Saturday, December 25, 2010

Def Jam Rapstar


Fuck you Activision. Fuck you for pumping out so many soulless Guitar Hero games and Band Hero games that you ruined the rest of the music genre. Because of your inability to pace the release of your wares, we now find ourselves with a disenfranchised public that lost their passion for matching coloured notes on a preset highway. It’s a shame, because it’s not like other developers have stopped thinking about cool ways to make people sing and dance like the dweebs we are. Take Def Jam Rapstar for example.

We finally have a proper, functioning rap game! An entire genre, maybe the most popular genre in the United States (I think), gets its most proper video game representation since the based-on-a-true-story masterpiece Def Jam Vendetta. And I’ve heard no one utter a word about Rapstar. Why? Is it because the people with actual hip hop talent are already hard at work on their personal Youtube mixtapes? Did last year’s Rock Band audience get sick of humiliating themselves singing and move on to humiliating themselves to death in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood online play? Are people adverse to giving Russell Simmons some money? Because I’m not!

Rapstar is essentially a graded karaoke experience. A music video plays in the background, you are charged with the task of producing the lyrical stylings. The game is scoring your efforts based on timing and perceived accuracy of the lyrics, along with the occasional pitch-based sections ala Rock Band. Like with Rock Band, you learn quickly that it is more important to match your pitch with the meter on-screen than it is to imitate the singer. I lost many, many points for trying to recreate DMX’s gravelly voice during the Ruff Ryders Anthem. Likewise, you are performing the censored music video versions of each song, and I don’t think the game takes too kindly if you decide to uncensor them. Again, I lost many points for refilling the Ruff Ryders Anthem with n-words. Or maybe it’s because the game just knows I’m not black.

But otherwise, the tech for scanning your microphone skills is very strong. If you are audible, pace out your breathing and have a strong familiarity with the song, you will do great. And let’s be honest here, kind readers. Whether you have talent or not, rapping is just fun! Maybe people are too scared to do rap karaoke for fear that they will be ambushed in a dark alley later today, or inspire Tupac to spiral around in his grave. But like any music game, it takes a degree of courage (or lack of dignity) to step forward, and the social rewards can be so worth it.

The soundtrack in Def Jam Rapstar is great. The game covers a wide variety of classic and contemporary hits. East side, west side, old school, new school, crunk school, Computer Technology School for Auto-Tune, all well-represented. Except for perhaps a lack of Jay-Z, you’ll find many iconic favorites within the game. (And the HOVA’s too busy watching Knicks games, or going in and out of retirement, to think about video games.) The online store has been pumping out a sizable quantity of downloadable tracks if you wish to expand your repertoire of beats. My one complaint? About five or six songs need to be unlocked in career mode. Always an uncool move in a music game.

I spent most of my playtime in Party mode, which lets you rap to any song at your heart’s content. I think there’s an option for multiplayer duets, but I couldn’t find a willing body that wanted to be the Redman to my Method Man. Ch-pow, anyone? Career mode has you playing songs to earn star…I mean microphones. There are a few challenge modes, like being asked pulling off a specific verse or a series of songs. But really, you’re only playing Career mode to unlock objects.

Such as more opportunities to humiliate yourself. If you have a Vision Camera or Kinect, the game will record your performance. And you can take 30 seconds of your performance and edit it to your heart’s content. You can add audio or colour effects, insert random stickers of hip-hop objects like dogs or necklaces, and other crazy items unlocked in the career mode. You can also forgo the whole “singing other people’s songs” bit and use one of several predesigned beats for a freestyle. This doesn’t serve any official purpose other than a chance to show off to the world your love of 8 Mile, or general love to make an arse of yourself.

You can then upload your musical prowess to the game’s server for all to see. Well I think you can; as of this writing, I haven’t been able to successfully upload a single video. Maybe the world hasn’t forgiven Canada’s hip-hop scene for Snow. I don’t know. At the same time, you will derive great pleasure going to the Def Jam Rapstar server and checking out some hilariously bad rap videos from a 90% white userbase. If you love watching posers unknowingly embarrass themselves, and who doesn’t, then you will be in for a treat.

So this is the tale of two experiences. One, Def Jam Rapstar is the first great dedicated rap karaoke experience, and I think that will appeal to many people. Two, enough of the wrong kind of people have clued in to this and made the online community a comedic gold mine. If either of these facets interest you, then it’s worth telling Activision to fuck off and buy this game.

4 stars

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Call of Duty: Black Ops


My advice for the day is to resist peer pressure in all forms. When your buddy Pete in school is telling you to take a puff of that cig, just say no. You already know the dark path that follows: a dark path of taking smoke breaks in -20 degree weather and spending money on packs that could’ve easily gone into other vices like booze or Big Macs. Well, multiple coworkers erked and nudged me for weeks on end to play this Black Ops game. Despite how they ignored my warnings of how the people that made our beloved Modern Warfare games had nothing to do with this release. Those Modern Warfare guys got escorted out of their building by security a long time ago for legally-confusing reasons. But alas, the Infinity Ward controversy was downplayed just enough for people to think that this is indeed the next official Call of Duty release. And I finally found myself caving into the pressure of my peers and renting the supposed most popular game going today.

Thank you, my local Blockbuster Video. Thank you for not shutting down yet.

The one thought running through my mind was that of acknowledgement. “Yup, this is indeed a Treyarch game.” I was reminded of all the Treyarch-isms that I saw in my last two Treyarch games: World At War and Quantum of Solace. The game has a lot of excessively flashy cutscenes interchanging real world footage with animated words and numbers in wacky fonts. All of it serving no other meaning than to say “hey, here’s JFK and Castro and explosions! Be impressed please!” Which is a shame, because the only thing that this Call of Duty game does differently from World At War is attempt to tell a consistent narrative with characters…and it’s a pretty dull one at that.

So you play as a guy being interrogated by another guy who wants to know about some numbers that are flashing in your head. And his plan for finding out what those numbers means involves conveniently submitting you to flashbacks of your past missions. This involves levels in Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs invasion and other Cold War hijinks. Somewhere in the midst of all this is a plan for a doomsday device that seems a lot more inefficient and unreliable than traditional nuclear bombs. (And I don’t think there was a shortage of nuclear bombs during the Cold War.) There’s some kind of conspiracy involving those flashy numbers, but the revelation, much like the rest of the plot, is predictable, illogical and bland.

I feel like the Call of Duty series as a whole is having a major problem transitioning from a somewhat-accurate recreation of famous battles to a consistent, narrated fiction. Black Ops is the current peak of that issue, having numerous characters drive the plot forward and not offering a single reason to care about any of them. Besides ethnicity and a missing eyeball, what is the differing character traits between Alex Mason, Frank Woods, Jospeh Bowman and Grigori Weaver? They’re all cut out of the same generic soldier archetype, which no longer holds up now that the game is asking you emotionally invest in them. Do they even have a family to come home to? A favorite hobby? A personality tweak? I don’t know! I know the villains are generic cackling doomsday-loving supervillains with thick Eastern European accents. I do know how to identify characters by their miscast voice actors. I know Sam Worthington plays an Alaskan soldier with a slight Australian accent, and that Ice Cube plays an American soldier with a Comptonian accent.

And these decidedly dry characters made me very frustrated when the game attempts to tie in one of its characters with a major historical event. I got even more frustrated when I thought about it and realized that somewhere, on the cutting room floor, probably lies a mission based on that historical event. And that someone at Activision thought that using that historical event could be pushed as this game’s “No Russian” moment as a headline-grabbing piece of fabricated controversy.

But alas, I spend so much time talking about the storyline because that’s about the most unique aspect of Black Ops. I could just about sum up this review by calling this game “Call of Duty: World At Cold War.” The campaign consists of a series of missions. Most of them involve following a linear path, hiding behind cover and shooting other guys before they shoot you. You know, the first person shooter business. Even the Vietnam missions feel remarkably similar to some of the World War 2 set pieces in World At War, which doesn’t strike me as very historically accurate. There are a few really neat set-pieces, like one that has you fighting enemies with infrared goggles amidst a thick layer of smoke. But most of the set-pieces feel kind of tired. You will control the guns on a tank. You will drive a helicopter. You will man the guns on a hovercraft. The game has a surprising amount of quick-time events that feel more distracting than irksome. You will be prompted a message like “Press the right stick to stealth kill this guy” followed by an elaborate animation of you breaking the dude’s neck while disarming him. This is the anti-Uncharted, the game that has no problem removing all but the most basic of controls from your grasp.

And much to my dismay, the competitive-co-operative mode from World At War was taken out of Black Ops. There was something satisfying in a passive-aggressive way about working together with other dudes while trying to steal their kills. Instead, hey! Look, the Nazi Zombies are back! What better way to spread out your military fatigue than to respond with zombie fatigue! They even have their own fiction now! I shouldn’t be so harsh; Zombies mode is the most interesting part of the entire game. It can be fun to scramble around an ever-growing area, scrapping together funds earned from the zombie-murdering economy to purchase new toys. It’s even more fun if you have friends to watch your back, because you’re not going to know where the bloody fleshbags are coming from without someone panicking cries of mercy in your headset. There’s one particular mission that teams certain American leaders together against the zombie onslaught in what feels like the only soulful, self-aware aspect of a game that needs a lot more soul and self-awareness.

You already know what the other multiplayer mode is, if you played a Call of Duty game in the last three years. All of the same multiplayer modes, weapons, short life spans, wacky maps, perks and killstreaks are back, but in slightly-modified Cold War form. There are probably more subversive changes that devoted Call of Duty fans might appreciate, but I’m not one of those fans. I guess the idea of using a currency to purchase your upgrades is kind of different, and I guess the idea of gambling those funds in gimmicky, Goldeneye-worthy match types like “you only get one bullet!” is kind of neat too. But I have been unable to, and still am unable to get into the multiplayer modes of Call of Duty games. I still feel like the victim of a multiplayer mode that awards perks and advantages to players who were already more skillful and committed than I ever care to be at first person shooters. See, I’m the kind of person that enjoys playing multiplayer as a distraction and not a full-time career. I view multiplayer as a way to kill an hour of free time, not my entire weekend. The whole idea of grinding levels in the name of being competitive with people playing 6-8 hours of team deathmatch a day is a major turnoff to me, and makes me crawl back to the Monday Night Combats and Halos of the world.

I get the vibe that Black Ops services the multiplayer demands of its audience well, based on how many people within my social circle gunning the hell out of each other with it. I guess if more zombies and more level-grinding is what you want, then I think you will be satisfied. But I was left underwhelmed. And I will admit to having a bias against Treyarch as a developer and the whole genre of the military first person shooter. But the Modern Warfare games have always found ways to circumvent my first-person fatigue with some unique ideas and twists. Black Ops, on the other hand, does nothing to fend off my sense of apathy.

3 stars

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Dance Central


The Kinect is a very special kind of hardware, both identical and polar opposite to the motion options of the Wiimote and Playstation Move. All three of them involve some kind of motion of the body beyond your thumbs, but otherwise…Not to rip into the Wiimote or PS3 Move (though I will gladly rip into the Wiimote anytime, actually, fucking Wii Sports) but the required motion in those games is limited to arm flicks and movements of various degrees of abstraction. You swing a baseball bat by either assuming a batter pose and pray the Wiimote acknowledges you’re in a batter pose, or flick your wrist and trick the remote into thinking your hand is on steroids. The Kinect is the one motion controller option that requires you to move! There is no waggles or sitting down in a relaxed position here, you’ve got to burn those precious caleries. I understand if you want your video games to be sedentary experiences. I can accept someone that wants to sit down and only sit down for their CODBLOPS experience because they had a long day at work or the concept of exerting force from their muscles seems intimidating. That’s cool. Dance Central is not the game for you.

No, Dance Central is the game for people willing to make a physical commitment. You may need to move furniture to create the necessary space. You may bump into chairs, walls, or have your hand crash into the ceiling a few times. You may need to learn about such fitness concepts as “warming up” and “stretching”. Your scores will improve with having a second player assume the role of a spotter, offering suggestions on how to better your technique. You may sweat. You may feel the pump in your muscles. You may get injured if you’re not used to using the full range of motion in your hips. You should consult a doctor before beginning Dance Central.

The game presents you with a simple concept; do the dance Harmonix tell you to do. A charismatic dancer figure with the build of a Rock Band musician does a dance move in the order displayed on a series of flashcards to the right of the screen. You are graded based on your ability to recreate these maneuvers. The game is alarmingly accurate at reading your motions; I’m sure the Kinect can’t tell how many fingers you’re holding up, or which wall your face is staring at. But the game can very much pick up on the major motions of your arms, legs, hips, torso, shoulders and neck, and thus becomes a stern critic of these joints on the harder difficulties. I learned very recently that Dance Central has a very specific definition for what constitutes a Salsa or a Cabbage Patch, and will not be happy if you swing an arm in the wrong direction. The game initially locks up the Medium and Hard difficulty settings of each song for a very good reason.

It’s very easy at first to blame the Kinect sensor for not scoring you right. You could curse and swear at the technology all you want. But what I found was that you can improve your scores through practice and putting your heart into your dance. You know, like real dancing, or real fitness-related activities. A friend of mine has kicked my ass hard at Dance Central scores because, as she puts it, she tries to be more sexy with her dances. I cannot hope to break her score on Christina Milian’s Dip It Low, and I tried. Jumping into a song for the first time often leads to disaster and head scratching as the player is left wondering what the game considers a “Gank.” Hence, you ought to take the time to enter Break It Down mode, where the game gives you ample chances to practice each move before giving the real song a chance. While I would’ve liked a more versatile practice mode that lets me jump straight to moves I want to practice, (you know, like the Gank!”) the mode here is adequate enough to use for practice.

Dance Central is, admittedly, not as feature-rich as most music games. It’s perhaps best comparable to the original Guitar Hero. Instead of customizable avatar characters, you can choose from pre-built dancers. They include the jock-bitch, the Brit-bitch, the Spanish-dick and my favorite, the Spiritual pretentious man with The Flash’s powers. There is no online play. There is no World Tour mode where you travel throughout a map of the world, increasing an arbitrary number of “fans” who idolize your song covers. The multiplayer mode is merely two people taking turns and competing for points.

At the same time, the multiplayer potential out of that single mode is higher than you think. This was a game designed to be played by a social bunch eager to kindly mock each other. Like every Kinect game, Dance Central frequently snaps photos of you doing your thing. Every song has a freestyle interlude, where the game just asks you to pounce around like a dancing fool. The game then animates a series of photos taken during this sequence and repeats them to you in a manner specifically designed to look as goofy and ridiculous as possible.

And then you get to the setlist itself. 32 songs does not seem like a large setlist at first, until you realize the time it will take to actually practice and learn each of the moves. (And keep in mind, harder difficulty settings will add newer, more demanding moves.) There’s a decided focus on songs from the last decade, which may or may not be enough for today’s finicky generation of teens that can’t compute anything not recorded on Auto-Tune. At the same time, you’ll quickly learn why each song made its way into the game after performing its routines. There are moves that you will be either glad to revisit (Funkytown) or wishing you forgot about (Salt ‘n Pepa’s song). And while the choices for downloadable content is expanding at a slow rate, you get the sense that Harmonix wants to pump out some gems. As of this typing, you can purchase and dance to “Whoop! There it is!” by Tag Team. Thank you.

Let me outline a scenario: there is a song on this game called “Teach Me How To Jerk.” I initially had great difficulty learning how to jerk, as jerking required frequently twisting my knees at odd angles and sliding across the floor. I had to roll up the carpeting off my floor in order to give my joints a smooth enough surface to jerk off of. I also had to do a lot of practice in order to master jerking myself off of. But I ultimately got the upper hand on how to jerk, and my lady friend got a real good laugh at all of the time I spent jerking myself off.

If that does not sound appealing to you at all, then you don’t want Dance Central. You want to get back to sitting on the couch and sipping on your soda of choice while playing your favorite military shooter. Dance Central is a game for people that want something more upbeat than that. Something that requires a little work, a lot of movement and a lot of laughs at the expense of themselves and others. Thus, I’ll constitute it as one of my favorite games of 2010.

4 stars

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood


So lets start this review for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood by talking about the end of Assassin’s Creed: Brother. And I won’t spoil the ending, except to say the ending sucks. Then again, the ending for every Assassin’s Creed game sucks. All of the games end with a horrible cliffhanger, asking players to pipe over $60 to find out what happens in the next game (and presumably to be left with another horrible cliffhanger, forever caught in a cycle of cliffhangers.) I begrudgingly accept that every video game of this generation must be designed with a sequel in mind, but there are other ways to pique interest without depriving players of a complete story arc. Look to the Mass Effect games for lessons on how to create an ending that is both satisfactory and leaves intrigue for future iterations.

Moving on to the rest of the game. I’ll go on a limb and say that everything you liked and disliked about Assassin’s Creed 2 is in full effect for Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. For me, things I hate include “the present day, Desmond, the conspiracy theories, the 2012 bullshit” and things I like include “pretty much everything to do with Ezio Auditore de Firenze.” So I walked out of Brotherhood still hating the present day conspiracy storyline, and still thinking that Desmond is the boring lackey of Nathan Drake, surrounded by a crew of outcasts that still haven’t gotten over Firefly’s cancellation. And likewise, I still came out of Brotherhood thinking that Ezio is the most interesting being in that entire universe. He nails a checklist of likable traits in a lead hero; charming, moralistic, experienced, confident, badass with a soft side. Many of his supporting characters return from Assassin’s Creed 2, bringing with them their passionate Italian bravado and affection for profanity.

The Ezio storyline takes place after Assassin’s Creed 2, with the hometown of the Assassin’s guild being ravaged by an army of goombas from Rome. His response is to make a trek to Roma and start over, create a new revolution and overthrow the arsehole Borgia family in charge. It’s a very straightforward plot, and in this case, that’s fine. The heroes are valiant rebels, the villains are cackling oppressive jerks, and you are out to give them their comeuppance. Like pro wrestling, but with a bit more spandex. What I also like is the game’s sense of progression in your rebellion. Most games about rebellions always feel cheap to me, as the work that I’m doing amounts to nothing. This is usually because at some point, the supervillain comes in and negates all the work I just did. (think the early portions of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.)

There is no big moment in this game where the villain, the bitter noble Cesare, mucks your rebellion over with some strange plot twist. The game gives you a constant sense of progression; you are gradually chipping away at Cesare’s grip on Rome while amassing great amounts of power yourself. A lot of that sense of increased influence over Rome comes from the many, many, many, many sandbox-ish side quests you can indulge in over your play experience. First, you can enter “Borgia territory”, and burn down their Borgia towers to magically remove the Borgia “influence” in that area. How destroying a single tower removes Borgia influence is beyond me; am I destroying the Borgia family poker rooms? Do the Borgia guards leave the area due to their lost bro-out area? After that, you can invest money into renovating and restoring any of the shops, banks and blacksmiths in the area and accumulating rent over a period of time. It’s similar to the property system from the Fable games, but with the reassurance that you are making a positive contribution to your Italian heritage. You can pay large sums of money to purchase monuments like the Coliseum or the Pantheon, but neither provide any kind of benefit besides the same minor rent increase you get for renovating a clothing shop.

Many, many other sidequests manifest themselves as you progress. You can take assassination missions, of course. You can improve relations with the guilds of thieves, mercenaries or female entertainers with side missions. You can venture into a series of side missions built around taking down a feral cult or destroying such legendary Roman weapons as the ancient Roman wooden tank. (Not one of Leonardo’s better inventions.) You will spend an inordinate amount of time not progressing the main storyline in favour of doing your part to rescue Italia, one pizza pie at a time. There comes a point, very early in the game, where you can look at the user map and panic at the sheer quantity of things in the world to address. And if you’re like me, you’ll begin to pick and choose the ones of interest to you and neglect the others (yes to the cult missions and assassination contracts, no to the courtesan or shopkeep missions.)

Though you’ll have to be patient, for the game is very slow to reveal itself. A friend of mine, someone who is very adept at Prince of Persia, was considerably frustrated at long it took for Assassin’s Creed 2 to introduce its concepts. Brotherhood moves at just as slow a pace. I was considerably annoyed every time I was told I could not access certain Borgia regions or unlock the next cult missions because I needed to advance the storyline. Equally as frustrating, albeit perhaps it shouldn’t, was how long it took to Ezio to regain his second hidden blade. You can’t access it until after a specific point in the story, and there were many an instance where I would have loved to stab multiple enemy temples at once.

Mind you, the story missions are mostly solid affairs. They are about as distinct and interesting as the ones you saw in Assassin’s Creed 2. Though I was very frustrated at the occasional forced stealth sequence that would fail you if you were spotted. Part of my frustration comes from how the game considers it a failure if a guard sees you just as you begin slicing their eyeballs out. Otherwise, all of the similar gameplay mechanics from Assassin’s Creed 2 are here; you are still running around rooftops, running away from guards, hiding in bales of hay and stabbing people while hiding in bales of hay. The swordplay is more timing-based; you are still timing button presses to attack enemies or block attacks, but the game rewards proper timing by letting you slaughter enemies one after the other. It doesn’t have the same visual impact of the Batman game, but I understand. I doubt Ezio would stand much of a chance fighting Batman anyways.

There does become something of a turning point several hours in, when Ezio decides to take a stab at running his own Assassination guild. First you help a disgruntled citizen beat up some Borgia goons, and then they swear their lives in servitude to the almighty Ezio. These goons are so devoted to your sexy accent that they follow you everywhere, and will pounce at any guard you point at if you so choose. While on the surface, you would think that doing so would make the game a little too easy, and well, you would be a tad right…and then you will be decidedly frustrated during the stealth-only moments of the game where you can’t use your students. You can also send your assassins on international contracts to accrue cash and experience points, and it does become worth your while to level up your goons with better armour and weapons.

The end result is a game that is feels conceptually heavy. Property buying, assassinating, helping the escorts, giving your pupils training exercises in Lisbon and Paris, upgrading Ezio with weapons and armor, the ten trillion other sidequests, buying a nice wine-coloured robe to match your Azure cape…the kind of player that struggles with concepts like “navigating menus in a video game” or “pressing the run button in Super Mario Bros” will suffer a minor stroke playing Brotherhood. Inversely, if you ignore side quests and focus on hunting down the one villain, then I would guesstimate the game lasting about 4-5 hours. But immersing yourself in the whole culture of subversively taking over Roma, I lost myself within the game for about 20 hours. ‘Tis a big game.

One more complaint; there’s a point of no return at the start of sequence 8. After which begins a long string of missions; you can still access the rest of Rome after completing these missions, but some kind of “hey, you should buy some nice equipment for this potentially lengthy stretch of the game” message would have been much appreciated.

Oh and by the by, there’s a multiplayer mode buried within this massive game too. You may have heard about it since it seemed to take up more of the pre-release advertising than the whole lengthy 20 hour campaign bit. So you and a posse of 6-8 colourful characters are in a world populated by civilians dressed as the other 6-8 colourful characters. In this elaborate game of hide and seek, you must seek out a single other assassin, while blending in with the populace and not killing any of the civilians. Your first few sessions will result in you getting repeatedly splayed on the floor as you get a feel for what is and isn’t a good idea. (Hiding in the hay pile isn’t quite the safe haven as it used to be.) But once you get a grip of the more methodical styling, then there’s a real sense of gratification that comes with sneaking up on an unsuspecting dude and breaking their darned neck. While it more or less borrows its core idea from The Boat, I feel like this is one of the most creative multiplayer experiences I’ve had in many a moon.

So I sit here, thinking to myself that I will probably never bother to revisit the campaign again. Not because it’s a particularly bad campaign, but because I don’t think I can bring myself to redo all of those assorted sidequests over again in the name of a bad cliffhanger ending. Mind you, I was borderline addicted to the main quest during my time revisiting Ezio. That was a good 20 hours of entertainment while it lasted. And I’m a good deal more interested in the multiplayer than I would have anticipated. So I would consider that something of an endorsement. If you liked Assassin’s Creed 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood offers a compressed and very dense rendition of that experience for your consumption.

4 stars

Monday, December 6, 2010

Donkey Kong Country Returns



I’ve learned over the past year or so that making a retro-driven video game throwback is not quite as easy as it seems. Merely applying new textures for HD television screens is not enough, as it sucked the timelessness out of Turtles in Time. You can’t go so far as to completely rearrange everything about the original game’s themes (Blaster Master Overdrive’s “kid who lost his frog finds a magical tank replaced with a post-apocalyptic future where mankind’s survival hinges on a single tank.) And you surely can’t just re-release the exact same game (Sonic 4, like Sonic 2 but costing twice as much for half the content). There has to be a combination of factors, old and new. There ought to be a sense of self-awareness as to what the original game was all about, along with a new twist as to justify playing this new product over blowing the dust off of/out of an NES.

Which is why I really like Donkey Kong Country Returns. It makes a whole bevy of tweaks and alterations from the original games, but it also understands the four reasons why people liked the original Donkey Kong Country games. Because lets be honest, we all like Donkey Kong Country games because:

-They were visually vibrant and energetic.
-They sounded vibrant and energetic.
-They had a metric assload of things to collect.
-They were a metric assload of punishing as hell to play through.

If Retro Studios wanted to go full-bore on the nostalgia, they would have sent me a promotional VHS tape (not DVD, not digital copy, not Blu-Ray! Something that could theoretically get tangled up in my VCR) telling me about the benefits of Advanced Computer Modeling and tease the Killer Instinct port. Instead, they settled on creating a new kind of fake technology, called HAWLOSHOTSAO, which I deem stands for “Have A Whole Lot of Shit Happen On The Screen. At Once” Which is to say that in each level, a whole lot of activity is happening in the environment. Ships fire their cannons, levels explode onto themselves, spider hatchlings are birthed for the sole purpose of attacking you…the game is great at filling each level with unique and energized aspects to keep the action going. Meanwhile, revamped renditions of classic songs from the Donkey Kong Country games blur in the background to sort-of-maybe-evoke warm feelings of your Christmas morning after unwrapping your copy of Donkey Kong Country. I miss my childhood.

This is a side-scrolling platformer. You go from the left side of the screen to the right, you jump on the heads of enemies, and you collect a whole bunch of floating bananas. In a kind-of ballsy move, the game has no kremlings or King K Rool. Rather, the antagonists are flying tribal masks that hypnotize the animal population with music. I had thought that this was a nice little tweak, up until encountering the final battle against a giant floating head with two floating hands. A boss seen in many, many popular Nintendo titles. This soured me on the game perhaps more than it should have, but…come on, really? The giant enemy crab boss feels less cliché.

They did pluck out a few other positive elements from the original Donkey Kong Country. There are mine-cart levels…many in fact! Rambi the rhinoceros is back in his overpowered glory, and even then the game manages to find a challenging late-game stage to test Rambi’s bulldozing skills. Cranky Kong appears as the shopkeep and frequent insulter of Donkey Kong’s intellect. And the game is great at filling each level with a bevy of power-ups. There are tons of bananas and extra lives to stimulate the parts of your brain that need glowing things. There are also the hidden K-O-N-G letters as well as bonus mini-stages and puzzle pieces designed to reward you with concept art and music tracks. The gaming kleptomaniac that must collect every shiny trinket will spend many an hour sifting through each of the stages.

The second-biggest issue I have with the game, besides that awful final boss (and yes, that boss is bothering me more than it should) is the controls. It does seem like Nintendo dropped a mandate on all of its developers to incorporate some kind of motion controls into every Wii game, some four years after people stopped thinking the Wii motion controls were at all novel. In fact, here is a list of Wii games that would have been made better without Wii motion controls.

In this game, you thrust the remote down to interact. The key word being “thrust”, not “waggle”. Waggling in a game like Super Mario Galaxy is at least somewhat tolerable in that it demands a flick of the wrist. Regards of whether you play this game with the Wiimote held sideways or alongside a nunchuk, you must thrust your remote up and down. Thrusting while standing still will make DK do a ground pound, or blow into the air while crouching, or do a barrel roll while moving. The pounding and blowing are meant mostly to interact with the background and collect more fruit, while the nuisance-factor of the thrust made me never use the barrel roll as an offensive maneuver like I would in the original Donkey Kong Country. Why the game does not support the Classic Controller, the controller shaped like the controller you played the original Donkey Kong Country on, is beyond me. I learned to tolerate the thrust, but there are a handful of moments that demand more precise timing than the motion is capable of.

It also bears mentioning that the game is pretty gosh darned hard. The later levels will have you burning through the 50-plus lives that you were accumulating across the earlier, more humane stages. At first, Donkey Kong purists will question the design decision to give DK two hearts of health…and an additional two if you have Diddy Kong in tow. And said purists will question the decision to give Diddy a jetpack that lets the pair hover temporarily. Then said purists will play the game and realize that they sure run out of hearts in a hurry. Look, I’ve 100 percented Super Meat Boy, and I’m not going to say one game is harder than the other. But Super Meat Boy’s philosophy of short levels, instant respawning and unlimited lives makes it feel more tolerable than Donkey Kong Country’s limited lives, larger stages and modestly-placed checkpoints.

If you collect every K-O-N-G letter and puzzle piece, you can unlock mirror mode. This mode flips every stage, removes the power-ups and bans the use of Diddy Kong. It was after reading about mirror mode that I thought to myself “nope, I’m good. I had enough. This game kicked my ass pretty thoroughly.” That said, if you can find a second, competent partner and stockpile some lives, the game becomes a bit more manageable in co-op play. In spite of that, there is the weird gaffe of how player two, as Diddy Kong, gets both the jetpack and a peanut gun while Donkey Kong gets…I don’t know, low self-esteem.

So I do think this game will last players awhile, provided that they are willing. All things considered, I think Retro did a damn fine job of reviving and reinventing Donkey Kong as a platformer. It’s not for everyone, but I think people that liked the original game for all the right reasons will dig it. I would also recommend buying this game with a copy of Kirby’s Epic Yarn, as that game makes for wonderful stress relief for all the pains that Donkey Kong Country Returns will unleash on you.

3 ½ stars

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare


Yup. It’s a zombie game. I need another beer.

Some corporate executive at Take-Two made a trip to Toronto one day and attended our annual zombie march. (And yes, Toronto has a zombie march. We cannot be the only city doing this!) He saw the hundreds of people painted and dressed in full creeper/geek attire and decided that people will buy anything zombie-related, regardless of how bored and exhausted the rest of the populace feels about the walking undead. Hence, we got a Borderlands DLC pack about zombie versions of all of the old character sprites, and now a Red Dead Redemption pack that’s about the same shtick. I dread the impending Civilization 5 pack where nations must unite against the new undead tribe, with its “graveyard” building and new unit types like “zombie” and “running zombie.”

The good news about Undead Nightmare is that it very quickly dashes off my zombie fatigue by being very, very self-aware over the matter. There is nothing about this game that is meant to be taken with a straight face. John Marston, having just been reunited with his wife and kid, is faced with the immediate threat of a zombie plague and must respond as only John Marston can. Which is to say, John Marston responds with a fistful of sarcasm. He quickly accepts that the dead are rising and has no problem getting a few kicks out of it. Many characters from the game’s campaign return, living or otherwise, and the game offers plenty of great new cutscenes, complete with a mini-Vincent Price send-up. Really, the best reason to buy Undead Nightmare is to just get more Marstonisms.

To the best of my knowledge, zombies don’t know how to operate firearms, let alone any weapon more elaborate than teeth. The gameplay is thus a natural tweak of Red Dead Redemption’s duck and cover fiesta. Gone are the days of safely crouching behind a barrel, picking off outlaws at your leisurely pace. Now the game is about scrambling to nab headshots and running-the-fuck-out-of-there. Since only headshots will redeaden the undead, and some zombies have no problem crawl-running towards you, the net result is many really tense combat situations. You will use Dead Eye as a crutch in this game, and some zombies are too fast for even that!

This is especially true in the very first missions, when ammunition is scarce. What I would constitute to be the game’s primary goal involves entering a settlement and filling a “town safety” meter. Doing this involves, naturally enough, killing zombies, but you also have to help the locals by giving them ammo. Since bullets have become scarce in this part of town (perhaps on account to a rising Canadian influence in the area), you have to find treasure chests filled with bullets to distribute to the townsfolk. These treasure chests tend to be surrounded by zombies. Perhaps you see the dilemma here. Your first few Town Safety missions are freaky as hell as a result. But since the reward for finishing a town mission is usually more ammo and better weapons, you’ll quickly find yourself gifting bullets as presents to the locals, then cleaning out the ammo chests after the zombie threat has perished.

The biggest crime that Undead Nightmare presents is that it doesn’t quite offer anything else more interesting than Town Safety Community Service. All of the missions involve either rescuing a town, killing everything in a graveyard or fetch questing within a purple circle on the map. I had heard, during a popular video game podcast of giant size, that the game does more than zombies. The golly individual mentioned something about seeing sasquatch and the horses of the apocalypse, and I was intrigued. Unfortunately, that is about the extent of the supernatural behavior displayed. There is a sasquatch-hunting mission, and you can indeed tame and ride the four horses of the apocalypse. But that is all of the absurdity the game divulges into; I would have loved to see some more horrors unleashed within the world.

How much you decide to play Undead Nightmare will depend on how much you get invested in the more menial tasks. There are more Survivor challenges, including ones that have you hunting undead animals. The game does indeed have an undead bear. There are many settlements that need rescuing from zombies, and some of them will need to be re-rescued from time to time. Otherwise, the game lacks the really great, diverse series of missions that the main campaign offered.

But if you can get invested in the more redundant tasks, then there’s a decent amount of playtime here. I spent about 4 hours finishing the game, which is a decent length for a $10 pack. It’s not a great expansion, and it doesn’t quite compare to the Lost and Damned pack from Grand Theft Auto 4, but Undead Nightmare makes a good, plausible excuse to revisit one of the best games of 2010.

3 ½ stars