Max Payne 3 - Review

Due to the success of games such as Grand Theft Auto IV, Red Dead Redemption and LA Noire, many have come to expect the Rockstar Games label to exclusively deliver free-roaming, immersive world experiences. It was for this reason that I was hesitant to pick up Max Payne 3 - a sequel to the groundbreaking Remedy games series that plainly announced its intentions to deliver nothing more than a linear, cinematic campaign.
In this modern video gaming era, players are given so much freedom of choice. They can roam a vast world hunting dragons and pursuing numerous optional quests in Skyrim. They can choose any item from a vast arsenal to engage their enemy in Battlefield 3 and leave a crumbling, battle scarred terrain in their wake. They can ride around, blasting away fellow players and gangs of NPC bandits in Rockstar's own Red Dead Redemption multiplayer and explore a vast story terrain in the single player. With games like these occupying our attention, is there really still room for the linear storyline?

Prometheus - Review

It's been nearly a week since I saw Ridley Scott's Prometheus at the cinema, and since then the film has occupied that vague part of my mind, somewhere between 'enjoyment' and 'disappointment.' It's taken me a while to find myself in a position to write a fair review, and that's primarily because the film did not meet my expectations, for positive and negative reasons. Infact, I imagine many viewers will find themselves surprised by the product of Scott's much publicised return to science-fiction, and without a doubt, the film will divide audiences quite decisively. It's the type of movie that ignites interesting debates across the board, but sadly for Prometheus, I can't imagine all of those debates will positively reflect the film.

Greatest Movie Weapons

Many weapons have been used by our favourite characters throughout the history of cinema, but only rarely do those weapons become so ingrained in the mythology of the film that they become extensions of the characters, and even become symbolic of a franchise. In the following list, I've selected (in no particular order) what I think to be the most interesting, inventive and iconic weaponry to grace the screen over the past few decades.

M41-A Pulse Rifle (Aliens)
The primary firearm of the Colonial Marines from James Cameron's Aliens, the M41-A is an assault rifle capable of firing 10mm caseless armour piercing rounds, and is also fitted with a pump-action underslung grenade launcher and a digital ammunition counter for monitoring the capacity of its 95 round magazines. The prop itself was constructed from a live firing WW2 era Thompson sub-machine gun, the action of a Remington 870 shotgun and the casing from a SPAS-12 assault shotgun all fused together under a manufactured carry shroud. The principal weapon design was sketched out by Cameron himself, and its distinctive firing sound is instantly recognisable.

Alien and Prometheus

Space Jockey in Alien, 1979

With Prometheus only a few short days away, I find myself trying to understand the film I'm about to see. Is it a fully fledged Alien prequel, or an entirely original film with minor Alien influences? Will it be a horror film, or is it a sci-fi epic with horror elements? Will the film conclude where 1979's Alien began - despite the Director insisting that it doesn't contain the planetoid or the crashed alien vessel from that earlier movie - or will it expand the series in new directions? We know the Space Jockey will feature at some point, but will the original alien organism also make an appearance? Or are we getting an entirely new variant of the Xenomorph's life cycle?

Call Of The Military FPS

Battlefield 3 - Quite stunning on a high spec PC

It's hard to think that running around on a virtual battlefield, trying to shoot the opposing player in the face to score bonus points towards your next weapon unlock was once a novel idea. While it was fresh and groundbreaking in the likes of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the formula is now as tired and predictable as the cliched action heroes who were once the stars of the the previous generation of corridor action shooter. Now, we get a new Call of Duty game every year, each one being nothing but a minor readjustment of the previous outing on the same tired and dated graphics engine. Once upon a time, material like this would only have been fit for an expansion pack. And in some cases, that expansion pack would have been free.

But in this modern gaming age, hordes of fans swarm to the shops to pick up the latest edition of their favourite title (currently COD 4.3) even though they essentially own the same game already. They pay £40 for it (£60+ for collectors editions), and then they start forking out for add-on packs to enhance the experience. If they're simple minded enough, they'll even pay an extra £40 a year to subscribe to Call of Duty Elite, essentially paying for a game twice and binding themselves into an agreement to play the game relentlessly until all DLC has been released and they've got their money's worth. It's almost forcing the buyer into a contract with the game - if they decide to trade it in or walk away before it finishes its DLC run, the publisher doesn't have to worry, because they've already got the customer's money. They're essentially helping themselves to the wallets of millions of narrow minded gamers who play these mainstream shooters because they are 'fun' or 'everyone else is playing them' or they get a vague sense of achievement in their lives from prestiging ten times and getting a shiny gold gun. If you were to argue this point with any of these fanboys, they would defend their COD hobby to the bitter end, insisting on its importance despite the fact that all their efforts to level up and 'achieve' will be pointless once the next game comes along, and they have to start the process all over again. Rinse and repeat.

But it's not just Call of Duty. EA's Battlefield 3 is heading down the same path, set to announce a paid subscription service later this year and also pulling support for its official servers, instead leaving it to the players to rent servers through the game interface at extra cost. While Battlefield's more sandbox approach to the genre is admirable, and it pushes the envelope in terms of graphics quality and scale, it's clearly a game living in the shadow of mega blockbuster Call of Duty, and the pains the developers are going through to try and emulate COD's success are starting to become obvious. Battlefield - a once genuinely innovative PC shooter and a leader in its field - is dumbing it down in order to appeal to the mass market of twitch shooter junkies.

But again, it's not just Battlefield. Any developer who wants to release a shooter these days must add an obligatory Call of Duty inspired multiplayer mode - complete with awards and killstreaks - in order to stand any chance of success. The upcoming FarCry 3 - which you might expect to be a single player experience about a man fighting for survival on a sandbox tropical island - contains a multiplayer mode with points for kills, weapon unlocks, levelling and killstreaks. It's sad that all of these games will be merely living in the shadow of COD. By sacrificing their own multiplayer identity in favour of trying to pick up a few stray COD fanboys, they will never be recognised as anything but poor imitations of an overrated formula. Originality is dwindling due to the ridiculous demand for more and more of the same, much in the way the demand for sequels and remakes has damaged the film industry.

Achievements?

I'm not saying this as someone who hates video games or military shooters. I love them. I bought every Call of Duty game up until the first Black Ops, and I've played almost every Battlefield game DICE has released up to and including the current Battlefield 3. But then I realised the lengths the developers of current titles were going to in order to gain access to my wallet long after I'd paid for the game in the shop. I realised there were an extraordinary number of gamers who would walk into a video game store and be utterly oblivious to the fact that there's anything else worth playing except Call of Duty. I realised the rinse and repeat setup of the games was driving me nuts and making me rage at my Xbox like a murderous psychopath, but I couldn't stop playing due to my unconscious desire to obtain another weapon unlock or modification.
While all video games have to deliver a certain sense of accomplishment in order to make the experience rewarding for the player, the current wave of military shooters have refined this formula to perfection. The format is painfully addictive, using stat tracking and achievements to take advantage of the human need to compete, complete and collect. And once they have a broad market of players wrapped up in their multiplayer world, the publishers of these games can charge whatever premium they want for downloadable content. Sure it's good fun to play, but once you've delivered the same template in six nearly identical Call of Duty games in as many years (and that's not including its imitators), it starts to become quite stale. But the average gamer laps it up year after year, and that's why Call of Duty will always stay fundamentally the same. The developers have been pressured into a corner where they're encouraged not to change anything substantial for fear of it not selling. And thus the creative barrier is reached.

Call of Duty 4 - The last time the series was truly innovative

With my current Battlefield 3 playtime at an astonishing 7 days 10 hours and 47 minutes (which I'm sure is nothing when compared to some), and Call of Duty long out of the picture for anything but alcohol fuelled splitscreen gaming parties, I've decided to take a step back from the military shooter in an attempt to find something more daring and original. Aliens Colonial Marines looks promising from a horror/shooter standpoint, as long as it utilises the strengths of the movie franchise to create a unique multiplayer experience and doesn't try to emulate Call of Duty.
I might even try a niche, low-budget WW2 flight simulator while I'm at it (Birds of Steel) which is currently being reviewed as the best combat flight simulator on the console, if not on any platform. I wonder how many people might thoroughly enjoy that game, but will miss it entirely due to the dominance of Call of Duty or Battlefield 3 in their console experience? My local supermarket isn't even stocking this new release simulator, possibly because their shelf space is taken up by dozens of pre-order cases for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, which isn't even due out until November.
Infact, I may even go back and finish Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which was a gripping single-player adventure with a genuine sense of player choice and atmosphere, and had me gripped until Battlefield reared its head and all other games were all but forgotten.
I know I'll eventually go back to Battlefield in order to rejoin the online ranks of multiplayer, and I'll no doubt grudgingly part with my cash in order to get the most from the game I'm playing. It's a predicament all current-gen gamers face - they know they're being taken for fools, but the temptation is all too much.
There's a whole world of video games out there, and it feels refreshing to acknowledge their existence, even for a little while. Indie and low budget game studios are struggling to stay afloat despite their valid concepts and lesser financial motivations, and if we want innovative games for the future, we need to start supporting them now, and not lining the pockets of studios who have limited their creativity to 'whatever sells.' Dare to play something different.