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Nintendon't Give a Fuck

So, March 3rd then. If you’ve pre-ordered you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. This is of course the date Nintendo’s new home/handheld combo console is unleashed worldwide onto the gaming public, and, for nearly all of those gamers who’ve pre-ordered, this is when the real excitement builds. Even those who aren’t at all interested can at least accept that they know the feeling well; the anticipation on the way to the store, finally getting your hands on your new beautiful box of gaming, hurrying home, the unboxing - oh the unbridled joy of the unboxing - and then the hookup, the final power button on, then at last! Wait what the shit are these fucking updates? Fuck you! How long to completion? Fine, I’ll go make a sandwich….. Then at last! You come face to face with the home screen and the real fun can begin. As a long time gamer who’s gone through this with the master system, an Amiga 500, an n64, a dreamcast, a ps2, 3 and 4, all the Xboxes, a Gamecube and both Wii’s, not to mention countless handhelds, the above process is something I’ve experienced and very much enjoyed quite a lot, and the reason I watched the Nintendo switch event with baited breath. I was already sold. Then it all came crashing down. Nintendo seemed intent on nuking all the goodwill and excitement they’d accumulated in the preceding weeks and months; unchecking all the boxes they’d previously ticked. I should probably reiterate at this point that I’m getting on a bit and use gaming as a form of relaxation. A lot of my friends have had kids, prioritised other things over gaming and nearly all live in a different time zone (I moved to Canada 4 years back). I have a wonderful partner who encourages my gaming hobby, yet doesn’t venture much beyond the free games she can get on her iPhone. Armed with this information, my opinion on what we’ve seen on the Nintendo Switch should make a little more sense. I don’t think I’m alone either, based on the reaction elsewhere. We’re people who’ve grown up with Nintendo and enjoy gaming as Nintendo originally provided it. And it appears they’re throwing us aside (once again), kicking us when we’re down and then spitting in our faces while they take a big steamy dump on our chests. While there are people into Nintendo defacating all over them, that's just not for me. Do you like Nintendo exclusive games? Of course you do! Well how about a game that you really want and can buy on our previous console (which we prematurely killed off because we fucked quite a lot up with it)? We’ve got you covered! Want to see what our console is really about and experience all the new tech Nintendo incorporated? Pick up 1-2 Switch! It’s a full price mini game compilation that they should definitely have packed in. You’ll likely play for a few days before casting it aside as it offers no replay value! It also makes you look like a tit and can simulate masturbation! If you look like a tit and there’s no one else around to see you, are you still a tit? Most definitely. Hey older gamer! You remember how much fun Bomberman was right? Well we’ve got a new one! The single player is still bunk but the multiplayer is still super fun, super simple and that’s right, definitely worth full price! So what if it has been surpassed in terms of depth by flash and mobile games on the last decade? How about some retro and indie games that, given you’re an avid gamer, you’ve already bought and played at least once on different consoles?! Why not rebuy them and play them on our new console while we get our shit together! I mean come on, there's no way to transfer that world of goo purchase from the Wii, so why not give Nintendo your money again? And that, along with a dancing party game and a plastic toy collect-a-thon, is the launch lineup. Done. Nothing else. Before you say it, I know consoles don’t traditionally have massively strong catalogues of games on day 1. I didn’t expect the switch too either. I did however want to see a couple - just two would’ve been enough - worthwhile unique experiences that I could sit down and enjoy. That alone would justify a console purchase for a grumpy twat like me. ‘80 plus games this year!’ I hear you cry. Ok but how many of those are games that I’ve already bought and enjoyed though? And how many are likely to perform better on those other consoles? If I want to play Skyrim, world of goo and the host of other older games that make up a significant portion of that 80, I just need to fire up my older consoles and save myself having to rebuy them. Even the upcoming Nintendo exclusives have managed to irk me (Mario admittedly does looks great though). I loved Splatoon, absolutely adored it. So much so that I played it to death less than two years ago. Two years I might add, is a very short time in Nintendo sequel terms, with good reason. Nintendo likes to give themselves more time than most to perfect their games, nurturing the things that work and tweaking until they’re just right. Releasing Splatoon 2 so soon smacks of desperation to have enough content on a new system, and leads me to believe it’ll likely be closer to an upgrade than a true sequel. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe asks those who’ve likely already bought the original to re-up, in order to play on their shiny new console. One of the main selling features being an upgrade to my former favourite game mode, battle, which Nintendo completely ballsed up for this iteration on Wii U. They’d previously refused to acknowledge they’d made an error with the originals battle mode, yet here they are trying to sell you the same game, on a new console, based on the fact that they’ve fixed the chuffing thing we complained about three years ago! To date Nintendo haven’t announced this as DLC for the Wii U version, which I’d totally buy, or any kind of upgrade program. I don’t expect either to materialise, which is a huge shame (for me). Let’s get this straight; most of the switch early adopters likely own a Wii U. Nintendo aren’t re-releasing games out of the goodness of their hearts. This is an easy way to flesh out the line up and make more money. Nintendo, like 99.9 percent of businesses, exist to make money, and given the state of the launch lineup and incoming game, it’s been suggested that this has been rushed out to hit the end of the financial year. It's a hard point to argue with, especially given the lack of online details. Nintendo are finally moving with the times in charging for online – a move that I don’t actually mind despite the ridiculous rent-a-rom-a-month system – you’d think, however, that they would probably catch up with the competitors in other areas, such as linked accounts and transferring purchases right? Wrong. Nintendo have a penchant for getting avid fans to rebuy games over and over but in today’s market, that just doesn’t fly. When your main competitors have systems in place to allow their customers to retain purchases and to transfer games from old systems to new, you really have no excuse. Nintendo’s silence on the virtual console element of Switch doesn’t bode well either, so expect to rebuy all those same virtual console games for the convenience of having them all in one place. I’d love to be proved wrong on this, I really would. Given Nintendo’s history in successfully fleecing gamers repeatedly in this regard, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Now I know this is all very negative, but I’m not making this shit up and I genuinely wish things were different. The consoles price, while a little higher than I’d have liked especially given that there’s no pack in, is in line with launch prices for competitor’s consoles, if not with the GameCube or the Wii. Hands-on reports have it that the console itself feels wonderful, like a sexy new piece of tech. Once you get it in your hands you apparently can appreciate why it costs what it does. Brilliant. This is something we all wished we had for the Wii U and I’m genuinely pleased to not have plasticky feeling components or compromised touchscreen tech. However, I do feel that there are other tech elements that they’ve put into the joycons which shunt need to be there and are responsible for accessories being priced extremely high as well. Nintendo truly appear to have taken a break from shitting on customers, so they can throw as much against the wall in the hope that some will stick. Getting a new set of joycons will set you back a chunk more than a dual shock 4 or new Xbox one controller, so if you want to play Arms, which looks like a wonderfully Splatoonish treatment of punch out, you’re talking $500 Canadian plus $80 for the game, which is a huge outlay, given the innards of the console itself. Additionally, if you’re like me and want to play games in the classic manner (on your arse in a comfortable chair) and don’t intend on using the portability features too much, you’d likely want a pro controller (the Wii U one won’t cut it from what I’ve heard); that’ll be another $90 please, which dwarfs the sweet spot cost of controllers that we’ve become accustomed to. HD rumble sounds intriguing and I hope we get to see enough innovative uses of the technology to justify its inclusion. Realistic wanking mini games won't cut it and if this tech doesn't end up changing traditional games much beyond what we currently have, the gamble of having it included everywhere wouldn’t have paid off. The less said about the ‘gesture sensor’ the better; I have an unkind hand gesture ready to be read. Again, the tone of this opinion piece is so negative, in part I think that’s down to my anger at how Nintendo shattered my expectations. If you pick one up at launch you’ll likely have loads of fun with it but I’m just so disappointed. Given what Nintendo showed us last year, it would’ve been so easy to get right. Having all of Nintendo’s internal developers beavering away on one machine, sharing knowledge is a fantastic idea. A portable console with a boost to specs and performance when docked would’ve been wonderful! Instead I’ve read that performance actually suffers when docked. W. T. F. I would’ve been perfectly ok with the additional console cost associated with the joycons. The ethos behind them is sound. If they were just well made, detachable controllers that enabled multiplayer on the go, that would be fine and justifiable. But no, Nintendo have to throwback to the Wii’s success again (seriously just let it fucking go) and make them arm waggling enablers with potentially unnecessary tech included. The worst thing potentially about the new technology I might add, is that Nintendo will feel they need to include it in games, whether it adds anything or not, in order to justify its inclusion in the console. Sigh. Just let the devs make great games! I don’t need to give the game a thumbs up or tap a plastic model to it to get maximum enjoyment, or to get content that should be in the game in the first place. If anything, that shit reduces my enjoyment and amplifies my inner grumpy gamer. Given all this it should be pretty clear that, despite still feeling that new console pull, I won’t be grabbing a Switch at launch. Every time I get the urge and think ‘well maybe it’ll be worth it’, I just remind myself of what my minimum expectations are for a new console, and the urge passes. I will still inevitably pick one up, either at the first price drop, or when the there’s a few more must have (true) exclusives, but I can’t help but feel like this is a huge missed opportunity for Nintendo. We were there for the taking but they had to go and Nintendo the fucking thing. Oh, the neon red and blue looks fucking ridiculous too...

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Activision know what us gamers want

In stark contrast to how things might actually appear, Activision clearly knows what us as gamers want. An inside source, possibly an executive or something, was heard saying, 'our customers don't want to be able to buy a remastered version of a classic product they all have very fond memories of on its own, they want to be forced to spend an extra $80 on the inferior spiritual sequel in order to get it'. It's difficult to argue with the executive's logic; clearly everyone is still so enamoured with the game series that literally everyone who buys the one game will be buying the other as well. Why not save the players those extra ten seconds at the register? 'in addition to that, the costumers don't want the original game with fancier textures and graphics and stuff, they probably want us to add all the additional shit that we've added to the series since, you know, the things that definitely aren't a scam and are definitely not the reason sales of the games are shitting the bed.' I mean, who doesn't want to spend money blindly on shit that wasn't on the original game, after already spending more than they wanted to spend on getting the game in the first place? It's not like this will annoy people, put off potential buyers and sully they memories of those who do buy it, despite all the hoops Activision have made them jump through, right? Activision and it's developers are currently busy at work, deciding how best to monetise to process of fragmenting their user base and long time friendships with DLC releases.

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Star Wars Battlefront X-wing Rogue One VR mission demo experience

So the title (I think that's all of it) is a little clunky but I can see where they're coming from; tying it into the movie helps both causes and costs can be somewhat written off as marketing. It needs to let people know that it's just a demo, so don't be getting your hopes up for anything too substantial, and it needs to inform people that it's a sparkly new VR experience. Not everyone has been rabidly awaiting this like I have. Needing the game to play is not a big deal as it was recently on sale for ten bucks, and you can probably pick it up preowned for the same amount (function of the lack of content and time since release). Having to download the huge update before playing however was a huge frustration and took hours on a really decent connection for some baffling reason. Very PSN-ey. When my anxious fingers fired the demo up though, all was forgiven. I spent longer watching the title screen AT-AT than I have playing a full game but as the anticipation continues to grow and you press start (or options or whatever) to see what glorious bounty awaits, you're warped into the hangar, or a hangar set in the matrix with all white walls, and plonked next to your ship. What follows is what most men born between 1970 and say 1985, with a huge percentage after that too, would call fantasy. You start off looking at the ship and a busy, nearby droid, and obviously because it's VR, you are (italics and everything) looking at the ship, not a ship on the screen a few metres away. It's brilliant. Better still, after warping around, arkham VR style, to have a gander from a few different angles, I decided this was it, the moment the childhood me, and the adult me to be honest, yearned for. Time to get into my x-wing. And it's perfect. Buttons beep and light up as you press them, some do things and some don't (or not that I could tell anyway), but half of the fun is not knowing what something does until you press it. All the dials and screens are good and correct and eventually your left with just one thing to do, get started (or optioned, or whatever). To my knowledge developers Criterion have never made a dogfighting, spaceship or star wars game but what they are experts at, is making super fast, extremely fun racing games with sexy, sexy vehicles. Despite the panels, and the nuts and the bolts and the built in feel, to my mind there's no sexier vehicle than an x-wing, and Criterion smash the feel out of the park. It actually feels like you're controlling a big hunk of metal in space, and you're not just a floaty head like in call of duty's dogfighting demo. Having never been into space I can't comment on the realism of how the ship handles but I can say that I much prefer how this vehicle plays compared to similar experiences currently out there on the market. And when you open and close the foils, I could almost feel the mechanics working, thanks to the excellent sound design. Once you're eased into the demo through a little story telling and asteroids avoidance, the real action starts. Hands up who thought you wouldn't have to fight some tie fighters? Idiots. You're tasked with protecting and escorting a ship, while fixes are performed and the pacing is turned up to 12 parsecs, or something. You're bombarded from all angles by the zippy little whiners and here is where the VR excels. I found myself frantically looking all around, trying to locate foes who wanted to take me down. While this is possible in the other dogfighting games available, I don't recall finding it anywhere near as useful, and definitely anywhere near as fun. Enemies go down easy for sure, but they also can also take you down with regularity if you don't keep your wits about you. It's a beautiful thing keeping track of a tie fighter trying to flank you, shooting them down and then seeing parts of its floating remains flying towards you. Truly brilliant. There's a couple more surprises Criterion has dropped into the demo, which I won't ruin, but it's wonderful to see how magical each element they've included is. As the curtain closed on the demo, I was smiling ear to ear and instantly went again. The experience itself has replayability because of what it is, but there are also a few challenges and a scoreboard adding to that. So, what next? From what I've read the developers want what we all do, a full game based on the demo. If I had to hazard a guess I'd say that's what they're already working on. However, this is clearly an interest gauging exercise as well. PSVR has sold reasonably well, and should break a million units sold next year but is that enough to warrant spending a full AAA budget that this type of game should warrant? Maybe not. As a PSVR owner, I want the device to succeed and the development of new and exciting experiences to be a worthwhile endeavor. Making this a PSVR exclusive (for now at least) is infuriating, and Sony, who I assume are behind that decision, are being incredibly short sighted. I know Oculus are probably worse but what's better, an exclusive demo that the publishers use the data from to can the full experience, or the publishers seeing that the full game is viable and forging ahead, growing the technology on the whole? I see a few positives for Criterion, however. They're backed by the money bags EA for one, who are in cahoots with Disney; everyone wants this to succeed. Alternatively they could probably release chunks of missions at a time, and a huge percentage of the VR user base would be throwing their money into mid air (there's no screen close enough you see, Luke Smith). If they didn't want to go that route then Criterion are certainly talented enough to develop a game that could be enjoyed with and without a VR headset, increasing the market for the game substantially. Something along the lines of the x-wing vs tie fighter games would do nicely. It could even form part of the next Battlefront game if they were so inclined. Overall though, this demo is an absolute triumph and with the work done here, Criterion have a great foundation with which to build a full game (fingers crossed). I'd recommend anyone with the headset to download it, anyone with a rival headset to pester EA demanding it makes its way over and anyone with any interest in star wars to track down a friend with a PSVR and beg, plead, borrow or bribe with beers to have a try, it really is that good. Wonderful, immersive, wish fulfillment. 5 mysterious passengers out of 5.

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Resident Evil 7 PSVR opinions

Unnerving and necessarily slow, that’s how I’d describe my experience with resident evil 7 playing through the PSVR. If you’ve ever watched any sort of horror movie set in the deep south (USA obviously, not Brighton), then you’ve likely witnessed a similar setting: creaking floorboards, rusted bars on the windows and a crow in the microwave….you know what I’m on about. Witnessing a setting is different to experiencing though, with true detective probably sitting stop that particular mountain. With PSVR, everything changes. All the dark corners and silhouettes aren’t comfortably situated on a tv screen a couple of metres away. They’re right in front of you, right behind you, wherever you look. When you hear a noise behind you you aren’t just turning a camera in a game, you’re frantically tiring your head, scanning the room in a panic. There’s no disconnect and it’s exhilarating. It’s enough to potentially make you a little queasy….no wait, I think that’s something else.

So nausea and the PSVR. I should point out that fortunately I think I’m one of lucky ones who doesn’t get too nauseous when playing through the VR headset. I felt a few twinges on Driveclub (but nothing to the extent of some sites who couldn’t review it) and for the most part everything else has been comfortable. That I put down to smart design and limiting movement (arkham VR) and playing games that don’t incur the wrath of the wobbly guts (Rez, most other games). Resident evil 7 is different however because of the required movement; Warping place to place just wouldn’t work as the game would need to be very different to the VR-less experience for it to work.

That’s where the compromises come in. It’s clear that the devs have done quite a bit of testing to see what movement speeds work, and which ones don’t. I personally only had a few early jitters, after which I was pretty much fine. However, I also noticed just how impatient I have become as a gamer. While the house isn’t somewhere you want to be moving quickly through initially (I truthfully had a few self-enforced breaks to ‘check my phone’, even though I know no one's messaging me), once you get into it and are going back through the house searching, then I started to get a little impatient, wishing I could move a little faster. Admittedly though, I wouldn’t want to sacrifice that box of 20 mcnuggets to the projectile gods just so I could go get a box of ammo 30 seconds faster.

I did notice a slight impact on gameplay though, one if not addressed could result in so many more deaths for the PSVR player (spoilers ahead). Near the end of the demo you head into the basement, where a terrible beastie awaits. The intention of the developers here is to grab an item, deal with the beastie temporarily, retrieve weaponry upstairs, then return to deal with beastie permanently and grab another item. Sans VR though, you can actually grab both items in one go if you’re quick enough. Try the same tactic in VR and the slow movement speed dooms you too a messy, unavoidable death.

Hopefully, in a game where there might be quite a bit of player stalking by bad guys, enemy movement speed will be tweaked accordingly when playing in VR.

Overall, it's an exhilarating experience, provided you keep your nuggets down and don’t try to cheese the ending. 4 silicon fingers out of 5.

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It's Good to be Bad

p>Publishers like nothing more than a good pre-order. It gives them an almost guaranteed sale and in turn can justify and indeed pay for additional marketing for a soon to be released game. They pull out all the stops to get gamers to blindly buy their product; exclusive outfits, characters, maps, xp boosts, guns, cars and item packs all get promised to those who invest without firstly having the chance to read up on others opinions of the final product.

The next stage on the selling ladder for the publisher is the release sale. How do you get players to buy on day or in week one? Marketing clearly does a lot of the leg work, playing off previous games in series, previous games from the publishers or developers or using the particular games USP to get gamers to the stores on release.

In the days where we have all become used to getting the information we want, right now, reviews are heavily used by gamers (myself included) to gauge what product they should be buying in an industry saturated with different gaming experiences, all vying for your cash.

For those confident in their product with games likely to score well in the press and on metacritic this is a fantastic, subjective means to make that buying decision easier. As part of the press though, how do you get that day 1 review information to your readership if games arrive late for review, or more commonly, games have a huge online component forming a big chunk of the experience?

Previously, certain websites will play the game internally offline or on private servers, assuming the whole game would be representative. They’ll publish their review early to get those much needed clicks at the expense of potential credibility. Recently though, more established sites will only review given decent time playing the game as their readers will. This obviously results in a week or so delay in publishing a review, which is often the time gamers want to buy. As this means of review increases in necessity and in turn popularity, publishers are getting a free pass to put out any broken old shit, paired with heavy marketing, and still having a successful release. Think of any recent Bruce Willis lead movies and you’ll get the picture.

So who do we have to blame for this? Publishers themselves of course. Think back to the releases of the master chief collection, drive club and assassin’s creed unity; all completely broken, yet all released upon the unknowing masses. People, including myself, bought those based on strong reviews from established sites (Eurogamer.net for example), those who have subsequently changed their reviewing processes to accommodate for this variability in product quality. By releasing those shitty, unfinished games, not amending release to allow developers to polish the games to the level the customers deserve, they’ve opened up a sweet one week window where they can get away with a sub par product.

So what can be done? As a consumer, the only thing we can do is to stop rewarding these guys by purchasing early, before we get informed opinions. As a lover of shiny things, I know how difficult this can be. It’s going to be especially difficult to change mass buying habits. The only other thing I can see working are robust refund policies, allowing consumers security in their purchases or, shock horror! The publishers actually respecting their customers, taking quality assurance seriously and not seeing it as an afterthought.

Will this actually happen though? Not until you start seeing seen impact on the bottom line for these businessmen at the head of the publishers unfortunately. The aforementioned games all did well commercially so where’s the drawback for releasing garbage on unsuspecting public? Well, there isn’t and that’s how things will continue, at least until we start doing a take that do and showing a little patience.

Sneaky division edit: So I'm hearing disturbances in the review landscape relating to 'the division' from Ubisoft. The gaming press are telling us that they're not getting review copies until release as playing the game early wouldn't allow for accurate representation of the game. What a load of bollocks. There are many ways around this such as holding review events or allowing early exposure to the fans for those who pre-order (and press) a la EA access. I personally was overwhelmed by meh when I played the beta though, so I get the feeling this is more than a little fishy and predict middling reviews a week or so later than release. But how these reviews will go down is a mixed bag as well.

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Report: Destiny The Taken King Result of Escalating Bet Between Activision and Bungie

Destiny’s soon to be released expansion, The Taken King, allegedly exists purely as a result of an escalating bet between head honchos at publisher Activision and developer Bungie, made at E3 2014.

Sources indicate that both parties were so happy with the success of the game (despite releasing it unfinished and without any decent story to speak of) that they went out after the show and got cray cray drinking Cristal, mixed with the tears of entitled but justifiably upset gamers. It was during this night out that the smug developer bet that they could remove a whole raid from the next dlc pretty much at the last minute and still get away with it.

Bystanders heard the developer say ‘most of the stupid fuckers have already bought it without knowing what it is anyway, so we can hold it back for the next one. We’ll replace it with a shitty little hoard mode and a 3 on 3 multiplayer variant’.

Not to be outdone, the Activision big cheese supposedly countered, insisting they would release the next expansion with one quarter of the content but at nearly the full price of a normal game.

Subsequent stake raising apparently included making people rebuy the game to get exclusive dances, sending out an employee at next years E3 to tell people they’re idiots who throw money at the screen for anything, rendering all year one gear and raids entirely obsolete, exclusive poison dependant DLC and seeing who can use the words ‘great value’ the most while keeping a straight face.

We have reached out to Bungie and Activision for comment.

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Delaying Zelda, opinions from Kami

Loved this comment from the euro gamer forums so I thought I’d share

@Spuzzell; Wii U has been by any measure of the market a failure. Sales wise, financially (caused Nintendo to get the first annual losses in its history) - hell, it even did the unthinkable and sank pretty much all third-party support - even from EA of all companies. EA! Christ, EA even supported the NGage!

Wii U sales have spiked a few times on certain game releases but nothing has helped it long-term sales wise. It’s now falling behind again in sales, to consoles which came out a year later. In May 2014, Nintendo said it was no longer losing money on each Wii U sale; but in July 2014, it admitted that the Wii U was still losing money overall. (Though that came from Kotaku…)

Compare that to other consoles in the market, the 3DS - heck, compare it to Dreamcast sales. There’s an eye-opener for you. From December 1998 to its official discontinuation in March 2001, the Dreamcast had 10.6 million sales (Link).

The Wii U didn’t even match this, the yardstick of “console failures”. As of January 2015, the Wii U sits at 9.8 million. That’s official Nintendo figures (Link).

Are there great games on it? YES. Is it a nice console? YES! Is the controller great? Erm, I’ll get back to you on that one. Last year I’d have said yes but my U-Pad certainly hasn’t held up under wear and tear. That’s a shame.

But as much as I love Nintendo and it’s always been there in my gaming life, I’m not dumb enough to sugar-coat this bitter little pill. The Wii U has been a disaster for Nintendo where it counts. Perhaps a good disaster; all companies need a slap here and there, and I’m pretty sure the Wii U sales numbers will be a hard enough slap across the cheek to knock a little more sense into the company as a whole.

And yes, Nintendo has godly financial reserves. Yes, I am aware currently it’s far more financially viable and valuable than Sony. The Wii U isn’t going to sink the company; it would be stupid to say that. And I didn’t.

We will probably even look back with fondness on Nintendo’s “little console that could”, but right now it’s even beginning to look like it will fail to match Gamecube figures(Link). At some point you do have to accept it; and the prognosis for the Wii U has been bleak for some time.

Despite ALL of this though; I like the Wii U. I like it a lot. I wish it was doing better, honestly. Hyrule Warriors was my personal best game of 2014. And I wish Zelda wasn’t being delayed.

But Nintendo needs to keep the notion going that it’s a place for top-notch games. Which arguably it is. Why on earth rush out a game for a short-term sales bonus (and so far, all big releases on Wii U have led to short-term sales surges) only to compromise your brand and image with a, “Well, we’ll sell this shit because we need the money!”?

It’d be lunacy for Nintendo to do this. But mind you, I still think it’s lunacy to keep the recent Fatal Frame from our shores…

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Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor

No Rush Review - Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor

Why would anybody bother reviewing a game that has been out for months you ask? Very good question. So often games journalists, due to the nature of their profession, need to smash through a game in order to meet a deadline produce an arbitrary score. This I find can lead to formulaic reviews where the very purpose of playing most games – enjoying yourself – passes the reviewer by. This is not a review to inform buyers as to whether they should buy the game but instead meant as a more entertaining read not bound by the sensible, reader and potential buyer friendly constraints that games journalists are subjected to. Hopefully it reads that way.

 The difficulties in adapting games from other medium has been discussed in many a review before and here, my concerns coming in were no different than they are with the countless licensed games we see hitting the shelves each year. If you’re lucky you get a development team given free-reign and absolute trust by their publishing partner (see Starbreeze with the Riddick or Darkness games); You could get one or two of the guys with decision making power being a massive fans of the source material (Metro) or you could have super rich perfectionist creators insisting on being involved at every step of the game (Stick of Truth). With nearly all other games you’re left with a shoddy, hollow mess with the license tacked on in order to shift as many copies as possible (Transformers, Superman, Spiderman 3 etc etc).

For those reasons I kept my optimism to barely a simmer when Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor was concerned; I’m a massive Tolkien fan and was worried that the game wouldn’t slot into the canon. I needn’t have worried though as Monolith has managed to craft a game that not only works extremely well with the source material but  also wisely avoids trying to mess with those stories that are already set in stone (much to the relief of this self-proclaimed fanboy).

The story does weave a few interesting threads into the games tapestry, even interpreting Tolkien’s extensive appendices in chin-strokingly interesting ways (blue wizards for example). It’s this obvious attention to detail that shines through and proves the guys and gals at Monolith are also massive fans of the lore they’re adapting. As a fan it’s very cool to see scenes with Celebrimbor - the Elven Lords spirit who has possessed the players character - interacting with the Dark Lord Sauron, pre and post spikey armour.

But aside from a few touching moments where your character Talion reminisces about/relives moments with his family, the story does exactly what it needs to do and no more; providing a reason for your character to be where he is doing something the player found deliciously entertaining, terrorizing Mordor. Story missions with the human resistance and the female warrior in the second playable area Nurnen feel like filler, being too underdeveloped to really hit home. Perhaps some flashback missions would have helped with the variety and the gravitas but it’s nothing game-breaking whatsoever.

Back to the terrorizing Mordor, this takes many forms over the course of the game, some familiar to anybody who has played open world action games from the last 5 years or so, and some utterly unique to this game. I am of course talking about the much vaunted nemesis system, a completely original feature which deserves all the plaudits it gets. In essence it represents a concentrated look at the hierarchy of the armies of Mordor, with Captains and War Chiefs of various rank vying for position throughout the game. This portion of the game requires the player to intervene in order to prevent the orcs increasing in power and becoming more difficult to kill later on. And you will meet the same orcs later on. Those who flee from your steely hurricane of zombie death and survive live to fight another day and will remember you and comment on particulars of your previous encounter, the same for those who manage to kill you; cockily taunting you based on how things went awry before.

It’s the orcs and the nemesis system that steal the show, with the sheer variety and humour providing much needed character to the games bad guys, and much needed humour to a type of game that often gets bogged down in seriousness (looking at you Ubisioft). I won’t ruin any of the lines but will say that keep your eyes out for the orc with the suffix “the slow”, reminds me of a few people I know. It’s not just the captains in the nemesis who provide this comic relief though as you drop eaves (movie reference there!) on those roaming the lands of Mordor, complaining about human slaves not being able to work longer than 16 hours hard labour a day for example, top stuff.

The visuals are wonderful and not as grim as I expected; Monolith wisely choose to not set everything in the land of fire and ash but add lush greens and beautiful sunsets to keep the game from being too grave. Weather effects and wonderful animations are the cherry on the already delicious Lembas bread, as are the host of appendices for the mega-fans among us.

To summarize, I can’t recommend the game enough to Tolkien fans seeing as it ticks all the boxes, without causing any offense (looking at you Hobbit movies). Even if you’re not a fan of the books or movies, you’re still left with one of the best examples of the genre available, and one that I don’t think would work on the previous generations of consoles (as those versions have proven).

If you haven’t yet played/finished it, give it a chance and you won’t be disappointed. I’m extremely excited to see what they do with the inevitable Middle Earth sequel (multiple character/races, elven woodland, Gondor etc).

Fog on the barrow downs, the road to isengard or a scouring of the shire/10