The O/C Gamer

A couple more Bayonetta notes is all you’re getting this week.

Firstly, finish the game to unlock the Couture options. Purchase the Witch Queen Couture Bullet, then change to that costume (RB at the Chapter Select screen). Now play the game again, watching all the cutscenes. It’s filthy… but in a totally good way.

Now do it all again, but with the P.E. Uniform. And then the Various – Type B costume.

Oh my.

Lest this blog become a teenage-ish outlet for physical lust, let’s mention the game again: it’s still bloody brilliant. My complaints last week about the difficult of Hard have been completely scotched after a bit of experimentation with the purchasable items; some nice combinations led to a Saturday-afternoon hammering of Hard mode, and an eventual completion time of a touch over three hours. Replay one botched level, and bang – 2:59:58, enough to unlock yet another item in The Gates of Hell. And now I’m coasting through the Non-Stop Infinite Climax skill level; that should be wrapped up by Australia Day.

Then there’s the simple matter (ho ho) of wrapping up some of the Alfheim Portals (little challenge levels within the game), and I’ll have nabbed all the GamerScore available to me from the game. But that doesn’t mean that Bayonetta will soon be off The List, oh no – there’s so many little unlockables within the game that I don’t even really consider myself a third of the way there yet. And that’s after nearly sixty hours!

I’ve got a few other games like that hanging over me on the 360; Rez HD really does require 100%-shot-down runs, and Ninety-Nine Nights has a whole lot of random drops to collect. But that’s the price I pay for being me, for letting my OCD have its way with my gaming hobby.

And I think about the sixty hours invested in Bayonetta so far, with the prospect of at least a hundred more, and I quiver with joyful anticipation :)

Hahahahahaaa. Aaaaaahahahahahahahaaa hahahahaaa. Whee :)

Giddy, I am. And aroused. But mostly giddy.

It’s beautiful. Stunning. Spectacular.

And I’m going to be amazingly bad at it. But I’ll look good being bad.

And aroused.

Once upon a time, in a generation of computers several orders of magnitude less grunty than those we enjoy now, ran a game called Prince of Persia. Like its predecessor, Karateka, it was stunning in motion an utterly, interminably boring for me to play. Not enough aliens and shooting and monstrous scores, y’see (oh how those words make me feel old now). But when the Prince of Persia franchise was rebooted in 2003 (with The Sands of Time), popular and critical acclaim led me to at least stickybeak into the demo on the Xbox. Looked lovely – still – and had sweet controls, but a rumoured difficulty spike (and a pile of other games on The List) stopped me short of purchase. Later games in the series allegedly detrimentally tinkered with the gameplay mechanic, according to trusted sources, so the franchise dropped off my radar.

And then Ubisoft Montreal announced another entry in the Prince of Persia series. And lo, did the internet have a field day! “The graphics look stupid and kiddy,” said the fictitious xI HardCoreShooter Ix (amongst others). After release, MetaCritic was filled with comments on the lack of difficulty, the fact you couldn’t die, and the broken combat.

And, in a marked change for internet forum fanboys everywhere, they’re all right – but that actually makes the game more appealing to me.

Opening with a suitably broken and abstract movie, The Prince (who is never actually identified as such) emerges from the desert, and plunges into a short and simple tutorial section. Within minutes, you know all that’s required of you – the difficulty curve is pretty flat, and there’s very little to break up the wonderful free-running platforming and occasional combat. Well, three puzzle sections, and the odd stop to chat with your off-sider, but that’s it.

My first glimpse of the protagonist annoyed me, for The Prince’s head scarf is annoyingly off-kilter. That drove me mad. I’m arsed if I know how a poncey, buffed-up thieving Prince could bounce around the place with one eye almost completely covered – surely that would affect his sense of spatial awareness, of balance? It doesn’t seem to bother Our Prince, though, as he hooks up with his hot magical playmate, Elika.

Now, I like female game characters. Really, I do. They don’t all have to look like Vanessa Z Schneider (although some of the Burnout Bikes girls do), but a decent, strong female character is always a treat. And, whilst Elika is easy on the eye, I’m not sure that her character design is what I’d call strong – she readily morphs from flippant to ponderous, flirtatious to prudent. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to her mood – but, given the open manner in which you can tackle the various areas in the game, that’s kind of understandable. And game-engine cutscenes are, generally, far from horrible – though there’s a ton of typical talking-torsos, some of the mouth and eye animation is delightful. I swear I saw a sparkle in Elika’s eye as she flirted, a dullness when she felt glum, and The Prince’s usual cheeky grin loses its edge with dialogue of weight.

And the dialogue… well, it’s a mixed bag. Some of it’s quite wonderful – touching, emotive. Some of it is dire – the “you should buy her a pony” line that pops up early on is, thankfully, not representative of the rest of the game. There’s some common threads – a constant luck-versus-fate debate, and repeated lewd, tongue-in-cheek references to The Prince’s relationship with his donkey. Rarely does the incidental dialogue get annoying – and, indeed, occasionally it generates some corkers. “This isn’t such a bad view,” said The Prince, with Elika’s arse parked just above him as he climbs a fissure. I laughed, then agreed.

As previously mentioned, it’s surprising that the central plot to Prince of Persia seems to have been “acquired” from Bullet Witch – but let’s face it, the story is merely a means to an end here. What we’re here for is platforming and combat – and what we’re given is slick, polished, and gleaming.

The combat is combo-based button mashing, limited to certain areas, and not very frequent. In fact, there’s only really six enemies in the game – four bosses which are tackled six times each, another recurring character, and the soulless soldiers of darkness that guard the paths between levels. Sure, they gradually increase in difficulty over time, but – as mentioned above – the curve is very gentle. And the combos themselves are almost as much as a delight to perform as they are to behold; it’s possible to string together massive links of sword slashes, Elika bashes, jumps, and throws that are pretty bloody impressive to watch. Mistakes are mostly inconsequential; as soon as you’re in perilous danger, Elika magically appears and yanks you to safety.

The platforming is pretty much the same; watching someone else play is like watching a well-choreographed free-running movie, even if the player is in far less danger than they’d think. Initial plays saw me prodding the action buttons with rampant fury, jerking the control stick to and fro in an attempt to keep The Prince on track; acclimatisation leads to the understanding that you can get by with just a tap here, a nudge there. But it really does look impressive, and in many ways is a perfect demonstration of style over substance: the end sequence (with slow-motion fly-bys lighting the monstrous Ahriman in the dark) evokes great exhilaration, even if the danger is largely imagined. There’s another sequence, in the north-east level of The Warrior’s City, that is absolutely stunning – sure, it’s scripted to all hell, and only requires one real decision of timing to succeed. But I’ll be buggered if my heart wasn’t beating like a drum, holding my breath in anticipation, as I pushed through that sequence – brilliant.

At game’s end, you’re offered the choice – leave the world as it is, or destroy it, undoing all your work. And the Achievements encourage you to both consider the emotional weight of the story progression, as well as wreaking carnage; the player winds up fucking the world for those 80 points of GS. Whether intentional or not, it’s an appreciated mental engagement; as is the dialogue of The Concubine (with the only references to The Prince’s… erm, princeliness) and the final fight with The Warrior, flames lighting the arena in an eerie setting to the hulk’s demise.

In fact, more than once the Prince of Persia evoked memories of Ico – which is horribly unfair to both games. Ico is a stone-cold classic, the quality of which Prince of Persia could only dream of attaining; but the fact that those memories were brought forth at all is, I think, a good thing… it means that companies are trying to conjure something better.

Now, I’ve been waxing lyrical about Prince of Persia for awhile now, but I want to make one thing clear: I don’t think this is a brilliant game. That statement may seem contrary to the rest of this post, but I’d like to think I can maintain a critique of the work separate from my enjoyment of it. And, truth be told, Prince of Persia has too many flaws to be truly considered “great”; some of the dialogue is atrocious, and the essentially western characters don’t exactly evoke the feel of Persia (though incidental tunes and the curves & spires of the world do create a mid-eastern feel). A lot of people claim that the combat system is… well, “shit”, but I had no problems with it. Mind you, I neglected pretty much every attack combo button except “X” most of the time.

The second play-through was fantastic – familiar with the levels, I was able to romp through the game in little more than a handful of hours. And it was only then that I figured out the impact of the deflection in combat; boss battles turned from death-filled wars of attrition to simple romps. The initially daunting “Be gentle with her” achievement (awarded for only requiring Elika’s resurrection ability less than 100 times) took just over six hours, and less than thirty deaths.

And I reckon this was the right game for me at the right time. After subjecting myself to N64-era Zelda games for a month, to be blasted by a game of such visual delight (hey, I love the cel-shaded-lite look) was a joy; to feel compelled by such a straightforward collection quest was a surprise. Prince of Persia hit all the right buttons – visually and sonically impressive, above-par writing, a fantastic ending, gettable Achievements, a cheeky adolescent sense of humour, and – with Elika donning the delicious “Farah” skin – some cute white knicker flashes.

And that’s just fine by me.

Back in May 2006, there was a little event called E3. It was a different gaming world back then: the Xbox 360 had been released, but the RRoD complaints hadn’t started flooding in; Sony’s diabolical press conference was brushed aside by the joyous Nintendo press gig. But Microsoft were the only company there that had next-gen hardware in consumer hands, and they were bigging it up.

To press home the advantage – preaching to the converted, sure – they released all the promo movies they’d collated and curated over Xbox Live Marketplace. For me, this was brilliant; I’d get up every morning, sometimes two or three hours earlier than normal, just to see what had been released overnight. Publisher movies, Microsoft compendiums, I downloaded it all, devoured it. For someone on the opposite side of the world to the action, it was a genuinely exciting time.

One of the movies that, for some bizarre reason, caught my eye was this one. Although I’d heard of Cavia, it seemed that the company was not seen in the most positive of lights; the buzz around Bullet Witch was also muted, but there was something about that trailer that had me convinced that the risk was worth taking. A middling GameTrailers review only further piqued my interest and, after a long and protracted online order / sorry-it’s-unavailable / but-you’ve-already-taken-my-money-and-it’s-available-across-the-road process, I was ready to dive headlong into the world of Alicia, the Bullet Witch.

The game starts with a ridiculous mess of a FMV – it’s all very pretty, but any sense of immersion is immediately arrested by the near-future timeline – the demon hordes are on their way next year, folks! And in just another three years, “2012 – Nations Dead” forecasts the poorly written, half-translated on-screen exposition. And yet, none of that matters the first time you take control of Alicia; in third-person mode, you can move slowly with weapon at the ready, run a little quicker at the expense of a re-arming period, and – using your broomstick-esque gun – mow down hordes of Geist.

You leap through the air with reckless abandon – and, since you’re unable to be shot whilst you’re leaping, you’ll be watching Alicia perform her acrobatic split-leg flips a fair bit. And – let’s be honest here – she looks pretty nice onscreen; yes, her voice acting is pretty average, but nowhere near as bad as that of the leader of the resistance. The AI of all characters would be generously defined as “dumber than dogshit” – your pals do a splendid job of getting in your line-of-fire, and the enemy is easy to manipulate.

Of course, after the delicious titular character, the first thing you notice is her gun… her Very Big Gun. A quick prod of the B button lets you flip between any of four different weapons, once you’ve acquired them via a simplistic RPG-lite levelling system. The initial machine gun is almost pea-shooter-esque, but the gattling gun – by far the most viciously effective weapon – is totally worth the upgrade effort, and almost necessary on later levels. Ammo’s not a problem – you simply reload when the clip is empty, depleting your magic meter temporarily. This – in theory – should encourage you to not waste your shots, since killing your enemy is the only way to replenish your magic meter; in practise, however, you have to be pretty bloody shit to be in a situation where you can’t reload, leading to a practically limitless flow of bullets.

The spells – responsible for the “Witch” part of Alicia’s moniker – are pretty hit-and-miss. These, too, deplete your magic-meter, and there’s only one really useful low-level spell – the ability to push objects around with a blast of telekinesis. Some of the spells are downright impractical – the Rose Spear, which launches a cluster of spears from the ground to perforate & trap enemies, would be useful if it covered an area bigger than a twenty-cent piece. But couple it with a flame-throwing powerup and you’ve got a time-wasting, inefficient and very pretty way to kill demons.

The Big Spells are awarded at fixed points in the linear progression of the game; and they, too, tend to be more trouble than they’re worth. In fact, I reckon casting the Meteor spell has actually killed me more often than it’s helped me, and the Tornado spell is impossible to direct, resulting in a massive chunk of magic being used up with a spluttering tornado scooting off into the distance, cannily dodging your foes. In fact, the only thing the Tornado murders is your framerate. Lightning is the big winner, and it had better be, too – it’s the only way to dispose of a number of the bosses you encounter in the game.

And, speaking of bosses, I just have to mention the (inexplicable) fish creature that you have to battle whilst standing on the wings of an airplane traveling at 30,000 feet. Go on, read that sentence again – it just doesn’t make sense, yet is spot-on-the-money in the context of the game. This boss battle was an utter shitpig – more luck than skill was required – and the few opportunities for skill were subject to the distraction of the sheer ludicrous nature of the scenario.

The final boss, too, was a bastard… sometimes seeing you invest a good 45 minutes of cautious shooting before being killed by a single errant stomp. Which is demoralising enough in itself – but when you’re trying to complete the game for the fifth time, on the highest skill level, for the reward of a single solitary GamerScore point, that instakill death is doubly galling. The post-game FMV, another piece of poorly-written exposition, just reminds you how crapulent the writing for Bullet Witch was: “Demon numbers diminishing. No sign of increase” proclaims the front-page headline of The National Times – “the world’s daily newspaper.” Then again, Nations did die off in 2012, so maybe that’s fair enough. “Tower of Pisa struck by lightning. Italy loses national treasure” screams another headline, supposed to inspire questions in my mind of what becomes of Alicia in the post-game; but by that time I’m just waiting for the credits to finish rolling.

Still, it’s not all bad; with the exception of the Big Spells, any spells or power-ups accrued throughout your game (points are gained on the basis of kills, elapsed time, and damage taken) carry over to subsequent games… Hell Mode isn’t so daunting with a Level 3 Gattling Gun. Achievements are reasonable – apart from that 1-point insult – and the game itself is pretty short: maybe only a dozen hours for your first play-through, and there’s plenty of shortcuts (and the benefit of the accruing power-ups) to ease you through the harder skill levels. And then there’s the DLC – each level has an alternate task for a mere 20 Microsoft Points apiece (ummm… no), and then there’s the downloadable costumes for sweet Alicia.

…well, given that they’re free, it’d be rude not to check them all out, wouldn’t it? Nothing pervy in that at all.

Let’s cut to the chase: the schoolgirl and secretary costumes are both worth the cost of the game. Delicious. In fact, they provided the visual highlights of my runs through the harder skill levels – with the somewhat dubious nature of the character physics prone to send limbs akimbo, it wasn’t too annoying to die.

No, wait. It was still annoying to die, despite any potential panty-peeking opportunities, because Bullet Witch suffers many of the worst traits of gaming: it’s unbalanced, unfair, unforgiving, and – worst of all – unfun.

And that’s the big shame of a game like Bullet Witch; it had so much potential, but pissed it all away with lousy writing and shallow gameplay. It just goes to show that two key ingredients – hot female protagonist, and massive guns – do not, by themselves, a tasty cake make.

So I’m still playing Mercenaries 2 a bit this moment, hammering my way through the game again using the “other two” characters. My OCD target for this game is to unlock all the unlockables (duh), fully explore the dialog trees – different for each of the characters – and check out all the FMVs in all scenarios, finishing up with three 100% character saves. Easy enough, I think – my first 100% play-through was about eighty(!) hours, but that included much faffing about capturing – rather than killing – key bad guys to garner a big fat 50-point Achievement.

This task is made particularly difficult by the fact that the enemy AI is so blinkered and trigger-happy that a careless assault can see enemy minions fill the very chap they’re supposed to be protecting – and who you want to claim alive – full of lead. Or explodey stuff.

Which is bad. And forces you to reload. And play that bit again. And, most likely, again.

Anyway, I was happy in that I’d performed that onerous task (there’s 50-ish of these High Value Targets to capture alive, rather than photograph dead) already, and subsequent playthroughs would be a doddle – I’d just airstrike them to oblivion, then stroll in and take a verifying photo when the area was scorched earth and bereft of life. But then I learned that the penultimate FMV is different depending on whether you’ve captured all the HVTs or not.

Shit. Shitting shit.

My estimate for completion for this game has just bumped out by another forty or fifty hours. And I have to chuck away a three-quarters complete playthrough with the American mercenary – by far the least fun of the three to play with. But such is life… *sigh*

With the turmoil in my life outside the nice fluffy goodness of gaming (yes, I didn’t completely give all other aspects of life to get No Collisions) reaching a stressful crescendo this week, I’m taking the soft option and pulling out an easy post this Sunday night. There’s not really been much gaming, anyway – I’ve been plugging away at Mercenaries 2, finishing the game through one path (of six), and giggling at some of the shitty voice acting and clunky programming – watching Agent Joyce call himself on the radio to alert himself that I was beating his face in was most amusing. So much more to do, though.

And so to the topic of this post: more gaming music. This idea was seeded by a post on the Llamasoft Blog a while back which announced that the soundtrack for Space Giraffe was available for free download. “So what?” I hear you say, “there’s only four songs on there.” Yes, but one it the super-wonderful Satipn, created by the equally-super-wonderful Redpoint who, by coincidence, have just released their latest collection of tunes, Nostalgia For Now – well worth the pittance they’re charging (and they offer a FLAC download, too). Most of Redpoint’s back-catalogue – including the stunning Firem – is available gratis (legit!) from Hidden Music… which is home to Covert, whose latest release Symbolic is a beautifully retro-tinged harbour of melancholic goodness. Highly recommended, all.

Releasing gaming soundtracks is, of course, nothing new – the number of CDs available of (say) music from the Final Fantasy series is, quite simply, staggering. In fact, my first ever purchase off eBay was a pair of (bootleg) Jet Set Radio / Future CDs. But the release of tunes for free is a little rarer; some recent releases include the score for Bioshock (as advertised on The Cult of Rapture on August 24, 2007 – check “Articles” for the original posting, and also an interview with composer Garry Schyman). Another recommended download is the soundtrack to The Longest Journey.

Of course, you could always do the somewhat-dubious perhaps-legit method of soundtrack acquisition – a modded Xbox yields all manner of raw source material, from ADX files of all of Jet Set Radio Future’s rockin’ radio mixes, to raw WAVs from Panzer Dragoon Orta. There’s more goodies to be had by peeking into Super Galdelic Hour’s PS2 disk, too, as well as the raw CD-format audio present on games such as Quake and N2O.

Shadier still are the torrent and rip sites. Poking around the seedier places on the Internet at the moment will probably have you tripping over complete compilations of all music from the Wipeout series – which, as much as it is lauded, really failed to impress me much. Give me the bright and bouncy JSRF soundtracks, anyday!

And now our mega-games seem to require mega-soundtracks. Check out the track listing for GTA4 – that’s an astonishing number of songs. And, as much as I can claim disinterest in Saints Row 2, the tracklist for radio station The Mix is just about perfect for this child of the eighties.

And if you followed that last link, it would just confirm what you probably suspected: that you should stop reading this post now. Because my cloth ears are hopelessly nostalgic and my opinions rooted in the eighties… and that’s good for maybe three people out there. One of whom is me.

So, music, yeah? Ummm… check some of the above links out. Throw some money Redpoint’s way. And next week, hopefully, I’ll write something about a game… fancy that.

The earliest reference to Rez I can remember reading was had Jeff Minter denouncing its gameplay, claiming it was “Panzer Dragoon with trance trousers.” Which meant nothing to me, until I snaffled Panzer Dragoon Orta on the recommendation of an Edge review. At that time, I had little-to-no understanding what a rail-based shooter was all about – but Orta sure taught me all about it. I still love the occasional bash at Orta (which, due to the Hard mode and all the fiddly little mini-games – and the original Panzer Dragoon – is still on The List), and it sparked an interest in the genre.

And then I recalled Minter’s words.

Rez, eh?

I already had a Dreamcast – Jet Set Radio forced my hand in that direction. A bit of eBaying led to a pricey, but mint, copy of Rez. Then came a period of days where I learnt all about the dodgy GD-ROM pressing that led to most Dreamcasts being unable to read the Rez discs. Worry not – it’s possible to adjust the GD-ROM laser (similar to the C64 Datasette’s azimuth adjustment) to read finicky discs; a bit of hardware hacking, a lot of time, a smidgeon of panic when the Dreamcast failed to read any discs, and finally Rez was booted.

And fuck me if it wasn’t magnificent.

The first level, Area 1, will go down as one of my favourite levels of any game ever – purely for the aural accompaniment. I feel like I’ve written this a million times before, but the sonic punch provided when you enter Areas 1-4 and 1-8 – “breathing” – has attained almost spiritual significance to me; the choice of Buggie Running Beeps as this (almost tutorial) level’s soundtrack is inspired. Visually, Area 1 provides a trippy introduction too.

But Area 4 is the one that I love the most (and yes, I realise this means that Rez has two of my favourite game levels ever – but I feel obliged to give credit where credit is due). For a long time Area 4 gave me grief – it was my stumbling block, the one that made me feel uneasy. But, with two years of hindsight, it’s also the level that excites me the most – I find the graphics to be the most arresting of the game (even over Area 5, which is the reason most people give for Rez’s greatness) – the Running Man boss is simply incredible. Joujouka’s soundtrack is edgy, driving you on through the level with rising levels of adrenaline and concern, building to a thumping crescendo; end-to-end, it’s a wonderful level, surpassing Area 1’s dull boss and Area 5’s introspective length. Area 4 is simply a miracle of gaming, one of the few times that the audiovisual experience is all-enveloping, all encompassing.

And yes – I do have the Trance Vibrator for my PS2 copy of Rez (a far less pristine version of the game, I might add; a most-definitely second-hand eBay acquisition, the PS2 version makes the hacking rainbows more colourful). Whilst my SO looked at me with what can only optimistically be described as quizzical indifference when I indicated Game Girl Advance’s Rez exploits, I found that it was a brilliant addition to the game – playing the PS2 version, Trance Vib behind a cushion nestled into the small of my back, was a sublime experience.

And so we come to 2008, and the long awaited release of Rez HD – and I’ve never been more excited about a game’s release, never felt so much anticipation. Having to travel for work determined the release date, with 2,000kms deemed an attractive torture device by Fate. Whilst others were blissfully playing through Area 1, I was half-drunk; I lay on my bed in the dark and listened to the soundtrack rips that have accompanied me everywhere on my MP3 player for the last 4(-ish) years. The backs of my eyelids glowed with the recreation of the visual experience that I know all-too-well, yet not well enough; Areas 1 and 4 came alive for me.

The plane ride home Saturday night was nominally two-and-a-half-hours, but felt much longer; I listened to that soundtrack again, over and over, while clouds and land and sea drifted below me. The plane only had a smattering of passengers, so I was unabashed in weeping with joy, weeping with anticipation, grinning like a loon – for I was on my way to play Rez again. A bigger, bolder, brighter, louder Rez.

I got home, kissed the SO, and played.

Oh yes. Oh yes.

But more on that later. Another day, when typing is easier because the tips of my thumb (which prove to be ever-so-useful for hitting the space bar) ache so much from the mashing I’ve given them the last 24 hours. Easily my best Score Attack scores, and even a miraculous 98% run through Area 5. I love this game.

But I’ll leave with this little tale:

When I had my little jaunt around the UK in 2004, the RLLMUK rips of the Rez soundtrack never left my MP3 player. Not once. Pretty impressive when you consider that it was only a 512MB player. There were so many dream-like instances where I’d be coasting through the English countryside – by train, bus – and have sunlight streaming through the window onto my face, the greens and whites and blues passing by, enveloped in a state of bliss. At those times I’d often reflect, a little self-indulgently, that this life I was leading was just a game, a game that – like so many others – I was only moderately “good” at, but I was having an absolute ball playing. And Rez provides the perfect soundtrack, the perfect metaphor, for that game of life.

Bloody hell. My earlier post must have jinxed it, eh? Well, reverse-jinxed it. Positively affected future outcomes.

It did good, anyway. A Royal Flush is mine, after a mere 11,086 hands of Texas Hold’Em on XBLA.

And when I say “mine”, I really mean “the power brick which sat atop the A-button for the last 2,000 hands.” And before the power brick was a Charles Petzold book.

No matter; I’m now sporting a shiny “Luck of the Draw” Achievement. Yay!

My avatar is crouched upon a rooftop, my foe on a rooftop two buildings away. A tiny overhang protects me from their gunfire; a city bustles around me. I leap up, instantly targeting an enemy in the middle of the group. Away scoots a homing missile. Or maybe two, I’m feeling feisty.

As I fall back to the rooftop, an explosion rocks the screen. Seconds later, a collection of tiny little orbs of light stream to my body, increasing my avatar’s competencies; I level up with a glorious feeling of power, accompanied by an awesome bass-heavy ‘FFFFFWOOOOOOOOMPSSSSSSHHHH’, my avatar erupting with new-found strength.

This is the joy of Crackdown, a game that is almost impossible to categorise. The popular description would include words like “open-ended sandbox” – after all, there’s no load times as you roam the three districts of Pacific City, and you’re free to tackle the tasks of the game in any order you please. But there’s so much more to it than that; RPG influences are blended with a fantastic selection of weaponry and vehicles, a refined sense of grittiness, and huge dollops of tongue-in-cheek thrown in. Racing, time-attacks, head-shots, stunt jumps, and some of the fiendish collect-em-ups ever… it’s all in there.

And then there’s the map. The world. Pacific City. Never before has a gameworld been so convincingly three-dimensional. Sure, you can run/kick/punch/drive your way from La Mugre to The Den, but why bother when you can leap from rooftop to rooftop, with a tense nail-biting ascent of the Agency Tower on the way? Granted, it’s completely devoid of “plot” – relying instead on the snippets of stories surrounding the three tribes and 21 bosses. As the game ends, there’s a sinister little twist that you kinda-sorta knew was coming, but it feels like an afterthought; after all, Crackdown isn’t about plot; it’s about a place, a premise. And it doesn’t suffer because of it.

I’m one of the few people that bought Crackdown on release for the game itself, and not the Halo 3 multiplayer beta that it carried with it; I’d seen demo movies of the game as part of a previous E3 showing, and became utterly smitten with the comic-esque graphic treatment. Sadly, that effect was toned down somewhat for the final release, but Crackdown pulls no punches in the visuals, with a tremendous draw distance and the ability to inspire vertigo with the sheer verticality on offer. Sonically, it’s functional – but with a great selection of tunes on offer whenever you jump in a car. And there’s no denying the aural power of the music in this clip of sample Achievements.

And what a collection of Achievements! At once tempting, difficult, and ingenious, they extend the playtime by hours… and, most importantly, encourage you to explore the co-op multiplayer. And here is where Crackdown claims the GotY crown for its own: whilst Halo 3’s multiplayer provides squillions of laughs (especially when you have 7 mates joining you for Rocket Races), nothing comes close to the co-op of Crackdown. Nothing quite compares to dropping into a mate’s game, helping him attack a tower packed with bad guys; covering each other’s ascent whilst racking up a massive body count. Suddenly, you accidentally pop him in the head with a rocket launcher – a completely innocent shot of extreme accuracy – and the enemy is forgotten, with pistols at dawn as you hunt each other down.

With rockets.

And you continue to hunt each other, silently cheering your own death (because it results in you getting more rockets).

Hours later, you remember why hooked up in the first place; you meander back across Pacific City and finish the intended attack. Then you shoot each other some more, before trying to help each other jump through suspended purple rings. With the help of rockets. Of course.

And that, my friends, is why Crackdown is my Game of the Year. Still compelling after 10 months, still able to generate a cheesey grin, still capable of providing challenge and laughs and entertainment… and wall-to-wall fun. The only game I’ve started playing on a second GamerTag, just so I can have the thrill of gaining those Achievements again. Yes, it’s that special.

So – job’s a good ‘un, then.

My final Space Giraffe task – to at least equal my pre-update level scores – is complete. A surprisingly hard slog, too, but such was the joy of Super Ox Mode.

“Super Ox Mode,” you say? Yep – when you ERROR_SUCCESS (beat level 100 for the first time) you also unlock the ability to play the Giraffe in a far more aggressive manner. I start Super Ox Mode by holding down the Y-button whilst I hit the A-button on the pre-Level select screen.

What’s Super Ox Mode all about, then? Well, it’s harder – from just-a-smidgeon-harder to completely-fucking-impossible. First up – enemies nearly always get an upgrade. Passive grunts start shooting, feedback monsters become aggressive feedback monsters, dull ploddy boffins become aggressive boffins. Apart from that, the waves stay pretty much the same.

…but the webs do not. They’re still the 100 webs we know and love, but every time you get a “New Start Bonus Set” (or somesuch) message, their order is randomised. So you play Level 1 and face the simple Level 1 waves on the heinous Level 53 web, or you might select Level 100 and be presented with an easier, circular web. Or it might go pear-shaped, and you’ve still got the Level 100 waves on the Level 64 web. Christ that was bad.

Anyway…

The lovely, score-maximising potential of Super Ox Mode mainly comes from the extra bullets the aggressive enemies lob your way. Juggling bullets is an incredible score maximiser; each time you bounce a bullet back by shooting it, you seem to add more “value” to it; the next time you juggle it, it appears to net more points. So with a fleet of bullets hovering at the end of the web that you can keep at bay with careful sweeping, and a friendly rotor hovering at the other side of the web, it’s possible to get some massive scores on seemingly insignificant levels.

Of course, the random allocation of the webs is a bit of a bastard; what I did was to ascertain whether the web currently allocated to my Level-of-focus was doable. If not, I’d drop back to normal mode and get another Start Bonus Set, inching the score up slightly; when I got a “good” web, I’d sweat on it until I thought I had it nailed. Remember – as soon as you see that “New Start Bonus Set” message in either mode, it’ll randomise the Super Ox Mode webs again; so, if I felt I could rinse the level better, I’d quit the game before the message appears at the start of the next level.

By the time I’d finished, my score of 857,640,088 had me second on the world rankings. Of course, the score above me was over 2 billion, and the score below me was a touch over 800 million… at level 76. So there’s obviously massive opportunities to snaffle even more points; but for me, the Giraffe is done.

And it was a wonderful, wonderful ride :)

Coincidences are weird, aren’t they?

I’ve just finished getting my final Achievement for Dig Dug and, in between pumping my fist into the air in triumph, started drifting through the gaming-news-of-the-day.

I spot an article by fellow Aussie Luke Plunkett on Kotaku: I’m Free of my Achievement Complex. It seems that, due to a minor snafu with multiple accounts, he lost about 6,000 GS of Achievements.

Ouch. Double ouch, with a stabbing on top.

But, rather than being mad as hell (as I would have been in that position… after I dammed the river of tears, anyway), Plunkett saw it as a liberation, a chance to be rid of the Curse of unachieved Achievements. Which I can kind of appreciate: I’d trade a kidney – and probably a testicle – to have not had Astro Pop grace my Gamer Card.

Back to the coincidence – during my Space Giraffe scoring spree, I thought a quick blast of Dig Dug was a good palate-cleanser. Coincidentally enough, I’d only bought Dig Dug during another Giraffe break because (a) it was a mere 200 MS Points, and (2) I still harboured some guilt from having a dodgy copy on the C64 all those years ago. The night I bought it, a quick game or two gave a lazy 8 (of 12) Achievements – but a bit of research revealed that one of the remaining Achievements, “Dig”, was… well, a bit of a bitch, frankly. Tales of woe exist everywhere – whinges about failures to unlock were countered with helpful tips and “works for me”-isms which were subsequently followed by more whinges and threats that Microsoft had better fix this game or else.

Anyway…

I finally returned to Dig Dug, and was adamant that my brand spanking new Hori EX2 Arcade Stick would provide oodles of assistance (as opposed to the deservedly-maligned 360 controller D-pad). An hour or two of frustration later (much musing over whether it was better to tackle Level 1 with two Pookas, or Level 2 with two Fygars), and the Achievement was mine. The remaining collect-em-up Achievements quickly followed, and Dig Dug was complete – ticked off the To-Do List, probably never to be played again.

But the fact remains that I had returned to it, and the only reason why was because of those outstanding Achievements. For the O/C Gamer, it makes it very easy to define the extent of the game: get the full allotment of GS, tick the game off – it’s done. Which is, in a way, much easier to handle than something like “complete the game on every skill level, collecting every item, one-handed”. Sometimes Achievements set the bar low – Dig Dug’s item collection is a rudimentary “completion”, at best, and EDF 2017’s brace of tasks were just plain thoughtless. Sometimes Achievements are a bit silly – 1 point for Bullet Witch’s Hell Mode? Nearly half of Gears of War’s points coming from ranked online matches? People attempting to subvert ranked online games to speedify their GamerScore plumpification?

But many other cases provide lovingly selected, gameplay-extending ideas. The meta-game targets in Halo 3. Crackdown’s grinningly loony little destructive side-quests. Even the Ridge Racer 6 No Crash Victory takes the original game and squeezes it into a new shape, yielding hours more enjoyment.

So – Achievements can be good, and they can be bad. I admit that, if a game is teetering on the edge of purchase, I’ll consider at the perceived difficulty of the Achievements before making a decision. But could I turn my back – as Plunkett did – on my gameplay? Hell no. The O/C Gamer requires proof of Achievement, for better or worse – and those lovely little icons and common nomenclature between gamers really hits the spot.

About that coincidence… bugger it, it’s in there somewhere. It made sense when I sketched this piece out :}

So – a week later and, having lost some time to a spot of illness and a spate of Halo 3 hijinks, my Space Giraffe quest continues…

As you can see, there’s a teensy bit of daylight opening up between the new scores and the old. I’m pretty happy that I’ve managed to best every level score so far, though some (which, no doubt, were inflated by an opportunistic Bonus Level or two) were bloody difficult. Of course, on the other side of the coin are levels that I managed to improve by over 40 million points. Needless to say, the Giraffe is still brilliant fun.

Catching up on some reading recently, I’ve noticed a few of the more… ummmm… thoughtful blogs level the (sadly common) “visual overload” criticism at the Giraffe. My take on the pyrotechnics is this: every game requires the player to learn the visual presentation of information, whether it’s a representation of a maze or a fancy new HUD. Space Giraffe offers one hundred opportunities to learn, to experience, to manipulate; all the information is still there, it’s just a matter of learning how to see it. A great example is Level 52, where the camera perspective shifts; initially, it’s nigh-on impossible to ascertain exactly what’s going on, let alone where it’s happening… but suddenly something in your brain clicks, and the information is as clearly presented as it would be in print. I loved those moments of realisation, coupled with the moments where you can step outside your head, look at the cacophony onscreen, and think “woah – that’s a mess. And I’m going to win because of it.”

Despite a chunk of the day being taken up by OC-ing Super Paper Mario (and other bits of “life” – sigh), progress on restoring my Space Giraffe score is going pretty well… swimmingly, actually. I’m about 30 million points up on my pre-update scores, and only up to Level 18! Level 15 was a complete bastard, though, and took the best part of 2 hours to nail an adequate score… here’s hoping further progress doesn’t hit too many more snags like that :}

As you (and by “you”, I mean “me” – nobody else reads this shit, do they?) might have guessed from my last post, right after I posted my six-weeks-in-gestation Tempest post, the Space Giraffe patch was released onto Xbox Live – removing the old exploits and resetting the Leaderboards as a consequence. So I updated, and leapt into a game… which just happened to launch me to the top of the Leaderboards for a second or so.

The most difficult Achievement in the Giraffe is, undoubtedly, the Long-Necked Long March – starting at Level 1, ploughing through every level in the game ’til you beat Level 100. Last night’s game was the second time I’d seen my LNLM attempt bomb out at Level 88; this morning was the second time I’d bombed out at Level 92 (after a particularly hideous brace of levels in the late 80’s). So, instead of beginning another assault (hey – these attempts were over two hours each!), I thought I’d start trying to resurrect my Level scores, and start the climb back to 400+ million.

Several attempts at Level 1 (using the time-honoured slow-start-left-inch-bull-left technique) saw me better my previous best by about 60,000 points. Level 2 went pretty well too, and before I knew it I was in the thirties, forties, sixties. The seventies sailed by, and – as usual – 88 and 89 tripped me mightily, reducing my lives dramatically. I only just scraped through Level 92 with one life in hand – I was stoked, though, as I’d never managed this before. I glean an extra life or two, and start playing ultra-conservatively…

…and suddenly I’m on Level 97 with 5 lives in hand. Holy shit, I think to myself, I can do this. I whore for lives, snaffling an extra three. I’m starting to shake; I sense the adrenaline starting to cause jitters, my hands shake when I take them off the controller. I take a break, try to calm down… Level 98 is smooth sailing, but I’ve never had problems with it before. Unlike Level 99, which has always given me grief.

I take another break, thinking calming thoughts.

I return to Level 99, and it becomes apparent that something is different. I’m playing this level completely differently, and have one of those weird out-of-body experiences where I look on in wonder. My giraffe dances about the rim, leaping over those bastard spiky buggers before blasting them to smithereens; I am ZONING, I am at One with the Game. The level ends; I’ve got 9 lives in hand, with one level to play.

I risk the ZONE and take another break. My legs are jelly, my hands are trembling mush. I return to my 360, pick up the controller; I try to recall my previous mental state, then begin Level 100. Its lazy opening jars me a little, the calm before the storm I know is coming – I just want the action, dammit! – but soon the zappy things appear, followed closely by spiky bastards and screaming flowers and feedback monsters…

…and then I’m through. The little Achievement toast pops up, and I view it with almost disbelief. The game is over; I have won. 377 million points are on the board (4th on the new Leaderboard), when all I really wanted was the 320 thousand from Level 1. I throw my hands in my air when it hits me – I have walked the Long-Necked Long March.

And so, but one task remains before I put a tick next to Space Giraffe in the To-Do List: return my scores to their original, pre-update levels. But, having missed my personal best tallied score by a mere 25-odd million on a LNLM run, I’m beginning to think I’m going to aim higher…