Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Lego Batman




Lego Batman : An action/adventure/co-branding venture game based on, or rather satirizing, the Batman universe by making every character and object composed of Legos.

Story : There’s a breakout at Arkham Asylum and every Batman villain that matters (and 2 or 3 that don’t) manages to escape, banding together into 3 groups with vile plans for Gotham City, and only Batman and Robin can stop them. Being that this is a Lego-themed game and thus Legos aren’t capable of thirsting for vengeance or having deep, psychological trauma, all that nonsense about Bruce Wayne’s parents dying or the villains’ assorted cases of dementia, much less any trace of character depth or intrigue that may have been present in the Batman mythos is thrown out the window in favor of Robin acting like a child. There’s the occasional nod to the 90s Batman movies and the theme from those movies will be beaten down into your skull throughout the entire game, but otherwise the storyline is originally conceived for this game.

If you’ve played any of the Lego games in the past, you have a general idea of what to expect from Lego Batman. Either two players or you and a dimwitted AI partner join forces to beat up a lot of criminals, smash a lot of furniture and not collect all the unlockables required to achieve 100% completed-status of the game, all with the safety of knowing you have infinite lives and no penalty for death, making completion of the game more of a formality than a test of skill. At the same time, this is a niche market that these Lego games have somehow cornered, the deliberately easy game that’s fun, charming and accessible for the whole family, except for perhaps the 15 year old angst-ridden Halo freak of the family, but he need not worry since the other 90% of the game market is targeting him anyways.

By reading this review, you may have a smoother play experience with Lego Batman than I did, and here’s why.

The game’s biggest failing is that the puzzles are not well designed. A good game puzzle should make sense within the contexts of reality and logic, and the player will rack his brain for a good while on it before finally reaching an epiphany and solving the issue, leaving him or her with that proud sense of accomplishment because they didn’t need to go to Gamefaqs! Batman and Robin can change costumes at certain pods, with different costumes granting different abilities that, for the most part, serve a single, solitary and isolated purpose, from Robin walking on a certain shiny metal to Batman breaking a specific colour of glass. Likewise, each villain has a specific set of individual powers.

Oh, I neglected to mention that there are 2 different campaigns, one where you play as Batman and Robin, and one where you play as the villains. I didn’t realize this either until I accidentally flipped a switch in the Hub that is the Batcave and found myself in the Arkham controlling The Riddler and Clayface.

Pretty much every section of Lego Batman has some kind of puzzle obstacle. Most of the time, you’ll be able to piece together how you get across by what suit of armour the game asked you to give Batman or Robin, or to apply the absurd but cute Lego video game logic of break a bunch of things, then hold a button so your character assembles something new. There’s something distinctly satisfying about smashing a series of tables and cabinets and using the remains to assemble the skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex that you can then ride like a horse and trample over everyone in your path. But some of the puzzles are rather abstract and illogical, with the solution either hidden away or not making any sense. Take the Batwing sequence; in one area, you’re required to fly past a pipe to move forward, but none of your weapons have an effect, including the mines you found out earlier that the Batwing can wield. You’re supposed to shoot this out-of-the-way gun turret in the far corner, and then shoot the debris until it resembles some kind of station that Robin’s vehicle can use to pick up missiles that can break this pipe. The on floor levels can be worse since they were designed with the intention that players can revisit them with other characters sporting different abilities to explore previously inaccessible areas in an attempt to gather 100% of the collectables (which no one will care to do anyways). Because of this, a series of red herrings is scattered throughout the level, giving players the wrong idea of how to approach a puzzle to progress. This is made worse with the villain sequences, because you’re never really sure what are all of the abilities of any given character. For example, scattered throughout the game are windows with a green question mark on them, where a Lego Man sticks his head out and only lets The Riddler pass. Well you’d assume only The Riddler can access these areas, the game gives no indication that Scarecrow or Catwoman can also somehow sway the Lego Man that spends his days inside that window. Several of the boss fights also have obscure solutions, like how the game gives no indication that you can only damage Mr. Freeze from behind, but being as how you have infinite lives and I just gave away the solution, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Alas, I just corrected a portion of the game’s faults with my own review, so I’ll give this game a slightly higher score if just because you can now enjoy it more than I did. It has all the features, strengths and flaws of the last Lego games but with a handful of dud puzzle sequences, so if you’ve played those games then your buying decision may as well be based on your previous experience. There’s a lack of online play here, but this really isn’t the type of tactical military shooter that demands online play so much as it is the Mario Party type fun for everyone or fun when smashed with friends-type of multiplayer experience. I’d recommend the other Lego games over this one, but…

Pros : …the difference between other Lego games and Lego Batman is that while your girlfriend probably thinks Star Wars and Indiana Jones are lame, her current crushes on Christian Bale and Heath Ledger will make her more likely to open up to a Batman-based game.

Cons : I would’ve preferred if the game was based on Batman movies as to poke fun at them. Batman And Robin is a goldmine of parody-potential.

3 stars

God of War: Chains of Olympus


God of War : Chains of Olympus : An action game set in a vengeance-driven version of Greek mythology, where the player controls a black, white character named Kratos, the gods’ personal army-slayer.

Story : Actually a prequel to current God of War games, Chains of Olympus (which doesn’t actually have anything to do with any sort of “chains of Olympus” and is presumably some kind of metaphor for Kratos being the gods’ personal bitch) depicts Kratos back when he killed whatever gods Olympus told him to kill, before later installments when he discriminated against all gods equally. Taking a cue from the popularity of 300, Kratos begins the adventure merrily slaughtering Persians before Morpheus decides to do evil things and must be punished.

God of War : Chains of Olympus joins the ranks of other handheld epics such as Zelda : Link’s Awakening, Super Mario Land, Sonic The Hedgehog : Triple Trouble, Metroid Prime Hunters, Metal Gear Solid : Portable Ops, New Super Mario Bros and Ratchet And Clank : Size Matters. By “handheld epic”, I mean an installment of a major franchise brought to handhelds that adds nothing but perhaps the most minute character developments and story revelations, and whom the gameplay is identical enough to its bigger brothers that if you decided to live your life without ever playing said game, you wouldn’t really be missing anything important.

But I would also argue that Chains of Olympus is a much stronger game than any of the above mentioned titles, if just because it narrowly avoids the feeling of being “watered down”. To get any other “cons” out of the way, the magic attacks aren’t particularly interesting and you’re only alternate weapon to the swinging chain-blade…thingies is some giant fist that you get late in the game. Oh, and say you’ve just bought your PSP and you’re not used to your fingers being so cramped with the shoulder buttons and that odd little analog …object, you’ll probably be feeling more anguish in your hands than Kratos does at the loss of his family.

But those faults aren’t going to cause nightmares, and otherwise Chains of Olympus holds up favorably well to its big, murderous brothers on the PS2. The same false sense of scope is there, using fixed camera angles and such to trick the player into thinking they’re exploring a giant temple and such. The same linear progression of areas that was very much welcome after people stopped demanding every game have a Grand Theft Auto-style overworld because doing so turned most of the in-game missions into fetch quests. The same manner in which enemies throw themselves at you, begging to all be sliced up at once with your blades-on-a-string. Lets be honest here, God of War games aren’t too deep when it comes to combat. They’re not completely mindless button-mashers, but they walk that fine line, tilting to the edge ever so slightly.

Well there may be one more “flaw” to the game, but I would argue that such a “flaw” is more of an advantage here. Chains of Olympus clocks in at about 6 hours of playtime, which I’m sure by many people’s inhumanly high standards is too short. I would argue that 6 hours is the perfect length for a game like that. As I had mentioned above, the actual gameplay isn’t the most in-depth you’ll find, and odds are you won’t find people writing essays on Gamefaqs on how to successfully handle a herd of basic enemies. GOW : COO (what a bad acronym) doesn’t overstay its welcome, and doesn’t get old like other installments, in particular God of War 2. The game has no filler, no fetch quests, very little in the way of repeated environments and no drawn out battle sequences. In being so short, I found it to be the one God of War game that I was replaying after I finished it. Also keep in mind that this is a handheld game and thus your longest play session tends to be as long as the bus ride, or at least the part of the bus ride where you can either sit down or lean on the board next to the back exit (annoying everyone who gets off the bus). Save points in this game are just frequent enough that you’ll be able to get some sort of enjoyment out of the ample time you get on the bus, but not frequent enough to insult your intelligence.

So unless you’ve got some sort of mentality where every single game you play, portable or otherwise, must be original content, then pick it up. Granted, it’s not a life-changing gameplay experience and your life will function perfectly without it, but then again, your life will function perfectly without a PSP or a DS or whatever too. Odds are, you bought your PSP so you can play something on the road (whether or not you bought it for the possibility of playing said things for free is another discussion) but in any event, this is one of the better games that you can carry around in your pocket.

Pros : Successfully translates moments of extreme emotional anguish into novel gameplay mechanics near the end. Less embarrassing to play on the bus than Patapon.

Cons : Won’t win over the crowd of people that thought 300 was racist. Like any PSP game, purchasing a copy requires a homebrew-fighting firmware update.

4 stars

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Rock Band 2




Rock Band 2 : A rhythm game where you and up to 3 others manipulate plastic toy controllers to match the colours scrolling down the screen in unison all the while imagining you’re part of Journey.

Story : The storyline of the game I guess would be the “Band World Tour”. You create a band and its members, and work your way from playing small venues to stadium sellouts and fame and fortune. Well that’s what the game tells you at least, at the end of the day, it’s a glorified repackaging of the normal music game campaign of just play songs to unlock more songs.

I don’t hate Band World Tour, I just hate being forced to play it. Unlike the previous game, you can play World Tour by yourself or even with other players on Xbox Live if you felt inclined. Perhaps because of this, the people at Harmonix decided it was okay to drop the standard Solo Tour mode, which was pretty much the barebones music game campaign of just playing songs to unlock more songs…. Okay so just playing songs in the order you’re told to play them doesn’t sound exciting as creating a band and turning them into international superstars, but you’ll wish it was there when you’ve got a party coming up in a few days! The process at which you unlock songs in World Tour mode is slower here than it used to be as your progress will often be halted when the game throws a massive setlist your way and won’t let you progress without finishing it. If you intend to go through the World Tour and have all the content unlocked so your friends this weekend can have their pick of songs to reject in favour of Living On A Prayer over, then you’re going to have to go through any number of setlists and hope that the incredibly difficult song you downloaded out of curiosity and can’t actually beat doesn’t randomly show up. Oh, and Lord have mercy, you better learn to love Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas, because it’s going to come up a lot.

Here’s a list of everything that’s new for Rock Band 2, just so I can get it out of the way.

For people who suck or just want to get drunk and make an ass of themselves : “No fail” mode, where you can do whatever you want and still finish the song. Singers also get it easier this time around as the game seems to be more forgiving with what constitutes as a syllable, allowing players who don’t know the words to a song to just shout “Timmy!” over and over and still rack up points. A Freestyle drum mode where you can jam with the drums while a song on your 360 hard drive plays in the background, a throwback to those old drum arcade machines that had working digital drums where players could try to play along to a song that played in the background and without the game calling you a failure.

For hardcore score freaks or I guess the “Through the Fire And Flames” crowd: “Battle of the Bands” mode where Harmonix randomly creates challenges of songs and posts rankings of the people involved. Since these challenges can be released even late at night, it ensures that manic Rock Band fanatics will spend every waking moment of every day smashing and breaking their drums. Also a new guitar and drum controller, with improvements that appear to be marginal and insignificant but won’t stop hardcore rockers from spending another $180 on a new set. If you feel this review is incomplete for me not having tried these new controllers for myself, I accept monetary donations to rectify this issue.

Otherwise this is Rock Band 1 with new songs. However, the hook here is that this is Rock Band 1 with better songs. The vast majority of tracks from the first Rock Band felt like they were picked off of an alternative radio station playlist. Presumably this was an attempt to choose songs that enough people would recognize, forgetting that this is a VIDEO GAME and that most of these songs present dull and uninteresting colour combinations for the player to match with their toy guitar. On any given instrument, the game didn’t become fun or interesting until around the seventh song set. Rock Band 2 begs for the player’s forgiveness for the sin of making us play Learn to Fly with a setlist of some 80 songs of solid gold. Seriously, when you play a song, any song (well, except the new Guns ‘n Roses song), you will quickly see why it’s there. The game makes some rather inspiring song choices, offering a combination of challenging riffs for the Youtube crowd and party songs like the Beastie Boys So Whatcha Want to make your high-pitched relative sing to. It makes it all the more painful that you need to “Start a Band, Tour the world” in the World Tour mode to unlock it all. And I actually love Carry On Wayward Son.

So should you buy Rock Band 2? (Yes).

Okay, I guess to be more specific, you should buy Rock Band 2 if you liked Rock Band 1. It’s pretty much the same game with much better music. If you Google a track listing, you’ll find the reasons to play this game. It also helps that any song you downloaded for Rock Band 1 will work with this game, and there’s the included coupon for 20 downloadable songs that Harmonix will release sometime in the future. If I had to guess when these songs will be released, I’d say “around the time Guitar Hero 4 comes out.”

Pros : If you have a phobia of changing discs, want to trade in your copy of the first game for the $5 it’s probably worth at EB, or think that the size of your in-game playlist equates to the size of your penis, you can purchase an online license to rip the songs from that game onto your hard drive and play with Rock Band 2…

Cons : Except that this feature is freaking useless as it excludes, among others, Enter Sandman, which tended to be the first song everyone wants to play from the first game.

4 stars

Guitar Hero: Aerosmith




Guitar Hero : Aerosmith : A rhythm game where the game orders players to press coloured buttons at the precise right moment the game tells you to. To cover up the oppressive nature of this practice, the game plays rock music in the background to make the player feel like a rebel. This instance of false empowerment focuses on being themed after AEROSMITH, the supposed biggest rock band of all time, though players won’t know that playing this game since half the songs in the damn game aren’t theirs.

Story : The career mode in Guitar Hero: AEROSMITH adds a bit of a twist to the standard GH career mode. First you play two songs by bands that are decidedly NOT AEROSMITH (but presumably either played with AEROSMITH, inspired AEROSMITH, or have some sort of connection to AEROSMITH that one would wish the game explain) until the crowd decides that they’d rather see AEROSMITH live than say, Joan Jett, The Clash, The Cult or Lenny Kravitz, and thus you play a series of songs by AEROSMITH. Each venue is based on some sort of past major event that AEROSMITH played in, and between each set of songs is a video of AEROSMITH explaining why such a venue is so important to AEROSMITH.

As far as I’m concerned, the strongest aspect of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is the ability to unlock extended versions of the above videos. Now, they don’t tell the complete history of the band as there seems to be some sort of mysterious void in the story between the time the band became popular and the time they attempted a comeback (I guess talking about drugs and alcohol would ruin the game’s ESRB rating. That or Activision is just plain scared of the topic.) But the band offers several entertaining stories that alone warrant renting the game if you have a passing interest in stealing t-shirts at your first gig at a high school dance.

Otherwise, this game plays exactly like every Guitar Hero game before it. You press buttons and strum the flimsy piece of plastic on your guitar controller when the game tells you to. As you may or may not have already heard, the biggest fault with Guitar Hero: Aerosmith is that it has about half the songs of the usual Guitar Hero game, but Activision still had the audacity to charge full price for the game. And while that indeed renders GH: Aerosmith as a complete and utter ripoff, that isn’t the biggest flaw with the game.

No, the biggest fault with the game is its own theme. By focusing primarily on one band for most of the game’s material, you focus on one playing style. Other GH games mix things up in the use of different artists, songs and rock subgenres. Here, the majority of the songs are from Aerosmith and thus tend to play the same. There’s only so many ways one can add variety to what is essentially pressing buttons when told, and here there’s even less variety. Even the non-Aerosmith songs play too much like the Aerosmith songs. As a result, you’ll find yourself feeling very underwhelmed of the whole experience. You can complete story mode in a couple of hours, and those couple of hours won’t exactly be the most thrilling hours of your life. And this is despite the fact that the game wisely excludes most of Aerosmith’s overplayed, radio-friendly power ballads.

So who should get Guitar Hero: Aerosmith? No one. The game is a bad idea and a poor investment, except as a rental to people who very badly want to play both versions of Walk This Way.

Pros : I’d like to use this section to give my thoughts on the arms race that is the music genre. It seems like people are clamoring for music games that aren’t just guitars, but include drums and vocals, and online play, and the ability to record music, and so forth. But in trying to bring in so many gameplay elements together in one game, could it not be argued that it takes some of the focus away from the core experience? With the major Guitar Hero games and especially Guitar Hero 2, almost every song brought something to the table, either a memorable riff or solo or musical style or something that made it either a unique addition or a suitable fit for the segment on the difficulty curve it sat on. Each song felt like it belonged and progressing through career mode was fun, as opposed to adding songs for name value, to brag about having a certain artist on the back of the box like Rock Band and now this game. While Rock Band makes for a fun party game is just to see if you can get the highest-pitched person there to sing Sabotage by the Beastie Boys, most of the game doesn’t hold up well played individually. Try progressing through career mode using one instrument, guitar or drums, and you’ll find it a tedious experience, up until the bottom tiers and the challenging songs. I can’t help but feel that with Rock Band 2 and the upcoming Guitar Hero: World Tour, that the same will be true.

Cons : But that said, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith lacks the same kind of balance. If anything, a series vet will almost never feel tested.

2 stars

Saturday, September 27, 2008

TNA Impact




TNA Impact : (or if you want to be more precise, TNA iMPACT! I guess) A wrestling video game based on the promotion trying to be the second-rate knockoff…or rather the “alternative” to the WWE.

Story : Yes they’ve conjured up a rather bizarre story for this one, and it feels like it came right out of the imagination of Vince Russo. A wrestler named “Suicide” ignores threats to take a fall and wins the World Heavyweight championship, despite having terrible attire and the attitude of a jerk that should insure no actual promotion would want to book him. As a result of his defiance, gangster babyfaces Homicide and Hernandez brutally disfigure him and leave him for dead somewhere in a hospital in Mexico, where Mexican plastic surgeons resuscitate you using the game’s Create A Wrestler. From there, your creation must climb his way back to the top. Okay, the nicest thing I can say about the story is that it’s more coherent and interesting than the last couple Smackdown vs. Raw games and definitely has better voice-acting. Special honorable mention goes to Kevin Nash for his amusing VO contribution. However, the story itself is far too hokey to be putting on television….which looks to be what they’re doing as they’re turning the awful Suicide character into an actual wrestler.

Speaking of which, I can only assume that the goal of the Create A Wrestler feature here was to recreate the plastic surgery options that a beaten-down hospital in an impoverished part of Mexico would provide, as well as the variety of clothing available at Goodwill in Mexico, being that both areas have a severe lack of variety. Your customization options are very limited appearance-wise, and moreso when it comes to movesets, as you choose from one of three movesets and every single individual move is locked from the beginning. This sucks not only for obvious reasons, but also because it seems like a vague attempt to hide the reality that there are very few moves to choose from, (more on that in a bit.) I wouldn’t mind such a paltry Create A Wrestler, or even the lack of one, except that the game makes it the centre of its Story mode and I’m forced to use this jobber of a creation to play the storyline and unlock half the game’s content.

The actual Story mode gameplay is more or less a series of matches as your attitude-ridden protagonist works his way up a ladder that no one with the chip on his shoulder would ever be able to climb in the actual wrestling world. However, several problems plague this mode, namely how your former World Heavyweight champion of a wrestler can’t do squat against the actual TNA performers. When you face off against the created “indy” wrestlers at the beginning (and at least this game recreates the feeling of being in a low-rate indy promotion with the out-of-shape opponents it pits against you), you’ll be able to win no problem, but when faced with an actual in game TNA wrestler like James Storm or Robert Roode, their stats far exceed your character’s stats. So you’ll have to unleash multiple steel chair shots and finishers before you can possibly hope to beat them, and all the while they need only hit you with a few precise shots to build up their finisher meter, hit their big move and put you away. This unfair advantage is made all the more frustrating by how bad the AI in this game is. Climb the top rope and count how many times your opponent will make an effort to get out of the way.

What I do like about Impact the game though is that they took a good look at the recent WWE Smackdown vs. Raw games and realized that over the years, the need to add and expand the gameplay with new gimmicks (as opposed to all the work that they’d need to do to revamp that dated mess of a gameplay engine) have made those games needlessly convoluted. The result of their countless “revisions” have stacked on needless quick-time event mini-games, excessively long move animations and some illogical control choices (why did they assign the right analog stick for grapple attacks?) Impact simplifies things back to what they looked like with the early Smackdown games, but with much crisper animations, smoother counters that themselves have counters, and matches which move at a brisk pace and just feel right. This is a game where you always get the sense that you’re in control.

But going back to what I mentioned before about movesets, the problem of a lack of moves spills into the existing wrestlers too. Namely, how there seems to be only three movesets – athletic, average and powerful, and these movesets are divided amongst the entire roster of characters. Except for the animation for each wrestler’s finishers, every single character here fights the exact same way, and it sucks out all of the novelty of playing as these wrestlers. TNA’s biggest strength as a promotion is how it brings to the table exciting wrestlers who are allowed to work a faster, highspot-ridden style that the WWE wouldn’t allow, but you wouldn’t know it playing with this game’s homogenous roster. Oh, it also hurts that said movelists are small in of themselves, as you’ll find yourself repeating the same 3 or 4 grapple attacks over and over.

This deserves its own paragraph, but why is the same button that does grapple attacks the same one that performs an Irish whip? It’s baffling how many accidental Irish whips one will perform within the span of a match.

I guess you can say the issues with the TNA video game boil down to the high demands it takes to make a wrestling game. The many fans who constantly cry for 100s of moves, an updated roster with every current superstar past and present, a create a wrestler/belt/move/stable/league/turnbuckle post and a 40 hour branching story mode take for granted the time and energy it takes to create a single move animation for a punch, or the care and attention needed to craft the small tattoo on somebody arm. Like with any sports game, many of these issues need more time to deal with but are bogged down by the demand to release yearly iterations of the franchise. I would’ve gladly accepted the smaller roster of fighters and the lack of extra (and usually needless) gameplay options that other wrestling games have in favor of tight gameplay. Had the team spent more time polishing the individual TNA wrestlers, then I would recommend Impact as a multiplayer experience, and push it moreso as a purchase if the Story Mode was more tolerable to play. However, the final product feels more like a glorified demo than a game, something that has promise to be great but ultimately feels too shallow, lacking in replay value and content. It fails to catch everything that makes TNA unique, but catches everything that makes TNA feel second-rate.

Pros : Mostly good voicework. The online play is mostly lag-free and functional. For what its worth, the Ultimate X match is more interesting than most gimmick matches found in wrestling games.

Cons : Bad commentary. Half the roster is locked, and some of the locked character choices are rather illogical; why is Brother D’Von available at the start but Brother Ray is locked? Not an in-game fault, but the actual TNA Impact TV commercial has become a 2 hour infomercial for the game.

2 Stars

Devil May Cry 4




Devil May Cry 4 : An action-adventure game where players control one of two practically identical clones of each other and slaughter an army of demon by way of using your giant sword to fling them in the air and either jumping in the air to slice them some more or juggling them in the air with bullets from your gun.

Story : Peaceful Sunday mass at the nearby sacred order of monks is interrupted by longtime Devil May Cry protagonist Dante, who murders their leader in cold blood and proceeds to engage new protagonist Nero in a clash of epic, unrealistic proportions (even unrealistic by the game’s standards, as none of your in-game fights will ever look as dramatic as the cutscene battles). Fueled by blind loyalty to his guild, the same guild that is using his girlfriend to threaten him to do the job (?), Nero goes on a quest to right this wrong. Obviously, we find out the order was really a demon-worshipping cult, the leader isn’t really dead, they have some plan involving giant demons to take over the world, and that Nero and Dante must now help each other out to right this wrong. I can’t in good conscience apologize for spoiling the plot since it’s not a very good plot to begin with, and I do wish that this game didn’t take so many parts of the story as seriously as it does. The best parts of the storyline for me are when the main characters are scoffing in the face of the assorted monster clichés, like the giant four-legged Satan figure early on or the mad scientist. But when the game tries to take a serious tone and add any semblance of emotional weight, such as anything involving Nero’s girlfriend in distress, it embarrasses itself. In essence, it cramps the style that the game works its ass off to build.

Other than the new gameplay mechanic, I wonder if there really was a point to adding a new main character. Nero and Dante look the same – same white hair, same buckle-laden trench coat, same teenage pretty boy looks, same big sword and handgun combination, same perchant for one-liners…except for Nero’s gimmick arm and weakness for his virgin lover, you could swap one for the other and odds are even the most diehard fans wouldn’t know the difference. Maybe that’s the reasoning – the developers thought a new character would allow them to reinvent the series and even be creative with the direction of existing characters, but at the same time they were so scared to death of alienating their core fanbase that they practically cloned Dante in designing their new hero out of fear that something as simple as say, a new hairstyle with a regular hair colour, would cause fans to protest on their message boards.

Maybe they felt that Devil May Cry 3 scared fans away with its punishing difficulty, despite how it was that same difficulty that made Devil May Cry 3 so distinct. Sure you were going to die a lot, but at the same time, making progress became its own reward. When you beat a level, you beat it because you felt like you were getting better at the game. Very few games nowadays can match that kind of design. DMC4’s default difficulty settings are more forgiving on newcomers than in the past, though hardcore fans and people who love using Youtube to brag about their skills will be happy to know that all the harder unlockable difficulty settings are here. You know the ones: “Son of Sparda”, “Dante Must Die”, “Hell or Hell”, “Your Balls Are Mine”, and so forth.

But what I do hope scares people away from Devil May Cry 4 is the assortment of bad design calls throughout the game that seemed to exist for the sake of artificially lengthening the game. There are areas where falling into a bottomless pit result in being forced to battle a large group of enemies in an enclosed space before attempting to navigate said pit again. The problem is that in part of this pit, platforms disappear and reappear in an unforeseeable pattern, and the only way to navigate this area is to learn the pattern through trial and error and thus, have to fall down a lot. In an end-game sequence, players must roll a die to move a board game piece across a set of tiles, and where the piece lands will determine whether or not the player battles newly-spawned enemies or not. The actual tile set this piece moves around is a circle and the only way to advance is if the piece lands on a green circle. After landing on said circle, the player fights a boss character and the process must be repeated seven more consecutive times before reaching the end of the level. While the game has largely tough and entertaining boss fights, the player will have to engage all the bosses three times throughout the length of the story mode.

You may have heard about this one already but in case you haven’t; you’ll play through the first half of the game as Nero. In the second half, you’ll play as Dante, and Dante must backtrack through all of the areas that you explored as Nero, fighting all the bosses that Nero already fought and even dealing with a particular enemy that randomly spawns out of nowhere and can trap you in an enclosed area where the only means of escape is to fight all of the enemies inside. Like many, many games of this generation, Devil May Cry 4 seems to have fallen victim to the rising costs, both in time, money and resources, of making a game for the current generation, as well as the seemingly unfair, unrealistic expectations of video game publications, their reviews and the public that has been affected by these reviews. There’s perhaps enough in-game architecture, enemies, design ideas and so forth to create a smooth game that would’ve been about 4-5 hours long, but game magazines tend to brandish a 4-5 hour long game as a ripoff, a rent-only title that isn’t worth your money, and hence Capcom felt the need to find every cheap method possible short of a fetch quest to stretch this game out into a more tedious, unenjoyable 15 hours.

It’s a pity, because I would’ve given Devil May Cry 4 a higher recommendation if only it turned out to be that 4-5 hour game. The gameplay mechanics are tight and the levels are mostly well-designed (not to mention visually stunning). On top of that, the one gimmick I mentioned earlier about Nero is actually a fun gimmick; the so-called “Devil Arm” is essentially a grab button that either pulls enemies towards you or vice-versa, and in the context of a game that’s primarily about killing enemies, this seemingly small mechanic helps to speed up the process at which death is dolled out - proof that sometimes the smallest and most subtle addition can make a tiring gameplay concept feel fresh. Had Devil May Cry 4 been released as that 4-5 hour adrenaline rush, then I would definitely have felt more inclined to replay it over and over again, inversely getting more playtime out of the experience and thus more of my money’s worth and would’ve been able to produce a glowing recommendation. But because of the need to produce a longer game, Capcom wound up releasing a game that isn’t quite worth your $60 and is best left for the Youtube fanatics who look to post their Bloody Palace high scores or whatnot.

Pros : If the memory of Devil May Cry 3 is still fresh in your head, then you’re in luck, as Dante controls exactly like he did in that game.

Cons : If you never played Devil May Cry 3, you might be a little SOL when the time comes to play as Dante.

3 Stars

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Street Fighter 4: Arcade impressions




Street Fighter 4 : A fighting game that allows players to pit martial arts warriors against a giant baboon, or the only sumo wrestler on Earth with a 6 pack, or an international superpowered terrorist for that matter.

Story : Not completely sure, but it feels like a safe bet to say it involves the cliché fighting game storyline of an evil force attempting world domination by means of hosting some kind of fighting tournament, with the reasoning behind how such a tournament can lead to world domination often being very, very irrational.

Street Fighter 4 has very recently been released in Japan, and a select few arcades have wasted no time trying to be on the cutting edge and import a machine of their own. It just so happens that one arcade within my proximity decided to pick it up (and they’re wasting no time trying to cash in on holding tournaments too) and being that most North American game websites don’t bother reviewing arcade games, I get the meaningless claim of being able to review Street Fighter 4 some 6 odd months before everyone else does.

Street Fighter 4 feels like an attempt by Capcom to rejuvenate the lost interest of the millions of former Street Fighter 2 fans. Perhaps Street Fighter 3 and its subsequent updates were too bold, what with how it flushed away most of the existing roster in favour of attempting to create new and interesting characters, and having the audacity to use 2D sprites – back in a time when most people looked at any new 2D game and brushed it aside because they thought it had “Super Nintendo graphics” all the while claiming that this was the cutting edge of technology.



And so we have Street Fighter 4, which brings back the entire original cast and animates them in 3D. Note that only the graphics are rendered in 3D but not the gameplay, it still controls almost exactly like any old Street Fighter game. The upside to this is that anyone who vaguely remembers how to play Street Fighter 2 can pick this game up and know what they’re doing. The downside is that this game, as a whole, lacks any semblance of originality. I didn’t actually get to play as any of the new characters; when you’re fighting some brash punk kid with expensive clothes and a lady on his arm thinking he’s original for using Ken with the white colour palette outfit, you tend to be thinking less about experimenting with new characters than you do thinking about kicking his face in – but they do look like they’re fun to play as. It’s just that they consist of four overdone fighting game clichés – the luchador, the fat man who fights with his gut, the SNKish sharp dressed woman wearing a very revealing tux, and another guy in a karate gi. Needless to say, this is a game that takes few chances. There’s a couple of new gameplay mechanics, a simpler variation of the parry/counter, the SF3-style superpowered special attacks, and a few other abilities with names I can’t be arsed to remember.

It’s hard to say too much about the game itself being that it’s an arcade game, and your gameplay options are limited to either beating up one AI opponent after another, or waiting for that guy in the Che Guevara shirt to hurry up and grab some corners so you can piledrive him again and again. I guess I can comment on the characters I used: E Honda fights like E Honda, Vega fights like Vega, M Bison fights like a slower and lamer version of M Bison, and Zangief has been training hard and dodging any sort of drug testing scandals that may have come up in the last ten years because he’s become one nigh unstoppable force here. I’ll go on a limb and say that until I see later updates of Street Fighter 4 (and you know they will make more updates) that I doubt that it’ll have the same staying power of Street Fighter 3 or Marvel vs Capcom 2 in arcades. Rather, that this game was made for the many, many people who don’t go to arcades because they can’t parry all of Chun Li’s rapid kicking attacks. This game’s audience is the rest of the world, the people that get drunk and high in their buddy’s basement/bedroom and alternate between playing old games and watching late night Teletoon or Cartoon Network. The people that wear retro t-shirts with goombas and mushroom sprites on them despite never beating the third world of Super Mario Bros. This is Street Fighter for the masses, and that’s both a good and bad thing.

Pros : Rufus’ victory dialogue includes a story on how he broke his bed frame, presumably from masturbating. The first Capcom fighter in almost a decade to have not bad music.

Cons : A final boss that rips off the final boss of Super Smash Bros Brawl, which in turn was a ripoff. Nothing bold and daring – even Clayfighter was a more gutsy franchise than this.

3 1/2 stars

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Spore




Spore : A googly-eyed simulation game where you dictate the progression of a created species from single cell through to all powerful civilization.

Story : One could make a case for the Civilization games having the greatest storyline in gaming, or at least the greatest of the “choose your own adventure” type storyline in that they let the player control history of a global level by dictating the development and actions of a single nation. It looks like Maxis is opting to one-up the Civ games by dictating the course of history on a galactic level by manipulating the evolution of an entire species, none of which remotely look like a human being, but most of which are cute and cuddly enough to be made into stuffed animals regardless of how many mandibles the player gives them.

I wonder what creationists think of Spore. All this game needs is soulful music and you have the SchoolHouse Rock episode on evolution. Thematically, it creates a cute and cuddly take on Darwinism, perhaps moreso in an attempt to reach out to the same predominantly female audience produced by Will Wright’s last major hit, The Sims. But at the same time, that’s also what I like most about Spore, the way it spoofs reality. The Sims was great in how it pokes fun at human nature, materialism, the corporate ladder, the social life and other facts of life (and I will admit that most of the above was lost in the midst of the many, many Sims expansions released over the years. After the recent Ikea expansion pack, I have to hope that some kind of Sims Fight Club expansion is planned to redeem the franchise.) Likewise, Spore ribs on the ideas of the development of intelligent life, survival of the fittest, peace and warfare, even the idea of intelligent extraterrestrial life. I can’t help but be proud of my creature as it does a happy dance because “its brain grew” and it started to become more sentient.

I can’t help but wonder why else I like Spore so much, because if you broke down the gameplay aspects piece by piece, you essentially have 5 games, 4 of them simple enough that could’ve been done by a single programmer in Flash barring a graphical downgrade. Let me just talk about the actual gameplay for a few paragraphs. At the cellular level, you basically click in areas to move your cell of a creature, leveling up and growing by eating things smaller than you and surviving by avoiding things bigger than you. Eventually you reach a point where your creature is big enough to grow legs and walk on land, and there the game becomes the equivalent of starting a new character in World of Warcraft or any MMORPG. Either you make peace with other species or you kill them, depending on whether you opt to be an herbivore, carnivore or omnivore. The difference being that you either dance to other creatures or devour them, but both are the equivalent to MMORPG combat at its most simplest of levels, and each “quest” is just the same; kill or dance with 5 or so enemies to complete the mission. After enough leveling up, your character discovers tools and the theme from 2001 : A Space Odyssey plays.

Woo

The next two stages are essentially real-time strategy games on the most simplest of levels. First your creature forms a tribe and advances by slaughtering or making peace with other nations. Resource management is limited here to the occasional session of mining fish or fruit, and your tactical options here are limited to a handful of equipment types and buildings to construct in your single hut. Eventually your tribe becomes the dominant species on the planet, thus beginning the Civilization phase. You can guess what game is fixing to get cloned in this phase. Actually, the civilization phase is largely the same as the city phase with the difference being you have land and air units in addition to your tank and you can take over other cities by whatever means necessary. Again, there’s no depth at all and the gameplay is just there to showcase something else I will get to. Eventually you “unite” your species under one government and become advanced enough to create an intergalactic spaceship. This space phase is the 5th game, the one that’s a bit more fleshed out and will take more than an hour to complete. Actually, to COMPLETE this game will take a long time, as there’s some 250 achievements to collect before the game deems you God (I didn’t get this far for the record, I’m only human) but this phase gives you a ton of room to do whatever it is you’d like. Explore and colonize planets, make peace or declare war with other races, collect and sell artifacts, establish trade routes, etc. This aspect of the game feels extremely fleshed out, and in particular is aimed at people who like to explore, as there’s a downright dizzying number of galaxies and planets with their own evolving species to control. Okay, I’ll admit that I’m not really big on how much of a pain it can be for a single ship to wage war on an empire on another planet, but for people that thought Sid Meier’s Pirates was an exciting adventure, they’ll enjoy space exploration here.

Yes, one out of five games doesn’t sound like a winner, but what makes Spore work is how they’re tied together in a manner that makes you care about your species, and makes you want to see your creature develop. To be more specific, the game gradually introduces more ways to make your creation unique. In the first two stages, you can use the game’s currency to customize your creature however you see fit, and this game really lets you run wild with your imagination. Place as many legs, eyes, mouths and sexual innuendos on anywhere you please and contort them to any size you desire, and your critter will move appropriately. At the tribal level, you can outfit your critter with bits of clothing just the same. Then at the Civ level, you can go bananas with how you design air, land and sea vehicles, along with what your City Hall, residential area, factory and “entertainment facility” looks like, and then finally your spaceship. On top of molding your species into a design that suits you, the game gives a great sense of growth and progression, like watching a little puppy grow up before your eyes, except the puppy eats other dogs in an attempt to establish the dachshund as the dominant species.

Spore is also great in how it ties all of that into its online integration. No, you can’t compete online against other players, that wouldn’t work as it would negate the possibility of letting you choose how you want your species to advance because every single player would be a bloodthirsty 6-eyed Genghis Khan. Rather, the game will beam into your system the creations of other players, including creatures, buildings and all that. So should you allow the use of this feature, the galaxy will be populated with all manner of unusual creatures. It gives the game a similar appeal to City of Heroes, where half the fun is just going to the central area and checking out all the unique and interesting creations other players conjure up.

So I guess you can say that Spore is aiming for a “Game 2.0” type vibe. It’s an early attempt at giving the gamers their own version of DeviantArt. The people who will like Spore the most will be the ones that like to create, and likewise like to see the creations of other people. If you want some kind of Starcraft-like strategic depth then you’re going to be let down, but I could say that all of that simplicity, that shallow gameplay also works in the game’s favour. Really, how many people nowadays have the time and patience to pick up on all the keyboard shortcuts of a tactical real time strategy game nowadays? Likewise, if your mentality on life is that the journey is more important than the destination, then you’ll dig Spore as well, as this is the seemingly rare case of a game where you can’t help but be proud as your creations grow and mature. Or at least mature in a cute, cuddly way. I’ll admit that I thought it was adorable when my creatures were talking about inventing the Atomic Bomb in their Sim-ish language.

Finally, lets be honest, there really isn’t anything like Spore on the market right now, and I think that should be rewarded in of itself.

Pros : Incredible sense of scope too, in how the small area you started playing in suddenly opens up into an entire planet within a galaxy within a universe. The spaceship section of the game really makes you feel like some kind of deity.

Cons : You can’t advance in certain areas without designing one of the previously mentioned customizable aspects first; this breaks the flow of the gameplay in the civilization phase, where out of the blue, you’re forced to take the time to create 6 different buildings or vehicles before being allowed to progress. Likewise, once you reach the spaceship phase, there are so many different gameplay concepts that need to be explained that the tutorials pile up en masse.

4 stars

New blog!


So, I've been writing video game reviews for a good while now with the intention of starting some kind of website, but well the whole "website" part was always the one thing holding me back. So, with that in mind, and after taking in some input, I'm just going to opt for the slightly more conventional blog method to post them as I type them. Who knows, maybe they might amount to something, some major publication will take notice. Okay not likely, but I'll be happy if my writing makes someone laugh or cry or think or get pissed off and write angry letters or post on their message board about how lame it is that this guy has a blog now (oh I'm covering all the bases here!)

Anyways, thanks for reading :)