Change Your Image
IokFromTheCrypt
Reviews
The Sims 3 (2009)
A Brilliant Evolution of The Sims Series
The Sims games are based on a simple concept: create virtual people then influence their lives. As they develop, so they express new needs, start relationships, develop skills and provide a unique experience, part dollhouse, part soap opera.
Now The Sims 3 takes all that and improves on it in every single way in a game that's the best of the series so far.
Previously Sims were restricted to living within the boundaries of a single lot and could only visit another location by taking a taxi ride (interrupted by a loading screen) at which point they were locked in another lot until they decided to return home. Not so now - your Sim is free to explore the entire city without restrictions. And what's more, life goes on throughout the city, with other households growing, evolving and changing. It's an amazingly deep, immersive world your Sims now inhabit.
Core gameplay remains relatively similar, but EA has streamlined a lot of the problems in the earlier games. Sims eat less, need fewer bathroom breaks, pathing is improved and the game focuses less on micromanagement and more on play.
One new feature is the "Moodlet." Your Sims' experiences may give them negative or positive "power-ups" that effect their mood. Eat a good meal or walk into a well-decorated room and your Sim gains positive moodlets. But in a room filled with dirty plates their mood sinks. It's a superb,quick way to gain an insight into your Sim's wellbeing.
Although it still revolves around watching the clock speed past, work has been overhauled, with new careers and paths and even a new "work attitude" option - push yourself for the raise or chill-out with co-workers being just two options open to your working Sims. Although still not perfect it's a more engaging experience than that found in The Sims 2.
Skills have been refined. Writer Sims can pen their own novels, choosing a variety of genres to work in (and even giving it a title). When your book is finished, you'll receive royalties and a complementary copy in the mail, which you can then place in your home. You can plant seeds and grow your vegetables, then use them in your recipes. The depth within the skill set is superb and rewards gamers willing to put the effort into exploring the new system.
Create A Style is a new tool that allows players to modify the colour/pattern of virtually any item in the game, from furniture to clothing and building surfaces. The power of this tool is incredible and offers a vast range of style options for the custom-content creators.
Visually the game is impressive. The Sims themselves - although stylised - are well-animated, with a "solid" feel to them and the environments really shine: trees shake in the wind, waves crash upon the beach, water droplets stick to your Sim's skin.
But perhaps what's most impressive is the sheer depth and immersive nature of The Sims 3. EA have cracked that "just one last thing" gameplay that keeps you hooked for hours on end.
Finally, it's impossible to discuss The Sims 3 without touching upon the negative reception the game has - unfairly - been given by a minority of very vocal players. There are complaints of crash-bugs, that EA didn't include all the content of The Sims 2's expansions and that EA are attempting to rob players with an unfinished/incomplete game.
All I can say is that having played on a Pentium 4 2.8/Nvidia 7600GT and a dual core 2.6/Nvidia 8800GT, the game never crashed, showed no graphical glitches and Time Advance works just fine (EDIT: a patch from EA has since improved Time Advance further, so now there's no excuse for not playing it!)
What I have experienced is people complaining about the "broken" state of The Sims 3 playing on machines that don't meet the minimum requirements. Perhaps they should also complain that their CD Walkman won't play Blu-Ray movies.
As for the "missing" content: even EA would struggle to release 18 DVD's worth of updates on time for under £300. Expansion packs - as they did for the previous games - will be appearing to introduce new content to The Sims 3, so why this is a problem for these people is baffling.
For those willing to accept this new evolution I'd strongly urge giving The Sims 3 a whirl, as it's without a doubt the best game in the series so far. For those unwilling to accept change, then I'm sure EA will continue to support The Sims 2 for another few years yet. However, during that time you'll be missing-out on some amazing experiences.
Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures (2008)
A Bug Ridden Mess
The launch of a Massive Multiplayer game is always problematic. Coping with the sheer number of players, server load, different configurations and humans doing what we do best - namely the unexpected - can cause serious problems for any game.
However, two months after release, Age of Conan is still an unplayable shambles of a game that's riddled with bugs, broken content and elements that simply don't work. I'm not talking about trivial bugs like miss-spelt names or items being the wrong colour. No, what we have here is a "game" that physically refuses to work. It's currently impossible to play for more than 30 minutes before a recurrent memory leak causes your entire system to lock-up. That's not good.
So what are Funcom doing to address this? Not a lot. Instead of fixing such major issues, they're instead playing around with the character balance, boosting some classes to the point of being God-like whilst lowering the abilities of others to make them as effective as a wet tissue. Not that any of this matters, of course, because it's impossible to play this mess of a "game" anyway.
Then there's the fact that the game was billed as a Direct X10 title. Not true. It's an unoptimised, flabby mess of a game that struggles on even the lowest of settings on a reasonable games machine. Be prepared to spend most of your time watching a 2 frames per second slide show if you crank your graphics up beyond even the most basic of settings. Even on high-end machines, the game still suffers from some terrible pop-in, poor frame rates and generally bad performance.
Credit where credit's due, the game looks pretty amazing. And the combat system is interesting. But beyond that, this is a perfect example of how not to launch an MMO: from the lack of content to the ineptitude of the Live Team to introduce fixes without breaking the game, to the lack of anything to actually do except kill creatures ad infinitum.
Put simply, don't waste your money.
The Lord of the Rings Online (2007)
Very Good, Instantly Playable MMO with Depth
As a pretty experienced player of Massive Multiplayer Online games, I was shocked when I realised LOTRO had slipped under my radar. After the bitter disappointment of Age of Conan, I found myself looking for another game and - finding the game at a knock-down price - decided to give it a go.
Fans of the genre will be very impressed with LOTRO. Developers Turbine have learnt from World of Warcraft's accessibility and quick-fix play but have not forgotten that a game also needs depth AND breadth.
What you have here is a game that gives players the opportunity to have their hack and slash fun but also backs it up with a strong community spirit, namely with a whole host of "trivial stuff" to entertain players. In what seems a throwback to older games, for example, players may own houses, something the WoW team looked at but dismissed. This may seem like a pointless exercise but here Turbine have gone back to the MMO roots and realised that for some people, Status Items are a big draw. Similarly, the title/deeds system - which is effectively LOTRO's take on Xbox Achievements - gives a further opportunity for bragging rights.
There's also an element of intelligence required in quests. Unlike other MMOs where quests involve going from one blip to another on your map, LOTRO leaves it up to the player to figure out the finite details. Don't worry if that sounds sloppy - it's not. It simply means that the game requires you to give consideration to your quests and effectively turns them from simple blip-chasing karaoke into something that actually engages you.
Then there's the Epic Quest line. Very cleverly the developers have integrated the events of the books into the storyline, with the player assisting the journey of the Ring and the defence against the Enemy, but in a very subtle manner that compliments the original in a well thought-out manner.
As for gameplay, it's pretty much as you'd expect - combat is based around auto attacks with a queued special move system, loot can be taken from creatures and used/sold and various characters give you quests to complete. There's nothing particularly revolutionary there but that's not a negative comment, as what is there is done very well.
Quests are well thought-out, interesting and suited to the setting. For example, a frontiersman may ask you to defend his homestead against attacking bandits, whereas a Hobbit farmer may ask you to help him woo his neighbour. Although these quests are really only based around a few basic concepts - kill X number of creatures, collect X number of items, go talk to X - the difference in LOTRO compared to other games is that they're very well-balanced.
Unlike many games, playing isn't a chore and you don't feel yourself battling constantly to advance. Instead, the quests are pitched just at that right level of being challenging but not impossible (I find the comments about "forced grouping" to be rather strange here, as that's not my experience of the game at all...) Visually, the game is very impressive and the engine rattles along at a cracking pace. There's very little slowdown and the game looks great, even on the lower settings. Not that you'll need to lower them (unless your PC is really out of date) as the engine is capable of rendering multiple characters without any slowdown (unlike some other MMOs I could mention) and even the massive task of drawing the cities barely causes the engine to sweat. It's a great achievement.
Sound-wise the game also excels, with great ambient audio. The only downside is that the ambient music is VERY ambient, being little more than a slow guitar strumming or low -rumble. It works, but it lacks the oomph of World of Warcraft's or Age of Conan's choral pieces.
Overall, LOTRO delivers on what it promises: great visuals, fun gameplay, depth and a lot of systems in place to keep you playing for a long time. It's also one of the most polished, professional MMOs yet.
And if you want proof of how good this game is, I've cancelled my World of Warcraft account! Yes, it's THAT good.
Doctor Who: Journey's End (2008)
A Good Run... Until the Finale
It's truly a shame that Russell T. Davies' final "proper" Doctor Who episode had to be this mess. RTD has worked wonders in transforming the show for the 21st Century, making it current, heartfelt, emotionally engaging and incredibly popular. But "Journey's End" is possibly one of the worst episodes of TV ever and is a discredit to RTD's writing, the characters and the fans.
There's no denying RTD can write. Look at the finales to the previous seasons. The Ninth Doctor's "no" speech, his heartfelt goodbye to Rose, the Tenth Doctor and Rose at the end of "Doomsday..." He sure knows how to hit the viewer hard and lay on the emotion.
But "Journey's End" was an incredibly flawed, flat effort. Yet again RTD writes himself into corners he can't possibly escape from without resorting to reset buttons or cheap get-outs. He throws in too many ideas, too many characters and too many set-pieces but doesn't give any time or effort to expanding them beyond being the most functional of scenes with characters that don't engage with each other and simply make announcements to move the plot ahead.
It's just a very badly written mess.
And worst of all, the season's end is unsatisfying, leaving a bitter taste in an episode even RTD himself said he wasn't sure about. Fans of the Rose-Doctor relationship are cheated. Fans of Catherine Tate's Donna are left angry at the treatment of the character in a resolution that's not sad or tragic - it's just pointlessly cruel, as if RTD is giving two-fingers at the fans. Fans of Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures get a few cameo nods, but again, it's all somehow empty.
The worst part of the whole thing though is that with just a few minor re-writes, "Journey's End" could have been the epic it should have been. Yes, it's easy to criticise and say "I could have done better" but in this case it's also true.
Even the media has - for the first time - responded in a less-than-positive manner, with some rather mixed reviews of the episode, leading - presumably - to RTD's outbursts about critical fans being "mosquitos." But he misses the point: he's being criticised because we love the show and see his heart is in the right place. He's just wide of the mark with his writing and that's the biggest tragedy of all.
So near, and yet so far...
The Monster Club (1981)
Not Amicus' Best, But Still Has Something To Offer...
Amicus enjoyed success in the late 60s and early 70s with their now-classic anthology series of movies. Starting with "Doctor Terror's House of Horror" the formula was simple: a group of people at a gathering tell each other stories (or recount their nightmares) as a way to pass the time.
The set-up was a success for Amicus: it allowed them to employ big names (as they weren't needed for a feature-length shoot) and if the viewer didn't like the tale, fear not, as another would be along in a few minutes...
In "The Monster Club" we follow R. Chetwynd-Hayes (an on-screen analogue of the writer Robert Chetwynd-Hayes) who after an encounter with Erasmus (Vincent Price playing... Vincent Price) is invited to learn more about the history of that we call "the monster" and so enters The Monster Club, where Erasmus explains monster genealogy and illustrates his points with three short tales...
"The Monster Club" is the last of Amicus' anthologies - and indeed productions. Never quite as visceral as Hammer's T&A technicolor excesses, Amicus always relied more on suggestion and kept a tighter reign on their bloodletting. But by 1980, things had changed and Amicus' suspenseful, ironic twists didn't sit well with an audience looking for a more effects-driven stabfest...
"The Monster Club" looks cheap. It's an unfortunate choice the producers made to not show a little more restraint with the *ahem* "creature effects" in the club. Essentially, it looks like a bad Halloween party where nobody spent more than a pound on their mask.
Added to that is the soundtrack. Presumably intended to appeal to "the kids" the decision was made to include musical performances at the club between tales. Whilst they're catchy in their own awful 1980s manner (and "The Stripper" provides a hilarious sequence I won't spoil) they do feel like padding.
On to the tales themselves. The first is a tale of dark love and the "Shadmock," one of RCH's many unusual creations. The story works well and has a quite ghastly ending. So far, so good.
Next up is a tale played for laughs (with a nice in-joke about updating a story to modern times for the movie adaptation, as it saves on the budget, something Amicus were known for.) Not bad, but let's move on.
And finally, the most memorable tale, featuring a lost village where not is all as it seems... And this is where "The Monster Club" shines. Had every story been able to reach the levels of this, "The Monster Club" could have been Amicus' crowning glory.
Unfortunately, though, the movie's pacing suffers due to the slackness of Tale 2. We all know the twist but have to spend another 10 minutes waiting for the movie to reveal it, then get on with it. Which is a shame, as it's a bit of a waste for all involved, really.
The biggest problem with "The Monster Club" though - as stated above - is it looks cheap, looking like a TV anthology show, which is ironic, as many people often mistake the final segment as being an episode of Hammer House of Horror.
But look beyond the cheap rubber masks and campy performances and you'll find a fun - but not always scary - movie here. Maybe not the best of Amicus' output, but it still has charm and a few twists, which is more than can be said for many other movies...
Películas para no dormir: Regreso a Moira (2006)
Spooky, Moving and Engaging
An elderly man returns to his home town, having left the country in his youth. During the course of his homecoming, we see flashbacks to his past and learn of his love affair with a woman branded a witch by the deeply religious locals. However, all is not as it seems and his jealousy and infatuation set into action a course of events that come back to haunt him years later...
A stylish, slow-paced but unnerving ghost story that combines M.R. James-style apparitions with an emotionally-driven story and some nicely handled, subtle twists. If you're looking for a "BOO!" shock movie, look elsewhere, though: this is a thoughtful, atmospheric and emotionally-engaging exploration of the effects of guilt, with a supernatural edge. You'll need patience to fully appreciate the movie, as the story unfolds at its own pace and those looking for outright shocks will need to look elsewhere (although when the scares come, they're handled well) but if you're looking for an intelligent, haunting drama, stick with it. You won't be disappointed.