No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

No More Heroes was Suda51’s love letter to himself. Here was a game starring a selfish and flawed hero with interests in pedophiliac anime, Mexican Lucha Libre, Star Wars and his pet cat. He engaged in a ranking war with assassins (that are never seen assassinating anyone but their fellow kind) and his motivations can best be summed up as “he is a male with a penis.” Call it self-indulgent but there was something very refreshing about No More Heroes’ non-conformist style. In a world rife with military shooters and sequels, this game felt bold and distinct. No More Heroes had the mentality of punk rock, but more akin the Sex Pistols’ independent brand of anti-authority, anti-conformity and anti-sobriety than Avril Lavigne’s manufactured brand. As far as I’m concerned, it was 2008’s real Game of the Year, Grand Theft Auto or Metal Gear be damned.

Fortunately, No More Heroes 2 doesn’t have a corporate aura, or the feeling that the franchise has sold out to the Man. In some ways, this game is even more daring, and bound to make many red-blooded Americans feel uncomfortable about themselves. But there’s also an underlying sense of fatigue, that you’ve seen the best this franchise has to offer already, and that the concept of No More Heroes has plateaued.

So Travis Touchdown is back, and he’s taken a three year hiatus from killing, a hiatus that makes him a legend amongst assassins everywhere in the city of Santa Destroy. Why did he disappear? No explanation is given, under the excuse of “gamers don’t care about exposition.” This game is wrong, especially since Travis’ sabbatical is glorified in later scenes. Anyways, Travis once again wants to climb the rankings, as he once again wants to mack the French chick, but there’s also a hilarious revenge device that fans of the first game will get a kick out of.

For better or for worse, this game has a much more serious tone than that of its predecessor. There are a few black humour chuckles in spots but most of the dialogue from the various assassins are straight-faced affairs to get over the games assorted themes. And the player will have plenty to be preached about. Themes such as the mindset of prizefighters and fan obsession are touched upon in various moments. Perhaps most prevalent being the themes of pro-violence and sexual undertones in video games. Enemies explode in a sea of blood and cash, a visual reward for ending others’ lives, and much ado is made about how Travis gets off on killing. The sword battery charge meter in the top is further symbolized by a phallic smiley face and a tiger icon represents Travis’ libido. The messages being that only a sick fetishist psychopath would be the one-man-army protagonist of a violent video game. One can almost call No More Heroes 2 the video game equivalent of Watchmen, albeit less subtle.

Not to mention how shamelessly upfront the female characters are subjected to voyeuristic scenes. The revealing sequences involving Sylvia or Shinobu such feel more like satires of how the female manipulator or Kill Bill-esque female hero than anything else. There may be no game more comfortable with its own sexuality ever made than No More Heroes 2.

That said, you’ll always wonder why Travis, a rampant murdering machine with a strong disdain for the assassin’s association doesn’t just give up killing his fellow kind and slaughter the association office members instead.

Gone from the first game is the city of Santa Destroy as a universal hub. Players merely hop from location to location through a menu screen. You still have the option to work side job mini-games to earn cash for upgrades and weapons. But since you no longer have to pay a mortgage’s worth in funds to progress in the story, there’s less of a sense of resentment to be harbored for their presence. But you’ll still want to get the new weapons and stat upgrades anyways, since later bosses have more health than the remaining members of the Sex Pistols have money. Almost all of the mini-games are presented in the style of 8-bit video games…in fact, scratch that. They are presented in the style of forgotten 8-bit mini-game compilations like The Three Stooges NES title, complete with hokey music and muffled voice samples. Being that “the bad NES mini-game set” has rarely been spoofed, seeing it done here feels more fresh and amusing than recent 8-bit homages like Retro Game Challenge and Eat Lead. Plus you can earn large sums of cash, fast, which makes these quirky games inviting in of themselves.

So after about 700 words of text, a reader of this review may be thinking that No More Heroes 2 sounds like some kind of great improvement of a game. But it’s when one finally divulges in the main game portion that things start to fall apart. The main gameplay portions consist of, and only of, Travis walking through a linear path and slicing up every hired goon he stumbles across. The lack of variety seen in these segments is almost disappointing. You’ll slice and dice the same kind of enemies repeatedly, from goons to goons with guns to fat goons with chainsaws to bouncers with lightsabers. The game feels about two onion layers of depth above a straight button-masher. You’ll press A repeatedly, then waggle the remote in a direction to pull off a gratifying finishing move, made all the more delicious by the cries for mercy from your fallen foes. From time to time, you’ll press B to Steinerize your enemies with a pro-wrestling slam. Old abilities like jerking off the Wiimote to recharge your batteries and the slot-machine shortcake superpowers are back as well. (Complete with a new slot machine power that liberates Travis’s hormones by transforming him into a tiger.) I had completely forgotten about how to break enemy guards or tilting the remote to change sword swipe directions until the final level, to be honest. Depth is certainly lacking here.

Oh, the camera kind of sucks. It’s pitched low, as to make the slashing of whatever enemy you’re making look all the more dramatic. But the camera doesn’t account for other enemies in the room, leaving a less conservative player to repeatedly get chainsawed in the back.

And the shallow nature of the combat is emphasized by just how much combat you’ll be doing in the game. There are several sequences where the game just throws wave after wave of enemies at you, almost to a point of ludicrousness. One level, set in a parking lot, has what could very well be one hundred enemies magically appearing from the back doors of four or five vans. Maybe this was intended to be a spoof of enemy respawn points in other games, but I wasn’t keen on being the victim of the joke.

The boss fights are a bit more gratifying. Sure, they mostly comprise of “sidestep their attack, then deliver your own.” Sure, they have a health bar worthy of Cal Ripkin Jr. Sure, you’ll swear in agony because you were one health bar away from victory and the enemy just dropped you with a one-hit-kill. But you’ll be the one laughing over the unconscious body of your fallen adversary when you finally deliver the QTE killing blow. None of the bosses approach the wacky creativity of, say, Super Destroyman or Bad Girl from the first game, but there are still some memorable battles that’ll earn a warm place in your heart. The final boss is certainly something to behold, not that I’d want to spoil it.

Now, the game does attempt a few diversions. Some, like an early-game mech battle that exists for no reason other than because a mech battle needed to happen, are humourous in concept, even if they’re not intuitive to play through in execution. There are two stages, occurring consecutively, that place you in Shinobu’s shoes and dress. (Though she’ll get out of both on several occasions.) They’re made distinct in that Shinobu can actually jump, though this feature is thankfully not fully utilized. As she has the trademark spinning forward jump seen in the recent Ninja Gaiden and Shinobi remakes, but with remarkably un-ninja-like agility and intuitiveness. You also get to play as Irish twin brother Henry for all of one single boss fight. I definitely wish that these side diversions were both better designed and more fleshed out. Instead, I was merely happy that they were all as short as they were.

I completed the game in 8 hours, though if I were to chart out how many of those hours were entertaining and which were of me being annoying, the line graph would have many valleys. Desperate Struggle has its moments but the gameplay doesn’t hold up and match the game’s sense of style. Fans of the first game will do themselves well to give it a shot, if just to see the continued adventures of Travis, Sylvia, Shinobu and Travis’s cat. Meanwhile curious parties should take a gander at the first No More Heroes instead.

3 ½ stars

Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time

Back in the 2002 action platformer Ratchet and Clank, it was revealed that the lovable dorkbot Clank was created in a robot war machine factory. Clank got ejected from that place and wound up becoming BFFs with the furry toughguy Ratchet, and later thwarted Clank’s robot mechanical brothers to neatly wrap up that story arc. But developers Insomniac were jonesing to create an origin story that could span three games, where Clank has some kind of important fate within the grand scheme of the universe. (You know, because saving the universe 5 or 6 times wasn’t grand enough.) So they decided to piss all over their own canon and declare that Clank is really the destined watcher of the universe in their newest and presumably final installment in the series.

A Crack in Time is the finale to the Ratchet and Clank Future story arc, possibly the last for Ratchet and Clank in general. A candid interview with the truthful and humble Captain Qwark during the installation brings players up to speed as to what happened in the last two games. I was grateful seeing the interview in that it confirmed what I already suspected; nothing of note happened in Quest for Booty. Ratchet is scouring the galaxy looking for his backpack friend, and Clank is getting adept at his new job as the minimum wage Janitor of Time. This game ties up just about all of the loose ends left in the franchise; where Clank (really) came from, what happened to Ratchet’s family, where Clank got his laugh, and so forth. There’s nothing particularly sophisticated or shocking here – it’s a children’s game, after all, though you may be surprised as to how much you find yourself chuckling along. There’s an unsuspecting amount of good comedy to be found here, moreso even than previous games. Qwark is allowed to be Qwark, the pirate robots from Tools of Destruction get their own radio station, and villain-of-the-moment Dr Nefarious gives a gripping monologue about his motivations that’ll place him in the annals of supervillain history. So what I guess I’m to say is that series fans will be sated with this series conclusion.

(That said, I’ve got some issues, and they’re all spoilers, so you should skip this paragraph if you think spoilers make baby Jesus cry. The story is built around this plot device that going back in time could potentially destroy the universe. Yet Clank has no qualms creating two portals to the past, to alter what I would consider to be major events in galactic history. Or at least I think a planetary war is a major event in history. Another note; one of the missions involves Ratchet walking into a trap…but you find out that this upcoming mission is a trap from the loading screen text. Whoever wrote that loading screen, let alone the testers that ignored it, need to feel a flying monkey wrench to the gonads.)

The horizontally-divided boxart lets the player know that in A Crack in Time, both Ratchet and Clank will embark on separate adventures. In actuality, those adventures are divvied up 89% Lombax and 11% midgetbot. Clank’s sections involve smacking snails with a staff, deflecting the projectiles back at Phantom Gannon’s pet seahorses, and effortlessly clearing platforming sequences with the all-too-generous quadruple-jump. If making Clank feel like a miniscule sidekick was the goal of these missions, then good job boys. There are, however, some nice switch puzzle sequences, and I never thought I’d be saying “nice switch puzzle sequences” in 2010. Here, Clank must navigate a series of switches that open doors and raise platforms by way of recording video clones of himself, akin to the thankfully-forgotten Blinx the Timesweeper. These puzzles are the epitome of “just right.” They won’t shatter your brain in half, nor are the solutions apparent from the onset. The puzzles appear just frequently enough to be deemed a worthy Kit-Kat break from the main action, and not too often that they get as annoying as the Kit-Kat jingle. In fact, they appear just frequently enough that if I see them in another, competing video game, I’ll probably curse that game and sing the praises of Ratchet and Clank in its place.

And Clank also has some insignificant mini-game about scouring a globe, shooting your deathray at key targets. This is somehow justified as “correcting the flow of time.” It is fortunate that this sequence only surfaces in one level, because I was fed up with this planetary maintenance sequence after the initial tutorial, let alone the 5 or 6 subsequent spherical sweeps.

The Clank stages seem to exist more as rest periods between entrees for the banquet hall party that is the Ratchet stages. The gameplay here will be plenty familiar to series vets – you run, you jump, you shoot. This is the last game franchise to still combine 3D mascot platforming mechanics with third person gunplay, and I’m starting to see the reasons why. Just about all of Ratchet’s combat sequences will consist of the player strafing and jumping over stray bullets while responding with large amounts of munitions. There really isn’t much of a tactical strategy in how you approach your enemies or what weapons to use, since you’re working on a limited ammo supply and will most likely deplete your pockets of rockets and shotgun shells quickly enough.

These games have always been more about the visual splendor and absurdity than the strategy, anyways. Throwing a disco ball in the air, watching those giant rancor monsters get crunk, then blasting them to pieces and collecting all the flying bolts that surface afterwards. You’ll recognize most of the weapons from Tools of Destruction, like the rocket launcher and the charismatic ball of energy that is Mr. Zircon. A few new toys, like the shotgun with an attached blowfish and a portal gun that summons tentacles from another dimension, highlight an underlying theme of animal cruelty.

But it’s hard to not feel a bit fatigued with the familiar gameplay. At the end of the day, you’re still strafe-shooting all of your adversaries in the same manner as when you first played Ratchet and Clank in 2002. All of the bosses are merely variations of “circle the goon and shoot.” And the game has a definite insecurity about its length that further draws out this flaw. You’ll repeat certain boss fights, sometimes in immediate succession of each other. The giant battlecruiser and the three-headed tank will quickly wear out their welcome. And there are plenty of sequences where Ratchet is trapped in a room, waiting for enemies to respawn and attack you, some of these being of questionable length. Oh, and there’s a few gun turret sequences. I can’t help but feel that any game released after Metal Gear Solid 4 shouldn’t even bother with gun turret sequences since they’ll only serve to be a step down, and the ones in A Crack in Time are especially underwhelming.

The central hub uniting all of the game sequences is, well, the universe itself, and Ratchet can fly around in his spaceship and engage in two-dimensional battles with enemy forces and…well they’re not particularly enthralling. You can land on these mini-planets and run through some smaller stages across the spherical surface, akin to Super Mario Galaxy. Except where that game made each planet a unique and creative sequence, A Crack in Time’s planet stages are reusing the same assets you encountered in the main stages. Thus, these stages feel repetitive, and do little more than remind you of a better video game. And you’ll more than likely have to play them anyways, because the game will abruptly halt your progress otherwise. You need to further Ratchet’s animal cruelty agenda by kidnapping these planets’ Zonis to upgrade your ship, as some stages will be blocked off otherwise. Artificial game lengthening, never a good thing. A Crack in Time is an 8 hour game with about 2 or 3 hours of that gameplay being unwanted filler.

If you’ve gone this far in the Ratchet and Clank Future series, then you may as well see it to the end and take a look at A Crack in Time. For what it’s worth, the story gives fans a satisfying conclusion and would perfectly bookend the series…not that I can imagine Sony putting this franchise to rest. Jak and Daxter recently made an unwanted comeback, after all. The curious newcomer to this series would be better served examining Tools of Destruction first.

3 ½ stars

Demon's Souls

Demon’s Souls is a game that pushes the boundaries of one’s patience. In fact, scratch that. It doesn’t push the boundaries, it pancakes the boundaries with a monster truck dressed in decal patterned after its box art. And the driver of the truck is the villain from Wayne’s World; the one that envisions an arcade game where players cannot defeat the blob, but will invest hundreds of quarters to figure out how anyways. Demon’s Souls is the kind of game that gets parodied on a show like The Simpsons, where a generic knight character will leap over a pit of spikes only to fall into another trap pit of spikes. It’s a sadistic and brutally difficult game, with the capability to drive players stark raving mad. So a degree of resiliency is required.

There’s a modest amount of backstory that will do little to entice you. There’s something about an ancient evil that has the munchies and is snacking on the souls of humanity, and a lot of kings and such succumbing to said munchies. You play as a would-be adventurer who dies in the tutorial and is drawn to the Nexus, an afterlife-like temple lacking any Prottoss. The only way to free yourself is the kill lots of bad things and collect their souls. Souls, after all, are a sort of superstitious currency that can be spent on items or leveling up your character. Shang Tsung would easily be able to save the land of Boletaria.

So first you create your silent avatar protagonist. And I consider any game that lets you create your hero to be starting on the right note in not risking the player control a pre-designed jerk hero (thank you very much, The World Ends With You.) You choose from your typical set of archetypes, from knights to mages to thieves to greasy cavemen, though the difference is mostly in relation to your initial stats and armament. If you’re resourceful enough, you can give your character any set of stats and abilities, which is fortunate since you’re going to want at least some form of ranged and melee offence.

Once you’ve created your peon, it’s time to send him or her out to the world to die. You’ll learn very quickly that you’ll spend more time dying than men think about sex. Any given enemy can finish you with a well-placed strike to the heart. And these enemies often hunt in packs. Combat is akin to the Zelda games with targeting, attacks and dodges. But Link is superhuman in his ability to wave around a giant sword like a feather, turn invincible while rolling to the side and freezing the universe while he drinks a magic potion. In Demon’s Souls, your attacks are a little more believably paced, a flying boulder can still crush you while you’re jumping to the side, and nobody has the manners to let you finish eating your grass sandwich. So combat is something that takes time to master, but the lack of comfort in knowing there’s no “easy” way to survive battles means that no matter how many generic soldier enemies you run into, you never feel like the combat is a chore. Partly because you’ve never had a chore that could end your life while you’re dosing off.

And if it’s not the enemies trying to slice and dice you, it’s the many traps that lie in wait on any given stretch of land. If you’re caught walking forward while blinking, you can wind up falling in a bottomless pit, smashing by a boulder on fire or skewered by the tongue-mouth of Admiral Akbar’s prison ward-cousin. The game already has a strong sense of atmosphere thanks to the great art direction of the various worlds and ugliness of the enemies. But there’s also a strong sense of peril; a constant feeling that everything in the world wants you to die. This stems from the fact that everything in the world DOES want you to die. And you’ll consistently find yourself uttering the phrase “oh you’ve got to be kidding me.” That skeleton monster you fought earlier with the giant meat cleaver? The one that can kill you with a single heavy swipe? Now you’re going to fight him on the edge of the cliff. And there’s actually two of them.

And die you will. Very often. The game has some kind of mentality where you start out “alive” and with full health. But if you die, you enter “soul form” with only half of a health meter. There are various ways to return to living form, but the most prominent seems to be to actually progress through the level and defeat a boss, thus proving you didn’t need the damned health in the first place. Between that and an early power-up that reduces the death penalty to 3/4s of your health, one quickly realizes that “soul form” isn’t really much of a penalty at all. Also, when you die, you revert to the start of the level, with all of the enemies respawning, and you lose all your souls, forcing you to revisit the place of your demise to gain them back. And that’s assuming you don’t die again on the way to fetch your prior corpse because it’ll vanish with all of the soul money you collected before if you do.

This whole “starting from the beginning of a level” thing, now that’s old school thinking. There will be times where you’ll spend a hardy amount of effort at a stage, only for a random flying manta ray to throw a spike in your back and nullify all your progress. Aggravating? Yessiree. The game doesn’t have real stat-bumping grinding, per say, but you may wind up revisiting a certain level in the name of collecting more healing power-ups or a few souls so you can go to the nihilist blacksmith and repair your weapons. This is the kind of game that, if it had a real checkpoint system, could probably be finished in 3-4 hours, but it doesn’t. So I wound up finishing it in about 34 hours. That, people, is a significant amount of time dying, respawning and dying again. At the same time, being punished so harshly also makes the game strangely addictive. Even in death, making a few extra yards of progress in a level or thinking up a slight change in your tactics becomes its own demented motivation for trying again. And I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I spent many lengthy game sessions a day trying to complete what was essentially a single level.

And even when I reached peaks of rage, even when all the testosterone in my body began to burn through my veins like magma, I always kept going. Yes, I wish I didn’t have to restart a stage every time a boss smote me. But that anger turned to adulation the moment I actually defeated my adversary. The bosses in the game, if anything, are very memorable. Even though many of them fit into familiar molds like “the giant spider”, “the giant knight” and “the giant knight with a bigger sword”, each battle is a mighty mountain that begs to be climbed, conquered, flagged and skied down. Plus, a lack of quick-time events makes each boss fight feel more organic, more personal than the many cutscene-driven boss fights that have become far too prominent in games today. When you beat a boss, you wear the accompanying PS3 Trophy on your profile like a badge of honour. Demon’s Souls is the only game to make me feel pride over a trophy or achievement.

After the first anomaly of a boss, you get the freedom to play through the game’s five worlds in any order you find comfortable. So there’s a Mega Man-like approach in that if one world is giving you problems, you can always try go to another world and find more problems. After you complete the game, the final “sequence” is made available. I have yet to decide whether or not this is a real flaw with the game, but both the final world and final boss are short and pathetically easy. While this kind of is anti-climatic, it was also something of a relief after all the pain and suffering the game put me through prior.

I should mention the game’s unique online component at some point. You can’t communicate directly with other players in what I presume to be an attempt at an online game the ESRB can rate, but the ratings group still refused to evaluate the online interactions. Rather, players can leave behind messages on the floor for others to read, warning players of incoming traps, threats, or ironies. You’ll get bored very fast of seeing “Poor Guy” written in front of a dead body. From time to time, this system will work and my hide will be spared thanks to the warning of an incoming trap, but there actually aren’t that many helpful hints. This could be blamed on my belief that other gamers are cold-hearted creatures, though perhaps you have to be a tad evil to be willing to play Demon’s Souls in the first place. Or because whatever benefit you get from having your message recommended by other players is easily obtained simply by leaving the phrase “I’m in trouble, please recommend my message” on the floor. That message appears way too frequently in my travels, and I’m a bit disheartened when I see just how many recommendations they actually get in contrast to the genuinely helpful signs. You can also look at bloodstains on the floor and see how previous players have died, and at first you’ll mock the other players and the sad ways they’ve met their fate. Then you’ll remember the many times that you shouldn’t have died too. Demon’s Souls makes fools of us all.

And there’s also a whole component of players entering other player’s games. A dead knight can leave behind an invitation on the floor to join another game and help another player defeat a boss in the name of having your body revived. Or, you can invade the game as an enemy and kill the player for the same purpose. But with Soul Form not being much of a penalty in contrast to the cost of returning to your body, I rarely found either to happen often. And I guess lag could be an issue, as you’ll see in what could be the game’s weakest flaw; it’s potentially greatest idea gone bad. One boss fight will actually pluck a player into your world and force you to do battle for that world’s final soul. On theory, this sounds intriguing, but the set-up for this battle fails. It takes a minute long, unskippable cutscene for the game to randomly find and load you an adversary. And after it does, you have to do battle with two very tough enemies before you can even progress. If you fall to the two Super Admiral Akbars, then you have to restart the process. I wonder what the player whom gets thrown into my game world thinks, waiting for me to arrive only to get thrown back out because I failed to heed the warning of “It’s A Trap.” When I finally got to said battle, unhealthy lag issues promptly resulted in my getting thrashed by lance shots from 3 feet away. It was like watching a bad wrestling match. (Watch at about 3:15 in that clip.) I opted to just disconnect from the internet and find victory beating up an AI version of said boss.

You can call that quite a snafu. But at the same time, my heart goes out to Demon’s Souls for trying something new with its online aspects. But even if the warning in the fine print that is the online user agreement comes true and Sony does decide to pull the plug on the game’s online servers in six months, the actual game part of Demon’s Souls is what makes the experience. The game is vicious, vile, evil, sinister, and yet the allure of making that much more progress and seeing what will try to kill you next keeps you going. The influx of games with quick-time events and flashy cutscenes makes Demon’s Souls feel refreshing in that the player is in constant control, responsible for the few successes and many failures you’ll experience. You do all the dirty work yourself, and when you finally bite off that giant knight’s ankles and stab his head, you’ll have no one to thank but yourself. After you beat the game, the option of replaying it with harder enemies and your prior character carrying over presents itself. So the potential to lose a lot of time is here. Demon’s Souls is a fine game for the player that can handle being tenderized in the name of playing something with meat on it.

4 stars

Retro Game Challenge

Retro Game Challenge is about the Game Master, a man who drowned his sorrows in 8-bit video games to suppress his self-esteem issues. The levels of his party in Final Fantasy would rise inversely with his dipping grades, and he had an anger problem pent up from a libido no woman would want to satisfy. Ultimately, his parents would delete his World of Warcraft account, and this leads the man taking his own life using a controller wire.

However, the ESRB would never give an E rating to such a concept, so instead he just embeds himself in the digital world. In turn, he traps you in the past, and forces you to play 8-bit video games with the young version of himself. Can you be the Game Master’s savior by being the friend he never had?

This is a faux compilation of games that look like they could’ve existed in the good ol’ Famicon era of gaming. The games are believable enough in their presentation that they feel like NES games that fell through the cracks of obscurity, despite how the game presents them as “mega popular, era-defining classics.” Like how Super Mario Bros or Zelda 64 or Grand Theft Auto 3 or no game from this console generation were earth-shattering Sgt. Pepper-esque releases, so too is…Super Robot Haggle Man?

In each segment of the story mode, Game Master will have some kind of goofy monologue about how you’ll never beat his next challenge. Then you’ll be ported to the 80s, where his younger self plays the kind of consumerist child that geeks out with joy over the latest releases. In other words, he represents the childhood of your local Gamestop manager. The first flaw in this game concept is the sheer amount of dialogue you’ll be forced to endure. The characters speak an awful lot more here than the average attention span of the children depicted in the game.

Anyone that played games prior to the WWW boom will get a kick out of some of the references: rapid-fire controllers, strategy guides, friends at school making up codes, The Wizard, annoying game magazine editors and so forth. They make the game feel authentically retro, but aren’t quite as amusing as one would hope them to be. The retro gaming culture has been spoofed to death, whether on overpriced “vintage” t-shirts or websites like ScrewAttack, so the nostalgic vibe here is treaded ground. It has been surprising how lame meta-games like this or Eat Lead have turned out to be (and in turn, how surprisingly strong the Simpsons Game was at the same brand of geek humour.)

Unofficially, there are 7 fake games here, though you may as well only acknowledge 5. Cosmic Gate is a straight Galaga clone, surprising in that a game of its kind being treated as a million-seller on the NES seems rather unlikely. Super Robot Haggle Man is a Mappy-like platformer that hams up on both Japanese cheesiness and Engrish wonder. Rally King is a top-down racing game with only four tracks and a focus on a strange drift-boosting technique that only make sense in a video game. Star Prince is a scrolling space shooter akin to Gradius, but with more overpowered weapons and all of two bosses. Then, in what appears to scream “magazine spoof” while whispering “artificial game lengthening”, there’s the game magazine’s special edition of Rally King with so few tweaks that the mock magazine has an article trying to justify its unique existence. Afterwards, there’s the sequel to Super Robot Haggle Man, which makes incremental improvements to a game that you’d rather not play again. Finally, the main event is Guardia Quest, which the magazine spends a whole lot of time and text hyping, advertising and subsequently crying over its numerous delays. This is the Dragon Quest-like RPG, complete with slow-toggling menus and level grinding, a combination that may be nostalgic for some but was also the point of which I stopped caring about the Retro Challenge.

I’ve made mention earlier to a certain mock magazine, GameFan. Each one only has a few sentences worth of text, including hints and codes that are actually helpful. So in that regard, Retro Game Challenge makes a successful rib at nostalgia. But that said, these games sure seem to have a lot of codes. I knew NES games had their share of hidden cheats, but these poser games seem to have everything short of the Big Head cheat intact. Not that you’ll need them, as these games are a combination of old school graphics and new school difficulty…which is to say they have no difficulty at all. Anyone who owned an NES will have little problems making their way through each of the game challenges.

Operative word being “challenges”, which right there is Retro Game Challenge’s greatest flaw. You’re not asked to finish these games. Rather, you’re asked to complete challenges akin to Achievements or PS3 trophies. These can vary from “stomp on the heads of two enemies” to “finish the second level without using a continue” but the one common denominator is that each game has four challenges. You can’t save between challenges, either. With each challenge, you’re always made to restart the game from the beginning, and you always have to deal with the same waves of text between challenges. Imagine playing Gears of War, and you get the achievement for chainsawing your first enemy. (I might be imagining this achievement exists, to be honest.) Afterwards, the game reboots, and you have to play through the entire first level. You get another achievement, the game reboots again. As a result, you’ll get very sick of each of the included games very fast, and have no desire to revisit them in the included Free Play mode.

Much like the included games if they existed back in the day, Retro Game Challenge is destined to occupy a bargain bin near you. And therein is where you should let the game rest. Odds are that standing next to it in the bin of old game releases is The Simpsons Game, a much better parody of the industry and one you should look into instead.

2 ½ stars

Actraiser: The Virtual Console fears god

Actraiser for the Super Nintendo is most notable in the annals of history in that if you were to rank every SNES game in alphabetical order, it would appear ninth. However, unless you watched AHHH Real Monsters back when Nickelodeon mattered, then it would be the first notable SNES game on the list. Ergo, Actraiser is alphabetically the most significant 16-bit release of all time.

In this game, you play as God. Not the real Christian God of course, the last thing the developers at Enix wanted was for players to be blamed for every unjust war in history by the game’s virtual non-believers. No, you play as a fantasy god in a fantasy realm where demons are slapping around your human worshippers. There are six cities of civilians that need restoring, and like the travelling rock star you are, you go from town to town in your temple-shaped tour bus with your Cupid roadie.

So you’ll get your Mode 7-powered ass to a town, and your first order of business will be to curb stomp some demons. To do the stomping, you are manifested into an animated statue of a knight with questionable fashion sense in a series of sidescrolling levels. Your knight runs and jumps kind of slowly and ungracefully, and your main attack is not so much a sword slash as it is a sword flick. Most of your enemies are equally ill-equipped for combat, aside from some tough bosses ripped out of at least four or five different international mythologies. Actraiser could very well be the 16-bit God of War if it had fast action, a real story, violence, and was entertaining. The platforming levels aren’t terrible, but they’re not particularly thrilling either. And odds are that you’ve seen the same forms of enemies and tactics in several games older than Actraiser and many more that have been released since.

After you trounce the local demon, claimed his soul and wished you were playing Demon’s Souls, the civilians of the area muster enough confidence to rebuild their town. This is where the simulation element of Actraiser kicks in, though what is actually being “simulated” is as good a question as any. Anyone expecting a SimCity-level of depth and strategy will be sorely disappointed. In fact, anyone expecting strategy in general will be sorely disappointed. Generally, you point the direction in which your civilians rebuild their roads (namely, into a demon portal so that flying cupid demons stop respawning), all the while shooting down demon cupids using your angel cupid in what amounts to a very trivial top-down shooter. Any obstacle that gets in the way of your road building is quickly dealt with. Is a forest in the way? Slaughter the wildlife inhabiting it with a thunderstorm. Rocks in the way? Cast an earthquake and slaughter some of your own people along the way. All of these are done through a menu with no actual gameplay mechanic, notable consequence or tactical element.

So the whole simulation element feels more like a formality than a game. Sometimes, the villagers may fork over an item or two as a “sacrifice” (some very PG sacrifices of course. Think more along the lines of crops instead of a human heart.) But otherwise, there’s no connection between the platforming levels and the sim aspect. At least the former provided some semblance of action and excitement. Or at least something of note. I stopped playing the game near the end, when I was made to run through a gauntlet of all the boss fights before engaging the final boss. This marathon annoyed me, being that I was given a set number of lives and power-ups. At least Mega Man games were usually courteous enough to consider the Wily fight a checkpoint..

So I began to ponder. Why is this game so famous? Apparently, Actraiser’s greatest claim to fame is the music. That ever-mechanical MIDI series of beeps and hums gets translated into something resembling an orchestral score in this game. If you like your 16 bit music, and actually listen to it on the ride to work as opposed to Ryan Seacreast’s Top 40 Actual Singers, then you may get a dig out of Actraiser’s odd score. But I will say that Actraiser gave me an appreciation for Diddy Kong Racing and every game released thereafter. I’m referring to games where the music changes to reflect the ambiance of the situation, whether it’s “no one is around and the music is quiet” or “crazy guys attacking you and the music is hectic.” Actraiser, like most games of the era, lets its soundtrack remain static throughout the level, sometimes to odd results. The first level features some kind of frenetic “Holy Crap The World Is Ending ASAP” theme song that moves with more tempo and pace than my knight character is even capable of walking. There’s something to be said for a soundtrack matching the mood.

Who should get Actraiser? People that already liked Actraiser, of course. Nostalgia is about the one good reason to give this game another go. Most players trying to discover it for the first time will be confused as to what the big deal is. Many games featuring similar themes and ideas, whether as a simulation or action title, have done better, and Actraiser only proves that the two genres are better left separate.

3 stars

DJ Hero

There are certain games that, for whatever reason, I don’t foresee myself attempting to play, let alone review. I can’t touch the Madden games because I won’t settle for anything less than the Pittsburgh Steelers winning sever consecutive Super Bowls, then crossing over and winning the Stanley Cup at least twice. I won’t attempt Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport because I’m about as confident in my ability to handle cars as Indiana Jones is with snakes. And I never envisioned myself attempting DJ Hero because textbooks cost money that I simply did not have to spend on another plastic musical instrument controller taking closet space away from actual clothes. Fortunately, a member of my family has a heart of gold and wallet filled with Benjamins (or is that “Elizabeths” in Canada?) Now I find myself with a new musical game, and one turntable short of possessing two turntables and a microphone.

DJ Hero is the non-creatively named turntable version of Guitar Hero. Included in the graffiti-laden box is a sizable record player-controller that is begging to be used as a weapon in a New Jack match. There’s a record-shaped spinning disc with three coloured buttons abroad, and you can imagine what those three buttons do. There’s also a slider, a twisty knob, a big glowing button, and…look, I don’t know what the official technical terms are for all this turntablature. Grandmaster Flash tried to explain everything in the tutorial but I started having a hard time believing any words that came out of his mouth when he started spouting about the creative freedom you can express in parts of the songs. This “creative freedom” refers to the ability to throw in canned sound effects in red-striped segments, sound effects that will more than likely involve Flava Flav.

Most kidding aside, the DJ Hero experience works because that strange DJ controller really changes the music game experience. Sure, you’re still pressing coloured buttons to match the coloured circles on the screen. But now you’re thinking about scratching the disc at certain parts (musically, not literally), flipping the switch to fade in or out parts of the song, and turning the knob to do crazy audio effects to the song. Remember the first time you played Guitar Hero and you felt like the grungiest of rock stars, playing out all of your on-stage rock ‘n roll fantasies? (and possibly apprehending some substances to play out the post-concert part of those fantasies?) Well DJ Hero evokes that similar feeling all over again. When you’re twisting knobs and scratching the disc thing in tune with the music, you really feel like that egotistical punk on top of the stage tearing the house down, and asking everyone if the roof is indeed on fire.

How close this turntable controller is to simulating actual DJing, I don’t know. My DJ friend was too busy fulfilling zombie apocalypse fantasies in Left Four Dead to let me know. I somehow imagine the reaction of the DJ community reflecting that of actual guitar players with Guitar Hero; that us gamers are all a bunch of poser amateur punks. Oh well.

Now, there are a few differences between DJ Hero and its Grandguitarfather. You don’t play one song at a time, but rather a mix of two songs. And while a handful of songs from actual DJs like Daft Punk and Eric Prydz appear from time to time, most of the songs are popular rock, pop, rap and retro tracks in a blatent, mainstreamed attempt to create the whitest DJ-related product of all time. As part of said target audience, I’m satisfied. There are some unsuspecting mixes of tracks from unlikely artists like Gary Newman, the Jackson 5, 50 Cent and Zakk Wylde, to illustrate the game’s unsuspecting variety. And whoever thought mixing Vanilla Ice with MC Hammer was a great idea was very, very, very correct. The tracklist has close to 100 mixes, though you’ll hear certain songs a bit too frequently. You’ll hear Rihanna’s “Disturbia” so often that you may begin to sympathize for Chris Brown.

Other differences between DJ Hero and music games that aren’t DJ Hero are a little more subtle. It’s no longer “Star Power” but “Euphoria”, with the two differences being that 1. you press the glowing button instead of turning the controller sideways and 2. presumably, the crowd pops acid when you activate it. Getting a good enough note streak gives you a Rewind Attack, where turning the disc counter-clockwise rewinds you back to a previous portion of the song. This feature that comes up too often and thus gets a bit repetitive when you’re kicking too much ass, but now I’m nitpicking. All of the songs are divided into “setlists” and…get this, you have to actually UNLOCK the game’s songs. Oh boy, when was the last time you actually had to do that in a music game?

Most of my problems with DJ Hero aren’t really dealbreakers, especially since the “deal” part for me cost nothing thanks to Santa Claus. But I’ll mention them anyways. This being an Activision music game, you’ve got all of five downloadable songs available for purchase to expand your music library. The turntable controller, being more nuanced than the guitar controller’s “five buttons and a flap” is a bit harder to explain to a newcomer, and thus the game’s party appeal is limited. You can play multiplayer with either a second turntable or, for certain songs, a guitar, but you’re better off just popping in a four player Rock Band or Guitar Hero and getting more than two people involved. And finally, my biggest issue is that of personality. The game has an assortment of characters, venues and equipment filling assorted DJ archetypes, such as the Eastern European weirdo or the slutty Brazilian model type that just happens to know how to play turntables (there might actually be 6 of those in the game), but DJ Hero as a whole lacks the brazen sense of humour of Harmonix’s Guitar Hero games. To be fair, no music game since Guitar Hero 2 has come close to matching the rock lifestyle spoof of such, which may have more to do with the music game genre as a whole selling out to The Man than anything else.

But really, DJ Hero is worth getting because there’s an aura of freshness surrounding the game, and I’m not just saying that because DJ Jazzy Jeff is in it. The experience feels exciting, fun again. It reminds you of the first time you played Guitar Hero and felt like Zakk Wylde without the mysterious odors. It’s worth the exuberant price tag (well, maybe not worth the Renegade Edition’s super exuberant price tag.) It may not rescue the music game genre from its impending stagnation, but it at least slows it down. And does so to the tune of Another One Bites The Dust.

4 stars

Demo double pack: Dante's Inferno and Bayonetta

I've had this typed up for like a month now, so perhaps it's about time I get around to posting it on my site.

Both of these games caught the corner of my eye for two reasons; one is because they don’t have a 2 at the end of their titles, and also because their promotional tactics strike me as odd.



I was just reading the Wikipedia article for the Dante’s Inferno video game. Apparently, video game critics were sent $200 in the mail by Electronic Arts with an accompanying message; either you succumbed to greed for cashing the check in, or were a wasteful individual for not. But either way, you’re sinning. What if I gave the money to charity? Would EA claim I committed a mortal sin if I spent the money on competing games like The God of War Collection? Is the one true path to salvation through making an offering towards the almighty John Madden?

Dante’s Inferno is based on The Divine Comedy, a legendary work of literature that I never read. So for all I know, this video game could be a dead-on accurate recreation of Dante Alighieri’s megapoem. But I doubt that for about three hundred reasons. One is the gratuitous use of the Crusades as a backdrop, trying its damnedest to evoke the same themes of religion-abuse as Assassin’s Creed, to the point where I began suspecting that developer Visceral Games consisted of a multicultural team of various religious beliefs. Then we have Dante himself, swinging an axe vividly and single-handedly chopping down legions of Arabs like grass to a weed-whacker. The mighty warrior just happens to get knifed in the back by a heroic Muslim, and the Grim Reaper comes to claim Dante’s soul. It was around the point where Dante pulls the knife out of his back and says something along the lines of “oh fuck you, you’re dead Death!” and engages in a boss fight with the Reaper that I began to question the game’s faithfulness to the story.

And thus begins Dante’s descent into the warm vacation spot of hell. There are a bunch of story sequences in there; like Dante stitching some logo to his chest because he’s a sadomasochistic sicko, and his wife’s soul getting kidnapped in the most naked fashion possible. Seriously, I swear that every shot of damsel Beatrice in the demo also features shots of her titties. This Beatrice woman puts out a lot more than the Princess Peach has in heir 25 year existence. But all of the story sequences are shown with so many quick flashes and so out of order that they just don’t make any sense. And as for the gameplay itself, well I need not spend too much time talking about the gameplay because it is, quite honestly, a pixel-for-pixel imitation of God of War. The same attacks, controls, dodging, special attacks, magic attacks, quick-time event attacks, even the ever-generous “combo system” that allows even the most primitive monkeys score a 125 hit combo in the opening sequence. If you want to save some bandwidth on downloading the demo, just boot up God of War or the Wolverine movie game and you’ll get as accurate a demo as this.



The second game on the docket is Bayonetta. I was interested in downloading this demo more out of spite than anything else; a website to go unnamed here was giving out free keycodes to allow players early access to this demo as part of a contest. “Who would even attempt to make an effort to sign their name up for such a contest?” I thought. “Why, people whom would gladly add their e-mail address to Sega’s marketing mailing list, of course!” Anyway, I only found that contest funny because the demo came out a week later. Fools.

Where Dante is trying his damnedest to sulk and swim in the deepest pool of self-pity like Kratos, Bayonetta is only mildly trying to impersonate the other video game Dante. The gameplay of this game, from the speed of attacks to the fluidity of the combinations, is very akin to Devil May Cry, but there are some nice little tweaks. Having guns on her arms and legs, you can link any attack into gunfire, one-upping Wet in the field of female characters wielding phallic weaponry. And you can reverse-bullet-time enemies by dodging them at the last minute, slowing them down…for some reason. Oh, and Bayonetta’s attacks are often manifested from her clothes for some reason, meaning that her spandex will fly off at assorted intervals to transform into giant fists, for example. This game is fulfilling all kinds of fantasies.

Not that it’s all bad; the action is as Devil May Cryey as you’d expect. There are two boss battles with a giant troll dude, one of them involve the troll using the very bridge you stand on as his Samba De Amigo rattle controller. And just like the Dante’s Inferno demo, the story sequences are all ripped from random points of what I presume to be the main game and thus make absolutely no sense. One moment you’re applying your craft as a dominatrix towards random trolls and monsters, the next you’re in a heated grudge match with some warrior in a monastery that you apparently have history with. Is it intriguing? I don’t know. Those story sequences all seem so serious and melodramatic, and I so prefer the game when it’s trying to be campy. I like the hokey twists, like how your lock-on target crosshairs look like lips and how rose petals surface when you land on the floor. I’d rather Bayonetta relish in its oversexed cheese factor.

So, are these games good? They could be. Dante’s Inferno has the novelty of turning nine circles of hell into gameplay levels, and on sheer art direction alone, I’m intrigued. Bayonetta could be funny as all hell and turn out to be a fun little Devil May Cry 4-clone, provided they don’t make the players replay all of the stages and bosses twice over again. But if the goal of a demo is to make players halfway interested in an upcoming game, then these downloads at least succeeded. And I think we can all agree that Nintendo very badly needs to get on the demo bandwagon and soon. Unless, of course, they’re ashamed of their Wii games. Are they?

Duke Nukem 3D

Forget the hubbub about next generation graphics and vehicle driving and 20 different kinds of physics engines per game. The reality of the matter is that the first person shooter genre hasn’t really evolved much since the early 90s. It doesn’t matter how much smarter the AI has gotten or how realistic the effects of wood shattering is nowadays, the major games still consist of military figures gunning either demons or Nazis. Perhaps I’m the fool for expecting anything more out of a genre where the only brains necessary are the ones excreting from the skulls of the enemy but alas.

And then there’s Duke Nukem. If space marines versus aliens represents the early stages of the shooter’s human evolution, then Duke is the monkey era. Duke Nukem flings it’s feces at its adversaries while slapping the mother of his offspring with his member. Duke Nukem is the king of the misogynous and masochistic combination, and you know what? There’s something rather refreshing about that. At least de-evolution marks a change of pace of sorts from the current norm. The King’s breakout game, Duke Nukem 3D, has been released on Xbox Live Arcade, and if anything, is oodles lot more interesting shooter than, say, the last Halo or Resistance.

In another nice change of pace from the norm, Duke Nukem 3D doesn’t feature any lengthy tutorials or introductory cutscenes or overblown CG intros to waste your time. (Okay, there’s one CG cutscene, but its visual quality is so bad that you’ll have a good chuckle at the expense of the Nineties.) Rather, Duke explains the backdrop of each of the game’s four storylines with a single sentence. This can include “Those alien bastards are gonna pay for ruining my ride!” or “Nobody steals our chicks, and lives.” Simple, yet powerful. I can relate to a man who’s motivation is exacting revenge for his ride. More games can learn from the Duke when it comes to getting to the point in a hurry.

Duke Nukem 3D is awfully different from today’s first person shooters. When I say that, I am also insinuating that the graphics do look like monkey Duke’s flung feces, for one. Being this was my first major attempt at playing this game, I had to undergo a certain unlearning curve in order to apprehend the game; adjusting to the way most enemies look like pixilated illustrations of a Three Little Pigs pop-up book, with maybe four or five frames (or rather, pictures) of animation between then. But the ever primitive tech also brings with its own brand of charming hokey camp; Duke’s melee attack is a straight mafia kick, one that he can administer to his enemies while running at full speed. Not to mention, all of the Duke-isms that bore high novelty back in the 90s are suddenly cute again; such pointless gimmicks like flushing a toilet or giving a stripper cash to do her pixilated dance. Plus there’s the novelty of thinking to yourself “someone in 1996 was pleasuring themselves to these stripper sprites.”

And many of the gameplay differences are oh so refreshing in their datedness. There’s no self-regenerating health, which in turn makes the sight of a health pack or steroids (proof that all great athletes are on the gear) very welcoming. Seeing a health pack in Duke Nukem 3D is as relieving as those moments in Demon’s Souls where you enter a room and there is only one grunt trying to ambush you. Likewise, Duke Nukem existed in an era where chiropractic was still considered controversial, and thus the Duke will gladly suck up some long-term back pain in the name of carrying more than two weapons at a time. Eat that, Master Chief.

You’ll need to be carrying more than two weapons at any given moment, since the technology in Duke Nukem predates the creation of the Headshot. Each enemy alien requires a finite and exact amount of damage to fall, with the difference between one alien and the other often being “carries a bigger weapon, and needs a bigger weapon to die.” Being smart about your weapons thus becomes a concern, both in regards to ammo conservation and not accidentally blowing yourself up with the rocket launcher. The upside to all of this weapon-thinking is the enormous sense of satisfaction you’ll achieve when you combust an enemy and Duke responds with a simple “Holy ****.” Duke Nukem is a man that speaks for the people.

Biggest problem with Duke Nukem 3D? Being one of those 90s shooters, it has a reliance on keycards and switches as its brightest idea of puzzle solving. (Switches that become shockingly hard to activate when underwater.) There were several occasions where I was stumped because I didn’t know which wall needed to be blown up or where the hidden keycard was lying. At the risk of being ridiculed by elite PC fanatics eager to slam my head against their Modern Warfare 2 dedicated server, I really could have used a hint system of some kind. On the flipside, a nice little rewind system is in place where, upon death, Duke can use the sheer force of his testosterone to rewind time to any previous moment of the player’s choosing.

And finally, there’s a multiplayer online mode. Duke Nukem 3D was released, thankfully, before a LOT of nonsense was introduced to the world. There’s no perks, no leveling up, no killstreak bonuses, no node-capturing, no capture the flag, there aren’t even teams. The only character class you can choose to play as is Duke Friggin Nukem. You can engage in either one on one deathmatches or free for alls with up to 8 players, though the latter takes some time to get a game going. Being a 90s shooter, success in an online Dukematch is 50% skill and reflexes, and 50% having a bigger gun than the guy in front of you. So the Duke Nukem 3D multiplayer is more entertaining as a nostalgia piece than a straight deathmatch experience.

Just like how Duke Nukem 3D as a whole is more entertaining as a straight nostalgia piece than a full blown video game. In a lot of ways, games have evolved gracefully and thus makes certain aspects of Duke feel crude, ugly, dated. But at the same time, some of that crudeness, that grittiness, that complete lack of shame, makes Duke Nukem 3D amusing in its own way. So consider me surprised by how much fun this rusty old shooter can still be. If you need a break from the monotony of space marines versus aliens, the king has the fun time you’re looking for.

3 ½ stars

The Saboteur

Momma always taught me not to speak ill of the dead. Besides being rather disrespectful, trash-talking the deceased could result in a poltergeist occupying your residence. The last thing I need is a ghost haunting my Playstation 3; slowing download speeds for the PSN Store moreso or attacking Solid Snake during the many Metal Gear Solid 4 installation screens. Part of the cruel aftermath of the economic recession, Pandemic Studios has passed away into the great beyond. This studio has produced once-mighty military games like Full Spectrum Warrior, Mercenaries and Star Wars: Battlefront. So I’m a bit worried that criticizing their swan song, The Saboteur, will leave my console haunted with the ghosts of trigger-happy marines that open fire at my team of cartoon warriors every time we’ve apprehended our fat princess.

But quite frankly, The Saboteur is game that should not be bought, either out of homage or otherwise.

You play as Sean Devlin, a rugged Irish mechanic that, coincidentally, is also adept at using firearms and explosives. He gets beat in a race against a Nazi race driver that, coincidentally, is also an evil Nazi sergeant and torture artist. Bad things go down at roughly the same time the Krauts decide to invade Paris, and Sean decides to be the one man army that does something about it.

There’s something about playing The Saboteur that feels painful in principle. (Actually, there are several painful parts.) In particular, I’m referring to how the game apes the art style of Schindler’s List. In theory, Nazi-occupied sections of Paris are black and white, with only certain aspects that the developers want to highlight receiving colour. (Like, you know, the explosions.) Meanwhile, the sort-of liberated parts of France are brim with colour, sunshine, hope, despite how Nazi troops still walk around these sections with that same attitude of owning the place.

This concept, while potentially interesting on paper, aggravates me because the rest of the game lacks the same kind of emotional weight or drama of the movie it’s ripping off. Imagine the version of Schindler’s List recorded by the high school A/V team. Here you’ve got your swashbuckling hero (who’s not particularly charismatic, mind you), speaking in dark-but-off Irish tones, surrounded by a litany of characters communicating with horrible accents. The voice acting as a whole is bad, the script is drab and hard to believe, and thus it becomes impossible to buy into the game’s super serious tone. So the storyline is a flop.

The Saboteur boasts a combination of gameplay mechanics. Being 1940s France, the car lock had presumably not been invented yet and you can just about jack any automobile of your choosing. You can then engage in a runaway, escaping from pursuing Nazis in a Grand Theft Auto 4-like chases to race out of the red circle on the map. Or you can parkour your escape, climbing around buildings to find the very scarce hiding spots, though Sean is no Ezio Auditore and is very hesitant about what ledges he can and can’t shimmy along.

Guns are always a nice option too. The gunplay here is a bit satisfying, if uninspiring. You shoot at things, then you take cover behind other things. Other, Gearier games have done this kind of action better, but at least you’ll crack a smile as your one shotgun blast mows down a row of church-attending Nazis. Though the looming threat of sniper towers and Nazis in weird places you didn’t see can ruin your Rambo approach, thus you may instead consider the stealth approach; this involves ambushing a trooper, stealing his clothes and goose-stepping your way around installations. However, even this approach has its limitations, such as “walking around the sight of the Super Smart Nazis that can spot a traitor from a mile away” and “walking around all the other Nazis anyways because they can detect the smell of Guinness.”

All of your missions, which seem to involve either killing someone, destroying something, or undestroying an ally, are often best approached by a combination of the above. That said, it gets a bit tiresome when you start falling into familiar habits. Sneak into an establishment, wind up getting caught because you got frustrated walking around all the yellow circles on the map, shoot things, drive out of the red circle on the map to escape. The formula gets a bit tiresome, especially when some of the aforementioned weaknesses of the above systems kick in. One mission guided me to the direction of a rope that I thought I could use to slide from one building to the next. But ropes are clearly something that does not exist in Ireland, so Sean had great difficulty trying to figure his way through the shelves and ledges on the building, onto this strange apparatus.

And I began to wonder what it was exactly I had to do to dispose of all this black and white oppression. Not because I cared for the annexed citizens of Paris, but because it’s so damned hard to see anything. I would frequently crash into poles, obstacles and civilians on the road with no sympathy for anything but my car. There are the odd moments where I would try to find the ledge of a building…an experimental process that entailed grinding up along every square foot of wall and hump-jumping the side until Sean found a window ledge of his liking. The stealth parts are a bit awkward in that it can be hard to discern what direction a Nazi troop is facing. Thus my attempt at a stealth kill will transform into an attempt at an awkward conversation about the weather. Gloomy as always, I guess.

Not that I ever knew what these missions were. Remember how in Infamous, you had those sidequests who’s sole purpose was to clean up two percent of that third of the city? As much as an overwhelming chore that felt like, at least you knew how to get the cleaning done. In The Saboteur, it seems like the anti-greyscale missions appear randomly throughout the main story missions. My eagerness to liberate the masses (even if I couldn’t give a damn about the masses) was being put to test through being forced to witness the main plot.

But really, The Saboteur’s greatest fallacy is that it nicks and steals aspects from better sandbox games. Grand Theft Auto 4, Assassin’s Creed 2, Infamous, all of which were probably in development cycles at the same time as The Saboteur, all pull off this sandbox parkour/violence/death/freeing the civilians nonsense a lot better. Maybe you have a strong urge to rescue the French, and that may be your motivation for playing The Saboteur. But that sense of Parisian pride will fade when you hear Luc’s wonderfully Looney Tunes accent.

3 stars

Grand Theft Auto 4: The Ballad of Gay Tony

Bas Rutten is an ever-popular retired mixed martial arts known for his liver kicking, impassioned colour commentary tracks for Pride FC (emphasizing the word “colour”), and his immaculately awesome martial arts instruction videos. A walking onomatopoeia, Bas Rutten has become a Youtube arse-whooping sensation for his love of sound effects to accompany his brand of violence. Fans of El Guapo will be thrilled to know that Bas returns for another fake episode of the fake television show “The Men’s Room” in The Ballad of Gay Tony. More sound effects, more low blows, more of Bas being Bas.

If you have no idea of whom I was talking about, then there are still plenty of other reasons to take a gander at The Ballad of Gay Tony. This is the second downloadable expansion to Grand Theft Auto 4, the second chance for Xbox owners like me to laugh at Playstation 3 owners like my brother.

While the previous expansion, The Lost and Damned, focused on the suppressed homosexual lifestyle that is the biker gang, this game goes full-blown-gay by having the player run with the owner of the sort-of-hippest gay and straight club in Liberty City. Tony Prince has amassing financial and drug-related problems and he’s going to be in big trouble if you, the player, do nothing about it. It’s fortunate, then, that you don’t play as Gay Tony. (I can imagine a sizeable percentage of Grand Theft Auto’s audience vehemently rejecting the notion of controlling a homosexual lead.) No, you play as his ally of sorts, Luis Lopez, the Dominican version of the modern Grand Theft Auto protagonist. That is, someone with a criminal past (to justify his marksmanship) who hates the idea of illegal crimes, despite constantly getting involved in them for missions (and despite the ten civilians I ran over on the way to the mission objective) and who accepts orders with Alfred-like obedience. But the odds are you’ll fall for his black humour anyways so Luis is an effective character in that regard.

The Ballad of Gay Tony works because it portrays the Grand Theft Auto 4 world from the perspective of the wealthy and whacked out of their minds. It would break my friend’s Persian heart to reveal the specifics about the new characters that you’ll deal with, but you will deal with a bevy of rich individuals whom idolized Ted Dibiase at an early age. They’ll get frustrated anytime they find someone that doesn’t have a price. As it is, there is a scary sense of believability; the knowledge that yes, someone would pay money for a gold-plated gun. We already know this from the people who pre-ordered Gears of War 2.

So these psychopaths will have you doing their dirty work. They’ll be sure, however, to give you some sweet hook-ups. New firearms like the sticky bomb and the shotgun with exploding shells give you an excess of firepower to really help enact your dark fantasies. You can expect several missions built around piloting the helicopter, and subsequently…parachuting, the most prominent new mechanic. While these new additions may seem paltry, they help flesh out the game’s duck-and-cover gunplay just enough to justify playing Grand Theft Auto 4 again in the midst of more recent duck-and-cover shooter releases. All of which carry forward into the multiplayer mode, to boot. Besides, Uncharted 2 doesn’t have an Arab prancing around in his skivvies.

And if you need a break from opening fire at whomever refuses to sell your friend the military vehicle of his desire, there are a few nice sidequests. The parachuting mechanic is transformed into a series of amusing missions that entail taking some particularly odd leaps of faith. You can test that exploding shotgun of yours in a series of “Drug War” missions built around doing all the dirty work for your thick-skulled friends and their dreams of being Tony Montana without the dying at the end part. There are underground cage fighting events fit for Bas, overground golfing events that might be fit for Bas, and a very demented anime called Robot Princess Bubblegum that will prompt dress code violations if anyone cosplays the cast at the next comic convention.

Being an expansion, The Ballad of Gay Tony makes little to no change to the game’s existing mechanics. If you think the cover system was dodgy before, or that taxi drivers miss your whistle calls too often, then you may be none too pleased with the lack of change found here.

But The Ballad of Gay Tony is worth getting, regardless. 8-10 hours of non-filler gameplay in a downloadable expansion is a whole lot more than what I’d wager most people are used to. The story is entertaining, the dilapidated sense of humor is ever-present, and there’s an exploding shotgun. I call that a winning formula. The jury is out on whether or not this is a better package than, say, The Lost and Damned, but there’s certainly more entertainment value here than in most full-price games.

4 stars

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

So me and Nintendo have different ideas on what to do with this Zelda license. I tend to think that the franchise needs an overhaul, a desperate tweaking of its stagnant format. I say enough to tired gameplay ideas, like dungeons built around a bow and arrow, or Link saving a Princess with a Triforce. How radical would it be to play a Legend of Zelda game that doesn’t star Link? On the other hand, Nintendo believes that it’s merely the input methods of the game that have gone flat. People are bored and confused with using controller button presses to swing a sword as opposed to the idea of using a sword in general, that’s all. Funny, I’ve been changing channels with a remote for twenty years and I’ve never thought to myself “gosh, I wish I could waggle my way through primetime.”

It started with Twilight Princess on the Wii. Set aside the questionably responsive Wii controls and you have a game so stereotypically-Zelda that it could be the victim of police brutality in California if it’s not careful. On the other hand, Phantom Hourglass on the DS reworked the entire control method through stylus interplay, hinting at the possibility of exciting new gameplay concepts. It wasn’t sterling perfection but at least it gave hope for the future. And now that the future has arrived in Spirit Tracks, I can say that hope was blind and this game needs to find itself in the wrong part of town alone with those California cops.

The game stars a strapping young boy whom just so happens to be the hero of destiny, whom just so happens to be around when Princess Zelda is kidnapped by an evil force, and just so happens to need to visit several dungeons in order to open the path to that evil force. Boy that sounds familiar. The key difference in this game is accessing that evil force involves restoring magical train tracks. You know how most Zelda games have “that gimmick”? That one little tweak that somehow justifies reusing everything else in franchise games prior? Gimmicks like the shrinking hat, the evil-faced moon crashing into the Earth, the sailing, the wolf form, or everybody’s favorite, “the alternate realm”. In Spirit Tracks, the game is all about riding your own private train, for the train tracks are the magical binds that tie down an evil beast…or something.

So you’ll frequently ride your train to access your assorted destinations. All apologies to fans of Railroad Simulator, model trains or maybe even riding real trains, but conducting locomotives in this game just isn’t interesting. Controls are limited to adjusting speed, pulling a string to blow the horn, firing a cannon and turning at forks, and even that latter part is automated through drawing a path on the map. So what we have here is a glorified, sluggish rail shooter. Occasionally, you’ll be asked to carry a passenger to a destination, and these passengers are a finicky bunch, insisting you follow speed limits signs, and blow the horn when a sign tells you to. For some reason, they find enjoyment out of your obeying the strange road laws of Hyrule, like this is Reverse Crazy Taxi or something. I never thought I’d say this, but the barebones travel system of Spirit Tracks is so boring that it almost makes me yearn for the sailing of Phantom Hourglass or Wind Waker. And that is no compliment to their sailing.

On foot, the gameplay mechanics will remind players of that other DS Zelda game. You’ll use the stylus to handle every gameplay aspect short of stretching your back after the long ass train ride. You’ll walk, barrel roll, sword swing, even access menus by way of “touching it” with your pen. For the most part, Link responds well to the finger-pointing you’ll give him via stylus, but Spirit Tracks also highlights some of the weaknesses with the format. Some enemies are considerably too agile for sword swipes, and often the best course of action is to unleash the boomerang and just scribble a path on the screen to unleash some kind of strange stylus Spread Gun. Also, keep in mind that to use special attacks like the boomerang and the bow and arrow (of course they would be appearing in a Zelda game), you have to press a button on the touch screen. Link will then stand perfectly still while you aim your equipped weapon with the pen. Most enemies and especially the bosses do not have the patience to wait around while you wait to aim your attack. So the boss encounters in particular are rather frustrating, curse-word-laden affairs. Maybe I don’t have the penmanship necessary to thrive in this game, but I don’t remember having too many of these problems in the last game, let alone a Zelda game manipulated by good ol’ controller buttons.

You may either remember, or attempt to block out of your mind, parts of Phantom Hourglass where you had to explore this giant spirit dungeon thingy, retreading certain areas over and over again, all under the influence of a time limit. Spirit Tracks has something similar in the Spirit Tower. Mercifully, both the time limit and the peddling of treaded territory are gone. Instead, the hook of these areas is that the ghost of Princess Zelda can possess a giant armour beast, and subsequently obey your commands. Thus, you’ll have the obligatory “both people need to stand on this switch” puzzles that EVERY game of this kind needs. It can be kind of satisfying to work through a puzzle that requires navigating both the hulking armour and the scrawny Link. Though it bears mentioning that Princess Armour Man is controlled by means of drawing a path through the stage, then growling in anger as the princess grinds up against a wall like a senior citizen’s shopping cart at the aisles of Walmart.

And then there is the microphone. For whatever reason, Nintendo thinks people want to talk into the blasted microphone, moreso than they ever did before. You’ll be asked periodically to blow into the microphone, for one of the power-ups, and to play the game’s pan flute instrument. The upside is that the microphone is sensitive enough that light puffs from a distance will be picked up, ideal for coworkers to not notice you blowing into your system like a fool. The downside is that the background noise of a bus, subway or automobile also counts as “blowing”. This is a handheld game, Nintendo! Where do you think people are going to play it, the library? There came a part in Spirit Tracks where my instrument playing demanded a modicum of precision, and thus I needed to wait until I got home to play my portable video game. Home, where I have TVs with bigger video games, computers, family members, friends and things much more entertaining than your stupid handheld game. And forget the blowing, there was a part where my progress was halted unless I spoke specific words into the microphone; another progress halter for anyone that doesn’t want to look like a schizoid in public.

I get the impression that because of all this microphone nonsense, that Spirit Tracks was meant to be played by kids who normally play their handheld Pokemon games at home while simultaneously watching Pokemon cartoons and shuffling their Pokemon card decks. But at the same time, some of the stylus-based gameplay feels too frustrating for players as well. So in my mind, the target audience for Spirit Tracks is “people that don’t value dignity in public places.” As it is, Spirit Tracks marks the jumping of the shark for Zelda on the DS, that we’ve gone as far as we can with the system’s controls in regards to making an entertaining game. It’s time for this franchise to return to the drawing board.

2 ½ stars