So, another year is lolloping to a close like a walrus rolling inexorably down a hill towards
a threshing machine and there's only one week left for catchups before the end of year festivities.
But what, of all the games I never got around to in 2017, most deserves a last minute second
look?
Some indie darling, something that proved influential in retrospect like Playerunknown's
Battlegrounds?
Or perhaps a game where one of the goals is to find all of the toilets and deposit in
each one a big smelly farty poo?
I think we all know the answer to that one.
So yes, South Park: The Fractured But Whole.
There's actually a clever joke in that subtitle, did you spot it?
Fractured But Whole?
That's right, you can't have something fractured and whole at the same time!
Oh the mindbending feats of wordplay of those clever young whippersnappers who make South
Park.
Clever middle-aged whippersnappers, rather.
Middle aged whippersnappers still making a living out of poo jokes.
My goodness my glass house is sparkling delightfully in the morning sun, what a nice day to indulge
in my favourite hobby of projectile mineralogy.
So why didn't I review South Park: the Traumatized Anus when it came out?
I did play it, but I just kinda stopped midway through.
Partly because I was having trouble thinking of things to say that I hadn't already said
about the last game, Stick of Truth.
It's the same town, you walk around it or rather hop around it because the animation's
so crude it's recovered from subterranean hydrocarbons, the plot concerns all the kids
playing a big make believe role play together that eventually starts blurring with the real
world and a lot of toilets get pooed in.
But I came back to the game last week and finished it, because in the intervening time
I took it upon myself to watch all the episodes of South Park I hadn't seen, after all, I
have to justify my Hulu subscription somehow.
And having caught up, you know what, the show's still pretty good.
Yeah, obviously it's not as good as it was, that's the nature of the beast - it's fun
to swing a dead polecat around your head but it's not going to be the same after you've
had to stitch the dead polecat back together ten or eleven times.
But it's holding together as well as can be expected for an adult cartoon with twenty
plus seasons.
Certainly a fuckload better than The Simpsons, which is currently best equivalized to a man
being dragged behind a car as it does doughnuts in Times Square, losing more and more bits
of skin and flesh with every spin while he screams and screams and upsets the children
but just won't fucking die.
But yes, having caught up I could understand all the new characters and changes in South
Park, like how those two lads have gone gay all of a sudden.
But that's sort of the first problem with Fractured Bum Tits Poo Poos - that it feels
a lot more reliant on the player's foreknowledge of the show than Stick of Truth was.
Stick of Truth's plot was self-contained enough that I could get into it despite not having
watched South Park since my last circumcision, but Damaged Sphincter is literally a direct
continuation of a couple of episodes of the show where the kids play as superheroes.
Seems a bit optimistic to expect us to have seen the whole show in this age of endless
competition for our eyeballs, between Youtube, Netflix, video games, social media, going
outside, Mrs Braithwaite's bathroom window... as much as the fact that my first attempt
to play Broken Botty led to me seeking out the series again kind of proves that cross
promotion works, not everyone has as much free time as me because they have real jobs
and probably haven't murdered all their friends.
But let's get back to the game.
Having been made king of fantasy land after the events of Stick of Truth, our custom protagonist
suddenly finds his, her or its world shattered when his her or its friends tragically decide
to play something else, and we must reinvent ourselves from the ground up as a superhero,
superheroine or super...thing.
You embark on a quest to find a lost cat, uncover a hidden conspiracy of people sticking
their faces in cat's arses which is another thing that's going to fly completely over
your head like a severely weathered dead polecat if you haven't watched the relevant episode,
and there's a prolonged running gag about my goodness aren't there a lot of superhero
franchises in popular culture these days.
But don't be turned off if you think it's going to be nothing but that kind of biting
lofty-minded satire, because the protagonist's superpower is the ability to fart so hard
that they warp reality.
Thus is the tone set.
And the tone sounds like this: THRRRRRRRP.
Gameplay-wise, it's like they took the Stick of Truth gameplay and streamlined it in a
tree shredder.
The main thing you do on a moment to moment basis is loot every container in the room
with a yellow highlight, it's like a urine fetishist's Christmas morning.
But where in Stick of Truth you'd have to look at the list of stuff in each piss box
and select 'Take All', now everything gets automatically hoovered into your pocket as
soon as you open it, which effectively cuts your workload in half at a stroke.
But that's not all!
There's quite a sumptuous bounty of features that Fractured But Whole doesn't have anymore.
Equipment, equipment upgrades, perks, all coming soon to a landfill near you.
What you get is, you pick a character class, your class gets three attacks and a super
attack and that's your lot.
How your character improves is that every few levels you unlock a new slot into which
special patches can be placed, which is a surprisingly deep system and requires quite
a bit of thought, but here's a brief beginner's tutorial - if you see a patch with a number
on it that's higher than the patch you've currently got, equip that patch instead.
Now for the advanced lesson: once you've unlocked two patch slots, equip the patch with the
second highest number on it.
If you're having trouble figuring out how numbers work, try punching yourself in the
balls the same number of times as each patch and then equip the patch that made your balls
hurt the most.
Close sarcasm quotes.
I'd say the only place the gameplay of the mutilated sphincter has evolved any is in
the combat, which has gone from the simplistic row-based system to a flashy chessboard affair
where we take turns to move our guys into optimal positions to use different attacks
that all affect unique patterns of squares, but don't be too intimidated by the need for
grand strategy, because you can also do a big stinky fart in the enemy's face that means
he misses a turn and you can freely punch them in the face a few times.
Which I found personally gratifying, because whenever I played chess with my brother when
we were kids he always accused me of making that rule up.
Frankly, though, the combat often felt like a chore and it's not the mechanics fault - it
was that the lack of equipment or perks or much else the game had to reward me with made
getting into random battles feel like I wasn't doing much more than wasting two minutes of
my life.
In the end, the big picture is this: I can think of several standout memorable moments
from Stick of Truth - the alien abduction, the retro RPG section in Canada, that bit
where you get shrunk down and have to avoid being squashed by your parents fucking, but
very little stands out in my memory of The Injured Rectum.
I remember it as a prolonged sequence of going to places and fighting some dudes.
And I remember that the game's final boss fight took place about half an hour too early,
then events just trundle along for a bit before the story just sort of peters out and abruptly
ends, leaving me feeling like the gerbil in my asshole had suffocated to death before
I'd even brought myself off.
So that's Fractured But Whole, it's Stick of Truth, but not so much.
Bit of a dowdy note to end the year on, really, so... here are some pictures of ladies' bottoms.
For more infomation >> She Survived Las Vegas Shooting, But Lost Her Home To California Fires | Megyn Kelly TODAY - Duration: 3:57. 
For more infomation >> Meghan Markle's Hat Dubbed 'Poo Emoji' Look Alike But Designer Remains Unknown - Duration: 3:47. 
For more infomation >> President Donald Trump Touts New Tax Bill, But Millions Are Confused By It | TODAY - Duration: 3:04. 
For more infomation >> AUDIOSLAVE - Nothing Left To Say But Goodbye (Subtitulada en Español) - Duration: 3:38. 
For more infomation >> Christmas is over, but the holiday rush isn't - Duration: 1:17. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét