Grand Theft Auto 4: The Lost and Damned

Grand Theft Auto 4: The Lost and Damned : The Xbox-only expansion to Grand Theft Auto 4, which Microsoft will be quick to remind you is indeed Xbox-only.

Story : You play as Johnny Klebitz, the vice-president of a once civil bike gang. All of his attempts at maintaining a peaceful, prosperous biker gang go to hell when the president, Billy Grey, is released from rehab and decides to throw a 40oz at common sense. If you thought it was weird that Grand Theft Auto 4 tried so hard to make you sympathize for the sociopath Niko Bellic, then you’re in luck because this game is filled with certifiably despicable jerks that you’d never want to run into. But I like that; to see these characters act as the goons they are and not try to rescue an orphanage or visit us from Mars or some other nonsense. There are a couple instances of the story intersecting with the main game, hilariously so at one point. The ending has a similar problem from the main game in that it comes out of nowhere without any build or rising tension, though it doesn’t feel as cheap or underhanded. Otherwise, an interesting and fairly unique plot.

So here’s the reason I disappoint my PS3-loving friends and extended family by depriving them the chance to gun me down in virtual Liberty City Survivor deathmatches and getting the Xbox 360 version of Grand Theft Auto 4. Not that I typically pin any high hopes on downloadable content; most of the time these extra packs comprise of items ripped right off the disc. Which is, in essence, what The Lost and Damned is; you’re still in Liberty City doing the same chase missions, gun battle missions and waste of time seagull hunt that you did in Grand Theft Auto 4.

It’s just also that I’m not used to downloadable content having such extended production values. All of the story sequences and in-game dialogue have the same high standard of voice-acting and script-writing of past games. There are a handful of new TV shows and radio songs, with a new episode of Republican Space Rangers worth the price of admission alone. And the developers at Rockstar North are continuously on the lookout for new and innovative ways to offend people. The contents of The Lost and Damned include; bikers, their crack-babies, a drug mule, a Howard Stern parody, pipe bombs, and a politician hanging out with his polygonal wang out. None of which are particularly shocking, though I find it funny that people find a virtual penis cutscene to be any kind of a big deal. Anyone that’s been in a gym change room shouldn’t be phased whatsoever.

The main game missions are more of the same; you have gunfights, you sometimes chase down people in locomotives, you run from cops, etc. You just now have the added context of doing everything as part of a bike gang. Prior to certain missions, the game will kindly ask you to follow proper biker gang etiquette and ride in formation, i.e. at the back of the line. You get body armour bonuses and the chance to hear your crew converse amongst themselves for doing so. A faux attempt at building a sense of camaraderie to be sure, as The Lost just don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to get to their destination when following formation. I was more thrilled when one of my brothers would proclaim that it was time to drop the hammer and RACE to your desired destination/deal/hit, and drop these false ideas of me wanting to conform to their non-conformist ways.

Speaking of group, I should at least give the game credit for trying its hardest to play on the biker theme, even if I didn’t want to play along. In your biker hideout, you can play a new and trivial arm-wrestling game and a silly high-low card game, or invite your new friends over to the bowlerama and play the new air hockey mini-game, which further proved to me that people shouldn’t try to make air hockey video games. You can summon your buddies at any time, sometimes in ways that change the dynamic of individual missions…you’ll know which ones because your friend Jim will be sure to text you every time and let you know that CLAY and TERRY (and not necessarily Jim himself) are eager to help. In another attempt to build a bond with your digital brothers for life, there’s some kind of Fire Emblem-style gang-mate experience system that strikes me as useless; the more you use members, the more “hard” they become and thus the more potent in combat they are. However, when they die, they stay dead, and live on as a portrait on a wall in the hideout. But being as they’re quickly replaced, the game gives the player little incentive to flinch at a gangster’s passing.

On the opposite end of the scratched poker chip, biking has been tweaked to allow more theme-friendly notions, such as “you won’t fall off the bike every time you run into a small rock” and “the ability to wield a sawn-off shotgun while driving, with surprising accuracy and no problems reloading.” At any time, you can call CLAY and he’ll drop off a new bike at your location. Likewise, calling TERRY will thrust the soul of Little Jacob into Terry as he comes to your location to sell weapons. And there’s two new, strictly-optional but still obnoxious attempts at artificially lengthening the game and give Xbox Achievment-craving psychos some petty new goals to aim for.

“Gang wars” consist of going to a certain area and dealing with waves upon waves of rival bikers. When you played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, did you ever think it was odd that the Ballas gang had seemingly hundreds of armed members? You know, enough to actually populate San Andreas or wage a turf war on Eastern Europe? Well the rival gang, the Angels of Death, seem to have the same over-recruitment problem. The less annoying sub-game is the motorcycle races, in part because they not-so-subtly rip off an older game by giving you a baseball bat in which to administer road-induced rashes on your enemies.

I’m a little torn about the new multiplayer options. I shouldn’t complain about getting new multiplayer options because the amount of content given to the game’s single-player mode is already pretty flabbergasting. I like the bike races because it’s the closest we’re getting to Road Rash Online anytime soon. “Own The City” comprises of two teams striving to control as much territory as possible, and the mode is surprisingly balanced. A careful player, if given the chance to get away with it, can pick off each AI defender of a territory and score his team some of that precious turf that gangs love to fight about. “Witness Protection” either has you playing as the cops protecting a bus filled with snitches, or as bikers trying to off them. This mode is anything but balanced; the bus has so much armor that there’s not really much a point in trying to damage it, but the moment a snitch gets off the bus to get into a station, there’s nothing stopping a biker car from running over the sucker and scoring easy points. My biggest issue with the multiplayer is that no matter what happens, I have to play as whatever biker or cop the game tells me to. This is the same problem I have with Halo making me play as an armoured troop, or Call of Duty making shoving me into the body of a soldier. Is it thematically correct? Yes. But there’s nothing thematically correct or realistic about the very concept of human versus human deathmatches, so please give me the option to run wild with whatever avatar I’d like to make. At least Grand Theft Auto 4 gave me the chance to customize my ordinary human being avatar a bit.

All but ignoring the redundant gang wars and racing, I managed to get an impressive 7 hours out of this expansion, which is more than most $60 games (and what more $60 should actually strive for). If you bought the “wrong” version of Grand Theft Auto 4, then you need not panic and rush out to get an Xbox copy. But that said, the gameplay is still enjoyable, the story is interesting, it’s much stronger than pretty much any single piece of “downloadable content” available on the Xbox, and you won’t feel ripped off, so pick it up if the chance presents itself.

Pros : And there’s some new weapons, which are essentially more powerful versions of older weapons.

Cons : Except the Pipe Bomb, which must be very heavy because it takes a whole lot of effort for Johnny to heave those things.

4 stars.

I blame Bethesda for my hesitance towards downloadable content, in more ways than one.

Arcana Heart

Another edition in the “games only I could care about reviewing” category.


Arcana Heart: An all-school girl anime fighting game!

Story : A rich, Dennis Rodman-like figure buys an island and invites all of the female fighters together to contests of bikini-clad volleyball and relax in the sun while the player watches and…okay not quite. There’s something about inter-dimensional disturbances and gods and evils and school girls fighting to stop it and I’m not really sure whatsoever what the story behind Arcana Heart really is. Usually, the more a fighting game tries to indulge in a storyline, the more spectacularly it flops (see King of Fighters), and fortunately, Arcana Heart doesn’t try to be serious most of the time. However, there’s a lot of dialogue and little of value spoken. The game has a story mode and an arcade mode, but the only discernable difference is that the former serves up large chunks of text in bulk.

To the best of my abilities, there isn’t a single male within Arcana Heart; the cast is an all-lady ensemble, with the only hint of masculinity being one character that fights with a giant ball that I assume is made of gelatinous testosterone for it forms giant arms and piledrives enemies Zangief-style. Otherwise, all the characters are skinny, young, promiscuous school-girl types…but while one would assume that the instruction manual editors bumped up the collective ages in the character bios to something more legal in the United States, credit should be given for to the game for never feeling sleazy. There’s little in the way of gratuitous boob or ass shots like in a Dead or Alive game and the characters are actually kind of creative. Yes you have your schoolgirls, but you also have schoolgirl samurais, schoolgirl bat thingys, schoolgirl roller-blading ninjas, schoolgirl Goth zombies and…well they’re manga clichés for all I know, but I thought they were more interesting than what you see in most fighting games.

Between the characterization and the prevalence of cheery music and many shades of pink, I’m lead to believe that this may be a fighting game aimed at the female audience. I can’t help but wonder if you can get anymore niche than aiming for female 2D fighting game fans.

Especially since this game is on a different level of sophistication than, say, Street Fighter 2. It bears closest resemblance to Guilty Gear on the fighting game spectrum, or at least Guilty Gear without the urge to wake the neighbours with 80s underground metal. You run, double-jump, have assorted attacks, special moves and super special moves. But you also choose a god-character before the fight. By pressing the L1 button, you activate what I assume to be GOD MODE, and in GOD MODE, you have access to the GOD’s super attacks. On top of all of this, you have what I can also assume is called the “Bum Rush Button”, where your character uses up some of her bum rush meter to charge up in front of your opponent, regardless of where they might be. I can speculate (and only speculate) that this opens up potential for new strategies and possible combination attacks.

The key word being “speculate” as the game does a less than stellar job of explaining itself to me. The Training Mode merely lets you beat up a drone character to practice moves, and with no in-game tutorials, I had no way of knowing if I was playing the game properly. Truth be told, either Arcana Heart is broken or I wasn’t playing it the way the game was the developers intended it to be played, and I’d like to believe the latter. Most of my AI fights lasted a considerably long time, with what I thought to be powerful super attacks doing little to chip away at my opponent’s health. Many of my victories wound up resulting from time limit expirations. There’s a feeling of lethargy that comes with using these screen-filling attacks that knock my enemy 20 feet into the wall doing miniscule damage to her health bar, leaving me to believe that the game assumes the player has some kind of knowledge of advanced combinations to put the enemy away. Which in of itself is a terrible assumption for the developers to make being that there are about as many arcades in America that imported the original version of Arcana Heart as there are Toronto Maple Leaf Stanley Cup victories in the last 50 years.

Fighting games depend on multiplayer to thrive, so I tend to think that any fighting game either needs to be; 1. Already popular enough that one can find others to play, like a Street Fighter or Soul Calibur or Smash Bros (as I risk my neck out there by calling Smash Bros a fighting game), 2. Accessible enough that anyone can pick up and play immediately ala Fight Night, or 3. have online play. Arcana Heart has the audacity of thinking it can get away with having none of the above.

Now I know you can’t have number 3 without an established fanbase (try setting up an online game of Battle Fantasia or Castlevania: Judgement and see how long it takes to find one person to play with. Or even better, tell me with a straight face you’ve heard of Battle Fantasia) but the game’s unwillingness to explain itself makes it extremely difficult for anyone to overcome its enigmatically large learning curve. Not to mention, Arcana Heart being a limited-release Playstation 2 game is doing little to endear itself to any possible new fans.

If Arcana Heart is a great fighting game, I don’t know it, nor do I know how to figure out if it is. Partly because the game is either broken or complex and doesn’t want to explain itself. Partly because I’ve got no one to play against. But both are faults that the developers should’ve dealt with. I can’t help but feel that the potential for a fan base to grow could’ve been achieved had the game been released on the Xbox 360 or PS3 as a downloadable title with online support rather than a semi-rare PS2 game. But in its current form, Arcana Heart is nothing but pent-up frustration waiting to explode.

3 stars. It’s a game that needs to get laid and bad.

Street Fighter 4: The real console version

Gonna burn some muscle.




Street Fighter 4: A BRAND NEW Street Fighter video game. That’s right, not a “Turbo Edition” of an existing one, not a crossover fighter with SNK or someone else with reused sprites from 1996, a brand new actual fighting game, and you can even unlock Sheng Long, the fighter EGM magazine made up for an April Fools joke back in 1992. Proof positive that a fly stepped on in prehistoric ages will have huge ramifications in the future.

Story : Street Fighter 4 takes place after the events of Street Fighter 2, and judging by how every character from Street Fighter 2 appears here without a change to their look, style or personality, it’s safe to say that nothing of note happened during Street Fighter 2. Well, Bison died and came back to life, and that seems to be it, so in case you didn’t dawn on this sooner, the Street Fighter story is equal to your typical children’s action cartoon, complete with obscenely muscular men throwing punches that their giant biceps couldn’t handle. I’ve seen a handful of Street Fighter animes in my life (and one really bad movie) so I’m electing to adopt the series “Street Fighter 2: V” as the official franchise canon, if just for the hilarious catchphrases and episode titles such as “The Natural Energy Wave: The Secret of the Natural Energy Wave” and “The Iron Man with the Secret Mission: The Ultimate Rescuers are Dispatched.” Speaking of which, when you play arcade mode, you are greeted with a unique anime cutscene introduction and ending for each character, and you’ll be lucky if the prologue and epilogue are even connected, as there’s often no rhyme or reason behind the depicted events. I’m rather partial to some of them though, such as Fei Long’s attempts to film a kung-fu action movie about fighting terrorists is being threatened by Bison’s real terrorists, and Zangief seems to insist that he protect kayfabe and prove that wrestling is real to little kids.

It’s funny how regression can be viewed as evolution sometimes. Just as how games like New Super Mario Bros and Mega Man 9 became hit sensations for stripping away all of the changes made in the last decade and a half to their forefathers, we have Street Fighter 4 working its ass off to erase the existence of Street Fighter 3 from the consciousness of the consumer conscience. The last Street Fighter game (well the last actual Street Fighter game) stuck with luscious 2D art and animation over disgusting but then-vogue 3D polygons (stressing the word polygon), disposed of almost all of the original characters in favor of some fresh and interesting faces and invoked a parry system that turned freak gamers with ungodly timing into quarter-dumping deities. It was bold in retrospect and several longtime fans will swear by its last revision, Third Strike, as the best fighting game ever made, but the absence of Guile’s manly backflips proved too unnerving for the mainstream audience.

The only mention of Street Fighter 3 in this game is a brief cameo by the Yin/Yang boys in one of the cutscenes.

In their stead, we get all 12 characters from Street Fighter 2, all fighting like it was 1994 all over again. They look the same, they act the same, they fight the same…or at least try. It would appear that old age has shortened the length of E. Honda’s arms as he doesn’t have the gusto to reach out as far as he used to for his thousand hand slaps. Inversely, recent steroid scandals have done little to phase Zangief’s resolve as the latest in performance enhancements allow him to walk through fireballs and piledrive opponents with Ivan Drago-like efficiency. And Balrog developed a personality beyond being a general goon. You can unlock other characters too, namely all the predictable fan-favorites: Akuma, Sakura, Dan (though Dan has never fit into a game more than he does here), Cammy, the previously mentioned anti-terror martial artist Fei Long, Gen for some reason, Rose for some other reason and SHENG….Gouken appears to be his name, and he makes a formidable impression in his first game after about 16 years of starring in assorted fan-fiction pieces.

I like most of the new characters, if just because they’re not Ryu clones but have unique fighting styles, though originality is not a strong suit in their design. C. Viper is an amalgamation of every single female character (and a few effeminate men) from SNK in every way possible. Abel’s fighting style is supposed to resemble that of some kind of jacked up mixed martial artist, except his backstory depicts him as made in a lab, so perhaps he’s a play on Fedor Emelianenko, but without the charisma. El Fuerte is the cooking El Santo, a luchador, following the recently installed guideline that every freaking fighting game franchise MUST have a luchador; though he’s less about grapple attacks than he is about running a lot and confusing opponents. Rufus endears himself to me the most; he’s a fat guy with victory speeches too long to be read within the given time (I’m sure one of them involves masturbation) and he’s got some fun surprise attacks in his arsenal. Finally, Seth, the final boss, is a big blue naked muscular man, and thus a ripoff of Super Smash Bros Brawl ripping off Watchmen.

The new characters are unique enough in their approaches that it gives whiny punks who cry for change (like me) something to experiment with while the rest of the world latches on to Ken. And I’ll admit that there exists the obvious advantage in using so many familiar faces in that anyone that’s played Street Fighter 2 can immediately pick up Street Fighter 4 and hit somebody with little a learning curve. Call an unfair advantage over the recent attempts at new and original fighters, the Arcana Hearts and Battle Fantasias and hell, even the Mortal Kombat vs DC Universes of the world. The gameplay mechanics here best resemble Street Fighter 2; as in, no illogical air-blocking or parrying, and thus the fireball becomes a tactical threat again. Despite the near 16 year old gameplay style, some new tweaks and in particular, the outstanding art direction, give Street Fighter 4 an aura of freshness to a long stale series. The painting-esque style, the brush-stroke effects, the over-voiced mid-fight trash-talk (which you can flip from English to Japanese if you’re trying to impress someone in your mind), the smooth animation and the dynamic facial expressions all work together to bring these age-old characters to life in ways that pre-drawn 2D sprite artwork never could. Even the recent remake Super Street Fighter 2 HD Remix feels lifeless and pre-programmed in comparison.

About the gameplay tweaks; in the place of parries, there’s some kind of super EX attack that you charge up and release with the X and A…uhhh, I mean MP and MK buttons. This can absorb a single blow and still strike, and likewise can briefly stun your opponent or break their guard. These are more supplemental than mandatory (i.e. YOU DON’T NEED THEM) but they help if you know them. Your super meter is fragmented, and you can use smaller portions to release stronger versions of your special attacks or one big super special attack… which I guess is kind of like Street Fighter 3. On top of that, there’s a side meter that fills as you sustain damage, and you can unload a really strong, really flashy super duper death murder attack once it’s full. So the learning curve for a fighting game veteran is rather small, but I wish the game had some optional in-game tutorials to explain the newer concepts to new players, being that Street Fighter 4 is more or less the sole ambassador of the 2D fighting genre (to my dismay, getting someone to play Guilty Gear is easier said than done.) I know it’s rather old-school to force the user to read the instruction manual, but most gamers of this day and age would rather not acknowledge its existence. Manuals are a relic from an age where trying to explain concepts in games would waste precious bytes of data on the restricted memory formats of yesteryear.

The game has this large insistence on making the user unlock stuff, regardless of value. To unlock the hidden characters, you’ll have to find yourself beating Arcade mode with every existing character in the game. Fortunately, you can turn the difficulty down all the way, set each fight to one round and fly through a single character’s life story in five minutes. You have to go to Challenge Mode to unlock alternate character palette colours, costumes, concept art, movies and very useless crap…and this part is reluctantly important; you can create a virtual persona that solely consists of in-game one-inch avatars and pre-determined titles like “punch-drunk!” and “full of beans!”, both of which need be unlocked rather than just letting the players choose their own slogans and personalities.

There exists this long series of Survival mode challenges (beating opponents with a set time or health limit) and trial challenges (perform certain moves and combos for each character) within the game. The former is flawed because each series of challenges is more or less the same, repeated 50 times over. The latter is flawed because the game offers no way to preview the combination you’re trying to execute (like in a Tekken or Virtua Fighter) and thus you have no frame of reference for how to perform the task at hand. Both of which are flawed because most of the rewards are crap; you can barely survive a 20-man edge of your seat gauntlet challenge and only unlock a single title like “master student.” And there seems to be hundreds of these titles and avatars in the game, crying out for you to unlock and spend an ungodly amount of time repeating the same 5 minutes of gameplay 50 times over.

So completionist freaks are going to have their hands full for awhile. The rest of the world need only bother with the other, more conventional fighting game modes. Arcade mode is what it is, though the AI can put up a bit of a fight. In a strange twist that I’m sure is meant to mimic the arcade experience of being challenged by random strangers, you can allow random players online to challenge you mid-game, which I quickly turned off being as how if I wanted to face human competition, I’d go to the ONLINE mode instead. Fortunately, once you do opt to play online, the experience is by and large lag-free, the human competition is more than game, and you can find hours of your life slipping by as you decide to go for one more match.
Truth be told, any issue I could nitpick about Street Fighter 4 won’t really present an effect on the desired gameplay experience of the player. Said desired experience being “unlock all the damn characters, then just play online or versus with friends until Street Fighter 4 Turbo comes out” And really, Street Fighter excels at being so friendly to play with others. You can gather a bunch of old buddies together from the Street Fighter 2 days and relive your memories with new technicolour visuals, or learn the new tweaks and challenge Kens from all over the world. Street Fighter 4 walks a thin tightrope, giving hardcore shoryuken.com forumites something new to tinker with, exploit and complain about while dunking quarters in the arcades for the next ten years, and providing the old fans a chance to sonic boom/flash kick their way back into the limelight.

Pros : The Street Fighter 4 intro cutscene is rather stylish.

Cons : The Street Fighter 4 main theme is some kind of boy band abomination

4 1/2 stars

Deadly Creatures

Deadly Creatures: A game about a scorpion and a spider, the type of alliance you’d normally only see in comics when the writer is running out of ideas.

Story : Dennis Hopper and Billy Bob Thornton lend their voices to a pair of hillbillies looking for treasure in the desert. Except you’re not playing as Dennis Hopper and Billy Bob Thornton, you’re playing as a tarantula and a scorpion, who’s own paths in life only briefly intersect with that of said hicks. It’s akin to a documentary having a pointless fake story to keep the kids from falling asleep, except the dialogue isn’t hilariously bad. I’m not too sure if the scorpion and spider have their own motivations; the game has some kind of “don’t fuck with the desert” message behind it so maybe they’re trying to expel the humans, and since scorpion and spider will occasionally spar with each other, they could have some kind of Ryu/Ken ancient rivalry, but otherwise their intentions seem to consist of minding their own business.

Though a lot of the intrigue that comes from Deadly Creatures may very well be from the nature of your arachnid heroes. These aren’t mystical animals with cartoonish voices, they’re not some Fly-like experiment where human brains are transplanted into animals, they don’t have any personality besides the mindset of “kill, eat, move on”… in fact there’s almost no attempt made to personify them. They’re just…bugs, and the developers at Rainbow Studios were content to let the excellent motion capture work alone establish the protagonists as the creepy crawlies they are. If you’ve ever been mesmerized by how a spider moves from watching Discovery Channel or ever tapped on the glass at a pet shop, you’ll understand where I’m coming from. They walk like bugs, eat like bugs, not really fight like bugs…

You’ll have to suspend a bit of disbelief when it comes to certain aspects of combat. Tarantula, for example, seems to be some kind of genetic hybrid of every species of spider you learned about in school. He/she can leap in the air like a jumping spider, poison enemies like a black widow, and web zip to certain areas like Spider Man. Combat consists of a combination of button presses and Wiimote shakes, and even if you’ve never seen it, you have to believe that spiders can fight by swinging their legs in tandem like clubs as well as jumping into enemies, spinning and holding their legs out like a living ninja star. But spider combat is actually fairly enjoyable, being that you can’t block and thus have to jump around to evade attacks. And the game keeps things fresh by consistently introducing new techniques (developed by…eating your prey). It’s always satisfying to leap two feet onto an unsuspecting enemy, web-trap them, charge up a poison bite, or knock them on their back so you can feast on their stomach and recover health.

On the flipside, scorpion is less reminiscent of alternate insect species than he is every action game hero of the last three years. I’ve never seen a scorpion execute a three hit canned combo, flinging him/herself around with this kind of agility, but this is a scorpion that enjoyed some Devil May Cry. Scorpion has a block button like he’s Mortal Kombat Scorpion, and has a series of combos and finishing moves to keep things interesting. After beating on an enemy long enough, you’re given a button prompt, God of War-style, and have to execute a series of quick-time event Wiimote waggles to finish off your foe. It’s a bit of a struggle to get the game to recognize the motion that you’re trying to pull off, but it’s hard not to smile when you’re jabbing your stinger into the skull of a rat, watching the pest screech in pain. I am a bad human being. Actually, the Wii motion sensors are mostly responsive, but not always in the way you want. For example, to get scorpion to burrow underground and try to ambush an enemy, you have to turn the remote upside-down, but the game frequently mistakes this motion for the “ninja star spinning attack towards your enemy” attack.

There’s nothing complex about the game design; you move from point A to point B in a mostly linear fashion, and along the way you thin out the pest population. There’s almost no puzzle solving to be had, not that I missed having puzzles. The spider has a bit of diversity in that he sometimes has to web zip him/herself towards predetermined locations, while scorpion can dig through predetermined walls (just another excuse to shake the remotes a lot.)

But in spite of this formulaic gameplay design, it’s hard to not get lost in the miniature world of Deadly Creatures. The levels, while linear, are clever in design, aiming for the same “small objects become huge monuments of wonder” design that Shiguru Miyamoto tried to execute with Pikmin, but with less charm and more intentional discomfort. Walking by a deserted motorcycle or the two hillbillies produces something of an ominous vista. And being that your characters can walk on walls, there’s a sense of vertigo in climbing along ceilings or spiraling tunnels. I’ve never seen a game get so much diverse and intriguing scenery out of a desert setting. And likewise, the game taps into a primal urge to challenge any wild creatures that approach your way. Even though all of the battles are forced, you’ll never want to run away; rather you’ll take offense to any rat, lizard or fleet of spiders that has the audacity to block your way.

The game has some minor blemishes; the game occasionally stops to load the next part of the level. Occasionally, enemies will fall through walls and either die or become trapped and lead to an easy kill. But really, any complaints one can levy against Deadly Creatures will be negated by two facts.

One is that this is a game about a scorpion and a spider. Thus, there is nothing like it on the market. Deadly Creatures is surprisingly immersive, a game that’ll pull you in, consume your focus and have you seeing critters in your sleep if you allow it.

Two is that it’s a good Wii game, and depending on what you constitute to be a good Wii game, we haven’t gotten one in a long time. In particular, it’s a good Wii game for males, and for the man who’s had to deal with his woman play Wii Fit or Wii Play, forcing her to watch you play Deadly Creatures is satisfying revenge.

4 stars

Suddenly, the Wii is getting good games again! This, House of the Dead, Madworld next month…not too surprisingly none of them are from Nintendo.

Sonic's Ultimate Sega Genesis Collection

So the first 2009 release that I review is going to be a bunch of old games!



Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection: A really big compilation of Sega Genesis games.

Story: Once apon a time, Sega mattered in the same way that In Living Color mattered. Names like Sonic and Golden Axe were once meaningful to a young, badditude-loving generation of aspiring Bart Simpsons and Jonathon Taylor Thomases before they were butchered, maimed and turned into werewolves, and the ratio of good to bad Sega games was closer to 2 to 1 as opposed to “Valkyria Chronicles to everything else.” The Genesis was the system of choice for cool kids, and every other kid on the block had their system plugged in with a Sonic, X-Men, Ecco and NHL game (well, here in Canada anyways) and now here’s a compilation that lets you relive half of those memories.

This is the second attempt at some kind of crazy super Sega Genesis collection, the kind of anthology you’d wish Nintendo would do with their systems instead of forking us over for more money by re-releasing every title individually. The previous Sega Genesis Collection on the PS2 and PSP were solid but incomplete sets, and this professed ULTIMATE Collection rounds out the package a bit more smoothly by, replacing such duds like Ecco Jr and the dumbed-down Virtua Fighter port with, say, all the Streets of Rage games.

If you love to beat up assorted ugly people, you’re going to enjoy this set. Finally, all the Streets of Rage games are available and they may as well be worth making the upgrade from the previous collection by themselves. All the Golden Axes are here too, plus an odd little burn-em-up called Alien Storm that I didn’t know about before, where a yellow-spandex chick, a robot and a muscular dude beat up grotesque aliens with their flamethrowers (in other words, all the things kids thought were cool in the 90s.) There’s also Altered Beast, and your opinion on Altered Beast will vary on if you played it when it first came out (if yes, you probably loved it. If no, then it’s a nuisance to play). I know that beat-em-ups aren’t as popular in this day, or at least ones not disguised with Greek mythology and shiny swinging fire blades, but getting a friend over and beating up skeletons is always a raucous fun time.

On that note, if I can make a complaint about the set, it’s that many of these games are hard and were designed for the player to die a lot and start over. Back then, we didn’t know better; dying meant our mothers won and we had to start our homework and try again another day, but in 2008 this doesn’t really fly. I would’ve loved to have seen the option to add unlimited continues added ala Metal Slug Anthology. You can sort of fake infinite lives with the Save/Load feature, akin to the Save State feature that you’ll see in emulators where you can create a save at any point in a game, but even this is inefficient for many games.

Going back to things that make me happy, platformers! Sonic 1-3 and that Knuckles game are present in what amounts to almost every Sonic game that matters. However you can’t fake connect Sonic and Knuckles to the other games as far as I can tell like you could with the real game. There’s also the oddball pinball game Sonic Spinball and the oddball failure at being “hip” with 3D gameplay, Sonic 3D Blast. You can see a lot of Sega’s attempts at being trendy to young kids of the era here with games like Decap Attack (a platformer starring a zombie that attacks things with his face) and Kid Chameleon (a platformer starring a kid with sunglasses and hair gel who wears a helmet and becomes a samurai, or a tank, or a bunch of things). Both games are the 90s equivalent of Saint’s Row in terms of trying to be “with it”, but they’re both pretty fun, simple and tough platformers in their own right. If you haven’t played Ristar before, you’ll be in for an odd treat; a fun (albeit slow-paced) platformer with solid and creative level design and largely the same gameplay mechanics as the show-stealer of the entire compilation, Dynamite Heady. Here’s a game that I’m glad I finally get the chance to sit down and play! It’s got this whole theme of being a platformer that’s really a stage play, and the levels are creative and there’s plenty of imaginative set pieces and…well what I guess I’m trying to say is that if you haven’t played it before, now’s as good a time as any. There’s also Vectorman 1 and 2, two really tough shooters starring a collection of floating balls, and E-SWAT, a less original shooter about some guy who shoots…guys.

Oh, and Shinobi 3 is a game about a ninja that throws daggers at enemies, and it has levels where you ride a horse and a surfboard battling other ninjas.

The other treat for me is Beyond Oasis, a Zelda-like adventure that I never got to play, with some kind of funky Arabian vibe. It’s fairly solid, and definitely more accessible than the other RPGs included. To the delight of old-school RPG fans (and I mean REALLY old school), all of the Phantasy Star and Shining Force/In the Darkness games are here, for people that love to grind levels and look up strategy guides on the internet for how to finish a level. And there’s a game called “Fatal Labyrinth” that I booted up, got attacked by some dude from behind, couldn’t figure out what to do about it, and flipped the game off.

There’s a few interesting games that at least give the impression that Sega was willing to experiment and do more than just push mascots with sunglasses and hair gel. Comix Zone had a grownup with sunglasses and hair gel thrown into a virtual comic book; it was unforgiving and unintuitive (you’ll welcome that Save State feature) but it’s a unique concept that begs to be revisited. Bonanza Bros featured what I can only describe as Mega Blocks characters robbing buildings, and you could do it with another player split-screen. Ecco 1 and 2 were these really tough side-scrollers about a dolphin, and while the art style is stunning, the games are rather frustrating and confusing to play and navigate. On the less original front, there’s the tired tile puzzle game Columns and the Puyo-Pop ripoff (albeit a sufficiently fun ripoff,) Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine. Gain Ground is some weird gauntlet ripoff that boasts about having 100 playable characters, but when each character is the size of a gnat, it’s hard to colour me impressed.

I also like the unlockable bonus features. There’s a slew of developer retrospective interviews, and a handful of unlockable Master System and arcade games. The requirements for unlocking them are mostly civil without being unforgiving, but the better games require playing the duds. For example, to unlock Space Harrier, you need to get a certain score on the first level of the slower, clunky Space Harrier clone Super Thunder Blade. To get the cult favorite shooter Fantasy Zone, you need to play the cult-less, Mappy-esque Flicky, a weird arcade-style game with technology that makes it seem like Kid Chameleon programmed it but has a simple, fun charm to it. You can also unlock the original Shinobi, the original Phantasy Star, the better looking and somewhat tolerable arcade version of Altered Beast, and for the sake of having name-dropped every game in this review: Zaxxon, Alien Syndrome, Golden Axe Warrior and Congo Bongo. But why no Outrun?

Now, I wouldn’t be the 16-bit fanboy I know I am if I didn’t talk about omissions from the otherwise ULTIMATE Sega Genesis Collection. The Treasure-developed Dynamite Heady is present but not their other cult-favorite shooter, Gunstar Heroes. Splatterhouse and Eternal Champions are absent, presumably because they would jack up the ESRB rating on the box. ToeJam and Earl are also absent, presumably because having Kid Chameleon in the game passes the game’s 90s badditude quota. And finally, no licensed games, meaning no X-Men or…Michael Jackson.

But if you take the package as a whole, this ULTIMATE Sega Genesis set is fantastic. It’s a beefy compilation with all the beat-em-ups, platformers and miscellaneous games you can hope for, including several multiplayer, girlfriend-friendly choices. It also makes a mighty fine time capsule, capturing all of the faux style and poser-isms that you get when a Board of Directors puts their creative juices together to piece together the next big mascot. And it’s only $40, the price getting 4 or 5 of these games on the Wii or Xbox online shops.

Pros: All of the cheat codes still work too.

Cons: Okay I forgot to mention one game. “Alex Kidd in the Enchanted Castle.” A game where success and failure depends on Rock, Paper, Scissors…

4 stars.

It’s amazing that I can type up so much more in a review about old Sega games than I can about Resistance 2.

The New Super Mario Bros

New Super Mario Bros: A two-dimensional side scroller in the vein of…Mario Bros.

Story : A dystopian tale of love and loss, examining the inner workings of the human psyche under extreme duress in an age of industrial crisis. Just kidding, Princess gets kidnapped. Though in a sign that this is one of the less important Mario games, it’s Baby Bowser and not full-grown ordinary Bowser that you’ll chase after. I will say this; it’s nice to have a game that doesn’t start with 5 minute introductory credits or forced tutorials explaining how to walk or even any dialogue. There’s a 10 second introduction, and then you get to the jumping and goomba-killing.

This game is meant to be some kind of homage to the original Mario games, which to me seems frivolous being that every Mario game is a homage to the original Mario games. Though NSMB could be considered a homage people actually wanted to play being that it’s a old fashioned sidescroller, akin to the Mario games people actually liked, and not some lame duck baseball or soccer game. You run, you jump, sometimes you fling fireballs, and you like it because it reminds you of when your mom told you to stop sitting in front of the television all day rotting your brain and neglecting your math questions.

A small aside, there are way too many people in the world that don’t quite understand that there’s a button you hold to run faster and thus jump farther. You know who you are.

New Super Mario Bros is supposed to be a spiritual successor to the Old Super Mario Bros, and it’s a strong success in that field. The level design is diverse and stimulating enough to put this game miles ahead of the many, many, many rom hacks, Flash imitators and other attempts to create Mario games by normal people. Though if I had to say that if the game had a weakness, it’s that it’s not trying to be the greatest song of all time and only a tribute…meaning, little in the way of originality.

The big Mario platformers, and especially the recent Mario Galaxy, were so memorable because they were so…strange. It doesn’t make sense for a plumber that can jump really high to deal with giant teethed plants and bullets with angry faces on them, much less doing so wearing a frog suit and on a flying pirate ship. Here, almost all of the enemies, locales and ideas came from the most basic of Mario clichés. And despite rendering the world and all the characters with 3D polygons, there’s no “2 and a half D” use of enemies attacking from the background or anything existing on a plane aside from your own. The level concepts are the usual ideas; land world, water world, fire world, another land world, and so forth, and there’s not a zany suit power-up to turn you into a statue or anything equally absurd.

Well, there’s a few new items. The Fire Flower is here, as is the star, and 3 new toys (which can be bought at certain stores with big coins in case you want to hoard one.) The highly advertised Big Mushroom turns you into a giant behemoth that can plow through everything in your path. It makes a good first impression in the first level watching Mario shrug off koopas and pipes like they’re just rubble, but none of the other levels seem to be designed with this ‘shroom in mind, so I’ve often found myself too big, too trapped or just plain unable to avoid death. Inversely, the mini-mushroom makes you smaller, lighter, more vunerable and able to fit into rare smaller passages. The most dubious and entertaining power-up, however, is the blue shell, where running too fast will transform you into a pinball, bouncing off walls at full speed and probably into a bottomless pit. Reckless shelling will lead to your demise, often actually but I have to admit that pinballing it up has its zany sense of fun.

It seems that bringing back old 2D franchises in their semi-original glory is the hip trend in gaming and New Super Mario Bros is a worthwhile follower. It’s far from the most memorable game in the franchise, and it’ll fit on the lower end of the totem pole of Mario platformers, but a lower-end Mario game is still better than the vast majority of portable games on the market. The levels are mostly short, but that works for the game’s handheld format; as levels are ideal for a quick bus ride or such. It’s certainly one of the stronger DS titles out there, and you’d do well to carry a copy on you.

Pros: The Single-cart multiplayer mode, where you and an opponent race in a single area for stars, makes a fun minor distraction.

Cons: Very forgettable bosses, very forgettable touch-screen mini-games. The “hidden” levels are mostly the more forgettable stages.

4 stars.

And my word that I’ll review Mario Galaxy.

Resistance 2

Resistance 2 : The First Person Shooter of the Month! In particular, Sony’s fifth or sixth-odd attempt at mimicking Halo, including all the Killzones and Hazes of the world.

Story : Why it’s the ever popular Humans versus Aliens! Actually I’m not quite too sure what these “Chimera” are supposed to be. Are they’re alien invaders, a virus that infects humans, or a combination? That had to have gotten those spaceships and lasers somehow. The game’s explanation is a bit confusing and their background isn’t explored beyond “these guys bad, shoot their heads.” You play as Nathan Hale, an especially skilled US soldier who’s trying his absolute hardest to adopt the Master Chief’s personality, and at least manages to capture his lack of charisma. The story’s a throwaway, with the one humourous bit being that characters who are standing right next to you will still feel the need to communicate to you over their radio headsets.

Resistance 2 is a game that tries its damnedest to be like Halo. Like Halo, you and a squad of armoured AI marines (who are mostly there for show) battle legions of aliens. Like Halo, you can only carry two weapons at a time. Like Halo, your health regenerates automatically when you avoid damage. Like Halo, you have separate buttons for melee attacks and grenade tosses. Like Halo, there are no puzzles to solve, just things to shoot. Unlike Halo, Resistance is supposed to be set in the 40 or 50s, which should make it like every other World War 2 shooter out there. But I can’t help but feel that the chance for some interesting, Fallout-style juxtaposition between 40s Americana and war-torn chaos is blown in all but one very clever level set in the suburbs, pitting you against the aliens in houses and a diner shootout. Otherwise all the levels are military bases, alien ships and warehouses. Kind of like Halo.

That said, the parts of Resistance that aren’t…well…like Halo, strike me as the game’s strongest attributes. For example, I’ve never seen secondary fire from weapons used to such great effect, and it extends further than “this weapon also shoots grenades and this weapon can add a silencer.” Magnums have manually-detonated exploding bullets, the alien gun has a tracking device that makes all the bullets home in on a target, another alien gun shoots through walls…okay Perfect Dark did some of this first, but we don’t see a lot of these ideas often. The weaponry helps keep things fresh, along with a bevy of enemy types ranging from bullet-soaking big monsters to annoying zombie thingys that run at you. It’s amazing the difference in a battle between a giant bullet-soaking monster with a rocket launcher paired with a few grunts and a giant bullet-soaking monster with a rocket launcher paired with bigger soldiers who’s bullets pass through walls.

I’d say that Resistance’s greatest victory is that, except for one or two segments near the end of the game, you never feel like you’re just fighting wave after wave of enemies, even though you are. Almost every gunfight feels like an exciting gunfight as opposed to respawning baddies. Supplementing this idea, there’s no cliché gun turret sequence or vehicle sequence, the game one consistent stream alien cyborg scum interfering in your path from Point A to Point B. The Campaign is about 7 hours long, which is long enough, as the experience admittedly gets weary near the end and the final mission in particular feels like a massive dud. Actually, there are few moments in the campaign that stick out of my mind in memory so the game won’t leave any kind of lasting effect on you, but I enjoyed it while it lasted so it’s a good way to kill a week’s worth of gaming.

There are two separate multiplayer components and they all fall under the blanket of what is quickly becoming my least favorite new trend in shooters; grind-based multiplayer. Not that any shooter will call it grind, it may be “perk-based” or “class-based” but it’s grinding, like you grind in an online RPG. Even when you shoot enemies, every bullet makes an experience point number appear above the enemy’s head, as if you were playing World of Warcraft.

Competitive multiplayer has all the usual modes, deathmatch, capture the flag, etc. On paper, the game boasts about being able to have 60 players on a single map, but I struggled to find any game that had more than 15. Otherwise, the plague of perks strikes here too. I’m always going to hate the idea of the game giving competitive edges to those playing for weeks on end over someone who just wants to kill a few minutes every now and then, and the problem seemed to strike me as worse here in Resistance than it did in the Call of Duty games.

On the other hand, Co-operative multiplayer holds up surprisingly well. There’s an original set of levels designed solely for co-op, even if there’s little in the way of story to hold everything together. You choose one of three classes; soldiers have big guns and shields to protect people, medics drain enemy health and use it to heal teammates, and special ops people have long range scopes and give people ammo. It’s easy to keep track of when allies need help, even without a headset (and it seems nobody playing a PS3 online has one!) and there’s a considerably frantic pace in keeping track of everything going on. You’re still fighting waves of enemies, but in spite of the repetition and HEAVY borrowing from MMORPGs, it’s still a unique twist in its own right.

If you asked me to create a lineup of the top ten first person shooters of 2008, number 1 would be “screw that, nothing this year touched Call of Duty 4” but number 2 would be Resistance 2. Though how much you consider it to be worth your hard-earned dollar depends on how much you value your co-operative multiplayer experience, and how badly you need to shoot aliens this very weekend. It’s enjoyable but forgettable, the first person shooter flavour of the month that impresses all with its technology and not too much else, and is only on the collective consciousness of gamers until the next big shooter is released. And Killzone 2 isn’t too far away.

Pros : Challenging on the normal difficulty.

Cons : As such, you’ll die often, and the death melody gets old FAST.

3 ½ stars

I am SO not looking forward to Killzone 2.

Valkyria Chronicles

Valkyria Chronicles: The shiny, big-eyed fantasy and magic version of World War 1.

Story: So two fictitious nations in a fake version of Europe are waging war over a fake non-renewable energy source. Along the way, Welkin, a teenage aspiring teacher with no military experience, gets involved with Alicia, a teenage aspiring trooper with slight military experience, and the two of them survive an assault on their hometown by the enemy. They are recruited into the army and are IMMEDIATELY appointed commanders of their own unit above people with, well, actual experience. This is the anime version of World War 1, meaning your group can comprise of big-eyed young teens of assorted genders and sexualities, 24 is old enough to be considered a salty veteran, most of the ladies have revealing skirts that do nothing to shield them from bullets or wind, there’s a mystical force that gets awakened, a secret conspiracy behind everything and a heaping scoop of dialogue. There are way too many cutscenes, and not enough of them are optional, but the characters are likable enough that you’ll find the cockles of your heart warmed as they start to bond and overcome their prejudices. And I guess the art style helps a bit.

Realism is my bane in gaming, in part because I have no first hand experience in most fields covered in games aside from being a virtual couch potato (thank you Grand Theft Auto 4.) I can’t handle a realistic sports game because I have no idea how to realistically choose plays for a virtual team and scout virtual free agents. I can’t handle a realistic racing game because I have no clue which virtual shocks will make my virtual car handle turns better. I can’t do realistic Tom Clancy shooter games because I have no clue how one should control a virtual team of elite troops and barge into a room filled with terrorists. And I can’t do a realistic strategy RPG because I have no idea how to realistically manipulate a team of black mages against a group of magic-wielding virtual goblins.

I can’t seem to handle a strategy RPG. I’ve heard people praise the genius of games like Disgaea and Final Fantasy Tactics, but it seems like I never seem to know enough about the units or required tactics to understand what the fuss is about. Of course, it could also be due to the grinding required to succeed. I get the idea that you need to redo missions repeatedly to level up your units, classes, sometimes even individual weapons! And if you make a new character, it seems that he or she will start at level 1 and you’ll need to grind levels to get him up to par with the rest of your team. Both of which are reasons are why I like Valkyria Chronicles.

For one, the class system follows a K.I.S.S. mentality. Scouts can run far and shoot people, Shocktroopers can mow down people in close range, Lancers can fight tanks, Tanks can fight everything, Engineers offer assorted gimmick utilities and Snipers pick off people from a long distance and die from other snipers. Classes level up as a whole rather than by individual units, a monumental improvement from every single strategy RPG I tried to play. The experience you win from missions can be assigned to the class of your choice (with the only sacrifice being that you have to listen to the annoying drill sergeant repeat the same dialogue every time you go to the “training room” menu.) There’s a bit of grind, regrettably; if you feel like you need to level up any given class more or make some money for upgrades, you’ll have to replay “skirmish” missions, which are essentially story missions without the story bits. I’d like for the rewards of completely such skirmish missions to be more generous, but alas. It helps that the gameplay is enjoyable enough that you may not mind at all the grind.

That’s right, I didn’t mind the grind! So Valkyria Chronicles is a miracle akin to Barack Obama being America’s first black president, in that it’s the first strategy RPG that I liked!

Well, I think that’s a big deal anyways.

Another key note is that you’re actually tasked with the recruitment of your units. You have a litany of possible recruits, each with a list of people they like working with, as well as unlikely strengths and weaknesses such as “power decrease due to pollen allergy” and “accuracy increase from motherly instincts.” Not electing to follow everyone’s individual preferences in ice cream flavor won’t cripple your tactics, but at the same time, you’ll find yourself picking favorites in your squad. I’m guessing that this game was developed by the Skies of Arcadia team, partly because you can recruit a few members from that game in your army, and partly because it’s the only rational explanation for a 2008 release by Sega actually not sucking.

The actual gameplay can be described as a hybrid of Fire Emblem and Brothers In Arms. You select which party members enter the fray along with Welkin in his tank. The game is turn-based, but rather than only being allowed to move every unit once, you’re allotted a set number of points to expend however you like, be it on making your tank do all the dirty work, giving “orders” (stat boosters in a nutshell) or saving said points for another turn. That’s another thing I like about this game over, say, Fire Emblem; with enough moxie, you can, for example, sneak a single unit behind enemy lines, pick off key enemies and then send in your army the next turn. And call me ignorant in the genre to make such a statement if you like, but it’s nice to see a strategy RPG depend so much on actual strategy instead of what level your units are.

The “Brothers In Arms” part of my Brothers In Arms/Fire Emblem siamese combination comes in the rain of bullets. When moving around, enemy units will open fire, and you can lose a trooper on your own turn if you’re reckless enough, so cover and smart unit placement is critical. The Fire Emblem half sticks his head out once again once your unit runs out of health. It’s possible that you can lose a beloved party member, but unlike Fire Emblem where a cheap ambush or underestimating an enemy will cause that black mage you’ve been trying to level up to die and force you to restart the mission or else carry on without him/her, here you’re given a chance to save your favorite spiky-haired soldiers by sending someone else to recover them.

Which is greatly appreciated, as missions can be quite merciless. More often than not, you will not be finishing a mission on the first go, as the game will often throw unexpected ambushes by divine angels or mortar shells from the heavens. A well-played assault can blow up in your face because of an unexpected set of reinforcements. Be sure to save often, and be grateful that you can create as many saves as you’d like over the Fire Emblem games.

You can’t quite power-play Valkyria Chronicles like one would be able to with other RPGs. I found myself playing a mission, losing, getting angry, and then trying the mission again the next day with a new gameplan and a new outlook on life. And every time I would get angry over a cheap enemy sniper attack or goddess assault, I knew that I’d be able to exact my vengeance another day. So you need a bit of patience to play through Valkyria Chronicles, but the uniqueness of it all and the game’s ability to avoid most of the genre pitfalls makes it stand out as one of the Playstation 3’s strongest games. In my mind, this is the best original gameplay concept of 2008 that doesn’t fall flat on its face. And quite frankly, I don’t care if I’m the only one that thinks this is special, but me liking a strategy RPG is big deal!

Pros : I’ve neglected to mention that there’s a really interesting cel-shaded-pencil-crayon-thingy art style used in the game.

Cons : The game is becoming hard to find in stores. So if you find it, buy it while you can!

4 stars.

Fire Emblem almost became the first strategy RPG that I liked, but the game kept finding cheap and deranged ways to kill my units and test my will to restart missions or carry on.