Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

So I was in the Best Buy parking lot talking with my brother about things that brothers are want to talk about. Important issues included women, cell phones, the revelation of a secret mission in Starcraft 2 whose existence completely invalidates my Starcraft 2 review for some reason. And why I haven’t played Starcraft 2 online in several weeks. Avoiding the real reason (because I suck at using supply depots to block entrances to my base), I suggested the reason was to move on to other games, like the new Lara Croft title.

“Lara Croft? You mean Tomb Raider.” He asked.

“No, no, it’s just Lara Croft. This isn’t a real Tomb Raider game.” I retorted.

“But it’s got Lara Croft. So it’s a Tomb Raider game. I’m confused.” He said to me.

And it was that moment that I realized that this naming convention really doesn’t make any kind of sense. Apparently, downloadable games do not count as canon Tomb Raider releases, hence the title of “Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light.” The naming convention confuses me because 1. The Tomb Raider games aren’t some kind of sacred treasure that needs protection from the taint of the Xbox Live Arcade, and 2. Because this release is several miles better than any of the so-called real Tomb Raider games.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light quickly burns through what I’m pretty sure are all the major beats of a typical Tomb Raider story. Lara enters tomb filled with perilous deathtraps and challenging puzzles. Lara overcomes traps and puzzles to find artifact she should not be trifling with. Evil tomb raiders ambush Lara after she does all the trap-solving for them to take the artifact. Evil tomb raiders trifle with artifact and unleash evil demon. Lara must untrifle the evil demon. It's all as dumb as you think it is, but at least it’s all dealt with in the introductory cutscene, leaving the rest of the game as a chase after the cackling demonic force of the month.

The one major difference of note is the introduction of Totec, the aforementioned guardian of light. He awakens from his centuries-long slumber to aid Lara with such magical powers as “bombs” and “automatic weapons.” Or at least he would, had I played the intended co-op mode. That co-op mode that seems to be the reason for the game’s existence. In playing single player, his sole purpose is to lend Lara his infinite-ammo spear and remind her that he is scouting ahead and conveniently out of sight.

You see, this game is intended to be played co-operatively with an amigo. My presumption is that Lara and Totec have different abilities that must be used in tandem to overcome the assorted puzzles and platform jumps of varying levels of peril. The game is modified to function as a solo campaign, but I constantly felt berated for taking this loner route, like the game resented me for not having a friend nearby. Puzzles that would seem like complex tests of wit suddenly became modified for simplicity’s sake. I remember one puzzle where a giant pillar covered in spikes rest atop a bottomless pit. Fortunately, whatever burden I had to overcome with Totec was easily bested with the flick of a switch that made all necessary platforms appear.

But the patch to enable online co-op won't be released until September 28, and you can probably skip this paragraph if you’re reading this after September 28. As of August 31, 2010, I sit and ponder. “Who plays through an entire co-operative campaign?” I'm not talking about Resistance 2-style one-off missions where a random group of players can play medic and muscle through each mission on sheer force of healing love. I mean elaborate teamwork based campaigns like Army of Two or Resident Evil 5 or now this game. With no online play, the appeal here becomes limited to a select group of people with access to another readily-available player, such as: dedicated gamers that room in the same apartment (in my past experience a volatile environment filled with negative emotions and beer bottles); Co-workers of a certain video game website; Maybe classmates who come over to Jimmy’s house after school to play games the ESRB deems them too young to play. I know I don’t belong in any of these groups, so I’ll never finish this co-op aspect of the game for myself.

This review feels lop-sided. I’ve griped perhaps too much on what I would consider to be the game’s only real flaw. Rather, I should admit that the rest of the package of UnTomb Raider is surprisingly strong. Like Limbo, Tomb Ra…Lara Croft works because there is a decided lack of filler. There are no long stretches of running or clunky block puzzles (dated Soul Reaver reference) and only a scant occasions of being trapped in a room battling respawning demons. You are almost always progressing, and almost always doing some kind of puzzle, exciting leap of faith or ass-shooting. The difference between Limbo and Lara Croft is that Lara Croft is about 2-3 times as long a game as Limbo.

Gunplay takes the slow and dated shooting mechanics of Tomb Raider games and transitions them into a top-down, dual-joysticks shooter. You are still firing dual pistols and barrel-rolling your way out of adversity. The big difference is that there are demons sticking their demonic heads at you from multiple directions. So now the game becomes an exercise in both crowd control and barrel rolling. The ability to drop an infinite supply of remote-detonated bombs is also a plus. The game does manage to hand you various firearms. Like many things in life, Lara likes them as big as possible, and I found that the Gatling gun was sufficient for weed-whacking the forces of evil.

Likewise, the game does a great job of throwing one mini-enigma after another. Most of the puzzles involve light switch-flipping, deathtrap-evading and impossible jump-making of some degree. You’ll toy with your bombs, grappling hooks and spears, both with infinite ammunition that all fit within Lara’s box. Of tools. There was never any single puzzle that stumped me to such a degree that I need spend time on a FAQ, or even more than about two minutes. But they occur at such a prevalent pace that I felt the many neurons flow back through the part of my brain that does complex thinking intelligent person thingys.

Running through the campaign takes a solid 5-6 hours. But each of the many levels are laden with optional challenges to revisit. These vary from score-based objectives and time-based objectives for you to speed-barrel-roll through each level to individual goals like “make this ludicrously pointless platform jumping sequence with no mistakes.” Rewards include stat-boosting artifacts (because wielding a Clay Owl biologically makes you a stronger person), new weapons and health/ammo upgrades. These are all optional, and I kind of wonder if a few of the score-based challenges are even outside the realm of possibility in the single-player campaign. But as someone who scarcely attempts optional side-quests in any game, that I kind of want to revisit some of these goals here is some degree of pretty amazing.

I think the best way to describe NotTomb Raider is that this game is enthusiastically playable. Sure the whole co-op ordeal strikes a bit of a sensitive spot with me. But I think I got a lot of that bile out of my system. There’s a lot of quality play-time for a game that costs about $20, and some decent incentive to revisit it afterwards. And who knows, maybe I’ll be open to forgiveness when that patch comes out.

4 stars

Scott Pilgrim Versus the World

First, some cleaning notes. I had twice planned to see the Scott Pilgrim Versus the World movie over this weekend but my friend twice vanished on me. Maybe things work a little differently in her native Mississauga, but where I come from, you try not to agree to see a movie the same day as your brother’s big birthday party. I don’t know. Fortunately I was in Toronto at the time and there’s never not something interesting to do in Toronto.

Which makes for a great segway into discussing the Scott Pilgrim video game. If you want to know my favorite aspect of the Scott Pilgrim video game, it’s that the game actually takes place in Toronto. After years of having to deal with games, movies and TV shows based in either New York, Los Angeles or a mock version of New York or Los Angeles, it sure feels fresh to have my home and native land in the spotlight. Seeing spoofs of such famous locales as Lee’s Palace, Sneaky Dees and disgusting TTC buses sure put a giant smile on my face. And where I always have a hard time believing other movies or games where the streets are riddled almost exclusively with young, perky women with bouncing boobs as extras, I can accept their existence here. Because, well, that’s how downtown Toronto is. You should live here.

As mentioned earlier, I haven’t seen the movie yet and can’t speak from personal experience. But I assume that the movie has really flashy and exuberant fight sequences and annoying plot and characters. So the video game excels in the regard of doing away with all that hubby-dubby Michael Cera gibberish nobody likes in favour of repeatedly wacky fisticuffs. The plot is kept to the bare minimum; Scott must beat up 7 of Ramona’s evil exes to win her love, and story sequences are limited to occasional stills of the kiddie-looking sprites making out. You know, in case you didn’t already feel like a pedophile beforehand.

This is a beat-em-up, one that really wants to be River City Ransom. You scroll from the left side of the screen to the right, punching and kicking a lot of bouncers and emo dweebs in the face. Often doing so with weapons, or the unconscious body of the last dude you punched in the face. At any given point, you can press a shoulder button to summon THE FORMER GIRLFRIEND OF SCOTT PILGRIM THAT SCOTT PILGRIM DUMPED TO PURSUE RAMONA FLOWERS TO HELP ON HIS QUEST TO WIN OVER RAMONA FLOWERS as an assist power-up. Your characters level up through experience points and learn new abilities, some of which (like the fall-rebound) would probably make the early-game experience more interesting had I learned them sooner.

This video game is all one giant love letter to assorted older video games, which lends it both a sense of charm and annoyance. The visual style both evokes NES-esque colours and aesthetic while being way too high-resolution to run on a real NES or ten combined. The music is that kind of faux-NES MIDI upbeat funk that mismatched so many great NES games of the time. I think the art style is supposed to evoke the Scott Pilgrim comics, but you’re asking the wrong person about this. I would rather play as comics Scott Pilgrim than Michael Cera anyways. And there are plenty of little references that felt kind of clever to me. The way bosses flash as you weaken their health. The giant black balls that fly off the screen for no logical reason, ala the TMNT arcade game. The ability to enter a hidden zone where the graphics fake-glitch out. The Super Mario 3-esque overworld. Probably the best Akira reference I can think of. The “Winners don’t do drugs” warning from arcade machines (that the Olympics has proven wrong time and time again.) And there are probably many more references that my naïve mind missed out on.

At the same time, there are some things that the game tries to reference, not realizing that they’ve already been referenced to death. Zombies. Ninjas. Coin blocks. The giant boss with an obvious weak spot. The evil twin. Anime robots. Too many of these nostalgic grabs have already been nostalgically grabbed in the ghoulies ad nauseam before. And then I realize that I don’t need this game to remind me about how great and dated 8-bit games are. Who needs pay homage to Super Mario Bros when Nintendo has been laboriously paying homage to Super Mario Bros for the last 20 years with almost all of its games? And lest we forget the dozens, maybe hundreds of already existing websites, Flash games and video series’ about old video games readily available. Screwattack.com has done a wonderful job of rendering this game obsolete. In summary, Scott Pilgrim versus the World is trying to fill a very flooded niche.

And then I can’t tell if some of the game’s actual flaws are either poor design or attempting to pay homage to poor design. If you don’t purchase stat-boosting items, the later enemies and worlds will throw you under a red, overcharging bus. But there’s no way to know what effect an item will have on your stats until after you purchase it; a weird way to operate businesses, I’m sure. (Though perhaps a successful business model for the denizens of River City Ransom. And drug dealers.) The pattern I found myself falling in saw me repeating some hidden bonus levels to save cash for stat-boosting items found in a hidden shop under a bridge, that wound up transforming my character into some kind of emo-meat grinder capable of easily dispatching every enemy up to the final boss.

I can also safely assume the game makes no attempt to pay homage to, say, the XBAND, because there is a decided lack of online play within the game. Now, this is a beat-em-up, and slapping around thugs by yourself has never been terribly fun. Gang violence is a social experience, you see. But if I’ve got friends over and they want to play video games, Scott Pilgrim Versus the World is sitting at the bottom of a list of games to boot up, beneath a pile of automatic weapons and plastic instruments. So my best bet for finding companionship for which to whoop arse with is the world wide web, and the lack of online play is something of an oversight.

As a cross-promotional tool, I guess the game succeeds at making me want to see the film, if just because I love my hometown that much. As a video game, it’s an experience that didn’t entirely endear itself to me. I can assume that perhaps the fan service here is strong, and the people that love this fiction will probably do well to play this game. Or maybe you really just like River City Ransom that much. Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, River City Ransom. Two niche concepts made for each other, perhaps?

3 stars

Madden NFL '11

There exists an impenetrable wall, 52 1/3 feet tall, that keeps me from figuring out sports games. I can’t quite comprehend the wall’s existence, or who built the wall (probably John Madden himself), but I know that this wall doesn’t let me function well at simulation sports games. I’ll admit that I am not much of an expert on sports that don’t involve shirtless men holding each other’s bodies, and that I can quickly list all the things I know about football right about now.

-Ben Roethlisberger is a great man with a great name and great motorcycle skills.
-There’s almost always someone accusing the referees of shenanigans during the Super Bowl.
-Michael Vick is an animal rights deactivist.
-The Super Bowl needs more Who.
-Forget the Patriots, it was the Lions that had the real perfect season.

Still, the problem is that while I can live without sports games in my life, my friends can’t. And I have long been the victim of many a multiplayer session alternating between Madden, FIFA and NHL games where I was the weak link and was quickly trounced, embarrassed and mocked. So I feel a slight obligation to figure out one of these games at some point in the name of my dignity. This year’s Madden game seems to make promises of being more accessible, allowing new players to grab the controller and not get blitzed repeatedly. Time to put this newfound accessibility to the test.

The first thing I noticed about Madden ’11 is that the game hopes you like the New Orleans Saints. Between the inspirational speech cutscene intro to the title screen consisting of Saints fans, to the various menu images pumping you with that Who-Dat spirit. Even if you go to the options screen and change your favorite team, (which is indeed an option to choose) you will be bombarded ever so slightly by that Bayou pride. Heaven forbid you live in Indianapolis.

The second thing I noticed is that the first option on the menu screen lists the game’s new features. The first of which is the Madden STORE. This allows you to spend your very real money on fake things in the game. I presume including stats, scouting reports, better cards for whatever amounts to Madden’s digital card game and other features that will be rendered a waste of cash when Madden ‘12 comes out. In the midst of Activision’s rise to power and well-documented abuse of the Infinity Ward guys, we had forgotten just how much of an evil empire Electronic Arts can be when given the chance to ask for money.

The second new feature on the list is called “GameFlow”, and this video game is extremely proud of its GameFlow. A cutscene is presented, explaining to the player that GameFlow will change the way you play video games, like this is the Super Mario 64 of your lifetime. Madden ’11 thinks very highly of itself for incorporating GameFlow, which is funny when you realize that this feature is just “the game chooses plays for you.” I thought to myself that perhaps this is what I needed, as I know squat about calling plays effectively. I don’t know the strategic advantages of having some X’s and O’s stand in one place over another, so I’ll let the computer figure it out for me.

What happens is that between plays, you press the X button to let a street-smart New Yorker tell you what to do in a given play. The first problem was that I got really annoyed with the Yankee telling me what to do. The second problem was that I found the plays being chosen to be failures in the making. QBs get sacked, passes fail, running attempts get snuffed. Maybe I should assume some responsibility for the impending disaster, but I felt like too many attempted GameFlow plays were miscast. Apparently, you can edit the GameFlow so that the Yankee only chooses plays that suit your liking, but that kind of nullifies GameFlow’s whole purpose of taking the complexity of play-calling out of the player’s hands.

So, I was back to calling my own plays, an act on par with asking a blind man to find a set bear trap. Or navigate the Madden Store. My next hurdle was attempting to figure out the controls. I already know how to pass, how to tackle, how to punt and how to tell the GameFlow coach to shut the hell up. But any football game will have different variations of tackles, jukes, jives, stiff arms and other stiff things in the locker room. The in-game tutorial is strange, telling you to press certain buttons when prompted, without telling you when or why you’d be pressing a certain button. I don’t know, for example, when it would be advantageous to use the analog stick to sidestep an incoming linebacker over the triangle button.

This is perhaps synonymous with my problem with Madden ’11. The game is very comfortable with holding your hand and dragging you through a game. But it refuses to teach you the ins and outs of doing it yourself. At various moments during a game, a pop-up appeared reminding me that I can hold the X button and the game will control the player for me. “Really?” I thought. “Well I’m flattered, Madden, that you think I suck and am not worthy to play you. Were you upset that I merely rented my copy? Did you take it personally that when I elected for a free trial of the online mode?” See, I want to learn how to play this football business, not have my hand dragged through while someone does it for me. Don’t be like my mother, Madden, and try to do everything for me if something is not done properly the first time around.

Heaven forbid that the game try to create a new football fan, and give someone else to pump in even more money into the ocean of cash that is the National Football League.

On the easiest difficulty, I found myself steamrolling the opposition, throwing football passes with greater ease than the temper tantrums I was throwing on the normal difficulty. Turn it up to normal and suddenly the Patriots can swat out passes like flies in the change room. Though inversely, I was able to nullify their offense as long as beat the fear of God into Tom Brady. So I think the normal difficulty is when you have to actually know a thing or two about football strategy to not choke. As someone who doesn’t know a thing or two about football strategy, this was the point where I failed to measure up. I could be like those many Madden lovers and adjust the many, many sliders (because Madden fans love their sliders more than they love their women) but I just can’t be made to care. Maybe I should adjust the injury slider; injuries happen a whole lot in this game. Between both teams, I had one exhibition game with 6 injuries. And I thought soccer players were the most frail of athletes.

It should be mentioned that I was almost exclusively playing exhibition matches in my time with Madden ’11. Gameplay ideas like Franchise mode, online franchise mode, play-as-a-single-person-throughout-an-entire-career mode and get-thrashed-from-playing-online mode all sound very appetizing. Provided I knew a few things about managing a multi-million dollar sports organization.

I feel like devoted Madden fans should probably stop nagging about whether the running game is too weak or if free agents are too greedy or if Gus Johnson’s commentary is too…Gussy. From my glance, Madden looks like a freaking sophisticated beast, a multi-storey complex of depth and features that can easily last several years. But with this year’s game being billed as the Madden that newcomers can pick up and play, I scoff at the giant monstrosity of a building and elect to play in the little kid’s sandbox. (Which I guess would consist of that Kirby string game.) Here’s an idea for EA; instead of trying to make your super-complex football sim accessible to us common folk, how about going straight for the fun vein and take a stab at a new NFL Blitz? I guarantee that profits will ensue.

3 ½ stars

Monday Night Combat

The Summer of Arcade has certainly simmered down, as there exists a real lack of excitement over the impending releases in my mind. Maybe we peaked early with the semi-avant-garde Limbo, and are now reduced to retreading of old material. Take the redux of an 11 year old arcade boat racing game, or the bizarre repackaging of assets from the last 13 years of Castlevania games, or the return of 14 year old Lara Croft, who should have sagging chesticles at this point in her career. And what does it say when the next most interesting game in the set is the combination of a Half-Life mod and a Warcraft 3 mod?

Fortunately, Monday Night Combat functions pretty well as far as online-only shooters go. With such a cavalcade of super-serious military shooters available on the market (retail or downloadable), it’s nice to see someone attempt to inject some semblance of colour into a shooter beyond “dirt brown camo.” Monday Night Combat takes place in some kind of dystopian future where athletes are cloned and killed for entertainment, cash rules everything around you, and the documentary “Bigger, Stronger, Faster*” is treated as a guideline for living. Imagine Smash TV without the heavy synth music. The game also makes no attempt to tell a story beyond “you are a contestant on our futuristic sporting event of death.” There is no campaign. You never ultimately stick it to the evil television executive or liberate your fellow imprisoned gladiators. You are merely allowed to soak in the black humour of an announcer alternating from bombastic joy to somber warnings of the audience’s curfew.

Like oh so many games, the only actual conflict in Monday Night Combat is Red versus Blue. A war that has been waged since the earliest days of colour ink, where someone presumably labeled Green too much of a pansy colour to take arms. A war that continued with the original Pokemon games, perhaps. The main gameplay mode is akin to the popular mod Defense of the Ancients (please don’t call it “Dota” like its one word. That sounds like the name of a Jedi master. And speaking of which, it’s also super lame when Knights of the Old Republic is referred to as “Kotor”, like its some kind of teddy bear.) Each team has an automated set of robots generating from their base, and your goal is to ensure those robots find their way to the enemy base’s core to destroy its shields. It’s worth mentioning that the “core” is made entirely of money. So running amok within the enemy base and destroying random soldiers will only do so much for the cause, as the real focus of the game sits somewhere between protecting your base and ensuring the safety of your ever replaceable machine companions.

The Team Fortress influence kicks in when you observe how class-based the proceedings are. And when you see how every character has a jaw that would fit into the DC Universe. You have your Assault unit, the charismatic machine gunner that may or may not be modeled after Lebron James. You have the flamethrower-toting Tank, whom I presume is imbalanced in that nobody uses him, perhaps because he has one of the lamest flamethrowers we’ve seen in a game in a long while. (Your wielding torch causes more damage than he does.) There’s the gatling gun-sporting Gunner, whom I also presume is the reason the Tank is so obsolete. You got your Sniper unit, the bane of my existence. There’s the surprisingly popular healing/hacking Support unit, and I presume his popularity is driven by his accent; imagine Mario with a gun turret fetish. My favorite unit, though, is the Assassin. Not because I like using the Assassin. But because most new players mistake her for some kind of solo operative that can stealth kill their ways to a high score. Since a frontal grapple attack isn’t a one-hit kill in Monday Night Combat, I get great pleasure in responding to being stabbed in the cranium by unloading an ammo clip in a failed assassin’s face.

Enemies that you kill will explode into coins and cash. Ala No More Heroes. Ala Ratchet and Clank. Ala Scott Pilgrim versus the World. Ala many other games with that kind of obtuse video game logic. Money earned through violence can be spent either on personal upgrades or robots or base upgrades or dru…I mean Juice. Since kills from purchased gun turrets earn you profit, it sometimes feels more selfish to support your base than yourself.

The game has a variety of other nice touches to make any given round feel utterly chaotic. Your randomly spawning robots vary from generic troopers to giant mechs and gorilla-bots that harass you in gorilla-like ways. From time to time, the Monday Night Combat mascot will spawn; I feel like focus groups designed “Bullseye” with the intent of generating the most annoying creature possible, as to encourage players into unloading ammo clips toward his gyrating pelvis for money. In the event of a tie, the game lives up to the phrase “Sudden Death” by dropping shields on both moneyballs, spawning many large robots and letting true chaos reign supreme.

Monday Night Combat is essentially a two-mode game. Besides Defense of the Benjamins, the other mode is a more typical tower defense mode where you and several allies defend your ball of cash from a barrage of no-doubt-expensive robots. Your progress in both modes earns you experience to level up your rank which means…a whole lot of nothing. Cash earned from both modes can be spent unlocking custom classes or…ehh…ranking titles. Custom classes merely allow you to allot your stats differently without making one character stronger than another, and I’d rather have this kind of balance over the more conventional FPS method of giving the better weapons and perks to people who already spend too much time playing a given game, and even more time scaring away aspiring newcomers.

But really, every flaw I can think of with Monday Night Combat is the flaw of any co-operative online shooter. Things are going to suck if you have party members drop out at random. Things are going to suck if one person has a lag-funky connection. Things are going to suck if your team consists of uncoordinated assassins all failing at stealth kills. Success hinges on proper teamwork, though smaller, more capable teams means that games feel less like a stalemate than they did in Fat Princess.

And the announcer repeats himself a bit much after awhile. I kind of am sick of hearing about his blooming former job.

I don’t normally care for team-based games of any kind. Most of my friends are either too into Modern Warfare or So You Think You Can Dance to assemble any kind of group together and bring the pain in any new and interesting online game. This leaves me at the whim of random strangers all aspiring to be the Kobe Bryant of shooters, only to better resemble modern-day Dennis Rodman. But a large number of people playing Monday Night Combat right now seem to “get it” and understand that it’s not what you do for yourself but those adorable little mech robots that counts. Besides having a gimmick more interesting than “American soldiers gunning down immigrants”, Monday Night Combat feels more playable and entertaining than most major online shooters on the market today, and it’s better priced to boot.

4 stars

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair

I’ve spent the last few days indulging in Harmony of Despair and I’m still not exactly certain what exactly Harmony of Despair is trying to be. Is it supposed to be a Diablonian gear-driven fire sale? A co-op adventure where players are made to work together to reach a common, anti-vampire goal? A developer trying to showcase as much low-resolution art on a single screen as humanly possble? An attempt to fill my heart with as much despair as humanly possible? A harmony of desperate guitar riffs?

This is what I can tell you with some certainty. It’s a Castlevania game that reuses all of its visual assets from Symphony of the Night and its Game Boy Advance/Nintendo DS offspring. The problem with that approach is that all of those games already had a problem of reusing assets within each other, making Harmony of Despair some kind of inbred child born in a part of Japan existing below the Mason-Dixon line. You can elect to play as Alucard or any of the characters from the DS games, with all of them succeeding at being very androgynous and not having the last name “Belmont.” They each have their perks that are semi unique to their native games, but all share the same affection for swords and weapons that slap-chop the undead.

I can tell you that Harmony of Despair has no storyline, which is a freaking godsend. All of these Castlevania games have horrible, overwrought anime-esque plots, and it’s nice to see this game take the simple approach of “here’s something evil, please knock it’s smile off its face.” There are six stages, each has a boss of varying ugliness. The levels are really sizable in length, which would normally inspire the intrepid Metroidvanian explorer to venture forth in hunt of treasure. Except there’s an inexplicable 30 minute time limit per level. Why? Is that the period of time before Dracula leaves for his pedicure? I can’t understand the rhyme or reason for this time limit business. People playing single player may want to peruse the levels at their pace. People playing multiplayer will breeze through each level faster than a washroom break, the kind of washroom break where you realize “Alucard” is “Dracula” spelt backwards. And the time limit doesn’t stop when you pause the game or manage your inventory, even when you are going solo. A strange game indeed.

As mentioned, this is meant to be a multiplayer game. Up to six players can collaborate on a mixtape of death-dealing in any given level. Even if the online settings are a bit of a joke; I an unable to use the “Quick Match” option for the game searches for players in your country only. And Canada hates Castlevania, Canada likes manly things like Mixed Martial Arts and Slap Shot. Just as bizarre, the “Custom Match” option only has one option, letting players elect to only search for games in their country or worldwide. A bizarre game, this is.

And granted, you could just work through each level on your own. But the path to the boss will always be the longest, and those bosses seem to have really large health bars. With several players working together, you can access shortcuts activated via contrived switch-flipping, and take down those larger bosses with relative ease. Hell, I’ve been in games where bosses were damned to the great beyond without me ever laying so much as an exhaled breath on them in person. I almost feel like a full six-player game is too easy; I once reached the Count Dracula in about half an hour, and stuck a stake in his heart within the span of 2 minutes.

You can, at any point, zoom the map out and see all of the activity happening on the level. There is some kind of unusual novelty to this, if just because it halfway justifies the reusing of nasty Nintendo DS sprites. It also lets you track the progress of your teammates. Speaking of things that suck like Dracula, those giant block indicators that point in the direction of your teammates occupy way too much screen space. The visual cue telling me where the four other Alucards on the map often get in the way of the enemy skull monsters I’m trying to whip fireballs at. The game does manage to find some novel uses for the large overworld, the kind of pseudo-logic that only makes sense in 2-dimensional side scrollers. One boss will discharge vomit-lasers across large portions of the screen in the face of someone’s poor Alucard. Another boss is so danged tall that you need the wide-view just to glimpse at his thighs.

But at the same time, there comes a point where a man sits and asks himself, “why?” Like “why am I replaying these same six levels repeatedly”, or “why do I allow myself to play as this excessively feminine man?” Leveling up might be a good reason, except it really isn’t. Your character doesn’t level up, though certain attacks do become more powerful with repeated use. Rather, you enhance your character via the stat-boosting equipment you acquire.

Except your character sprites don’t wear the equipment you pick up. So the hot chance you have to show off your gear to the world will not present itself. Worse, most of the equipment you pick up is worthless, repeating junk. Someone needs to sweep Dracula’s castle and donate to Goodwill all of the loose coats, capes and corsages lying around. Better the homeless have them than my wealthy looking androgynous sprite. If Harmony of Despair was meant to be a Diablo-like loot quest, it closer resembles a spreadsheet charting a recycling plant.

I almost feel like there is a good idea somewhere within Harmony of Despair. I would like to see a sidescrollers who’s co-operative focus reaches beyond the dick-around-fest seen in New Super Mario Bros or LittleBigPlanet. But there isn’t much of anything in this game that’ll maintain your interest longer than an hour or so. Revisit any of the DS Castlevania games, or go online and buy Symphony of the Night or Shadow Complex or the Wii’s port of Super Metroid. Maybe someone out there likes the idea of having a Castlevania game that they can enjoy with their friends. I am not one of those people. I don’t want any of my friends knowing I played a game starring Soma Cruz.

2 stars

Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty

Maybe my brain functions a little differently from the rest of the world, but I always find the hardest part of writing reviews to be the introductory paragraph. I know what I don’t want to do with my beginning and go into the usual spiel of “it’s been a long time coming, the sequel to the all time great strategy game is here” because quite frankly, everyone starts their Starcraft 2 review like that. (And I wish people would stop quoting the Tychus Findley “Hell, it’s about time” cutscene.) So bear with me for a moment, this is the best I could slap together.

“I was having burritos with a fairly lovely lady friend of mine after she had just travelled across Europe. After telling me her plans to abandon many upcoming parties in the name of representing Aiur, she had sold me on revisiting this Starcraft business for the first time since high school. I subsequently unsold her on this game she had bought the night before by telling her that Wings of Liberty is merely the Terran campaign and we would have to wait a considerable long time before Blizzard comes around to presenting their story from a creepy alien perspective. Oops. Sorry.”

The campaign is a good point of entry in talking about the ever tender package of Terran meat that is Wings of Liberty. The game presents an all-Terran campaign, which comes with natural disadvantages. Being that the traditional Starcraft 1 campaign served as an introduction to the various traits and units of each faction, one can see how disadvantaged the Zerg and Protoss become in the field of presenting its new recruits. While the human campaign does make quick introductions to some of those races’ new concepts (with a particular fixation on those lumpy little junebugs of love known as Banelings), I still felt like several of the new units don’t receive proper explanation. I had no way of learning the function of the Zerg’s new brain slug monster, the presumed mother of the brain slugs from Limbo. A Starcraft newcomer will have to learn the hard way that “creep” is the Zerg’s bread and butter and not something you don’t want staring at your Facebook page.

But the upside to that focused campaign is that it very successfully fleshes out the Terrans, both as an RTS video game faction and a deranged lifestyle. Between missions, you can explore your spaceship, converse with the crew, watch Intergalactic Fox News, listen to Skynyrd covers and soak in the Southern charm of your rebellion. That your space-faring military army is so delightfully below the Mason-Dixon line gives what is otherwise a cliché story with cliché characters using cliché lines in cliché scenarios more intrigue than it ought to have. (There is a bearded dwarven mechanic and a dreadlocked, African-accented voodoo-practitioner. A friendly reminder that this franchise started as Warcraft in space.) Small tweaks, like seeing new pieces of equipment in the Armory after they debut in missions, or new conversation cutscenes that open up after missions, or the fake arcade game named after Trine’s mistress, give incentive to explore and take breathers after your last Alamo-caliber slaughter.

If anything, I am now dreading the Zerg and Protoss games, because neither race present themselves to me as any more charming. I want to be free as a bird, not serving a collective alien tribe.

The missions are also much better thought out. The main idea behind Starcraft is still “mine resources to spend on buildings and goons, and use your goon-building in a manner more efficient than your enemy’s goon-building.” And while the majority of Starcraft 1’s missions were of the “build a goon-factory and use it better than the AI”, Starcraft 2 manages to find more hooks and twists to trap you with. Like Uncharted 2, the problem with reviewing Starcraft 2 is that you can’t go into detail without giving away the better moments. If you’ve read any number of reviews, you’ve no doubt heard ad nauseam about the zombie mission, the lava mission, or the train mission. (Because video games in general love zombies, lava and trains, eh?) Perhaps there are too many missions built around time limits for my liking, and my brain doesn’t handle being rushed as well as it handles introductory paragraphs. But I still managed to get to the ending on the Normal difficulty. I’ll just say that the game finds plenty of unique mission ideas to maintain your interest, and manages to exploit the assorted unique twists of the Terran race. Expect your fair share of flying buildings, bunker cuddling and Tychus Findley enjoying himself too much.

That rugged, handsome man with the cigar from that ever popular reveal trailer did wind up becoming my favorite character in the Starcraft universe. Though I can’t help but feel the endgame does poor Tychus a severe injustice. Likewise, some plot threads remain untied by the game’s end, and I am reminded that Wings of Liberty is the first of a trilogy. You know, like every current generation game. The game hopes that players find contentment in wrapping up a prior storyline at the expense of several more (and by the way, Starcraft 2 very deliberately ignores the existence of Brood Wars. There was only one real Overmind, folks.) How much positive or negative energy you walked away from the ending of Assassin’s Creed 2 will probably be similar to how you view the end of Wings of Liberty.

There’s also an online multiplayer component designed to scare the bejeebusses out of you. I am reminded very quickly that people have been playing Starcraft for over 10 years while I’ve spent much of that time on things like education and education-defeating liquor. A disclaimer: I can’t figure out hotkeys to save my life and my micromanagement skills don’t exceed setting an alarm clock. My video gaming brain functions better with the “point at something so it dies” set of motor skills than the “arrange these things in efficient killing order” set of skills. I’ve gotten killed many times over playing online and I haven’t even left the beginner mode. This is not my game, and I can’t help but feel like the “challenge mode” missions included, designed to introduce the concepts of rush defense and build order are not enough to brace me for the cruel, harsh world of the internet. Somewhere within the last ten years, “harass the other guy’s SCVs” became a popular strategy amongst players. Players that hate me.

And looking at the Achievement list, this game is designed to be played for another 10 years by those very same maniac individuals. Online avatars and decal designs unlock after playing 100, 250, 500 or 1000 games…per race!

But I will be the better man and admit that this is merely not my cup of tea. The Battle.net functionality seems to be effective at it’s job. It’ll quickly find rival players to pit you against. It’ll divide the online strangers on your friends list from the real friends you know from Facebook. It lets you post its own version of Tweets on Battle.net. (Bweets?) . You can review build orders and stats after each match and find out how your opponent punked you out in detail. The game being all of two weeks old as of this writing, I still don’t have a feel for how the user-created maps function. One of my favorite aspects of Starcraft 1 was the custom maps with custom rules and gimmicks, with certain maps renaming the units as Pokemon or West Coast rappers How they will fare on a more closely monitored, Activision-dictated server, I don’t know.

And the online game still serves the proper Starcraft experience, changing just enough to feel fresh. The new units seem pretty intriguing, from the giant Protoss mechs to the giant Terran mechs that sound like my favorite governor. And you can still click on each unit repeatedly to annoy them to great comedic effect. Certain Protoss units seem to excel in the field of being angered or flattered by your mouse.

The underlying message I’ve been trying to get across is that Starcraft 2 is not my style of game. It’s either too ridiculous for my tastes, or too smart for them. However, it still found some ways in which it forced itself to be my kind of game for a few weeks. Even if I’ll never make any kind of impact on that notorious Korean tournament scene, I was still hooked on the campaign for a long enough time to hamper both my social life and my progress playing through Okami(!) So while I’ll never figure out the secret to defending the dignity of my SCVs, I’ll at least submit myself to the upcoming Zerg and Protoss campaigns and see what crazy ideas Blizzard conjures up next.

Finally, if ever you think this is a dark age we live in, remember that we are in a time where a new Starcraft game and Civilization game are being released within the same year. To me, THAT is amazing.

4 stars

Bayonetta

Here is a common scenario that aspiring electronic video gamers can look forward to upon booting up Bayonetta. The player, a leather-clad witch of abnormal height, will leap across the screen doing battle with angelic monsters. You will fire guns strapped to your arms and legs and batter enemies with giant fists and legs manifested from your hair. Your hair also doubles as the material for your clothing, so the more elaborate your attacks, the more skin is revealed. You can also spank your enemies to death or finish them off in a bondage guillotine where you kick their bottoms before the blade offs their bigger head. The enemies then explode into a series of rings taken right out of a famous Sega game. All of this is happening while a J-pop rendition of “Fly Me to the Moon” tings in the background. And you can transform into a panther.

Bayonetta is awfully reminiscent of No More Heroes in that it feels like the director of the project was shamelessly incorporating all of his personal interests in one fantasy project aimed to appease himself. The perpetrator here is Hideki Kamiya (who’s worked on Devil May Cry, Okami, Viewtiful Joe and some Resident Evil games, all of which are referenced in Bayonetta at one way or another) and the man has some interesting tastes. Besides having an IPod with songs from the Wondergirls and Nat King Cole, he seems to enjoy BDSM, Sega arcade games, nonsensical anime storytelling, The Divine Comedy, tall women, Paganism, anything that can remotely be fetishized, character archetypes and bullets galore. And this game is so brazen about all of its excessive hobbies that it becomes rather comical.

In fact, “excess” is a good way to describe every facet of Bayonetta. The combat is excessive. You have such a large list of moves that randomly pressing combinations of the different attack buttons will always yield something flashy. And nearly every move can be chained with bullet fire from one of your appendages. It moves in a pace similar to Devil May Cry’s, but with more of a loose feeling (innuendo may have been intended.) You get the sense that you are largely in control of your movements and can freely air-combo any poor sap that makes the mistake of lifting two or more feet off the ground. A well-timed dodge will enable Bullet…I mean Witch Time, which slows down everyone but you, and grants the chance to turn the tables in a sticky situation. Between levels, you can enter a store and spend those Sonic rings on an excessively large selection of moves, items and upgrades that you may or may not ever use. But their presence reminds you that this game is the Anti-Limbo, defiant of anything remotely considered minimalist.

The more discipline you dole out, the more a special meter fills, which enables you to execute special attacks, often inspired on medieval execution, Looney Tunes and extreme S&M tactics. Some of them are just incredible, like how Bayonetta will whip out a 20-foot chainsaw against a small flying enemy, and then wield the chainsaw as a usable weapon against other foes for a short period. Bosses are especially wonderful. Most of them are giant monstrosities that talk down on you like they’re the Creator of the Heavens. You’ll then get the chance to systematically break them down and torture them into submission, often using some kind of giant monster spawned from your hairdo. These put Bayonetta at her most nekkid-est.

As an aside, I wouldn’t call the game sexy by any stretch of the imagination. The game is so lost in a catacomb beneath the uncanny valley to be considered arousing, and it makes me all the more appreciative that Bayonetta’s unholy parts are always conveniently concealed. Seriously, there are Pokemon cartoons with more legitimate sex appeal than this game. Rather, the game’s love of sexuality is more of a comedic tool, a unique form of humourous self-indulgence. Perhaps the people that’ll enjoy this game the most are women who aren’t scared by sex-culture. These women might be in their 30s and enjoy taking wealthy businessmen into their basements on the weekends. Businessmen like Hideki Kamiya, perhaps.

This is very much an “all action, all the time” ordeal. Puzzles are never more complex than finding intuitive ways to destroy a magical wall with your knuckles. New enemies frequently debut, complete with biblical introductions. You’ll learn soon that the moment a new enemy makes a dramatic cutscene entrance to mash the dodge button immediately, for they waste no time drawing first blood. Even the final sequence goes through a few teases before letting the player settle down and watch the ending. And then there’s a dance sequence at the end.

Like Domination, the game hits its high notes when you are the one on top. Destroying legions upon legions of angel-cronies, smashing bosses into submission, changing into wild animals while cheery music plays. The most interesting characters in the entire game may in fact be the day-to-day generic enemies that you face. All based on a different section of heaven from The Divine Comedy (and Bayonetta may do a better job referencing it than the Dante’s Inferno game), these elaborate angels of death are wonderfully used as petty cannon fodder. You beat them up your minute-to-minute playing, Bayonetta slaughters hundreds of them in the cutscenes, you’ll shoot them down in vehicle sections (loosely based on Sega games like Afterburner), you’ll gun them down in a shooting gallery mini-game between levels, some even join Bayonetta in the post-game dance-off. These are the ultimate henchmen, the game’s version of zombies, and their pain is the world’s pleasure.

Likewise, the game falters when it asks the player to zip up and play slave to the storytelling. There are several cutscenes that vary in length, from “longer than usual” to “god damn I thought this was an action game.” A lot of these are serious cutscenes revealing a very deliberately complex plot. There is a secret war between heaven and hell. There is a secret war between two sacred orders. Bayonetta has a female rival that she duels with a lot. There’s a weakling male figure that both loathes and desires to reproduce with Bayonetta (a projection of Kamiya?). There’s a mobster cronie and a tough-talking black dude. There’s a little girl that looks an awful lot like Bayonetta. There are a lot of elaborate, Devil May Cry-style cutscenes of the characters having incredible fights that you the player would like to be participating in. There are quick-time events with unforgivingly small windows of time before you fail. It’s a whole lot of mindless tripe that isn’t particularly well told, and the deathly serious tone often betrays the game’s upbeat rhythm. Of course, maybe it’s my personality type that holds me back. Maybe one of those wealthy businessmen will enjoy the cutscenes and hate the rest of the game.

I got to play Bayonetta a little later than most, after I’ve played the other two major action titles in Dante’s Inferno and God of War 3. And I’m glad I did, because I can now laugh and say Bayonetta smokes both of them. (Figuratively, not figuratively in the sexual sense.) Both of those games feel trapped in a rut, showing off their best tricks early while pandering to the same male cathartic revenge fantasy that too many games appeal too. Bayonetta is all about fantasies, including revenge and empowerment, but it’s at least honest about it. This kind of gutsy comedy and full-bore action makes it one of my favorites of 2010 so far.

4 stars