Week 8

   Well, Mafia 2 has certainly slowed me down, it's a second successive week without completing the game and the reason is that Mafia 2 is bad. I'm just not having fun at all, and I'm treating it more as a chore sitting down for about an hour a night to do one more chapter until it's done. Thankfully, I'm nearly at the end now, yet you may ask yourself, why am I still playing this? The honest answer is that I'm not sure, I guess I started, assumed it would pick up (you see, there's a 6 year time jump about a third of the way in to the game and I kept thinking (for a reason that no longer makes any sense to me) that it would pick up after that, of course, it hasn't) and I'd enjoy it more. Don't get me wrong, the story's fine, I don't hate it, but it's certainly not enthralling. The main problem is that it just seems so outdated. It released in 2010, but seems more like something you'd expect from a PS2 game, circa 2003. Obviously, that's only in the gameplay areas though, graphically and in reach it's bigger than that, but the gameplay is diabolical.
   Somehow, this game has gotten mostly positive fan reviews on metacritic (although many of their 'reviews' are defending against criticisms from media outlets, so I know I'm not totally alone in my thoughts) and I don't believe that games have come so far in 4 years. There's so much time spent doing menial stuff, like driving between locations to start missions, and this has enough annoyance attached to it anyway. As I said last week, if you speed past a cop car, you'll get chased (it's easy to lose them mind you) and if you have a passenger they'll start complaining about your reckless driving. I tell you, it's like my driving test all over again, just because I ignore all red lights, go as fast as possible and run over pedestrian who are in the way of me saving half a second around a corner is no need to fail me. Not only that, the handling is poor, sure, it could be blamed on old timey 1950's cars, but the stopping distance of these cars is massive, if you've hit about 80 mphs, you'd better be prepared to start braking about 5 junctions before the one you need to turn, else you'll be flying past. Also, it seems like half of your time is spent driving to and from Joe's (your partner in crime (literally)). I barely know any of the map except about 8 roads that are all around his flat which i could traverse with my eyes closed because it seems to be the only location in the game sometimes. Then there's the checkpoints, which are ridiculously far apart, and I'm not just talking for shooting and car chases and the like. Just travelling between locations is a nightmare. You see, if you go head on in to a ;pillar or oncoming traffic at significant speed, then you'll die (to any none gamers Reading this you probably think that's a ridiculously obvious statement, but gamers will know that, that kind of stuff shouldn't kill you), and if you're in the part of the chapter where you inevitably have to drive between 5 places to pick someone/something up, you'll always have to go right back to the start, even if you've made 3 or 4 stops already, an sit through the same in car 'banter' and moaning about your driving abilities. Yes, there's nearly been many a smashed controller whilst playing this game. On the plus side though, the music on the radio is better in the 50's, an you can personalise your number plate, so make sure you come up with some 6 letter gags before you start.

   There also seems to be quite a few bugs as well, I've had cutscenes where one character wouldn't say their lines, another where they would disappear, and several frustrating instances where you park your car outside of a location, go in to see someone, come out, and the car was gone, so then you end up having to nick some total piece of crap car because there's inevitably nothing anywhere near as good as what you left parked outside anywhere to be found. There was also mention of a wire tap, did they have those is the 50's? if so, where's McNulty? plus, one of the guards in prison asked me to do something with 'would you kindly', so where's Fontaine? I'm begging to think there isn't going to be a Bioshock or The Wire crossover in this game at all!

   However, it's not the only thing that I've been playing this week, as The wolf among us, episode 3, 'a crooked mile' also came out. I think I've touched on this game series before, but if not, then a basic overview is that it's made by telltale games, and done very much in the same style as the Walking dead (cell shaded, interactive story style, terrible animation etc.) except it's set on the 'Fables'  comic book series instead of the Walking dead (but it can't be called fables due to the pre-existing videogame series 'Fable' (also, as with the walking dead, it's an episode and not a full game so wont count towards the completed tally)). Got it? Good.

   So, I couldn't remember the ending of episode 2 at all, and when I did get shown what it was, it didn't jog my memory at all. In fact, I could hardly remember anything from episode 2, although I remember episode 1 almost perfectly. It's hard to really talk about a game that's nearly fully story focused without spoiling it (especially when you're already half way in), so I'll keep it light. You're deep in the middle of a murder investigation, and you finally have a suspect, you spend the majority of this episode attempting to track the suspect, but when you do find him, plot twist!

   Just remember. don't trust the B in apartment 23.

Hopefully by this time next week I'll have finished Mafia 2, if not and there's no post next week, just assume I've killed myself out of boredom. No Grid 2 btw.

Completed:

                 Mark of the Ninja

                 Donkey Kong country: Tropical freeze

                 Crimson Dragon

                 Toy Soldiers: Cold war

                 Metro: Last light

                 South Park the stick of truth

                 Titanfall

                 Brothers: a tale of two sons

                Metal Gear solid V: ground zeroes

Underway: 

                Mafia 2

                Grid 2