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Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories – 15 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/26/2020

Posted in: PlayStation 2, PSP, Sony Consoles. Tagged: grand theft auto, gta, liberty city stories, open world, rockstar games. Leave a comment

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Rockstar Leeds

Release Date: 10/24/2005 (PSP), 06/06/2006 (PS2), 12/17/2015 (iOS), 02/11/2016 (AND)

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Grand Theft Auto was an unstoppable juggernaut in the early to mid-2000s. With the rise of the PSP and its new near PS2 quality visuals, it was a perfect match for the series. Liberty City Stories wasn’t simply a GTA3 port, but a whole new story and set of missions set within the same world. The exact copy of GTA3’s Liberty City is ripped out of the PS2 and copied on the PSP with grace and detail. I felt like I was playing GTA3 the entire time through my 10-hour campaign, but it came with caveats.

When you jump into a car for the first time LCS has that classic GTA feel. Arcadey physics, campy humor, and unrealistic everything else. You can run people over, get 5-star police wanted ratings, jump off cliffs, and do everything else you could do in GTA3. It’s a sight to behold on such a small system. Driving is probably the most enjoyable aspect of LCS including the missions that have you driving the most. When you jump out of the car is when things go awry.

Combat is abysmal in this game and really brings it down. Since there is no right analog stick you must rely on a lock-on system that just doesn’t work. Half of the time if you aren’t facing an enemy shooting at you there will be no lock-on causing cheap deaths. There is no cover system, so missions are tailored toward the console with slightly better controls. It’s impossible to gun down two dozen enemies while also only being able to take 4-5 shots before dying. This is the most infuriating thing about LCS and really brings the score down. I had to use cheats to finish the game. I died maybe 10-15 times on several missions even with cheats! Having only a few enemies is manageable and some missions felt tailored towards the PSP controls and some didn’t. There were missions I really thought were fun, but then I’d be thrown into a multi-part mission and die a dozen times on the last part just to have to restart all over again. It also doesn’t help that you don’t make much money in this game quickly so every time you die or get arrested your weapons are gone. For some missions I was stuck with no money and had to have a weapon so I had to use a weapon cheat. The game’s flow was not thought out very well.

At least the story and characters are entertaining. While not as fleshed out as later games in the series Toni Cipriani and his fellow employers are all classic GTA-style characters and I enjoyed seeing them on screen. The radio stations are back and are one of my favorite parts of the game. Driving around listening to the hilarious commentary is gold. Due to the small volume space on the PSP disc, there isn’t much of it. I would start to hear repeated stuff about a quarter of the way through the game which is a shame, but the game supports custom soundtracks which are nice. There is a multiplayer mode, but it’s nothing really special. You and a buddy can basically wreak havoc over ad-hoc. You can participate in races, taxi, and first responder missions, but there’s nothing special here that wasn’t in GTA3 or is PSP exclusive.

The visuals of the game are pretty impressive, but there is a lot of slowdown and pop-ups. LCS pushes the system to its limits, and the amount of detail is crazy. There are reflections when it rains, tons of traffic and pedestrians, and large buildings loom over the horizon. The sound is great as well as it feels like a living breathing city despite how little interaction there is. But, on the surface, after the story is over there’s no real reason to come back unless you just want to ride around causing mayhem.

Overall, LCS is an incredible technical feat but is brought down by a mission structure not tailored for the handheld’s control system. It’s way too easy to die with missions that require sometimes dozens of enemies firing at you all at once, which leads to dozens of restarts and endless frustration. There’s a lot of slowdown and pop-in, and the radio stations start repeating after only a couple of hours, but that’s just the roughness of the original GTA open-world games. They weren’t perfect but were enjoyable thanks to their sense of freedom and great writing and character design. I recommend playing LCS, but keep the cheat sheet handy as you will need it since there are no difficulty options.

Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne – 17 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/20/2020

Posted in: Mac, Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 2, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox. Tagged: max payne 2, remedy entertainment, rockstar games, the fall of max payne, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Release Date: 10/14/2003 (PC), 11/25/2003 (Xbox), 12/02/2003 (PS2)

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Max Payne 2 was released a little over a year from the original and a surprising amount of fat was cut from the original. It’s the same game, but more refined and updated and feels more tightly woven than its predecessor. A lot of problems were fixed, but new ones arose as well. The narrative continues right after the first game with Max still trying to avenge the death of his wife and child, still trying to get to the bottom of The Inner Circle, and a new love blooms: Mona Sax.

The game starts off similarly to the first game, we get some weird trippy dream sequences, but they aren’t nearly as awful with zero platforming this time. Once you are in control of Max you can instantly feel the difference. He has more weight, his animations are smoother, and gunplay overall just feels punchier and sharper. More weapons were introduced with many old ones coming back. The new M4 and Kolishnokov weapons are a great addition, but unnecessary. One assault rifle is good enough as well as the addition of the HP5, but the Ingrams do just fine for a sub-machine gun. While the older weapons pack more of a punch the new weapons just feel like they were added just to add to the weapon count, less would have been fine. A new dedicated projectile button has been added so you can throw grenades and molotovs without equipping them.

Bullet Time has been refined and fixed as well. Max can now spin around in a 360-degree motion while dodging and the bullets impact harder and there’s less of a delay when you shoot. There is also better feedback on enemies when hit as they stumble more and drop their weapons so you know they’re dead in bullet time. Max can also stay lying down while continuing to empty a clip so the delay in getting up doesn’t make you completely vulnerable as the first game did. The difficulty has been dialed way back and I died a lot less than in the first game. All these great fixes and additions make Max Payne 2 the better of the two games already.

When it comes to level design, Max Payne 2 has more interesting levels like a creepy funhouse, a sprawling mansion, a construction site, and some apartment slums, but there’s a lot of backtracking and I feel the overall scope of the game feels claustrophobic. The variety is better, but you explore those few areas longer and I just feel I wanted to see more of New York inside this noire world Max lives in. Also, gone are the boss fights so the game feels better paced and I felt a tempo of gameplay going that the first didn’t have. However, the game is much shorter clocking in at 4-5 hours. There aren’t any collectibles or anything like that so once you fly through the game it’s over and there’s no reason to ever go back honestly.

Max Payne 2 is a memorable ride. The story is still told in those awesome comic strips, and I feel at the end of the game we get to know Max and Mona well enough to understand their characters and want them on screen more. Their love story is a great centerpiece for this Mafia revenge tale and it makes Max and Mona feel more human. There’s still a cliffhanger at the end of the story, and a third Max Payne game didn’t come until a decade later, but what we get is one of the best single-player shooters of the PS2/Xbox era. It’s tightly compacted and solid and while it’s short, sometimes that means quality and that is rare even to this day.

Publisher: Gathering of Developers

Developer: Remedy Entertainment

Release Date: 07/23/2001 (PC), 12/06/2001 (PS2), 12/12/2001 (Xbox), 07/16/2002 (Mac), 12/16/2003 (GBA), 04/12/2012 (iOS), 06/14/2012 (AND)

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Bullet time. While The Matrix made it popular amid pop culture, Max Payne started it all in the video game realm. You play as a cop, Max Payne, who is framed for the murder of another NYPD cop. Your wife and newborn child are also murdered and you are trying to get revenge on the people who did it. The story isn’t anything amazing, but Max Payne’s voice actor, and the well-done writing, keep you hooked long enough to find out what happened behind the scenes. The game is told in a comic noir graphic-novel style and it suits the game well. The cut scenes are imaginative and different and don’t look cheap or like the developers were trying to take shortcuts.

Outside of the story, the gameplay is all about shooting because that’s literally it. Max runs around with various weapons such as Barrettas, Ingrams, shotguns, grenade launchers, Molotov cocktails, grenades, and assault rifles to mow down the Mafia and corrupt cops. Bullet time is the main gameplay element here and when activated Max does a jump dodge in the direction you move and you can see him dodging bullets in real-time. This is actually a mechanic you must master as most situations require you to use it to stay alive. You can’t stand in one spot or you will be dead in a few hits and there’s no cover system. I had to quicksave every 2-3 minutes as well because the game is so difficult. It’s cool to jump dodge around a corner, but once Max lands there’s a delay in him getting up and you are completely vulnerable to gunfire. I had to make sure I jump dodged behind cover or across a hallway so I wouldn’t die the second the bullet time finished. You can also activate bullet time and just run your meter down so you can run and gun with it too.

There are very few scenarios in which you do more than press buttons. One scene has Max driving a crate crane around an area, but it’s nothing special, and there are some interactive objects that trigger comic cut scenes, but 95% of the game is just shooting. The weapons themselves feel good and I felt I had to switch up weapons depending on the situation to make my life easier. The locales are varied, but they are a bit too stale and boring for my taste. They don’t quite capture the noir feeling of the comic cut scenes, but there is one level early on called Ragna Rock which was a gothic cult house that reminded me a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, so that’s a good thing. The game really does feel like a first-generation PS2/Xbox game, but it’s very polished. The game flows nicely, but the difficulty is all over the place, you will die dozens and dozens of times in this game.

The visuals are clean and look nice even 20 years later. I installed a texture upgrade patch and some other things to make the game upscale to 4K nicely and play on modern hardware, and it looks pretty good. Even in the original, the facial textures are nice and very realistic, and the aesthetic of the game stands out over most shooters of its time. The voice acting is great, and I finished the game in about 7 hours. After you finish it there’s literally nothing else to do as the multiplayer mode was scrapped. It’s a fantastic single-player game that holds up well even today despite its insane difficulty and unbalanced gameplay. The story isn’t anything special, but Max is a great character to dive into and it makes for a fun evening.

L.A. Noire – 9 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 04/16/2020

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Switch, Xbox 360, Xbox One. Tagged: l.a. noire, la noire, open world, rockstar games, shooter, team bondi, third person shooter, tps. Leave a comment

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Team Bondi/Rockstar Games

Release Date: 11/14/2017 (XONE/PS4/Switch) 05/17/2011 (X360/PS3) 11/08/2011 (PC)

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America loves to romanticize the police. Despite the political environment, we are in, the only way we can really satisfy our lust for crime and murder mysteries is to put ourselves in the shoes of the police. L.A. Noire is set in an almost historically accurate 1940s Los Angeles right after WWII ended. You play as war veteran/detective Cole Phelps in solving a drug mystery and many murder mysteries within.

The game starts out like any typical open-world game by slowly introducing gameplay elements to you before opening the world up. You are Cole as a beat cop who is called to a murder scene. You chase down a suspect, investigate some clues in an alley, and you’re so good at what you do that you magically get promoted to a traffic detective. L.A. Noire has a few core elements and it mostly sticks to these throughout the game ad nauseum. The first element is crime-solving. This is done by picking up various objects in an area, examining them, and moving on. This sounds interesting in theory but 90% of all objects in this game are completely useless and really don’t need to be picked up and examined. There are maybe one or two objects that are puzzle boxes and a couple of documents that require you to tap on certain information. It’s cool the first time you do all of this, but after that, it’s boring and feels pointless. Make the objects I’m holding more interesting or allow Cole to do more than twirl them around.

The next core element is interrogations and this implements Team Bondi’s groundbreaking motion capture technology that actually makes facial animations life-like but in a creepy uncanny valley type of way. Sure, you see neck muscles move, eyebrows twitch, and it all looks nice, but on hardware that couldn’t run the engine very well, these realistic life-like faces look odd on low textured and poly counted characters. The whole point of an investigation is to use these facial expressions to determine whether someone is lying or telling the truth and it never works as intended. There is no set to tell that the game gives you to look for, and it always becomes a guessing game or a crapshoot. Most of the time the logic never makes sense based on what the game wants or its hyper-specific. A certain question may seem like selecting Good Cop would be a good idea because that’s what your guts tell you, but instead, you were to accuse the suspect and pick a piece of evidence that you never would have guessed. The interrogations are an awful guessing game and I never felt engaged like the developers wanted.

The next part of L.A. Noire is exploring and gunplay. Firefights are mundane and feel pretty lifeless. There are a cover system and the weapons shoot, but they all feel the same and there’s no feedback or satisfaction from firing these WWII-era weapons. Each firefight is a whack-a-mole style shooting gallery of enemies popping their heads above cover. When you’re not shooting you’re chasing people or driving around. Driving is one of the worst parts of the game as compared to Rockstar’s other offerings, it feels stiff, slow, and lifeless, and I had no fun driving around the city. Sure, Los Angeles looks pretty good with some great landmarks, but having a piece of a fence bring my car to a complete stop is nonsense. I can ram through a fire hydrant, but a wooden fence will stop my car dead in its tracks. The driving is inconsistent and even car chases are no fun.

There are 40 side missions called “Streets of LA” but these are just various car chases, shooting galleries, or on-foot chases and repeat and become stale and annoying. Thankfully there’s a fast travel system that allows your partner to drive to the next destination to skip all the boring driving. I understand this is a realistic game, but Mafia did it much better. There are 95 different cars in the game, but they honestly all drive the same and it just becomes no fun after the first hour of the game is over. There are other side objectives like finding hidden badges, all the landmarks, and trophies but why bother? Anything outside of the story cases is just completely boring and stiff, there’s a layer of polish that’s seriously missing.

Lastly, we come to the story and characters. Nearly every character is completely unlikeable in the sense that they are just plain boring. Cole Phelps is a goodie-two-shoes who can do no wrong and has zero character flaws which make him very unlikable. His partners on the four desks you work on are also just as poorly written. I hated them, but not because they were written so well that I wanted to hate them. They were just so average and too Mary Sue. One partner was just a lazy asshole cop and never budged from that stereotype, another was just corrupt, and the issue is that there was no development. No back story to any of these characters and Phelps’ flashbacks to WWII did nothing to make you care for him as he acted just as stubborn and perfect as he did as a cop. For the game being a noire there is zero character build-up or any reason to care. The overarching story doesn’t actually pick up speed until the last few cases, as each and every case drones on and on and is exactly the same as the last just in different orders. I never once felt interested or attached to any one case. Give me fewer cases and build up the victims within so I can feel like the boring twists are worthwhile.

And that’s where I conclude with L.A. Noire. It’s just “okay”. Each of the many cases feels rudimentary in the end and mundane and I felt like I was just checking off boxes (literally) and had no reason to care for the first or last murder case. The driving is painfully stiff and slow and despite 1940s Los Angeles looking nice it’s stale and boring with nothing going on inside. You can’t even shop for clothes or go buy weapons. It’s just a giant hub world to get from point A to B. Streets of L.A. side missions are just randomized gameplay loops of chasing, shooting, and driving with neither of the three is particularly interesting in their own right. So, is L.A. Noire worth playing? Sure, it’s a fun game and some of the cases are decent and I did want to see what happened to Phelps in the end, but just barely. After getting so far in the game I felt like I had to finish it hoping it would pick up in the next case. The game plays and looks great on Switch, but has performance issues and bugs that required game restarts. The framerate can dip into single digits in certain spots, but it’s still very playable.

Oni – 11 Years Later

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 09/13/2012

Posted in: Mac, PC Reviews, PlayStation 2, Retro Consoles, Sony. Tagged: adventure, anime, japan, oni, rockstar games. Leave a comment

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Rockstar Toronto

Release Date: 3/9/2001

Also Available On

Oni was a very hyped anime-style game back in the day. This game was made by Rockstar before getting into the 3D Grand Theft Autos and other games. This game has a lot of potentials but is flawed in a lot of ways that make the game more boring and frustrating than bad. With that said, the only redeeming quality is the good-looking combat animations and challenges.

Right out of the gate you will notice that the controls are complete upside and backward. All the combat moves are on the shoulder buttons. Why in the world they thought of this is beyond me. You actually don’t really use the face buttons all that much. This makes jumping, fighting, and shooting clumsy and cumbersome and you can’t change the controls to something more natural. These are just some of the worst action/adventure controls I have ever used. The actual combat is fine, but executing these moves is a pain. I felt like I was stumbling over myself because I had to think about the controls. These just aren’t natural! Jumping with R1, L2 and L1 are kick and punch, and you pick up items with R3. What?! I felt like I was trying to solve a Rubix cube, not play a game.

Secondly is the exploration factor. The levels are boring. They all look pretty much the same with flat boring textures and the design is confusing and labyrinthine on some levels. There’s no direction and your compass is useless. The bar gets smaller as you get near an objective, but if you are two flights down it will act like you’re standing right next to it. Enemies are stupid and clumsy, boss fights are frustrating, and the game just can’t compensate for its own design with the clumsy controls. I can’t tell you how tired I got after just three levels of finding this colored console to open the same colored door over and over again.

The story isn’t really worth sticking around the 14 levels either. The anime cutscenes are nice, but you probably won’t even get through this slog of a game. I tried really hard to keep going, but there was never a change of pace. It didn’t help that there is no mid-level saving and the checkpoint placement is unfair. If you quit in the middle of a level you have to start all over. There are just a lot of annoying things with this game, but even if it was flawless you still have the fact that the game is just boring and not very fun.

When it is all said and done only the hardest core of anime fans will stick around until the end. You really had to have played this when it first came out, then come back for nostalgic purposes. The game is just clumsy and boring but has so much potential if only the developers spent more time on the game. As it stands, I really can’t recommend this to anyone.

Max Payne 3

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 06/19/2012

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, PC Reviews, PlayStation 3, Sony Consoles, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Xbox 360. Tagged: bullet time, directx 11, max payne, max payne 3, multiplayer, pc, rockstar games, shooter, steam. Leave a comment

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Rockstar Studios

Release Date: 06/01/2012

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Max Payne pretty much took bullet-time effects made popular by The Matrix and made them mainstream for games. Back in the day, Max Payne was a high-tech graphic noir story by Rockstar Games. It was fun, full of action, and had a great story and character. The second game did the same thing but felt too familiar with the first game. The third time around is a decade later, but Rockstar now has the tech to do what they originally wanted. Max Payne 3 is one of the best-looking games out there but also features one of the richest and well delivered cinematic stories in recent gaming history.

Max Payne has retired and is just mourning the death of his wife and kid while getting drunk every day. An old buddy from the police force stops by and recruits him for a bodyguard job in Sao Paulo protecting a very rich family in a third-world country. Things go wrong as they always do for Max, and he needs to redeem himself and set things straight after so many screw-ups throughout the game. I can’t say much more without spoiling the story, but you’re in for a treat on this one.

The game feels familiar once you start getting into it. You can dual-wield weapons or use a two-handed weapon. Bullet time is back with bullet dodge as well. You can get behind cover and use bullet time to pull off headshots and kill a dozen enemies that would normally kill you without it. Bullet dodge is fun too when you don’t have a cover or just want to knock some guys down quickly while moving to cover. My only issue here is that it isn’t as fast as previous games. Spinning around in bullet dodge is slower and feels too weighty for me. Max’s bullet-time meter only refills if you stick your head out and start killing enemies without it so there is some balance. If you get hurt you can pop painkillers, but they aren’t in abundance like in the last two games. I don’t think I ever had over 4 at one time and they are hard to come by.

That’s pretty much all there is to the action. There are many different weapons with things added on like laser sights, night vision sights, scopes, and flashlights. I really wish the gameplay was evolved a little more, but all you do is shoot everything that moves. There are some great cinematic moments that break this up like bullet-time shooting in different scenarios which are really fun. I just wish it wasn’t spread so thin because a lot of the time the game gets extremely difficult and repetitive with too many of the same type of shootouts in a row. At least the environments change all the time so you have a lot of different scenery to look at.

Max Payne 3 has some of the best camera work and cinematography in a game that I have ever seen. At certain points, the camera will snap to the last enemy in the area that is dying so you can pump more rounds into him as he falls. Then the scene will go right into a cutscene seamlessly and then right into another action sequence. I don’t think I have ever felt like playing an action movie before more than I have with Max Payne 3. The game is also really long with 14 chapters that will take about 12+ hours to beat. The story is just bursting at the seams with detail and lots of scenarios to make it not seem rushed and incomplete.

There’s a multiplayer mode that can be pretty fun as well as an arcade mode to keep you coming back. You can play through the main story again to find all the golden gun parts and clues if you want for achievements. The game also plays better on the PC due to the pinpoint precision of a mouse, and the addition of the latest DirectX 11 graphics which will require a monster rig to run at a decent frame rate. I didn’t find any major problems with the game, just a few annoying ones that were persistent throughout the whole game like the difficulty imbalance, some bullet time quirks, and actually a big issue with last-man-standing. If you have a pill bottle left and you die you get a few seconds to shoot that enemy and Max will automatically consume the bottle. If Max is flopping around or turned around you have to wait for the reticle to automatically face the enemy. If you are out of ammo you’re screwed. Sometimes objects will be blocking your shot and you get screwed there too.

Overall, Max Payne 3 is a wonderful game with top-notch cinematography, superb voice acting, and high-end visuals. Fans of the first game will be pleased with this lengthy shooter, but the gameplay itself can be repetitive, and shallow sometimes. The cinematic bullet-time events are spread too thin, but it can be forgiven due to how wonderful everything else is. Max Payne 3 was well worth the 10-year wait, and here’s to hoping there is another one.

Bully: Scholarship Edition

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 02/14/2012

Posted in: Microsoft Consoles, Nintendo Consoles, PC Reviews, Steam Deck Playable, Steam Deck Verification, Wii, Xbox 360. Tagged: bully, pc, port, rockstar games, scholarship edition, steam. Leave a comment

Bully-Scholarship-Edition-Front-Cover-49825

Publisher: Rockstar Games

Developer: Rockstar Vancouver

Release Date: 10/21/2008

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Everyone was bullied at some point in their life during school, so Rockstar took it upon them to help people reflect on that and become a bully themselves or anti-bully. Jimmy Hopkins is sent to Bullworth Academy because he’s a huge jerk and his mom and step-dad hate him. The story really makes you reminisce about high school because of how accurately it portrays it. You walk around and you see jocks beating up nerds and greasers beating up preps. Of course due to the game’s age (about 7 years old) comes problems, glitches, and stiffness due to the PS2’s limited technology, but the overall atmosphere and fun content will keep you hooked.

The game is based on Grand Theft Auto so if you play that series a lot you are right at home here. You get a mini-map with stars marked on them, a combat system, a vehicle system, as well as a shooting system. They all work really well and even better than the GTA games, but don’t forget this is a Teen rated game so you can forget about Jimmy killing hookers and pushing drugs. After you get familiar with the engine you will get introduced to the combat system which works well thanks to a lock-on mode and targets switching with the right analog stick (keyboard controls suck). A health bar is displayed around the target’s feet and the melee combat system is surprisingly deep. You unlock combos and moves by bringing transistors to the bum that lives behind the school.

With grapples, takedowns, and various combos come ranged combat which is fun thanks to the interesting and fun weapons. Instead of rocket launchers and AK-47s we get potato spud launchers, bottle rocket launchers, slingshots, stink bombs, itching powder, spray paint (for tagging), eggs, and various breakable melee weapons that are awesome to use. You can’t jack cars, but you can jack bicycles and you have a skateboard in your inventory. I really wish there were more vehicles to use than just these two things, but it works because the world isn’t big enough to need anything faster.

The days in Bully go by like school and of course, you can get busted, and instead of wasted, knocked out like in GTA games. Prefects are the authority on campus and there are a lot of rules. There are two classes a day and you will see a bell on your map and if you are skipping class you can be busted for truancy, hit kids and get chased for violence, hit girls or adults and the meter goes red and everyone runs after you for this. You can be busted for trespassing (being inside a building after hours), theft, vandalism, and all the hijinks of kids so watch out. Of course, getting busted is actually hard because you can always outrun them and if a prefect gets a hold of you can you rapidly press Y to break free, if a teacher or cop gets you you’re done.

Classes are fun and consist of mini-games like music class uses the triggers to tap out the rhythm, biology has you dissecting animals, math class has you answering simple questions, shop class has you doing button commands to repair bikes, and photography class has you snapping pictures. There are more classes and they help keep you busy between missions and can be fun. When you aren’t doing missions or classes you can do one of the two jobs in town which is a paper route and mowing lawns. I really wish there were more jobs, but more on why later. There are also challenges for each faction as well as random activities like people have you egg things, make delivers, or break into lockers.

Missions are varied and range from throwing snowballs, playing tricks, assaulting faction fortresses, sneaking through an asylum, and helping teachers with adult problems. There’s a lot of variety in the main missions and it will keep you hooked and wanting to do the next one. I just wish there were more side missions that had a good payoff because money is kind of useless in this game. I rarely spent it and didn’t really need to. There is also a lame dating system built in where you can compliment a girl, then give her a gift, then she’ll kiss you. This is as far as it goes and after trying it once you won’t do it again.

All this sounds fun, and is, but it comes with a price of age. Everything feels stiff, stilted, and linear which really detracts from the experience. The same NPCs walk around and sayings repeat constantly, animations are stiff and awkward, the same music repeats constantly, the sound is low quality, and the graphics aged poorly with low poly models, and some ugly textures. The only things that haven’t aged are the excellent voice acting, memorable characters, and charming and witty dialog. This is the best part about Bully because of characters like Gary who are whacked sociopaths who you want to just punch. The world isn’t very big at all, and while you can change your clothes, and hair, and earn money there’s really no reason for it. You can find collectibles in the world, do races, and more, but honestly for what? There’s no payoff and I guess you just do it to be a completionist a best.

I could go on about how stiff the game feels or the multiple glitches that I encountered, but after completing the 10-15 hour campaign I felt no reason to continue on. I couldn’t bear hearing the same saying, listening to the same music, or seeing the same NPC walk by me. Back in the day, it was revolutionary, but now it’s just a wrinkle in the game timeline as something unique and playful because there isn’t a single game out there like it. Enjoy the game for the great dialog, characters, and story, as well as the fun mini-games and varied missions, but if you can’t overlook the many faults then move on.

Games That Would Have Gotten A 10 — Part 1

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 01/22/2012

Posted in: Blogs. Tagged: action, adventure, arkham asylum, assassin, assassin's creed 2, assassin's creed ii, batman, bethesda, bioshock, blog, comics, DC, elder scrolls, fallout 3, fatality, fighter, fighting, fps, game of the year, games, god of war 3, greek, irrational, kratos, Microsoft, mortal kombat, netherrealm, oblivion, open world, pc, playstation, portal 2, post apocalyptic, puzzle, red dead redemption, rockstar games, rpg, sandbox, shooter, Sony, steam, ten, that would have gotten a 10, ubisoft, unreal, valve, warner bros, xbox, Xbox 360. Leave a comment

There is no such thing as a perfect game. There never will be and that’s just the cruel hard truth. Very few games come close and that’s why I have only ever given one 10 (Gears of War). If I could go back and give games a 10 what would they be? Some almost felt perfect, but there was something there that didn’t quite make it that high. Games that get 9.5’s are usually amazing and probably the best games out, but sometimes games will sit as perfect to you whether they are technically or not. This is part 1 of 2 because there are just too many to list in one sitting. These are the game I have reviewed and sit as 10’s in my heart (in no particular order of course!)

BioShock

This game pretty much changed narratives from here on out because BioShock really blew me away. Not only was the pacing perfect, but the story was dark and terrible and something imagined in nightmares. It wasn’t monsters popping up out of the closet, zombies shambling towards you, but it took humanity’s imperfections and let them loose. The gameplay had an array of amazing weapons to use, the EVE powers were great to use, and who can forget seeing a Big Daddy and Little Sister for the first time? That demo really blew me away and it was one of the few games that I could play over and over and never get bored. At the time the graphics were fantastic and helped you feel claustrophobic in that underwater utopia. With BioShock Infinite coming along I hope it hits me the same way.

Mortal Kombat

Who can deny the fact that this was the true return of Mortal Kombat? The game was everything fans wanted with the best characters, excellent graphics, a simpler fight system, and the inclusion of great content for single-player users. The X-Ray moves were shocking, plus the return of superb and original Fatalities that have been lacking since MK: Deception. The game was silky smooth in the controls department, plus the addition of four DLC characters and a slew of classic costumes. I truly felt like a kid again and was basking in the feeling that MK was back and felt just like it did 20 years ago.

Portal 2

A puzzle game usually doesn’t get as much recognition as Portal has gotten. It has become a household name thanks to one thing that the game is named after. Portal 2 completely turns the game into a full-fledged adventure through different areas complete with scripted cinematic events. What makes Portal 2 as great as it is the voice acting and characters. Never have characters been so memorable, and being game staples is hard to become. The pacing was perfect, there was just enough content not to overwhelm you, but to make you feel like it was new and fresh. The puzzles were laid out perfectly and gave you that “AHA!” moment when you finally solved it. I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed playing through the entire game and laughing through the entire thing. Portal 2 will always sit with me as one of the best games ever made.

Red Dead Redemption

Not only is Rockstar the best at making worlds you can totally get lost in, but RDR also made you believe it was real. When I played through RDR I felt like the game came to life with such accurate landscape, wonderfully played out characters, and some great missions that make you feel like they were different every time. The atmosphere was rich and bursting at the seams with depth. I never played a game where I felt like a real cowboy and felt like I was doing cowboy things that made a difference. RDR will always sit as a game that many should be based on especially open-world games because this one was perfect to me.

God of War III

God of War is the father of a lot of things. Cinematic action/adventures, quick-time events, and huge giant bosses in said action/adventures, but nothing could prepare me for GoW3. The graphics were way ahead of their time (even in this generation) and the pacing and story were just perfect. The combat was so smooth and just ran like butter across the screen. The powers you held, the weapons you got, and the puzzles were so fun that you actually savored each moment in the game. Sure, the first game made me think differently about how games should be made, but GoW3 set the standard and still is today. GoW was the first game series I could play over and over again and never get bored, and GoW3 is probably on top of all of them.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

If I had to pick my favorite game of all time this would be it. I had never spent so many hours on a game as I did in Oblivion. It set a whole new standard for RPGs. The interaction with characters, the looting, the lore, the dungeons were all just fascinating and mesmerizing. Over 100 of just minute detail that I had never seen in any game. All the books could be read, random quests from people who actually mattered because the effects would impact you later on. Being able to pick plants, the number of swords, magic, spells, tomes, shields, armor, and riding horses? It was truly a fantasy book come to life and it had never been done before in that much detail. I actually would get lost for over a dozen hours without putting the controller down and no other game could make me do that. Oblivion sits in my heart as something more than just a game, but a world I could escape in and forget about all my problems.

Assassin’s Creed II

AC2 really hit home with me because of the grand scale of the characters, story, and the just sheer amount of content in the game. I really got sucked into this world that beautifully recreated, and for once I felt like I was playing a piece of history. No other game has been capable of that, but what got me more than anything was how free I felt. Running from rooftop to rooftop and seeing and hearing shingles shift under my feet, climbing grand buildings, unfolding a deep mysterious plot, and using awesome kill moves is something of most kids’ dreams (if you’re a psycho kid like I was). The graphics were unbeatable at the time, and it still holds up as the pinnacle for free world action/adventures to this day.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Arkham Asylum set the standard for superhero games and is declared as the best one ever made. Not only was the combat silky smooth, and the fact that you were Batman, you actually did everything you could in the comics! It was unbelievable using the detective mode, swinging around with your bat claw, and scaring the daylights out of enemies by tossing a Batarang at them. How cool is that?! The excellent voice acting and all the characters from the comic helped make it the greatest superhero game ever made. EVER.

Fallout 3

When I found out Bethesda was making Fallout 3 I knew I would be sucked into another amazing world for over a hundred hours, and I was right. Fallout 3 sucked me in just like Oblivion with tons of memorable characters, a great overarching story, but the setting and environment was the main character and drew me in. I actually felt lonely and scared walking The Capital Wasteland, and no other game made me feel that way before. I looted every corner with caution because the game felt so close to home, and you could wonder about this giant apocalypse. I really felt a sigh of relief when I found a new town and almost dreaded going back out in the wasteland alone. What kind of game can you think of that made you feel that way? Probably none.

2011 Game of the Year Awards Round-Up

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 12/26/2011

Posted in: 2011, Game of the Year Awards. Tagged: 2011, action, adventure, alice, arkham city, artistic, atmosphere, awards, batman, battlefield 3, best, codemasters, comics, DC, dice, directx 11, dirt 3, disappointing game, dishwasher, downloadable, driving, elder scrolls, epic games, fatality, fighter, fighting, fps, game of the year, gears of war 3, graphics, id software, la noire, madness returns, mortal kombat, multiplayer, music, new character, nominated, origins, pc, platformer, playstation, playstation 3, portal 2, ps3, puzzle, rage, rayman, rockstar games, round up, rpg, Sega, shogun 2, shooter, skyrim, Sony, sound design, steam microsoft, story, strategy, technical, total war, valve, vampire smile, voice acting, xbox, Xbox 360. Leave a comment

Don’t want to look through each reward category? Here’s a round-up of Binary Messiah’s 2011 Game of the Year Awards.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Awarded

Game of the Year
Best RPG
Best Music

Nominated

Best Atmosphere

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Gears of War 3

Awarded

Best Shooter
Best Story

Nominated

Game of the Year
Best Atmosphere
Best Sound Design

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Total War: Shogun 2

Awarded

Best Strategy

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Mortal Kombat

Awarded

Best Fighter

Nominated

Game of the Year

————————————————

Portal 2

Awarded

Best Puzzler
Best Voice Acting
Best New Character

Nominated

Game of the Year
Best Music
Best Story
Best Multiplayer

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Rayman Origins

Awarded

Best Platformer

Nominated

Game of the Year
Best Graphics, Artistic

————————————————

DiRt 3

Awarded

Best Driving

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Batman: Arkham City

Awarded

Best Action

Nominated

Game of the Year
Best Voice Acting
Best Atmosphere

————————————————

Battlefield 3

Awarded

Best Sound Design
Best Graphics, Technical
Best Multiplayer

Nominated

Game of the Year
Best Shooter

————————————————

L.A. Noire

Awarded

Best Atmosphere

Nominated

Game of the Year
Best Voice Acting
Best New Character
Best Action

————————————————

Alice: Madness Returns

Awarded

Best Graphics, Artistic

————————————————

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile

Awarded

Best Downloadable Game

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Rage

Awarded

Most Disappointing Game

Nominated

Best Platformer

2011 Game of the Year Awards — Achievement Awards — Game of the Year

Posted by BinaryMessiah on 12/23/2011

Posted in: 2011, Game of the Year Awards. Tagged: 2011, action, adventure, anime, arkham city, assassin, assassin's creed, assassins of kings, atlus, awards, batman, battlefield 3, catherine, cd projekt red, comics, dark souls, dating, DC, deus ex, dice, directx 11, drake's deception, ea, elder scrolls, epic games, ezio, fatality, fighter, fighting, fps, frostbite, game of the year, gears of war 3, guerilla, human revolution, insomniac, japan, japanese, katherine, killzone 3, la nore, Microsoft, mortal kombat, origins, pc, platformer, playstation, playstation 3, portal 2, ps3, puzzle, rayman, resistance 3, revelations, rockstar games, rocksteady, romance, rpg, runner ups, shooter, Sony, steam skyrim, ubisoft, uncharted 3, valve, warner bros, witcher 2, xbox, Xbox 360. 1 Comment

Game of the year is the hardest of them all. What makes the game of the year? Everything must be almost perfect, well balanced, epic, have a great story, characters, mechanics, graphics, and everything that makes up a game must be amazing and better than the competition. I wish I could have picked more than one because there were so many amazing games this year.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Skyrim actually wasn’t my first choice. It won because of how grand in scale the game was and the attention to detail that only a few games this year did. Over 100 hours of gameplay, unique characters, a grand story, beautiful graphics, lots of customization, and a gorgeous soundtrack made Skyrim come out on top of the entire pile. Skyrim is a special game in the sense that no other RPG or game can do it.