Super Mario Bros 3

So here we have a game that the Guinness Book of World Records proudly proclaims to be the best selling game of all time. When I went to the Guinness museum in Niagara Falls, they had a nice little display with a Game Boy Advance set up for anyone that wanted to play Mario 3 for themselves. And while I was eager to sit down and play through the entire game in that one sitting like the platforming geek that I am, this was New Year’s Eve and we were quickly running out of year. So I had to be on my merry way and get to the Loverboy concert. Silly little personal anecdote to bring up, but I thought it was a more original way to start a Mario 3 review than “Super Mario Bros 3 is one of the greatest games blah blah blah.” I will, however, be a sad man when I go to that same museum years from now and find a desktop set up and someone’s dwarf mage out in the middle of the desert in honor of World of Warcraft’s possible dethroning of this platforming icon.

While the 20-plus year old game had sold an excess of 17 million copies in its heyday, that its been released on the Wii Virtual Console is as good an excuse as any to give Super Mario Bros 3 the review treatment. After all, most NES games haven’t quite aged gracefully, so at least there exists a looming threat that I won’t be five-starring this reveled game.

The “plot” if you will, is a few coloured shades above most NES games in that you can figure out the gist of things without reading the manual. I’ll also argue Mario 3 is a few pixilated shades above most current games in that it needs no lengthy introductory cutscene to set itself up. Bowser has transformed the seven kings of the land into strange animals, Mario must do something about it. Simple, trivial, but non-intrusive to the game. Occasionally, when I reach the King’s castle and see the mutated royalty on his throne, I’d wish for the text dialogue Toad is spewing to hurry up so I can get back to my high-jumping action, but ‘tis a small complaint.

The core gameplay mechanics of a Mario game comprise of “run” and “jump” with an emphasis on the “jump”. It’s almost baffling to see a new player pick up the controller for the first time and not understand that holding the button will make you run faster and thus jump farther. Video game physics were strange back in the day. Along the way, a small Soviet armory’s worth of quirky power-ups trickle into the gameworld: a leaf will give players a Wright Brothers running-start style of flying, fire flowers let you spew flaming balls of American glory, a frog suit will make Mario a…frog, and swim better…there’s a plethora of small and odd powerups. While their strength is fleeting (take a single hit from an enemy and it’s back to being regular old chubby Mario), there’s an aura of uniqueness that comes in walking around with a Hammer Bros suit that most games of today seem to neglect. The power-ups are introduced at a gradual, logical pace and thus feel special rather than overbearing and done to death the way most games will treat a unique mechanic (think gun turrets in Killzone 2).

But whether players acknowledge it or not, it’s the level design that puts the game ahead of other would-be platformers, and games in general. Every individual stage has a unique layout, with unique enemies and obstacles, and unique solutions. There are also hidden paths, alternate routes, stashed away power-ups, and the presence of assorted coins and treats for players that feel inclined to explore with their flying raccoon tail powers. If the game has a stray weakness, it’s that you can’t replay levels at your leisure; say you want to relive the Kuribo’s Shoe level over and over, you’d have to replay the first 40-odd levels (or cheat and use the hidden whistle) to get there. Though perhaps the counter-argument to this statement is that this inhibits players from hoarding particular power-ups at will.

Between stages, there’s a sweeping overworld…now these have become common enough that seeing on in Mario 3 isn’t so much of a big deal. You get the occasional branching path that lets you choose one level if another gives you too many problems, but you’ll probably find yourself wanting to experience every individual level for yourself. Also between levels, you have a small sect of slot/memory-based games to earn extra lives and powerups. All of those funky-strange-groovy powerups can be hoarded in the overworld to a limited degree, and used at any point. So if you wanted to jump into a level and start with a super-star, you can! If you’re feeling really wily, see if you can beat the game without losing a Tanooki suit. While wearing a real life Tanooki suit. I’m sure someone has cosplayed as the thing before at least!

It’s amazing how no one really cared to question the strangeness of the Tanooki suit back in its heyday.

My real, real (for real this time) biggest gripe with the original game was how you couldn’t save your progress midway, but fortunately the Wii’s strange save feature corrects this.

Mario 3 is one of those games that manages to remain a great deal of fun, even after all of these years and having all-but-memorized every hidden trick and secret. The levels, the items, the overall wackiness, the inventive drug-fueled imagination, they’re all there. And the game only costs about $5 on the Virtual Console. Unless you already own some kind of previous version of Mario 3, you may as well grab this one.

5 stars.

Mass Effect

I’m not exactly the kind of person who jumps for joy every time another sequel is announced to a gaming landscape that is peppered with sequels. (Some game sequels even have their own sequels; look at Call of Duty or the Tom Clancy games.) Yet, my brain will all but completely block out the existence of a new franchise, regardless of what, if any new ideas it may bring to the buffet table that is the holiday season. Mass Effect went unnoticed by me for a good seventeen months, and I only found myself finally making the dip into my wallet because it was a meager ten dollars. Perhaps it was the look; the game was presented as another science fiction RPG, ground that Bioware itself (among others) have long since explored with their Star Wars-or-Star-Wars-Like role playing games. But it also had elements of a science-fiction shooter, a genre explored by pretty much every other developer. In my mind of minds, combining two uninspired genres does not make for an original idea, so I left it to float in space and denounce its existence like scientists denounced Pluto as a planet.

If Mass Effect did one thing right, it made me feel bad for neglecting its existence all this time.

On the surface, the game struck me as some kind of fanboy’s twisted dream of the Star Wars and Star Trek universes combined. You play a Mister or Missus Shepherd; a proud human whose past is left partially to the player (you can’t, however, dictate Shepherd’s love of the gym for he/she is in tremendous shape.) You’re asked to represent humanity and some grand government council as a top law-enforcing superpowered Jedi-thingy and stop a renegade former law-enforcing superpowered Jedi-thingy from doing bad things. At first glance, I found myself getting into the habit of typecasting species and characters; you have your Jedi, your Klingons, your Vulcans, your Borg, your Jawas, your random evil alien monsters, and so forth.

But what I wasn’t expecting was for the game to come up with new and interesting plot ideas and twists for these characters. I’m halfway scared that a science-fiction guru will try to correct me on this statement and reference some book that I’ll never be made to read, but I can’t remember seeing many of the plot twists in the past, and I found myself being oddly intrigued by the unfolding events. Now, being that I’m trying to sell you on the game, I won’t be giving away any of these twists in this review. A lot of the story plays into the typical Bioware good vs. evil morality play. You have a rating for “Paragon” and “Renegade”, both of which are just fancier terms for good and evil. But there always seems to be a reasonable justification behind the “good” and “evil” arguments in all of your moral choices; there’s no “rob a homeless person because you can” type of options that Bioware’s long-titled Star Wars games resorted to. I will, however, say that you must be patient with this game. And brace yourself for the verbal dam to collapse and a flood of words heavier than my reviews to overwhelm you.

The characters in-game love to talk. They love to reveal their life stories and opinions on matters. There are dialogue trees that’ll make Treebeard proud with the size of their branches. It helps that the voice-acting is strong and most of the actual characters aren’t throwaways. Many RPGs have a tendency to feature tomes worth of optional text explaining the history and nature of their fictional homeworld, but Bioware may have risen the bar beyond the ozone layer. There’s a massive virtual universe, with virtual galaxies and virtual planets within them. You can highlight any of these NUMEROUS planets and get detailed geographical information. Like reality, most of these planets are gaseous, can’t be touched down upon and thus meaningless in the grand scheme of your main quest, but that they exist does add a touch of immersion to the game as a whole. And it gives Trekkies a chance to play Virtual Enterprise with their spaceship.

Now, when you’re not talking, then you’re probably shooting at something. The parts of the game where you’re not listening to the emotional woes of the captive-of-the-moment consist of going to an area and shooting things. This is where the game stops cloning Star Trek and starts cloning Gears of War. You take cover with a (usually) functional cover system, you shoot at enemies, enemies shoot at you, yippie-kay-yay. The biggest difference is that how you leveled up your character’s stats has a halfway effect on how badly you’re chipping away at enemy health. So if you’ve always imagined that Gears of War needed to be more statistic-based rather than, well, skill-based, here you go! It’s not quite as fluid and fun as the Gears games but the gun combat is still plenty times more fun than say….Eat Lead.

It’s the class of character that you choose your very own private Shepherd to be that determines the style of play. Soldiers try their hardest to be like Marcus Fenix and shoot things, with their unique twist being that they can use different kinds of weapons. The other two classes, in particular the Adept, proved to be much more interesting for me. The Adept is your equivalent to the “Mage” character whom has no physical protection and thus needs rely on cunning and sly magic tricks to survive. A good Adept must have an assortment of futuristic spells at the ready, including protective spells and ragdoll-physics-abuse traps, to stay alive. Granted, your pistol is still doing all the diplomacy in the end, but it does keep the gunplay more exciting.

The game moves at a mostly-brisk pace. There are never any moments where you are made to stand still and shoot an endless array of respawning goons with guns (thank you very much Knights of the Old Republic.) Focusing on the main quest by itself, the game is about 12 hours long. That may seem paltry by RPG standards, but trust me when I say this is a game worth replaying twice, just to experience several classes and both sides of the moral spectrum.

However, there are a few flow-breaking moments. Occasionally, you’ll be asked to drive in a giant jeep-like vehicle for extended periods to traverse landscapes and shoot things smaller than you. On paper, it’s an idea for mixing up gameplay mechanics, but the vehicle is clumsy to control, and will easily fly into the air at the slightest speed bump. And the inventory system, oh how I hated thee.

The game has a lot of “loot” to raid from crates and other futuristic equivalents to treasure boxes. But none of them fall under the disposable powerup category; the only health items you find are the one single med-pack (of which you can only hold 5) and the only grenade-type weapon is well…the single grenade, of which only five can be carried. No, instead you’ll find weapons….many many weapons. There are about four kinds of weapon-types, along with numerous forms of armor (light human armor, medium human armor, medium Asari alien armor…you can guess where this goes), not to mention individual modifications for weapons and armour. Now, you can’t just tell the game to automatically sell weaker weapons or break them into “omni-gel” (a substance you use to repair/hack into things) and equip the best. For you see, one weapon may be stronger than another but have worse accuracy, so the game hopes that you’ll be the one that wants to make that decision. But each weapon has generic names like “Striker II” or “Stinger IV” that it’s hard to keep track of which brand of weapon is different from what. And you can’t view a weapon’s stats upon picking it up, so you’ll find yourself hoarding every power-up you can find, going into the equipment menu, and then spending more time than you’d like sorting through a long list of items and having to individually tell the game to break down each one into omni-gel. By the end of the game, the entire staff of my spaceship were greasing their hair with all the omni-gel I had hoarded.

And the final boss is a jerk.

That’s about all the bits of space debris that I can cast aside from the intergalactic wonder of Mass Effect. If you have a bit of patience (and I know patience is a dying commodity amongst gamers), then Mass Effect will reward the player with an interesting quest that begs to be played multiple times over. And as of this moment, the game is as cheap as rocks, so it very well may be the new king of the bargain bin. It makes a more accessible king than its former royal highness, Killer7, so I’ll consider this a worthy usurpation.

4 stars

And there’s alien lesbian sex in the game. Though it’s a shade below soap opera sex scenes in terms of sensuality, so sorry boys.

The House of the Dead: OVERKILL!

While scientists theorize as to why the dinosaur went extinct, nobody will ask any questions as to why the light-gun shooter is on the endangered species list of genres. Nor will PETA or the WWF have any remote interest into saving the breed of zombie/terrorist shooting simulators. The arcade, their natural habitat, was deforested by the loggers of Time. Their unwillingness to adapt to modern standards made the public bored in their cause, and left them to be devoured by their evolutionary superior, the first person shooter. The few strays were made to find shelters and cages within the confines of touch screen-based systems, phones, or overpriced bundles with gun controllers. Fortunately, the Wii makes a logical petting zoo for the last remnants of the species to exist, and House of the Dead has managed to breed with some kind of mullet-toting redneck to produce Overkill, the most gloriously bizarre shooter in years.

House of the Dead: Overkill is meant to play homage to 70s B-movies of the most offensive kind. Though I have doubts that many players, let alone the developers at Headstrong games (and certainly not me) have seen these films. So let us call it a tribute to the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino Grindhouse movies that served as a tribute to said flicks. However, those tribute movies feel a bit too serious in comparison to the excess-driven Overkill. Here, a mysteriously dorky Agent G teams with blaxploitationary cop Isaac Washington and gun-toting biker/stripper Varla Guns to stop evil scientist Papa Caesar and his legion of mutanted humans.

Along the way, you’ll find intentionally bad movie editing, raucously excessive voice acting, an overflowing spleen’s worth of gross out humor, film grains, overexposure, all the errors that go wrong at a low-rent theatre and a fantastic 70s soundtrack of dirty funk and dirtier country music. The production values are the rotting, half-eaten heart of Overkill. The South Park-esque humor pervades every aspect of the game and is really something that has to be seen and cringed at for youself. Overkill is a game that has one goal, and that’s to have fun by any means necessary, and this often means taking good taste and choking it with its own fallopian tube.

Reverting back to the other half of Overkill’s family tree, the gameplay is your typical House of the Dead. The Wii sensor is used to aim and B is the disembowel-button. Your other control options are limited to: switching weapons, using the rare grenade, reloading, pausing and the Home button because your fiancée thinks this game is disgusting. It’s a rail shooter, meaning you shoot at the zombies that appear, they become a bloody mess, Isaac Washington yells out profanity, the camera moves on to the next set of zombies looking for a lead transfusion, repeat. Even the bosses follow a simple pattern of “shoot the part of their body that we’re circling here”, followed by more Washington swearing. There’s a bit of an adjusting curve to the camera, as it makes sudden movements like, say, you’re looking through the eyes of an actual human head and not a slow-moving camcorder, but it all helps to give the game a frenetic pace.

If there’s something about Overkill that threatens to bring the experience down, then it would be (ironically) the guns. Money earned from playing the game can be spent to purchase and upgrade guns. And really, anything besides your standard handgun is just too much power and masculinity for these mutants to handle. Shotguns dispose of the undead with a wide firing range with automatic weapons turn your prey into ground undead beef. Likewise, if you’re playing co-op with a friend, then you’ll be doing a rain dance of bullets on your adversaries; it’s fortunate that the game has a button that reads “More Mutants” to somewhat remedy this, but even with this option helping to motivate the zombie menace, light-gun pros will still sweep their way through the main campaign.

Said campaign is about 3-4 hours long by itself, decent by rail-shooter standards but brief when pitted against bigger and more evolved games. Also, in an acute case of the Bioshock Syndrome, your only penalty for running out of health is a points deduction. Thus, beating the default game is more of a formality than an accomplishment.

Once you’ve beaten the game, the much better “Director’s Cut” is unlocked. Here, the levels are longer, continues are limited and the zombies have devoured the flesh of caffeine addicts and will spring at you with full energy. This mode is the way Overkill is meant to be played; however the same problem with gun upgrades reducing your enemies to rotting rubble reoccurs. To combat this, play through as much of the game as possible with your handgun. Thus, progress becomes earned and your reflexes and accuracy will be tested.

Being a light-gun game, the spinal column that holds the experience together is the desire to top your own high scores. In this case, aiming for high scores should be considered a patriotic duty. Earning a high enough score multiplier will have the narrator proclaim that you just had a Goregasm and responds by waving the American flag above your health bar.

You really have to play House of the Dead: Overkill, in some form or another. I’ll understand if the economic crisis has rendered you unwilling to buy a game you can finish before your scabs dry, or if you have some kind of innate grudge against having a good time. But at least rent Overkill if you’re still on the fence. The game is infectiously fun, a wonderful parody, and it lets you kill a lot of things in the simplest way possible. And really, isn’t nine-tenths of gaming all about sense violence anyways?

4 stars.

WWE Legends of Wrestlemania

In the early 90s, the then-WWF was caught amidst a major drug scandal, wherein Vince Mcmahon was accused of giving his performers anabolic steroids. The federal government managed to crash down on one Dr. Zahorian for his prescribing drugs to assorted wrestlers and put him in jail. However, some legal mistakes on the government’s behalf and a claim from Hulk Hogan that he enhanced himself on his own volition allowed Vince Mcmahon to walk away from court a free man. A free man with a company ravaged talent-wise due to drug testing, but a free man nonetheless.

THQ’s video game, Legends of Wrestlemania, is meant to be a retro-oriented time capsule, except it takes place in an alternate realm. Here, nobody ever accused the WWF of foul play, wrestlers were allowed to shoot needles in their asses until they were more jacked than Captain America, and every day is a Wrestlemania Pay Per View set in an economic climate that allows fans to fork over $65 to watch King Kong Bundy in High Definition.

You get a relatively solid sampling of wrestlers throughout the last 20 years that are on Vince’s good side. Perennial 80s favorites like Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Andre the Giant and Roddy Piper are all here, along with 90s icons like Bret Hart, purple-clothes-era Undertaker and dirty-mullet-era Shawn Michaels. Representing the Attitude days are Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock, both of which feel out of place as the only workers of their time, flipping middle fingers and calling Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake a rudy-poo candy-ass.

Now I wouldn’t be the complete mark I am if I didn’t complain about omissions. Absent are current TNA employees like Mick Foley and Kevin Nash for understandable reasons. Less understandable is the absence of Randy Savage, and there are any number of rumors to explain why. Whatever he did has to be pretty vile to be passed up in the video game for the Ultimate Warrior, a man whom had been given his own slanderous DVD documentary. Eddie Guerrero’s presence could’ve at least given Rock and Austin some 90s company for when they feel lonely amidst the Barbers and Elvis impersonators from the 80s. Ricky Steamboat is missing from the roster for absolutely no good reason. And with Michael “PS” Hayes in his Freebird glory, the omission of the other Freebirds (let alone anyone from World Class) becomes a bit obvious.

Fortunately, you can give the roster a nice shot of depth (among other injections) by importing the Smackdown vs Raw 2009 roster in the game. “Importing” isn’t quite the right word being that the character data seems to already be on the disc and is merely unlocked to those who have a SvR save on their hard drive, though I won’t complain; Xbox 360 hard drives are too expensive to want an upgrade and by now, most players’ 10 gig drives are going to be filled with Rock Band songs anyway. Plus you get to have your Rock vs Cena dream match that Duane Johnson casually brushed off as never happening on E!

And why are Ric Flair and Arn Anderson the only present Horsemen?

The characters that are included in the game are mostly true to their real-life counterparts’ moves and mannerisms. The Junkyard Dog will get on his knees and headbutt his opponents in a manner that would never work in a real fight. However, the character models are unrealistic in that they’re all jacked beyond reprieve. Even by the standards of 80s action figures, these guys are so big that it gives any sense of immersion the big boot and leg drop. Hulk Hogan has a back so big that he must be pulling Mack Trucks on a chain as a lat workout, while Brooke works fulltime to keep his movie-screen body oiled up. Greg “The Hammer” Valentine becomes The Pale Incredible Hulk. And old school Undertaker looks absolutely ridiculous in his purple get-up concealing what appears to be some undead cleavage.

The game has Davey Boy Smith, but why not Dynamite Kid?

It appears that THQ and Yukes had opted to simplify the control scheme of the Smackdown games in order to widen the game’s appeal. To which I thought “Great!” The Smackdown vs Raw games, solid as they (sometimes) are, have convoluted, illogical controls that that use every button on the gamepad multiple times over, to a point where I simply deemed the game nigh-impossible to explain to a newcomer. Here, only the face buttons are used, and in a slightly more logical progression. We’re back to grappling with a button instead of a stick (what an intuitive idea! Makes you wonder why they made the switch in the first place) and the game is rife with quick-time event sequences based on actual in-match spots where the first player to press a button gets the advantage. Four out of five times, these are presented in a logical way, but the sequence of special move animations is about as properly edited as a bad horror movie (or a parody mocking a horror movie’s bad editing, thank you House of the Dead Overkill), and can be interrupted. That’s right, the right press of a button can deny the player his hard-earned Stone Cold Stunner. And you’ll have to earn your stunner too; there’s some kind of three-tiered system where you need build up a meter to get the right to use your finisher. But it takes so much effort to get to that point that its simply easier and more effective to punch and stomp your opponent’s health away to victory. So the game is a rather broken in that regard.

Why not Jerry Lawler as a wrestler? It’d be better than his current role as colour-commentator, doing the same hackneyed, terribly edited excuse for commentary that the Smackdown games have become associated with.

You have a handful of gameplay modes. Online play returns but it’s the same laggy, badly coded online play that previous games have suffered with. Or at least laggy in my part of Canada, which may very well be my punishment for well over a decade of “You Screwed Bret” chants. Likewise, Legend Killer mode feels like some kind of punishment for people that cheer for Randy Orton; here, you play through a gauntlet of matches against opponents, with not much in the way of replenishing health and no option to save your progress. The key is that you must play with your created wrestler, which killed my hopes of a heel CM Punk going on an anti-drug rampage against the entire 80s. The idea is that your progress in this mode improves your created wrestler’s stats, and that this is the only way to upgrade a character from his paltry, Barry Horowitz-like initial stats to a superstar. Reaching that status takes a ludicrous amount of effort and grinding; Yukes needs to drop this idea that people enjoy leveling up created wrestlers. This isn’t World of Warcraft, where people are willing to invest hundreds of hours into a single wizard; people are going to use the Create-A-Wrestler (the exact same CAW that appeared in the last Smackdown game by the way) to fill the roster gaps or have their dream Darth Vader vs Mr Clean Hell in a Cell match. And when someone creates a wrestler, they’d like them to actually be able to hang with the existing roster of characters, not be painfully outclassed by them. Sheesh.

Where’s Scott Hall?

The Wrestlemania mode included is a bit more interesting. There are three sub-modes here. In “Relive”, you’re tasked with replaying any number of famous Wrestlemania matches, almost always as Hulk Hogan. First, you’ll be greeted to a video montage showing assorted clips of matches and storylines building up to the real match, and these are, without a doubt, the strongest points of the entire game. Next, you’re given a checklist of spots from the match that you can do to earn points in the goal of earning a medal and unlocking, say, an alternate wrestler costume. One can see that a healthy amount of care went into this mode, as there are quicktime events designed specifically for each match’s memorable spots. Sadly, you’ll run through Relive quickly and be relegated to the other two modes. “Rewrite” makes you play as the loser of a match, while “Redefine” throws a Russo-like stipulation that would’ve made no sense whatsoever in the context of the card in question. You still get the great video packages, but the medal goals are reduced to more redundant challenges like “get three grapple counters” and “hit three ropes off the turnbuckle.” The latter of which made no sense in one match that made me play as Yokozuna.

Speaking of, where’s Lex Luger? The first man to bodyslam Yokozuna?

If any of my complaining about missing wrestlers amounts to anything, it’s that there will more than likely be a sequel to Legends of Wrestlemania next year. I’m more hopeful of the prospects of a future game than anything else, as this current product is shallow and broken. It makes for a good weekend rental to get drunk with and play with friends as you geek out over playing as the Iron Sheik as he finally gets his chance to humble Hulk Hogan, B Brian Blair (another one not in the game), Ultimate Warrior, Chris Jericho and everyone else that needs a broken back. But nostalgia wears thin and this game lacks the depth to achieve immortality. Stick with Smackdown vs Raw for another year and hope that this or the next TNA game live up to their potential with sophomoric releases.

For what it’s worth, the game is better than the Acclaim Legends of Wrestling games of years past.

3 stars

Doink the Clown? Okay I’ll stop.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

More Virtual Console goodness.


While it’s easy to go back and review an old game that you never played or cared much for in the past, reviewing an old game that you grew up on presents a small challenge. My play experience differs from that of other due to having the innate knowledge of how to solve every single puzzle programmed into my cerebellum, and I’d be degrading a part of my childhood if I were to denigrate the game in question. Likewise, if I praise the game too much, then I could be accused of being nostalgic, and I hate the idea of blowing smoke up the ass of a game that already has the collective gaming industry giving it a chimney stack enema. So, I found myself replaying the game, trying not to take for granted aspects that I used to, breaking old gameplay habits and asking myself “if someone who never played this before started now, how would they react?”

After all, what good is it to say “well this game is an innovator, the first to have so-and-so” if players have already experienced so-and-so, but better utilized in other games. The overall impact a game has had on the industry means little to the uninitiated player trying it out for the first time.

So, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

I really couldn’t tell you what the overall story of the game really is, other than the critical points. Young boy discovers he has a fate-based connection to the “hero of legend” and must rescue Princess Zelda, the Triforce and two realms from Ganon, or Ganon in disguise. It’s kind of funny actually, that Ganon, an evil sorcerer, assumes the alter-ego of “Agahnim”, an evil sorcerer. That’s like Marv Albert disguising himself as Al Michaels. There is an excess of backstory; a lot of talk about ancient knights, wisemen, maidens, golden lands, and that I’ve played this game dozens of times over in my lifetime and still couldn’t give you an honest account of the mythos is an indication of how much insignificant plot is present. Most of the time, this story is told in some kind of explanation from any number of rescued maiden-crystal persons and ultimately accounts for nothing in the grand scheme of life.

There’s a good amount of text reading involved when it comes to story. Though I’ll take being able to mash the A button the scroll through dialogue over the unskippable cutscenes of Ocarina of Time any time. The actual dialogue isn’t terrible, mind you, and most NPC characters, when not running at you with a blade in front of them, will often give you hints on how to progress or find treasures. That’s an aspect on A Link to the Past that I do like; the game will try to point you in the right direction without holding your hand. You can always resort to your map to find out where the dungeons are, but you’ll be left to your own devices (as well as whatever text gossip you may find) on how to get there.

Oh, and there’s a light and dark world dynamic. While A Link to the Past was the first to use the two alternate realms concept, it’s since been seen in far too many Nintendo games, including of the Zelda breed. Other games make more thorough use of the “do something here and it affects something there” dichotomy, which may actually be to this game’s benefit, as it means less time travelling between realms fidgeting with every tile in the virtual landscape, trying to find the right passage. Also, the “Dark World” in this game is far more interesting than in subsequent games in that it’s not just a “darker, more evil” version of the “Light Realm”. Knights become knight-pigs, a person is transformed into a headbanging shrub and trees have faces with elephant trunks that spit bombs at you; this game was definitely designed at the peak of Nintendo’s creative phase (drug-induced or otherwise). As a result, exploring the two realms becomes a joy, as I found myself looking forward to exploring the alternate realms.

That said, if I have one small complaint, it’s that you never reap the benefits of your hard work. The whole idea is that the “Dark World” is this once legendary landscape transformed by Ganon. Yet once you stick an apple in the pig’s mouth and roast him, you never get to see the reformed “golden land”. The actual ending comprises entirely of the NPCs from the Light World celebrating the liberation of a dimension that has no bearing on their existence.

This is a 2D Zelda, meaning a couple of things. One is that you’re never standing still, manually aiming your bow and arrow, or fumbling with a targeting system as you dance and cartwheel around a single enemy. The other being that the game is viewed from a top-down perspective. Link moves a tad slow (well I guess he’s quick considering how his legs are about a quarter-inch tall) and can only attack what’s in front of him. As a result, the “combat”, if you will, becomes a methodical affair, as you find yourself striking down enemies while avoiding assorted projectiles and threats. This is actually a tougher game than it may appear; later dungeons have rooms filled with enemies that’ll rip your heart(s) out if you’re not careful. While the bosses generally have a single method to defeat, you’re given free reign to be creative with your typical henchpigs.

For this is a Zelda game, and one of the trademarks of a Zelda game is to start out with nothing and collect more toys as you progress. And unlike later games (and boy did Wind Waker botch this), items don’t have a singular, context-sensitive use. You can use the Fire Rod, for example, to light torches and burn up enemies, at the expense of your Magic Meter. And you’ll collect the lion’s share worth of offensive and defensive items, some of which are optional and can be missed out on if you’re not exploring or paying attention to character hints.

And one thing I noticed on this recent playthrough is that the game isn’t entirely linear. Granted, there are some areas that are inaccessible without key items, but you have a limited degree of freedom to tackle challenges in the order you see fit. I found myself neglecting the second Dark World dungeon when I noticed I could survive just fine without the Hookshot, regardless of how blasphemous such a statement may be. Dungeons all have a general solution in terms of how they are to be navigated, but you’re never told how or what, and are thus made to explore and toy with your surroundings.

I played the Game Boy Advance “update” of A Link to the Past previously and found all of the changes, the simplified dungeons, the voice-samples, the sprite tweaks, to all be jarring, forced and uncomfortable. So I’m glad to see that the Wii Virtual Console release is indeed a straight port of the SNES game.

Surprisingly (or maybe not), A Link to the Past is still great, so long as you’re not sick of the Zelda clichés that later games help beat to death. If anything, the less linear nature of the action-adventure game actually feel like I was on a grand adventure, a notion that most games seem to miss by a country mile. Really, this game’s biggest threat is Nintendo, and how many of the gameplay conventions here have since been repeated ad nauseam in later games. But if you’re not sick of collecting the Hookshot time in and time out, this is well worth the ten odd dollars you’ll spend on the Virtual Console.

4 stars

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil is an example of a franchise that could’ve only succeeded as a video game.

What other film or television series has gotten away with combining the depth of storytelling equal to a Power Rangers episode with the gratuitous violence of a horror film? Such a concept would nary succeed in movie theatres where film ratings are enforced, but the ESRB ratings didn’t quite carry the same weight in a video game store back in the day. Not that they carry much more weight nowadays but still. Besides, the standards of storytelling in video games are significantly lower. Game magazines were proclaiming that Grand Theft Auto 4 could win an Oscar once upon a time.

In Resident Evil 4, a complete smartass with an exceptional haircut was asked to rescue the president’s daughter from an evil army of mutated Spanish peasants lead by a diabolical cult leader. It stripped away all of the Resident Evil backstory that clouds the previous games, opting to create its own unique, fun little standalone adventure.

Resident Evil 5 backpedals a good deal and returns the series to its main story; of going to great lengths to characterize “The Umbrella Corporation” regardless of how little one could possibly care. And this is the final chapter of the whole Resident Evil story arc; all of the answers to the questions fans may have had will be answered here. If you’re extremely sensitive to any line of text resembling a spoiler then skip this whole paragraph but really, anybody that takes the Resident Evil mythology seriously has already bought this game anyways. The plot is ridiculous, but without a sense of humour or self-awareness. The dialogue is still terrible, and I know that it’s a franchise tradition to have hammy, illogical speech, but this game is trying to be taken seriously with its key plot points. And if you have been following this whole franchise for some 13 years, then you may be disappointed to find out that all of the mysteries built up across the many, many games in the series have been building up to one man trying to destroy the human race like he’s the friggin Shredder or something. To me, the Resident Evil franchise is the intellectual equal of a Saturday morning cartoon with gore (well, maybe less if you count the writing.) There’s a cackling supervillain, a muscle-bound hero trying to stop him, a sexy sidekick and many henchmen along the way.

So we have the incredibly muscular Chris Redfield, going into an African nation to stop some kind of terrorist threat. Joining him is partner Sheva Alomar, sister of the umpire-loving baseball player, and along the way they’ll encounter legions of the same kind of zombie-but-not-quite beings from Resident Evil 4. The gameplay takes many right pages from that game, as well as a few wrong pages from games before it. It’s the same kind of run/stop/aim shooter as Resident Evil 4, and the people at Capcom have yet to pick up on the Japanese translation of the word “strafe” for you still can’t run sideways and fire. The behavior of your enemies is built around this concept, sometimes oddly so; they’ll sprint to your location, even jumping ten feet in the air to a higher platform, and then start slowly approaching you zombie-style when in your close proximity. Then, they will subsequently take their time to remember what offensive tactic to use, before settling on “chokehold.”

The game also takes a bit of a sour turn near the end, when the mindless zombie-but-not-quite beings start arming themselves. Their idea of gun combat is a bit silly, often standing still and firing in a rhythmic pattern, like their shots are being timed by a gym teacher. It’s equally silly that you can take cover only on pre-determined walls during these segments, as opposed to say, any wall and crate in the game, as it creates this crisis where I found myself running across the level looking for what the developers decided would be suitable cover, all the while trying to fend off the meat-shields that are the zombie-but-not-quite melee attackers who were trying to flank us as the zombie-but-not-quite gunmen fired their machine guns and in tune to the beat in their head.

But in spite of these odd scenarios, I liked the gameplay…most of the time. The whole idea of standing still to shoot means there’s a greater emphasis on precision aiming and thinking about your shots instead of running around instinctively aiming in the general direction of the head. There are tactical advantages to say, tripping an enemy with a leg shot, or aiming for the stick of dynamite in their hand. And lest I forget, there’s a decidedly strong feeling of tension when you’re surrounded by zombie-but-not-quites slowly approaching you and acting like the zombies they’re trying not to be.

About the partner aspect; boo-urns to it. It’s annoying when Sheva’s occupied one of the sparse cover locations later in the game, for one. For another, Sheva is anything but good at handling resources. I wouldn’t trust her to run my small, unnamed African nation. If she has a first aid spray or herb, regardless of size, she’ll use it if she notices a small scratch on your arm. While the AI is proficient enough to rarely find itself in danger, she also tends to burn through ammunition like it’s a renewable commodity. So you kind of have to idiot-proof your AI teammate; don’t trust her with healing items and make sure she doesn’t carry the same kind of guns you do. Even then, she seems quite oblivious to the makeshift weapons system I invented and I still found myself ordering her to pick up ammo cases I had reserved for her.

And lest we forget about the inventory system; each character can only carry nine items. Body armour that you’re wearing counts as stored item, and thus I couldn’t waste precious inventory space with protection. Dropping an item will disintegrate it forever, and the interface for moving items from person to another is too cluttered. If you want to, say, give ammo to Sheva, you have to go to your inventory screen, pick the ammo box, select “Give” and then confirm that you indeed want to give Sheva this pack of ammo. And the game doesn’t pause during this whole process; you could be swarmed by legions of the undead-but-not-quite and thus in a situation where you need to make key item decisions (like combine two herbs), only to have a zombie-but-not-quite chokehold ruin your botany practice.

So Resident Evil 5 is meant to be played with another person. In fact I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed most of the boss battles more if I was playing with a friend, being that they were all designed with some kind of teamwork aspect in mind. You can play online but there doesn’t seem to be too many people willing to allow a stranger from the Playstation Network in on their game. Or perhaps everyone’s PS3 is busy installing the game. Likewise, you can play in your living room with a friend, and I’m sure that if I had a friend that wanted to play through an entire Resident Evil campaign with me, that I would’ve found the experience to be fantastic, inventory micromanagement and everything. But I don’t feel like Resident Evil 5 is the most accessible multiplayer experience to someone that doesn’t already know that red and green herbs belong together. When I think multiplayer, I think of games that buddies can casually come over, learn how to pick up and play quickly, kill some virtual Nazis (or the solo to Let There Be Rock), and be on their merry way. I feel as though Resident Evil 5, with it’s slower pace and focus on item management, doesn’t constitute to a positive and accessible co-op experience. Thus, it’s meant to be played only with a fellow hardcore Resident Evil 4 fanatic, or whoever counts inventory at your grocery store.

The game is about 8-9 hours long, shorter than its predecessor but that’s still a good length for a next-generation action game. I couldn’t, however, tell you what the multiplayer versus mode is like, because Capcom is charging five bucks for that and this game already sells at a full $70 in Canada. For aspiring Jill sandwiches, I believe the real value in the package is the unlockable Mercenaries mode, where the player is thrust in an open area with a time limit to rack up zombie-but-not-quite kills. This time around, there are more levels and online leaderboards, so there’s an inherent lasting value amongst devoted fans.

But I ultimately didn’t feel like Resident Evil 5 is a good purchase to anyone but those who are already committed to the franchise and must see it through to the end. If you’ve waited 13 years to give Albert Wesker his just desserts, or you’re a devoted Resident Evil 4 fanatic with a roommate who’s also a Resident Evil 4 fanatic, then this is $70 well spent. But for the average Joe gamer, looking from the outside wondering what Milla Jovovich is doing appearing in all of these movies, then don’t bother. Go play Resident Evil 4; it has all the action with a touch of wacky fun.

And as the climax to a supposed iconic game franchise, I can’t help but a feel a bit disappointed. This could be due to a lack of an attachment to the cast on my part, but why would I want to sympathize with Mr. Redfield? Metal Gear Solid 4, despite a compulsive need to make the largest stretches in logic to explain the smallest loose ends, felt like a grandiose epic, an explosive climax to a story arc more than a decade in the making. By comparison, Resident Evil 5 lands with a thud.

3 ½ stars.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

The 18-35 male is a valuable commodity. They have the kind of money that allows them to afford $500 consoles, and thus makes them the hot target for developers. They work part time jobs at your local supermarket and are usually in some form of debt in spite of their spending habits. In their free time, they enjoy multiple energy drinks, weed to ease the energy drink buzz, and UFC because there are fewer highs more sweet than a good ground and pound. And their hero? The soldier. The partially unknown soldier, in the sense that he doesn’t need an identity. The military man that goes into the line of duty and shoots terrorists, Russians and all things Un-American. Odds are, the natural habitat of the 18-35 male will have some kind of camouflage decal and some Todd McFarlane US soldier action figures next to their Scarface or Bruce Lee poster. They love the name “Tom Clancy” not for his espionage thriller novels but his games about systematically gunning down the ethnic threat of the month.

So I bought Call of Duty 4 from a fellow 18-35 male recently. A game who’s very cover art features the unknown soldier. I’ve played the game when it first came out, back when Game Informer’s claim of this being “The most photo-realistic video game we’ve ever seen” actually belonged on the back of the box. The game was great back in November of 2007, but times change, and in particular the first person shooter genre, where a new, bigger and shinier entrant enters the gaming arena almost every month. So the test here will be if Modern Warfare 1 has longevity, if the game can hold against the rising demands of the 18-35 year old males that write for game websites. Like me.

The Modern Warfare universe is some kind of dreamland for people that think wars are cool; Russia is in a civil war and an evil dictator has turned a Middle Eastern country into some kind of paradise for sociopaths. The introductory credits involve a lengthy cutscene where you drive along Warsville watching terrorists kill innocents, enemies and probably other terrorists along the way. Throughout the game, you’ll find bunches of nukes and Americans and Brits coming to the rescue, but the surprise here is how well-executed the story is done.

There’s no Master Chiefs or military supermen that parade across the countryside laughing about their kill counts. There’s an aura of believability to the characters; one sequence that amused me was a mission where I was in an aircraft carrier and one pilot asked the other for clarification on what he meant by “a curved road”; it made me feel like I was surrounded by normal people in what could be an actual combat situation. At the same time, the game takes some surprising twists and turns, elevating itself above the usual “Great Americans killing foreigners” plotline that these games lean towards and into an intriguing thriller that could only work in a video game.

It also helps that the trademark famous people “war is bad (or at least ironic)” quotes that appeared when you die in previous CODs (the CODs tactfully made by Infinity Ward, anyways) return here to mock the 18-35 males who consider war to be glamorous.

On the surface, Call of Duty 4 plays like X number of shooters. You go from one point in a level to another and you kill a lot of bad people along the way. The gameplay is as refined as a realistic shooter should be; iron sight aiming and covering your back are key to survival, and enemies will be quick to capitalize and send you face down into the ground and a war-is-bad Robert McNamara quote if you’re not evading the line of fire. Unlike the recent Call of Duty: World at War, the game never feels like you’re simply fighting wave after wave of respawning enemy, rather there’s a logical sense of progression, of constantly pushing further into enemy territory. Not to mention the trademark Call of Duty “you are one man in a larger army, in the middle of hell” atmosphere is ever present. Your allies will be perfectly content to kill off the enemies (but depend on you to advance in the level).

But really, the strongest aspect of Call of Duty 4 is just how incredibly varied each level is. It’s as if the game consistently thinks of new and unique scenarios for each mission. Most shooters are content to mix up the action with frequent gun turret or flame thrower sequences (cheers to you, World At War, as I spit in your glass), killing the novelty of the respective gimmick. Here, certain sequences appear once and thus make their appearance level memorable. One moment you’re using night vision goggles while staring at dozens of laser-sights from your allies, the next you’re dressed in foliage and crawling through the bushes while enemy tanks drive by your prone avatar. Each mission stays in your memory and, when placed in a greater whole that is Call of Duty 4, makes the combined experience a stronger one. Really, I can’t think of another first person shooter where I’ve looked back on every single mission so fondly.

Well, except for the bonus “airplane VIP” mission that appears after the end credits. Some kind of explanation behind this mission would be a bit appreciated.

The game is only about 5 hours long, but you’ll want to play through it again and again, on harder difficulties where your survival skills become crucial and you’ll become quite acquainted with those war liners.

I’m a bit less partial to the multiplayer, however. The core mechanics are sound; that each character has limited health gives deathmatches more of a cat-and-mouse feel than the superheroic-like combatants of the Haloverse. However, I hate perk-based multiplayer, and this is the game that started such a trend.

I know there’s an audience of 18-35 males that love the hell out of perk-based multiplayer, and clearly a big one too since this is still one of the most popular multiplayer games on Xbox Live. But I don’t like online shooters enough to want to play the same modes repeatedly in order to unlock content. I can’t give you an assessment of how the other online modes besides deathmatch play because I couldn’t be made to clock in the amount of time necessary to unlock them. Worse, the better weapons and character attributes only open up to higher classes, giving 18-35 males who pull all-nighters along with their can of Mountain Dew (who are already better than me at this kind of game) a bit of an unfair advantage.

Call me a girly man if you want for not being willing to cope with the “big boys.” I’ll simply say that the online function is just “not for me.” These perk-based modes are meant for the kind of 18-35 male who’s willing to play deathmatches all weekend at their dorm between Youtubed episodes of Robot Chicken.

But for me, it’s the campaign that makes Call of Duty 4 special. I have yet to play any other shooter, including the last actual Call of Duty game, that has such a well-constructed, varied and entertaining single-player mode, and its surprising that so many shooters that have since been released (as I glare straight into the red eyes of the armoured soldier on the Killzone 2 box) that captures the very same essence. And good luck to Infinity Ward, because I have no idea how they can possibly top this act with a sequel.

4 ½ stars.

I am indeed part of this demographic.

Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

So this is my essay. It’s titled “Why I hate the Nintendo DS sometimes”, by me. The thesis to this essay will be “games like Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars makes me hate the Nintendo DS sometimes.” Hopefully handing in this instead of an essay on Macbeth’s greed will still net me a passing grade from my English teacher.

I’m fully aware that there’s no way to write an essay titled “Why I hate the Nintendo DS sometimes” as your review for a Nintendo DS game without being labeled some kind of fanboy or hater so I’ll roll with it. Sure, I’m a DS hating fanboy. Granted, I lean favorably towards an assortment of solid DS games that would be considered too small or old-fashioned to be released on a console, and it’s the handheld that I wound up not selling because it actually got new game releases that weren’t just Playstation 1 JRPG re-releases, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a slight grudge against a system I’ve invested so much of my life into. After all, while the DS lost the battle with my approval, it won the war against the PSP, so I’ll suck it up and force myself to accept that the latest Castlevania side-scroller boasts the Nintendo Seal of Approval.

For it’s not the games that I hate, it’s the assorted bits of hardware that irrationally stray from what would make sense in a normal, rational video game system. What’s the point of the DS having a microphone? So the game can force me to yell or blow into it while out in public, surrounded by strangers in a society that shuns schizophrenics? I can’t talk to people online with that microphone either; players still needed to buy a headset adaptor for said purpose. Any game that has attempted to use the presence of a second screen for anything but secondary information has neglected to account that most gamers aren’t Ozymandias and have a hard time computing date from two screens at once. Finally, the touch-screen, the highly touted gameplay innovation! It’s not that the touch screen doesn’t make sense when used in certain cases (point and click adventure games) or even spawned new and unique ideas (Kirby’s Canvas Curse, and….well….), it’s just that so many people seemed so convinced that having a touch screen was going to change the way we play games that everyone tried their hardest to force some kind of use out of it. Remember when the DS first came out, every game tried to incorporate some kind of shoehorned touch screen gimmick, like the forced mini-game segment or the unintuitive control layout with “virtual buttons” on the screen? I try to forget those days, and thankfully so do most developers it seems, as most DS games nowadays comprise of traditional, non-touch screen-based games. Even Nintendo has made the touch screen, at best, an optional control method in its recent high-profile releases.

But games like Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars make me hate the Nintendo DS sometimes.

I thought that developers stopped trying to make games like this; games that think of a bevy of illogical and inappropriate touch-screen mechanics for no reason other than the sake of bragging about “innovative” touch-screen mechanics on the back of the box, but here’s the highest-profile DS release in quite some time, asking the player to poke and jab their bottom screen at the most inopportune moments. Missions will constantly ask the player to go to the bottom screen and execute some kind of trivial job; tap the screen to break a lock, turn a handle, open a wallet, assemble a gun, and a bevy of other assorted games that are nothing short of pointless. The initial series of missions exist as tutorials to explain possible optional mini-games that the player can elect to use, like searching dumpsters or a really insipid mini-game where you pump gas at the station to fill Molotov cocktails.

The game takes EVERY excuse to make you go down to the bottom screen and tap something; need to pay a toll to cross a bridge? Look down. Need to move “supplies” from a bag in your apartment to your suitcase? Look down.

One mission in particular filled me with fits of anger. I was asked to drive a boat to a remote location, pick up some contraband and evade the Coast Guard while heading to a specific dock. However, the entrance to the dock is surrounded by police boats and every minute or so, the boat will stop and force me to play a nonsensical mini-game where I had to rev up the boat’s engine. I can’t even fire my guns or control the character when the engine stalls; so if I’m surrounded by unfriendlies firing at me, mission failed. The only solution I could come up for this was to take the long road and travel all-around Liberty City and sneak into the dock from behind, taking a considerably longer time (and still revving up the boat when prompted) to complete a terrible idea of a level.

Changing pace from the pointless to the extremely unnecessary, car jacking! If you attempt to break into a parked car, the game randomly asks you to play one of three touch-screen car jacking sequences that take about 20-30 seconds each to accomplish. These are 20-30 seconds that I don’t have if I have a 3-star wanted level and the police are hunting my ass down. There are few more incessant slaps in the face than trying to run from the 5-0 and scurrying into your getaway car, only to be asked to pull out your PDA and hack into the car’s computer while an officer throws you down and to jail, confiscating all your weapons and drugs along the way.

Speaking of, there’s a drug dealing mechanic in there too. The game has some eight different kinds of drugs (based on a suburbanite’s perception of real world drugs) and the player can buy and sell them from a collection of dealers across Liberty City. The goal is to travel from a dealer selling one product for cheap to another dealer buying the same for a high price. How a gamer is supposed to keep track of the chemical free-trade market is a question in of itself, as players are often asked to go to a part of town where there may be a potential client and search far and wide for the dark alleyway that the buyer is hiding. The bigger problem is that this isn’t entirely optional, as your story missions offer little reward, and hijacking a taxi and collecting fares doesn’t quite pay the Crazy Money that it used to. The game has the tendency to occasionally (and begrudgingly) halt your progress and demand that you bring X number of drugs or cash before you can start the next mission.

Finally, there are a few awkward control choices; to throw a Molotov or grenade, you need to look down at the touch screen and move the stylus around a circle to aim, all the while attempting to dodge enemy fire on the top screen. Just above the “throw fire” button is the weapon select screen, which may or may not respond to a press from you thumb. All of these, combined with the knowledge in the back of your head that the game can throw an unlikely touch screen mini game at you at any time, means that I found myself having to awkwardly hold the stylus in my hand as I played the game and controlled my character. And keep in mind that this is a game that uses every button on the DS as is.

In conclusion, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars makes me hate the Nintendo DS sometimes.

Now that my essay is done, let me shift tone and get to the positive attributes of the game with the rest of my review.

You play as Huang, the spoiled rich son of a murdered Triad boss looking for revenge and a lost sword of great value. Of course, this being a Grand Theft Auto game, Huang can elect to vent his rage on the civilians of Liberty City by jacking someone’s car and driving on the crowded sidewalk. The game has a sort of cartoonish visual style, with all of the buildings adopting a cel-shaded look and civilians presented as 2D sprites that break in two when you gun them down, adding a playful, recess-time giddiness to your killing spree. The gunplay mechanics are generally simple; lock on to something, shoot it while it shoots you and hope you have more health and a bigger gun than your adversary. Of course there are a few basic strategies one needs apply (like not run into the middle of a circle of angry gang members), and the lock-on system has the tendency to occasionally target inanimate objects that aren’t pointing automatic weapons in your direction, but otherwise the game gives a fun sense of slaughtering legions of cartoon fools.

Driving is wonky and unruly, but that’s part of the fun. Unlike Grand Theft Auto 4’s semi-realistic driving physics, here your car has a habit of flying and swerving in and out of control, and I loved it! To compliment your violent new driving style, the means of which you evade police officers has changed, as you now you reduce your wanted star rating by causing cop cruisers to crash chaotically. So as long as you’re not caught driving in reverse when a cop is next to you opening your door, suddenly having the authorities on your tail becomes a recklessly jolly good time!

And when Huang realizes that the old ladies he’s been shooting at have nothing to do with his father’s death, he can begin to take the in-game missions. All of the cutscenes are presented in still pictures and dialogue, and usually consist of your boss giving you an order and Huang responding with an innuendo. Story isn’t particularly deep and all of the characters combine one crime archetype with another kink archetype, but the humor is solid enough at least.

Setting aside the “touch here to give your buddy a new tattoo” mini-game nonsense, the missions are surprisingly varied and entertaining. The later in-game missions put the focus more on driving and killing, despite the occasional contrived gimmick sequence. In particular, I enjoyed a series of missions provided by an undercover cop working incognito amongst bikers, because they almost always involved me on a motorcycle shooting other bikers at fast speeds. That terrible boat level notwithstanding, most of the missions are about a couple minutes long, which mean that you can play Chinatown Wars on the bus between stops, accomplish a mission or two and still feel like you’re making progress. In that sense, one could argue that Chinatown Wars is a better handheld game than, say, Chrono Trigger, and that’s high praise.

Despite how I spent a good two pages putting down the game and its hardware and thus terribly unbalancing the tone of this review, buy Chinatown Wars. It’s a great title that does what a handheld game is supposed to, and that is occupy your mind so you don’t have to pay attention to the snotty, tight-jeaned high school kid on the phone next to you on the bus yapping on about who’s spreading gossip about her late-night antics. And if you’re more tolerant of the DS hardware than me (or, dare I say it, actually think highly of the DS as a whole) then you might enjoy it even moreso. It’s just that I dug the game in spite of its hardware, not because of it.

4 stars

Left FOUR Dead

What’s in a name? Well many dollars out of the marketing budget for one. I’ve been refusing to give this game a fair shake for the better part of five months by in large for having such a bad name. “Left for Dead” struck me as the title of what would be an uninspired bargain bin shooter, and then to see it referred to as “Left 4 Dead” added an extra layer of tackiness. So I deemed Left 4 Dead the worst-titled game of ’08, worse than “de Blob” and chalked up my refusal to buy it for this long on bad marketing. Because, really, what should the box art of a dismembered hand doing the Four Horsemen salute do to inspire curiosity?

The other reason that I’ve neglected Left 4 Dead is the presumption that it’s a co-op shooter, which does nothing to phase me since every shooter now is a co-op shooter… for better or worse. Call me an anti-social gamer if you like and perhaps my stance on co-operative games will change when the team-based Street Fighter is released to prove me wrong, but your gameplay options in a level that must take in consideration more than one person hopping around gleefully in it are limited. Storyline becomes an inconvenience and you can’t design individual set pieces, so co-op-centric games like Call of Duty: World at War or Saint’s Row 2 devolve into “you and friends killing wave after wave of enemies” followed by “you and your friends killing a few more waves of enemies.”

And really, that is exactly what Left 4 Dead is; you and three others and you’re killing about a thousand zombies in a level. Each mission is presented as a fun little knockoff of an old-fashioned zombie movie, with your Steam accounts as the actors who play one of the four horror movie archetypes; the stubborn tough guy biker, the old military vet with the clouded past, the token black guy and the hot college girl (who’s wearing more clothes than college girls normally wear in these movies). There’s no actual story though, aside from “get to the rescue chopper, a lot of things die along the way” and the dialogue is limited to characters yelling “ammo here!” in the presence of supplies or the voice-chat of the light-voiced teenage kid playing as the college girl.

The gameplay comprises of your simple shooter mechanics; you use the standard gun archetypes of shotgun, machine gun, etc, with the one deviation being the pipe bomb that seems to have some kind of pheromone that sexually attracts zombies and has them all humping its location before the device blows its payload. However, Left 4 Dead rises above other shooters in its integration of its 4ness. You need your three buddies to survive, lest you be overwhelmed from all corners. Certain special enemies can knock you down, and you’ll need a party mate to knock that zombie who pounced on top of you or grabbed you with its…tongue, and then risk a moment of vulnerability to pick you up.

If you have teammates that know what they’re doing, are willing to co-ordinate and SHARE their first aid kits (HINT! HINT!), then there’s an uncanny sense of satisfaction in navigating a level, all the while competing for the most kills or even the most teammate rescues. Likewise, careless partners who insist on running ahead alone or have a habit of falling straight into a zombie horde can kill the experience. So really, a level of Left 4 Dead is entirely dependant on whom you’re playing with.

A small but appreciated tangent; if someone leaves a game, the AI will take that movie star’s role until a new player joins. And if, say, reality comes in and your woman wants loving, then you can use the “Take a Break” option and let the computer take over while you play real life Smoker.

The game’s biggest weakness is that there are only four levels. While each of them, on the normal difficulty, are about an hour long, you’re still relegated to exploring the same areas and shooting the same four or five types of zombies and using the same propane tanks (what is a propane tank doing inside a hospital?) to set up the same traps. Valve has personified computer algorithms into an unseen entity called the “director”, which is their marketing phrase of saying “the game distributes ammo, health and zombies based on your performance.” I’ll give the game its due and say that this ensures that you can’t truly memorize a level or where the enemies come from, and also demand a degree of exploration to find power-ups, but even then the player can still guess where and when the zombies will bum rush you…as in they’ll always bum rush you.

And for a bit of variety, there’s Versus mode, which as of this moment is only functional for two of the four maps. Two teams of four alternate between playing as the human offense and the zombie defense, with points scored based on how far the human team travels before reaching the safe zone touchdown. It’s a novel little twist, but true success amongst zombies can only be achieved through wise planning and teamwork, which surprises me that playing as brain-eaters can require such cerebral play. And while it’s extremely satisfying to wither down an enemy to red-level health and untimely death (and hear all of your teammates swear on their microphones in frustration when one of the humans uses a health pack), zombie play is ultimately a sort of grind, where you and your allies die a lot and wait for the respawn time to elapse, so I guess Versus mode is more of an acquired taste.

This being the PC version of Left 4 Dead, the amount of content will (in theory) increase tenfold once Valve releases a level-editor for the masses, but as of this moment, you basically have to ask yourself “how much do I like shooting things with other people?” The focus on team-based shooting makes Left 4 Dead a much better co-operative experience than anything on the market. However, I can’t help but feel that the lack of content makes the game feel overpriced, and I can’t say with a straight face that I got my $50 worth. Fans of the forthcoming zombie apocalypse, (I’m looking at you, Viktoria!) on the other hand, will get some kind of strange hands on training the field of surviving the onslaught, so I guess Left 4 Dead is the champion of the zombie-subculture.

3 ½ stars

Does anyone else find it strange that the same four characters appear in the same four movies?