Right as rainy

Back in the day of the point & click adventure games, a lot of titles had a scoring system. Every correct action in the game, every successful dialogue, every useful item (and some less useful ones) rewarded the player with a number of points. The objective, of course, was to finish the game with the maximum score, or to get as close to it as possible. It was something that added to the game (or tried to do so), provided for some bragging rights and maybe even made it worthwhile to play the game again.

For some time, as the classic adventure games lost popularity to other genres, the concept was forgotten. Until the console world picked it up again in a slightly different fashion. On the XBox 360, every retail game is worth 1000 points in so-called gamerscore. Since not every game comes with enough story or dialogue or items to adapt the concept 1:1, they had to come up with a few other ideas. The answer is Achievements – milestones scattered throughout the game, each worth a number of points.

(continue reading…)

Good old James Bond is back on stage. “Casino Royale’ was arguably one of the finest movies ever to grace the franchise, and ‘Quantum of Solace’ missed that bar only by a couple of inches. So logically enough, and going with the zeitgeist, there has to be a video game as movie tie-in – by the title of ‘Quantum of Solace’. And remarkably it’s the first James Bond game to make it to the PC since ‘Nightfire’ which was released in 2002, and also the first modern PC title to be directly based on one of the movies. Needless to say it is obviously present on virtually all other mainstream platforms as well. Enough reason to give it a try.

About 5 hours later the conclusion was somewhat sobering. I watched the credit roll (which seemed to be almost as long as the game) and thought to myself ‘Is that all?’. ‘Quantum of Solace’ is clearly trying to appeal to the mainstream FPS crowd, leaving a lot of potential unused or ignored. Level by level is spent doing run&gun scenarios and chicken shoots in the style of the early ‘Call of Duty’ titles, with a bit of hand-to-hand, some minute pseudo-hacking, a bit of pointless stealth and some irritating awkwardness in a few scenes. Most of it is just Bond-unworthy, as he usually has smarter means to outwit his opponents than shooting everything that moves. To add to the frustration, there is exactly one way through each level, each event is scripted, and the  execution of the objectives is as flexible as a railway track. No alternate routes, no silent way, nothing. (continue reading…)