Are we having fun yet?

Are we Having fun yet?

Jon Evans

Here we go, the first ‘round up of the year’ article on the interwebs. What’s that you say? It’s only bloody November? Yup. As I write this, there are mere hours to go before Sony release their latest electronic toy box doohickey to our friends over the pond. It is with much gnashing of teeth and nerd-frustration that we sit here in our cold, damp british bedrooms, eagerly masturbating over videos of unboxings, first-look reviews and judgements on the, rather paltry, launch lineup of PS4 games, while we bask in the neon glow of the OXO tower with it’s garish christmas decorations in the style of the Playstation controller buttons. Bitter? Me? Hah.

This got me thinking; with two weeks to go before my Playstation gets demoted to the ‘Pile of Shame Machine/PVR device’, I wondered what games I’d played over the last year that were actually fun. I don’t mean good, I mean fun. There has been a lot of discussion recently on the whole ‘are games art?’ debate, but let’s not beat about the bush, games consoles are toys and us grown-ups play games on them. I wanted to look at what games over the last year, that I’ve played, have made me chuckle, smile, laugh out loud or left me with a warm geek-glow, while also providing the twitter equivalent of the water cooler conversation. So I googled ‘games released in 2013’ to see what fun I had. There weren’t actually that many. Ah. Perhaps I’m a miserable bastard. Anyroad here are the games that I’ve played, old or new in 2013 that have been fun. Hey, there may be a few things here that flicked your switch over the last 12 months.

Battlefield 3

I know, I know, this game was released in 2011. I was was still playing this at the beginning of 2013 as, lets be honest, there was feck all else to play. I’m pretty crap at first person shooters. I’m approaching my fourth decade, I have the reaction speeds of a geriatric goat on ketamine, and I generally convince myself that drinking beer while playing will help. I was lucky though. I fell in with a good crowd online, who could give me advice, hold my hand around the battlefield and, in most cases, send me out into the fray as cannon fodder, but I had some great times. I’m not kidding myself that the single player was much truck but, goodness me, the multiplayer is fun. Having been disenfranchised by Call of Duty since Modern Blops 3, or whatever it was called, I do rather enjoy being able to spawn and actually think about where I’m going and what I’m doing without being killed within seconds by a energy-drink-fuelled, FPS-genius-zygote with tourettes. The thrill of planning a route and strategy to an M-COM station, combining classes for the best tactical advantage, zooming around snowy valleys in ATVs or just taking out some persistent twat in a helo with a big fuck off missile launcher never gets old. Smashing.

Aliens: Colonial Marines

HAHAHAHAHAH!!! Only joking.

Thomas Was Alone

2013 was a bit of a revelation for me. Unlike my early sexy, boozy, womanising, get back from the pub and play seven hours of drunken tekken with while proudly burping the entire alphabet before being carried down to the kebab house on my mates’ shoulders days, I have a lot less time to play games. I discovered indie games. This was mainly because lovely old Playstation made great inroads in supporting the smaller developers and shoved their games in front of my philistine console-loving face. Unlike the triple A titles, I can snack play indie games and still get a lot of enjoyment out of them. TWA is pure joy. Great writing, excellent voice acting, polished musical composition and a truly satisfying platform mechanic combines into a package of handheld bliss. THAT moment when you connect emotionally with four sided shapes is the sweet spot. The genius behind the game is that the difficulty (whether intentionally or not) has been balanced exactly right to allow you to follow the narrative without any interruptions or frustration and just revel in the fun. I’ve come so far from that kebab-eating wanker that used to pause the game to look up Chun Li’s skirt.

Hotline Miami

What could be more fun than donning a varsity jacket, placing an animal themed mask on your head and killing the shit out of every poor bar-steward that gets in your way? I still have some pretty colourful dreams about this. I really believe that Hotline Miami is a pretty perfect game in terms of fun. A combination of almost persistent speed runner style play and the threat of insta-death with a mentalist electro-80s soundtrack all nicely blended together with death, drugs, sex, perverts and rainbow visuals. It make for a sinus-searingly snort-filled package of fun. The story is weird and pretty much passed me by, I repeated each level endlessly, but I didn’t care. In fact, towards of the end of the game, I zoned out in a bacchanalian fugue of 8-bit maiming and dicing. Wow. Good job I’m not a nutter or something.

Mass Effect 3

I miss my Femshep. I invested in a 5 year relationship with that slinky, spunky, lady. I went through good and (mainly) bad times with her, travelled the galaxy commanding my own spaceship, Captain Kirk stylee, shacked up with blue lesbians, danced badly in bars with gnarly Krogan dudes and even kept my own goldfish (and I genuinely thought the original ending was fine). I actually bought an Xbox just to play this game. The rather excellent Mass Effect multiplayer is my last remaining connection with that perfect universe. A four player horde mode which may, at first glance, not seem particularly varied, but is actually infinitely complex in its gameplay due to a dazzling variety of classes, modifiable weapons, and biotic powers. This is a dream for fans of levelling up and has been given a lot of care and attention by Bioware in terms of DLC and extra content for a very long time. It is also a very forgiving game, allowing beginners and experts to play alongside each other and still have fun. Add to that the fact that you’re never playing against other real people, thus removing the 12-year-old FPS genius factor I mentioned earlier, allows the team to set their own pace and build up a great feeling of camaraderie. Playing as the infiltrator class, appearing out of an invisible stealth field and penetrating some poor unsuspecting husk in the back with your force-field-laser-knife-thingy on your arm doesn’t really beat any other experience in terms of kick-ass thrills. Definitely quite freudian too.

Saints Row IV

I’m still playing GTAV at the moment, and although I’m enjoying it and appreciating the love and attention put into the game, Saints Row IV didn’t make me do a pissy ‘mop the floor’ mission or a ‘tow a car to a breakers yard’ mission. SRIV is balls out, shameless, misogynistic fun. It certainly isn’t particularly PC. It’s my guilty pleasure. Don’t get me wrong, I still have a sensitive side, you can check out my articles on Gone Home or The Last of Us to see that, but I do think we all need a SRIV in our lives. Deep Silver have gone for pure wish fulfilment in the latest in the franchise, with plenty of fan-service for film and game lovers. The weapons are overpowered, as is your character, as you become a super-hero, lording it over the little people, but without the guilt as all characters are merely NPCs in a massive virtual reality in which you are trapped. This game is stupid and metaphysical all at the same time. It’s one long, mad, acid-fuelled gun and dildo-bat fest all dressed up in Silk Cut purple. I’m surprised that Deep Silver didn’t include a tummy-rubbing packet of kleenex in the packaging.

Killzone Mercenary

A recent purchase and, I have to confess, the fact that this is a bloody good FPS on a handheld contributes to its worth. I’ve played through the single player, which is okayish story-wise, and is a good medium to move away from playing the role of the ISA soldier yet again. The switching loyalties of the Mercenary does allow you to play from the point of view of both sides, and is a clever lead up to build sympathies with the Helghast for the upcoming PS4 game, Shadowfall. Nevertheless the fun part of this for me are the contracts and the multiplayer modes. Playing the contracts allows you to play sections of the single player in any order you want, but to approach each ‘chapter’ from different fighting stances, ‘covert’, ‘precision’ or ‘demolition’ with the appropriate objective to achieve in each. It’s not often I replay a game once it’s finished, but I kept coming back to this and it allowed me to earn cash to buy new weapons which transfer over to the multiplayer. The gameplay is satisfying and the control system, once learned, is the best yet for an FPS on the Vita. The multiplayer is also fun, with a great balance of weapons, and companion devices, called Vanguards, to spice up the gameplay. The fact you can chat with the Party app outside of all games on the Vita, much like the Xbox, makes this even more of a draw. It means your mates, who may end up on the opposite team due to the janky match making of Mercenary, can still talk to you and allows for some great banter and good natured jibes during the battle, a feature I do actually miss in more modern online games.

Looking back, there are probably more games I’ve played and enjoyed but for different reasons. Gone Home and the Last of Us were certainly emotionally affecting, and great examples of storytelling, but were they fun? I’m not so sure. That doesn’t make them bad games. To use an analogy with films; Dancer in the Dark. That film where Bjork loses her sight and sings shows songs and is a bit bonkers before being given the death penalty for a crime she didn’t commit. It’s a brutally affecting film and great in it’s own way, but it certainly wasn’t fun. I watched Battleship recently, after hearing much criticism about it. I wasn’t expecting to be entertained. It is a banal film, full of terrible narrative holes and a ridiculous central premise, but I did enjoy it. It was popcorn-fuelled, mindless, brash and fun. I’m hoping that next generation games developers don’t forget that; fun is very important and doesn’t have to win awards or get 10/10 reviews. I don’t want to become mired in pointless willy-waving over resolution and frame rates or fan-pleasing endings. It’s nice to have the new shiny graphics and grunt of next-gen processing, but thankfully fun is still a resource that has no limits. Stroll on.

Images courtesy of relevant publishers