The Playstation 3 was a terrific console. With a wildly diverse set of games, there was something for everyone in my family. We stayed up far too late far too often playing several of the games listed down here, and part of what makes most of these games so special to me is the people that I played them with. Take a trip down memory lane with me and let’s revisit some classic PS3 entertainment.
Resistance: Fall of Man (*****)
There is no game I know as completely as this one.
In summer 2006, my parents split up. For the next five years, my siblings and I would live for a week at my mom’s place and a week at my dad’s place. And in November 2006, the PS3 came out. The motives are up to interpretation, but I distinctly remember that we had a PS3 in our dad’s house before the end of the year. Along with it came Resistance, the first first-person-shooter released for the console. It was also one hundred percent the first FPS I’d ever played in my own house.
One thing that made Resistance such a perfect game for us was its cooperative mode. In a family with three other siblings, there was no shortage of people wanting to have a few minutes with the PS3, and the fact that you could go through the entire campaign with someone else meant that I played all of those missions many times over. Sometimes I played it alone, sometimes I played it with my brother, and sometimes I played it with my father. Honestly, we played that full campaign more than thirty times. If you showed me a picture of any of the levels, I could describe completely how to get through the level – in some cases, down to the number of opponents you’d face at any particular point. We played the game so much it became muscle memory. I knew when to jump, when to throw a grenade, and when you could circumvent the game’s actual design to find more efficient ways of completing levels.
One of my oldest friends and groomsmen Stefan Lavery gifted me with his old PS3 this year, which is how I was able to revisit this game for the first time in years. It’s never been made available for purchase on newer consoles, destined for whatever reason to be a game of the past. But the moment I booted it up, a flood of memories rushed into my brain and I felt like I was back on my dad’s couch again. I beat the game in three days, and started over almost immediately after that.
Part of what makes this game so special to me is the memories I have of playing it with my father. We would stay up late, looking for new ways to defeat a particular batch of enemies or just playing around in the levels to see what mischief we could get into. At the time, a game where cardboard boxes and medical gurneys could actually be kicked and moved around was endlessly entertaining for me, and I remember spending far too long trying to move all the boxes in one level into one place just so I could throw a grenade at them and watch them go flying.
The other thing I loved about this game was the multiplayer. Now, I’ve never been one for online multiplayer, and that’s likely because of my own lack of skill. But when it comes to playing offline with friends, I’ve always been up for that. Resistance offers up to 4 players playing together in a map, and there were so many times where we took advantage of that. All of my siblings and I could play together, which we did semi-often. For some reason or other, the girls weren’t as interested in this game as Joel and I were, so we had to get creative in convincing them to play. We often pitched playing ‘Peaceful Village’, where we selected a multiplayer map and then moved our war-torn action heroes around like they were all living and working peacefully together. Inevitably, a gunfight would break out over some missing cardboard boxes or a window that had become broken – in short, Peaceful Village was never peaceful for long. I have such fond memories of that time with my family. My brother Joel would use a flamethrower to shoot ‘fireworks’ into the sky, and cleverly aimed the blast so it would eventually land on one of us in some ‘freak accident’. There was a room in one of the maps that was taller than any other, and we took to calling it the Presidential Office. Many games on that map started with someone crying, “whoever gets inside the Presidential Office IS the President”, whereupon it would be a desperate, violent struggle to get in there first so you’d have the right to make whatever ludicrous law you wanted. I really really loved that time that we spent together, as bizarre as it was.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, this game has massive sentimental value to me. But as a game in its own right, it was a lot of fun. You play a character named Nathan Hale, who is an American soldier who’s been sent to England in the 1950s to defeat an army of alien monsters who turn people into themselves. Part of the aesthetic appeal of the game is war-torn England and blasting an eclectic mix of aliens in the midst of it, but the main thing that sets this game apart is its wide range of weaponry that you have instant access to at any moment. As the campaign progresses, you pick up more and more guns, and you never seem to run out of room. The end result is that you can customize the way you try to get through a level – there’s never ONE solution to a problem. The Fareye sniper was one of my favourite weapons because it allowed you to slow down time to get a more accurate shot. I always tried to save a few bullets in that weapon in the event of an emergency. Nathan Hale was also just a fun character to follow. He’s the stereotypical strong silent type, but we just developed an affinity for him over the course of the campaign. It was the backstab of the decade when they killed him off at the end of Resistance 2, and I’m still not over it if I’m being honest.
Resistance will always have a special place in my heart. It’s a family-friendly (though not in the traditional sense) game with near-endless opportunities for creativity. I’ll never forget those nights staying up way past my bedtime blasting aliens with my father. Amidst everything that was wrong in that season of my life, Resistance was a brief escape to simplicity, where the only bad guys were aliens and the good guys were the ones sitting on the couch with you. Thank you, Nathan Hale.
Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag (****)
If you’re half as crazy as I am about pirates, this is a must-play.
My brother bought me this game as a gift one year, and immediately it became one of my favourites. Like I’ve said before, I’m a sucker for open-world games. While there is a linear narrative to this game, you’re totally free to sail the high seas at your leisure. To be honest, the game is at its best when you’re doing your own thing. I haven’t played much of any other Assassin’s Creed games, but I have to say that anytime this game tried to tie itself to the rest of the franchise, I got disinterested. I just wanted to keep pirating. I imagine others would’ve shared the same experience – I mean, a number of scenes take you out of the golden age of piracy so that you can walk around a modern era skyscraper and press some buttons. How on earth could that possibly be interesting?
What makes the pirating so fun in this game is the seamless transitions between one kind of pirating to another. You can walk into a tavern, get into a brawl with some customers, take on the Spanish guards that inevitably walk by, and then flee via rooftops and fence-hopping to the dock where your ship awaits. Your character then orders ‘full sails’ and you take to the seas, all without a loading screen. It’s an absolute blast, and we haven’t even gotten on the water yet. While you’re sailing around looking for adventure, your crew will sing sea shanties happily to themselves. You can ‘skip tracks’ if you like, but over the course of the game you start to learn all of these old songs – and some of them really get in your bones. “Padstow Farewell” is one of my personal favourites.
Then there’s the sea combat, which is exhilarating. The sea is teeming with ships ripe for the plundering, and you can challenge tiny ships or massive war galleons. There’s even four ‘legendary ships’ at the corners of the map which are a devil to beat but so rewarding to sink. Sure, firing the cannons at the other ships is fun, but once you’ve beaten them down enough, you can actually sail alongside and board them – again without a loading screen. It’s seamless action, and you’re always at the center of it all. The first time I managed to capture a man-of-war was such a terrific experience, and it wasn’t part of the narrative at all. You can go out and pick on enemies much larger than you right from the get-go, and I guarantee you’ll get your butt handed to you. The game dares you to go after the big dogs again and again until you’re strong enough to take them down, and that trial-and-error strategy makes the game incredibly rewarding. Just the sound of your crew cheering as you carve the enemy flag off of their crow’s nest is enough to give you chills.
Again, this wasn’t a perfect game. I didn’t care for any of the lore that connected this game to a wider story, and there were a few too many missions where you just had to crawl behind unsuspecting villains and listen to them whisper their secret plans to each other. But aside from that, this had everything you’d want from a pirate game. Buried treasure, sea battles, bustling cities stuffed with guards, and a story that’s infused with nonstop action. Man, now I want to play this game again.
Rock Band (*****)
I can’t tell you how much fun it’s been to revisit this game.
Like I wrote in my review of Resistance, one of my oldest friends Stefan Lavery gifted me his old PS3, which came with a complete Rock Band set. The drum kit, guitars, and microphone for the game are hard to come by these days, but Stefan’s always kept his stuff in good shape. And man, playing this for the first time in years was like reconnecting with a long-lost buddy. The title of Rock Band says it all – you and your friends play classic songs together. You can do bass, lead guitar, drums, or vocals – and if you’re particularly pompous, you can do two at once. This version of the game works for up to four people, so for myself and my three siblings, it was the perfect game. Unlike Resistance where my brother and I always had to beg to get our sisters to play, there was never any hesitation for the girls getting involved in this game.
One of my favourite components of this game is the way that you’re really relying on and cooperating with your bandmates. You earn ‘star power’ throughout a performance based on whether or not you can hit the right notes – and if your friend starts failing a song, you can use your own power to save them. There are also certain segments of songs that give bonus power if your entire band plays them perfectly. The best example of teamwork in this game is when a song ends with a wild freestyle, you and your band just have to go nuts on your instruments to rack up as many points as you can. As long as you hit the right note right at the very end, you walk away feeling like a king. But miss that last note, and all you’ll hear is crickets. There’s nothing wrong with competitive games, but I’ve rarely played one that rewards you for teamwork as much as this one.
Rock Band also taught me and my siblings a bunch of music that we may not have gotten into otherwise. Boston’s song Foreplay/Long Time has become a song that always reminds me of my brother, and other hits like Wanted Dead Or Alive, Are You Gonna Be My Girl, or Ballroom Blitz take me right back to the days playing this game in the house we grew up in. And to top it all off, you get to design your rock character and even name your band. I’m sure this game wouldn’t be boring if you played it alone, but it’s a game that was always designed with friends in mind. I love that. Thanks for the memories, Harmonix.
Call of Duty: Black Ops (****)
I’m not here to talk about Call of Duty as a franchise or even about the campaign of Black Ops. There was really only ever one part of this game that I loved – Zombies.
Zombies is a game mode within the Call of Duty franchise. It didn’t begin with Black Ops, but Black Ops is where I got introduced to it. The only map available right from the very beginning is ‘Kino Der Toten’. In this game, you play one of four caricatured characters stuck inside a Nazi cinema where waves of zombies are charging towards you. They crawl through windows, doorways, and fall from the ceiling. You can patch up some of these holes to slow their advance, but the primary way to beat these guys is just to kill as many of them as you can before they kill you. There’s no way to ‘win’ Zombies – every time you kill a certain number of Zombies, a new round begins where more Zombies come and they’re a little bit stronger. The fun of the game, then, is to find out how long you can last before they get you.
Now, admittedly, Zombies is hyper-violent and fairly insensitive. Like I said earlier, the characters you play are cartoon representations of soldiers from Cold War-era America, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union. They swear at each other, make comparisons between former lovers and zombies, and generally make parents uncomfortable. In my teenage years, there was absolutely nothing more fun. There were so many nights where my brother and I or my high school friends stayed up until well after midnight trying to make it just one more round. Joel and I made it past round 50 once, but it literally took us days of playing.
Would I recommend this game? Look, there’s Nazi Zombies in this game. That should give you an excellent idea of whether this game is for you or not. As for me, this has always been a fun way to blow off steam or blow past my bedtime.