Features// Girl Gamer: Goes Wooing

Name: Tequila
Real name: Probably Jeff
Age: Indeterminate
Occupation: Maverick cop
Likes: Paper cranes, shooting people, squinting, sliding across things.

Dislikes: Tidiness, moving in tight spaces, punk ass gangsters, seeing your buddy’s headshot post, erm, your buddy’s headshot.
Mission: To create as much of a mess as possible and reclaim tequila and lemonade as a macho beverage.

Before we even start the tutorial for the Stranglehold demo on the 360 the graphics comparisons start. I thought it looked pretty good. Better than Oblivion for skin, I thought. My friend countered by refuting my claim and then pointing out that Oblivion was crap and that I’d been impressed by the graphics of every game since Manic Miner on the Spectrum. Thankfully it was at this point that the demo started, interrupting what would have soon descended into a hardcore pillow fight. My friends are exceptionally camp at times.

The tutorial is pretty short and the controls easy to master seeing as there are only two actions which are then used to excess: diving and shooting. As you’d expect in a game directed by John Woo, there are some rather fancy cinematic devices like ‘Tequila Time’ that slow down the action (generally either diving whilst shooting or shooting whilst diving) to Matrix speed, allowing you to line up the perfect headshot. I was tempted to instigate some sort of drinking game to go with it, but as Tequila Time kicks in automatically whenever one is ‘interacting’ with the enemy, and in this game one is pretty much always interacting with the enemy, it would be enough to hospitalise a Russian sailor.

I got very excited over Precision Aim too. This gives you another bullet-time view, but this time tracking your slug’s trajectory and the resulting damage and what is usually hailed as the best death ever. I can see this game inspiring many more finger-gun battles next time I’m down the pub, unless that foolish bartender won’t let me because of some triviality like glass on the floor.

I get the feeling with Stranglehold that the desire to have the most thoroughly destructible scenery ever is thought to matter more than retaining a sense of realism or improving the actual play of the game. After five minutes I found myself wishing that not everything would collapse under the force of a vegetarian mosquito.

We all agreed after our respective turns that Stranglehold has loads of interesting features, but generally it’s not very well executed. The remainder of the evening was spent rummaging through the pile of unplayed games to find out why they are unplayed, creating an altar to gaming and then sacrificing the crap ones to it in the hope that Bioshock is as good as we’re all hoping.

Gregory Horror Show on the PS2 got an airing for about an hour until we lost interest. Impatient as I am, it just seemed to take too long to get anything done, and an over-sexual crocodile nurse and a zombie cat aren’t going to change that. Well, they’ll help a little I suppose, but not enough to save Gregory from being offered up to the white and nerdy gods of gaming. Repeat after me: Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil 4. Bioshock, Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil 4. Now let us all stand for the geek anthem.