Dragon Age: Origins

Bioware loves its fantasy settings Lionel likes a security blanket. If they’re not enraptured with dragons, dwarves, demons and debauchery, then its spaceships, science-fiction, strange aliens and…well more debauchery. Mass Effect was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic with hot alien sex, and now we have Dragon Age: Dungeons and Dragons with hot interracial elf/dwarf action.

I kid. There’s more to Dragon Age than underwear-sporting intercourse, just like Mass Effect had more to it than LSD-induced sex with the blue alien chick. I’m just a bit surprised that Bioware has made little effort to stray from the all-too-familiar paths of either sci-fi or Tolkien fantasy. It’s as if fifteen members of the team died during the development of Jade Empire and the staff is scared of peeving the gods of pen and paper RPGs. Of course, my surprise could also stem from my constant attempts to woe over Morrigan, the slutty evil mage, only to discover later that she only goes down for male characters. Alas, my female elf character was, at best, “friend material” for her. (Yes, I’m one of “those guys” that always makes female characters in RPGS and MMOs. If you’re going to stare at something’s ass for 40 hours…)

So the Dragon Age experience starts with you crafting a character. He, she or it can be either human, elf or dwarf, and can run the occupational paths of either warrior, mage or rogue. Your race and career path determine your run through one of six origin stories. I am fairly certain that, after playing though two of these origin stories, that they all involve a whole lot of killing. After said loss of life, your character finds him/her/itself in the ranks of the Grey Wardens, an order of Fighting Irish ass-whooping machines determined to oppress evil demons.

Okay, there’s a lot more to the plot than that. Oodles and oodles and oodles more. You’ll pick up many books, letters and stray articles about the fiction of the land of Fereldin for the player to ignore. Much of the game is spent travelling all across this fancy, fictional, Tolkieninian land, where you’ll do such D&D-like acts as: talking to villagers, engaging in conversation trees, doing quests, doing side-quests, looting the corpses of your deceased enemies, looting the property of your living villagers and selling all the crap resources you’ll never use because herbalism without pot is no fun.

For the most part, the story as a whole is interesting (or at least the main bits. I can’t speak on whether or not the sheer quantity of tomes I picked up about the lore of the land are potentially gripping. I wish I could sell those codex pieces, turn my mage into a travelling World’s Largest Bookstore.) Like other Biogames, there comes a point where your journey splits into 4 different sub-quests, built around recruiting for a makeshift army, which can be tackled in any order. During these sub-quests, you’ll get the vibe that the developers were hellbent on shoving every human injustice, political controversy and sociological issue in the game short of Apartheid...and there’s always the sequel. Elves are the segregated Afro-Americans that can’t drink from the same water fountains or urinate in the same restrooms as their human counterparts. There’s a religious order that forces their beliefs (and swords) down the throats of all the land. I laughed uproariously when I heard that dwarves were governed by a caste system. Castes! With dwarves, the least Indian of the Tolkien tribes. But the overabundance of morality plays actually makes Dragon Age work from a story standpoint.

Gone is the forcefully black and white “good or evil” system of RPGs past. Your character no longer has a “good/evil” meter like in Knights of the Old Republic. You are free to make moral decisions based on how you personally feel about a given issue, instead of forcing yourself to side to just side with either good choices to get the “good guy ending” or vice-versa. (And none of that nonsense from Infamous that FORCED you to play one side or the other in the name of unlocking abilities. Therein is a sigh of relief.) Rather, each of your party mates has a “relationship meter” that affects how much they like you, dislike you, or are willing to fornicate with you. And even if your partner is upset that you slaughtered his or her entire race, you can always win them back over with them presents. The Dragon Age world is realistically shallow indeed. It also helps that your decisions have a sense of weight to them, affecting the storyline in their own ways. (And I assume affecting the storyline of Dragon Age 2, which is kind of neato if you think about it.) In particular, you’ll often come across factions in conflict, and the decisions you make will affect which party aligns with you in the final battle. You’ll be made to choose, for example, whether you want the aid of an army of Elvin archers or werewolves, and I think that decision will be a no-brainer.

You know how in real life, people generally befriend people with similar interests, styles and personalities? And you know how, in RPGs, the opposite is always true? Dragon Age is akin to every RPG in history in that your character builds a party of eclectic characters whom would never, ever band together in a real life situation. You’ll recognize certain Biowareisms in your cast of characters; the straight-as-a-pole male, the innocent, promiscuous school girl-like figure, and the obligatory monster figure that seeks comedic relief through psychopathic tendencies. Shale, the golem that you need to download (and potentially pay for) will get some laughs with his odd quirks but I was just waiting for him to call my dog a meathead. Actually, this is a small complaint, they’re largely a likeable bunch, in particular said pet dog…mostly because he is a pet dog and you can win approval points by petting him. I may have treated my dog better than I treated the entire kingdom of Fereldin.

I guess I should talk about the gameplay at some point. Dragon Age is like any Bioware game in that your true gods are not deities or mythological figures but rather behind-the-scenes dice rolls. Battles occur in pseudo-real time, with your characters casting spells, attacking enemies and being attacked in a rhythm and flow akin to that of those pesky MMORPGs. At any given point, you can freeze the battle to assign specific orders to yourself and your team, though I would have rather not. I can’t call this a flaw with the game so much as it is a flaw with me losing the patience to strategize, but I’d rather focus on what my character is doing than any of my teammates. Hence, I found myself occasionally tweaking the Gambits…I mean Tactics settings of my teammates, which affect how they behave in combat situations (like, for example, HEAL when you’re about to die so that you don’t freaking die.)

Really, the only times I wasn’t enjoying Dragon Age was when I was forced to micro-manage. And it’s not quite heavy micro-management, either. It’s not like there was a pesky sphere grid or one of those needlessly convoluted leveling systems that so many JRPGs like to confuse me with. (The leveling up process is rather traditional, easy to interpret. More in line with other Bioware games or World of Warcraft than some kind of Junction nonsense from Final Fantasys past.) That said, I hated trying to figure out the inventory system of the game. You can’t assume that the next town you go to will be selling the next best set of armour like most RPGs defy real marketplace logic with. Rather, like Mass Effect, you have to examine every bit of armour, and wrap your mind around what all the fictional buzzwords mean in relation to each other. How am I supposed to know if Red steel chainmail armour is better than Veridium chainmail armour? All I got going for me is the prior knowledge that Red Steel was a crappy game. I ultimately gave up on the concept of armour altogether, through using a party consisting of two mages, my dog, and the stone golem, all of which can get by just fine fighting in their birthday suits.

So my biggest issues with the game were more to do with the re-education process of learning to play an RPG than in-game faults. But there are a handful of flaws that beg to be picked at like a scab. Some of the game’s dungeons just seem to last longer than Everlasting Gobstoppers, breaking both my jaw, my patience and my inventory; far too often I would run out of space from collecting loot I intended to sell, often right before a boss fight (and the subsequent treasures that come with.) There is one particular NPC that should wear a striped shirt and be labeled “travelling salesman”, for he follows your party around, begging you to go on particular quests that involve buying downloadable content. Also, this being the console version, you’ll have to adapt to the radial menu for in-game attacks and clumsy fumbling with the shoulder buttons to navigate your management menus. I imagine the PC version of the game being easier to comprehend, but I’d rather adapt to these quirky menus and play my 40 hour RPG on the comfort of a sofa anyways. And finally, you can’t have a Bioware game without glitches and bugs. The game froze on me twice…which I guess gives it a better track record than games of past. Who else encountered that save-erasing glitch from Knights of the Old Republic?

But ultimately, Dragon Age is worth getting for several reasons. It’s a big game that you’ll (mostly) enjoy from your bloodstained beginnings to the ending that you’ll choose based on your whims and not the whims of a good or bad meter. It took me 30 hours to finish on the first playthrough, missing several sidequests, and I’m already toying with the possible crimes against humanity I’ll commit on my next game save. It’s an evolutionary RPG that intelligently matures the genre without mucking it up through convoluted gimmicks like too many other contemporary releases. And finally, Dragon Age is the game that convinces me that Bioware is amassing a real legacy of RPGs. Where I used to dread the monotony of seeing sequel after sequel, I now find myself intrigued by what awaits me in Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2. A rare feat.

4 ½ stars

New Super Mario Bros Wii

A rotund, European blue-collar worker with both an obscenely low center of gravity and yet a shockingly high vertical leap teams with his lanky brother. Both are twins so therefore must dress identically in fashion but different in colour. Both have a strong resemblance to Ron Jeremy. They exist in a land paved and constructed almost entirely of bricks and sewage piping is used as transportation. These European plumbers must leap on top of unassuming turtles and teeth-boasting plants while seeking power from mushrooms and flowers with presumed hallucinogenic properties. Their goal is to rescue a teeny-bopper princess from a giant, fire-breathing turtle king.

Find someone you know who doesn’t follow video games at all, preferably a movie buff. Tell them that the above synopsis describes the Citizen Kane of video games. I know, the Mario games are a bit…imaginative, but the wacky sense of drug-induced creativity has always been part of the fun. Most key Mario platformers have a demented sense of personality, flavour, identity, IT, whatever. Something that makes it a unique and beautiful snowflake in the pile of slush that is the video game industry. It’s a certain intangible, an immeasurable combination of solid jump-driven gameplay, apeshit creativity, nostalgia and zen-like harmony that New Super Mario Bros Wii is trying too hard to obtain.

New Super Mario Bros Wii (a tongue-twister if there ever was one) is trying its sweet little heart out to be a Mario game. It’s like your daughter, sneaking into mother’s drawers and wearing dresses and high heels too big for her little soles; it only looks cute until she finds the cigarettes in her purse and imitates smoking. In this game, the Princess gets kidnapped yet again (by virtue of Baby Bowser and a cake being a lie, go figure) and Mario will have to traverse a series of stages, castles and ghost houses to unkidnap her.

The core mechanics of a Mario game are intact; you run, jump, smash blocks with your head, smash enemies with your feet or rectum, you collect stars and mushrooms to power up and you traverse pipes to collect coins. If you’ve played New Super Mario Bros on the DS, you’ll find a very similar game here. There are 8 worlds, including the obligatory ice world, water world, desert world and lava world. Many of the obstacles facing the player are throwbacks to other Mario games, namely Mario Bros 3 and Super Mario World.

Which, in turn, is part of the problem with New Super Mario Bros Wii. It relies almost entirely on nostalgia, which feels redundant since just about every Mario game before it played a nostalgic fiddle. (Well, almost every Nintendo game does too, but that’s another discussion for another day.) The difference is that past games, and in particular the outstanding Mario Galaxy, merely use those throwbacks as either pleasant surprises or conventions for which many new and exciting ideas can be built upon. Those games have identity. New Super Mario Bros Wii merely tosses one old Mario-ism after another in some kind of strange platforming mixtape; one level will pit you against the spiked ball-throwing lizards from Mario 3, the next will be built around Yoshi eating the red berries from Super Mario World. Even the Koopa Kids drop out of community college to make their return to gaming as each world’s easy end-boss. The game feels like a fan-made Flash version of a Mario game, but with an out-of-place soundtrack that belongs more in a fabric softener commercial.
Oh, there is waggle in there, too. That waggle jumping mechanic that was a minor nuisance in Mario Galaxy is swarm-of-mosquitoes-annoying in New Super Mario Bros Wii. You’ll have to waggle to pick up some items, tilt the remote to manipulate platforms and shake it to fly using the new propeller-pajamas powerup. The motion controls in the game are about 65% responsive (which I guess is better than most Wii games. Better in my mind than freaking Zelda) and they’re not a deal-breaker, I just would rather be able to play the game lying on my arms than sitting upright.

Now, keep in mind that the game is completely devoid of merit. The platform jumping sequences are appropriately hefty. There are plenty of obstacles to test the spring in your step. The levels scale in difficulty at a suitable pace, starting out as inviting but becoming true tests of one’s leaping prowess. And the game is, if anything, more lengthy and beefy than most platformers. It should take about 5 hours for a seasoned platform leaper to hop, skip and jump through all of the game’s stages, so at least the $60 price tag is halfway justified. And just like the DS New Super Mario Bros, the stage-based nature of the game makes it ideal to pop in and play at any given moment in time. We’ve all had those moments before, where we want to play a video game but just don’t know which one, and most of the games in your collection require hearty multi-hour sessions. In that regard, New Super Mario Bros Wii has them beat.

There is also a multiplayer component. Up to four players can control Mario, Luigi and two coloured Toads (because presumably, Wario or any character that could be considered more interesting than a blue and yellow toad were out vacationing in better games.) It’s the LittleBigPlanet kind of multiplayer where all the players run through the stages in tandem. The theory behind this mode is that players can either 1: co-operate to reach the end of a stage and collect the rare coins, or 2: sabotage each other like jerks. The answer will almost always be either 2, or 2 by accident. Characters on screen will bounce off each other like you expect fat people in Looney Tunes cartoons to bounce off each other, and the stages feel designed for the specific purpose of having multiple on-screen casualties. So you’re stress level will reach unwelcoming levels if you treat the multiplayer component as a serious mission like the Modern Warfare 2 Spec-Ops mode, or if you’re a firm believer in the power of teamwork. Rather, I think that there is potential fun to be had if you bring out the multiplayer mode in New Super Mario Bros when your friends are drunk. Hell, you can even turn it into a drinking game where shots are to be had when someone loses a life. I can’t, however guarantee that there won’t be fatalities as a result.

New Super Mario Bros Wii is a safe purchase for platforming fans to be sure. You’ll get a decent amount of content, your wits will be challenged, and you’ll get to hear Mario’s pudgy voice chant “Lets A Go” enough to fill your heart with nostalgic joy as you’re reminded of better games. But most major Mario platformers and even recent games like Trine have New Super Mario Bros’ number. I feel no obligation to collect all the star coins and unlock the hidden levels, and I would sooner unleash Mario Party 8 or Tiger Woods at a social gathering than the four player mode here. (No, really, Tiger Woods on the Wii has alarmingly wide appeal as a multiplayer game, and not just for all the infidelity jokes that it will now inspire.) So think of this as a trepid recommendation; buy it if you crave a new platformer, but don’t make it a priority on your to-play list.

3 ½ stars.

EARTHWORM JIM 2~!

Remember how we all thought Tiger Woods was this clean-cut sports role model so wholesome that even the thought of him having facial hair was appalling to people? Remember how that whole image evaporated when word let out that he had a mistress or twelve? And now how his prowess as a golfer was thrown into doubt because his trainer possessed growth hormone? That is almost somewhat kind of like my situation with Earthworm Jim right now. I used to think that the first two Earthworm Jim games were the bee’s knees, the tip of the top, the jolliest of the jolly. A pair of platformers so wonderful that they motivated me to collect all the action figures as a youth (including “Battle-Damaged Jim”, “Underwater Jim” and the rarity that was “Regular Earthworm Jim.”) But then I had an affair with just about every better sidescroller released in the past ten years, and my pituitary gland naturally released growth hormone that, in turn, made me no longer a child. Thus the Earthworm Jim games don’t quite have that same appeal that they used to. So indeed, in the vaguest way possible, me and Earthworm Jim are a lot like Tiger Woods and his vices.

Ever since Earthworm Jim 1 was released on the Virtual Console last year, I’ve been in a state of unseeing denial, telling myself “it’s okay that it didn’t age well, Earthworm Jim 2 was always the better game, everything will be right in the universe again.” And now, Earthworm Jim 2 is out, and while I enjoyed it plenty more, I doubt the rest of the world will share my enthusiasm.

Earthworm Jim 2 stars Earthworm Jim (I know, shocking, but in this day and age, games aren’t always named after their mascot hero. You don’t play as the god of war in God of War, nor do you play as a supernatural law of matter in Mass Effect.) He is a worm in a giant armour suit with a ray gun and a hard-on for an alien woman thingy called Princess What’s Her Name. The Princess gets unceremoniously kidnapped by Psy-Crow during the Sega Logo screen and Jim must make things right before Psy-Crow gets hitched with the princess on the Planet of Quickie-24-hour-Las-Vegas-Weddings. That is the honest-to-goodness plot.

In retrospect, if Earthworm Jim 2 has a flaw, it’s that the game lacks narrative. The above-mentioned plot, I took from the instruction manual…the original game’s instruction manual, not the Wii’s online instruction manual thingamabob. There’s no in-game story progression, just a series of random stages placed together with seemingly no rhyme or reason. I distinctly remember the instruction manual having some funky explanations for each stage (to be more specific, the levels are the summer-home of Jim’s arch-enemies.) that makes some sense of the impending madness. But without those explanations, the game is but a series of random sequences, all very different from the stage before them…though I guess the quirkiness can be viewed as a strength too.

Earthworm Jim 2 is a 2-dimensional sidescrolling shooter...sometimes. You’ll run, jump, whip your head out in a manner less revolting than I made it sound, and stand perfectly still while firing your giant machine gun. This isn’t so much Contra where your commando can leap and fire his gun in any direction while barrel-rolling in the air. Rather, this game is less about skill and reflexes than excess machismo for using too much firepower to destroy a small flying penguin. Earthworm Jim 2 lets the player collect new weapons, ranging from “useful” (like a homing missile shaped like a house. Get it?) to “useless” (A bubble gun!) and the thing about the Wii version that confuses me is that it’s a port of the Sega Genesis game. Why the Genesis version, I wonder? Why use the port of the game that didn’t have shoulder buttons to switch weapons with? Why the version of the game where you can’t press buttons between levels to make the end-mission cows say “Well Done” in different tones of voice? Why use the version of the game with the less-clear audio? The game’s famous Tommy Tallarico soundtrack doesn’t quite translate so well on the Sega Genesis’s ringtone-like audio system. My ears were in pain during the “cow level” and how its once elegant background music has become a high-pitched glass-shatterer.

The upside is that, as a Wii Virtual Console game, the once-pointless “password system” now makes sense. The game lets you start your adventure after any stage that you’ve collected three hard-to-find flags in. The issue was that the game never saved this progress, so flipping the system off meant that players had to start each new summer home-tour over. Now, with the Wii has it’s funky save-state system, Earthworm Jim 2’s password system will actually work when you walk away from the console to live life.

I mentioned before how Earthworm Jim 2 is only sometimes a shooter, because the game has a habit of transitioning into a completely unrelated gameplay sequence with different mechanics. One level, called “Earthworm Jim is now a blind salamander” has Earthworm Jim playing as a blind salamander, swimming through the innards of a giant pinball fish thingy. Another level has you flying on your spaceship through a medieval Warfield filled with mucus. And there’s on particular stage that you’ll have to learn to love or face the consequences; it’s called “Puppy Love”. Here, Psy-Crow is throwing hundreds of Peter Puppy’s children out the window, and Jim has to catch them with the MARSHMELLOW OF LOVE, lest they go splat on the floor in the most cruel of manners. If your apartment landlord forbids pets, it’s because he played Puppy Love as a child. Should one puppy too many taste concrete, Peter Puppy flips his lid and whoops your ass in a billowing dust cloud of Looney Tunes pain. And you’ll have to grin and bear this agony for three separate stages. The only relief to this pain and repetition is Mr Tallarico serenading your ears with a charming Italian medley.

So, is Earthworm Jim 2 worth purchasing? If you were a fan of Earthworm Jim 2 the first time around, well sure. It’s as effective a nostalgic release as any, even if it’s not exactly the right port of the game. On the other hand, I feel as though the oddball humour and random gameplay will be lost on today’s generation of level-grinding deathmatch players that crave either familiar military shooters or familiar space military shooters. But let us look at the glass from a half-full perspective. An upcoming remake of the original Earthworm Jim could make the series relevant again. The Earthworm Jim cartoon, a product of the Animaniacs-generation of WB shows, is still a fun, 90s rendition of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And in my time volunteering for a holiday toy drive, I had found that one person had donated an unopened Underwater Action Earthworm Jim action figure. I sure as hell hope that whatever kid that winds up with that present has a Happy Holidays. Even if he has no idea what an Underwater Action Earthworm Jim is supposed to be.

3 ½ stars

Assassin's Creed 2

Assassin’s Creed 1 starred a preachy, philosophical, emotionless, characterless unibomber-lookalike named Altair. Killing was his business, but business was not good. First he had to pickpocket, eavesdrop and stalk random targets to obtain “information”, or rather grind missions to extend play, time about his victims-to-be. He would then proceed to attempt an assassination on said targets, one that would involve stealth and cunning…on paper. In practice, they usually ended in extended fight sequences, combating both a tiresome barrage of respawning enemies and cumbersome climbing mechanics and a dull combat system. When you finally killed your last target and a grand unveiling of the true nature of the game’s sacred artifact was about to occur, the “flashback” was cut off. Players were brought back to the present day storyline, of Altair’s descendant, Desmond, being held captive by templars and…the game ended with him continuing to be trapped. Many questions were thrust on the player, and the only surefire answer provided was “buy our sequel two years from now.”

And now we have Assassin’s Creed 2 to address some of those annoying cliffhanger questions…while providing plenty more mysteries anger players with the notion of waiting another two years. But while the first game was a wholly aggravating experience from beginning to end, Assassin’s Creed 2 only has slight growing pains and issues with modern times. Rather, unlike ex-girlfriends and boyfriends everywhere, Assassin’s Creed 2 thrives when it lives in the past.

The game begins with Desmond being liberated from his prison by that blonde chick, whom switches from cliché empathetic scientist girl to cliché ass-kicking woman in leather. After the breakout, Desmond finds solace in the assassin’s headquarters…or rather, the apartment of some preppy British geek and his stoned best friend science girl who moonlights as the the girl on change room duty at Urban Behavior. They have an Animus of their own, and they’re going to use it to Matrix-ise Desmond into an assassin. Honestly, everything about the “present day” plot sucks, and I mean everything. It’s hard to accept the struggle between assassins and templars as some kind of history-shaping struggle when the assassins look like Chess Club members and the templars like mall cops with batons. The almighty templars with infinite resources can’t afford guns. Despite centuries of history, neither party would survive a night in Compton.

Bear with me when I say that the game as a whole is more interesting when dealing with the past storyline. And I really do mean “bear with me” because even that aspect takes awhile to build steam. You alternately spend most of the game as Ezio, a noble paysan in 1400s Italy. He’s young, brash, charming, and you’ll have to go through a series of tutorial missions to get these points across. The tutorial is long. Lengthy. Unending. Verbose. Extensive. Substantial. Hulking. Massive. Voluminous. Elongated. Mammoth. As fun as watching Italy play soccer. And any other word for long and drab your thesaurus may boast. The Grand Theft Auto 4 tutorial cowers in comparison, feeling ashamed that it cannot ever aspire to be as extended and boring as the Assassin’s Creed 2 tutorial. You have to undergo tutorials on how to jump, climb, fistfight, swordfight, bribe prostitutes, pickpocket your money back from them, taunt, flail your arms, and explain the many different forms of side-quests. It took me about a week of casual play (about 1-2 hours a day) before I got to partake in my first assassination. You can understand why I empathize the importance of bearing with me when I say that this game does eventually become great.

Somewhere within that lengthy tutorial process of making Ezio pay his dues, his father and brothers are unjustly killed and thus begins his descent from cheery nobleman to ruthless-but-still-cheery assassin. The Italy storyline then bases itself around Ezio’s quest to dispatch the conspirators responsible, all of whom just happen to be templars.

And the revenge quest part of Assassin’s Creed 2 is really where the game shines. Ezio is an appealing character that never falls in the same religious/ideological preaching sessions that Altair spent too much time being pre-programmed into mechanically spouting. You’ll witness his development over a ten year span, including positive and negative thoughts, and he’s surrounded by a bustling Italian landscape filled with poor people, prostitutes, that jolly next door neighbour Leonardo Da Vinci and his own little code… more poor people and plenty of lively characters and lavish buildings to climb. It’s hard to not get enraptured by the game’s scenery. That this is the only game with this unique European setting gives Assassin’s Creed 2 a wonderfully unique sense of style and immersion.

Just be sure to play the game with subtitles turned on. The characters have a tendency to slip between English and Italian as often as Italian grandparents. Even though most of the Italian spoken word consisted of prayer and swearing, sometimes in combination, it’s still nice to have the translation.

Oh, and there are religious themes. This game was made by that very same multi-cultural team of various religious beliefs, after all. Keep that in mind during the…final sequence.

Assassin’s Creed 2 is a sandbox game, though a sandbox game where you cannot kill civilians without punishment. (For you see, Ezio never harmed a civilian in his entire life, which I have a hard time believing.) You run around, you climb structures with the same Prince of Persia/Assassin’s Creed 1/Tomb Raider/Imfamous/Uncharted/Uncharted 2 climbing system that’s starting to get a bit tired in games. Most of the climbing is automated, but Ezio’s pathfinding can be a bit suspect at times. He has the occasional habit of jumping off his ledge and in the wrong direction, sometimes to his untimely dea…I mean desynchronization. This is especially profanity-inducing during certain timed platform sequences. And the sword combat isn’t particularly exciting. It still comprises mainly of timing button presses to execute combos and counters, and while there are a few new moves (mainly the ability to jack another fool’s weapon) you’ll most likely employ a mindset of “attack a lot, then block when attacked” in combat. It’s not a bad combat system, just one that lacks the flow of Batman: Arkham Asylum, and to be fair, Jackie Chan and Jet Lee as martial artists don’t quite have the flow of Batman: Arkham Asylum either.

I hope at this point you’ve bore with me up to now, because even though the platforming seems drab and the combat average, the rest of the game is quite entertaining. Those annoying pickpocket/eavesdrop/stalking missions have vanished altogether. The next story mission is almost always at accessible immediately, only asking the player to grind a fetch quest near the game’s end. (There are codex pages scattered around the world that you can collect on your own throughout your journey, and getting them is a simple matter of distracting the guards with hired floozies. So this fetch quest as a whole is harmless.) Most of the story missions are varied and enjoyable, offering a much higher ratio of time spent killing to time spent not killing than in the prior game. You’ll kill plenty of guards, often by sneaking up to them and hidden-blading their asses, and the variety of challenges that await you ensure that the campaign never grows tiresome.

Now, not all of the missions are great. The game doesn’t quite approach the same ratio of great levels to wastes of time that Grand Theft Auto 4 achieves. In particular, Assassin’s Creed 2 may feature the lamest rendition of Capture The Flag in the history of video games, and that may actually be a rare achievement. But the post-tutorial game moves at a consistently brisk pace, assuming that you even want to play the story missions. The optional side missions, including assorted assassinations, muggings, races and so forth are exciting enough to occupy your attention. In particular, there are six set-piece “tomb” levels that will have you traverse a specific platforming sequence, giving chase or solving weird timed puzzle sequences. This isn’t like other games that rehash side missions to artificially pad out the game’s length. It just happens that you’ll feel more inclined to take time away from the main plot to indulge yourself, and time will just magically fly by. The money earned can be spent on assorted upgrades (and you’re always going to need the best sword available if you want to have fun with the combat) or renovating your home villa, for Ezio is the Mike Holmes of assassins. Renovating your village is intended to be an investment; money made from tourism goes into a chest that you subsequently and unethically pocket yourself, the corrupt politician you are. The issue with this whole system is that “quick-travel” stations are scarcely scattered around the map, hence you’ll waste an unnecessary amount of time just to collect your paycheck.

Back on the positive side, the game gives you a greater sense of control. New abilities like the pistol upgrade give you more options for dispatching your fellow goomba. The addition of two hidden blades lets you feel more like Steven Segal in allowing you to end the lives of two soldiers simultaneously, and from different positions. Whether it’s killing from ledges or while hidden in a haystack, the game puts a greater emphasis on stealth kills. The guard AI is kind of dimwitted in a variety of ways, most notably how they’ll never notice how one of their fellow workers has suddenly vanished, but their ignorance provided me with great bliss as I picked them off one-by-one. And should you decide to run from the large flock of guards giving chase, new options like the ability to hide in any crowd and not just four strategically placed scholars give you a greater sense of control. Gone are the days where you ran around blind, hoping the guards would suddenly lose sight and you just happen to notice a pile of hay to slip into.

So Assassin’s Creed 2 is a great game…all the way to the end. As I and most anyone else predicted, the game ends with another cheap cliffhanger, opening up tons of questions and completely reworking the plot in the name of building towards an Assassin’s Creed 3. Without elaborating too much, the “plot change” is cheesy as all hell, and almost puts a damper on the Ezio revenge quest that I fell so in love with. But the damage done at the end doesn’t quite sour the experience the way the first game’s ending did; rather, it merely kills off whatever enthusiasm I could’ve held for Assassin’s Creed 3, knowing the direction the story will follow now.

But let us live for the moment instead. Standing on its merits as both an action game and an immersive experience, Assassin’s Creed 2 is a treat. It isn’t perfect but is perfection something that exists anyways? The redeeming qualities are worth experiencing for yourself in spite of the flaws. Just remember that if this is your first experience with the franchise, to not give in to curiosity and play Assassin’s Creed 1. You’re not missing much.

4 stars

Actually, there is a few flaws in the game I should mention, but it’s more an issue with me than the game itself. The characters in the game revere Altair as some kind of legendary prophet or hero. I disagree with them. I did not want to see anything from the first game revered as sacred.

Also, I have beef with any game that feels it should have an achievement system separate from the Xbox one. Now Ubi Soft has to have its own online achievement system. Why?

Excitebike: World Rally

Excitebike is one of those games that you either like or really like. There is no middle or alternative ground. Somewhere between its simplistic, rarely imitated gameplay and the fact that its an old game with a cheery, campy MIDI theme song is the reason why so many people have such fond memories of it. Like Ice Hockey or Punch-out, the gameplay is so distinctly…Nintendo Entertainment System-y that more people will care about this 24 year old game 20 years from now than last year’s million copy-selling Madden. Nostalgia plays with an unorthodox set of rules indeed. Now we have Excitebike: World Rally, a remake in the purest and most shameless sense.

World Rally feels like the kind of remake that a would-be programmer/fanatic would make at home. It’s akin to the fan-made attempt at a Chrono Trigger remake or the Left 4 Dead demake. The intro theme is a playful redux of the original song, and all the artwork and character models (and by “models” I mean “model”, the one character model of “guy on the bike”) are so alarmingly faithful to the original game that I started to ponder if I should’ve saved money and bought the original Excitebike on the Wii for half the price.

The gameplay is largely unchanged, and that works to World Rally’s favor. There are no sliding turns, no powerslides, no handbrakes, no clutch, there isn’t even a brake. Your bike travels along a horizontal plane, navigating between lanes and avoiding dirt patches and hurdles. All the while timing your wheelies on the ramps to get more air out of jumps, and subsequently trying to align your bike with the ground to not wipe out and paint the floor with your facial features. There’s also a turbo button and a need to run over chevrons with magical cooling properties to keep your bike from overheating. Oh, and new to this game are other bikers riding along the track, despite how most of your races are time trials…which leads me to believe that Excitebike races are not sanctioned events but rather consist of a bunch of drunk biker buddies driving along a public track, ruining the fun for the rest of the drivers. You can subsequently use your wheelie trick to hop over these drivers for a speed boost and concussing them.

You have two control scheme options; first you can act a fool and try steering your bike by tilting the remote. When you realize how inaccurate and annoying this method is, you can revert to playing with classic NES-style controls. But both methods require the player to shake the remote furiously to recover from a crash in an ever annoying and ergonomically-diabolical control tactic. Seriously, some people want to be able to lie down on their side or stomach, holding themselves upright with just their arms. Any time a Wii game has at least one form of shaking or “waggle”, then this lax position becomes impossible.

The upside is that the game is so simplistic and accessible in nature that you can complete the tutorial in about two minutes. That’s a legit 30-60 times shorter than the slow, overbearing tutorials for games like Grand Theft Auto 4 and Assassin’s Creed 2.

The main gameplay mode has you racing on 16 courses in time trials…time trials ran on courses featuring other bikers that don’t appreciate your reckless driving. There are ramps, dirt fields, hurdles and magic chevrons, and solid times are needed to advance. S-ranked times (for there must always be a letter rank in games higher than an A for some reason) will unlock more bike paint jobs, which gets me to Excitebike’s greatest issue.

Excitebike: World Rally has a decidedly flimsy amount of content. Unlockable paint schemes for the bike include “yellow” and “green”... and a limited other set of colours. The game doesn’t even let the player start with all of the primary colours unlocked, light or paint-based. The 16 tracks, (all of which are based in 4 or 5 different cities with different background textures) are meager in length, similar in design, and can be completed in little over half an hour. Thus, the tutorial modes for Grand Theft Auto 4 and Assassin’s Creed 2 are longer than the entire Excitebike: World Rally experience.

There’s a four player online mode now. You and three friends or strangers (but probably strangers because lord knows the friend code system has completely shattered all hopes of ever playing Wii games online with real friends) can compete in largely lag-free races. These competitions make for a nice distraction and are fun in short doses. But it does beg one to ask; why doesn’t World Rally have an offline multiplayer mode? A split-screen mode most likely could’ve been arranged. This game strikes me as something that would be oodles more fun to play alongside a drinking buddy who’s too inebriated for Gears of War than with silent strangers over the internet.

Fans of the old Excitebike will be happy to know that the level editor is back in full force. This time, you can save many different levels, and this time, turning the game off won’t eliminate all your hard work in one battery save-less swoop. And like before, the level editor is very basic, merely letting the player insert the same set of ramps and obstacles available in the existing tracks. However, you can’t upload the tracks or race them online, so whatever masterpiece you create will be reserved for your own private gallivanting.

As far as recreating the original Excitebike racing simplicity and fun, World Rally succeeds. But the game does little to justify existing on its own, and thus only comes recommended to the most strangely-obsessed fans of the original. Otherwise, players would be better served buying the NES Excitebike on the Virtual Console for half the price.

3 stars

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Having already sold more copies than most countries have citizens, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has now transcended the video game industry to become a major player on the world stage. I feel as if Call of Duty should have its own representative at the UN, bullying countries into trading resources in exchange for Modern Warfare’s two top exports: flashbang grenades and anti-war quotes. Modern Warfare 2’s economy is both socialist and violent, with the government doling out welfare only as a perk for citizens that kill five delinquents in a row. Oh, and there are protesters on the street fighting for the right to have dedicated servers, but no one pays them any heed. Thus, I feel that reviewing Modern Warfare 2 is like a 5 year old doing a geography project on another country, perhaps one inhabited by Fidel Castro. I’m a bit overwhelmed and scared that a patriot will knife me in the back over the false hope of ranking up. But review it I shall, and my verdict is “yeah it’s a pretty good game.” Please don’t shoot me.

So we’re back to the all-too-familiar pre-mission loading screens of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 1. The ones that are too flashy, intricate and excessively graphic-oriented for any real military organization to ever invest in. This time we have a pretentiously wannabe-wiseman in “”Shepherd” going off about war-this and terror-that and behaving like every other pessimist general. Once again, there’s a terrorist threat that outsmarts the Americans (yes, for the second game in a row!) and causes a war between the former Soviets and the former Colonialists. So you’ll flip-flop control of several different soldiers from the US Army and British Special “we get things done” Forces.

Sort-of spoilers in the next paragraph. Though I feel that at this point, it’s safe to say that everyone reading this has finished the game, twice possibly, and engaged in at least one MW2 boycott of some kind before caving to the pressure of wanting to earn that Martyrdom perk.

Do you remember how there was a big news story about how there was a scene so shocking, so controversial that at least three or four people considered boycotting the game? You are given the option to skip “the scene” but really, if you’ve ever played Grand Theft Auto and thought it would be kind of amusing to drive on the sidewalk, then you’ve already committed more despicable acts than this airport mission. One consistent problem with Modern Warfare 2 is that it seems to be trying too hard to shock the audience. Remember how the one voiceless, faceless soldier you controlled suffered a surprise death in Modern Warfare 1? Well Modern Warfare 2 goes Gemini and kills off two voiceless, faceless soldiers, then expects you to sympathize for both. But all of the “shocks” come off as forced, often coming in close succession of each other. And like Hollywood celebrities, the game tries too hard to come across as “edgy” for showing flashes of being “Anti-American.” So I can imagine many yankee players being a bit disheartened by the campaign. Fortunately, I’m Canadian, and I’ve got bigger problems (like the Leafs) to cringe about. But one last gripe about the plot; the story takes a major shift 4/5s of the way that feels rather jarring; creating a new conflict that gets solved at the endgame while leaving the original conflict untangled. As far as I can tell, the “modern warfare” doesn’t come to an end at the end of the game “Modern Warfare 2”.

But there are enough people that think the campaign for a first-person-shooter is little more than training for the multiplayer, so let me slap their hands away from the keyboards and talk Story Mode. The Campaign missions have a largely similar style to that of the first game; most missions have you going from point A to B, all the while killing off enemy soldiers and sitting in a corner to wait for your health to heal. My first impression of the game was the thought that perhaps it should be renamed “Call of Duty: I Can’t See ****.” The new damage indicator is that the screen fills with blood that seems custom built to only improve Dexter’s performance in online play, and frustrate the eyesight of players everywhere. To boot, the very first mission has players firing at enemies on the opposite end of a very long river, squinting ever so hard at the screen and hoping your retinas won’t be ambushed by a blood splatter. It doesn’t help that the first mission is an anti-climatic mission about a bridge-builder, and the level as a whole seems to exist only to introduce players to the phrase “oscar-mike”. Another mission early in the game was built to discourage players with high blood-pressure. This stage pits you in a village filled with enemies that know the town well, and will use every window and rooftop possible to ambush you and take advantage of your poor trooper vision.

So the game, by mere existence of a few blemishes, doesn’t match the quality of the original Modern Warfare. I played through that game’s campaign twice, both times a year apart, and I can vividly remember critical aspects of every level. On that virtue alone, I was already decided that there is no way Infinity Ward can conjure up enough original ideas for the second, and while I was halfway right, what does exist makes for a thrilling time. Large chunks of the experience still comprise of the player shooting terrorists, finding cover to recover your infinite self-regenerating health and the occasional upchucking of the enemy’s grenades back in their direction. And many of the Call of Duty-isms are still here; you’ll still pop smoke to avoid fire from a tank, you’ll still have a legion of fellow troopers with only a last name to identify their existence before they die in the line of fire and are never mentioned again, and you’ll still have the philosophical quotes greeting you when you die. (Though one gets the idea that after 6 years, Infinity Ward is starting to run out of quotes. This game’s lines are less “anti-war” than they are “pro-murder.”) But the game still manages to keep an upwards pace; you’re almost never a sitting duck, waiting for respawning enemies to come forward and die at your rifle’s grasph. There are some decidedly creative set-pieces, like a gunfight set between different fast-food restaurants in the kind of neighbourhood you could live in. It’s that startling juxtaposition between chaotic warfare and hometown suburban comfort that Resistance 2 tried to recreate but drowned in a sea of brown colour schemes that makes these missions so fun to play. And then there are some cool new toys, in particular a laptop that not only allows you to drop missiles from the sky, but aim them from a glorious first-person perspective of sadism. Now that’s cheeky fun. So the campaign, ultimately, is great, and all I have to say to Infinity Ward is “yeah, you guys got your work cut out for you in the next game.”

At least they’ve made multiplayer modes that can last awhile while IW sits on their hands and thinks of every possible military scenario that might be fun. “Spec Ops” is a two player co-operative mode that has the common courtesy to be playable via split-screen, an option that far too many games are forgoing nowadays. (I can’t be made to list all the games, but I would like to specifically express my disappointment in Nintendo for botching this one on the new Excitebike game. Seriously, Nintendo? Screw up a multiplayer mode?) Here, two players have to work together on a variety of missions, ranging from “shooting bad guys in a mission ripped off from the campaign” to “shooting guys in a mission ripped off from the Gears of War 2 Horde mode.” Still, if you have a friend that’s ready and willing, the sheer quantity and variety of missions available will give you something to waste many a substance-driven evening away with.

And then there’s the now-legendary Call of Duty 4 competitive mode. The rage that has been driven from me by this mode. As before, the game is driven by perks, both awarded for kill streaks in-game and through a level-up experience system that grants weapons and upgrades over time. The problem I had is the same problem that capitalism presents in making the rich richer and the poor poorer; players who were already bound to dedicate endless nights to the online component earned the advantages over the already-less skilled, less committed players…like me. There’s no way for me to argue this mode and not hold up a cardboard sign reading “I SUCK!” But the real issue with this multiplayer is that someone unfamiliar with the genre now has to spend many hours of leveling up and getting thrashed if they desire to make it big in the FPS game. And now we’re seeing perks become commonplace in games like Killzone and Uncharted. Modern Warfare 2 has more perks, more ranks and a dedicated fanbase that has been playing this game for two years now. Suddenly, the hurdles for a new player got a whole lot more steep. The American Dream, it seems, has been perverted to become “achieve success in a Call of Duty game.”

But the odds are that you already know whether or not you’re buying this game for the perk-based multiplayer component. And I guess there are people that eagerly look forward to starting back to level 1 and grinding their way aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the way back to the top. As of this writing, Modern Warfare 2 has only been out about ten days and I already competed against level 60 troopers. Some people should contemplate stepping outside from time to time. But it’s the campaign that I invested money in this game for, and my prognosis is this; it doesn’t quite pack the same punch as the first Modern Warfare 1.And granted, it may try a little too hard to dethrone that very same game. But taken as a whole, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2 is pretty damned great. An exciting, action-driven shooter for a more…excessive generation.

4 stars

Trine

(Playstation 3 version reviewed)

In Trine, you assume control of a group of three characters that happen to be the destined chosen ones; a burly but duty-bound knight, a scantily-clad female thief and a wizard that quotes scribes off the top of his head like a bookworm. They must traverse forests, caves, castles and dungeons, slaying legions of walking skeletons to rescue the kingdom from an evil spirit.

Right now it sounds like every play from the storybook fantasy playbook is being run on the football fields of Middle Earth, but bear with me, for Trine does not resemble a Dungeons and Dragons RPG. No, nothing you do in Trine will be dictated by a “behind the scenes dice throw” and it sure is nice to escape the clutches of chance. Rather, Trine is a side-scrolling platformer that makes modern technology work to its benefit, crafting an experience that stands out above the New Super Mario Bros’ and Mega Man 9s of the world.

So you control the three above characters. The twist is that the “Trine”, an artifact that they all just happened to touch at the same time (okay, scratch that, chance is alive and well) has bound the three heroes. So you press the shoulder buttons to alternate control into different characters. The knight has melee attacks and a shield to deflect projectiles, among other things that cause boo-boos. The thief has a bow and arrow projectile, as well as a grappling hook to rappel or swing off of wooden surfaces. The wizard has access to the enigmatic “mouse cursor” which can be used to manipulate objects, or create assorted platforms and cubes by drawing them. Any comparisons to The Lost Vikings can go to hell because Trine smashes that game with a lightning-infused hammer in the rectum.

For Trine rocks the house that physics engines built. Each of the game’s fifteen stages are littered with assorted floating platforms, movable boulders, teeter-totters, breakable surfaces, spikes, spike balls, death traps and other concoctions that would not make sense outside the context of a sidescroller. If ever a game was made that earned the right to be labeled as “perilous” then Trine is that game. There is one Simpsons episode where someone was playing a generic medieval, trap-filled platformer game that foreshadowed the creation of Trine. Would-be death-trap-survivors can expect a hearty combination of puzzle-solving, platform jumping and skeleton-smashing. But what makes these puzzles so great is that there is almost never just one mandatory solution. Unlike countless games in history that forced the player to wrap their minds around the developer’s unorthodox sense of logic in solving a puzzle, Trine merely throws one unlikely scenario after another at the player and lets them go nuts. You can work your way around a spinning wooden platform structure either by, say, some strategic placement of the wizard’s magic blocks, or tricky jumps assisted by the thief’s grappling hooks and wizard platforms, or getting your ass back to the checkpoint because both your wizard and thief died and need to be resurrected.

But the key here is that the player is given free reign to approach all challenges in a manner that suits them. And thus, one feels more inclined to explore the various levels and make a passing effort to earn “100%”. Scattered throughout the worlds are green vials that earn you experience points, and they often appear at out-of-reach locations. But thanks to the freedom of the game’s physics and platforming, I found myself excited with glee at one’s presence. Thus, my quest to rescue the kingdom was put to a screeching halt as I wrapped my mind around (i.e. “obsess over”) how to apprehend a green vial or two. So you can abandon any pretenses of trying to “speed-run” through Trine.

And yes, your characters level up. But each character only has three abilities that can be upgraded only three times; appropriate for the game’s length. And there are treasures throughout the land that offer stat boosts; a feature that be negligible in another game (like, say, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) but benefits Trine since most of the treasures are but a prompt to do more adventuring and puzzle-solving. At least experience points make a more interesting reward than…you know, the Assassin’s Creed markers or any number of generic collectables that most games toss in as a complete afterthought.

Now, there are some imperfections. The count of enemies is limited to a selection of skeletons, bats, spiders and easy boss fights. Some segments will have what often seems like a never-ending series of respawning skeleton soldiers all loyal to Skeletor. These skeletons can behave like mosquitoes that fly in your face, distracting you while the wizard is trying to conjure some kind of platform structure. Speaking off, the wizard creates blocks by drawing a square and floating blocks by drawing a triangle. The game has a hard time distinguishing between the two and you can expect to waste plenty of magic conjuring cubes in the name of creating the one flying surface. Finally, the physics engine can sometimes…SOMETIMES lead to the player slipping off a platform into an accidental death. But Trine seems to have a better handle of this whole “physics-platforming” business than, say, LittleBig Planet. Part of this is thanks to some better level-layout, and also partially due to some kind of mini “wall-hop” option that gives you an extra mini-jump in case you just barely reach a cliff’s edge. And part of this is also thanks to a kind, caring, heartfelt checkpoint system that’ll save any collectibles and changes to the level made afterwards should your characters pass on to the other side for a bit.

And finally, the “indy” game label is branded all over Trine, with the story told entirely through vocal narration of the characters and some storybook reader…guy that explains events during the load screen. It’s just that the narrator sometimes takes his sweet time to read his lines while his tea brews, and thus take twice as long to finish his piece as the stage takes to load. There are no cutscenes of note, and in-game story sequences usually consist of walking past some important artifact in the background while a character starts speaking in awe. So don’t expect Uncharted-levels of production values. (But you can can expect a better game than Uncharted.) Even then, the worlds are shiny and the music is serene, so the game has an easing quality on the senses that lulls the player into an eased state.

Trine is great. Buy Trine. Pretty please. Support a smaller developer for a change. The levels are ingenious, the platforming is fun and you’ll almost universally enjoy your play experience. Trine seems to be better in touch with what makes a sidescroller enjoyable than fellow contemporaries Braid, Splosion Man or even the mighty LittleBig Planet. Finally, to put things into perspective, I bought this game on impulse and it distracted me thoroughly from beating Modern Warfare 2 and opening up Assassin’s Creed 2. I’d like to think of that as the mark of a mighty fine title.

4 stars

…wait, there’s a co-op mode in this game? Really? Ummm….where?

Halo 3: ODST

I could’ve sworn that the appetite for Halo was long ago sated. We already got not one but three very sizable shooters. All of which were very similar (albeit incrementally improving) titles that involve largely the same identical marines-hurting-aliens gameplay. Halo 3 was a sufficient finale, offering more of the same chunky levels, all co-op friendly, a strong online component and neatly closing up the story so that the human race need no longer fear the threat of the strange alien alliance and their giant proposal rings of death. Existing series’ fans already have three games to satisfy their craving for meleeing midgets and popcorn-alien-thingys, so with that in mind, what need does Halo 3: ODST satisfy? Well there’s the obvious need for Microsoft to squeeze every last drop of profit out of the Master Chief’s breast. But with little to no change to the formula, and a very fatal flaw that completely shattered my will to finish more than sixty percent of the campaign, ODST is a game that left me feeling that Bungie wasted their time. And the vide I got was that Bungie felt the same way.

Set prior to Halo 3, this game is about the previously acronymed Orbital Drop Shock Troopers. The role of these troopers is to be the Master Chief, but not quite as Chiefy. They spend their days in a spaceship playing Go Fish and comparing scrotums until aliens randomly invade, wherein they’ll drop onto Earth in their mini pods (for they’re not as manly as the Chief in Halo 2, when he made that drop that was followed by the end credits and players dropping controllers in frustration.) Upon arriving, it is assumed that an ODST is a Bad enough Dude to rescue the pres…I mean beat up a lot of Covenants single-handedly. I don’t think I can quite put the same faith in this defense strategy as the rest of the world seems to be; one-man-armies sound exciting and dramatic in movies but relying on a single officer to stop an entire alien assault? It’s as the Secretary of Defense designed this concept after mistaking Chuck Norris jokes for a potential model of law enforcement.

Between main story segments, you’ll play as “The Rookie”, whom really is the walking archetype of “the first person shooter guy.” He doesn’t talk, think independently or feel emotion, and has exactly as much capability of human behavior as a walking gun turret. Remember the big plot twist in Bioshock? It’s people like Rookie that Bioshock was coldly parodying. Rookie gets a text transmission saying “find out what happened to the friends you have no relational attachment to” and he’s off like the drone he is. It’s kind of funny, actually, how the game pours in rain effects and ominous music in an attempt to make these sequences somber, emotional, like we’re supposed to feel for this Rookiebot’s struggle to follow a computer’s goto statement.

In the Rookie segments, you wander around the streets of New Mombasa, an honest to goodness sandbox city. But the game never justifies the use of an open-ended city over, say, a linear and focuses path; you’re still just following waypoints. So the “open-ended environment” serves only to provide more enemies to fire at you and more dead ends to get lost in. For a second, I was in doubt as to which hated me more. But the game seems to encourage stealth over action; sneaking by the Covenant fools instead of engaging the enemy and thus trying to impersonate Master Chief harder than the Rookie does on the ODST box art. But truly being stealthy is tricky when the enemies are so damned hard to spot with the naked eye, so instead I opted for the strategy of “run like the dickens” during the Rookie levels.

When you reach a waypoint, you’ll find a random object: a gun, a helmet, shoelaces, baseball cards, something. The Rookie seems to have incredible powers of deduction, and will then imagine what happened to his squadmates that very moment. You’ll then be thrust into a linear stage sequence as one of the other ODSTs, who struggle even moreso to be like the Chief. And remember how we all thought the Master Chief was some kind of super badass that never lost his nerve, never felt any emotion aside from unshaken confidence in his ability to win, and only spoke at the most opportune moments to com across as the Ultimate Defender of Earth? These guys, not so much. Even though there are some 6 different members of the squad, they all fit into the exact same character mold; the boisterous army yahoo that is having far too much fun taking the lives of foreign entities. So Halo 3: ODST is the spitting image of the “space marines versus aliens” formula. And granted, Halo popularized that narrow-minded genre of shooter in the first place, but that also means that you can subtract “new and unique storyline, theme or characters” from the list of reasons why one should give a damn about ODST.

In fact, it seems at times that ODST is merely marking checkmarks off a list of things to shop for at the Halo Grocery Store. You’ll ride the Warthog, you’ll ride the tank, you’ll ride the alien ships, you’ll use all the old weapons. In fact there are seemingly only two major differences of note.

-You can’t dual-wield pistols anymore. Only the Master Chief had the motor skills necessary to compute having a separate firearm in each hand.
-You don’t have recharging shields. Instead, you have “stamina” (which functions exactly like recharging shields, but with more hyperventilation involved) and if that is depleted, your character’s finite health bar is next on the docket of meters to be drained. This feature is actually kind of neat in that it makes the player more hesitant to charge into every room as if there is no such thing as an alien invader.

Otherwise, you’re essentially playing as the Master Chief with exposed fingertips. It’s the same recharging health/two weapons at a time/melee and grenade buttons Halo combat, against the same brand of high-pitched midget aliens and their bigger, more menacing counterparts. To be fair, when you’re in a heated battle, you’ll still feel the tension, you’ll still feel the burn melt your nose hairs right off. Amazing how games like Resistance and Killzone 2 try so hard to imitate Halo’s mechanics but fail to capture the thrill of rushing to find another alien charge gun in the middle of a firefight against a fleet of invaders from the Planet of the Apes.

And then there was the fatal flaw. After reaching about halfway through the seventh level I turned my console off so that I could enjoy some drinks with friends and other personal details that have no place in a review. Upon booting my console up, my save automatically loaded me back to the start of the sixth level. “Oh hell no!” I thought, so I went to the mission select screen to start from the seventh level; better to restart one stage than two, I thought. After completing the stage, I returned to the pointless, empty void of The Rookie’s world, where I followed the waypoint all the way back to a helmet I found earlier, which took me to…the very first level! The game had the audacity to restart me at the very beginning! That is the point where I just gave up on trying to finish this damned game.

Even assuming that such a glitch didn’t exist, even assuming that I was able to play through the game and inhale the complete hillbillies-listening-to-Skynyrd-killing-yankee-aliens experience, there is still the matter of the game having only one save point. What if I had a six year old son that suddenly developed an inexplicable fascination for Halo and wanted to start a new game? (Six year old playing a first person shooter? Can you really act like this is not happening? Can you really tell me with a straight face that you haven’t had one curse at you over the mic in an online deathmatch?) For him to start playing would muck up my existing save in a manner that cannot be properly recovered. The Legend of Zelda, released on the NES in 1987 as one of the first games with a battery save, had three separate slots for saving three different games. A 22 year old game has this whole saving business better figured out than a next generation Xbox 360 big budget first person shooter. Come on now. And I know this is a problem in other shooters too, like the Call of Duty games.

Going to multiplayer, the one new addition is called “Firefight.” “Firefight” is but another fancy way of saying “you and some friends in a room against a lot of respawning enemies.” The twist in this mode is that the game randomly generates status changes that can either help or handicap your team. Maybe the enemies will be more elusive of grenades, maybe they’ll have stronger shields, maybe they’ll realize that this mode was a lot more fun when it was called Horde mode in Gears of War 2. I guess it can be fun with a group of friends, but every other shooting game has some variation of this mode anyways.

For some reason, ODST includes a second disc featuring the multiplayer mode for Halo 3, complete with all downloadable content. Now, I adore the Halo 3 multiplayer mode; it truly is the last great first-person deathmatch where you don’t have to spend 50 hours a week grinding “levels” in the name of unlocking some perk to make your aiming sharper or some other annoying yet unbalancing attribute to put me on par with the shooter freaks that pull all-nighters on this stuff. But would it not be a safe assumption to say that everyone that loves the Halo 3 multiplayer mode has Halo 3? In particular, I would wager that the hardcore Halo fanatics that could be the only people possibly interested in this game will have some 98.246% chance of owning Halo 3. As a result, the bundled second disc comes across as a petty attempt to jack the game’s price while avoiding criticism from the media as being an overpriced “expansion pack.”

But label it I will. Halo 3: ODST is indeed just a Halo 3 expansion pack. The gameplay, the characters, the weapons, the vehicles, the enemies, everything about it is ripped from the previous games. Devoted-to-the-point-of-designing-their-own-cosplay-green-armour fans will buy it regardless of what I say, but ODST strikes me as the point where they ought to wonder when enough is enough. As for the more casual fan, save your money and just boot up Halo 3 again.

2 ½ stars

Luigi's Mansion

I think Luigi’s Mansion may have traumatized longtime Nintendo fans.

Imagine a group of kids that were raised by their parents to eat a hearty breakfast every morning. This breakfast would be nutritious and delicious; scrambled eggs with gourmet ketchup, French toast with sugar powder sprinkled on top and a hot chocolate with whipped cream and a cherry. Life is great, kids go to school happy. Now imagine one morning, all that food is replaced with rotten eggs, sour bread sprinkled with gunpowder and a cup of napalm. That’s Luigi’s Mansion. Most gamers habitually expect a major Nintendo console to launch with a life-changing, Earth-redefining, constellation-devouring Mario platformer from the gods. Super Mario Bros. Super Mario World. Super Mario 64. That hot streak of divinity was soundly broken by a heaping spoonful of Luigi’s Mansion.

Now, I never played this game when it first came out, so I never felt the blunt of the meteor impact when Luigi’s Mansion hit retail shelves. I was a late bloomer to this whole Gamecube concept, too pre-occupied with the Metroids, the Eternal Darknesses and the short controller wires of the world to stress much over a title whose reputation was dragged through the mud by many a critic. But with about 8 years passing, my curiosity has struck and I am inclined to find out if time and lowered standards has eased the tragedy. Maybe Luigi’s Mansion is a pretty good game, just merely misunderstood. Miscast as a Mario platformer that turned people away when they realized there wasn’t even a jump button.

So you play as the cowardly Luigi, the less courageous of the bros, sure, but at least fear is one more emotion than Mario ever displays. He enigmatically inherits a mansion, which predictably turns out to be haunted, and just so happens to have plumbernapped Mario. So we have a Donkey Kong Country 2-like dichotomy going on. The game has little in the way of noteworthy story beyond “Luigi fights ghosts”, which makes it a surprise that there’s so much danged dialogue in the game.

Luigi’s Mansion is baby’s first survival horror game. Luigi walks around this big mansion that seems custom-built for Scooby Doo and his crew to make the mistake of splitting up again. There are ghosts of all kinds, and Luigi is best served to catch them with his vacuum-weapon-thing. Some ghosts are but mere cannon fodder, while some of them are bigger and demand a bit of thought to trap. These are the “portrait” ghosts, and they are part of some kind of presumably large undead family that haunts the mansion. An eclectic and decidedly brady bunch that includes at least three grandmothers, 3 babies, a bodybuilder, a pool junkie and a starving artist. I question the drug habits of all of them, and the circumstances that led to their simultaneous demise. Occult?

But all ghosts will vanish by means of a similar method; vacuum cleaning. First, when their “heart” appears, you surprise them with Luigi’s flashlight. Then you draw the vacuum, suck away while aiming the right analog stick in the opposite direction to whittle away their hit points until they submit to your suction. The aforementioned portrait ghosts will require you to solve some kind of puzzle, like flipping a switch or something that’ll cause them to lose their temper and reveal their weak hearts so you can pull them in all the same…they just have more hit points to suck up. A similar mechanic was ironically used in the recent Ghostbusters game, but I can’t help but feel that Luigi’s Mansion does it better. For one, the ghosts put up a bit if a fight, running around the room resisting your vacuous wrath while Luigi is dragged along the room, dodging evil mushrooms and banana peels (I know. It’s a Mario game.) In a way, it’s kind of exciting, a form of spectral fishing.

Along the way you’ll…walk…and…hit walls and…call for Mario’s name and…well I guess Luigi’s Mansion’s biggest fallacy is that the scope of the game is rather limited. You solve puzzles, but they generally consist of vacuuming a surface or using an elemental attack; and what would a Nintendo game be without some kind of elemental influence? Inhaling a fire, water or ice spirit enables Luigi to temporarily exhale said form of molecular activity, but the uses of this ability are rather limited to some arbitrary puzzles.

You also get the impression that the game developers ran out of ideas about half-way. In fact, this seemed to be a defining trait in the Gamecube’s existence; games built on a gimmick that was too insubstantial to carry a whole game (Mario Sunshine, Mario Kart Double Dash, Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Zelda: Four Swords, Zelda: Wind Waker, Kirby’s Air Ride, etc.) Eventually, you’ll realize that all you’re doing is sucking ghosts off, and that the puzzle elements consist of “find the hidden trigger”. And then there’s the Boo quest; the Boos from Mario games past make a return about a third of the way, hidden in assorted objects. You’ll suck them up in the same manner, except many of the boos have a tendency to run into other rooms. With the later Boos having so much health, this part of the game becomes equivalent to catching a panicking Chihuahua across a giant mansion. But this Chihuahua can run through walls and you must respect the laws of matter.

This repetition of ideas drags to you in the game’s final chapter; where you realize that the puzzles haven’t gotten anymore sophisticated and the only thing about the ghosts that’s harder is their increased hit point number. (I doubt ghosts can get erect but I wouldn’t know.) I was starting to wonder if perhaps this is a game aimed at children, but then this giant beast of a final boss surfaces and paints the floor green with Luigi’s corpse. I’m all for a challenging final duel, but the difficulty curve in this game shouldn’t spike from zero to the heavens in a single moment.

And the repetition of vacuuming is bogged down by several other nagging repetitions. There’s the repetition of having to backtrack all across the mansion to open up a new part with your newfound key. There’s the repetition of hearing the exact same audio clip of Luigi yelling “MARIO!” every time you accidentally press A away from the surface you wanted to interact with. There’s the repetition of hearing the same two songs over and over; the haunted room medley and Luigi whistling the haunted room medley. The repetition of being unable to skip cutscenes, a frequent problem in early Nintendo games. The repetition of watching the same animation of Luigi panicking every time a ghost manifests behind him. I don’t know if the gamer was meant to find this scary, or be amused at the green one’s expense, but I stopped feeling either emotion about ten minutes into the game. And finally, the repetition of dialogue.

A note about dialogue. I know people have this unspoken idea about how Nintendo games like Mario and Zelda shouldn’t have spoken dialogue. This idea stemmed mainly from Super Mario Sunshine having such terrible voice acting that players never wanted to hear the Princess utter another word again. (I wonder if the plot in the first Mario and Luigi game was some kind of jab at the Princess’s voice work.) But that shouldn’t scare people from demanding that Nintendo be more liberal with spoken word. No voice acting may be better than badly spoken dialogue (thank you Resident Evil) but strong speech is better than both. Any chance Luigi’s Mansion had of sending chills up my spine was ruined when a text box appeared displaying the spooky message the mysterious entity in the room was trying to terrify me with. And don’t get me started on Professor E. Gadd, the scientist figure that gives Luigi his vacuum. That dweeb needs to shut the hell up. And get an atomic wedgie.

So the verdict on Luigi’s Mansion? Decent but not great. Nothing you need to go out of your way to see, but any store that sells it will have a reduced price, so you won’t lose out on much for your financial investment. But I should at least give some credit where credit should be given; it’s a unique concept, it has a bit of charm and character, it went against the expectations of the masses (even though it kind of failed in doing so) and it’s significantly better than the real Mario game, Sunshine. And in an unlikely surprise, I had more fun with Luigi’s Mansion than I did Ghostbusters. How about that?

3 stars

WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010

The situation with our annual wrestling video games seems to mirror the wrestling scene in reality. Every year, Yukes, THQ and the Fed pump out their annual Smackdown vs. Raw title, rudely telling the fans what features they want to see implemented (like last year’s tag team system, in spite of the WWE’s general lack of tag teams.) All the while, they ignore the existing flaws of the series and thus release a similar product year after year. Kind of like the weekly television and their rehashed feuds and excessive use of Hornswoggle. Keep in mind, Yukes has been working on this series for nine years, so that certain faults persist year after year is baffling. Meanwhile, the more trendy, fan-friendly UFC has come out of the gate swinging with a fantastic fighter in UFC Unleashed, on the first try. And from the same developer!

So I guess you can see why I’m confused at how Yukes, the very same company, could pull off such an excellent UFC game on their first try and yet struggle with Smackdown for nine long years.

I’ll get those annual faults out of the way here and now. The AI is “suspect” at best and “Colin Delaney-esque” at worst. On the normal difficulty, they’ll stand perfectly still and wait for you to punch their face as if they forgot their next spot. On Legend difficulty, they’ll turn up the aggression to resemble someone who’s drunk and lethargic, throwing a few more punches than the normal difficulty’s jobber AI. You may or may not have to alter sliders to reduce or improve the AI’s counter rate, or the rate that the special meter builds (you’re going to get finishers built up fast.)

The online play as a whole is still being choked by the plodding Randy Orton chinlock of lag. Games are hard to be matched up with and harder to actually play, and you’re at the mercy of whatever match type the host is playing. I found myself in a Ranked three on one handicap match once. Huh? Who says that leaderboards matter?

And as for the commentary… vintage Smackdown vs. Raw! The editing of the commentary calls has been cleared up enough as to not embarrass the player with bad levels or out of place calls. So you won’t hear Michael Cole say that “JOHN CENA is in a lot of trouble” after hitting the Attitude Adjustment. However, the problem is with the recording themselves. The announcers sound decidedly phony or disinterested, reading lines off a script instead of being in a 16,000 seat arena filled with screaming kids in Rey Mysterio masks. Jim Ross in particular seems to be squinting at his script, reading lines at a slow, librarian pace. The wrestler voiceovers in Road to Wrestlemania are equally inconsistent, with many of the performers guilty of disregarding the situation instead of reenacting a scenario. Triple H, for example, sounds like he’s having a conversation at the dinner table while he’s in the middle of the ring vowing revenge on his enemies. Some wrestlers are more believable, like JBL or Mr. Kennedy (both wished well in their future endeavors) but the words coming out of their mouths are generic, lacking the dynamic promo work that either of them are famous for. Chris Jericho in particular stands out as someone who really should’ve been allowed to write his own material because he speaks nothing like his current persona.

And the Career mode is still kind of a throwaway, making the player fight in a series of matches. That the player can select the order of his opponents and even the match gimmick kind of sucks any sense of escalating difficulty or format, leaving this mode to feel like a means of grinding levels for your created wrestler (more on this in a jiffy.)

The in-game wrestling feels largely the same, though with some positive and negative changes. Counters are assigned to one shoulder button instead of two, simplifying the process but not breaking the system as to make counters too easy to execute. You can now hold a shoulder button to pull off strong grapple attacks, further proving that natural evolution should transform this series into No Mercy eventually. I just wish that Yukes would speed up the process and drop this concept of analog grapples or having four different grapples. My problem is that each one has its own animation; arm wringer, grapple, headlock, etc, and you have to wait for each canned animation to finish. What sense does it make for me to wring someone’s arm only to grab the head and go for a DDT? That’s an indy wrestling-level of non-psychology. (And all your favorite indy groups have had this problem at some point or another.) As a result, I found myself relying on striking attacks and wishing for the less sluggish, less pre-programmed feel of No Mercy or the recent TNA Impact game.

And that is about the only time you’ll hear me say that the TNA game is better than Smackdown in any way. Promise.

I like how the HUD was cleaned up though. Gone are the 50 health, special and limb-damage meters that cluttered the game screen, instead replaced by a single special meter that appears beneath your sweaty boots. However, also gone is the coloured arrow that tells you which body your wrestler has locked his focus towards. The default target setting is “Auto” which means “your wrestler will randomly target any opponent who’s baby oil splashes onto your chest” which is too random and annoying. The manual target system is more reasonable, but even then, the lock on button is not always responsive, occasionally not listening to you at all, or targeting on to the ref when you wanted to direct your attention towards the face-painted Carolinian with the drug problem.

Speaking of that, while an outdated roster is normally a frequent-occurring problem with this series, I’m not downtrodden this year. This game is better for still having Jeff Hardy, Umaga and the like. Besides, it’s not like the WWE is going to create any new stars anytime soon. And there are some nice presentation touches too, like the logo flashes for a title defense or the individual smart marks that scream stupid comments under the misguided pretense of being funny. That said, the presentation values are still far too behind the EA Sports games when you consider the whole “9 years” business, and some presentation aspects feel like a stretch. In particular, no crowd will ever, in a trillion billion years, start a “Koslov’s gonna kill you” chant. Imagine what Samoa Joe, the man whom helped make that chant famous, thinks about that. He could binge-eat himself in a depression from that. Well moreso.

You still have your plethora of match types that the Smackdown series has…quite honestly built its existence around. You can still boot up a Hell in a Cell match, climb the top of the cage, throw the Undertaker off, watch as he lands back-first from the 30 feet fall…and get straight back up. The Royal Rumble is the match with the most notable improvements, implementing a glorified button-mashing system to recreate the lack of thrills in trying to throw someone out of a ring. As always, Smackdown vs. Raw was meant to be played with friends, assuming you still have friends that still watchwrestling and assuming they can still wrap their mind around the always-convoluted control scheme. It helps, then, that the title screen is a “training school” where your John Cena-atron can wail on a defenseless Randy Orton-atron at your leisure, all the while being presented with pop-up screens displaying commands you can choose to follow through. It’s a great way to learn the game at your pace as opposed to being walked through every single button command in a forced manner like way too many video games (especially the UFC game.)

Road to Wrestlemania is thankfully back. The gist of this mode is that you compete in a series of matches leading to Wrestlemania as a certain wrestler, all the while watching fully-voiced cutscenes of varying quality. You’ll also be given the occasional optional objective like “hit the Pedigree twice to ensure this guy’s career is thoroughly dead and buried” in the name of unlocking goods. If you thought that the heels didn’t get enough loving in last year’s games, then you’re in luck, as Edge and Randy Orton have their own gloriously villainous paths, and they are arguably the most entertaining. The Mickie James career path is Diva-oriented and displays the WWE’s…questionable views on women in television, though I didn’t spend much time with it as of this writing. The Shawn Michaels path has its moments but seems to be filled with 2-on-1 scenarios that’ll cause you to lose your hair in frustration faster than the real Shawn Michaels. An early instance put me in a match against Randy Orton, and JBL ran interference. Except JBL never quite “left” the ring, he merely continued to run roughshod on my Heartbroken ass. The referee just stood there and allowed it, and my attempts to equalize the situation with a steel chair were met with a disqualification. What? And I had no choice but to win said match to advance the plot. And lest we forget about the Auto-targeting problem mentioned earlier.

The storyline designated for Created Wrestlers is a bit of a laugh in that it has the same issue with the TNA game and its use of Suicide. That problem being “you play as a punk kid with a massive attitude problem that would never be allowed backstage at a WWE show, ever.” The only difference is that your created wrestler isn’t used as an on-screen character in the real life show and shoved down fans throats. Poor Frankie Kazarian. Finally, the John Cena/Triple H team storyline is designated as the game’s “two player co-op” storyline, but that’s a lie. Most of the matches are spent in one-on-one battles with the two players taking turns fighting; a multiplayer mode as cutting-edge as the one in Super Mario Bros.

And finally, there are the game’s creation tools, which you will likely spend more time on than you will with the main game. The Create-A-Wrestler mode has been revamped, with all of the art being redone as to not make your creations look like they came from an early Playstation 2 game. The load times have been scaled down too, as to ensure that your army of 30 WCW wrestlers are recreated in no time. If you so desired, you can use a basic Paint program to create your own logos, and record footage from matches to use in custom-made video packages for your entrance. Keep in mind that this video editor is basic…Baby’s First Final Cut-basic, but having footage of your creation is better than my previous alternatives of giving every CAW Kelly Kelly’s video. The Create-A-Move is also back, now with the option of creating top-rope finishers. I sought out to create the wackiest dive possible, and settled on “triple forward flip into the Low Ki foot stomp.” Something else that could never exist in the real WWE. My issue with the Create a Wrestler, and this has been recurring for the last several years, is that you still have to use your wrestler to grind his stats up if you wish for him to be stronger than Kelly Kelly. While this year’s game improves on previous iterations in that merely using your wrestler in any match as opposed to a broken career mode will elevate stats, the problem is that most players are going to create many wrestlers and the process of making one Man Up takes many hours. I get it World, grinding is the hip thing in games right now, people enjoy doing the same monotonous tasks over and over in the name of boosting a number or “level”, but said concept is very impractical in a wrestling game built around creating numerous personalities.

The most interesting and unusual of all is the new and ever threatening Create a Story mode. A potential hazard to the WWE’s writing team, this mode lets you design your own career mode storylines. The player chooses from a list of scenarios such as “people meeting backstage” or “car runs someone over”, chooses the pawns, the text spoken and/or the resulting matches. Created wrestlers have an annoying limit on how often they can be used, and your ability to keep your writing sharp will depend on the presence of a USB keyboard over the in-game text input thingy. But otherwise, the potential for the player to create wacky scenarios that could play out on real television is surprisingly strong.

And all the created stories, wrestlers, moves and videos can be uploaded and downloaded on an online server. If you so chose, you can download someone else’s Great Thrashmaster, or their rendition of AJ Styles before the moderators rush to take it down. The uploaded storylines may be of greater interest, for there are some decidedly wacky plots out there. I amused myself greatly on a downloaded story I found of Mark Henry’s turn to cannibalism. And you can claim that I’m out of my mind, but this more limited and yet so true-to-form Create a Story gave me many more hours of entertainment than the overly complex and soulless level editor from LittleBig Planet. There’s a moral about user created content to be had somewhere here.
Smackdown vs Raw 2010 is in the exact same rut that the series has been for years, and I feel that most fans will know exactly what they’re getting themselves in for. So fans of the series or the current WWE product should be satisfied with the package, provided they don’t expect anything more out of, say, the commentary. Actually, the user-creation tools help give this game some newfound life, and fans may find themselves divulging more in creating storylines about Evan Bourne actually winning matches than they will in the real WWE television. So in that regard, give the game a shot if you feel inclined.

But do you want to know the game’s greatest strength. No Monday Night Raw special guest hosts.
3 ½ stars

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Oh Uncharted 2, how hard you try.

Uncharted 2 feels like that one insecure kid at school that puts too much effort into fitting in. He buys the most expensive pre-torn jeans and matching Rocawear shirts, and totes the newest IPhone (he’s in Grade 5 by the way) so that he can post more text in Twitter updates per day than this review’s length. However, the fear of being rejected by his peers is mortifying and the obligation to stay within popular norms is so overwhelming that Uncharted 2 won’t order anything less popular on the cafeteria menu than French fries.

Uncharted 2 doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase “be yourself”, though I could be wrong. Naughty Dog does have a tendency to just clone the ideas of others in their games without contributing an original thought to the video game think tank. The Crash and Jak games, great as they are, could very well be immune to the Butterfly Effect. What I mean is, they’re so uninspiring that you can wipe their existence from the course of time and human history will not change one bit. So maybe Naughty Dog’s developers (or the Sony execs that tell them what to develop) are just doing what comes natural and “Among Thieves” is but an apropos title.

In particular, there are three key victims that Uncharted 2 is looking to pickpocket, the first being good old fashioned American action movies like National Treasure. Through and through, this game is trying to pay homage to action/adventure movies. But when you acknowledge how every other action game has a story that is, at best, on par with “Hollywood” movies, then Uncharted 2 trying to portray itself as a “Hollywood” movie feels like just another drop in the Gamestop shelf bucket. Even more groan-inducing is that Uncharted 2’s plot is all too identical to Uncharted 1. You have your dashing hero, his mischievous but kind-hearted old friend, his love interest, his sex interest, a famous explorer’s lost treasure (this time the less fictional Marco Polo), said lost treasure’s evil secret, an evil foreigner villain and his more-evil foreigner boss. I feel as though Amy Hennig, whom once sculpted Kain and Raziel into poetically tragic monsters in the Legacy of Kain series, is having her talents wasted on a shallow popcorn game that could’ve been written by a straight-to-video action film writer.

Though the glowing ray of hope in Among Thieves, just like in its predecessor, is Nathan Drake himself. He appears to be your typical Perfect Human Super Hero on the outside; peak physical condition, sharp-dressed, go-get-em attitude, ladies man, more confidence than your windshield faced with the looming threat of a fly on the highway. But his macho bravado fades quickly when thrown into a battlefield and very real bullets are whizzing by his head from the very real guns of very real terrorists. The pessimistic doubts and cries of panic when Drake is in danger makes the experience all the more entertaining and winds up transforming him into a John McClane-like “ordinary hero.” There was a point in the game, like in any movie, where the hero’s will is broken and he decides to abandon this inane quest. And I cheered! “A likeable fellow like him should be cut some slack. If an ordinary man like Drake can gun down hundreds of these terrorists, the American Armed Forces would fare just fine if this evil villain dared attempt any kind of conquest.” I thought to myself.

Speaking of, the second victim of Uncharted’s crimes against originality is the armed combat of the ever popular Gears of War games. Drake and the crew of friends whom he may or may not have had sexual relations with will fight hordes of terrorist-like enemies by taking cover and firing away. You make a list of popular gunfighting conventions and Uncharted follows it move for move, Gear for Gear.
-You latch on to cover with a button press, wherein you can blindfire or make yourself open for more specific firing.
-You self-regenerate health automatically.
-You can only carry one small firearm and one large firearm, including automatics, rocket launchers, sniper rifles and such. (Actually, the game’s most unconventional weapon may be the mere crossbow of surprising power)
-You lobe grenades with a separate button press (mercifully, you no longer aim with the Sixaxis controller motion thingy.)
-Enemies are just intelligent enough to attempt to flank you or flush you out with grenades
-You have melee attacks to defeat enemies up close, but they’re as useless as they were in Uncharted 1 and feel more contrived. They usually consist of: you pressing Square three times to punch, waiting for the enemy to counter, pressing Triangle to counter back and then Square to finish them with a Pro Wrestling move. The problem is that you’re still vulnerable to enemy fire while doing these canned combinations. This is why the Tekken fighters would collapse under the weight of the battle of Normandy.

On one hand, the mechanics of gun-action feel more improved from that of Uncharted 1. That game’s wifebeater-sporting pirates were capable of absorbing twenty bullets to the chest, while Uncharted 2’s armored terrorists feel more reasonably mortal. And you have fewer instances of being locked in a single facility, waiting for droves of enemies to respawn and charge at you…they just only become an issue near the game’s end. But as a whole, I felt that the gun combat in Uncharted felt very…drab. Generic. Status-quo. Terrorists come at you and you fire back with the same kind of guns you’ve been shooting terrorists with for decades. Maybe it was the frustration of dying a lot that turned me off; I found Drake meeting an untimely demise with alarming frequency. It could’ve been the AI, intelligently finding ways to flush me out and conveniently have an RPG at the ready just as I started arguing with the Cover button. (And that cover button has funny ideas sometimes, mistaking “I want to move from that cover to another” with “I want to get out of cover and get shot at” or “I want to make a rolling dive and then get blown up.”) You can blame my inadequate gunplay skills, but even when I was succeeding, I didn’t feel like I achieved a victory through skill or hard work, but merely from the stars aligning to match whatever solution the game developers had intended.

The game’s third major victim (but certainly not the last victim) is the climbing elements from Tomb Raider or the recent set of Prince of Persia games. Drake will make the obligatory leaps of faith, as well as climb, shimmy, struggle and cringe with fear over all kinds of buildings, rock formations and other surfaces that only a primate like Nathan can access. Uncharted 2 has the same qualm as Uncharted 1 in that the natural geography or architectural decay just happens to build a linear path that you are intended to follow; like the hand of fate has somehow crafted a series of bricks on a very specific wall that you can climb to your destination. But that is more of an acceptable oddity than a game-crippling flaw. Rather, these tomb raiding platformer sequences are Uncharted 2’s greatest strength, in part to how the sense of peril has been completely ramped up. Signs will bend as you climb them, pillars will crack, Drake will slip and subsequently soil himself with fear. These structures were not meant to support a human male’s mass. While all of these segments are scripted, they happen at the right times, with just enough infrequency that they never lose their suspense. Also, have you ever thought it weird in Indiana Jones movies or Tomb Raider games how a 2000-year old tomb can have trap doors and other complex contraptions that still function after however many millennia? Uncharted 2 addresses this inaccuracy with several tombs that didn’t quite survive the wrath of Father Time. Also, there are no Sixaxis controller gimmicks, and quicktime events are kept to a bare, appropriate minimum. The game’s scripted moments often feel like the most dynamic and exciting, in part because you stay in control as opposed to merely pressing buttons when told while watching a movie. The segment where you are asked to jump out of a collapsing building is an example; even though I died several times trying to figure out what the game wanted me to do to escape my unlikely-yet-horrifying predicament, that I stayed in control and managed to figure it out made that escape all the more dashing.

But much like Drake’s dramatic leaps above the abyss on to an ice-coated ledge, these segments feel like Uncharted 2’s only strong sense of individuality. Afterwards, a gunfight would occur. Then I’d pop someone in the head, score my hundredth headshot and earn an Achievement; yes, the game has an Achievement system both working separate and together with that of the PS3’s trophy system. How frivolous, and yet becoming all too common in gaming. And lest I forget about the stealth aspects, which consist solely of “get behind an enemy and break’er neck.” Except for the rare occasion of walking in front of an enemy and his not spotting the twenty-something Banana Republic consumer intruding his turf, the stealth sequences are nothing particularly distinct. However, you do get punished with another annoying gunfight if you’re spotted.

After you finish the ten hour campaign, you’re more than welcome to engage yourself in the Gears of War-like online multiplayer component. There are your typical team deathmatch and objective-based competitions, as well as the co-op Horde/Firefight/You-in-a-room-against-respawning-enemies mode and co-op mission mode with two other players. That the matchmaking is automated and an overall smoother process makes this online mode, at the least, a marked improvement over Killzone 2’s mess of a lobby system. Lag is a rarity, the community seems strong, and…well if you thought Uncharted needed an online mode, here you go.

But I can’t help but feel that Uncharted 2, along with many other online games, represent an uncomfortable shift in how online games are approached. Like Gears of War, most game sessions (in particular the co-op sessions) are lengthy in nature, perhaps averaging in the 20-30 minute range. I tend to favor more the online games where I can quickly enter a game, headshot some Spartans and get back to my merry way. There were games that I left because the pace of the action was just not exhilarating (some of the maps are just too damned big, it seems, to accompany 8 on 8 deathmatches) but the game punished me with a 90 second delay and a points fine. During a co-op session, one of my teammates presumably moved away from his controller, perhaps in post-funny cigarette case of the munchies, and my decision to not sulk around and wait for this guy to return from the 7/11 found me punished with another time delay.

Then you marry the Gears-esque time commitment needed to complete a game with the Call of Duty Perks system. Your performance earns you money and levels up your rank, which in turn can be spent on a set of upgrades. None of them seem overly imbalancing (and the “drop a grenade when you die” perk’s novelty feels worn out) but I still feel like we’re giving an edge to the committed hardcore players that were going to donate months of playtime to a single game anyways. In turn, this online gaming capitalism makes the great players greater and puts the newbies or people like me that just want to kill a few minutes from time to time at more of a disadvantage.

And we’re starting to see this perk-based multiplayer in just about every online shooter.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is the archetypical next generation game. It has cutting edge graphics, a trend-following combat system, a ten-hour campaign, multiple achievement systems and a reward-based competitive and co-operative multiplayer. It feels like a game custom-built to win Game of The Year Awards at game publications and websites, all the while making few strides at creating new trends or enhancing that same archetype of “the next generation game.” Such games have a tendency of being forgotten in two-three months when videos of the next big shiny console game make the rounds, however. You can ask Killzone 2 all about that. But looking at Uncharted 2’s merits as a game, it has some frustrating moments, but also some fun moments, and you should pick it up if you find it in a bargain bin at a discount price.

3 ½ stars