Tiger Woods PGA Golf '10: The Wii-rescuing edition

Imagine a vocal Communist living in America. He burns flags, speaks the virtues of a Marxist economy and preaches on his porch with megaphone in mouth extolling the evils of President Obama. Yet he refuses to heed his neighbours coarse advice of “love it, or leave it!” because he’s gotten too used to this whole “freedom of speech” business that Americans are granted. That’s my relationship with the Wii in a nutshell. The much ballyhooed motion controllers turned out to be considerably flimsy and inaccurate, and not quite capable of handling the input commands of normal games. Thus, potentially good games have been gimped and many more bad games have been rushed, releashed and hustled into bargain bins, using the motion controls as their feeble justification for existence. And the great Wii games, the Mario Galaxys and No More Heroes’ of the world, seem to succeed in spite of their motion controls, using small, insignificant motion mechanics to keep the suits at Nintendo satisfied at their choice of marketing strategy for their new console.

The Wii MotionPlus, or as I like to call it, the Apology Adaptor, has arrived. I’ve deemed it such because it makes the Wiimote do all the things that Iwata and Reggie and the Nintendo pitchmen promised us it would do in the first place. Basically, plugging the Apology Adaptor into the Wii will add some kind of newfangled gizmos that allow the remote to pick up more precise movements. It’s another classic case of Nintendo’s old strategy of releasing a flawed product, then releasing an upgraded version to milk over some more profits… the Game Boy Advance SP effect, if you will. So I can’t help but feel like the MotionPlus should be entitled to the Wii audience rather than bought by them, but the admins of this site might take offense to a review that says “steal this product!” so I’ll just that you should do what you can to “procure” four Apology Adaptors.

On a brighter note, I feel a bit surprised that the tie-in game of choice for this important new adaptor is not a Mario or Zelda game. Not even that highly publicized sequel to the poetically agonizing Wii Sports is the launch game for the MotionPlus. Rather, the Wii’s salvation from shoddy hardware damnation comes from wide-grinned, bright-spirited, endorsement-loving, surgically-enhanced, non-Goomba-stomping, non Wind-Waking, Ryder-cup-hating, mega star Tiger Woods. Like a celebrity cameo appearance on The Simpsons, it’s Tiger Woods to the rescue with his annual EA Sports golf release, a series I typically ignored over the years on account that I lack the attention span to watch sports that don’t involve a fist to the face. But this game came bundled with the Apology Adaptor and that was reason enough to entice my curiosity.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour ’10 is a golf game, duh. It’s the biggest Nintendo game to not revolve around rescuing a princess. If you’ve ever been the victim of a Wii Sports party and got to squeeze in a few virtual golf rounds before some drunkard splashed her cooler on the TV and screamed “MORE BOWLING”, then you know exactly how to play this game. You imagine the remote is a club, swing wildly and throw your back out as you smash the digital ball into a lake. Playing Tiger Woods with the Wiimote by itself is…plausible, but faulty. Virtual Tiger stutters back and forth trying to recreate your swing motion like a stroke victim, and the game seems able to only pick two kinds of swings; feathered tap of the ball or rage smash into the parking lot.

But when I plugged in the Apology Adaptor, I suddenly had some kind of an epiphany, as if the MotionPlus helps the Wii find God. Suddenly, Tiger’s swing animation is in near-perfect harmony with your hand motions. Suddenly, the distance and force placed into your swing will actually yield a unique outcome that determines which windshield gets smashed. Even putting feels accurate and in harmony with the universe. And then it dawns on me; this is how a golf game should be.

And there’s an oddly inviting quality to Tiger Woods ’10, where every option and toy on the HUD screams “pick me! Pick me!” The more I played, the more I wanted to toy with the advanced controls, and that’s a rare victory for a sports game. Suddenly I was toying with shot angles, shot types, even adding spin to the ball. In one of the stranger control choices, you can hold a direction on the d-pad and shake the remote to add spin while the ball is in the air, in effect allowing the player to control the Hand of Fate. Essentially, Tiger Woods ’10 almost has that Tony Hawk-like “it” factor that converts players into golf fans. Almost.

There’s a massive variety of game modes to toy with, for people of all shapes, sizes and interest levels in golf. I figure that the one that’ll get the most playtime will be the ability to play an ordinary round of golf with friends, but say you and your troop of golf-obsessed supporters don’t think “ordinary golf” is that interesting anymore. There are variations that include “golf but both players hit the same ball”, “golf but the winner can steal one of the loser’s clubs”, “capture the flag golf” and other modes that I couldn’t possibly get a less golf-inclined person to care about. Fortunately, there are more distinct variations of golf to play with, such as golf courses with floating ring targets or an elaborate mini-golf set. The vocal, gifted child of the class is “Disc Golf” which lets the player throw Frisbees on any golf course towards the direction of a big rack. It’s a pants-on-the-floor, smell-of-piss, vomiting-on-itself-shameless tech demo for the MotionPlus, but nonetheless fun to play. Plus my shots tend to arc to the sides away from their intended target and into someone else’s face, an accurate recreation of how I play Frisbee, which tells me that the MotionPlus is for real. You can play all of these modes in “Golf Party”, which is Tiger Woods’ initiation into the Nintendo Mascot Freemasons club, where up to four people compete in minigames for points. The kicker is that unlike in other modes, each player needs a separate Wiimote to play and a separate Apology Adaptor to have fun. Plus the music sucks. The menu music is some kind of bland, slow-paced techno tracks that don’t match the atmosphere of a golf game.

When your real or hallucinated friends aren’t around, you can indulge in the Career Mode. You’re charged with creating a golfer and building his or her stats through repeated plays of events on the tournament calendar. This mode is a picture-perfect example of what I hate about similar career modes in other sports games; your created character has paltry stats that can’t compete with a family playing mini-golf at Niagara Falls, let alone Tiger freaking Woods and his posse. The process of grinding up his or her stats to a competitive level is long and arduous. I know the road to athletic superstardom involves years of hard training, dedication, sweat and questionable favors for talent scouts, but I’m playing a video game to have fun right now, not practice for five years! More interesting is the “Tournament Challenge” mode, which asks your created character to recreate a laundry list of famous moments in golf history. Most will be familiar to hardcore PGA followers but none were recognized by me. These are often accompanied by a video of the real life Tiger talking about the moment in question and using golf terminology that flies above my head. These challenges are diverse and fun, they unlock more golfers and courses, and you still earn the stat boosts for the created character. But eventually you’ll hit a wall and play a challenge that your virtual golfer just isn’t good enough for, and you’ll have to go back and train for a few virtual years before trying again.

The online play is fairly solid, pitting you against several other golfers, all swinging at the same time. They have these strange line graph-like representations appearing on screen to indicate their shot progress. Its fun, but you’re probably gonna get your ass handed to you in the least physical way possible. Plus there’s no voice chat. Speaking of online, you can get online weather updates from the real life golf courses and play their digital counterparts as such in a feature that only the most scary of golf freaks could possibly care about. Also, you can virtually play in a tournament that is in progress and compare your scores to that of actual golfers in real time in a fun twist that’s more amusing than say, watching actual tournament on television.

But any complaint that I can levy against the game, the career mode grinding, the trance-inducing throwaway music, the fact that it’s a GOLF game, all fall to the single most basic reason people play video games; because they’re fun. And Tiger Woods ’10 is stupendously fun. It’s stupendously fun to play by yourself, it’s stupendously fun to play with others, its stupendously fun to watch your created golfer do the worm to celebrate a Birdie (which seems to be the default victory pose. But I couldn’t be made to change that since I was having so much stupendous fun with my golfer.) Anyone of any age, whether they like golf or not, will find something fun about this game, and is that not what Nintendo aims to do with their mascot titles? So I guess Tiger Woods has earned his place as a fighter in the next Smash Bros game. Tiger Woods PGA Tour ’10 may quite honestly be the most unassuming killer app of all time.

4 ½ stars.

But for the love of Christ, get it bundled with the Apology Adaptor. It’s only an extra $10.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game

Whether its Tony Montana not dying in his mansion and thus given the chance for revenge over the comeuppance he never got, or Don Corleone asking a nameless grunt to engage in Hollywood blockbuster-style gun shootouts with rival gangs, there’s something undisputedly unholy about video games based on old movies. The original filmmakers always seem to scold the damage done to their “art”, the original actors put no effort whatsoever in their voicework, fans seem to be hesitant to spend the money, the game developers struggle to finish the game within tight deadlines and the royalty fees must be through the roof. It makes one wonder why publishers bother, other out of a lack of good original ideas.

But Ghostbusters feels a bit different. One can’t help but feel as if the folks at Terminal Reality came into this project with nothing less than the upmost passion for the franchise. I can imagine the developers having the Ghostbusters logo plastered on their walls, shirts and tattoos, and bringing their life-size Proton packs to the San Diego Comic-con and spraying any individuals who dare dress up as that ghoul Sephiroth. And they were bound and determined to make their dream project of a Ghostbusters video game a reality for the sake of all the fanatics around the world who bided their time, waiting for the inevitable Ghostbusters comeback. And while this game is based on a movie license, I can’t at least have a small degree of respect for the devs, and the folks at Atari, for making the dreams of a couple people come true.

Ghostbusters the Video Game feels like the most TLCed game I’ve played in a long time. A lavishing amount of detail has gone into many of the game’s facets, whether it’s the numerous little references strewn about the world to the movies and cartoons or the backstory given to every ghost and rare collectable artifact that the player can scan Metroid-style. There’s even a monetary value allotted to every in-game item that can be destroyed, for the game keeps a tally of the combined property damage the player causes during his or her adventure. Ghostbusters The Video Game really is the ultimate Ghostbusters homage…it’s just that its merits as an video game are as questionable as the real Ghostbusters’ work ethics around the mayor.

You play as The Rookie, a nameless, voiceless chap who is hired by the team to test experimental equipment. He doesn’t give out a name because the team doesn’t want to get too attached should he meet an untimely demise, he doesn’t speak presumably out of lack of self-esteem and the only reason he applied for such a dangerous job is because he must be the kind of Ghostbusters fanboy that would’ve developed this very game. Mind you, being in the verbal background of the original gang fulfills every bit of geekout-potential that one would hope, despite how the Rookie does the vast, vast, VAST majority of the dirty work in the game. Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, PECK and the Ray Parker Jr. theme all lend their voices to the game, but with varying degrees of interest. They seem to get into their characters comfortably when it comes to main story points, but lose interest when its time to voice a video game character; for example, Dr Stantz seems less than enthused to explain to the player that pressing a button will execute a slam attack.

The game repeatedly stabs a nostalgia knife in the player’s memory lobes with no remorse. The first mission throws the player back at the hotel trying to capture Slimer, followed by chasing the Stay Puft Marshmellow Man on the streets of New York…followed by a return to the library to from the beginning of the first film. Ghostbusters clinches harder to its franchise cannon worse than any given Zelda game, and that’s saying something. I never saw Ghostbusters 2 until I was a third of the way through this game, and only then did an assortment of jokes and references (like the presence of Viggo’s painting in the firehouse) click for me. So this heavy retreading on old material does put a kick in Dan Aykroyd’s idea that this is the third Ghostbusters movie as opposed to a common internet fanatic’s Ghostbusters fan fiction.

The thing about the game is that it’s not particularly…funny. Oh there’s a few good lines, particularly within the ghost/artifact bios. But most of the humour stems solely from references to the movies – “oh look, Slimer escaped…again! And he slimed Venkmann…again!” The second half of the game strays into new territory with a new plot and new villain, but the attempts at humour seem to either dry up or feel more in place in a children’s cartoon…which could very well be the goal, but I surmise that most people buying this game are much, much, much older than your typical Saturday morning crowd.

The game plays like your typical Gears-of-Wariented third-person-close-over-the-shoulder-view shooter. But unlike the musclebound Marcus Fenix, your character has limited view, is slow to dodge incoming fire, can’t take cover and can only run short distances. Maybe this was intentional, an attempt to recreate playing as an out-of-shape Canadian comedian. But all the politeness and receding hairlines in the world can’t save these Canucks from the legion of the underworld. If there’s more than one ghoul in a room, the odds are you will be hit repeatedly with attacks from off-camera, often knocking you down in a ragdoll physically-impaired state for a few seconds, highly annoying in of itself. Should your Second City training fail you and you run out of health, an AI teammate can revive you Gears-of-Wariously, and you’re expected to return the favour to if need be. But the need will be frequent, and on the normal difficulty, both you and your fellow Busters will fall down often, turning the game into the equivalent of a retirement home worker giving breakdancing lessons to the seniors; a constant game of pick-up. This problem can be alleviated by playing on the easy difficulty.

Perhaps you’d like to hear more about your firepower, the oddball proton packs that make the Ghostbusters not your typical gun-toting commandos. You start out with the standard laser beam, and in later missions, Egon will conveniently remember that he installed a new weapon earlier in the day. Like bloody imFamous, most of the weapons are just remixes of standard shooter fare like the rocket launcher or the rapid fire gun, but really, the only reason you’ll use anything but the regular proton beam is because scanning an enemy revealed that another weapon will do more damage. Smaller enemies will crumble beneath your electrical might, but larger ghosts need to be captured and this is where Ghostbusters stops being so damned Gears-of-Warful and more like Atomic Fishing. First you must drain the phantasm’s health with your munitions, then you use your physics g…I mean “capture beam” to hook them, then you slam them on the walls and floors to tire them out, then you drag them near a trap you’ve tossed on the floor and watch as they resist being pulled into the nuclear abyss. On one hand, it’s a viscerally satisfying experience, between the trippy light show and the wild animations of a ghoul resisting protonic arrest. And while the ghosts are often quick and hard to hit, that nearly everything in the game world is readily destructible makes this the most fun you’ll have missing your target. But almost every ghost battle feels the same, and combined with the very drab boss fights, (how could they make the battle with Stay Puft so…basic?) the gun/proton play starts to get stale near the end of the game.

Not that the game is a non-stop thrill ride of battle after battle, oh no sir. Actually the opposite is true. You’ll spend most of the game walking from one empty corridor to another, not quite sure of what to do. The game is heavily scripted in nature, with the player being thrown an assortment of “events” involving the ghosts being ghosts and trying to spook the player. The problem is that while the game is linear in nature, it’s surprisingly easy to get lost in the virtual world, or find yourself in a position where you’re walking all over the area trying to find the spot that Rookie must stand in to trigger the next sequence. And even after you find that specific sweet spot the game wants you to be in, the result could be something as small as the team talking amongst themselves or someone opening a door. Speaking of, there are some doors that Rookie can open, many doors he can’t, and some doors that only Bill Murray has the charm to unlock. Knowing the difference is not always easy. The supposed solution to all my gripes is the “PKE meter”, where the player is thrown in a goggled first person view staring at a meter of bars that spikes when faced with the presence of…things. But I hated using this, partly because it rarely helped to find my way and partly because even when it did, the view quickly shifts back to third person to display the pre-scripted event that was supposed to happen in a jarring, immersion-shattering way.

Oh and there’s very basic physics puzzles, involving either using the worst physics gun in the history of gaming to put a key in a keyhole, or using the “slime tether” to pull one item to another. Being that either provide the only form of in-game puzzles, the solutions to any given puzzle always feel straightforward.

The campaign is about 8 hours long, a hearty length for an action game, one that may leave the player feeling a bit fatigued when something stops acting strange in the neighborhood. On the other hand, there’s a fairly solid online multiplayer component. In addition to playing the campaign co-operatively, (like, you know, every other freaking game! Why does Bioshock 2 have co-op?) there are a few multiplayer modes that involve pitting a group of online buster-buddies against computer ghosts. They’re fun in of themselves, and it’s different from your typical Gears-of-Warian deathmatch, but your mileage will depend on how much fun you have with the ghost-catching mechanic, and I can’t imagine this game’s online community staying being around for months to come.

Ghostbusters is the ultimate fan-service buffet, perhaps moreso than Super Smash Bros or certain Final Fantasy side-games. It’s rife with jokes and references aimed for the hardcore fans (of which I’m amazed they still exist), and it gives players a chance to rub shoulders with the anti-phantasm four. But on the other hand, the game depends too much on its insider jokes, and the gameplay feel banal and frustrating when compared to other action games. Honestly, you’re enjoyment of the game as a whole depends entirely on how many movies and cartoon episodes you’ve seen in your life. The true believers in the supernatural shouldn’t take this mixed review with anger or disappointment, because they will love this Ghostbusters game and cherish their moment of digital glory. They just shouldn’t recommend it to any friends whom don’t get what the big deal is about crossing the streams.

3 stars.

And there’s no more predictable way to start a reader review for a Ghostbusters game than “Who ya gonna call?” I mean seriously…

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Uncaged Edition

So there’s a discernable and almost concerning difference in mentality between Hollywood and the games industry regarding violence. Within the film world, big budget films need be toned down lest they earn the dreaded R rating and restrain kids from seeing the movie and buying the action figures. As a result, we have the goreless Terminator, as well as an action movie where the main protagonist and antagonist are murderers with claws and yet not a single drop of blood is allowed to let.

And then there’s the video game industry, where games go out of their way to feature gratuitous violence to appeal to those exact same kids who nag their parents to buy their shady crime game or space marine shooter of the month while whining away with cries of “But Mooooooom! Doug’s mom let him buy that M rated game!” And thus the game based on that exact same movie can feature torn limbs, seared flesh and exposed bone so frequently that the appearance of a healthy, unscathed human being becomes foreign.

So X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Uncaged Edition is the very embodiment of what’s wrong with retail marketing in video games. As a Mortal Kombat child, I won’t sulk much on the issue.

Here’s a game so excessive that it makes God of War look like Tom and Jerry. Logan slices and dices and dismembers his prey with more rage than the combined teen angst of the late 90s rap/rock movement. And just as the comics have the bad habit of doing, the game goes overboard with Wolverine’s “Healing factor.” My what a factor it is; you’ll find Wolverine’s skin tear, flesh char, muscles rip and organs and bone expose, and then watch in awe as they gradually patch together until Hugh Jackman’s muscular frame is restored.

And you know what? In this game, it just fits the gimmick perfectly. “God of War clone” is the most apropos description of X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Uncaged Edition (and my what a top-heavy title the game has.) But the game makes just enough tweaks and modifications that you feel less like you’re playing as Kratos and more like our real Canadian hero. Every attack, from the basic light and heavy slashes to the super rage attacks to the ability to mount and repeatedly stab a fallen enemy, has the look and bloody result that you’d expect from nobody but Weapon X. The brightest new tweak is the “Lunge” attack, which allows the player to lock on to a distant enemy and instantaneously pounce the fool like, say, a wolverine. Besides making a great way to quickly close the distance between you and that unassuming trooper with a gun, lunging into a crowd of enemies is just nothing short of pure Wolverinism.

Okay, okay, so Wolverine The Game is actually really good. Almost great, even. I was expecting to be grossly disappointed with a shallow, generic, buggy movie tie-in like all almost every other Marvel movie game... moreso with this game because I hated its movie counterpart almost as much as Wolverine hates humans with two arms. This dislike for the X-Men movie prequel is less due to the lack of violence as it was from the terrible lines, illogical plot and forced attempt to shoehorn as many comic characters as possible, regardless of what drastic changes must be made to the original character’s integrity. And Will.i.am is in it. Wolverine: The Video Game (is that not an easier title to pass through your system?) tweaks and paces out the story so that it becomes a bit more tolerable. Some of the minor characters are dropped, a subplot involving Sentinels is inserted, and the game mixes the main story with flashback stages set in a Mayan jungle that actually manages to stay diverse enough to not feel inconvenient. The plot as a whole is still bad by any storytelling standards, but inserting an elaborate action sequence involving the introduction of helicopters to Wolverine’s claws between pieces of dialogue makes for a more palatable experience.

The game is predominantly linear, with Logan going from one side of the stage to the other and inserting his bone to many a man’s insides along the way. (Surely you’ve heard of the bone claws storyline.) There are a few breaks: the occasional platforming/climbing bit and the odd floor switch puzzle, almost all of which are so simplified that they exist only to give Wolverine’s liver a chance to grow back. Really, the story of the game is this; waves of enemies appear, Wolverine growls, they get cut, you move on. Except for maybe one or two parts, the game never feels like wave after wave of drones are being thrown to prolong the experience (expect for a few exceptions), and I appreciate that. There’s a decent variety of goons ranging from armed soldiers with guns and a quick death wish, to superpowered guardians with swords, elaborate attacks and a slightly delayed death wish. These tougher goons keep the game from being a complete button-masher, and also encourage the player to keep an eye on their surroundings for spikes or other hazards to take advantage of instant kills.

To top it all off, pressing Up on the d-pad reveals Wolverine’s “Feral sense”, which I guess is a cute term for “sense of smell.” This allows a visual representation of things you can interact/impale with, which helps to keep the player pointed in the right direction. So there’s a constant sense of forward momentum, and just enough downtime placed between the lengthy murdering sprees that there’s no sense of fatigue. Oh, and there’s some quicktime events, almost always involving mashing a button repeatedly, but they never catch you by surprise and always deliver a spectacular cavalcade of violence.

So Wolverine hits all the right notes in the field of being a game about Wolverine; you can even unlock his yellow and orange costumes if you hated Hugh Jackman that much at the Oscars. But the game has a few hiccups that keep it from being the best at what it does. The biggest issue (and perhaps only legitimate issue) is the pacing. The second chapter just seems to go on and on. “Alkali Lake” consists of an endless stream of forestland followed by what may as well be the largest military base to not appear on Google Maps. And in that level, a certain large enemy, the “Wendigo” is inserted with a bit too much frequency. This “Wendigo” has absolutely no resemblance to comic book Wendigo. Similar to God of War’s Cyclops but more annoying, defeating the large beast requires that Logan lunge on his back when it’s caught off guard, mash X to chip away its health bar, then repeat 3-4 times over. The first battle with Wendigo, and its giant magma monster cousin in the jungles would’ve been considered memorable affairs, but then another Wendigo appears later. In the Alkali Lake level, you’ll fight one Wendigo, and then another, and then two at the same time, and then four in succession (with each one awaking if you accidentally fall near it’s cage, leaving the possibility of fighting comic book desecrations at once!)

Once you finally escape that blasted lake, the game becomes awesome for a good lengthy stretch. The scenery becomes interesting and the enemies become tougher without feeling “cheap.” Then the game throws three, THREE boss fights at the player, all in succession of each other, and all of which could rank as the most entertaining boss fights in a rather long time. For these couple hours, I’m grinning with joy at the shockingly entertaining action game that I’m playing, that can easily give the last Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden games a run for their blood-stained dollar.

And if you were disappointed in the lack of screen time given to Gambit in the movie (you know, like EVERYONE else?) well you’ll be more than thrilled by what this game gives you.

And then I get to the final chapter, the military base at the end of the movie. And instead of an epic war involving legions of guards standing between Logan and his revenge, I get a small scuffle with some Foot Soldier-worthy troops, two easy bosses, and an ending. The only explanation I can think for such a strong game getting cut off at the shins is the kind of deadlines that’ll ruin any movie tie-in game.

Now, there are other little issues that scream of a rushed product, but they’re less hampering than they are petty or even humourous. The lunge move is sometimes used as a means to clear a massive gap with a lone enemy lying across the distance as bait, and it’s almost funny how Wolverine will only attempt such a long jump if the promise of fresh meat awaits him.

The aftermath of the adamantium skeleton fusion is often depicted as a violent and savage massacre, and in the game, Wolverine collects his thoughts long enough to reason with a doctor and then rescue a little girl.

Without giving anything away, a revelation involving Will.i.am and another character from the movies appears that, while harmless to the actual game in question, filled me with great rage at the long-since soiled movie canon. Another story sequence appearing only in this game could have served as a suitable replacement for a terrible plot device from the movie…except they resort to that terrible plot device during the ending anyways, rendering the cutscene before it useless. Ask me personally if you’d like the spoilers.

Wolverine gets experience as he progresses, earning points that can be used on assorted stats. But the system as a whole feels useless. I barely noticed the upgrades to attacks or stats when I assign points to them. More insubstantial is the “battle reflexes” system, which theoretically increases the damage Wolverine does to certain enemies the more he fights them. Why they included such a system in a linear game with a finite number of enemies, I’ll never know. Perhaps World of Warcraft has made people fascinated with seeing a number that gradually increases overtime to give a false sense of progression. If leveling up in games makes you feel better about your progress, here’s an exercise: grab a pen and a piece of paper, and make a line every time an hour passes. At the end of the day, you’ll be at level 24! By the end of day three, you’ll have reached World of Warcraft’s level cap!

If all of the faults in the last two paragraphs are insubstantial to you, then these complaints will be nothing short of worthless. As Wolverine takes damage, his shirt rips (both for realism and because ladies find Hugh Jackman sexy), yet the shirt will magically reappear in cutscenes. It becomes more comedic when you’re wearing one of the classic costumes, and Wolverine develops superhuman fabric regeneration powers that can repair torn spandex. If you’re climbing a rope or ladder and enemies without guns are on a nearby ledge, they’ll start randomly swiping their swords in your direction in perhaps what is the evil enemy soldier version of jazz hands.

So there’s a bit of a stench reeking of rushed product looming about the Wolverine video game. The more overbearing issues keep a very good game from being a very great game, but that doesn’t keep Wolverine from being a throwaway. It’s a sufficient God of War/Devil May Cry clone, and we haven’t gotten a good one since God of War on the PSP. On top of that, it’s almost certainly the greatest game ever made about Wolverine. If for whatever reason you’re swamped with playing other action games that are trying to imitate comic book storylines (of which there are now two too-many) and you can’t afford to drop another $70, you can get by just fine by waiting for the price to drop, as movie-based games are prone to doing. But if the urge to stick three claws into someone’s diaphragm surfaces, or for whatever sick reason you actually LIKED the movie, well then here’s looking at you, bub.

3 ½ stars

Wii Sports - A poem

Wii Sports, Wii Sports, you rue my life
How you have plagued these days with smite
Into the abyss I should throw
This damn broken motion controls

When I bring the Wii to parties
Other games I bring just get teased
No More Heroes gets sold short
And Monkey Ball passed for Wii Sports

Wii Sports, Wii Sports, makes parties lame
When we take turns on the bowling game
These fake gutterballs make no sense
When a real alley has a liquor license

With a tennis game that’s shallow
Amusement sinks to a new low
For baseball, the programmers should yield
And let players control the outfield

For pitching controls rarely work
And batting seems to have some quirks
Plus it burns retinas to see
A field not of dreams but Miis

I can’t complain much when I realize
Wii Sports gives fat kids exercise
Moving their arms, make swishing sounds
As they play through all three Golf rounds

But golf isn’t as fun as it could
Why play as a Mii when there’s Tiger Woods
But at least Wii Golf isn’t as bland
As the worst Sports game in the land

Fragile as a butterfly
Inconsistent as a bee
Figuring out the boxing controls
Would dumbfound Muhammad Ali

Sometimes you punch, sometimes you duck
The controls for Boxing flat out suck
Should’ve warned players the Wii’s a sham
Yet 40 million sold across the land

Though I have enough class to say
I’d rather this be bundled than Wii Play
But 2 stars is what you will find
For the most overplayed game of all time

2 stars

de Blob

One of my psychological pet peeves in all of gaming is a gimmicked title. Few things repel my wallet from a game store like seeing a game with a title that plays with improper punctuation (Punch-out!!!), numbers in place of letters (Left 4 Dead), or deranged capitalization (inFAMOUS.) So in spite of appearing to be the kind of clever, original game concept that would need all the financial support one could lend it against the oppressing brigade of space marine shooters and plastic instrument music games, I outright refused to buy de Blob because someone refused to hold the Shift button on their keyboard while typing the D in the title.

I have other reasons. Look at the box art for De Blob (I’ll put more effort typing the game’s title than the publishers did in their press releases by holding the Shift button when necessary. You’re welcome.) Look at that mischievous, Dennis the Menace look on his face and his Bugs Bunny running pose, the look that says “I’m going to cause mayhem to my teacher and look very cool doing it!” De Blob would have fit in perfectly with the many other badittude-ridden mascot platformers in the 90s, trying too hard to appeal to a generation of youngsters smart enough to see through their shallow marketing campaign. And thus, like the Bugsys and Aero the Acrobats of the world, De Blob is destined to ride in bargain bins across Walmarts and pharmacies across the country.

I’m not quite sure who De Blob is marketed for. The story is the long-since beaten to death concept of a group of underground rebels challenging the might of an evil empire, except everything is intertwined with a colour motive. The captive citizens are colourful blob creatures reminiscent of Patrick Starfish. Meanwhile, the evil empire, the INKT Corporation, literally sucks all the colour from Chroma City and oppresses the populace in the most fascist way allowed in a E-rated title. This is like some racist kid’s dream. So you play as De Blob, a blob more mightier than ordinary blobs, perhaps because he’s fatter and can retain liquid better. Story sequences are kept to a bare minimum and the humour is definitely aimed at children, but there’s something in me that says that the game won’t reach a target audience; the core gameplay mechanics are too demanding for youngsters and kids older than ten, who are sneaking Halo sessions in behind their parents’ backs won’t be anymore impressed than me.

That said, kudos for naming your final villain “Comrade Black.” If anything, I’m completely disappointed at the entire video game industry for not creating a villain named “Comrade Black” sooner.

So the world is bleakly monochrome, and De Blob is charged with using his girth to make things right. The crux of the gameplay is that Blob can absorb packs of coloured paint from assorted walking canisters and spread his colourful ooze onto any building he touches. Being a wannabe Bart Simpson of the colour world, Blob follows no rules other than the rules that govern paint colours (RGB need not apply.) Paint canisters come in red, yellow and blue and mixing two will result in green, purple or orange. Blob controls using a control scheme focused on two buttons; unfortunately, one of them is Waggle. Blob jumps with Waggle (dammit) and can lock on to specific targets with the Z button to be pounced on with, yep, Waggle. Controller waggling will yield a jump about 6/7ths of the time you do it, but Blob often has a tendency to jump where you don’t want him to jump. If he’s clinging to the wall like Playdoh, you have no control over him other than to have him jump in the opposite direction, which makes a select few narrow platforming sequences on high surfaces above poisonous pits of ink a higher risk ordeal than need be. And the lock-on system doesn’t always lock on to a desired target; say I need to be Blue to attack a specific target, the game is just as likely to target a canister that’ll make me Yellow as it is the target of my mission objective and…well that sentence makes a lot more sense within the context of the game and I can’t help it! But summed up, Blob hates authority, and he views the player as authority and will sometimes refuse to listen to your instructions on how to be played, the damn child.

Each level has a pseudo-sandbox-linear vibe. Blob enters a part of the city and must earn a certain number of points to unlock the next section of the level. Points are earned either through restoring colour to the buildings or completing objectives. Now, there’s an almost hypnotic feeling that overcomes the player when it comes to painting, and perhaps De Blob should be given credit for making manual labour interesting (something Super Mario Sunshine failed spectacularly at.) The vibrant splashes of colour are accompanied by musical notes of assorted instruments that play in accordance with the jazz/funk/techno theme song in the background. Said song, by the way, is chosen by the player before each level, listed as Blob’s “mood”. This kind of control over one’s emotions is almost robotic and I start to fear De Blob more than I do the neo-Nazis at INKT. But when I’m not dreading De Blob’s true origins, there is a bit of a sense of accomplishment in gradually transforming a dull, grayscale landscape into a collage of fruity flavour.

But you can’t always depend on your arts and crafts skills, and thus you’ll have to complete the game’s missions to progress. There are only four kinds of missions, such as one where you follow an arbitrary set of flares along a guided path. Another will make a group of INKT soldiers spawn at your location and charge you with their artistic execution. Another will ask Blob to go to a giant building and use a certain number of paint points (and a lot of Wiimote shaking) to transform the building. And the most annoying asks you to paint certain buildings certain colours. These four mission objectives are repeated far too often with very little variation, and in particular the last one is of great frustration as the game starts asking for a variety of buildings that are in close proximity to be of different colours. So if, say, the camera acts a bit slow as it can be sometimes and Blob trips on a curb and hits the building that should be purple with a shade of green, well…that’s when I find myself having a hard time willing myself to fight the powers that be.

There are ten levels, each being an hour long. But you can’t save mid-level, which becomes a big point of frustration for me. You can unlock some fun side-missions that charge you with painting a confined area within a time limit, as well as the “Free Paint” mode that does away with objectives and lets the player spew colourful vandalism across each of the stages at his or her leisure. And there’s a multiplayer mode too, but I can’t pass judgment on that being that I couldn’t find anyone interested in playing it.

…and that’s all there is to De Blob. It reminds me an awful lot of Jet Grind Radio. Similar themes, styles, taste in music. But where psychotically loyal Sega fans will be talking about the former game for an extensively long time, I doubt that De Blob will endure the same kind of cult status. The game is fun for awhile, but once you’ve gotten a fine taste of the soundtrack, then the repetitive format of the game as a whole will begin to grate at you as you progress.

Fortunately for you and unfortunately for THQ, this game is yearning to reach your local bargain bin. And it wouldn’t be too bad of a purchase if you do find it in a basket at your local supermarket for a few bucks.

3 stars

SUPER MARIO BROS!

Why not?

You know you’ve written too many reviews in your lifetime when you lie in bed at night and the words for a review for a random game begin to materialize in your head. The problem with this scenario is that once the flow of text starts to leak into your consciousness, then your night of sleep is lost, and the cogs in your brain spiral with one line after another, despite the knowledge that going to sleep would be the wiser move for your real life. So this is the result of one night’s insomnia and subsequent terrible day at work, a review for Super Mario Bros One. The original game is available on the Wii Shop in its original glory for 500 points, though a solid Game Boy Color port that includes among other innovations, a BATTERY SAVE, is out there if you’re willing to go treasure hunting at your local mom and pop game shop.

If you don’t know the historical significance of Super Mario Bros, you can either search the internet or ask anyone in their mid twenties or older, because odds are they were around in the heyday of the Super Mario Bros Super Show. Thus, they know that Lou Albino is a great man. I’m sure the Nintendo PR version of history will tell you that Super Mario Bros resuscitated the video game industry single-handedly without the assist of a moving robot toy or clever marketing. As well, it revolutionized gaming in numerous ways, such as being one of the first great games that ENDED rather than just kept going at a higher speed until the player died, the game crashed (King of Kong reference,) or the janitor kicked you out of the pizzeria.

Despite being so utterly popular, I can all but say that Super Mario Bros is not the best game of all time. I would question its status among even the top ten or twenty best platformers of all time. After all, subsequent Mario games managed to do better in both second and third dimensions. And a game whose story consists of “dude must rescue princess from evil turtle” doesn’t quite push the limits of interactive storytelling the way later releases would.

And there’s the damned maze levels.

The gameplay of Super Mario Bros is just simple enough to be summed up in a paragraph. Mario is to move from the left side of the screen to the far right end of a stage….for there is no turning back! The NES cart didn’t have enough memory to allow the player to revisit parts of the stage.

This worked great for me. inFamous left a bad taste in my mouth for so-called “open world sandbox games,” so what better way to rebound than with a title so linear that that “backwards” isn’t even an option?

Mario has a mighty impressive jump and must use this to navigate an assortment of gigantic potholes, brick apparatuses capable of floating in midair, armoured Ninja Turtles that throw hammers, a heavenly bald computer nerd in an angelic cloud that throws spiked demon seeds at the player and a small handful of other illogical challenges. There are giant pipes that Mario can flush his entire body into to visit hidden crevices filled with coins, for this was 1985 and paranoia about alligators in sewers were at an all time high. Hence, coins and giant plants with teeth weren’t quite as foreign. Along the way, Mario can pick up drug-based powerups like mushrooms, flowers and a star with a face on it to enhance his abilities. I refuse to believe that anyone at Nintendo was at all sober during this era of gaming. Super Mario Bros is gaming’s Yellow Submarine, in so many ways.

Wikipedia tells me that the common enemy of the Mario universe, the Goomba, is some kind of “mushroom traitor.” I am eager to learn of the Goomba backstory. Did they feel like the regular mushrooms were discriminating against them? Is there some kind of religious dissention? Are they the Protestants of the Mario universe?

Super Mario Bros is very fundamentally simple to play, yet it’s absolutely baffling to see people struggle regardless. You hold one button to run, the other to jump. The key to success being the player’s mastery of the speed and trajectory of Mario’s acrobatic maneuvers…and I made that sound indefinitely more complicated than it really is. But it’s amazing how many people will pick up the controller and not understand that the B button makes you run. Or perhaps pressing two buttons at the same time saps too much brainpower for some, I don’t know.

This being the Virtual Console version, the game can freeze your game and let you continue at a later date. But that is the full extent of the mercy the player will be given. Once Mario runs out of lives, you start the game from the beginning in a prime example of the dated mentality of the 80s when beating a game was considered a high honour rather than something the normal man is capable of, and “Game Over” meant “homework time”. The pseudo-compromise to this; there are hidden “warp-zones” in the game that can take the player to the start of any chapter. It’s a better alternative than being made to replay the first 15 levels repeatedly because you’re stuck at the 16th, but being made to replay the same first two stages to get to that warp point is still an inconvenience I’d rather not deal with. Come on Nintendo, there’s no need to be afraid to tamper with these dated NES games; give players the option…the option! To play with unlimited continues.

And I must give this a paragraph but boy do those maze levels put me in a rage. The game has three stages, including the final stage, where you must run through a strangely laid out series of multi-floor platforms in a precise order, lest you be made to replay them over and over and lose your mind. The catch being that you have to figure this unorthodox pattern out within the already prudent time limit. They may have some use; if there’s someone you hate with terrible short term memory, you can throw them at one of these stages.

But in spite of being such a fossil, the dated nature of Super Mario Bros does have its innate advantages. There’s no load times, no installation, no mandatory updates to download, no downloading trophy support, no introductory cutscene, no thirty minute tutorial that slowly and agonizingly explains each button press as if the game were potty-training the player, there isn’t even a graphic displaying the company logo at the beginning. No, you start the game, the title screen appears instantly, you press start, you assume control. We need more games like this!

Each level, despite a limited number of background sprites, still feels different than the one before it, presenting unique challenges that gradually escalate in difficulty. The game is difficult enough to slap you for trying to accomplish a level, but accessible enough in nature that you’ll be encouraging yourself to press on regardless. Perhaps it’s a subliminal track in the MIDI music. That same subliminal track seems to inspire every one in ten people to have the SMB theme as their danged ringtone. On top of all that, once you’ve completed the game, there becomes a deep-rooted desire to try and speed-run the game, or play through with as little lost lives as possible.

And at the risk of spitting at the virtues of independent music lovers, Super Mario Bros is a great game to have because it’s so damn popular. Almost anyone that wasn’t raised to believe that the video game industry was founded by Halo will have some kind of emotional connection that urges them to play Super Mario Bros. Your non-gamer girlfriend? Your group of stoner buddies? Your sober relatives? The Wiimote, on its side, bears just a reasonable enough resemblance to the layout of an NES controller to recreate to feel of playing in your parents’ basement on Christmas Day with your brand new Nintendo Entertainment System. You can almost hear them telling you to turn the volume down. If you’re really feeling nostalgic, blow into the Wii disc slot.

Even when company isn’t over, Super Mario Bros is a game that is always fun in a pinch. Once you’ve reached a certain high skill level, you’ll find that the game can be completed in about half an hour, and really, having such a short experience can be more beneficial on those days when you’ve only gotten half an hour before Lost is on. So at the very least, having Super Mario Bros appear on your Wii television channel…thing, is more than worth the 500 points.

4 stars.

I don’t watch Lost.

Punch-Out(!!!) for Wii

If the numerous smug little kids walking around today’s streets with frizzed-out afro hair and gray shirts with NES controller artwork or Super Mario Bros 1 sprites are to be believed, then retro is hip. Flannel seems to be making a comeback and every other rapper on the radio is searching for the next big smash hit by remixing 80s songs with Auto-Tune torture. I feel as though Nintendo shouldn’t be encouraged to cash in on this fad with more video games based on old NES games on account that NEVER STOPPED making Marios, Zeldas and Donkey Kongs to begin with. But then I remember Wii Music and realize that an E3 lineup littered with Mario sequels is not the worst thing that can happen.

I used to think that most 8-bit games should stay dead. The world needs not a new Excitebike, or Ice Climbers, or Ice Hockey, or especially Kid Icarus (which already exists. It’s called God of War people.) And yet here we have a revival of Punch-out!!!

Disclaimer: This game makes the fatal mistake of including misplaced punctuation in the title which I’m going to be ignoring from here on out, because normal people will also ignore the punctuation in conversation too. Just try reading the title out loud, tell someone “Well I’m a tad curious about that PUNCH-OUT!!! game over there”.

Punch-out proves me wrong in ways I could never predict. The folks at Nintendo probably thought that a Punch-out revival would work because it’s a game that you can sell to the masses with motion controls. Every ad I’ve seen of the game prominently highlights that the Wii Fit Balance Board can be utilized to bob and weave like Muhammad Ali. In practice, using the Balance board to dodge attacks has the responsiveness of Butterbean. However, the game does provide a more viable use of the remote/nunchuk “throw the doohickey to punch” setup than Wii Boxing, partly due to how only “punch” is designated to motion controls and all of your other commands are allocated to buttons. But these motion controls just aren’t fast enough for the fast-paced nature of a fistfight against a boxing Russian carbonated beverage-fueled combatant. So you’ll eventually realize that “buttons for all commands” works better than “buttons for some commands” and promptly switch the control setting to “filthy-old-school-style.” FOSS controls (my term, not the game’s) means you hold the remote sideways and play the game like you would an NES controller, taking advantage of what may as well be the smartest design choice Nintendo ever made with the entire Wii console.

No, it’s not the “innovative” controls that make Punch-out relevant in 2009. Rather, it’s the nature of evolution. Fighting games have become complex over the years. By “fighting games”, I’m talking about games based on boxing and combat sports, rather than your Street Fighter-fighting-video-game-fighting games that were always complicated. In the pursuit of realism, fight sport games like Fight Night and the recent UFC title force the player to grasp elaborate control schemes using every button, direction and square inch of plastic on the controller to master the game’s depiction of a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt fighter. All the while demanding the player keep track of each fighter’s fatigue, strength, speed, arm length, leg length, unit length, 50 bars of statistics, pre-fight training, team members, stylistic strategies, organizing the layout of sponsor logos on your pants, what order you want the game to play its hip-hop songlist and your ability to heal wounds as the EA Sports Cutman ©.

So it’s rather refreshing to see a fighting game where all the player needs to know is “you hit them, they don’t hit you.”

You play as, and only as, Little Mac. You’re a 107 lb flyweight with fast hands, quick reflexes and outstanding cardio. He’d be a surefire top contender if only the WVBA had a flyweight division. No, the WVBA adopts the Japan/Pride Fighting Championships philosophy that there is nothing wrong with pitting fighters of all weight classes together and that freak show big-man-versus-little-man matches are big ticket sellers, regardless of fighter health (see Kazushi Sakuraba). And drug testing is nothing more than a crazy American idea. With trainer Doc Louis in his corner to inspire his clean diet with junk food, Mac begins his unlikely journey to topple opponents that outweigh him a good hundred pounds and become the world champion.

The gameplay is all but identical to the original NES Punch-out. Mac throws punches with the two side buttons, aiming at either head or torso, and well as uses the d-pad to block or evade. That it took me a single sentence to explain the basics should give you an idea of the game’s instant accessibility and thus tactical advantage over Fight Night in terms of getting your lady friend interested. The only other control note is that if you hit your enemy at prime moments, you can earn up to three stars that can go towards a powerful A-button uppercut.

Likewise, the 13 opponents will all try to punch, uppercut, boomerangicut, teleport, headbutt, flex, drink, dance, laugh, sometimes box and many other unlikely strategies to defeat you. Fortunately, these are the kinds of boxers that always swing for the fences and would be hopeless in a Floyd Mayweather tactical battle to a decision. The key to success in Punch-out is to study your opponent’s visual and audio cues, learn how to evade their attacks and respond with a buffet of knuckle sandwiches.

And while the difficulty of each opponent raises sharply as you progress, the game at least gives you the tools to succeed. Unlike previous fossils in the series, you have no lives limit and can fight each boxer until you get it right (with the only punishment being the number of losses that surface on your win-loss record. By the end of the game, people will look at your record and ask you to posthumously donate your brain for concussion research.) On top of that, if any particular roid monkey has you stumped, you can go into Doc Louis’s gym: a facility that looks decrepit and run-down, probably has an eviction notice or two lying around, a massive cockroach problem and maybe even a homeless problem…but is also the home of a hologram-projector! One that Mac can use to train against opponents while taking no damage. So while the game is the very epitome of a trial-and-error style, it’s also a very user-friendly form of trial-and-error.

And boy does the game throw some interesting opponents at you. All of the original Punch-out’s cast returns in this game short of Mike Ty….I mean Mr. Dream, along with Super Punch-out alumni Bear Hugger and Aran Ryan (why not Dragon Chan? Bob Charlie? Old guy with the staff?) And boy do they love their Wii debut! Each of the game’s 13 stereotypes are fully realized, oozing with personality in their every punch, walk, pre-round trash talk… even the loading screen graphic is used as a chance to punk you out. Whether its Glass Joe’s nervous stutters, Soda Popinski’s…addiction, or Super Macho Man’s pec flexing, it’s hard to not to fall for these racially charged chums. As a Canuck, I can tell that this game was developed by fellow Canadians because Bear Hugger is the living lumberjack stereotype, complete maple syrup and Joe Bowen reference. The one new fighter of the bunch if Disco Kid, a dancing fool with a funky style who comes off as one of the best of the bunch, and his presence makes me wish developers Next Level Games were given the chance to create some more new faces.

No matter how hard you try, you cannot, cannot, keep a straight face while looking at King Hippo celebrate a knockdown. It’s impossible.

But even the complaint that the 14 fighters isn’t enough holds little water in the spit bucket. Once you’ve beaten all of the fighters and won the title, Title Defense mode is unlocked. Here, each fighter returns with a new look and new gimmick. For example, King Hippo uses a manhole and some tape to stop Little Mac from hitting his weak spot for massive damage. Each opponent has learned new strategies and will easily beat you and win your title on the first try (yes, even Glass Joe.) So Little Mac becomes the Ric Flair of the WMBA and will have to reclaim his title many times over as he fends off each new challenge.

My biggest issue with Punch-out; once you’ve beaten all contenders, “Mac’s Last Stand” mode is unlocked. Here, you have only three lives to defeat ten opponents and unlock the last hidden fighter (won’t spoil it if you don’t know already) and the hidden Championship mode. Fail, and it becomes locked and you have to start a new save file to unlock it again. The work-around to this (thank you internet) is to copy your save file on an SD card and reload it on the Wii later, but I shouldn’t have to this at all.

Also, being that all fighters are speaking in their native tongues (presumably so the game isn’t labeled as racist) why not allow the option for subtitle translations?

That said, Punch-out has a surprising amount of replay value. You can revisit any opponent at any time in Exhibition mode, and the game gives you a list of three bonus objectives for each fight. Think you can figure the secret to beating Mr Sandman without dodging or blocking? How about knocking down Glass Joe 3 times and then letting him win by decision in a manner that would defy all judging conventions? The game gives just enough leeway in each challenger that each fight doesn’t necessarily have to look the same provided the player is willing to experiment (or look for answers on the internet.)

Finally, the two-player mode. Each player assumes control of a Little Mac and attempts to out-slug their adversary. If one Mac lands enough shots to fill a Giga-meter, that Mac takes a massive growth hormone injection and becomes Giga Mac, a boss-like enemy whom takes the same anti-Mayweather fight approach as the game’s other boxers. This mode is fun for a few minutes but too shallow to truly hold your attention.

But taken as a whole, Punch-out for the Wii is nothing short of fantastic. It’s simple, it’s challenging, yet it has more personality than most any game released before it this year. The trial-and-error approach to fighting may not be everyone’s cup of juice (inside drug reference intended), and I don’t think most people will walk away from Punch-out yearning for a sequel due to its simple nature. But in spite of this, Punch-out will occupy many hours of your time and jab a nice warm, tender bruise in your heart.

4 stars

inFamous - what a terrible name

Certain comic book storylines have been around long enough that few people bother to question their logic…provided they remain within their original fiction holding cell. People won’t question the science that allows a radioactive spider bite to grant one superpowers, let alone what exactly constitutes a “radioactive spider.” Most of us read these ludicrous but imaginative comics as kids, and the stories that have been around long enough that people are less eager in questioning the logic behind a woman with the genetic power to alter the outside weather around her than they are to complain when the movie adaptation doesn’t treat these completely insane stories with respect and dignity.

So there becomes a problem when one tries to create a brand new superhero storyline for an audience that has since matured enough to rationally question life. The ending of imFAMOUS, without giving anything away, is a surreal mindbender with massive plot holes that would’ve fit into an X-Men story many years ago with little doubt or objection. But in today’s day and age, the ending feels stupid and illogical. It’s as if the writer had a brilliant idea for a swerve and was eager to use it, despite not being able to figure a means to make it work within the existing plot.

Perhaps I should talk about the rest of inFAMOUS, or as I like to call it, “Infamous.” Because the only thing more annoying than a title with altered capitalization is a title with either inappropriately-inserted punctuation or numbers in place of letters.

Like many, many, many RPGs before it, Infamous forces the player to choose between good and evil; either be the divine savior of the land who farts Febreeze and Jesusly heals the sick, or the diabolical, no morals version of Satan with a knapsack.

You play as Cole, the generic name for a generic-looking character. I’ve been on the receiving end of a vicious lecture from a writing teacher about the importance of giving your character a distinct name, and I’d like to bring his frustration out to the readers; what a terrible name, Cole. Cole McGrath to be exact. The unofficial descendant of Resistance’s Nathan Hale is a delivery boy who drops off a bomb that devastates Empire City and transforms himself into Electro without the hokey yellow costume. The game introduces a small circle of characters (the angry girlfriend, the terrible comedic relief sidekick, the pushy agent, the villain that does nothing until the third act) and does nothing of note with them for most of the game, leaving you with a story of “Cole beating up gangsters that just won’t go away” until a fairly intriguing final chapter, where the player is finally given decisions that actually bear relevance to the main plot.

The whole idea of good and evil comes into play during key missions where the player is asked to make a decision for either the people’s benefit or Cole man’s own. Some of these decisions are a bit logical, like one where Cole contemplates leading a riot against the National Guard or letting the not quite as armed citizens absorb the first spray of bullets. But then some of the later “decisions” are agonizingly contrived. So there are these valves that Cole must shut off to stop the flow of toxic waste into the water supply. Seems simple enough, except a small crack will spray chemicals into the face of whoever turns the valve. Still seems simple enough being that a logical person would just turn the valve from the side after having already seen how this trap works, but Cole is not a logical person! So you must decide whether to take the shot in the face or make someone else turn the valve. A similar scenario; when faced with a need to destroy canisters containing the liquid, Cole must either stand next to this canister and use one type of attack that’ll project the contents in the direction of the public, or another kind of attack that’ll send the chemicals to Cole himself. Using the lather attack from a safe distance seems to not be an option for this man who loves to make hard decisions, even when he shouldn’t have to.

But really, the proverbial kryptonite of the whole morality system is Cole himself. The decisions that the player makes don’t reflect in the way Cole chooses to handle himself, which is to say that he flip flops on issues like John Kerry. One moment he’s expressing the need to save the city and the next, he’s trying to convince Agent Lady that these people don’t deserve salvation. There’s no rhyme or reason behind his scattered shifts in tone and belief other than that the writers didn’t want to put in the extra effort into having multiple scripts. Certain RPGs got around this issue by letting the player choose one of several possible dialogue options, and while they meant less than nothing in the actual game, they at least gave the player the chance to keep his or her character as consistent as desired. Here, Cole is trying to be some kind of shade-of-grey mix of beliefs, and that doesn’t work here. Especially since the game rewards players based on staying true to one moral alignment over the other with special powers, so the player will always try to be either morally pure or chaotically evil, both of which clash with the existing Cole character.

If someone told me that Infamous was supposed to be a superhero game, I’d be a bit confused. Actual superhero games that I’ve played in the past felt distinct, like I could only be controlling Spiderman and not some karate guy from a Streets of Rage beat em up. Cole doesn’t quite play as Cole so much as he plays like Crackdownman (I guess that would be his name…you know the guy from Crackdown) or even your agent of chaos protagonist from Saint’s Row. “Open world third person shooter” is as fitting a description as any for Infamous. Cole-man challenges his enemies by going into an aiming mode and firing bolts of electricity like bullets from a gun. The novelty of throwing sparks of electrocution fades quickly and you realize that you’ve played this game before. Your list of “powers” that can be unlocked include electric gunshots, electric grenades, electric rockets, electric sniper rifle shots and the electric physics gun blast. The feeling of possessing mastery over the ions doesn’t come over the player until near the end of the game, whence you unlock a deliciously overpowered lightning bolt attack that squashes everything in the path of your Sixaxis controller motions. Which I’ll gladly consider that to be the best use of the PS3 motion controls to date.

That massive explosion also helped Cole awaken his “genetic memory” and remember that he’s a descendant of Altair too. With more swiftness and grace than the creed of an assassin, Cole can cling, climb and shimmy along ledges of buildings with relative ease. Exploring the world from the tops of buildings is actually fun in its own Prince of Persian way and the game throws a small handful of entertaining platforming sequences to take advantage. The vertical aspect of the game becomes even more enjoyable once the abilities to grind wires like brother Tony Hawk or glide through the air like brother Fan Man become available. So many famous relatives, not to mention his Sugar Ray brother too.

I should mention that this is indeed a sandbox game, because every other game needs to be a sandbox game these days. Empire City is divided into three portions that become accessible over time, each containing their own sect of gimmick gangs with little variance amongst them; the later gangsters can absorb more damage but except for a few stray mini-boss units (including one that comes up far too frequently in the second chapter of the game for my liking), you’ll be deep-frying the same brand of gun-toting-fools far too often. Infamous’s greatest failing for me was simply the lack of variety in mission objectives. Most of the game’s missions involve either killing a troupe of enemies, or escorting something while an onslaught of enemies comes from all directions. I thought the escort mission went out of style in gaming back in 2000 and yet not only are they in Infamous but they’re here with great frequency and annoyance. The main story missions are hit or miss; there are some good set-piece sequences, and most of the game’s final third missions bring the thrills in large megawatt quantities, but far too often I found the game falling in the same traps as other sandbox games; overdone respawning enemies, frequent-occurring mid-bosses, repeating the same objective repeatedly within the same mission (and then asking the player to do the same mission again at a later time), and escort missions, escort missions, escort missions! The game’s sidequests are especially guilty of repetition, with several missions repeating across all three islands and only offering a petty reward; a paltry sum of experience points and a 2% reduced presence of gang activity in the region. Really? Only two percent? The game hopes that the player will actively attempt each side quest in the goal of purging the crime away from one island, only to go to the next island and repeat the exact same objectives once more. No, Infamous, I’m not interested in your community service.

Skip the nonsensical sidequest filler and the storyline takes about 5 hours to complete. I would say that five hours is a tolerable length if I hadn’t spent so much of it on missions that felt more drawn out than they should’ve been. And obviously, the game expects you to play it twice over to experience both vice and virtue. But with the main game feeling so stretched out as is, Youtube makes a viable alternative for players wanting to see both “good” and “evil” versions of the ending without going through the trouble. Both of which are but a minute long Cole monologue after the game’s bizzaro ending.

If you thought there was nothing fundamentally wrong whatsoever with such Grand Theft Auto clones as Crackdown, Saint’s Row 2, Assassin’s Creed or Spiderman: Web of Shadows, then this is your game to get. Moreso if you’re the kind of completionist that enjoys the thrill of searching every nook and cranny for the 150-odd collectable items that are typically scattered in a sandbox world then you’ll be in Grand Theft Auto clone heaven. For Infamous may be the mother of all Grand Theft Auto clones. But like all of the above mentioned Grand Theft Auto clones, Infamous creates a giant virtual world but fails to find anything but the most tired sandbox conventions to keep players looking for something to do once they’ve grown tired of killing the citizens on the streets.

Oddly enough, walking around killing pedestrians offers no chance on Cole’s good/evil meter. Strange.

3 ½ stars