Wednesday, January 28, 2009

LittleBig Planet


LittleBig Planet: The forerunner of the “Game 2.0” movement, a 2D sidescroller that allows the common man the power to create their own levels.

Story : The supposed storyline existence behind the world of LittleBig Planet is that all stray bits of imagination from human minds floats up and condenses in space as part of this giant planet. I know this to be a lie, judging by the lack of breasts in LittleBig Planet.

Calling the “Story” mode of LittleBig Planet a “Story” mode is the second lie this game has told me. The “story” has you hopping from one loosely-tied together sequence of events to another, doing unlikely jobs for non-living NPC characters. Their “dialogue” is minimalist and so blatantly to-the-point in regards to doing the developer’s will at the expense of any kind of continuity. A character that you just freed from prison will tell you to hop on this car that came out of nowhere and then advise you to go to Mexico and play with explosives.

Not that anyone is playing LittleBig Planet hoping for the next great cinematic epic, but I’d like to think that the people at Media Molecule could at least come up with a better ending than the self-serving “isn’t our game great?” crap that you get for going through the “story mode”.

You play as Sackboy, the third lie in LittleBig Planet. The Castlevania games notwithstanding, LittleBig Planet has to be the first sidescroller with a transsexual protagonist. You the player are free to dress up Sack-thing any way you like, male or female, and there’s an online store that allows you to purchase new threads to dress up your character from an assortment of fashions for men, women or Raiden from Metal Gear. There seems to be a good degree of freedom within the Sackboygirl editor to create an interesting puppet-hero, or at least that’s the impression I’m given based on how people have created levels online with snapshots lined up of their Sack-Dragonball Z character designs.

Satchel-Ass’s abilities as an actual platform hero include run, jump, grab onto things, push, pull, pointlessly flail his arms around and go through emotional mood swings with the d-pad. He or she can also bring up a menu that grants the option of taking photos, throwing stickers around carelessly, inviting friends or trying his/her damnedest to blow up and commit suicide. As an aside, you can play any level co-operatively, online, with up to four people, and goof around to your heart’s content. Just be sure to stick with friends; in my attempts to join strangers online, I was often thrust into a game that had just finished and was deprived of any swashbuckling adventures.

There’s this sort of pop-up-book/grade school art style that pervades the entire game. On one hand, it’s unique, visually appealing, and even the levels other players make will look at least visually competent in comparison to most attempts at a Flash game you’ll see online. On the other, except for Sack-object, there really isn’t a single living organism in LittleBig Planet. All of the NPCs are practically talking signs in the background and all of the enemies are basic objects or trains with green buttons on them that you jump on to thwart them. I couldn’t help but have a feeling of emptiness as I journeyed across the levels. I never realized just how much personality a goomba added to a game world.

But on the other hand, there is the occasionally solid platforming sequence. The developer-made levels sometimes feature strong obstacle course-like areas that you’ll want to pat yourself on the back for accomplishing, and you’ll occasionally see an interesting set-piece sequence, like a particular sequence of tunnels occupied by…flaming worms. However, they’re not all winners, and you’ll feel like there’s perhaps one vehicle sequence too many where you hop into a ride and let the game do the rest, or areas that are all too blatant with their attempt to show off a new possible tool to use, like explosions or lighting.

But the game lays a LittleBig turd when it comes to the game physics. Platformers tend to have their own set of largely unrealistic physics, but they were largely related only to the character the player was controlling. It’s rather unintuitive that Simon Belmont will phase through a staircase (and probably die) in a Castlevania game unless the player presses up near the ledge, but that could be begrudgingly accepted and worked around. Here, the entire boobless world of LittleBig Planet is dictated by an unsavory set of physics. While that at least makes events feel less scripted than they were in older games, it also lends to some setbacks. Teetering platforms can become too far apart and thus impassible. Too much momentum can cause Sackey to fly off a platform spontaneously. Slipping off platforms is a common occurrence. How much height you get from jumping off a moving platform can sometimes be random. There’s also this system of layers where you can jump back and forward between the background and foreground of key areas. The controls for doing so manually is clumsy, and the game’s attempts at automatically making adjustments can lead to unwanted shifts into a corner or slipping to your…you guessed it, accidental death. To sum up; you will die accidentally quite a bit. You have a set number of lives that resets upon reaching a checkpoint, but you’ll swear that it isn’t enough with the sheer number of nonsense deaths awaiting you.

Along the way of playing through this campaign, you’ll collect a dizzying number of items to use in the level editor. From my…struggle to create a level, I can tell you that this level editor is very powerful. You have a strong degree of freedom to edit any object to your heart’s content and create your own dream level. I at least get the idea that this level editor is powerful based on the game’s long tutorials, or rather long-winded tutorials, as the British narrator who explains all of the game’s concepts is very good at speaking for long stretches of time without actually saying anything of value.

If LittleBig Planet did one thing correctly, it’s successfully give me a whole new level of appreciation for side-scroller video games… a level of appreciation that most actual LittleBig Planet players haven’t quite adopted yet. It takes a great amount of time to conceive, plan out, design and test a level that functions, let alone one that’s entertaining to play through. There exists a wealth of user-created levels available for download in the LBP universe. It’s just that most of them…well, they suck. To all of the LBP fans out there viewing this, you guys are letting me down right now.

Oh, there are certainly some visually interesting levels. There’s a large amount of supposed tributes to movies and games, but the gameplay of the vast majority of content is subpar, basic, a second thought in the designer’s mind besides “yeah! I’m going to have Virtual Buzz Lightyear!” I’ll attest to having played through at least one or two genuinely fun platformer levels, but I had to look far and wide to find them amidst the sea of “ride race” and “check out my Star Fox theme” levels. The folks at Media Molecule need to conceive a better way of organizing user-generated content, perhaps into categories such as “actual levels with fun gameplay” and “useless gimmick levels that I think is cool”, rather than the set of generic “moons” that showcase everything thrown at them.

Right now, LittleBig Planet is like Youtube; it gives the player the freedom to create whatever they’d like, no matter how bad it is. As a platforming sidescroller, LBP is decent but flimsy in comparison to actual 2D sidescrollers that focus on single themes rather than try to be the all-encompassing omni-platformer ruled by one governing set of physics. As a user-driven game, the potential for LittleBig Planet is vast, but unorganized, and any potentially great concept will be drowned out in a sea of user-generated crap. And if you’re a LittleBig Planet user-content-generator and this semi-scathing review enrages you, great! Use your anger to produce better levels and contribute positively to your game world, as opposed to polluting the LBP environment with another lame driving stage. Because a game that’s driven by its user content is only as strong as its community, and right now this 3 and a half stars is for both Media Molecule and you.

Pros : I got Rick-Rolled in a user-made level once.

Cons : I really, really, really hate that narrator.

3 ½ stars

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Robots

I never expect anyone to send me any comments on this blog being as how most everyone that reads this knows me directly and thus can harass me directly, but lately I've gotten a couple of odd replies that could in no way be sent to me by intelligent human beings. Take the Motorstorm review below, where I made jokes about a mad scientist using global warming to take over the world. I was met with this response.

I'm Hernadi-Key said...

i'm very interest with your information,

i've a lot of article about global warming

come on join with us to fight GLOBAL WARMING

we can exchange link for it..

*not posting the link again. not interested in clicking on it either*


I bet you are interested sir, to find out what I know about global warming. Go ask Dr. Nofunhowser about his scheme, and if he's like any good supervillain, he'll explain the whole thing right to your face after he's kidnapped you in an easily escapeable deathtrap prison.

Even more absurd was the robot-post I got for fucking Metal Gear Solid 4, a game about a senior soldier who fights giant robots and is wrapped in multiple conspiracies involving nanomachines, computers controlling the world and a hand that possesses people.

Hello, looking on Google for Snake wine information I found your website, do you have anything more posted here related to Snake wine liquor ?
Snake wine is shown there:
*link removed again, but man that domain name sounds dumb*

Thanks a lot for your help.




You, fucking, bot!

Lets do an experiment. Lets post some common search topics and see if I can get anymore of these robot responses.

Global Warming

Barack Obama

York University Strike

Britney Spears

Recession

Oscars

Animal rights

Boston Celtics

UFC

Terrell Owens

Snake Wine

Bear Wine

Spyware

XXX

Porn

Barely Legal Porn

Man on Man Porn

Terrorism

How to make a bomb

Wii Music

BCE

Persian Wife Finder (Thanks, Jim Carrey)

Guns

Bigger Guns

America

Anti-Americans

Torrent files

Piracy

MP3s

Napster

Facebook

Spyware on Facebook

Auto-Tune

A positive review for "Chinese Democracy" by Guns 'n Roses (hmm, I guess Google can only do so much)

Youtube

The Flintstones cigarette commercial on Youtube

Auto-posting robots

This thing should be flooded with responses in no time.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Motorstorm: Pacific Rift




Motorstorm : Pacific Rift : An offroad racing game. Yep. An offroad racing game is Motorstorm Pacific Rift.

Story : There doesn’t seem to be a storyline, so lets invent one. The Coors Light Offroad Sex Party Power Team is throwing their latest mystery party contest (the ones that are always on commercials and boxes every season) at an island in the Pacific for a weekend of intervehichle offroad racing excitement and worry-free sex when the evil Dr Von Nofunhowser arrived, threatening to ruin the Power Team’s weekend with GLOBAL WARMING. The only way to thwart Dr Von Nofunhowser’s plans for warming their beers is to engage in exciting offroad races while generic alt-rock tracks play in the background. None of this makes sense but storylines in racing games don’t have to make sense, in fact I’d be a bit upset if there was a story in a racing game that didn’t involve a supervillain’s plans being inexplicably trifled with by means of a race.

The cutscene that plays in the background of the main menu details a lot of partying and racing fun in what I presume is “The Festival” but The Coors Light Offroad Sex Party Power Team isn’t letting you into the shenanigans, after all, you didn’t find the golden bottle in your box of Coors Light.

No, you’re relegated to merely racing. “The Festival” is but a series of races from four different challenges. Completing races and their assigned challenges earns points to improve your rank, of which doing so will open up more races and challenges. In reality, what you’re doing is racing on the same 16-odd tracks repeatedly, but with a different bonus objective like “finish before this time” or “race without crashing more than three times.” So in essence, you’re grinding the same tracks over and over again, and not to my delight.

Motorstorm : Pacific Rift is an ordinary offroad racing game; one that took a look at the numerous ATV vs MX bizarro land crossover games and thought that the world needed one more because the dirt graphics in those previous games wasn’t pretty enough. There are absolutely no brand name vehicles, just “ATV”,” Bike”, “Monster Truck” and other complete failures to give these rides an identity beyond their stereotypes.

There’s also decided lack of vehicle customization, which delighted me, because I know nothing about car parts and feel intimidated when a game like Forza Motorsport or Gran Turismo throws at me X number of ways to customize my tires, shocks and rear-view mirror. So this is definitely an arcade-style racer, one where you need not study special drifting techniques to turn your ride through a corner. You have a “Go” button, a “Brake” button, and a lot of dirt in between.

In my dilapidated mind, a good arcade racer should be accessible, fast, and exciting. Pacific Rift gets the first part right but the latter two succumb to the vile schemes of Dr Von Nofunhowser. Vehicles feel a bit slow and sluggish, going off a ramp didn’t have the exhilarating feeling that catching big air should, and for an off-road racer, there was never any sense of “getting dirty”. These are all hard things to explain thinking about it, but when you look back at some of the more recent racers, the Burnouts and ATV’s of the world, you realize that some smart use of camera and particle effects contributed to a fun and nasty experience. In contrast, Motorstorm feels too…clean, dull, uninteresting. Sure the environments look fantastic but someone driving a motorcycle at 120 miles/hour has more important things to look out for than the details in the leaves.

I had to think long and hard to figure out what it was that made Motorstorm unique. Other games have done the multiple types of vehicles big or small gimmick before, and did it with much more personality and gusto. Even collision battles…knocking someone off their bike with your rally truck isn’t quite as satisfying as I’d like. There actually is one interesting gameplay mechanic; you can press the turbo button for as long as you can before your ride explodes from the heat and pressure. Water can help cool down your vehicle, while magma and GLOBAL WARMING conspire to warm you up to death, so the people that will succeed the most in Motorstorm are the ones who study the tracks and develop the best and least fuel-efficient plan of action.

Confused as to how a game with so little desire to stand out can garner so much publicity, I looked to the internet in hopes of finding out answers as to why people care about Pacific Rift besides “it’s the sequel to a game people were excited about back in a time when the Playstation 3 didn’t have much to be excited about.” The best I could garner was the claim that the tracks would change as the assorted automobiles wore down the roads. Upon hearing this, I felt absolutely terrible for the people who toiled in an office for hours on end designing these dirt physics because, well…I didn’t notice this. Have we ran out of new and groundbreaking ideas for racing games that we have to create barely-noticeable shifting dirt physics as a way to stand out?

The online play is relegated to simply racing other competitors in any of the given tracks. There’s nothing flashy, but at least the Power Team have long since prevented Dr Von Nofunhowser scheme to ruin their good times with lag, as the online experience is mostly smooth. I guess there’s also potential for Motorstorm as a party game, as you can play four-player split screen and not have the same fear one would have with a Gran Turismo or Midnight Club; settling for using the most basic of cars while your buddy who owns the game picks his souped-up ride and drugs you with nitrous oxide.

All and all, Motorstorm : Pacific Rift is about as interesting as soil. It’s a functional racing game that can be pretty to gawk at but it lacks the thrills and excitement of better arcade-style racers like Pure…or at least the demo to Pure. It’ll suffice in the absence of a better racing game, but like an actual Coors Light party, it’s not quite as exhilarating as the commercials would lead one to believe.

Pros : No purchase necessary to get invited.

Cons : Must be legal drinking age.

3 ½ stars

The Coors Light Offroad Sex Party Power Team will return!

Monday, January 19, 2009

Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

Hooray for my first Playstation 3 review! And what else could I possibly review but…






Metal Gear Solid 4 : Guns of the Patriots: The supposedly FINAL rendition of one of the most popular and bat**** insane franchises in the history of the industry.

Story : Here’s something to think about. Guns of the Patriots is the first Metal Gear game in about ten years where you actually play as Solid Snake. Yes, after ten years of having Solid Snake dangled in front of us, only to be baited and switched into playing the rest of the game as a more androgynous blonde cretin, or tricked into playing as someone who only bears a resemblance to Snake, we finally have a game where we play as the hero who’s supposedly too legendary to appear in the same video games he appears on the box art for. And this time around, Snake faces two dire enemies: premature aging and every single unanswered plot thread remaining in the series.

There is certainly an unfair standard here that I’m not going to pretend doesn’t exist. If “Metal Gear Solid” wasn’t in the game’s title, myself and every other person who had played the game would be trashing the story for so many right reasons. The cutscenes are agonizingly long, the writing would be considered annoying, and a lesser human being would lose their mind with the conspiracy buffet they’re being asked to binge on. It often feels like there’s a series of conspiracy theories laid out on top of each other, like every “truth” has five other “truths” behind it. Hell, just the explanation behind how a man’s hand can possess Ocelot has a massive conspiracy beefy enough to upset one’s stomach. And lest we forget, the complete break in consistency of a game that puts so much emphasis on modern warfare and government policies to throw at you an enemy that defeats adversaries with voodoo dolls.

But this is a Metal Gear game. By now, fans have not only come to accept the series shortcomings, but they might be disappointed to not see them. Old age hasn’t helped Solid Snake’s hearing, as he’ll continue to ask for clarification on every noun thrown at him. You know what I’m talking about. “The Patriots? PMCs? War economy? My brother Liquid? Guns? Urinary Tract Infection?” The writing in general tends to reiterate points repeatedly and there’s no sense of subtlety; main characters will gladly spell out the game’s themes in case you didn’t get them the first ten times. But we’ve come to expect this after the last three games. We’ve already dealt with cyborg ninjas, a soldier that shoots bees and a psychic that reads Playstation memory cards so perhaps we’re desensitized by absurdity.

After all, it’s hard to criticize the length of the cutscenes when they look this good.

Just like with past games, the cinematography here is leaps and bounds above anything else in any game ever released, which is even more astonishing when you consider it’s all done with the in-game engine and not pre-rendered video. If you have experience with this franchise, then you’ll know to expect half-hour-plus long sequences of watching the game before you actually get to pick up the controller and play. Though cutscenes occasionally prompt you to press a button; the X button is literally the FLASHBACK button while the L1 button is the “first-person view of a woman’s cleavage” button. Any other game, I’d be frustrated and wondering why I’m not shooting something right friggin now, but with Metal Gear Solid, I can’t help but sit back and grab another soda.

It also helps that the characters are…mostly appealing. There’s little in the way of generic archetypes here, though does become redundant to hear what is essentially the exact same backstory over and over again for each member of the “Beauty and the Beast Corp”, this game’s set of unsavory supervillains/boss fights. It’s also worth mentioning that this game has some of the lamest comedic relief characters you’ll ever bear witness to. Nothing kills the mood like seeing Otacon’s weird RC mech thingy or a monkey in spandex drinking soda. The game does have some good jokes though, most of which make fun of past games, but I couldn’t in good conscience spoil this game, or at least spoil it moreso than the countless reviews or eager brothers were to tell me about what moment freaked them out (and you know who you are. Thanks, you ass!) Oh, and pretty much every character still alive (and plenty that are dead) will make some kind of appearance here. Fortunately, Fatman stays dead and forgotten. Unfortunately, The End also stays dead and forgotten. It seems that Hideo Kojima is hellbent on making sure he isn’t forced into making a Metal Gear Solid 5, so he wraps up every single loose end and gives each character the kind of resolution that ensures they’ll never see action again for one reason or another.

It helps that the game proficient at bringing players up to speed as to what happened in the past. If anything, you can get by playing this game with almost no prior experience with the franchise, which is something very few sequels of this ambitious nature can pull off. Then again, no game of this nature has a fraction of the dialogue of a Metal Gear Solid introductory cutscene. Obviously, to get the most out of your Metal Gear experience, you should have played through the first three games, but I’d say “don’t touch Guns of the Patriots until you’ve at least sat through the very first game, otherwise many sequences within this game will mean nothing to you!”

Speaking of game, there actually is a game somewhere within this game. Shocking? Not a whole lot of game, mind you. I was told by the game that I had invested about 17 hours of time into the single player campaign, but I think I only spent about 4 of those hours in control of something. It’s absolutely absurd, but again, this is Metal Gear, so after ten years, fans should be used to this kind of gameless gameplay. And to a degree, I kind of respect what would otherwise be considered a short game because there’s absolutely no filler whatsoever.

There’s no fetch quests or contrived excuses to go back and forth in a single area. You need only go through each game environment once, and how you go through it is strictly up to you. There are no mandatory tutorial sequences or video packages where the game slowly details each button press, you merely tap a button to bring up a menu at your leisure detailing the default controller layout. And as opposed to say, the Prince of Persia games, there’s never a single solution to any given scenario, and the game won’t constantly badger you with how to whatever command you need to do at that specific moment. You’re merely given a handful of items and weapons, and it’s up to you to invent a means of going through any given area, and how peacefully you want to go through that area.

Because of this, there’s a large degree of trial and error involved in figuring out a successful technique. A certain degree of patience and technique is required to sneak your way around. If you’re really proficient and peaceful, you can play through the entire game without killing a single human being, demented bosses included. The “guns blazing” approach also has plenty of validity to it, though you’ll have to overcome some baffling controls to mow down your competitors. You have to press three different buttons to enter first person view to shoot your adversaries. Considering how combat seems to have a large focus this time around (what with most of the game set in a freaking WARZONE), the cover mechanics in this game are as old as the protagonist, as you’re relegated to ducking behind an object that you hope is taller than Snake’s crouching animation, and then have to peek out because you can’t view enemies from behind cover, hopefully spotting and picking them off before they do the same and send Otacon into the same crying frenzy he enters every time you die. And you’ll probably die a lot, partly because of the controls but also in the pursuit of experimentation with assorted tactics. You have two advantages in the battlefield though; one is that you can access a weapons shop at any time and use money amassed by automatically selling the extra weapons picked up from fallen enemies to buy new toys, ammo and mods. The other advantage is that enemy AI is generally rather thick.

There’s also the game’s boss battles, which take the same approach as the rest of the game in that you’ll be left to your own devices to figure out what tactics will work best. Because of this, the battles here feel more…organic, like the enemies are living, breathing foes that you need to outsmart, instead of you and an enemy hacking away at each other’s shins until the first to run out of health collapses, or a robotic like enemy with a predetermined attack pattern who becomes hopeless to your assault once you’ve got them figured out.

Illustrating examples presents a small challenge for me as I would hate myself for spoiling anything.

Again, a lot of this is eased by the uniqueness of the settings. For the first half of the game, each level is spent on a battlefield, and sneaking around while two factions duke it out makes for some unique sneaking scenarios. I hope you like gun turret sequences though, because there’s at least three of them here, but the latter two are actually quite memorable in of themselves, without me giving anything away. The one gameplay sequence that peeved me was a section where I was forced into following someone without being seen, and any attempt to help him against enemy soldiers was met with said person opening fire on me. And for better or worse, the game shamelessly evokes the nostalgia card; expect plenty of moments designed to tug on the heartstrings of people who have played the previous games.

Finally, there’s the online play…which features an update that, at this point in the review (including proofreading), is only 60% downloaded. I’m going to have to update this review at some point to include the multiplayer aspect, but this really shouldn’t take so long.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is a bit of an old fossil. Combat mechanics should be much tighter by modern standards. The standards of writing have improved (at least in specific games) enough that we shouldn’t need such lengthy story sequences. But at the same time, some of the “dated” aspects are admirable. We rarely get games anymore that don’t submit the player to a slow-paced tutorial that holds our hand while detailing every single possible action, followed by asking the player to repeat said action repeatedly like we’re learning to write the Alphabet in grade school. We rarely see games anymore that are comfortable with being short and sweet, not feeling obligated to force the player to re-do levels over again or grind enemy battles to progress. And we rarely see games anymore that give the player freedom to figure out their own solutions to a challenge.

To sum up this obscenely long review, the more you like Metal Gear, and in particular the first Metal Gear Solid, the more you’ll like Metal Gear Solid 4. I would argue that it’s not as charming a game as say, Metal Gear Solid 3, but I doubt this game aimed to charm. For what it is worth, I would suggest that Metal Gear Solid 4 is perhaps the greatest conclusion-game in the history of gaming. When you think of attempts at multi-game epics, the final game either ends with a forgettable whimper (Halo, the Sands of Time trilogy), in a hurry (Xenosaga), or not at all (Shenmue). So Metal Gear fans can be honoured to be given such a fantastic send-off. Solid Snake is leaving the stealth genre on top, and he’s leaving it his way.

Pros : For the life of me, I couldn’t recall any reference to Portable Ops, Metal Gear Acid 1 or 2, or the Metal Gear Solid Game Boy Color game, which is great for people like me that couldn’t be made to finish most of them.

Cons: Product placement for Apple products feels out of place in a game with this many conspiracies about corporations. The ending is a lot longer than it should be; imagine the ending to Return of the King, but to the power of ten.

4 stars

Someone out there is attracted to the idea of their virtual in-game character listening to a virtual iPod, and listening to old themes from past Metal Gear games.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Dead Space


Dead Space : EA’s brand new Survival-Horror franchise. That statement feels like a lie.

Story : Dumb.

Okay the story of Dead Space is that you’re on some kind of mission to go to this spaceship. You and your dim-witted crew discover that everyone’s been slaughtered by some kind of monstrous species and now must find a means to survive. The first thing I noticed about Dead Space is that the voice-acting is bad (and not in that Resident Evil hilariously bad way but just bad), the characters are unlikable and couldn’t die soon enough, and the whole story is predictable, lame, cheesy, a dud.

The second thing I noticed about Dead Space is that the developers are really proud of their limb disembowelment gameplay mechanics and are fixated on making sure gamers know this too. It’s like the very soul of Dead Space is found from severing appendages. As you begin exploring the ship, you will run into at least two messages written on walls in blood “Cut off their limbs!” before you even know what exactly “their” refers to. Then, your crew members will be sure to tell you point blank that in order to defeat your enemies, you must attempt to sever their body parts. After that, a green message will pop-up telling you to your face that you must dismember limbs to kill these monstrosities. And just in case you didn’t pick it up the first five times, the loading screens will frequently tell you to aim for the limbs to kill enemies faster. And isn’t the box art making it apparent enough that the very essence of this game is to slice off limbs? Was this game designed for the pirate crowd of people who downloaded the game without reading the box at the video game store?

The third thing I noticed about Dead Space was a feeling that crept up on me; I did this all before! Dead Space seems to be an amalgamation of many other gameplay clichés combined into one very unoriginal piece. To be specific, you have the third person camera, inventory/store system, movement and shooting controls of Resident Evil 4, but in the Aliens-esque infested spaceship setting seen in Doom 3, among MANY other games. The basic gameplay in any given chapter involves going from one part of an area to another, dealing with enemies that pop up and separating them from their arms and legs.

For what it’s worth, you’ll face a hearty variety of grotesque enemies and the action will stay fresh. Only in the end-game levels did I get annoyed at the sheer quantity of enemies being thrust at me. What these enemies aren’t, however, is remotely frightening. I wonder if it can be considered some kind of accomplishment that a game can have flesh-eating monsters with fangs growing out of weird appendages and make them less terrifying than Spanish peasants with pitchforks. Oh they try to scare you, appear out of nowhere as an orchestra shouts loud and proud to proclaim their presence, but I never felt startled or unnerved. Throughout the entire 9 hour experience, only the cheap-scare ending was able to elicit an emotion out of me that wasn’t contempt at the ordinary action/non-horror game I was playing.

The game does have two original bones in its body. I mentioned the limb-cutting mechanic earlier (though I didn’t mention it as much as the game will) and as biologically illogical it is to kill enemies faster by aiming for some stray tentacle instead of say, their head or vital organs, it does make for some interesting battles. There’s also a select few areas in the game where there is no gravity, and because of such, you can hop directly from one area to another with your magnetic boots. I won’t give anything away, but these segments make for some unique set-piece sequences that ask for some outside-the-box thinking.

But then there are the other 204 unoriginal bones in the game’s body. Like the Half-Life 2-esque gravity gun that you use to manipulate items in the game world for puzzles. Or the ability to slow down enemies or fast-moving machines. Or the obligatory gun turret sequences!

All things considered, I should at least give the game credit for managing to extract 9 hours of gameplay without excessively spamming enemies (well, except for the end) and repeating too many areas over again. But try as I might, the feeling of déjà vu was too strong. I hated the storyline, couldn’t care less about my surroundings, certainly never felt terrified, and all and all it was just an action game that I was playing for the sake of playing it.

If you were to assess Dead Space on technical merits, and have a separate review score for graphics or sound or presentation, then you would have gold-medal caliber scores across the board, as this really is one of the most visually impressive games on the market. But what Dead Space lacks is emotion. The game feels heartless, just another futuristic sci-fi shooter but with nay all of the gameplay extracted from Resident Evil 4, and not the sense of atmosphere or dread. I hate it when people call Dead Space an exciting new franchise that needs new installments; it sends the message that it’s only okay to create new franchises if they’re exactly like the old ones.

Pros : The ability to curb stomp. For people that hate HUDs and things that remind them that they’re only playing a game, health bars and all pertinent information are integrated on your weapons or the back of your suit, and all messages, pop-up displays and menus are presented in the form of Minority Report style hologram windows that pop up in front of the character’s eyes instead of yours.

Cons : Because of this, these pop-ups are SD DEFICIENT and thus hard to read if you’ve got an ordinary television set.

3 ½ stars.

Oh, and the name of the game sucks.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Sega Superstar Tennis for the DS


Sega Superstar Tennis : It’s a tennis game with assorted Sega characters. Or at least the Dreamcast-era Sega characters.

Story : I don’t think there is much of a story here other than the story of a bunch of big-eyed cartoon characters getting together to play tennis. Okay, here’s a storyline, one executive at Sega says to another “hey! Nintendo makes tennis games with their franchise characters. We already make tennis games. Lets make a tennis game with our franchise characters!” Who says Sega does what Nintendon’t?

Sega Superstar Tennis allows players to pit Sonic against Tails in a dream battle of tennis, or at least a doubles match of Sonic and Tails against Dr Rob…Eggman and miscellaneous. Most of the characters in the game seem to be of the cute, family-friendly variety, including the inflatable doll from Space Channel 5, the methed up skater from Jet Grind Radio and most of the monkey characters throughout Sega’s history. You can unlock the dwarf from Golden Axe, but that’s about the most interesting hidden character, otherwise your bonus unlockables are clones like Shadow The Hedgehog or… evil NiGHTS.

I guess what I’d like to say is, if you’re going to go with an absurd concept such as a mascot tennis game, then run with it! Let me play as Vectorman or the Comix Zone dude or the vigilantes from Streets of Rage, the Sega games people look back on fondly. Get that guy from Shenmue to open matches by saying in his trademark monotone voice “I am going to play a game of tennis” to team with Shinobi against the dude from Splatterhouse and a Panzer Dragoon dragon flying around wielding a small tennis racket.

There’s a novel mini-game collection that divulges in the fan-service territory that’d you wish the rest of the game attempted. You have these mini-game sets based on obvious picks like Sonic The Hedgehog and Super Monkey Ball that involve collecting rings, but you also get sets based on House of The Dead, Space Harrier and Virtua Cop. There’s some novelty in watching a guy with a tennis racket run through a Space Harrier stage smacking balls into giant stone heads and dodging pixilated fireballs. The games aren’t great, but they are mildly amusing and work in a pinch if you’re trying to kill time on a bus.

And I guess there’s a tennis part of the Sega Superstar Tennis game. The tennis here is very basic; you have a button for slices and topspin swings, and otherwise the game figures out the rest for the player. I stand that one of the strengths of the Mario Tennis games is that they’re so basic with the controls that someone who’s never touched a controller before could jump right into an exciting four player doubles match. On the most basic level, the gameplay here is of the same level of accessibility, and I can imagine most gamers being able to pick up on this game and smack a ball in Tails’ face. The one single twist is that each character has a little star meter that fills up during play and, when maxed out, enables players to trigger a 3 second cutscene. After this annoyance, every shot you throw back at your opponents will curve around or go in some kind of weird pattern before hitting the ground (the pattern varies between each character). The kicker with these super attacks is that the only genuine way to respond to these attacks is to have actually spent a bit of time playing against each character, which hampers the whole idea of the game being accessible to non-players. On top of that, I’ve had games where three AI players on the court all decided to trigger their super attacks in succession of each other in a conspiracy to completely kill the flow of the game.

However, the multiplayer aspect is kind of hindered by the fact that this is the DS version I’m looking at. With a single copy of the game, you’re restricted to playing a Sonic vs. Sonic singles game with another DS owner, and to play otherwise requires the other players to own the game…and well my personal philosophy on multi-card play is that it can screw off; I can’t be made to try to sell fellow DS owners on buying a game. Now, when 3 other owners of Sega Superstar Tennis aren’t around to have a good doubles match with (which is all of the time), then you can play a series of “tournaments”. Calling these tournaments feels like a farce as you’ll always play against the same opponents in the same order, and the AI tends to be a breeze.

In the absence of Mario Tennis, I’d wager that the console versions of Sega Superstar Tennis would make a semi-decent party game. This Nintendo DS version, on the other hand, has significantly less value, other than presenting the chance to kill a few seconds of time between bus stops killing zombies with tennis balls. Only pick this one up if you find it in a bargain bin for pocket change.

Pros: Except for accessing the Options screen, there is absolutely no forced use of the touch screen!

Cons: Sub-par audio.

3 stars

Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Fallout 3


Fallout 3 : Oblivion-developer Bethesda’s open world post-nuclear apocalyptic RPG thingy, combining dread and depression with a smiling 50s cartoon character!

Story : The character creation system and tutorial are not-so-subtly tied into your character’s birth and upbringing, within a giant Vault that’s been shut of from the rest of the world. When you’re father (voiced by Liam Neeson and why not?) suddenly escapes, all hell breaks loose and you escape the Vault and into the desecrated remains of a post-nuclear-war Washington DC, where you can think about searching for your father, or just walking around town picking pockets and killing people. The main story doesn’t get interesting until near the end, but you may as well follow it anyways since it’ll open up more locations on the map.

Comparisons to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion are indeed inevitable, so I’ll get them all out of the way now. Yes you’re more or less dealing with Oblivion in the future. No, Washington DC isn’t quite as big as Oblivion’s world was, but it’s a lot more interesting. Instead of 15 towns that are practically clones of each other and a lot of empty jungles and identical caves, you’ve got about 4 interesting towns, a wasteland filled with interesting set-pieces, unique sights and people that want you dead, and radiation poisoning. Yes, you’re playing with guns instead of swords now. But the core ideas are the same; you can rob and kill anyone you please, with the predictable moral (you lose “karma” or GOOD GUY POINTS) and legal (people will want you dead for awhile!) consequences. You can pick up as much junk as your kleptomaniacal heart desire, which becomes somewhat important since you’re going to need to scavenge and sell whatever may be valuable in order to make some money.

And that’s when Fallout 3 started to develop an identity to me. One of the things I like is the sense that I was barely getting by in this desolate wasteland. Ammunition feels scarce, money can be hard to get by, and unless you’re some kind of expert thief then you’re going to be stingy on health packs. Any penny your frugal ass can make will be needed, and whether you choose to spend your hard-earned bottle caps on repairing weapons or health becomes some kind of important decision. When you level up, you get to choose which character attributes are upgraded, and you may have to think twice about putting everything into combat, as opposed to being able to independently fix weapons, pick locks or barter.

The downside to this scarcity of assorted commodities is that it becomes trickier to specialize in any combat style. You can’t quite get by being an explosives or energy weapons specialist, as whatever weapons you elect to use in any given situation will be based on whatever weapons you actually have ammo for. I had the same problem with Bioshock where the whole idea of letting me level up certain areas was rendered null and void by how I was being forced to use whatever attacks I could actually afford to use.

On top of that, I always felt like I was missing a piece of the puzzle; some kind of crucial bit of knowledge that I would’ve had to have played the previous Fallout games to pick up on. Like a certain kind of strategy I would need to use to kill a Super Mutant without emptying out entire clips of bullets on one, let alone the next twenty. The in-game tutorial is great at explaining concepts that one would’ve known about from playing Oblivion, but certain other concepts, like whether or not there are parts of the body I should shoot at in VATS other than the head, or how to deal with enemies that can shoot me from a football field’s length away when I can’t shoot them unless football’s length off, or even something as silly as the need to use abandoned subway systems to get to certain areas, seem to have alluded me in my inexperience with this franchise. The key here is that I can’t be alone; the vast majority of people buying Fallout 3 have more than likely never played a Fallout game before.

And thus, combat is a mixed bag. You have to adapt to the idea that everything is stat based and thus you won’t be able to instantly headshot and kill everything like some kind of deathmatch uber 1337 creature. My biggest annoyance is that the farther you are from a target, the less likely you are to hit; a weakness your enemies don’t seem to have. And being that you won’t have a somewhat expendable supply of ammunition until late in the game, your strategy in combat will tend to be “rush up close to an enemy and pop them in the skull.” To assist in this point-blank gunplay, the VATS system lets you expend a certain number of action points to automatically target key parts of the enemy, if you’re not feeling confident in your reflexes and want to be stingy with ammo. If there’s one advantage to this system, though, it’s that successful kills will often result in some fantastically excessive death sequences with exploding heads and slow motion dismemberment.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if Fallout 3 has a fault, it’s that it has an unorthodox learning curve and difficulty curve. One of the earlier missions will require you to plow through a legion of Super Mutants despite your limited munitions. Unlike Oblivion, where if you never leveled up your hero, you could realistically be fighting rabbits and mice on the end-game levels, enemies don’t seem to get progressively more difficult as you level up; an angry Super Mutant will always be an angry Super Mutant, and can only get easier to kill as your stats improve and you wise-up to the game’s mechanics.

But once you get into that groove, that’s when you can start to appreciate the nuances. The otherwise long walks to any given destination on the map feel like fun little adventures into the unknown rather than some needless way of artificially lengthening the game. Characters are mostly interesting and have their own personality and pockets to explore. The juxtaposition of the wholesomeness of the 50s’ perceived idea of America and the horrific nuclear Armageddon makes for a distinct contrast that one can’t help but get immersed in. There’s a slight tinge of USA-bashing and that’ll always put a smile on my Canadian face. If you look hard enough, there’s a hearty assortment of fleshed out side-quests that you can wind up losing yourself in. The number of unlikely bonus stats or “perks” that you can give your character upon leveling up opens up a bit of experimentation and incentive to replay the game. And I guess once you’ve wrapped your mind around the stat-based combat, you’ll welcome the challenge of battling armed soldiers with your shotgun.

I can’t compare Fallout 3 to previous Fallout games but I’d wager that people who enjoyed those games will find radioactive bliss here. For fans of Bethesda’s games, what you’re getting here is a smaller, but more interesting and arguably more fun open-world RPG for you to pillage and fiddle with, or at least in the later end of the game when you can afford to waste bullets on something that wasn’t trying to kill you first. For people who’ve never tried one of these games before, I’d say that Oblivion makes a better gateway drug into this genre; a warm-up, if you will, for the real exercise of Fallout 3. You kind of have to adapt to the game to really appreciate it, but once you do, it’ll trigger a nice, warm, light-green glow in your heart.

Pros : Great 40s music to jive to while you maim ghouls and giant mutants.

Cons : Some glitches. I was of the impression that in earlier Fallout games that, with the right stats, you can play the entire game without ever getting into a fight. You SO can’t do that here.

4 stars

Now I see why so many people geek out over that Fallout cartoon mascot.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Battle Fantasia

For my 50th review, I'm going to cover...a game nobody's ever heard about!




Battle Fantasia : A Cel-shaded, medieval fighting game from Ark System Works, whom are famous for a very wonderfully obscene franchise.

Story : So there was this massive evil force, some kind of black-armoured embodiment of all things diabolical, and all the races in this mystical kingdom united to trap him in what looks like some giant volcano. However, evil stirs once more and…well this sounds familiar.

Well they’re about 7-50 years too late depending on which adaptation we’re talking about, but it appears that the folks at Ark System Works have discovered the Lord of the Rings trilogy and were so psyched by said epic that they decided to make their own work of fiction that ste…Is heavily influenced by J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. Prior to Battle Fantasia, said game developers were staying up late on a Saturday night watching their favorite music station, caught some really cheesy 80s hair metal music videos, and decided to turn that into a franchise.

And their previous brainchild was glorious. Guilty Gear took the devils, dragons and hairspray of 80s music videos and combined them with the absolute most over-the-top campy and sexualized anime style they could find to create a decidedly bizarre and uncomfortable yet eye-catching and memorable concept that gave the fighting game genre a much needed smack in the face (with a talking guitar). Combined with an outrageous fighting engine that made each character fight like they were Superman on meth, high resolution artwork that made the competition at the time look embarrassed to stand by their Neo Geo hardware, and numerous updates to help perfect the system, and you’ve got the unrecognized but undisputed and unsavory savior of 2D fighting.

Enter Battle Fantasia. Imagine that very same demented art style hurled into Middle-Earth, and you’ve got a fair idea of what’s happening here. Actually, the game is all cel-shaded, so there’s a strong resemblance to Dark Cloud 2 or the more recent Valkyria Chronicles here. A lot of the innuendo from Guilty Gear is slightly toned down, as now there are only two blatantly homosexual characters here. Likewise, there’s a lot taken from Harry Potter and any other books you may been forced to read as a child, as characters will include your assortment of way-too-young knights, a boy wizard, a merry dwarf, the embodiment of evil and so forth. As uninspired as some of these concepts are, there’s also a lot of charm to the characters, and a bit of that trademark Guilty Gear machismo; the main character wields what looks like a 70s motorcycle engine that, when revved up, reveals a chainsaw blade made of fire.

As far as gameplay goes, there doesn’t seem to be any original fighting styles or gameplay mechanics here. It’s a Street Fighterian 2D fighter, with basic attacks, special moves, super special moves and even a parry button. The one sort of unique aspect (and I know this has been stolen from other games) is that pressing a button will put your character “in heat”, which powers him and her up, opens up new moves and has the potential to be taken the wrong way for many, many characters. The game feels like a toned-down Guilty Gear or a straight Street Fighter clone, as there’s no double-jumping or instant kill attacks or a lot of the spice of Battle Fantasia’s more demented forefather.

All the characters fight like variations of characters in other games, especially Guilty Gear X. You’ve got your Ryu/Sol Badguy character, your Zangief/Potemkim character, your Jam/waitress character who wears a short skirt and takes every opportunity possible to ambiguously bend over, and so forth. When you consider how the Guilty Gear games are known for coming up with some incredibly abstract fighting styles, it’s a bit disappointing to be given a watered down variation of characters past. The one unique aspect seems to be the varying character sizes, such as the mouse wizard and child knight that are a fraction of the size of dwarfman but also have less health.

By the by, the game has an HP number underneath the health bar, if just to make you associate it more with fantasy RPGs.

And if this game is in fact deeper than I’m giving it credit for, if perhaps there’s some unique hook to the gameplay that I’m missing, then I wouldn’t have any means of discovering it through playing against other opponents, as it seems that absolutely no one else is playing this game online. I’ve waited for a very long time with an open ranked game waiting for an opponent and found nothing. With arcades a shell of their former glory, fighting games need a good online community to develop actual lasting value to anyone that doesn’t have a group of dedicated friends to play against (that’s a not very subtle poke at Super Smash Bros Brawl). It makes it all the more harder for a new fighting game franchise like Battle Fantasia to succeed without an established user base generated from years of sequels stemming back to an era when arcades were popular, but at least Ark System Works could at least TRY to market this game a bit; I’ve had a few too many people asking me what this Battle Fantasia game I’ve been playing instead of Fallout 3 was.

This game has all the traditional fighting game modes, the standard Arcade mode, the standard VS mode, the standard Training mode, the standard OPTIONS mode, the standard-yet-useless VS CPU mode, and so forth. The “Story Mode” will be familiar to Guilty Gear veterans, in which fights are separated by dialogue sequences of static images of the characters speaking Japanese with English subtitles. Some of the dialogue is cute and funny, but most of the time it just feels wordy. The exposition/gameplay ratio in story mode is lopsided, as you’ll spend several minutes at a time reading dialogue that just isn’t going anywhere, and then fight for a single 30 second round, before returning to more dialogue. You’re better off just sticking to the traditional Arcade mode.

The best thing I can say about Battle Fantasia is that it is GOOD, with capital letters. And really, how many original fighting game franchises from the last 5 years can you say the same thing about? It’s a fundamentally sound fighter and if you have a couple of friends that want a medieval fighter that’s more Street Fighter than Soul Calibur, then it’s a good pick. However, there’s nothing here that stands out and screams “Pick me!” over any existing fighting game franchise, and unless Ark System Works decides to push forward and give this game the same support it gives Guilty Gear with its numerous updates and intestinal fortitude, then Battle Fantasia is bound to fade into obscurity.

Pros : I didn’t state this enough in the actual review, but the cel-shaded visual style is rather easy on the eyes.

Cons : A vicious final boss that can only be damaged while your character is in heat. I guess there are some strong sexual undertones after all if the forces of evil can only be triumphed over while you’re aroused.

3 ½ stars.

I promise I’ll review something a little more well-known next time.