Peter Molyneux has a T-Rex under his bed, honest

Once upon a time Peter 'Moneyloo' used to be my very favourite figure in the computer games world. He was the guiding hand behind Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper. Games so good they will be remembered as cherished classics forever. Bullfrog studios was the development house responsible, and I loved them. However all good things come to an end, and when Bullfrog faded away so did Peters grasp on reality.

Lionhead studios started off like a shining beacon of hope for gaming. They would be the great new hope for the medium. The Barack Obama of interactive experiences. However like the real Barack all they turned out to be was flimsy under scrutiny. Suddenly rather than the games being about fantastic storytelling and innovation they started being about stupid AI gimmicks, and so the dark road to Fable II had begun.

Peters myspace profile picture

Black and White was the first Lionhead project to be released, and up until it arrived everything Peter had touched was solid gold. Black and White was going to be a revolutionary moment in gaming. It was going to resonate and destroy all our pre-conceived ideas of what a video game could be. It was going to make us laugh, cry and dance in the streets.

What Black and White turned out to be was a vague remake of Populous with an enormous tamagotchi instead of a cursor. The ‘avatar’ wasn’t a sapient or sentient being capable of independent thought. I didn’t fall in love with it and run away with a printed out picture. I didn’t even get to use it for half of the missions in the game, of which there were about three. Black and White wasn’t awful but it wasn’t as advertised. We forgave Lionhead though because the beautiful styling and presentation were so wonderful we’d allow them a bit of room for manoeuvre.

After Black and White was forgotten we were told of Fable. This was going to be it. The storming of the entertainment Bastille. The second coming of pixel Jesus. Characters in the game would actually exist. The stories of player’s adventures would be so amazing and unique Hollywood would buy the rights to them. It came out and once again Fable wasn’t terrible, but in reality it was just a slightly above average action RPG with excellent presentation.

First Black and White screen shot released to the press

So far Lionhead had provided us with two solid but unspectacular games. This didn’t matter though because Black and White 2 was on the horizon. Lionhead had been around for a few years now and had some experience to draw on. Black and White 2 was going to be everything that the original should have been and more. In a way it was, if you considered the original to be disappointing and buggy.

It was at this point that Molyneux’s had to start to explain himself making this statement:

"If I have mentioned any features in the past which, for whatever reason, didn't make it as I described into Fable, I apologise. Every feature I have ever talked about was in development, but not all made it. Often the reason is that the feature did not make sense."

The problem with this is its meaningless. I could tell you that in this very blog I’m going to explain the mystery of life and give conclusive proof of alien existence on Earth, except it might not make it in... But I intended it too.

The Movies was the next game to come out, and yes once again it had been hyped to Mars and back. It was a neat idea for a game with some clever elements borrowed from strong Molyneux games like Theme Park, but once again it was just a shallow gimmick fest that failed to make a lasting impact.

As I mentioned earlier, all the games Lionhead made were just a sombre march toward Fable II. Like the Nazis marching into a wintery Russian landscape and dying of hypothermia because they didn’t get any of the winter equipment that Hitler had been promising them. For a few brief hours I loved Fable II. It seemed as if Peter had finally cracked it. That’s when it hit me, I’d felt like this before. I’d felt like that when I first played Black and White. And Fable I, and Black and White 2. I snapped out of my dream state and saw Fable II for what it was a facade.

The bond between man and UI

You could work as a Blacksmith, but you never used a single sword that you made. You could buy every single house in the world, but all that did was earn you more money for more pointless houses. You could marry and have children, but all that did meant there were a few more mannequin NPCs filling up your houses. Nothing you did really made a difference. All it did was decide whether you had a halo or horns, and even that was just cosmetic. Then there was the dog, apparently a futuristic breakthrough in AI. In reality it was just a complicated mini map that barked.

It’s a good job games like Mass Effect have proved that games with consequences can exist, and there is morality between evil son of a bitch child rapist and do gooder nun protector. Fable III is going to arrive soon and I expect ‘Lionhead syndrome’ to be all over it. At first it amazes you, and then it amazes you again for the wrong reasons.

I just wish Peter Molyneux would go back to making fantastic creative games and give up on stupid glorified tech demos. I guess I’m accusing him of misrepresenting his games but he does call them ‘Fable’ so maybe the jokes on us.

Crackdown 2? More like Crapdown 2 – Fnaar fnaar fnaar.

That hilarious pun has probably telegraphed how I feel about the joke of a game pretty quickly. As has referring to it as a ‘joke of a game’ in the first line. Now, I’ve been unwell lately and perhaps my sickness is making me crabby but seriously guys, what on earth were you doing during the development cycle?

Yes, the graphics are this bad

I was a fan of Crackdown 1. I enjoyed its rather silly take on Grand Theft Auto genre, but that was back in 2007 when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the bible was yet to be written. Since then Saints Row 2, GTA4 and Red Dead Redemption have come out and it’s left Crackdown 2 looking like a marginally graphically updated Pac-Man. In fact I’d take that further, Crackdown 2 isn’t a sequel to Crackdown it’s a sequel to Pac-Man. You run around a boring grey box collecting orbs while being chased by the undead. Except Pac-Man was better because at least it had half decent characters.

Crackdown 2 is a game with almost no game play. There is no story to speak of, no characters, no humour, no hope, no chance, no return and no diggety. All it is is a sandbox in its most basic form filled with boring identi-kit citizens and boring identi-kit bad guys. This is exacerbated by the fact you play a totally invulnerable moral blank nameless super soldier from the beginning. The only real danger your character is ever in is from the risk that whoever is playing this load of rubbish might try and kill themselves. It honestly feels like a game from 2001.

Crackdown 2 Beta

The narrative of this game follows a system whereby you repeat the same ‘location clearing’ missions over and over again. I mean really, that’s it. You pitch up at the big flashing icon on the map, kill everyone, and move on. I finished the game in about 5 hours on the day it arrived. Also if you’re a sado-masochist like I am and you actually bother to find the ‘audio logs’ (How original) the apparent plot doesn’t even make sense. In fact let me break it down for you.

· Woman scientist creates disease that makes zombies out of ordinary people and releases it

· Woman scientist demands the Agency cure the disease

· The Agency builds big walls to contain the zombies

· Woman scientist isn’t happy with this and starts a terrorist group

· The Agency builds technology that can kill the zombies once and for all

· Woman scientists terrorist group actively try to stop the Agency wiping out the zombies and attack the big containment walls

And the real problems arise when we are sort of meant to sympathize with this woman and feel that the Agency are evil bad fascists. It just doesn’t work on any level at all.

The Agency if you are wondering is the police for whom you are working as a genetically engineered enforcer. Although rather than arresting criminals and bringing justice to the streets your first duty seems to be mass murder of anyone and everyone on an industrial scale. Murder civvies? Not a problem. Murder fellow cops? They might shoot at you for 10 minutes but that all. There are absolutely no rules in place and you just end up with the game feeling futile and pointless, which is handy because futile and pointless is exactly what this game is.

Never before has boxart described a game so well

Another master stroke is the ‘Voice’ that follows you around making snide and unnecessary comments. It’s like playing the game as a schizophrenic with self esteem issues. For example if you get into a helicopter you’ll never fail to hear, ‘’Are you SURE you know how to fly this thing?’’ Mild patronization by the game is bad enough but it’s even worse when it starts being rude to you. Yes, that right the game starts being rude to you. I was playing co-op mode with a friend and we were trying to squeeze some fun out of the game by building a roadblock out of ruined cars when the ‘voice’ actually pipes up saying , ‘’What the FUCK do you think you’re doing? Stop wasting time.’’

I think that’s the real problem I have with this game. It has almost zero sense of humour. Sure it’s got comedy zombies and wacky ‘Battle bus’ vehicles but it’s like a stand up comic with autism repeating jokes he heard a much better comedian perform. We don’t find it funny and neither does he. Games like Saints Row have a permanent tongue in their cheek and are always ready with a wink and a nudge. Crackdown 2 is just a joyless slogfest with the charm and wit of a wheelie bin that’s shat itself.

I admit I didn’t try the ‘competitive’ multiplayer because after two days of this game the thought of booting it up again makes me die a little inside. I’d be willing to bet its rubbish anyway. On the positive side of things the co-op works quite well for what it’s worth. That’s pretty much the only good thing I can think of. The engine of the game itself is years out of date too – it can only handle about twenty cars on screen at a time and shapes outside of cubes seem to be beyond it. The pedestrians have only have a couple of set models in an age when sandbox game characters have been made out of a variation of composite parts for years.

In closing I think the ‘Voice of the Agency’ said it best.

‘’You know, this is getting really tedious.’’