainly didn’t share the same enthusiasm for collectible figurines and Lego. This always led to the sense that I could never fully be myself around girls, which may explain why my relationships don’t seem to last very long. Do you know how devastating it is to find out that your girlfriend thought the stormtrooper helmets on your hoody were cars because she’d never seen Star Wars? Or to receive a blank, empty stare after explaining that you spent £25 on a Halo 3 figurine because it “looked awesome”? If not then you are lucky to have a partner who understands and accepts you for who you are. Or you don’t own Star Wars clothing and gaming toys.

I asked my last girlfriend if she'd like to "polish my helmet until it shone" and her eyes lit up until I whipped this baby out!

The problems aren’t just limited to conversations or the time spent together either. Valentine’s Day is a particularly difficult celebration for most men in relationships because, let’s be honest ladies, we’re too busy staring at your chest to hear or care what type of perfume you’re requesting. Depending on how you look at it, I was lucky enough to be in a relationship when Valentine’s Day rolled around last year. She used to be an avid PC gamer, but I didn’t hold it against her – she had a 360 and a SNES after all so she wasn’t a total lost cause…Valentine’s Day was approaching and we both agreed that presents where in order. Being a typical male, romantic items such as flowers and chocolates were out of the question, but knowing that a computer game related present was a viable option, I started thinking of possible gift ideas. “What games has she mentioned?” I asked myself. Professor Layton was the first thing that came to my mind, but unfortunately she already bought it herself the day before. I was back to the drawing board. Suddenly, I remembered back to the previous Halloween. Dead Space had been released, causing my girlfriend at the time to squeal with delight. She was a huge horror fan, having a large collection of gory movies and regarded Silent Hill as the best game ever. I rushed to the shop, picked up a copy and wrapped it as neatly as I could. I have never seen such a look of disappointment when she opened her present. Maybe I should’ve just bought her a pink slanket instead.

There's only one thing wrong with this girl... I don't know her gamertag

I’ve been single for 3 months now and it’s already starting to show; my beard has become so unkempt that passing wine making enthusiasts keep trying to pick blackberries out of it and I haven’t left my room for anything more than work or food in about four weeks. It’s time to have a shave, leave the house and try to meet a girl who will embrace a geek like me. I might even put an ad in my local paper’s lonely hearts column.

Single, 22 year old male seeks a female who understands the difference between FPS and RTS, knows that Transformers are more than meets the eye, appreciates the need to spend £30 extra for a collector’s edition steelbook case and ‘statuette’ – read; toy – and realises just how awesome dinosaurs are. Ability to speak in binary code or Wookiee, optional.