Battlefield 3 – Multiplayer & Jets… Yes!

I recently played through Cult of the Lamb, a satirical take on the concept of running a demonic cult. It turns horrific things like sacrificial rituals, cannibalism and straight up gaslighting abuse into hilarious amusements by filtering everything through its cartoonish lens. You are a sheep, after all, and all your followers are sycophantic anthropomorphic […]

Hello, world! This post marks the moment in time and space when BangClickReload got a little redesign and was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Every post before this point is rather old and might not look right, and unless I decide to go through them all to fix them, they’re going to […]

I’ve been pretty absent from PC gaming for some time, since moving to Canada in early 2017, because I haven’t had a proper computer to play games on. That has recently changed, since I got myself set up with a new gaming rig that can handle pretty much anything that’s out at the moment. I […]

Game of Thrones scratches a medieval fantasy itch I wasn’t aware I needed to scratch. I hadn’t actually heard of the show until people started talking about it a few episodes in, so in case you’re also in the dark, here’s a quick rundown: its a brutally dark medieval TV drama with hints of fantasy set in a world of warring factions, backstabbing nobles and corrupt families. It focuses more on drama and its characters instead of mindless fight scenes, but it knows when to apply the violence and isn’t shy when it comes to its very adult themes. Based on the first of the fantasy novels ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ by George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones is chock full of tense drama and fantastic writing. Throw in an obscene amount of female nudity and you have one of the most mature TV dramas of recent memory.

Batman Arkham City is Rocksteady’s fantastic sequel to Arkham “best superhero game ever made” Asylum. Taking the framework that made that game so good and expanding it into an open-world playground filled with the most vile scumbags imaginable, not to mention the trademark villains and sidekicks that makes the Batman world so appealing, Arkham City is easily one of the best games of 2011.

Format: N64
Release date: 1999

The successor to Goldeneye, Perfect Dark improved every possible aspect of the classic shooter and created an original masterpiece. 4-player multiplayer game modes, with the option of adding 8 extra bots made matches frantic chaos and endless fun. The singleplayer was fantastic at the time, featuring such state-of-the-art features as realtime lighting, blood spatter effects, and fully voice acted cinematic cutscenes. It even let you play the story in local co-op with a mate – player 2 got to be Joanna Dark’s weird-looking blonde sister – the first game I ever encountered with a co-op singleplayer mode.

The globe-trotting story bounced all over the place, including off-world to the Skedar’s planet (at which point, I gave up because the Skedar were just too scary). My particular favourite levels were the Carrington Villa, a sunny holiday home where you start off sniping soldiers on a pier far away, in order to save a negotiator. And Chicago, looking like something out of Blade Runner with floating cars and a dirty urban sprawl. That level had an excellent stealth section where you had to crawl into some sewers undetected to plant a bomb on the underside of a limousine. Really cool stuff.

Multiplayer was where I spent most of my time, though. Whenever I got 3 mates together, we’d play for hours and hours. We banned the Farsight gun, because it could see through walls for goodness sake. But grenades and rocket launchers were fine, even though their explosions would cause the N64 to chug and sputter if you happened to be playing with 8 simulants (first game I played with bots, too!). The game even had a persistent ranking system, which awarded you with a score and promotion based on how many kills you had. This was years before the likes of Call of Duty and Battlefield’s unlock systems, and I admit to being a little smug whenever my ranking appeared on the screen, as it was always slightly higher than any of my friends… it was my game, after all.

They rereleased Perfect Dark on the 360 Live Arcade, and I never realised how terrible some of the voice acting is. Back in the N64 days, simply having a fully voice-acted story with cutscenes was a fairly new thing, and hugely impressive, so I think the quality of said acting didn’t really matter much to me. Still, I don’t need a pair of rose-tinted goggles to remember how much I love Perfect Dark. I was absolutely blown away by that game.