Phoned In

(PC, PS3, PS4, WiiU, Xbone, Xbox 360, Ubisoft, 2014)
When first unveiled at E3 2012, Ubisoft’s Watch_Dogs was speedily declared the game of the new generation by rabid fans, who continued to stoke the hype train's engine to full throttle, through its delay, until its eventual release in 2014.
By this point, the intriguing looking sandbox adventure had, through word of frothing mouths, been spun into this magical game that could build you a mansion, help you achieve immortality and, less realistically, kill your buyer's remorse over having purchased a next-gen console in launch year.

Set in a bleak near-future Chicago, Dogs sees the player step into the trenchcoat of nihilistic hax0r Aiden Pearce, a supposed "vigilante" who likes to jack cars, run down pedestrians and steal from civilians. After a botched heist leads to vehicular tragedy, Pearce' sets his narrowing eyes and iconic baseball cap on a mission of personal vengeance, aided by his sociopathic partner Jordi Chin and a poundshop version of Lisbeth Salander.

The Girl With The Dreadful Tattoo

WD’s gimmick, heavily showcased in promotional materials, is Aiden’s ability to access Chi-town’s entire technological infrastructure via his smartphone. This neckbeard super-power gives Pearce options to manipulate computer servers, bridges, traffic lights and everything in-between. (Though sadly there is no option to download Pearce a likeable personality.)

Tucked away behind this unique and admittedly interesting curtain is the actuality of what Watch_Dogs really is, a standard GTA clone which utilises QTEs to turn the floaty driving sequences and cover-based shoot-outs in Pearce’ favour, raising road blockades to dodge high-speed pursuers for example, or hitting the lights to turn a frantic gun battle into a flailing game of blind man’s death.

Not pictured: an abundance of generic shooting

Whilst these abilities provide a momentarily interesting new take on the typical sandbox world of the crime-sim, they are, in reality, quite basic and redundant, requiring little more than a well-timed button press to almost completely free Pearce from whatever danger he is currently facing.
Once this realisation dawns and the mask is stripped away, Dogs becomes little more than just another "Watch the cutscene, Drive to the icon, Shoot the guys and Repeat" gaming experience, littered with shallow Easter egg hunts and plotless sidequests.

Watch_Dogs' fills its visually attractive city with an over-abundance of things to do, a common problem in modern sandbox games, where developers cannot grasp that just having "tons of shit going on" does not equal a fun gaming experience. In fact, it makes a game flabby and directionless, taking the attention away from any narrative urgency and filling the HUD with an explosion of pointless thumbnails.
There is nothing wrong with adding sidequests to support a story, or to reward you with additional characters or items, but just saying "Collect these 100 arbitrary items" or "visit all these locations" isn't adding longevity, it's just needlessly distracting filler.

Less really is more.

"But first, lemme take a #Selfie"

It would remiss of me to point out that, despite this personally negative review, Watch_Dogs is an acceptable game, it is action packed, visually attractive and its phone-related chicanery is a clever and unique concept. Praise should also be given to the voice acting from the entire cast (bar Pearce himself, who, you guessed it, has that whole "Metal Geeyeear" thing going on.)
But, behind the hype and bravado, it offers nothing at a base level that we haven't seen in a hundred other games since the early 2000's, and a tired sense of deja-vu sets in after only a couple of hours play. Add to this the recent controversies over the abhorrent uPlay system, the suspiciously crippled PC version and the FIVE different collectors editions, and the negatives heavily outweigh the positives.

What could have been..

Watch_Dogs could never have lived up to the rabid hype pouring from its starry-eyed followers and Ubisoft themselves, who are the very epitome of hyperbole. As a general B-list product it is fine, but as a supposed spear-tip of a new generation of gaming, it's no more than the Emperor's new clothes.

Anyone tired of crime-sims may want to drop this particular call.

Qu'est-ce que c'est?

(DOS/Commodore CDTV, Delta 4 Interactive, 1993)
Interactive Movies.
That should run a chill down the spine of any gamer in their mid-thirties.

The dawn of CD based gaming was instantly seen as a way to supplement real video footage in place of doing any actual work designing graphics, characters, backgrounds and such. The early 90's was drowned in such entertainment (questionable word choice) on fledging new CD consoles such as the 3DO, CDi and Sega Mega-Cd.
All terrible machines. Fact.

£15 for the lot, You pay me.

In 1993, I would have been about thirteen years old, and I was more than interested in the concept of "Real Video" games, already being a disciple of Don Bluth's laserdisc trilogy and the American Laser Games shooters, of which I'm an unashamed fan.
I remember reading short, forgotten reviews about an interactive movie that appeared around this time on the PC and the first ever CD based console, the Commodore Amiga CD-TV

Ever used one of these? Liar.

The game was called "Psycho Killer" which tied it in with another interest of mine, as I was obsessed with Slasher movies as a young 'un.
A scary pair of eyes stare out from behind the game's title logo, sinister stuff indeed.

You know it's a real game because it's ADULT

The game never got large reviews, or much coverage in general by the gaming press, as it was a small scale release, and for such an obscure format to boot. But I often wondered about it, as this game sounded right up my particularly dark alley.
Fast forward twenty years later and, whilst browsing a site for DOS abandonware, my eyes set upon a title, a title that literally unlocks a memory long since buried under stacks of old gaming magazines and episodes of Knightmare in my brain.
Psycho Killer is here..
and I can finally play it..
and Fuck Me is it rubbish.

If this picture excites you, you're gonna LOVE Psycho Killer

My first realisation is that it's a British game, a very British game, and more than likely a bedroom developed one at that. My second realisation is instead of being Full Motion Video, it's more camcorder footage, converted to photographs, then slide-showed next to one another which gives a bizarre stop-motion look.
Also, on the PC release, all the colour has been compressed out, giving everything a fugly, one tone palette.

The narrative is as simple as this: Three people, A geeky protagonist, the anorak-sporting PSYCHO KILLER and some girl as a damsel in distress, chase each other around a muddy field in an area we Brits refer to as "The Home Counties" that is to say, very sparse farmland moors, completely lacking in life, animals and interest.

Gameplay consists of moving through a series of locations/photographs, choosing whether to go one way or the other. Every so often, our completely unbelievable Psycho Killer will attack, and you have to click on something on the screen to avoid death, such as his weapon or his bored looking oik face.

"Eat my Reeboks, Freak-Face": ACTUAL DIALOGUE

Our hero narrates each scene with his poindexter voice, his husky breath heaving and popping on the soundtrack as he records the dialogue too close to the mic jammed into the AUX socket of his Amiga, exclaiming "Sugar!" when in a near-death struggle so as not to offend the audience.
Occasionally, the killer speaks, and he hilariously sounds just like a walkman when the batteries are running out.

There is little to no direction given to the player as he stumbles through endless sequences of tree photography, or even a heads up on what to do when danger strikes. Thus, much death will occur as the player fails to realise when they were supposed to perform an action, or that those four grainy pixels in a murky photograph were actually an essential item that needed collecting.

Psycho Killer presents its myriad of gameplay options

I persevered after several deaths, and eventually found my way through the grotty fields to a jetty, where I simply sparked PSYCHO KILLER the fuck out with a pointed stick.
And that was that.

I'd completed the game. Less than forty five minutes after booting it.

On release, Psycho Killer cost around £30. I had finished it in a little over a half-hour, like you would a browser game on a rainy afternoon. This is hilarious today, when people now constantly bitch because some Blockbuster Xbox game was "only" 15 hours long.

Admittedly, I have been a bit mean to Psycho Killer, because at the end of the day, it was just a low budget production, and it at least deserves praise for having the inspiration to quickly latch on to the just-birthed Interactive Fiction market. A market that is still going today in its own form, with games such as Hotel Dusk and Virtue's Last Reward.
So I'm not bashing the game's developers for their work, though they should have known better than to cast some guy who looks like the school playground weed dealer as their machete wielding homicidal lunatic.

Seconds later, he fell into the river and drowned... OR DID HE? (yes, he did)

But Psycho Killer is a terrible game, far too expensive for its short and tiring experience. I would have been furious to have dropped that much cash on this back in the day.
It's probably the worst Interactive Movie ev....

..oh...never mind.



(From the internets: The game in its entirety, including Tutorial and death scenes)