Category: Game On

Medal of Honour : Rising Scum truly pushes the boundaries of how much excrement you can fit on one disk. I have rarely had the excruciating misfortune to play, never mind own, a “game” as poor as this.

And I use the term “play” so loosely that if watching demo-footage of a game through a telescope counted as “playing”, well, MoH : Rising Scum would rank below that.

Although not advertised on the packaging, the game features “bullet-time” quite extensively. In fact, the whole first mission is spent predominantly in “bullet-time”, yet for some reason, unlike Max Payne or Enter The Matrix, the player character also seems to slow down along with everything else. To the point where it’s unplayably slow – I’m talking “turn around quickly, then go make a cup of tea while the game engine catches up” kind of slow.

It’s like EA wrote a game that could only possibly run at a decent frame rate on that Deep Blue super-computer that gives chess Grandmasters the run–around every so often. Then, instead of thinking “woah – it’ll be PS3 before this sloppy code can run smoothly on a console,” they wrote a Deep Blue emulator for the PS2 and stuck it in the shops anyway.

And this is not the PS2’s fault at all – there are games like the sublime TimeSplitters 2, which is over a year old now and absolutely hoses on anything that MoH: RS even attempts to do.

The reason I happened upon this sorry excuse for a game was due to me returning Need for Speed Underground. Rising Scum was a convenient swapsie at the equivalent price… but… but… I expected to get a frickin’ game in return, not just a collection of poor cut scenes and the worst rendition of a first person shooter you actually need to pay money to own!

Avoid this game like nothing you have ever avoided before. I’m talking suppositories, kidney failure, fallen power lines during a rain storm – that kind of thing. If someone offers to sell you this game, even at half price, run. Run screaming like you would if you were doused in petrol and they were offering you a light.

This was by far my favourite series when I was a kid. I ranked it way beyond Star Wars and it was kind of sad that even though you could get hold of even the most obscure ship models from SW, owning a Viper or a model of the Galactica itself wasn’t an option. The amount of time I spent making Lego replicas is amazing – I must have built and re-built Lego Galactica’s a hundred times, always running out of Lego before I could make something big enough to capture the sheer scale of how it looked in the films and on TV.

With this in mind, I’m totally looking forward to the Battlestar Galactica video game – if flying the ships is as fun as it is with the planes in Ace Combat 4, I’ll be a very happy pilot. Either way, I cant wait to immerse myself in the storyline – I hope it’ll be just as cool as Wing Commander was on the Amiga – the last space–flight type game I really got hooked on. :o)

Check out the official Battlestar Galactica game site for more info.

Been playing this cool Stick RPG Flash game over the last couple of days. It’s kind of short, so the best challenge is the 40 day game, since you can do everything it’s possible to do in the space of around 55 days.

Best tips are to get the alarm clock from the pawn shop as soon as you can, as it makes the day last longer, and get the kid on the corner some smokes from the store. :o)

The screen grab on the right shows my final ratings after 58 days of game time. I reckon I could have gotten close to that in much less time if I hadn’t spent so much time faffing around in the casino!

The game map is pretty small, so hopefully they’ll keep working on it and produce a version with a bit more to do for greater longevity.

Still, who’d have thought that drink would increase your level of charm? ;o)